Comment on It is very therapeutic to garden, though.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 6 months agoThe industrial farming of corn in the US requires using hybrid corn strains to reach the yields it has, which in turn requires the use of fertilizers because the natural soils is incapable of sustaining the density of corn plants that hybrid varieties achive.
Those fertilizers in turn are mainly made from oil, which is a non-renewable resource, making the whole thing unsustainible. It’s is possible to make the fertilizers sustainably, it’s just much more expensive so that’s not done.
A lot of the reason why the US is so deeply involved (including outright military invasions) in the Middle East from where most of the oil comes is because in the US oil it’s not just a critical resource for Transportation and Energy, it’s also a critical resource for food.
Those fertilizers in turn are mainly made from Oil,
Fertilizer is not made from oil. Oil/gas is used to power the factory but that doesn’t make the farming unsustainable.
Because if you use the criteria of where we get our energy from, home gardening isn’t sustainable either because your house is powered by oil/gas.
Fertilizers are made from Amonia which in turn is made using the Haber-Bosch process which requires fossil fuels to provide the necessary energy (see this related article)
There is also “natural” fertilizer made from organic mass left over from other activities which would otherwise go to waste, but that’s insufficient for large scale intensive farming (composting is fine for your community garden or even for supplementing low intensity agriculture, but not for the intensive industrial farming growing things like hybrid corn).
Finally, the use of techniques like crop rotation which lets letting fields lie fallow so that natural nitrate fixation occurs and the soil recovers do not make the soil rich enough in nitrates to support hybrid corn growing because, as I mentioned, the plant density is too high to be supported by natural soil alone without further addition of fertilizers.
Fertilizers are made from Amonia which in turn is made using the Haber-Bosch process which requires fossil fuels to provide the necessary energy and as reactants
That’s exactly what I said! Fertilizer is not made from oil. The factory is powered by oil. Just like your home where you garden is powered by oil.
Natural Gas - which is not renewable - is a reactant and Oil is still involved indirectly as a means to generate the power needed for the process.
That said, it’s unclear to me if the Oil is somehow used at the chemical plant to generate said energy (for example, to reach the necessary temperatures) or if it’s even more indirect than that and it’s just fuelling Power Generation plants which in turn provide electricity used in the heating, pressure generation and subsequent cooling for that process.
If it is the latter case I have to agree that it’s not quite as bad in the renewable sense as I thought.
Bertuccio@lemmy.world 6 months ago
On indirect consumption, corn is largely used to feed cattle, make high fructose corn syrup, and other products that are not directly eaten as corn.
This makes corn insanely inefficient as a food source.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 6 months ago
There is a book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma which is a great read on this.
MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 6 months ago
But for now my PLA 3D printer filament is still cheap! Yay? =\ lol…why is everything so broken…
Kingofthezyx@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Greed
MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 6 months ago
I mean…yeah. I was more lamenting rhetorically. 😅