Depopulation: A Threat to Civilization or Just a Phase?

[Narz]

Right, more old people to take care of but fewer kids.

 

[Angst]

Right, more old people to take care of but fewer kids.

where you should specifically factor in an incredible boom in productivity, if you actually parse samson's figures properly. it's really weird that you look at those graphs and samson's notes and leave that out.

imma try explaining it. it's like... take a step back and look at agriculture. in Europe in the 800s, pulling from wiki, around 80% of people were farmers, and starvation was common. today, it's 4.2% in the EU, pulling from official data, and we have an exuberant food surplus. now, there's a bunch of international imports and such, it's all very complicated, yadda yadda, but we're not dependent on the Nile or whatever for calories. this incredible productivity of modern farming is naturalized to people today, and we don't particularly question how changes in technology and production has a farmer sustain near twenty people on the hour. if you dig into the numbers, we're infact using farmland incredibly inefficiently due to our high rate of animal produce consumption and what it takes in sheer farmland to sustain. it's actually quite absurd if you consider this scale of production, of a core importance to just staying alive, from such a small demographic.

labor elsewhere isn't actually that different. there's much fewer people needed in manufacturing today, producing more than we used to. it's not just in agriculture that tractors and chemicals has farmers pull above their weight; the high decree of industrial automatization makes the individual worker able to produce an incredible amount of goods. now, more yadda yadda: there's also complexities in how a lot of the raw material production is tied internationally, but then we get into the same situation that lowering birthrates isn't actually that much of a problem, since so much raw material industry happens in areas where birthrates are still high. and if we get to a point where birthrates decline there too, it's not like machinized extraction isn't possible in those places, either.

point is, if tech is hypothetically at a point that an active working population of say 10% or whatever can sustain everyone, it can just sustain everyone. that's the basic point.

we aren't there yet, no, but the whole point of samson's was that production has increased enourmously as birth rates declined. the problem today is more allocation of wealth than it is sheer production of goods. we're doing very well at the latter. that you can't afford it is a problem of allocation.

 

[Farm Boy]

8.5 cents a day here for base calories for an adult man. Pigs(let's use pigs) convert at one premium high protein animal calorie per 4 to 9 low value plant calories. Let's use 9. So that's ~76.5 cents a day eating straight pig at unrealistically poor conversion ratios. That's for the baseline plant production. Almost the entire bill for your food is labor and profit taking along the way. Just like the majority of our agricultural bill is propping up food assistance for the people that are priced such that they don't have the money to pay for that labor properly to eat the dirt cheap produce. Distribution distribution distribution. But yes, angst has it, most of the problems people think happen on the farm happen on the way from the farm to them.

 

[Samson]

8.5 cents a day here for base calories for an adult man.

Can I ask about your maths? I get 18 cents with some very favourable assumptions, I wonder how you get so much lower?

I Started with a man needing 2,500 kcal/day, corn at $4.16 I think per bushel, a bushel at 14.515 kg, "carbs" at 4 kcal/g which I think is high for idealised carbs, and certain high for corn. That gives me $0.179125 per man per day.

Spoiler Sums :

> kgPerBush <- 14.5150
> dollarPerBush <- 4.16
> calPerMan <- 2500
> calPerGram <- 4 # Is not 3.5 closer
> gramsMan <- calPerMan/calPerGram
> gramsMan
[1] 625
> bushPerMan <- gramsMan/(kgPerBush*1000)
> bushPerMan
[1] 0.0430589
> dollarPerMan <- dollarPerBush*bushPerMan
> dollarPerMan
[1] 0.179125

 

[Farm Boy]

bu #2 corn at 56lbs
1566 calories per lb
87,696 calories per bu
2,000 calories per day(we're not active like we used to be)
43.848 days/bu
I can pull around $3.70-3.75 for a bushel, delivered to the commercial elevator from the farm, at that board of trade price. Real grain has a location and hands to pass through, unlike imaginary grain, which lowers its value significantly.

 

[Samson]

bu #2 corn at 56lbs

That is where I went wrong. I did not get that a bushel is volume rather than weight, so differs by product.

 

[Farm Boy]

Conversions are fun. I get wrong the routine ones routinely.

