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Good article, although I need to digest some of the points. I don't necessarily agree with a few points.
The highlight for me is one of the last graphs showing a sharp deviation in private sector ag R&D and public sector R&D. Private sector agriculture corporations are dominated by legacy multinationals that are very much in the rent-seeking stage of their existence. Because of onerous regulations (that aren't necessarily wrong) it is difficult for start-ups to disrupt these legacy players.
However Ag3.0 (yes I am stealing a web3.0 reference) will change this dynamic significantly when this current 'chemical era' in worldwide agriculture burns itself out due to unsustainability. See website in bio for my thoughts.
ETA: The 'cheat code' used to get that insane efficiency on corn yields is well known and well understood. Single-cross hybrids. Once scientists/breeders perfected the seed production mechanism, we reap those insane gains in the early 1940s. It was a transcendent change and IMO needs to be analyzed through a different lens that the slow grind of mechanization improvements, fertility improvements, etc.
ETA2: this link has a graphic that shows a _different_ measure of efficiency, one that shows steady growth over the past ~50 years.
https://thinkingagriculture.io/what-agriculture-has-and-does...
We're about to see a huge "Green" revolution (renewables, battery, etc) in the next 10 years as well as huge advancements in medicine. Tbh, I think we're just about to get started with this next wave.
I'm very skeptical that these technologies will be more efficient than incumbent solutions. These products seem to be designed to comport with well intended political goals, rather than consumer preferences.
It may be that these products are taxes-by-another-name, as consumers either shell out more money for inferior solutions (ebikes, I guess), or, turn to the secondary market instead (for gas leafblowers, say).
After seeing what we did with recycling, I would not be so naive going forward, on the claims of environmentalists. (I still have yet to see the research on the electric car co2 implications of producing batteries and offloading co2 output to power plants, when compared to the incumbent solution)
Ebikes are without doubt both more efficient and superior transportation methods.
They have less space requirements, both in private and public investment, and require less energy to move.
They fit modern requirements for really expensive real estate and rental costs really well.
Overall, I'd expect the efficiencies of the technology to approach similar numbers to what they're replacing, but the businesses profiting off the technology's use will change. Maybe for the better for end customers, and maybe not, but there's disruption opportunities galore
> I still have yet to see the research on the electric car co2 implications of producing batteries and offloading co2 output to power plants, when compared to the incumbent solution
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https://www.transportenvironment.org/discover/does-electric-...
This numbers take into account that countries like Poland use coal to produce electricity. And even that is improving fast.
Also, don't forget that even we in Poland use mostly coal for electricity - and will continue for next 20 years - it's share will fall, hopefully drastically.
Thank-you. Candidly, I think 'no car' is what we should be promoting. I got rid of mine earlier in the year. I may find out this plan is wishful thinking. We'll see.
"Progress" needs to be defined. What is the goal here?
Neither diversity nor soil was mentioned once in TFA.
Is yield the only relevant metric? What about quantity/impact of pesticides? Amount of fertilizer required? Sustainability of local communities? Negative externalities?
"Technological progress" is "greater output with fewer inputs".
Economists typically measure inputs either in terms of total financial costs, or specific types of inputs, typically capital and labour. As is being discussed elsewhere in this thread, energy is also a principle input, and there's a strong argument that it should be considered on its own terms.
If you measure ecological degradation as an output in those terms, then progress is proceeding swimmingly.
I'm reading that as a sarcastic response.
In that reading, true, and a major consideration. It could also mean that _apparent_ progress (efficiency gains) are not. And there are multiple inputs or consequences of farming (both modern and ancient) which sharply increase costs:
- Use of nonrenewable fossil fuels whose true costs of creation (the 5-million to 1 ratio of rates of formation to consumption
https://www-legacy.dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_C...
) are unaccounted.
- Contamination of sinks at rates exceeding their clearing rates (atmospheric CO2, local soil salination, downstream nitrogen and phosphorus polution leading to algael blooms and dead zones, downstream animal wastes with both chemical and bioactive consequences).
