When you change the focus from "farmers" to "food systems" you have effectively changed the receiver of information and made it more abstract. Researchers at land grant universities help farmers grow food, including environmental and economic considerations. Researchers who study "food systems" don't appear to have the goal of talking to or helping real farmers; they talk about "transforming food systems". Leaving out the people who make the current system work. What could go wrong?
Well there are food systems and agricultural systems. Which are very complex and involve fundamentally our energy system, transportation system, manufacturing & trade. Farmers are an essential part of that system. As are truck drivers.
I would like to see a return to smaller family sized farms, but they will need to be productive. I see a great potential of robotics i.e. the Teslabot for smaller farms. The monotonous drudgery and back breaking work of many farm tasks could be carried out 24/7 by such robots, making small farms quite profitable. Musk figures he can make Teslabots for $10k each. And will be capable of visually programming them to do basic tasks like digging or pulling weeds, harvesting fruit or vegetables.
We will make energy 10x cheaper as we correctly use nuclear and equally good energy supplies like deep enhanced geothermal.
That makes minerals, and products made from minerals about 8x cheaper.
We also have a new supply of energy or work. Automation. Now that AI can learn it's job we aren't held back by human programmers to make fleets of robots.
Indian farming is 9x more productive per unit land than American. It's the labor input. Automation can therefore make American farming 9x more productive without labor demands. And make Indian farming much more productive, while freeing the labor pool to do better things.
Indoor farming doesn't give a crap about climate and can easily be certified organic. It takes energy but not much.
Water is abundant in a cheap-clean energy world. The ocean has all the water we need, and it's easy to desalinate.
The main problem is making a food system that doesn't kill us all marketing toxic addictive foods, so Wall Street casinos prosper.
I find it remarkable that your focus is so narrow and reductionist.
Climate change is already beginning to increase the spread of disease to humans, plants and animals which will significantly affect agricultural productivity.
Millions more workers are already unable to work in the fields as productively or in some cases at all due to disabling heat.
Increasingly severe extreme weather is negatively affecting the robustness of supply chains challenging farmers to get the equipment, the materials and the resources they need.
climate change is leading to greater migration that is affecting the labor force for farming -, The increased heat and severe temperatures even if for some short periods of time may result in increases in plant growth but will not necessarily maintain the nutritional quality of these crops- and on and on.
Your choice to not examine the agricultural system with all of its inputs while focusing narrowly on the food component makes your analysis highly incomplete and basically not very helpful if not utterly misleading.
You should follow @jimbaird62221006 to learn what is happening in the real world every day almost everywhere
I have no beef with your analysis - as it treats the subject as whole - which is what Miss Ritchie always does.
I have read published articles however - that there are very arid areas around the world - that no longer can grow a food crop - because of the increased heat caused by Global Warming / Climate Change.
Temperatures have not increased enough to make the land arid and barren except where you have prolonged droughts (bad weather which comes and goes). And, climate change is not a cause of bad weather, rather it’s a statistical construct representing weather over a period of decades.
Not that this refutes anything, but the Sahara goes thru approximately 40 year cycles. It is only desert part of the time. We can expect it return to being good farmland in the future, for a while. Nothing is forever, not mountains, not rivers, and probably not us.
Your correct about the Sahara - if you lived 12,000 years ago - and it turned back to desert 4,500 years ago.
How about getting into the reality of today - which is the first time that - instead of just trying to score a cheap point.
There are people that are living now - not earlier than 4,500 years ago:
--- who are now starving; because they can no longer grow even marginal crops because of the higher heat levels:
--- in areas other than the Sahara:
--- caused by present day the Global Warming / Climate Change that we have created by burning fossil-based fuels.
Since 1900 - we didn't have burn those fuel --because in that year - Nikola Tesla invented an electric power circuit that has recently been "developed", i.e., "put on steroids" and can continuously produce commercial sized electric output power.
And how do you; and the past history number crunchers::
--- square the Earth's past history - with the fact that this is the first time in the Earth's history - that human produced pollution is now the cause for the situation?
There is a whole lot of greening the desert going on in the Middle East and elsewhere. Key is of course fresh water but that can be produced in immense quantities using unlimited Nuclear energy.
