peak food

[Sunna]

production of basic foods , rice , wheat , chicken , corn ect ect

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment...09185.html

slow and cant keep up with demand.

food shortages on way...?

[Skean Dhude]

We are nowhere near peak food despite the scaremongering. There are vast tracts of land as yet untapped as well as the sea that we can use to produce food. That excludes all the stuff we don't want to eat such as bugs and healthy food that we would eat if things got too bad. Plus if things got too bad we as individuals would convert our entertainment and convenience back gardens to produce food like they did when they had to prior to the 1980s.

Our food shortages are artificially created by the society we are in where the food produced is too far from the consumer so that if there is a hiccup in the supply chain we have an issue. That is the issue here.

Self inflicted.

[Sunna]

china and india now have much more cash to spend on food , ie meat leading to crops being grown to feed live stock instead of people we in the west can pay more for the food but its the people of the 3rd world who are not part of the new economic growth who will have less food.

yes their are large parts of the world we could use to grow crops that are not being used at the moment [we could chop down loads more rain forest] sounds like a plan....

if the worlds population keeps growing and getting a taste for a western diet , we are going to have to do more that grow some spuds and onions in our back garden.
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SUNNA
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[Skean Dhude]

It'll be over for us as a species well before that point. It isn't anything we need to worry about at all.

[Steve]

I don't think it's as safe as you think, SD. Although the world has a lot of land much of it is unproductive, much of the land that is productive relies on artificial fertilizers, intensive farming is causing massive soil erosion of previously top-grade land, and climate change could cause wide-spread crop failures.

It's not a pretty picture, there are farmhouses in the USA that have had extra stairs built to reach the front doors, as they've lost 10 feet of topsoil.

I think that we can feed ourselves for a long time, but only if action is taken. We need to get organic material back into the soil, it provides and holds nutrients and water, reduces our reliance on imported fertilizer, and reduces nitrogen rich run-off, keeping rivers and drains clear and preventing the algal blooms that are wrecking the oceans.

The big problem is that the public have got used to paying very little for food, which means the supermarkets screw the farmers, and in turn they screw the land.

[T-oddity]

As Steve said there is not as much fertile land as you would think and with modern farming practices we are actually destroying fertile land at an alarming rate, it is not so much peak food its more peak soil, soil takes a long time to build up, but can be lost in a matter of years, most of the damage to the land in the UK has been done in the last sixty years.

http://www.fao.org/soils-2015/news/news-.../c/277682/

http://www.fao.org/docrep/t0389e/T0389E02.htm#Some countries poison soils

[bigpaul]

the only reason a lot of soils in the US and the UK are producing ANY food is because of the enormous amounts of manmade chemicals, fertilisers and weed killers that are being used, without these things most of the land would be sterile incapable of producing anything.

[Skean Dhude]

Fertile Land may be limited but everything in finite. We have aquaponics where we grow food in other mediums. You don't need fertile land to grow bugs either.

We may have to change what we consider is food but I am saying that we are a long way from running out. Unlike oil which takes millions of years to be replaced food can be created fairly quickly.

[bigpaul]

unless its winter when TSHTF.

[Skean Dhude]

TSHTF is not peak food which is what we are discussing here.