- Stripping of soils at rates ~100x that of their formation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26824479
- Degradation of natural biodiversity and ecosystems at rates exceeding their ability to recover and regenerate.
All that said, the basic notion of technological progress remains: can more be achieved with less. What you're rising is a critically important point, but it remains one of making an accurate assessment of inputs and outputs. Within it however is an identification of an Achilles heel of markets: they _don't_ assess long-term or diffuse costs, and hence _systematically and persistently_ bias toward underaccounting for these costs and their consequences.
Markets also fail to assess long-term and diffuse benefits, which is to say that their inherent focus is on the _short term_, _direct_, and _manifestly evident_.
My direct intent in my initial answer was to define what is meant within the economic orthodoxy by "progress" or "efficiency".
For farmers, yes, yield is the only goal.
All of those things you mentioned are intangible at this point and are not incentivized. We need to restructure the incentives around farming away from a commodity perspective (yield) and more around quality (sustainability and all that good stuff).
I often say, don't make farmers out to be the bad guys anymore than airplanes, cars, ihpones, etc. that similarly don't price in externalities.
For a farmer, at least those who own the farmland, the sustainability of their land is far more important than the yield this year.
>_" For a farmer, at least those who own the farmland, the sustainability of their land is far more important than the yield this year."_
Sustainability only matters if they can make the mortgage payments this year.
That’s part of sustainability. You have to balance hundreds of competing factors to do it correctly.
I was replying to a comment that says "sustainability of their land is far more important than the yield"; I wasn't arguing for or against the premise of the dilemma.
As another comment stated, short term and long term goals need to be balanced. Unfortunately, the margins in ag (USA) are razor thin, so it is difficult (not impossible) to adapt sustainable practices while maintaining top yields.
Many sustainable practices require a learning curve and there is a high risk of losing yield if not done correctly.
I think many farmers and landowners _want_ to be sustainable, but the current state of economics makes it challenging except for the top x% of producers.
Even if this is true, which I doubt, those marginal farms will soon be bankrupt, and their lands will be taken over by someone with the means to plan long term.
Short sighted practices only remain in the short run.
I'm confused. You doubt implementing sustainable practices is difficult or that it doesn't affect the profitability of farmers? I assure you, both are true.
Those farmers survive b/c they are basically using unsustainable practices and transforming natural resources (soil fertility) into cash at the _expense_ of sustainability. There is basically no market for sustainable practices other than some small public relations gimmicks. People/companies are trying things, but the scale agriculture operates it makes the problem exceptionally challenging.
I'm a small-scale farmer. Yield is a secondary goal. Primary goals for me are the health of my land, the quality of life for my animals, and the ability to provide for my family.
Correct, and not to sound too obtuse, but your production 'doesn't really matter' in a supply chain sense. Most agriculture production comes from highly scaled, large operations.
My goal is to accept this fact, and try to bring those sustainability qualities to the big guys instead of chopping the big guys up in 1,000 smaller players that _would_ care.
Farmers are reluctant to change their ways though.
They are because the risk is so high. This isn't tech and the margins aren't as high as tech. Want to tinker with the tried-and-true methods on turning profit in farming, great:
Whoops, I ran into $UNFORESEEN_VARAIBLE and it cost me a ton of money. Now I lost the farm or can't get a bank to give me an operating loan because they don't agree with my practices.
There is plenty of room to innovate in agriculture but _how_ to do it (successfully) is vastly different than innovating in tech, manufacturing, pedagogy, etc.
Suggestion: go sell something new to people. figure out what they will buy, won't buy, what they are paid for, what they believe.
I've worked in ag-tech and I think that long-term sustained contact with decision makers for growing operations will be much more revealing than R&D budgets.
Correct, but that data is hard to enumerate and quantify.
Long-term sustained contact with decision makers are also a relatively small cabal and notoriously fickle (IMO).
It's hard to sell people something new when their margins are very small and the risk of failure is high even when you do _everything_ right (weather). Thus, these decision makers usually go with what has worked in past and are extremely cautious to try something new. That mindset contributes to some serious moats in ag (tractors, seed, chemical, fert companies).