Also there is some plan to fill the Qattara Depression in Egypt with water from the Mediterranean. Which would cause a lot of rainfall in the region, going as far East as Saudi Arabia.
Overall Agriculture productivity will increase, in fact substantially due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere and warmer temperatures that are predominant in Northern areas, opens vast areas of the largest landmass on Earth to greatly improved agricultural productivity. With overall increased rainfall.
Of course there is ALWAYS winners & losers in climate change. But overall there will be a lot more winners than losers.
Got a question - about the warmer temperatures being predominantly in Northern areas -- which Earth are you talking about -- because it sure isn't this Earth.
And ANYONE that plays "winners" and losers" with human lives -- isn't anything but a cold hearted idiot - and I cleaned that up.
Definitely most of the temperature increases are in the Polar regions. That's Climate Change 101.
Who's playing "winners" and "losers"? That's just the way it is, whether Mother Nature is doing the changes or Humans or any combination of the two. And many of those changes are unpredictable. Definitely global warming is an overall winner for humanity, not just for the greening of the planet, but to avert the next Ice Age which is otherwise inevitable.
I enjoyed your recent contribution to the Breakthrough Journal but stumbled at the beginning of the section on organic agriculture (OA). The force of your argument would have been much greater if you had started with an accurate estimate of the OA yield penalty. It is not the 20% that you used but more like 50% and often less. The 20% value originates from a study of the relative yield of individual crops grown with organic fertilizers or otherwise under experimental conditions. It was wrongly presented as a comparison of the relative productivity of organic agriculture that has been repeated with other data sets (e.g. the most recent 2023 paper you reference) to be widely propagated in the literature. Organic farmers do not have the tools that others do to control weeds, pests and diseases so OA yields are proportionally smaller in practice.
But more importantly, the comparison of individual crop yields ignores the fact that in OA some land must be allocated to legumes (crops or legume-based pasture) to provide the required organic N by biological nitrogen fixation (BNF). BNF is the only significant source of N for organic agriculture along with a small amount of atmospheric deposition (dust, lightening etc) and non-symbiotic N fixation. In practice, other farmers use N fertilizer made commercially from the same atmospheric N as legume BNF but at higher rates than BNF can provide.
Consequently, individual crop yields are generally > 20% smaller in OA and smaller still when expressed as yield over total system area that includes the legumes. Overall productivity of OA systems depends upon what yield can be obtained from the legumes in addition to the N supplied to other crops by transient increase in soil fertility or physically as organic manure (biomass or faeces). Dairy farming, in which cows can convert the energy of human indigestible biomass to milk with an efficiency of 25% is such an example, but total food production in OA still has a yield penalty > 20%.
I have writing about this for 20y since Nature first published the report of high organic productivity that supporters still prefer to reference and others to copy. I will send you some papers by email at info@thebreakthrough.org that provide analyses that conclude otherwise.
David Connor 14 SeptemberI enjoyed your recent contribution to the Breakthrough Journal but stumbled at the beginning of the section on organic agriculture (OA). The force of your argument would have been much greater if you had started with an accurate estimate of the OA yield penalty. It is not the 20% that you used but more like 50% and often less. The 20% value originates from a study of the relative yield of individual crops grown with organic fertilizers or otherwise under experimental conditions. It was wrongly presented as a comparison of the relative productivity of organic agriculture that has been repeated with other data sets (e.g. the most recent 2023 paper you reference) to be widely propagated in the literature. Organic farmers do not have the tools that others do to control weeds, pests and diseases so OA yields are proportionally smaller in practice.
But more importantly, the comparison of individual crop yields ignores the fact that in OA some land must be allocated to legumes (crops or legume-based pasture) to provide the required organic N by biological nitrogen fixation (BNF). BNF is the only significant source of N for organic agriculture along with a small amount of atmospheric deposition (dust, lightening etc) and non-symbiotic N fixation. In practice, other farmers use N fertilizer made commercially from the same atmospheric N as legume BNF but at higher rates than BNF can provide.
Consequently, individual crop yields are generally > 20% smaller in OA and smaller still when expressed as yield over total system area that includes the legumes. Overall productivity of OA systems depends upon what yield can be obtained from the legumes in addition to the N supplied to other crops by transient increase in soil fertility or physically as organic manure (biomass or faeces). Dairy farming, in which cows can convert the energy of human indigestible biomass to milk with an efficiency of 25% is such an example, but total food production in OA still has a yield penalty > 20%.
