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
It’s 2026, Earth’s pop. is 8.3 billion people. I genuinely think we are going to be 2/3 this in ~5 years.
You think that 2.75 Billion people are going to die in the next 5 years?
Sorry - I can’t get past that. It’s possible I’d read an article that had this conclusion, as shocking as that would be - if it had a more credible bit of evidence than “I genuinely think”. I also don’t know what WHS is. I would normally google that if I wanted to be informed by the article, but yeah - I’ve already dismissed its contents as crazy and stopped being interested.
I’m being harsh, I apologise about that. Normally I’d have closed the tab and never thought about it again. But you’re asking for criticism and appear to be new at this. As a reader of lots of articles, I approach them something like:
Is this plausible? No? Who is saying it? Some random on the Internet? What’s their source? “Trust me bro”?
If you have bona fides on the topic, be clearer about what they are. If you have data to back your conclusion up, be clearer about that before you drop a bombshell like ‘3 Billion people are going to die in the next few years’.
From the bits I read/skimmed, you appear to be saying that present levels of food production are relying on artificial fertiliser, which in-turn relies on LNG to be produced. But you haven’t made clear is what’s changing, why this is a problem, why we can’t use alternate fertiliser sources, what trends you are already seeing to demonstrate that you’re not projecting everything.
Hey, thanks for taking the time, there is a big collection of sources in the article. What is changing is the global energy economy fracture after the war in Iran and the current agricorp sole focus on yield and cost per tonnage making regenerative farming ‘unviable’ plus loss of institutional knowledge and an uninvested workforce.
Our farms are literally unable to practice sustainable farming and remain solvent, we don’t collect seeds and can’t rotate crops. Without investment in biomass fertilizer programs over the next 12-24 months, I suspect the agricorp cost benefit analysis flips and sells off farms and farmland at pennies on the dime to cut losses and maintain quarterly profits. My source on that is, we are up for sale right now, but might be liquidated into the assets like water rights and land value rather then sold wholesale.
How is that killing three billion people
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.
I think your document needs an executive summary. There is too much information to process here. I appreciate your thoroughness, but it’s too much and most people won’t commit to reading all of that. It’s like sifting through academic papers, you need to read an abstract to decide if it’s worth your time.
Thank you, I will try to write an executive summary. the gist of it is, tough times coming.
I think most people also feel like tough times are coming. But your document resembles an information dump, and it draws on so many ideas that it comes across as incoherent. I don’t want to be mean about this, because you’ve clearly put a lot of work into it. But I think you should distill these ideas into an essay format, because I’ve kind of got no idea how to process it and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Please take a look, I am open to critique.
your timing is wrong, when civilization collapses is unknown but everything we do is wrong, and we have little interest in changing it. Don’t be surprised when you’re ignored, you’ll need to learn to deal with that.
We are currently in the midst of the sixth mass extinction and climate change will destroy civilisation
i understand you’re excited about this insight but know none of this is new, Limits to Growth from the 1970 pointed this out on a planetery scale.
It’s human entitlement vs the laws of nature
Tom Murphy is a good resource on this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CmnQD3QHeY
he also has a blog, his series Metastic Modernity is a good start
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/07/metastatic-modernity-launch/
