'We're going to have a food crisis:' The energy crunch has made fertilizer too expensive to produce,

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

says Yara CEO

The world is facing the prospect of a dramatic shortfall in food production as rising energy prices cascade through global agriculture, the CEO of Norwegian fertilizer giant Yara International says.

"I want to say this loud and clear right now, that we risk a very low crop in the next harvest," said Svein Tore Holsether, the CEO and president of the Oslo-based company. "We're going to have a food crisis."

Speaking to Fortune on the sidelines of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, Holsether said that the sharp rise in energy prices this summer and autumn had already resulted in fertilizer prices roughly tripling.

In Europe, the natural gas benchmark hit an all-time high in September, with the price more than tripling from June to October alone. Yara is a major producer of ammonia, a key ingredient in synthetic fertilizer, which increases crop yields. The process of creating ammonia currently relies on hydropower or natural gas.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/were-going-to-have-a-food-crisis-the-energy-crunch-has-made-fertilizer-too-expensive-to-produce-says-yara-ceo/ar-AAQj50g

[PortTack]

1. Comes down to oil gas producers greed! There's no shortage of oil or any of its by products!

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

2. Maybe a lot more food will become organic.

[womanofthehills]

7. That 's what happened in Cuba when they could no longer get commercial fertilizer

Chicken manure will out perform commercial fertilizers.

[Diamond_Dog]

3. Maybe we will learn not to waste so much food.

[MagickMuffin]

4. Time to go back to Nature

Mother Nature took care of our produce until the 1940s. The use of "normal superphosphate" fertilizers peaked. In later decades, it was replaced by triple superphosphate and ammonium phosphates. Nitrogen production got the biggest boost from World War II developments. Nitrogen is, of course, one of the main ingredients in explosives.

[Klaralven]

5. The Haber-Bosch process to make ammonia using atmospheric nitrogen is from WW I

About half of the nitrogen in your body came from the atmosphere through the manufacture of fertilizers, mostly using natural gas as the source of hydrogen.

[MagickMuffin]

9. Yeah, I'm not a scientist, just C&P job just like below

The use of synthetic pesticides in the US began in the 1930s and became widespread after World War II. By 1950, pesticide was found to increase farm yield far beyond pre-World War II levels. Farmers depend heavily on synthetic pesticides to control insects in their crops.

The thing is farmers used to do very well without these products. They used good sets to combat the evil ones, used crop rotation so their crops grew better and didn't cause the land to become less productive. They also planted in groups of vegetables also known as companion growing, where the plants help each other throughout the growing season. Also in the winter after the crops has been turned under the farmers would plant useful plants for nitrogen production such as red rye, clover grasses and much much more.


Bottom line farmers don't need chemicals to grow food.

We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

We are stardust, we are golden, we are caught in the devil's bargain,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

[Effete Snob]

8. Nature is not going to feed 3X more people on less land

[hunter]

14. We can't do that anymore with the world population approaching 8 billion.

The world population in the 1940's was maybe two and a half billion. If we went all natural billions of people would starve.

What we can do is reduce our consumption of factory farm meat and dairy products and quit using natural gas and other fossil fuels to generate electricity.

In the long run we can promote realistic sex education, easy access to birth control, and the economic and political empowerment of women. That will stabilize the human population and give us breathing room to develop sustainable economic systems, including more natural sorts of farming.

[Klaralven]

6. The US, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, and some others produce an excess of food

They can probably stand a reduction in food output due to shortages of fertilizer without too much pain.

Others like the EU, China, Russia can probably tighten their belts and be OK.

It will suck to be in most of south and southeast Asia, Africa, Middle East, and parts of South America.

About half the global population will be on short rations. And there will be little or no agricultural surplus for food aid.

[panader0]

10. My greenhouse is almost done.

High lumber prices slowed me down, then my land taxes. Soon I'll be growing most of my
vegetables. Maybe I'll have to get some chickens again.

[MissB]

11. I'm going about that backwards a bit

I have a dozen hens - we’ve kept chickens on our half acre for about 16 years.

Greenhouse plans are currently set for the foundation to be installed in 2023, with the greenhouse itself going in around 2024. Still growing veggies now but I’m not able to extend the season at all. Dh will be thrilled to get my basement grow equipment for springtime veggie starts out of the basement.

I do have a fenced garden to keep out deer, dogs and chickens and have converted the beds inside the fence to 30” high raised beds.

The henhouse poop tray gets scraped into the compost piles (I put shredded paper down for them to poop on) and left to sit and break down for a year before being used on a planting bed, though I’ll put some straw/dirt from the run on my raised beds that I’m letting sit for the winter. There’s less poop, more broken down stuff in those. This time of year we are dumping dry leaves into their outdoor covered run so they can scratch through and break them down.

Anyway it’s a nice circle of material for the yard. I generally buy one bale of straw twice a year as I clean out the entire run. Lots of it goes into their hen house.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

12. Maybe we need to learn to apply fertilizer more wisely.

In my area, fertilizer is over-applied by a lot. This results in lakes choked with algae and other plants due to runoff from the lawns of McMansions that are lush and green to the water's edge. The runoff excess fertilizer from farms causes algae to run rampant in Lake Erie, dunno about the other great lakes.

[roamer65]

13. We could stand to lessen our food consumption in the United States.

A LOT goes to waste and we have an obesity epidemic.

Type 2 diabetes is going through the roof.