I have writing about this for 20y since Nature first published the report of high organic productivity that supporters still prefer to reference and others to copy. I will send you some papers by email at info@thebreakthrough.org that provide analyses that conclude otherwise.
To SmithSF -- If you believe what you just wrote - then you are both blind to facts that you don't like , and guilty of the same, i.e, choosing your own facts.
They have a name for people that silo themselves like that - they're called "Flat-Earthers" - and have no relevance except in their own minds.
The average Orangutan has more demonstrated relevance than Flat-Earthers - because they add something to the world.
You're just taking up space with your "opinions" - which seems to be the only thing you can do -- because you sure are out of sequence with the real world.
Mr. Theilen -- tell that to the peoples in middle Africa at the edges of the Sahara - and elsewhere -- who have progressively lost the ability to grow any food crops now -- because the heat temperature during the day - has increased to the point - over the last three years: -- that it has been enough to eliminate their ability to grow the meager crops they were growing three years ago.
The last three years -for these people: -- is your "statistical construct".
And I'm quite sure that they would tell what to do with your "statistical construct"..
There always have been people adversely affected by bouts of drought or heat spells all over the World, for various periods of time, that might even last for a century or more. These natural cycles have occurred for the entire history of the Earth's climate. There is no evidence connecting them to human induced climate change as yet. That may occur at some point, but as I said, any change brings winners and losers, the economic benefits of the winners (which is the vast majority of people on Earth) would easily be enough to compensate the losers. Instead of making everyone losers like you want to do.
Before you show just how uninformed you are -- again: -- Nikola Telsa invented and US Patented the radio in 1900.
Included in that circuitry is what is called a "resonant tank circuit".
And when one a tank circuit is "tuned" to a specific frequency:
--- the resonant tank circuit ALWAYS "electrically reduces" the input power level "connected to it" - to it's "...absolute minimum power level...".
Simultaneously - the tuned tank circuit; ALWAYS develops it's "...absolute maximum power level...":
--- in the tank circuit itself.
That "developed power level" to "input power level" ratio - is ALWAYS "more than '1' " - with "1" signifying "unity" -- meaning -- a resonant tank circuit ALWAYS operates at "over-unity" - without breaking any Laws of Physics - or anything else.
The fact is that most every well written / well researched college level textbook since 1900 -- has included the necessary at descriptive terminology on resonance - and just because you don't know about it - is of absolutely no consequence.
Again - you just keep demonstrating just how much about a lot of things -- you just don't know.
Facts are facts - whether you personally agree with them or not.
Your "facts" are nonsense. There's this thing called energy conservation. Kinda hard to get around that. Even by a minuscule amount like 0.001%. But you figure "a resonant tank circuit" which is old as the hills, somehow can do thousands of times better than that. Only a kook would believe that could generate energy.
To SmithSF -- you are entitled to too your own opinions - you are not entitled to your own facts - and I'm ending this conversation -- I don't suffer fools.
You wouldn't know a fact if it ran into you and smacked you over the head. I keep to the truth, you promote nutball crackpot crap like the supposed Nikola Tesla's "electric power circuit".
I have a question for you...are you a shill for the chemical companies? Your denigration of regenerative practices and organics is throwing the baby out with the bath water. As for V. Shiva advising a change in Sri Lanka, he did not have to take her advice, and the fact is you can't just transition from one system to another overnight.
When you change the focus from "farmers" to "food systems" you have effectively changed the receiver of information and made it more abstract. Researchers at land grant universities help farmers grow food, including environmental and economic considerations. Researchers who study "food systems" don't appear to have the goal of talking to or helping real farmers; they talk about "transforming food systems". Leaving out the people who make the current system work. What could go wrong?
Well there are food systems and agricultural systems. Which are very complex and involve fundamentally our energy system, transportation system, manufacturing & trade. Farmers are an essential part of that system. As are truck drivers.
I would like to see a return to smaller family sized farms, but they will need to be productive. I see a great potential of robotics i.e. the Teslabot for smaller farms. The monotonous drudgery and back breaking work of many farm tasks could be carried out 24/7 by such robots, making small farms quite profitable. Musk figures he can make Teslabots for $10k each. And will be capable of visually programming them to do basic tasks like digging or pulling weeds, harvesting fruit or vegetables.