It has the legacy of a volume(and maybe still is for some things, I dunno!), but really it's a unit of weight of a specific product at a specific moisture. If that makes it more fun. I think it does for some things. I usually calculate at around 14%, since I have to pay drying costs when delivered above that, and if the moisture content is high, they will correct for its weight upon delivery and reduce the number of bushels counted appropriately. If I deliver under the mark for moisture, I pay no drying, but the dry weight does not get the number of bushels corrected back up to account for the lack of water weight in the product. Additional fun fact, trying to add moisture back to your grain to increase the weighted bushels is adulterating one's grain, and is illegal.

 

[Zardnaar]

Here we don't subsidize farmers.

In USA seems a small step from that to distribution of excess to the poor.

Here it's one of the best value for the dollar social programs you can do.

 

[Narz]

bu #2 corn at 56lbs
1566 calories per lb
87,696 calories per bu
2,000 calories per day(we're not active like we used to be)
43.848 days/bu
I can pull around $3.70-3.75 for a bushel, delivered to the commercial elevator from the farm, at that board of trade price. Real grain has a location and hands to pass through, unlike imaginary grain, which lowers its value significantly.

Not sure what's the point of this exercise. No one lives off just corn.

You can fit 70,000 people in a baseball stadium too, that doesn't mean it's housing for 70,000.

 

[Zardnaar]

Not sure what's the point of this exercise. No one lives off just corn.

You can fit 70,000 people in a baseball stadium too, that doesn't mean it's housing for 70,000.

Kinda points out you could add other stuff to the diet for dirt cheap.

Vegetarian diet meat say twice a week. People like their fats and sugers though.

Farm boy knows more about it than I do but we are the only two here with experience on working farms afaik.

If you want stuff more than corn and grains it's gonna cost more. Eg adding lettuce, cabbage, potatoes, fruit, berries etc.

 

[Narz]

People already know you can live cheaply on nothing but ramen but that's not really living.

A man can survive in a 8 by 8 jail cell also.

"Surplus corn for all (while the topsoil lasts) in our glorious empire, make babies now, chicken nuggets served on weekends!"

 

[Farm Boy]

That's hardly the argument, though I'd put water, higher, first. People will and do live off just carbs and fats. It's not a healthy diet, but malnutrition isn't exactly at record highs in America, inactivity may be. Fresh, labor intensive, travel required from food deserts may be hard to get, but that isn't an ecological stewardship argument. Efficiency becomes far more important in that regard, and meats are a valuable tool to capture low quality or unfit quality calories.

I don't think you get to presume that way on me, man. Have all the babies!!!lol hehehe

 

[Narz]

I got enough

 

[Farm Boy]

Three more for quota. Get steppin'!

 

[Voidwalkin]

Three more for quota. Get steppin'!

Very unrelated, but in your estimation what is the best farmland in America? From a calorie production standpoint. Presume ideal ground for whatever the highest yield crop is.

And best in the world.

I'm curious to have a reasonably experienced view on it.

 

[Angst]

Not sure what's the point of this exercise. No one lives off just corn.

You can fit 70,000 people in a baseball stadium too, that doesn't mean it's housing for 70,000.

the point wasn't to sustain everyone on corn, but to point out the incredibly cheap cost of massive food production today. farm boy's first example was pork, where he went with the worst possible calorie conversion rate from plant to meat for high quality protein, where as an example, if everyone only ate pork and did so at production costs, they'd do so for less than a dollar a day. the costs you see in the store are labour, transportation, admin, etc.

again, the discussion came from the idea that we produce a lot, and a very small % of people can sustain everyone with good enough tech and technique. agriculture is a good example here since we have a huge food surplus with just a small part of the population doing actual production.

 

[Farm Boy]

I'm hoping the pork farmers' share pulls it over a buck a day, most of the time, on prices(they're pretty spiky, food has nonstandard demand curves). But yar, the economic argument shows how much we invest as a society into something, since economic expenditure reallocates social clout(what else is money? You can't eat it, but you can trade your clout allowance for something you can). I'd say we consider food to be a right, and as such it should come for free when one needs it. Moreover, I think we actually assume that it sort of is free since we individually pay so little for it. But then you get into the issues of the people who need assistance paying for it, still, and we think we should make the production cheaper yet. I'm just saying you aren't getting much more from that stone no matter how hard you squeeze. If you want the prices to come down more, you need to decrease low end wages since that's near what a lot of people in the chain are getting paid. Meat packers, Dollar General store employees, people working at the cereal mill, the butcher at Whole Foods(or wherever). That's what you're actually paying for. There's like ?15 cents? or less of food products in your boxes of Kellogg's Corn Flakes. The other $4.43 are everyone else. You'll need to squeeze them if we want more blood outta the rock. Or we can do what we've been doing, and as we price people out of being able to pay for the labor of food distribution, we just give them federal food assistance funds from the bigger half of the farm bill. Which then subsidizes the whole chain and the price drifts up with inflation. While the cost of production trims deeper and deeper into the meat.

