[dohboi]

Here's a thoughtful piece on "Energy and the Future of Food" that Bruce over at neven's Arctic Sea Ice forum linked to: http://www.howericlives.com/energy-and- ... e-of-food/

This penultimate paragraph was the takeaway for me:

Modern food systems suffer from path dependence. Institutions throughout food systems have invested overwhelmingly in input-intensive technologies and practices, leaving those that are less input-intensive to flounder. These decisions seemed reasonable when they were made, as farmers and other agricultural innovators gravitated towards strategies that yielded increasing returns. The inevitability of diminishing and negative returns was far from anyone’s mind. Today, the realities of diminishing and negative returns stare us squarely in the face. The next century of food production and consumption, both in the United States and around the globe, will necessarily be very different from the previous century. I don’t pretend to know particulars, only that the future holds plenty of surprises.

[Graeme]

Climate change could cut world food output 18 percent by 2050

Global warming could cause an 18 percent drop in world food production by 2050, but investments in irrigation and infrastructure, and moving food output to different regions, could reduce the loss, a study published on Thursday said.

Globally, irrigation systems should be expanded by more than 25 percent to cope with changing rainfall patterns, the study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters said.

Where they should be expanded is difficult to model because of competing scenarios on how rainfall will change, so the majority of irrigation investments should be made after 2030, the study said.

"If you don’t carefully plan (where to spend resources), you will get adaptation wrong," David Leclere, one of the study’s authors, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Infrastructure and processing chains will need to be built in areas where there was little agriculture before in order to expand production, he said.

International food markets will require closer integration to respond to global warming, as production will become more difficult in some southern regions, but new land further north will become available for growing crops.

Based on the study's models, Leclere expects production to increase in Europe, while much of Africa will remain dependent on imports.

reuters

[ennui2]

Will this lead to price spikes that lead to more 'Arab Springs'?

Don't forget expensive oil. Both things cause 'Arab Springs.'

The expensive oil component is currently missing.

[dohboi]

Global warming will cut wheat yields, research shows

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... arch-shows

[Tanada]

Land redistribution: when landless peasants campesino (or unemployed suburbanites) struggle to source groovy/sophisticated local foods.

Peasants in those schemes are already growing food on the land, they know how, when and why to do what needs to be done. Suburbanites, not so much.

[dohboi]

Those would be former campesinos.

[Graeme]

Rising fossil fuel energy costs spell trouble for global food security

Ongoing efforts to feed a growing global population are threatened by rising fossil-fuel energy costs and breakdowns in transportation infrastructure. Without new ways to preserve, store, and transport food products, the likelihood of shortages looms in the future.

In an analysis of food preservation and transportation trends published in this week's issue of the journal BioScience, scientists warn that new sustainable technologies will be needed for humanity just to stay even in the arms race against the microorganisms that can rapidly spoil the outputs of the modern food system.

"It is mostly a race between the capacity of microbe populations to grow on human foodstuffs and evolve adaptations to changing conditions and the capacity of humans to come up with new technologies for preserving, storing, and transporting food," wrote lead author Sean T. Hammond, a postdoctoral researcher and interdisciplinary ecologist in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University.


"More people moving to cities means there are fewer people working to produce food, which means we need to use more energy in the form of machinery to grow and harvest things," Hammond noted. "Problems with bridges, rail and port infrastructure increase the time needed to transport food and lead to even more energy needed to keep food from spoiling while it is transported."

Technological advances in preservation and transportation systems have improved the diversity and nutritional qualities of food over what was available to pre-industrial societies. Nevertheless, it's been estimated that up to 40 percent of the food produced in the United States is lost or wasted. The estimate is lower in developing countries, about 10 percent, due to different diets and cultural norms.

sciencedaily

[Graeme]

Seawater greenhouses to bring life to the desert

Greenhouses that will use seawater to grow crops in one of the hottest and driest places on earth will be designed by researchers at Aston University working with industry partners as part of an international project.

The installations are to be erected in specially selected sites across the Horn of Africa, a region where temperatures regularly breach 40°C, water is scarce and food insecurity is very high. Due to the climate, conventional agriculture has been severely marginalised and the situation is worsening.

The project aims to overcome the region's inhospitable conditions to help farmers drastically increase their crop yields, providing them with a consistent, sustainable income. Currently in Somalia, only 1.5% of the country's land is cultivated and average annual crop yields per hectare are just 0.5 tons -- compared to 700 tons per hectare in commercial greenhouses.

sciencedaily

[Graeme]

New rice variety could feed the planet without warming it

A new type of genetically modified (GM) rice might significantly lessen the impact of agriculture on the climate. The plant, equipped with DNA from barley, emits as little as 1% of the methane—a powerful greenhouse gas—of a conventional variety, while also producing more rice. Experts say the approach has great potential for boosting food sustainability, but requires more research to check whether the new rice performs well in paddies and fields. “They are extraordinary results,” says Timothy Searchinger, who researches climate and agriculture at Princeton University and wasn't involved in the study.

Methane has caused roughly 20% of global warming since the industrial revolution. The major anthropogenic source of methane is agriculture, principally from the guts and manure of livestock and from rice. Why rice? Most of the crop is grown in flooded soil, which lacks oxygen and is an ideal home for methane-producing microbes. Between 80% and 90% of methane emitted from rice fields is produced by microbes living on plant roots; some of the gas dissolves into the water and bubbles up, but most is absorbed along with water by plant roots, travels up to the stems and leaves, and escapes into the atmosphere.

