Just a few points.
Smithy wrote:Cattle go on land not good enough for cereals. Sheep go on land not good enough for cows, and goats get bare rocks...
Actually, here in Oklahoma, they're commonly put on the wheat fields during some particular part of the wheat's growth cycle. Apparently, if the wheat plant loses it's seeds at that point, it'll grow back 3 times as much. The reason for the interest from the farmers is understandable.
Smithy wrote:Secondly: "1 lb meat needs 3-10 lbs grain". Livestock is not just dependent on grain, you need to include feed caking from crushed oil meal, pasture, roughage, haylages and silages. An animals grain intake is also dependent on the "finishing" regime and the species itself, you can go all grain feed to no grain feed. Often dependent on the local agricultural scene. Eg, a farm placed near a brewery will supplement it's feed mainly with Brewers grain (pulped barley malt). But perhaps most importantly is animal grade feed is not fit for human consumption. It's a far too harder grain, mainly because it's been in the field much longer. The reason grain farmers rush to get their crops in during dry spells is that combines can't harvest wet crops. Excessive rain pushes harvest back, and can force expensive premium bread grade wheat into cheap feed quality grain.
Just as importantly, cattle at least don't do that well on grains in the first place, they're biologically grass eaters and the grains cause them problems. Humans, on the other hand, have both traditionally and now rarely ever eaten the actual grass itself, as we don't have the digestive system for it.
Eh, while I agree, you really should remember that the region where the dust bowl formed isn't omnipresent. It's basically a quasi-desert region, and Oklahoma is windy in general. Chicago may be the "windy city", but only because of public figures. Oklahoma is essentially at the intersection of three different weather patterns, and we have almost constant wind as a result. That tends to skew things (personally, I'd look at water erosion in other places).
Smithy wrote:Soil erosion is a complete nightmare for any farmer. And very large fields lack wind beakers. Ie trees and hedges. If you ever go to England I'm sure you'll see that quintessential patchwork of hedgerows, that act not only as exemplary wind breakers, but also habitat that helps control pests.
Presumably larger fields could be sectioned into a "snake" pattern with windbreaks if the correct species could be selected for the region, right?
Smithy wrote:-"Vertical/city farming. Gives more space to food production."
I haven't made my mind up about this one. But I believe it to be an overly engineered solution to problem we don't yet have. If anything, mass hydroponics would work much better in a warehouse structure rather than the eco-architects wet dream of huge farm towers, and when you go up, you get more and more expensive. If it is effective, I think it would only really be useful for horticulture at a stretch, and then it's competing with plasticulture (which is actually what I currently work in) which is dirt cheap. And if I remember correctly, USA land use is something like only 5% developed, building towers for farms doesn't make a lot of sense.
Algae culture might make sense for some places, though it might produce some unexpected variations. For example, a New York tower with a seafood restaurant & up-scale clientele might have an algae-culture system on the tower's southern face, with salmon or trout or something released into it.
Mostly though, I think the idea's relevant for places like Japan, where the usable land isn't enough to feed the population anyways.
Smithy wrote:If you want to see the future, the future is Wheat that fixes it's own nitrogen. GM crops are the next step in the constant agricultural revolution. No matter how much people fight against it. Which if I recall is exactly what the Loroi have in the shape of the misesa supergrain.
Actually, I don't think many people would fight that one (or perennial varieties, or salt-resistant varieties). What they don't like is things such as grains that naturally produce their own pesticides.
As Trantor pointed out, Monsanto. To be frank, all of the GMO crops that I know of were made for the sake of increasing pesticide sales, not anything else. The promise of GMO is
still on the horizon, all of these years after the first varieties were released.
Victor_D wrote:I am not talking about simple "feeding" the population, I am talking about the global environmental impact of such a huge population (resource depletion, overfishing, soil erosion/salination, habitats destruction, biodiversity loss, pollution, climate change, toxin build-up, etc. etc. etc.).
The current statistics are anomalous, and will improve with the flow of population back into the cities. Greenhouse-gas emission especially is going to steadily improve in the US as we move out of the suburbs, causing an increase in building of modern structures closer to the things that people leave their houses for. At the same time, this urbanization across the world will improve mass transit (city administrations won't have much choice, and private developers have actually done it before as well). Overfishing will simply produce new businesses (open-ocean fish farms), and as land and ocean use centralizes the depopulated zones will experience a resurgence in local life.
Things don't always go down, especially when we already know that they've been pushed "down" by temporary anomalies.
Victor_D wrote:Then there is the demographic argument - fertility rates are dropping rapidly.
I don't have any evidence (I think it's actually too early for the evidence to exist), but I suspect that this will "breed" itself out. As the population shrinks, it'll become dominated by those who culturally have more children (e.g. Mormons). This will counter the shrinkage, as those demographics become more dominant than the "sexual revolution" demographic that the current statistics are dominated by.
And besides which, in 50 to 100 years time, I wouldn't be surprised if all of today's 1st-world nations will either no longer be in that bracket, or will have pushed through reforms that tie social-program retirement benefits to the number of children that the person in question raised: the demographics practically scream for it.
Victor_D wrote:I guess a possible answer to this is that Terrans now live a lot longer (150-200 years?) and that their 'productive' age has been greatly lengthened; so that women can safely have children not just for ~30 years, from the age of 15 to about 45, but from, say, the age of 15 to 105. But then, why wouldn't they try to impose some kind of population control policies?
Because they wouldn't need to. In the Outsider setting they have both colonies on other planets, and large space habitats. They have all of the growth room that they need, and any time that they want more they can just spend a few years building it. Population growth wouldn't be enough to push humans out of the star system for hundreds (more likely thousands, or hundreds of thousands) of years.
Incidentally, the age-extension stuff is likely coming in our lifetimes (among other things, there's an anti-cancer drug that also fights some early-aging diseases).
The real question is the fertility stuff. If you've got people who have a 40 year old body when they're 80, then certainly you'd see more demand for substitute mothers (I've forgotten the actual phrase, sorry), but I don't know that it would produce anything more than a blip.
Victor_D wrote:The Loroi did that for a reason, I'd say. And I don't think "but Humans are democratic" is a good answer; democratic societies should have the same self-preservation impulse as the Chinese. It wouldn't even be that hard, you'd just give people a choice: either limit yourselves to 2 children maximum, or you'll be excluded from medical treatments that would double or triple your natural lifespan. Also I'd think that governments would try to redirect the population surplus toward the off-world colonies (first in the Solar System, then extra-solar settlements).
Actually, they'd redirect it to orbital stations. Arioch mentioned somewhere that there's likely to be a fairly respectable number of those.
Also, I think you're underestimating the potential impact of proper management on an ecology. We have to do the basic research before we can really get the stuff going, but it should be quite possible to super-charge many of the eco-systems on Earth if we spent the money on it. It would be a large project, but the biggest parts of it (building hydrogen pipelines inland so that hydrogen can be burned for energy and then condensed for water, using charcoal to sequester carbon as a form of fertilizer, probably some other things) would often be either long-lived (charcoal) or self-sustaining (cheap hydrogen). The world would certainly be a mess for several decades after any such theoretical project was begun, but the end result would be (at least for as long as we spent the effort to maintain it) a stronger ecosystem than when we first
started causing problems. To understand what I'm talking about, start with a rainforest. Consider the fact that they're normally nutrient poor. Now consider the possibility of using drip irrigation or something equivalent to add nutrients to the soil in sufficient volume to have an impact on fertility. With a focused plan, that type of thing (even if not the sheer scale) should be achievable over the course of a few decades.