According to a report by The Guardian, extreme weather is wreaking havoc on crops across the region. England experienced more rainfall during the past 18 months than it has over any 18-month period since record-keeping began in 1836.
Hmm, I wonder how that happened
"There is a concern that we won't ever have the volumes [of potatoes] we had in the past in the future," British Growers Association CEO Jack Ward told The Guardian. "We are not in a good position and it is 100% not sustainable," Ward added.
Britain suffering a potato shortage? Ironic.
If these were just isolated events, farmers could more easily adapt — bad growing seasons are nothing new. The problem is that rising temperatures are directly linked to the increasing amount of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere.
Wow, they actually named the problem. I'm surprised. Normally, the news does its best to pretend climate change isn't happening.
If we replace a quarter of our meat consumption with vegetables, we could cut around 100 million tons of air pollution yearly.
Vegan gang stay winning
large scale monocrop agriculture using synthetic fertilizers is fantastic for growing a lot of food; the problem is that it's not at all resilient to changing climate conditions (and all of the chemicals applied wreak havoc on the ecosphere).
controlled-enviroment agriculture is really only economical for fast turnaround crops like salad greens. even taking transportation cost into consideration i'd be shocked if indoor farming was more sustainable than good outdoor practices (not talking big monocrop fields here). using PV to run lighting is so much more inefficient than just using the sun it's laughable, and there's a ton of extra infrastructure you need to put in place for indoor growing.
the thing is it's a lot more resilient to random heat waves and cold snaps, which will become increasingly difficult to predict
indoor farming isn't going to feed human civilization but I think it will be necessary to have at least some form of stable food output
I think that's basically the only way to ensure sustainable food supply with the climate becoming increasingly unstable. I recall seeing some studies showing that you could build vertical farms in cities to make them largely self sufficient. While these would use more energy than growing food outdoors, some of that is offset by not having to ferry food to the cities.
I think that's a pipedream. Transport of most food is insanely low on the list of costs because it's cheap as fuck. Sure, air freight costs, anything else is nigh neglible. And I don't think I've ever seen vertical farming produce anything other than leafy greens
It's going to become a necessity because the alternative will be famines. Imagine a drought that destroys the crops for the whole season, what happens then?
Incidentally, China's been leading in this department recently, seems like the aim is very much to go beyond leafy greens
- https://news.cgtn.com/news/2019-09-23/Vertical-farms-a-new-solution-to-food-security-in-big-cities-KdwRIHmAZG/index.html
- https://igrownews.com/the-evolution-and-impact-of-vertical-farming-in-china/
- https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202307/1293783.shtml
It's going to become a necessity because the alternative will be famines. Imagine a drought that destroys the crops for the whole season, what happens then?
It's a necessity if you work off of the premise that some-to-most of the poors die is a no go or alternatively that there's a vested interest in keeping the poors around so somebody does the poor people jobs necessary to run a society but I'm not convinced either of these premises ring true in the UK. I remember, just in the last few years, the "petrol is out not because there's no more petrol but because there's nobody left to drive the petrol trucks" or "all the shit on our vines keep rotting because we can't find anyone to pick them". I have an inkling as to how this is going to play out
Oh I very much agree that UK, and likely the rest of the western world, will just continue to ignore the problem until there are actual famines happening. I'm just highlighting how easily this can happen. We're already seeing massive heat waves happening all over the world now, including cooler climates. There are already large scale crop failures happening in North America as well. It's only a matter of time until a famine occurs.
What China is doing with vertical farming is the solution to this problem, but there is little chance of that actually being implemented in the west.
i have a friend who is doing their graduate work on vertical indoor farming, i should ask them specifics one of these days
