Climate lies explained in 1 chart
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Government intervention and incompetence is what is threatening those things. If the assholes up top would stop fucking with the farmers, we wouldn't need to worry about the food supply at all.
Only to a degree. People need food all the time, but you have to grow it long in advance. As supply dwindles from certain areas, demand will absolutely spike, but no new supply will be able to be made until the following year. Additionally, farmers who can't buy different land and move equipment (again, even more massive capital investment) will just add more and more chemicals and fertilizer to try and cope with worsening soil and weather conditions which will cause bigger problems for the local environment.
Now, it's true that the global food supply won't crash or anything, but I'm talking about protecting our farmers.
What you fail to understand is that things like the Wheat Board (Canada), various supply subsidies (America--paying farmers not to farm) and so on are what cause underproduction in the first place.
Not to mention Soil quality and Weather Conditions are not worse now than they have been historically. The weather in the 30's was horrible beyond belief in comparison to the droughts seen in the northern hemisphere right now. The dust bowl was a direct result of a HUGE drought that completely flattened the prairie states ability to farm. We haven't had anything nearly as bad since and likely won't. If global temperatures increase, it will open up land in Canada, Russia and Scandanivia (as well as Greenland, interestingly enough) that haven't been farmed since the medieval warm period, a period of very very warm temperatures that lasted a few hundred years.
Furthermore, farmers don't just throw chemicals at the soil to make it produce. They are actually highly educated tradesmen who engage in a number of ameliorative practices that include the use of silage, animal wastes, turning, fallowing, and so on--all of which are traditional techniques--in order to maintain the quality of their soil. Especially because rising fuel prices (a government caused problem) have made the use of chemical intermediaries prohibitive. Of course, certain governments don't want Farmers to use animals wastes either, for some reason, because I guess Shit and Piss are bad for the environment now too.
The food supply is not under threat from the climate. Farmers have farmed all the way through huge disruptions before and know how to manage their crops quite well even under fluctuating temperatures. When it's hot--grow grains and squashes. When it's cool, grow legumes a silage. Corn in all weather, lettuce and greens when it's wet. Animal feed and meats depend on a wide array of silage which are independent of our own food needs but end up as food themselves.
The only thing that will stop the Farmers from doing good work is bureaucratic intervention. I grew up with Farmers, they know their business.
I'm taking that into effect.
I don't agree with that. I think it's the tractors and their improper and overuse which inflamed the dustbowl and actually helped to make the droughts even worse, if not cause them by preventing normal rainfall from occurring thanks to the dust storms.
I'm well aware of that, but that's like saying that miners and engineers are highly educated. They still have had nightmare level spills and releases that kill people. Not every farmer is perfectly behaved, or refusing to cut corners, or overly fertilizing land that's already losing it's productivity.
I'm not saying that it is, I'm saying that prices, supply, and farmers are.
This is precisely my point. With Climate Change, the average temperatures, incidents of frost, incidents of drought, soil conditions, soil ecology, and rainfall patterns can all change. It's not just, "oh it's cooler this year so I'll grow legumes." What happens when, after year after year of slow changes to the climate you're only growing legumes, while demand for squashes keeps getting higher, and when Cargil starts getting orders on the Food Commodity exchanges, you'd better have some fucking squashes instead of the legumes that nobody fucking wants.
Well, you'll need new land, or you'll have to use chemistry to try and make your farms more productive in an environment that can't sustain it. At that point the food supply and prices are already in stress, and you're going to have to spend $50 million on new land and moving your operation.
Having grown up in territory that got hit by the dustbowl and growing up hearing about what went down from people who actually lived it, I wouldnt put it up to tractors. At least, not by themselves. Tractors had already been a staple of farming for almost 80 years in these parts by the time the dustbowl happened.
The cycle basically went like this:
Farmers in the area were growing more crops because they could make absolutely hilarious amounts of money selling it in Europe after WW1. This continued until about the 1920's, when Europe started to rebound.
Farmers made all kinds of loans, bought land and equipment, and made promises off of the idea that the prices would stay high.
Europe started to rebound and the early pangs of what would become the Great Depression started to emerge, and prices fell.
Farmers drastically increased their acreage and planting to compensate for the decreased cost of food. This included tilling new land, plowing fields that should have been left fallow, and pushing fields to their limits.
This causes further price drops due to excess product, causing farmers to get into a cycle of making the above point worse. When they finally ran out of fields and room to expand, farmers started cutting down trees to make the fields even bigger.
As it turns out, those trees were windbreaks, and had been there because it kept large wind gust from blowing onto the fields. Then a drought hit, the land turned extremely dry, and then windy season hit. This caused all of that dry soil, now without windbreaks, to be blow up, and create the dust storms. Then the dust storms became a self-sustaining machine where the soil remained dry, so it caused storms, which further dried the soil. It took a wet year before it finally fixed the situation. And people started to replant the cut trees and return to the old size fields.