Hi All,
I work with large producers. I manage WHS for some Australian farms in Victoria. I am deeply concerned about:
Our capacity to feed 8.3 billion humans in 2027-2032
I fear we are headed to the 1945 world population of 2.5 billion
Synthetic fertiliser is made from LNG and likely to never be in abundance again.
Please take a look, I am open to critique.
https://biofert.substack.com/p/we-cant-eat-data-license-cc0-10
https://e.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZE5brZTm1gPNbnWYyhzGdznR7vrkxiCCeX
Synthetic fertiliser shortage never ending, lower crop output per input, massive population growth from 2.5 billion to 8.5 billion in ~80 years thanks to synthetic fertilizer and industrialisation. So without synthetic fert, without diesel (farming is very diesel heavy) cheap labour and with a huge global debt making capital investment tightly aligned with cost/benefit then we likely can’t produce and transport food for all the people who now live 100’s kilometers from it’s production. I’m not hard claiming 3 billion but i feel it’s a fair assessment weighing agricultural innovations over the last 80 years against the probable the loss of abundant fert/oil/labour/water/pollinators/biosecurity programs
Before billions of people are starving to death though, I would imagine that as an emergency measure there would be massive shift from meat to grain production, which is multiple times more productive.
At least in the short term, if we get long term issues of that scale, things might be different.
Also when it becomes a matter of survival, market economics stop to matter. Then it becomes a question if a state can afford to close the financing gap or not. The EU is already subsidising agriculture for productiveness to secure regional food production for example. The mechanisms are already there, they just would have to be strengthened.
Diesel demand is currently falling in Europe as diesel cars are becoming obsolete. If saving fuel for agriculture becomes a priority, just push harder for EV transition.
Lastly, ammoniac can be produced from air, while that requires s lot of energy that does not have to come from fossil sources. Also, just shit down all those useless ai data centers during a state of energency to secure energy for fertiliser production.