There is already a way to significantly cut methane emissions from rice paddies: Briefly draining the fields adds oxygen to the soil and knocks back the methane-producing microbes. This has other benefits as well: Farmers in China already drain their fields because it can boost yields, and in California and elsewhere, draining helps conserve water. But this type of water management isn’t easy, especially in places where fields drain unevenly or where there is lots of rain. And if done wrong, it can harm yields. “It’s a heck of lot easier to just change a seed,” Searchinger says.

sciencemag

[dohboi]

A bit further down in the article:

much work needs to be done to see if that holds up in realistic field trials.

Linquist says: “I’ve seen a lot of promising things come out of controlled situations that just don’t work in the field.”

Another possible issue is the long-term health of the soil.

By hosting fewer methane-producing microbes, the GM rice might alter the soil ecosystem in unknown ways, notes microbial ecologist Paul Bodelier of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology at Wageningen University in a commentary.

Moreover, if the new rice supplies less carbon and other nutrients to the soil, farmers might eventually want to use more nitrogen-based fertilizers, resulting in the release of nitrous oxide, another strong greenhouse gas.

[Yeah, like 4 times more powerful than methane and about 300 times more powerful than CO2!!]

Indeed, the root mass of the transgenic rice weighed about 35% less than that of the conventional variety, which means that microbes have less to eat after the plants die.

As they say, you can't change just one thing. Everything effects everything else. So with lots of these 'magic' gmo breeds, you end up with things that could cause even more harm than whatever they were replacing. Mostly, this stuff is just window dressing an propaganda for big ag companies that want gmo's to have a feel-good aura about them, so you won't notice as they make gmo crops ever more tolerant of their poisons so they can go on making gobs of money poisoning all of us along with the rest of the planet...

[Newfie]

I'm reading Taste of War.

Seems very appropriate to this topic. Surely the wold pitifal and shipping image changed during WWII. There may be some parallels to our future.

The Taste of War is the first book to tell the intertwined stories of some 20 nations battling for food. This is a story of individual governments struggling to feed civilians and troops with limited resources. Britain and Germany introduced rationing. Japan allowed civilians and soldiers to starve, on the grounds that lives were expendable and the fighting spirit should be sustaining enough. Meanwhile America began to cultivate its image as a land of plenty by giving each soldier a staggering 4,757 calories a day in rations.

[sparky]

.
Newfie .... you legend
, I've read Lizzie Collingham book "the taste of war" and it blew my mind .
I'm pretty conversant with World war 2 ,this was a total change in paradigm
it explained the axis geopolitic problems , the reason for the switch to a Jewish final solution .
and confirmed the underlying reasons for Switzerland and Sweden policies , access to food

I can confirm the part about the French being on starvation rations
while the occupying Germans were living off the hog ,
coal miners in the Northern fields were not issued food coupons if the coal quota wasn't met
My grand father was working for the Citroen factory forging truck axles ,
the work was so important for the Germans that the hot metal forgers had one steak a day ,to keep their forces
it had to be eaten under the watchful eyes of the company agents
else some would have kept it for their underfed famillies
I had anecdotal evidence from Russian friends about the desperate , truly desperate food situation
an old woman told me she was working 12 hours a day in a frozen factory on two slices of bread a day
all the dogs and cats disappeared , girls were dropping dead at their work .

[Pops]

Pops: GMO's are designed to sell more herbicides and pesticides. Monoculture NEVER builds soil. GMO no till cropping slows soil erosion, but does not stop it, much less build soil. How do you build soil by leaving only one food in the soil at a uniform depth? Face it, it's a mining operation, and therefore unsustainable.

And Permaculture® is designed to sell books and will NEVER feed the world.

So now that we've got the strawmen out of the way... notice I explained how tilling burns up soil organics and eliminating tilling to a large extent stops the burning:

So then what is the best way to allow the soil to begin to build up that organic matter so the fertility doesn't wash away?

Stop turning the soil.

Obviously you aren't going to build anything if you don't add anything so the next step (after you stop turning) is to incorporate residue and add to it with cover crops.

Turns out I was wrong in one aspect though, a meta-study last year showed that though no-till and cover builds the most soil carbon, moldboard plowing is better than chisel plowing. That will have a big effect since NRCS just about has a fit over moldbord plows even those sitting in the yard as ornaments.

(A moldboard plow is just what you imagine a plow looks like, it has a big "shovel" designed to turn over the soil. A chisel plow consists of a bunch of straight tines that essentially rake the soil. I assume the reason the moldboard builds more organics is the action of "turning" the soil buries more of the cover than a chisel.)

[sparky]

.
The big problem with "sustainable agriculture is that it doesn't allow large surplus for the cities
the old model was , all the food is consumed local , wastes are carefully recycled
there is very little exports as this would means export of nutrients

modern agriculture bring a lot of inputs as fertilizers to boost and feed the growth
all the nutrients exported to the cities have to be replaced .

[dohboi]

Exactly why cities, at least not hundreds to thousands of cities over a million people each, are probably not a sustainable settlement pattern in the long run.

Before fossil fuels, there were very very few cities over one million in population that weren't centers of military or commercial empires.

[Subjectivist]

Exactly why cities, at least not hundreds to thousands of cities over a million people each, are probably not a sustainable settlement pattern in the long run.

Before fossil fuels, there were very very few cities over one million in population that weren't centers of military or commercial empires.

It was written that when you approached Paris in the time of Napoleon you could smell the stench for hours before you were close enough to see the city. The sewers were basically in distinguishable from the street itself and the wise went to the river to draw water because all the wells inside the walls were contaminated. Population around 1 million but the disease rate was so high the birth rate could not maintain that level, merchants had to recruit farm kids to fill their apprentice rolls.