Either way, as a society, I think we pay almost nothing for food production. We treat it like it's actually as free as we want it to be, conservation be damned. Or we treat it like it's free, but punish people for doing it "wrong" without changing the system so they can do it differently(so probably just an excuse to **** them outta some money). Look, if you want more topsoil protection you need to change the program. Farmers farm the program. If that program becomes uncompetitive, you have to subsidize it, or the whole thing stops working. Then you need to look at how carefully green or nondestructive the people are that you are now paying to do the thing instead(or if they even like you. Of all the people I want to like me, people who serve me food are tops of the list). Which sort of goes into Void's question: I've no idea where the most productive ground is. Seems like it'd need to depend on what you're growing. I usually think in terms of the big 3 grasses +1 when it comes to feeding the humans of the world, not a lot of things scale up enough to do it. Rice, corn, wheat, and potatoes. Potatoes seem to be really tillage intensive and grown where other crops don't do well, so they're probably not "most productive." Wheat does that too, with the scale of Canada and Russia taking over for a quality all of its own. I'd guess(and correct me if you want to look it up and I'm wrong!) that rice and corn are where it's at. Brazil and Argentina can doublecrop their seasons, growing more than one commercial crop of corn off the same ground per year. Twice as intensive right off the bat, but not twice the yield, it's a decreasing efficiency power curve sort of like a car on a dyno. But I'd guess, throwing this out in the dark, that the Indian subcontinent probably has the most productive farmland in the world. Overwatering from pumped groundwater in our western deserts is the only thing I see competing with that, and I don't think it'd pull even.

 

[Narz]

.

again, the discussion came from the idea that we produce a lot, and a very small % of people can sustain everyone with good enough tech and technique.

People need more than food and even in regards to food large swaths of the population are deficient in basic nutrients.

Taking one metric and saying "look at all this corn that's really cheap right now therefore human civilization is suatinable" doesn't prove we can "sustain everyone with good enough tech and technique".

Can we even sustain current farming practices?

I don't know much about farming but iirc it's massively subsidized, requires massive amounts of chemical fertilizers (made from fossil fuels iirc), we're destroying the topsoil not to mention biodiversity and food is much less nutritious than it used to be.

I don't think "it's cheap right now" works as an argument. Petrol is very cheap rn too that's doesn't mean fossil fuels are sustainable.

 

[Farm Boy]

The less nutritious food thing was with vegetables, I think, but they figured out what they were doing wrong with the conventional breeding of (tomates and whatnot) about 10 years ago*. They've been growing much tastier veg since. But it takes a while to re-propagate good lines. Give it another 10 years and I bet we have the best tomatoes that have ever been grown on earth. I'm not saying your point is wrong, just tangenting on a limited part of it.

*They were selectively rebreeding crops that took less damage from insects so they could spray less pesticides while the plants were growing. Win! But what actually happened was they kept rebreeding the fruits and vegetables that sucked so much that even bugs didn't want to eat them. So you got huge, beautiful, high yield, crap.

 

[Zardnaar]

I just picked the stuff didn't get behind the scenes.

NZ can grow enough to feed 40 million population 5.1. Something like 84% are urbanization though. Theoretically we could double that but don't have the labour and would have to change what we produce.

Working directly in Agriculture was around 140k iirc.

Long term it's not sustainable without cheap energy and fertilizer imports and environmental degradation.

Farm Boy knows more about prices and bulk calories. Mostly harvested vegetables by hand and fruit. Potatoes. Onions. Lettuce, cabbage. Brocoli, Brussel sprouts things like that vs bulk grains.

Fruit was apple's and storefront. Apricots, peaches, nectarines. Didn't do cherries or grapes.

Can't automate that until they invent sonething like a Star Wars Droid. Mechanization has boosted production of course.

A healthy but bland diet would be heavy grains, cereal bread diet with meat twice a week. Or wartime rationing diet in UK.