You are making a point, but incredibly myopic.
We will make energy 10x cheaper as we correctly use nuclear and equally good energy supplies like deep enhanced geothermal.
That makes minerals, and products made from minerals about 8x cheaper.
We also have a new supply of energy or work. Automation. Now that AI can learn it's job we aren't held back by human programmers to make fleets of robots.
Indian farming is 9x more productive per unit land than American. It's the labor input. Automation can therefore make American farming 9x more productive without labor demands. And make Indian farming much more productive, while freeing the labor pool to do better things.
Indoor farming doesn't give a crap about climate and can easily be certified organic. It takes energy but not much.
Water is abundant in a cheap-clean energy world. The ocean has all the water we need, and it's easy to desalinate.
The main problem is making a food system that doesn't kill us all marketing toxic addictive foods, so Wall Street casinos prosper.
Healthy foods are easy.
I find it remarkable that your focus is so narrow and reductionist.
Climate change is already beginning to increase the spread of disease to humans, plants and animals which will significantly affect agricultural productivity.
Millions more workers are already unable to work in the fields as productively or in some cases at all due to disabling heat.
Increasingly severe extreme weather is negatively affecting the robustness of supply chains challenging farmers to get the equipment, the materials and the resources they need.
climate change is leading to greater migration that is affecting the labor force for farming -, The increased heat and severe temperatures even if for some short periods of time may result in increases in plant growth but will not necessarily maintain the nutritional quality of these crops- and on and on.
Your choice to not examine the agricultural system with all of its inputs while focusing narrowly on the food component makes your analysis highly incomplete and basically not very helpful if not utterly misleading.
You should follow @jimbaird62221006 to learn what is happening in the real world every day almost everywhere
There is no reputable evidence to support anything you said. And that comes straight from the IPCC, and they're no climate change deniers.
Read Roger Pielke to get the facts:
Know the Facts on Extreme Weather and Climate :
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/class-is-in
That is an astonishingly uninformed statement you’ve just made.
Perhaps as a start you should read chapter 6 of this highly referenced book which supports everything I wrote and more much more.
But I doubt you’ll read it as you seem to be only interested in sources that confirm your bias.
Breaking Together: A freedom-loving response to collapse https://a.co/d/0Eb5Fex
I have no beef with your analysis - as it treats the subject as whole - which is what Miss Ritchie always does.
I have read published articles however - that there are very arid areas around the world - that no longer can grow a food crop - because of the increased heat caused by Global Warming / Climate Change.
Temperatures have not increased enough to make the land arid and barren except where you have prolonged droughts (bad weather which comes and goes). And, climate change is not a cause of bad weather, rather it’s a statistical construct representing weather over a period of decades.
Not that this refutes anything, but the Sahara goes thru approximately 40 year cycles. It is only desert part of the time. We can expect it return to being good farmland in the future, for a while. Nothing is forever, not mountains, not rivers, and probably not us.
Your correct about the Sahara - if you lived 12,000 years ago - and it turned back to desert 4,500 years ago.
How about getting into the reality of today - which is the first time that - instead of just trying to score a cheap point.
There are people that are living now - not earlier than 4,500 years ago:
--- who are now starving; because they can no longer grow even marginal crops because of the higher heat levels:
--- in areas other than the Sahara:
--- caused by present day the Global Warming / Climate Change that we have created by burning fossil-based fuels.
Since 1900 - we didn't have burn those fuel --because in that year - Nikola Tesla invented an electric power circuit that has recently been "developed", i.e., "put on steroids" and can continuously produce commercial sized electric output power.
And how do you; and the past history number crunchers::
--- square the Earth's past history - with the fact that this is the first time in the Earth's history - that human produced pollution is now the cause for the situation?
There is a whole lot of greening the desert going on in the Middle East and elsewhere. Key is of course fresh water but that can be produced in immense quantities using unlimited Nuclear energy.
Also there is some plan to fill the Qattara Depression in Egypt with water from the Mediterranean. Which would cause a lot of rainfall in the region, going as far East as Saudi Arabia.