IMHO the answer to the question is quite simple and doesn't need any stats from a particular buisness sector of a particular country and 50 paragraphs.
Technological progress is not slowing, but it is being slowed down, like accelerating a car while having the handbrake slightly engaged.
On one hand we have the constant need to do more with less, building on top of our evergrowing pile of collective knowledge and wisdom.
On the other hand we have economic forces that drag down tech progress: Patents, trade secrets, conflicting corporate interests, planned obsolesence etc...
Wouldn't planned obsolescence actually speed up tech progress?
Old things lasting forever are taking places for new things.
Planned obsolescence increases products being bought and sold, but I would guess that it actually decreases innovation, since customers (of a product which breaks or stops being supported) are going to need a new product no matter what – innovation will not increase their need, so innovation is not necessary.
you might not "need" it, but sellers need to innovate to beat their competition.
> sellers need to innovate to beat their competition
they would still need to innovate to beat the competition. But if there is no planned obsolescence, then their competition includes their old products as well, so it guarantees that there's at least one competitive option.
Therefore, i argue that planned obsolescence is removing competition.
I think that planned obsolescence would absolutely slow down tech progress.
A washing machine manufacturer has little incentive to make his product better when he knows that his customers will keep buying his washing machines anyway. Creating "new" models could be as easy as giving the thing different paint job.
It then makes difficult to sell, for example, graphics cards because customers that wanted to buy a card now have to buy a washing machine because it unexpectedly broken down and may then resort to buy cheaper model from competition. The manufacturer will end up with less money to pour into R&D.
I wrote this with the assumption that the washing machine company shares their market with competitors employing the same strategy, entrance to the market is extremely hard because dominant players own the patents which require huge up-front investment with uncertain results due to the rivals' strong market position.
My thought was that it is a waste of resources:
- R&D resources towards making things last less instead of more
- If you are a technologist/researcher and you have to constantly pay for more equipment then it is harder to spend those funds in research.
Also, I wouldn't agree much with the argument that new things take up space from new things. New and old can co-exist, the issue is that you are buying the same tech over and over again slightly revamped
the washing machine and drier we just purchased was much worse than the older model, this was due to planned obsolescene would be my guess. the salesman was quite honest about it: "they don't build em like they used to, nowadays they only last about 8 years". the older models could last more than 10 or even 20 years.
this newer model wasn't better in any way that i could appreciate. sure it had a bunch of useless apps attached to it and the brochure was filled to the brim with lists of shiny technologies, that didn't make a ounce of difference in the power usage or water use (at least not compared to our 10 year old model). Driers haven't improved in power usage at all in the last 30 years.
A potential alternate theory: worsening soil?
The 1940-70s productivity boon seems to correlate (to my knowledge) with increased chemical input usage. Perhaps these were short-term wins at the cost of long-term damage.
the enormous increase in agricultural output in the US has been sustained without any significant increase in these two inputs. Land use has stayed roughly flat, while labor has fallen dramatically. That suggests it’s technology that instead accounts for the big upswing in production.
It's mind blowing to me that I could find no reference to the Haber process[0] in the article at all.
The missing input here is fossil fuels.
Certainly mechanical automation has played a factor, but the number 1 contributor to increased crop yields worldwide is the use of nitrogen based fertilizer. We have completely disrupted the natural nitrogen cycle and are completely dependent on nitrogen fixation for modern day agriculture. The Haber process is an essential part of nitrogen fixation and is also completely dependent on natural gas as a feedstock for the process.
We have had amazing growth in agricultural output in the last century not because of our inventive minds but because of our ready access to hydrocarbons.
In a world increasingly at risk because of this dependence on hydrocarbons it's borderline irresponsible to use agricultural production as a proxy for "technology" and not even mention the relationship to fossil fuels.
