Tag: agriculture

Rivers No Longer Burn

By many measures, the Clean Water Act has fulfilled the ambition of its drafters. The sewage discharges that were commonplace in the 1960s are rare. The number of waters meeting quality goals has doubled. Given the successes described above, how has the Clean Water Act done so poorly despite doing so well? Much of the answer lies in the law’s narrow focus. We have made great progress in controlling industrial pipes that discharge waste, but other major sources remain largely unregulated. To gain sufficient congressional support from farm states in 1972, the Clean Water Act largely exempted runoff from agricultural fields and irrigation ditches.

while there is still a long way to go for many rivers, it is encouraging to know that some environmental trends are going in the right direction. as far as i can tell, this success was mostly passive, stopping new pollution and letting sedimentation take care of it. an active approach would have much more impressive results.

Gardening at scale


Large-scale agricultural experimentation by the incas, and how similar designs could be used to affect climate on a continental scale. There are some theories that this is exactly what happened in the amazon basin:

“Anthropologists now believe that the majority of the Amazon rain forest was managed by humans. There are many fruit and nut bearing trees in the Amazon, and this was probably due to human interference. They also used a unique form of burning in the Amazon, where they would stop the fields from completely burning so that there would be charcoal. Turns out the active carbon in charcoal bonds to organic elements and makes the soil as good or probably better than using fertilizer.” (from the excellent 1491 by Charles Mann)

The amazon basin has been terraformed on a large scale as far back as 2500 BP, supporting a population of 8M by the time the spaniards showed up in 1492. After that, it of course crashed.
2020-04-11: The large scale cultivation goes back much further.

We show that, starting at around 10 ka BP, inhabitants of this region began to create a landscape that ultimately comprised 4700 artificial forest islands within a treeless, seasonally flooded savannah. Our results confirm that humans have markedly altered the landscape ever since their arrival in Amazonia.

2022-06-02: Amazonian cities

Starting 1.5 ka BP, ancient Amazonians built and lived in densely populated centers, featuring 22m earthen pyramids and encircled by kilometres of elevated roadways. 2 of the urban centers each covered an area of more than 100 hectares — 3x the size of Vatican City. The lidar images revealed walled compounds with broad terraces rising 6m above ground. On one end of the terraces stood conical pyramids made of earth. People likely lived in the areas around the terraces and travelled along the causeways connecting the sites to one another. Lidar images found reservoirs in the settlements, perhaps indicating that this part of the world wasn’t always wet — an environmental shift that might have driven people away. But then again, steady pollen records reveal that maize was grown in the area continuously for 1000s of years, indicating sustainable agricultural practices.

Robot agriculture

The robots are able to locate and pick a specific tomato, and even pollinate the plants. In the long run, the researchers hope to develop a fully autonomous greenhouse.

2012-09-14:  AutoMicroFarm

AutoMicroFarm is an automated farm system that enables gardeners to grow 90% of their food with a system that replaces time, effort, and agricultural expertise with design, technology, and software. It is an open-source aquaponics system with best-of-class design, monitoring and automation to make it easy to maintain.

2016-06-01: Automation has some not so obvious consequences that should make the Birkenstock mafia happy if they weren’t so preoccupied with being luddites.
2018-05-22: New AI-enabled tractors target weeds, using 90% less herbicide

Farming is undergoing a quiet but radical transformation as machine learning and automation innovations reduce waste. One especially promising new technology targets individual weeds. This is especially important as the world slowly moves to ban glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup and others that may be linked to cancer and loss of biodiversity. Some studies have linked the chemical to changes in bee behavior.

2021-06-07: Australia’s first automated farm

Robots and artificial intelligence will replace workers on Australia’s first fully automated farm created at a cost of $20m. Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga will create the “hands-free farm” on a 19km2 property to demonstrate what robots and artificial intelligence can do without workers in the paddock. The reality of “hands-free” farming’ is closer than many people realize: “Full automation is not a distant concept. We already have mines in the Pilbara operated entirely through automation.”

2022-02-23: Verdant Robotics

Verdant Robotics announced the delivery of the industry’s first multi-action, autonomous farm-robot capable of millimeter-accurate spraying, laser weeding, and AI-based digital crop modeling, and the expansion of their robot-as-a-service offering to farmers. Combining multiple technologies, the company’s 6-row and 12-row commercial implements can treat up to 4.2 acres per hour, achieving a higher weed-removal rate per acre than other technology or human ability, and reducing chemical usage by 95%. Simultaneously, its autonomous software system collects data and uses machine learning capabilities to optimize yield and growing outcomes, ultimately unlocking new revenues to help farmers reach profitability and sustainability goals.


2023-02-23: Dogtooth strawberry picker

2023-05-01: Drones to avoid soil compaction

Early one recent morning in Vidalia, Georgia, Greg Morgan launched a Hylio AG-230 drone carrying 30l of fungicide over a field of sweet onions. The chemical, which is essential to crop survival in this humid state fell in a fine mist from the spray jets of a 36 kg drone scudding 3 meters above his cash crop. It has cut his fuel costs and already reduced his agrochemical usage by 15%. The drone has also enabled him to work his fields after heavy rains — when the ground is often too sodden for heavy equipment — and has spared his crop from the routine damage caused by tractors. It has also saved his soil from the compaction, bogging and erosion caused by farm machinery.

