nah it’s the tarrifs bro
The sort of large scale, highly mechanized agriculture that led to today’s cheap-by-historical-standards food prices was never going to last, and the future is probably going to see a large portion of the workforce in high-income countries return to agriculture. Get your land before Bill Gates does, I guess.
I know this is the doomer sub but soil “productivity” isn’t a permanent problem, it’s an economic one and a sign of a system under stress.
Soil health can be restored, but it’s easier and cheaper for farmers to declare soil “unproductive” (to project capitalistic language onto a natural process) than to take the action to restore it.
Bookchin was cooking so hard when he helped invent the concept of dialectical naturalism because this is a perfect example of it in action, but also a perfect example of how we still have autonomy to repair our food chain.
Oh you thought you could just slather fertilizer on your field every year and get infinite gains? Fucking loser modern farmers.
Three field system stay winning (I don’t know literally anything about agriculture).
We’re gonna have to start eating TVs
the soil’s getting whiter. we love our pale soil don’t we folks
Soil conditions plus climate instability has been putting pressure on productivity advances, and this is causing price volatility. When there is volatility companies play it safe and charge extra. These prices are sticky - they recede much more slowly than the rise - which means higher costs in the long-run as a result of short-term blips.
If you would like a nice visual reference of food price volatility, you can find one here: https://www.foodsecurityportal.org/tools/excessive-food-price-variability-early-warning-system
Poor soil condition can be compensated with fertilizers but this is a potentially fragile supply chain, and relying on fertilizers further degrades the soil and reduces long-term fertility. Fertilizer production and use is also destructive in other ways, such as eutrophication of water bodies. All of the big commercial producers are already using fertilizers but they are likely to use more as yields drop.
There is a related issue at play here: The nutrients in our food are decreasing, and will continue to decrease with more CO2 and other GHGs in the atmosphere. Which means we need to consume more food mass for the same levels of nutritional benefits.
Study Links
Study 1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10969708/
Study 2: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1369526617302406
Study 3: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfcfa/meta
I’m afraid food is going to continue getting more expensive.
anecdotal, but I knew a guy who knew a guy who did contract work analyzing soil for companies
Combination of pesticides and fertilizer get you stuck in a loop of constantly buying more of each to combat the long-term effects of last year’s fertilizer and pesticides. Also, apparently cannabis growers are the most egregious of these industrial agriculture producers. Being in a weird space with federal regulations, there isn’t much oversight in regard to the sort of fertilizer and pesticides they use, so it ends up being the very worst sorts available.
That definitely lines up with what I’ve heard as well.
I think the diminishing returns / negative feedback loop was one of the big motivators for GMO investments. The amount of investment is indicative of the scale of the problem.
Our approach has been to innovate our way out of crises, but it seems to me that we’ve really just been kicking the can in the long run because (within the capitalist paradigm) every time we create a new solution we also create a new problem.
Hard to solve a problem when every solution must include profitability.
You know, that’s interesting. I know a farmer who does small farming (for CSA boxes and local restaurants) and his farm is doing just fine because he grows a variety of things, properly takes care of his field, cycles crops around, composts all the waste, uses natural things like chickens and bees to help care for the land…his farm is producing really well even though this was kind of a weird year for his region.
Almost like if you farm properly to grow food for people to eat instead of farming for short term profit alone, the land doesn’t turn into a giant dustbowl
I definitely encourage regenerative agriculture however I’m not sure that is a “solution” all by itself.
The destructive agricultural practices in use were adopted during the Green Revolution. We can argue that the suffering if we do not change course on these practices will be immense - and I do - but it should also be acknowledged that changing course at this point would also inflict massive suffering.
I don’t want to get into this too much but I can provide a graphic that I think explains my point rather well: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-land-use-per-person
Reducing or eliminating animal agriculture could compensate for significant losses in productivity. Mass subsistence farming could also assist in transitioning more safely back to a less productive agricultural environment that doesn’t rely on corporate farming practices. Then add in regenerative agriculture to heal soil and restore long-term fertility.
I like to think all of this together would make a big impact (plus it would be a win for animal rights) but I am not optimistic about the wide-scale adoption of any one of these policies, let alone all of them.
I’ll tell my hexbear comrades the same thing I tell every other comrade: If you can do some subsistence gardening, you absolutely should. Get the practice in, learn about your soil and climate, collect and share seeds, reduce your food costs, and put yourself in a position to help your local community when the going gets tough. Almost no one has a huge success their first year of gardening so I think it is better to learn the ropes before we are desperate.
Remember: One cannot fight if one cannot eat. There is no political or economic stability for the working class without food security. There is no left so long as the left cannot feed itself.
ok but can his farm grow 10 million tomatoes that taste like plastic?
No, it can grow a few hundred tomatoes that taste fucking delicious instead!
i hereby charge this man with terrorism
La via campesina and other food/peasant movements have been saying that agroecology is the only way to make sure everyone has enough food in the future for about 50 years already.
Everyone working in food research or agronomy knows that, but we don’t get the big grants from bunge, Cargill and so on.
Yeah, we figured this out more than ten thousand years ago. But why think about next year when you can squeeze the ever loving shit out of this one?
Have they tried using jira to make the soil work faster? The soil needs to be send on a time management course
The soil is quiet quitting
Sounds like the soil needs a pizza party
they should give the soil a zero interest loan
Alfalfamaxxers stay winning
:chuckles-i’m-in-danger:
been waiting for this to break into the mainstream for a while. really hate that I’m increasingly viewing the rest of my life as waiting around until I starve to death. Or asphyxiating if things go reeeeeally bad.
Have I read this something like this in Capital Volume 3
Something something, @[email protected], go take it away
Toward the beginning of chapter 40, I think Marx is getting to the scenario that caused the dust bowl. Successive investments of capital on a soil of declining productivity eventually will reach a point where the sale price of the crop won’t cover the rent on the crop land
oh
We did it, reddit.
nah it’s the tarrifs bro
The article suggests it’s actually price gouging post covid