[0].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
I was reading the 3rd edition of Limits to Growth (2003) and was very interested to see this article and its take on corn yields as one of their collapse scenarios relied on arithmetic growth in ag yield versus exponential increase in requirements. They did note in the book that some organic farming techniques were able to increase yield substantially without need for as much fertilizer, which itself masks soil salinization. A closer reading of their charts seemed to indicate that there is enough land and yield available for the 21st century so long as the land is not destroyed by pollutants or climatic events.
They didn't go into depth about these topics and I don't know much about farming. Do you think there are non-fertilizer based techniques that would be sufficiently beneficial?
The current system (as noted above) is dependent upon fossil fuel inputs, and it may be a driver of a future decline as you note. Unfortunately we've boxed ourselves in -- we don't have the industrial capacity / biology for something as basic as cover cropping to meet estimated demand should everyone want/need to be sustainable/regenerative:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-020-1022-1?proof=t
Thank you for that info. I didn't know what a cover crop even was.
For anyone else that doesn't know this video helped me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XTeKmccl7w
EDIT: ...and so did scrolling down below the abstract in the linked article. ^_^;
I feel like this is a little disingenuous.
It is currently most economical to source the hydrogen for the Haber process from natural gas, but there are many alternative ways to produce hydrogen. I wouldn't call that true "dependence".
"most economical" is not just some minor feature. If you were to switch to another means of producing hydrogen the price of the process would rise dramatically. The only non-fossil fuel hydrogen generation process is water electrolysis (well and biomass, but guess what's involved in efficiently producing large quantities of biomass).
If you currently eliminated fossil fuels from the process the price required to maintain our current food levels would escalate dramatically. In practice this would mean likely that both food production will drop and food prices would rise.
I don't think it's disingenuous. Maybe I should add "affordable" as a prefix to nitrogen fixation, but "less economic" fertilizer means "less economic" food which is a fairly big problem.
According to the IEA (International Energy Agency) [1] the current (well, as of 2018) production cost of hydrogen using methane as a feedstock is $ 0.9-3.2 /kg, while using renewables is 3.0-7.5 USD/kg. However, as the cost of renewables goes down, there will be plenty of places in the world where the cost of producing H2 (including transportation to the place of use) will be below $2/kg, so quite competitive with methane (not to mention that the price of methane is about twice now what it was in 2018).
[1]
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/hydrogen-prod...
[2]
https://www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-hydrogen
Given the rapid drop in green hydrogen costs, this argument is itself becoming outdated. We will just switch green sources of ammonia and there will be minimal if not nonexistent increases in cost.
From the other reply's (very green optimistic) source [0]:
> While less than 0.1% of global dedicated hydrogen production today comes from water electrolysis, with declining costs for renewable electricity, in particular from solar PV and wind, there is growing interest in electrolytic hydrogen.
When do you think we'll see >50% of hydrogen produced with green energy via electrolysis?
I'm betting: "not within our lifetime", but enjoy taking long views on these things and being wrong. Just curious when you think that's realistically feasible, and when we'll reach 10% (again, I'll still vote "not within our lifetime")?
I'd be delighted to be wrong on this, but still haven't convinced myself. I would be genuinely interested to see your targets on this and then we can interpolate and come up with some milestone we can agree will be seen in our lifetime if you're correct.
0.
https://www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-hydrogen
It will happen by around 2030. It might reach 100% shortly afterwards. Also, hydrogen production should increase by well over an order of magnitude in 25-30 years.
A lot of the progress is due to fossil fuels/fertilizer to be sure, but given unlimited access to fossil fuels in 1900, a single person would still do a tiny fraction of the work a modern farmer can do thanks to modern equipment. I think it is a _massive_ understatement to say that the output of the last century isn't due to inventive minds, ignoring the fact that the Haber process was invented itself.
Author discovers technic distribution has diverged from anthropometric spheres, resultingly thinks its declining overall
If the premise is true, this isn't good news. I know people are still circumspect of `The limit to growth` since their worse predictions (about ressources especially) turned out to be "wrong" (Jury is still out on conventionnal oil tbh), but their optimistic models, even the "business as usual" one, all demand a continuous (or even growing) rate of progress.