Overall Agriculture productivity will increase, in fact substantially due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere and warmer temperatures that are predominant in Northern areas, opens vast areas of the largest landmass on Earth to greatly improved agricultural productivity. With overall increased rainfall.
Of course there is ALWAYS winners & losers in climate change. But overall there will be a lot more winners than losers.
Got a question - about the warmer temperatures being predominantly in Northern areas -- which Earth are you talking about -- because it sure isn't this Earth.
And ANYONE that plays "winners" and losers" with human lives -- isn't anything but a cold hearted idiot - and I cleaned that up.
Definitely most of the temperature increases are in the Polar regions. That's Climate Change 101.
Who's playing "winners" and "losers"? That's just the way it is, whether Mother Nature is doing the changes or Humans or any combination of the two. And many of those changes are unpredictable. Definitely global warming is an overall winner for humanity, not just for the greening of the planet, but to avert the next Ice Age which is otherwise inevitable.
I enjoyed your recent contribution to the Breakthrough Journal but stumbled at the beginning of the section on organic agriculture (OA). The force of your argument would have been much greater if you had started with an accurate estimate of the OA yield penalty. It is not the 20% that you used but more like 50% and often less. The 20% value originates from a study of the relative yield of individual crops grown with organic fertilizers or otherwise under experimental conditions. It was wrongly presented as a comparison of the relative productivity of organic agriculture that has been repeated with other data sets (e.g. the most recent 2023 paper you reference) to be widely propagated in the literature. Organic farmers do not have the tools that others do to control weeds, pests and diseases so OA yields are proportionally smaller in practice.
But more importantly, the comparison of individual crop yields ignores the fact that in OA some land must be allocated to legumes (crops or legume-based pasture) to provide the required organic N by biological nitrogen fixation (BNF). BNF is the only significant source of N for organic agriculture along with a small amount of atmospheric deposition (dust, lightening etc) and non-symbiotic N fixation. In practice, other farmers use N fertilizer made commercially from the same atmospheric N as legume BNF but at higher rates than BNF can provide.
Consequently, individual crop yields are generally > 20% smaller in OA and smaller still when expressed as yield over total system area that includes the legumes. Overall productivity of OA systems depends upon what yield can be obtained from the legumes in addition to the N supplied to other crops by transient increase in soil fertility or physically as organic manure (biomass or faeces). Dairy farming, in which cows can convert the energy of human indigestible biomass to milk with an efficiency of 25% is such an example, but total food production in OA still has a yield penalty > 20%.
I have writing about this for 20y since Nature first published the report of high organic productivity that supporters still prefer to reference and others to copy. I will send you some papers by email at info@thebreakthrough.org that provide analyses that conclude otherwise.
David Connor 14 SeptemberI enjoyed your recent contribution to the Breakthrough Journal but stumbled at the beginning of the section on organic agriculture (OA). The force of your argument would have been much greater if you had started with an accurate estimate of the OA yield penalty. It is not the 20% that you used but more like 50% and often less. The 20% value originates from a study of the relative yield of individual crops grown with organic fertilizers or otherwise under experimental conditions. It was wrongly presented as a comparison of the relative productivity of organic agriculture that has been repeated with other data sets (e.g. the most recent 2023 paper you reference) to be widely propagated in the literature. Organic farmers do not have the tools that others do to control weeds, pests and diseases so OA yields are proportionally smaller in practice.
But more importantly, the comparison of individual crop yields ignores the fact that in OA some land must be allocated to legumes (crops or legume-based pasture) to provide the required organic N by biological nitrogen fixation (BNF). BNF is the only significant source of N for organic agriculture along with a small amount of atmospheric deposition (dust, lightening etc) and non-symbiotic N fixation. In practice, other farmers use N fertilizer made commercially from the same atmospheric N as legume BNF but at higher rates than BNF can provide.
Consequently, individual crop yields are generally > 20% smaller in OA and smaller still when expressed as yield over total system area that includes the legumes. Overall productivity of OA systems depends upon what yield can be obtained from the legumes in addition to the N supplied to other crops by transient increase in soil fertility or physically as organic manure (biomass or faeces). Dairy farming, in which cows can convert the energy of human indigestible biomass to milk with an efficiency of 25% is such an example, but total food production in OA still has a yield penalty > 20%.
