this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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Monoculture is terrible for the ecosystem. Fertilizer runoff causes algal blooms and dead zones in the ocean. Multinational agricultural conglomerates force developing world farmers to purchase their GMO seeds sue them for copyright infingement if they try to use their seed stock in the next season. Rainforests are being burned down to make room for pastures of methane emitting cattle and monocultured palm oil plantations. The Haber-Bosch process is responsible for 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Should I go on? At what point am I supposed to like this?
Fix the system, make a new system, buy discerningly. Have a garden if you can and advocate for more of them if you want. Fight against monoculture, irresponsible fertilizer and pesticide use, copyright abuse, and more. None of that is an irreplacable part of growing food at a large and efficient scale.
By the way, I'm curious about the Haber-Bosch figure. Isn't that the process that allows us to easily make fertilizer, and greatly increase productivity? It seems like that 5% is doing much more heavy lifting than, for example, the ~20% from cow burps.
Right, those are all irreplacable parts of global capitalism and its ruling oligarchy.
Haber Bosch is basically just squeezing nitrogen and oxygen together with a catalyst to make ammonia. To generate high pressures you need energy which you get by burning hydrocarbons. Legumes and bacteria can also do this, which is why crop rotation and letting fields lie fallow has been done for centuries. But you can't let your field lie fallow if you have to compete with other firms who are burning coal to make fertilizer...
They worked out four-crop rotation during the agrarian revolution in the 18th century, they haven't let fields lie fallow since they worked out how to rejuvenate the soil with crops like turnips that could become horse feed...
Pre-Columbian Meso-Americans were already exploiting nitrogen fixing bacteria with the milpa (corn, beans, squash). Anyway the point is if your yield is dependent on how much fertilizer you produce industrially then the sky is the limit for how much coal to burn.
I think at the point where you have food on the table. Without haver, you wouldn't have food on your table and you'd die from hunger
Nobody is claiming it's perfect, nobody is claiming things cannot or should not be improved.
The point is that these systems are there because like it or not, they work. Haber works, you are alive, ain't you? Now from here on we must improve.
Rotate crops more often, cut the stranglehold from agriculture conglomerates, lower the world population by lowering birth rates, be super 8+ billion and rising is just too much for this world to handle... Things like that.
Either way, tonight you can eat, maybe be at least a little grateful for that?
Haber will obviously continue to be used and work but as long as there's a fossil fuel price to make it happen expect more extreme storms, fires, droughts, floods, ocean acidification, and possibly methane clathrate release triggering a runaway greenhouse effect like during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum.
I know. Same for cars, which cause up to 25% of all CO2 exhaust, much easier to curb that. We can do with much less cars, food would be harder.