End of Farmers Markets?

kickbacks for big farming under the always popular safety fetish banner.

What this will do is force anyone who produces food of any kind, and then transports it to a different location for sale, to register with a new federal agency called the “Food Safety Administration.” Even growers who sell just fruit and/or vegetables at farmers markets would not only have to register, but they would be subject inspections by federal agents of their property and all records related to food production.

In vitro meat

Many people have an initial reaction that invitro meat would be yucky and they do not want it. However, people already eat meat slurry in fairly large quantities.

Yuck – invitro meat. But deep fry it and call them improved McNuggets and they eat billions.

2012-02-15: Mark Post at Maastricht University

It looks more like squid than steak and because it lacks the fat and protein found in real cattle, does not taste like traditional beef. So why would anyone eat meat grown in a lab? In-vitro meat may still be years away from our supermarkets, but they will be able to grow a hamburger by the end of this year.

2015-01-01: Overblown title, but still interesting:

Why turn plant proteins into burgers? Why not just eat them as peas? Culture is a lump of flesh wrapped in dough. If you want to save the world, you’d better make it convenient. Sometime in the next 10 years, Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods or another rival will perfect vegetarian beef, chicken, and pork that is tastier, healthier, and cheaper than the fast-food versions of the real thing. Overnight, meat will become the coal of 2025—dirty, uncompetitive, outcast.

2016-03-23: Limit meat. Vindication!

The Netherlands Nutrition Center is recommending people eat just 2 servings of meat a week, setting an explicit limit on meat consumption for the first time. The recommendations come 5 years after a government panel weighed the ecological impact of the average Dutch person’s diet, concluding last year that eating less meat is better for human and environmental health.

2016-12-12: Beyond Meat

Most people have a vague feeling that factory farms aren’t quite ethical. But few people are willing to give up meat so such feelings are suppressed because acknowledging them would only make one feel guilty not just. Once the costs of giving up meat fall, however, vegetarianism will spread like a prairie wildfire changing eating habits, the use of farmland, and the science and economics of climate change.

as usual, don’t read the dumb comments.
2017-09-04: Memphis Meats

Memphis Meats is announcing their Series A syndicate today, and it is a fascinating group of people coming together to help the world modernize the manufacturing of meat by removing animals from the process. It is identical to the meat we eat, down to the cellular level; it’s just the manufacturing method that radically changes. For full disclosure, DFJ led the $17M Series A, and I’ll be joining the board. It has been hard to contain my excitement as I have been looking for a meat solution for 5 years now. Since signing the term sheet, I have been wearing their t-shirt for a month now, and it is quite an evangelical conversation starter, generating keen interest the likes of which I have rarely seen before (e.g., Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Kimbal Musk joined us). We also got leading research institutions and some of the largest meat industry corporations to join the syndicate.


2018-03-08: Wired piece on Memphis Meats

By January 2016 they had grown up enough for a taste test. At a cost of $1200, it was by far the most expensive meatball either man had ever eaten. The process is now orders of magnitudes more efficient. But there’s still more work to do. Clearing the cost hurdle will be key to cultured meat catching on. Consumers aren’t going to spring for a bioreactor burger if the farm-raised or grass-grazed version is 1000s of times less expensive. Valeti is feeling the pressure. “We need to get this expansion done in a timely fashion so it can actually make an impact while we still have a window. There’s definitely a race on.”

2018-04-06: Lobbyists are being hired

The beef industry has started to quiver, and rightfully so: Flush with untold capital, Impossible Foods has apparently decided to spend some of it on a Washington lobbyist. Back in 2016, people from Memphis Meats, Just (formerly Hampton Creek), and other “clean meat” start-ups banded together to form the Good Food Institute.

2019-04-02: Available in major chain restaurants

Burger King has announced that it is introducing a vegetarian Whopper on its menu. Burger King will test the new meatless option at 59 restaurants in the St. Louis area. If it proves popular, the “Impossible Whopper” will become available in all 7200 United States Burger King branches. Burger King is the latest fast food chain to add a vegetarian burger, following in the footsteps of Carl’s Jr. restaurants that added a vegetarian burger using Beyond Meat, in January and the “Impossible Slider” added by White Castle last year.

2019-06-27: Satanic Meatless burgers

Rick Wiles, host of TruNews, reveals that meatless burgers are “plant-based alternatives to meat and dairy products, is part of a satanic plot to alter human DNA so that people can no longer worship God.”

2019-09-30: Longer term, much more will be replaced:

Precision biology will displace, replace or transform agriculture by using designed microorganisms and adapting beer industry fermentation processes to produce food that is identical to milk and meat but without using animals. The first product we are seeing with mass impact is the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat products that are impacting ground meat.


2019-12-11: Is Eating Meat A Net Harm?

Overall, the case for reduced meat consumption is strong. Vegetarianism is cheaper, better for your health (if you can afford a diverse diet and are not an infant), and is less impactful for the environment. It also has a significant moral cost in terms of animal suffering.

