The Sparrow Problem - <AUTHOR> http://appcubby.com/blog/the-sparrow-problem/ <comment><USER2> I've been saying this for years. It is easier, _way easier_ , to sell someone a 12 dollar a month subscription to a traditional SaaS app that stores their sales leads. Get your monthly churn rate down to 2% over time and you have a client with a life time value of $600.[1]

Now, you could spend the same time making an app that you sell for $0.99 but you would need to sell about a thousand of them just to break even (since Apple takes such a huge cut, plus it costs more money to service a thousand people than it does to serve one). Furthermore your cash flow is much more predictable under a SaaS model (hence, easier to raise on, exit with, hire on, or just plain sleep at night with) so it isn't even a 1:1000 ratio. More like 1:2000.

The psychology behind this is pretty simple. Most business owners know that saving time increases their billable hours. If you can do that, then great. They would be thrilled to hear that they will be paying you that 12 bucks for the next 4 years, because it would mean that they survived at least that long! Most of them think there is a good chance that they will be toast in their first 3 or 4 months, and what's $40 bucks compared to their other expenses?

Whereas a general app purchaser isn't costing in their saved time (for business or productivity apps), since they don't view their mobile device as a work tool, and consumers don't usually care that your game is good because their are plenty of alternatives to choose from when it comes to wasting time on the internet.

Where I would build an app:

For an existing product that exists in a browser, mostly as a sales gen tool. Possibly for functionality that people would like to be mobile but doesn't work in a traditional SaaS app (check-ins for a ticketing app, for example, could be done on an iPad).

Most other cases I just wouldn't bother.

[1] I'd say 1.5 to 2% is basically the floor because that is roughly what small businesses close at.

<comment><USER3> >> Whereas a general app purchaser isn't costing in their saved time (for business or productivity apps), since they don't view their mobile device as a work tool, and consumers don't usually care that your game is good because their are plenty of alternatives to choose from when it comes to wasting time on the internet.

I like the way you identify the costing "point of reference" for various segments (web/mobile and business/consumer). To add to that, it seems the costing point of reference for mobile is the monthly phone bill. In comparison with that $1 is negligible (in the ballpark of carrier overage charges), but $10 or $20 extra is a "major expense".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The age of selling software to users at a fixed, one-time price is coming to an end. It's just not sustainable at the absurdly low prices users have come to expect."

While it is fun to watch folks figure out that business school is more than just a big party until graduation, watching them draw the wrong conclusions from their experiences hurts.

There is an old joke about a scientist who teaches a frog to jump when you yell "Jump!" he then proceeds to cut off the frog's legs and notes that it no longer jumps when he yells "Jump!". From this he concludes that removing a frog's legs makes it go deaf.

The same is true about concluding that the age of selling fixed price software is over. It is not economically viable at these prices. So people will go out of business, and the people who remain will raise their prices to the point needed to support themselves. Now it may be that its not economically viable to live off the revenue from a 'simple' application, but its also true its generally not possible to live off the revenue of a single paperback book either.

That said, its easier to see how a 'subscription' is a better model for somethings, but people aren't too excited about those either.

<comment><USER5> It seems like there's a key point you're missing, which is that there is currently a constant stream of people entering the market to write $2 apps. They write an app, it fails, and they move on, but instead of a situation where the surviving app makers can now raise their prices due to scarcity, instead the people who left are replaced my someone else who tries to do the same thing. The end result is that no one can raise their prices, because the instant they do, some college kid comes along and does the same thing for $1. And of course the acquisitions of instagram and Sparrow make this even worse, because now there are 10 times more college kids thinking they're going to make $1b by making an app and getting acquired.

Of course, the key to being able to charge a premium comes down to marketing, and positioning yourself well in the market, but that's obviously not a fairly difficult thing to do, especially in these competitive markets.

<comment><USER6> Yes,

Forming a rock band is not a viable business plan. Hasn't been for years, since long before the music industry's current woes. The music industry survived for years and years parasitically feeding on the free labor that would-be stars put into skills for their hoped-for careers. The movie industry and the sports industry similarly harvest the freely available talent of would-be stars. And some musicians, some actors and some athletes indeed make lots of money but total final rewards look like very little if you divide them by the effort expanded by those aspiring to success. And consideration of the problems involved here can easily avoided if everyone who fails in any of these fields is dismissed from consideration as a "loser".

This stuff may not sustainable but it can be sustained for longer than one might imagine.

I heard once that the only ones who got rich in the gold rush was the ones selling pans. Too bad Apples seems to have a monopoly on the mobile-app equivalent.

<comment><USER7> > I heard once that the only ones who got rich in the gold rush was the ones > selling pans. Too bad Apples seems to have a monopoly on the mobile-app > equivalent.