We can't really afford not to continue progressing in all fields.
There are easy ways to bring major yield improvements but scientific knowledge is by default ignored. E.g Skq1
Let me stop this right here; are we equating "OVERproduction of food that we likely don't need" to "progress?"
There are certain events in human history that are so destructive, that paying a regular cost to prevent them is wise.
Famine is one of those calamities. It will absolutely destroy the entire economy, and get even bring down governments/democracies.
Over-production is an absolute conscience choice we make.
Do not mistake insurance for waste. Also note that US food surpluses are funnelled into the US Food Aid program which distributes excess production (which we actually used to outright destroy) into preventing famines abroad. This has significant humanitarian, as well as diplomatic value.
Because of the intentional overproduction , the US has not had a food shortage for over 100 years, despite occasional crop failures that have occured.
It's fine if you throw the overproduced food away. If someone gets the silly idea to eat more then you will create massive medical costs in the process.
yeah, i was also not sure whether I've missed something. Equating "Technological Progress" to "Increase in Agricultural Output" doesn't make sense...maybe we don't need that much more food, that's why it's slowing down. Maybe the american agricultural output could double in the next 10 years, but is it energy well spent? After all, it's a bit of a zero-sum game, a society has finite capacity for research and must spend its budget wisely.
Agricultural output is usually per unit of land and/or inputs, so more output means less land, less pollution, and less ecological damage for a fixed amount of food produced. If some fields can be reforested instead, it'd pull carbon out of the air and increase biodiversity.
Most agricultural land was short grass or long grass prairie prior to being plowed over. Prairie is the most endangered ecosystem on the planet. Perhaps instead of "reforestation" we can look at restoring native prairie.
Is it physically or biologically possible to double agricultural output in the next ten years?
It doesn't matter how much you spend on R&D if we hit the limit of what we can do with biology.
Probably yes.. e.g. there's a massive amount of research into RuBisCO. If we could speed up the primary carbon-fixing reaction, we could massively increase Ag output (also could make a dent in carbon sequestration):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuBisCO#Genetic_engineering
There's tons about plant bio we don't fully understand and a lot of room for R&D. An imperfect measure, but in 2021, Google Scholar added over 5,000 results for the term;
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C23&as_yl...
If/when we figure out how to make good tasting beef industrially, without the intermittent "there is a cow" stage, the world will change a LOT, for the better.
Yes, it is possible. Probably just entering a new golden age with genomic tools and excellent metadata on the farms that currently do produce.
Plenty of arable land, but ideally we only want the most efficient land in production.
Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
Corn and soybeans are better thought of as raw material for industry, rather than food.
We don't need more corn to eat, but alongside the fact that it's an industrial input, it's a strategic export that works as a part of American foreign policy: other nations are dependent on US crop imports the way they're dependent on oil.
In that way, rising output is always great, as it solidifies our position as an exporter, and lowers the price of the material which prevents competition and solidifies this dependence. And it's a better (more affordable) product for the importer countries.
Well stated and I mostly agree
It is strange talking about overproduction when large part of the world is hungry.
Growing enough food isn't the problem. Distribution, which includes economic and political factors, is the issue. Google tells me that 811 million people go hungry. That's a lot of people, but it's not a large part of the world, since 7 billion people presumably have enough to eat.
That's the point. Instead of worrying about overproduction we should worry about distributing food to ones they need it. And 811 million is a huge number. Can't be ignored just because another 7B are ok. Also I suspect that there are more than 811 hungry. They're just not literally dying.
Zimbabwe could easily feed itself and export to other African nations until Mugabe basically threw out all the farmers because they are white.
Sending food from developed nations might work over the short term but you know, before the industrial revolution every economy was an agricultural one. The only thing these countries can export is food.
If the developed nations want to act as a parent, then they would obviously give a lot of things away for free, just like you give food to your children for free. That's not what's happening though. Institutions like the IMF are counting every dollar owed to them by developing countries.
OP is spot on. There’s a big reason we use corn for so much more than food today. We over produce it.