I have writing about this for 20y since Nature first published the report of high organic productivity that supporters still prefer to reference and others to copy. I will send you some papers by email at info@thebreakthrough.org that provide analyses that conclude otherwise.
Can't answer it - can you. Thought so.
Your source is another blogger -- oh that's rich - no offense to Mr. Wang.
As far as electricity and electronics -- what's your education on the subject - if you have any?
Put up or shut up
As they say: DON'T FEED THE TROLL!
To SmithSF -- If you believe what you just wrote - then you are both blind to facts that you don't like , and guilty of the same, i.e, choosing your own facts.
They have a name for people that silo themselves like that - they're called "Flat-Earthers" - and have no relevance except in their own minds.
The average Orangutan has more demonstrated relevance than Flat-Earthers - because they add something to the world.
You're just taking up space with your "opinions" - which seems to be the only thing you can do -- because you sure are out of sequence with the real world.
As they say: DON'T FEED THE TROLL!
Mr. Theilen -- tell that to the peoples in middle Africa at the edges of the Sahara - and elsewhere -- who have progressively lost the ability to grow any food crops now -- because the heat temperature during the day - has increased to the point - over the last three years: -- that it has been enough to eliminate their ability to grow the meager crops they were growing three years ago.
The last three years -for these people: -- is your "statistical construct".
And I'm quite sure that they would tell what to do with your "statistical construct"..
Facts are facts
There always have been people adversely affected by bouts of drought or heat spells all over the World, for various periods of time, that might even last for a century or more. These natural cycles have occurred for the entire history of the Earth's climate. There is no evidence connecting them to human induced climate change as yet. That may occur at some point, but as I said, any change brings winners and losers, the economic benefits of the winners (which is the vast majority of people on Earth) would easily be enough to compensate the losers. Instead of making everyone losers like you want to do.
Before you show just how uninformed you are -- again: -- Nikola Telsa invented and US Patented the radio in 1900.
Included in that circuitry is what is called a "resonant tank circuit".
And when one a tank circuit is "tuned" to a specific frequency:
--- the resonant tank circuit ALWAYS "electrically reduces" the input power level "connected to it" - to it's "...absolute minimum power level...".
Simultaneously - the tuned tank circuit; ALWAYS develops it's "...absolute maximum power level...":
--- in the tank circuit itself.
That "developed power level" to "input power level" ratio - is ALWAYS "more than '1' " - with "1" signifying "unity" -- meaning -- a resonant tank circuit ALWAYS operates at "over-unity" - without breaking any Laws of Physics - or anything else.
The fact is that most every well written / well researched college level textbook since 1900 -- has included the necessary at descriptive terminology on resonance - and just because you don't know about it - is of absolutely no consequence.
Again - you just keep demonstrating just how much about a lot of things -- you just don't know.
Facts are facts - whether you personally agree with them or not.
Your "facts" are nonsense. There's this thing called energy conservation. Kinda hard to get around that. Even by a minuscule amount like 0.001%. But you figure "a resonant tank circuit" which is old as the hills, somehow can do thousands of times better than that. Only a kook would believe that could generate energy.
Again SmithSF - your always entitled to your opinions - but your not entitled to you own facts.
If someone thought it was a good idea to use a nuke plant to produce fresh water -- they would have done it a long time ago.
And that "greening" - where exactly is it - because it hasn't hit any news source ---or it this another opinion?
Quit repeating that cliche over and over, pretending that you invented it.
They do produce fresh water with Nuclear power. They've been doing that for a long time. It's not rocket science, you know. Get educated.
Read, learn and then weep:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/04/food-and-water-worries-are-not-reasons-to-fight-climate-change.html
To SmithSF -- you are entitled to too your own opinions - you are not entitled to your own facts - and I'm ending this conversation -- I don't suffer fools.
You wouldn't know a fact if it ran into you and smacked you over the head. I keep to the truth, you promote nutball crackpot crap like the supposed Nikola Tesla's "electric power circuit".
I have a question for you...are you a shill for the chemical companies? Your denigration of regenerative practices and organics is throwing the baby out with the bath water. As for V. Shiva advising a change in Sri Lanka, he did not have to take her advice, and the fact is you can't just transition from one system to another overnight.