Not just Apple... The original pan seller's legacy isn't doing too badly, either: [http://mashable.com/2012/07/01/stanford-top-major- computer-s...](http://mashable.com/2012/07/01/stanford-top-major-computer- science/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Sparrow did everything right. They built an incredible email app_

I would say they did everything right _except_ choosing to build an e-mail client. The days of paying for e-mail clients is long gone. The days of even using a local mail client are over for most people. It's just a tough sell to make money selling a paid client to a free service. I use Sparrow and will continue to use it but I can understand why they were going to have difficulties making any real money off it. Way too small of a market.

<comment><USER9> _> The days of paying for e-mail clients is long gone._

I'm not sure I totally agree with that. My first example is the ridiculously wide-scale enterprise adoption of Microsoft Outlook and Exchange -- sure, there's a bunch of features that are piled onto those "email clients," but at the heart of it, people are still paying for this stuff.

The second example is Sparrow itself. If people _weren't_ paying for e-mail clients, then would Sparrow have such a huge, dedicated userbase? Or is this just the vocal minority we're hearing from?

<comment><USER10> I agree - people are no longer willing to pay for the little bit of the client that connects to a server, downloads the email, and renders it, because all of that is widely available for free.

What they _are_ willing to pay for is a value proposition that goes beyond the mere mechanics of email. Outlook succeeds because it integrates email with calendaring (so does GMail, with less success), does a _fantastic_ job with sortation, filtering, and highlighting, and also is a champ when dealing with unmanageably large address books.

The market for an amazing email management service is absolutely existent. The market for a rubber-stamp me-too mail client is not.

<comment><USER11> I agree that if someone could improve email management they would indeed make more money. However, I still feel that sparrow was able to become so popular because it's iPhone interface was so much nicer to use than both Google's and Apple's free alternatives.

<comment><USER12> > _sparrow was able to become so popular because it's iPhone interface was so > much nicer to use than both Google's and Apple's free alternatives._

Sparrow became popular way before the iPhone version. Anyway, how is making an app more convenient supposed not to be an improvement worth at least a couple of bucks?

BTW, _"All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less."_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've said it in two previous threads and gotten down-voted for it, but it's the truth: apps _must_ have a recurring revenue model.

The upgrade-train model is over for a lot of software out there. Those of us who want good desktop software should be begging our favorites (I'm looking at you, JetBrains) to charge on a subscription basis.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps I'm just cheap (I prefer frugal), but I refuse to purchase anything with a recurring subscription. Don't even own a cellphone. That said, I had no problem buying Sublime Text 2 for $60 because it was a great product, and I was guaranteed updates until the next major version. If it was subscription, even at $5 a month, I'd have never made that purchase.

<comment><USER13> And, because of that, Sublime's developer will never make a living at it, and it will either be a labor of love or abandoned.

I'm with you, man, I'm cheap too. But that's the reality of todays software.

<comment><USER15> As long as Sublime can charge for upgrades in the future, it's not too large a problem. The problem is all the App Store software that can't _and_ the user expectations of free upgrades that are being set by Apple (not familiar with other app stores to know if they are following the same path).

<comment><USER16> Having purchased sublime text 2 I would definitely encourage the author of it to do this. The main competition text mate is a great example itself of this model being unsustainable in terms of having someone continue to develop the product full time in the long term.

<comment><USER17> Opposite problem. TextMate made Alan Odgaard so much money that he didn't need to work on it anymore[1].

Who wants to maintain an old code base when they could spend ten weeks trekking in New Zealand[2] and then hunker down for the Great Rewrite That Fixes All The Problems?

(Not that I blame Odgaard; in fact, as an ST2 user this is my greatest fear about that product--selling thousands and thousands of copies at $60 is an extremely viable level of revenue for a one-man shop.)

[1]: <http://blog.macromates.com/2006/year-in-review/> [2]: <http://blog.macromates.com/2006/20-will-require-leopard/>

<comment><USER16> I disagree, I think it it more that the future effort vs reward didn't stack up as well. Because so many developers had already purchased and it was well known, a free version 2 wouldn't represent the same kind of financial gain the initial spike did, despite all the extra effort.

A paid version 2 though produces a similar windfall again, rather than diminishing returns.

<comment><USER7> > A paid version 2 though produces a similar windfall again, rather than > diminishing returns.

Marginal utility. The first million is worth a lot more than the second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Apple seriously needs to implement support for paid upgrades on major version releases without having to add an entirely new, separate product. If that were easily done, this point is moot. No one seriously discussing this really expects free updates for life. I'm happy to pay for a major new release every year or so.

<comment><USER19> That's what in app purchases are for. If you want to add new functionality then allow people to purchase it separately.

That way existing users still have a core product that will see upgrades.