2020-01-07: Impossible Pork targeting the chinese market.

that tester agreed that the texture was off but the flavor was there. Lopatto tried a bánh mi sandwich, char siu buns, dan dan noodles, katsu, and sweet, sour, and numbing meatballs all made with Impossible Pork.

2020-03-13: Post-Zoonotic Food

There’s no time to waste in pushing forward solutions for what is likely the underlying cause of this pandemic, and what has been at the root of dozens of prior zoonotic events. We can’t afford not to have the same level of urgency in directing funding, effort, and talent into accelerating the development and deployment of safer, modern meat production methods. It is past time to move away from animal-derived meat altogether.

2020-08-07: CO2 and Methane impact

if every burger eaten in the USA were replaced with an Impossible burger, that would require 90% less land and water while reducing GHG emissions by 90%.

2021-05-14: Artificial Duck

My first taste of their cultivated meat, duck in this case. It was delicious and indistinguishable from duck, because it was duck. It just did not quack like a duck. Future generations will marvel that we thought we had to grow and slaughter a whole animal to get all the yummy meat that we might like to eat.

2021-07-15: Beyond Chicken

Some people do care about eating something that tastes exactly like chicken, so I took Beyond Chicken tenders to the toughest food critic I know: my 87-year-old grandmother. She’s been cooking incredible chicken dishes for decades, and I wanted to see if she’d sniff out the difference if I didn’t tell her that what she was being served was not real chicken. After taking a few bites, she said it tasted “very good.” Then I revealed to her that this was not real chicken; it was made from plants. She stared at me for 1 second. Then she said, “I don’t mind, as long as it tastes like chicken. And it does! It’s a bit heavier, but if you hadn’t said anything, I wouldn’t have noticed.”

But plant-based companies are not yet able to mimic chicken in all its forms. Making a breaded tender is one thing — the breading can act as camouflage. Creating a convincing chicken breast is a whole other dream, and Brown suggested we shouldn’t expect it to come true anytime soon.

2023-03-23: In vitro meat has tons of challenges, the plant alternatives are doing much better.

But while the industry releases increasingly optimistic projections, well-informed commentators remain skeptical. It’s still unclear if cultivated meat can be made affordable or at large-enough scale to compete with conventional animal products. As we approach the decade anniversary of Mark Post’s first burger, many are confused as to when, if ever, cultivated meat will be on their plates.

After spending a few years inside the industry, I’ve come to believe that the true prognosis for cultivated meat is somewhere in the middle, between that exuberant initial hopefulness and more recent cynicism. I agree with the pessimistic commentators that “The Dream” of cultivated meat — full bio-replicas, cost competitive, at scale — is not feasible in the short term. However, comparison to other technologies like solar energy suggests that cultivated meat may take decades and 100s of billions of dollars in investment — but is ultimately possible. If we accept longer time scales, many of the seemingly intractable problems become tractable. In the meantime, companies can justify large venture capital investments by pursuing cheaper products that combine cultivated and plant-based components.

Against Ethanol

Gasoline alternatives will boost CO2 levels and aggravate global warming.

Of course. fucking corn mafia

The prices mainly reflect changes in demand—not problems of supply, such as harvest failure. The changes include the gentle upward pressure from people in China and India eating more grain and meat as they grow rich and the sudden, voracious appetites of western biofuels programmes, which convert cereals into fuel. This year the share of the maize (corn) crop going into ethanol in America has risen and the European Union is implementing its own biofuels targets. To make matters worse, more febrile behavior seems to be influencing markets: export quotas by large grain producers, rumours of panic-buying by grain importers, money from hedge funds looking for new markets.

I can’t believe Obama is believing the ethanol nonsense.

“fuel-efficient cars and alternative fuels like E85, a fuel formulated with 85% ethanol, represent the future of the auto industry. It is a future American car companies can attain if we start making some tough choices now.”

The average Iowa farm has the potential to feed 3500 people per km2. But planted with nothing but corn — and with almost all of that corn going to ethanol production and the feeding of animals — the same land can only feed 744 people per km2.

On all the ethanol and similar nonsense.

The biomass industry—selling ground-up tree pellets to European power plants—is an economic boon to the South, but experts worry its growth is terrible for the planet. Will the Biden administration decide it’s climate-friendly?

2008-07-03:

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75%

Subsidies kill.
2022-03-06:

But whatever the (slim-to-none) merits of that argument in 2007, its merits are 0 in 2022, when the United States has become the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas. And though ethanol may have some small environmental advantages over gasoline, those arguable benefits are nullified by ethanol’s terrible toll on world food output.

It may take some time and government assistance to rotate US farmland back from corn-for-fuel to food crops. But unfortunately, the war in Ukraine may last for a long time. If food-importing nations in Asia and the Middle East could be assured that more American wheat, barley, and sunflower oil would be heading their way in 2023, and that more corn would be available for animal feed rather than burned up as automobile fuel, wiser US farm policy could even help consolidate global support for Ukraine.

Ending the ethanol mandates and subsidies will boost world food supply. More food supply will reduce price pressures. Less pressure on food prices will remove a Russian weapon of intimidation.