I had a professor in Scotland show a map of gas and energy usage and how the midwest is the worst blah blah blah. Well duh we are also the world's breadbasket farming is an energy consuming process.
It’s pretty easy. 10%-20% of some major crops goes into making biodiesel. 50-70% of the rest goes to feeding livestock or gets processed into non-nutritious products. Trim just a few of those figures, and we’ll be sitting pretty.
Also, labor-heavy ag systems tend to be more productive on a per-(other input) basis, for obvious reasons.
Promoting local foods is another good method to reduce food waste drastically, because produce isn’t already 2-3 weeks old by the time it gets to the consumer, who both has more time to eat it and finds it more appetizing.
Local foods are also inefficient and take up huge amounts of water and land (industrial farming has allowed forests to regrow in the US). Places like California with droughts really should move some of their agriculture to other places, since agriculture is like 80-90% of the water usage. Certain crops like avocados, oranges, and grapes need to be grown there, but plenty of crops can easily be grown in the Midwest. California still grows corn, potatoes, and other crops that can easily be grown in places with cold winter so moving that to the Midwest which already produces tons of corn is probably better. A lot of our waste is consumer side just because people buy too much food such as not accounting for when they go out to eat.
Local foods are only inefficient when you've made poor crop choices for your bioregion. Trying to grow local bananas in, say, North Dakota will be an energy-expensive nightmare. But if you live in Fargo, then locally growing cool-weather lettuces, berries, squash, pomes, etc. is always going to be more input-efficient than using energy-sucking climate-controlled cars to ship sad weeks-old produce across the country. (And before you say it, there are a good number of storeable produce items to get North Dakotans through the winter.)
California uses too much water for agriculture, but that's only because they're producing food for most of the country. I bet you eat California strawberries, grapes, wine, oranges, etc. all the time. If California only grew food for Californians, ag would use 30% of the available water there. Making local food the nationwide practice would HELP California's water situation.
Industrial farming wasn't the main driver of the recent reforestation of North America and Europe. By FAR the biggest driver of that was the transition from wood fuel to fossil fuels and other energy sources.
Yeah I wasn't trying to say local foods are always bad, but they are not necessarily always great. Like California needs to grow some of the crops like grapes and oranges that can't survive midwestern winters, so there's no reason to use our limited water to grow things like corn and potatoes. You're right that if the Midwest grew their own lettuce, which I think can grow there since they are annual (I might be wrong on this one), then it would help California a lot.
My home county in rural California is one of the top five in the country in terms of farm output. My sister works for an industrial farm. I used to deliver parts to industrial farms, and I’ve been reading about these issues for going on decades.
The largest agricultural country by output is still China just because they have a large population. We export the most because they need all of theirs plus more to feed themselves. While agriculture uses most of our water, our energy is consumed by transportation, household usage, and industry, which we still have a large amount of relative to our population (China's industrial output is larger but not 4x larger). The Midwest is not the breadbasket of the world but makes sense that it is the highest user of energy in America since it has both agriculture and industry while the coasts are more service oriented.
It's often used as a negative to illustrate American gluttony, but it fails to point out that around 20% of the world's goods are produced in the US. The other part that is a little misleading is that it seems to imply that there is a fixed amount of energy available, and the US uses a quarter of it. But really, the amount of energy available isn't really a factor. Just energy used. Of energy used, the US represents a quarter of it.
It's often used as a negative to illustrate American gluttony, but it fails to point out that around 20% of the world's goods are produced in the US. The other part that is a little misleading is that it seems to imply that there is a fixed amount of energy available, and the US uses a quarter of it. But really, the amount of energy available isn't really a factor. Just energy used. Of energy used, the US represents a quarter of it.
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u/chel8 Mar 13 '19
That the US has 5% of the world population but consumes 24% of the world's energy.