<comment><USER20> I've yet to really think about it like this, but your comment seems spot on. Has any app really gone the route of already being established before introducing in-app purchases? The only utility app I can remember paying for an in-app was Paper — but even then, a large chunk of functionality wasn't available without it (the different brushes) and it wasn't an established app beforehand.

<comment><USER21> I listened to a talk by a game developer last week, and their thrust was exactly in this direction.

The app is free and revenue is made from in-app purchases.

The basic app is structured so that upgrades are infrequent, because of the time lag.

However, the app connects to back-end servers which contain much of the smarts of the app. Thus they can upgrade them whenever they like, without having to upgrade the app. Then can also introduce premium features to be sold with the existing in-app purchases.

How you achieve this in a non-game setting is a challenge, but I believe it is the key.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The value obtained from the application should mirror the value received by the developer.

For games, one-time app payment makes more sense: usually, you complete the game or there is finite set of game rules that is implemented.

For most apps one uses day to day, one-time-pay model works against the user by mis-incentivizing the developer, just like TFA said.

It's somewhat ironic that AppCubby itself is an illustration of the same problem: their GasCubby app, which I use several times a month, has been effectively abandoned. Now, I would gladly pay at least $4 a year for that app, if it were actively developed, as it continuously delivers value AND getting improvements is important to me. However, since I've paid for the app once and that's the end of story, the app's own development reflects the same.

Pay to get updates is really the way to go.

Now, I am afraid to go shopping on the App Store for the same kind of app, as I'm wary of another disappointment. If I were to develop a competing app that filled the same need, but was critically more usable on several subtle, but important fronts, I would have a very uphill battle against the established stalwarts, which have been reviewed and rated since the early days of the App Store.

Thus, we are stuck in a situation where, given a popular app category, existing/old school apps tend to dominate based on reputation, but stagnate due to the lack of incentive to update or innovate, and the new apps a tough time breaking through.

</comment><comment><USER23> There are some issues with the numbers in this post:

 _Thus, when Dominique revealed to Ellis Hamburger in August 2011 that Sparrow had made at least $350k in it's first 6 months in the Mac App Store, they had already been working at least a year on the app._

The article actually states they made over half a million in the first 6 months

        DL: In terms of numbers we've made more than half a million dollars in the past six months since Sparrow was introduced in February.

_I don't currently have an app in the Mac App Store, so it's hard for me to estimate sales, but I'd bet the Mac version isn't generating much more revenue, even at the higher $9.99 price point._

I do. You really can't take iOS App Store sales trends and extrapolate them to the Mac App Store, the markets are quite different.

1\. Sparrow is first and foremost a Mac app, and its target demographic is (or was) Mac users. The iOS version is supplementary. Without the ability to do push on iOS they wouldn't have been able to deliver as great of a user experience on iOS anyway. I would bet that the vast majority of their sales actually come from the Mac version.

2\. Mac apps don't drop out of visibility nearly as quickly as they do on the iOS App Store. Part of this is because it takes a LOT more effort to produce a quality Mac app compared to an iOS app.

3\. The Mac version of Sparrow has been pretty consistently in the Top 50 Grossing on the Mac App Store since launch[1]. I would be surprised if they weren't averaging at least $1000-1500/day on sales of the Mac app alone, with _much higher_ spikes when they hit the Top 10 Grossing.

That said, I will agree that whatever they were making was probably not sustainable for a team of 5, especially compared to the $25M that Google was offering.

[1] [http://www.appannie.com/app/mac/sparrow/ranking/history/#vie...](http://www.appannie.com/app/mac/sparrow/ranking/history/#view=grossing- ranks&start_date=2011-01-01&end_date=2012-07-20)

<comment><USER24> 350k is the net after Apple's 30% cut.

<comment><USER23> Hm, I suppose that's a possible explanation. Although since the sales reports provided by Apple already include the 30% cut, I'm more used to developers reporting their net revenues. And the original quote says "we've made more than half a million dollars", which to me implies that's _after_ Apple's cut, and how much they're actually taking home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> And yet Mailplane continues to pay the salary of a sole developer. Maybe Sparrow's aspirations were too big for an email client? The interesting thing about Mailplane is that it targets an arguably different user base (gmail power users?) at a higher price point ($24.95). Personally I'm a Mailplane user because I prefer gmail's web-interface and I have three accounts to juggle. I never saw the appeal of Sparrow over OS X's Mail.app. And I'm still waiting for something like Mailplane for the iPad.

<comment><USER26>
        Maybe Sparrow's aspirations were too big for an email client?

Why is it people keep painting a $25 million dollar exit and jobs at Google for a year and half's work as some kind of failure? It looks like like a home run to me.

<comment><USER16> Because it is, in terms of the goal of building an awesome app and a sustainable business solving peoples problems with email. It is a personal win for the founders but not the one I imagine they were hoping for when they set out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I can tell you, as a developer on Growl, being in the top 100 paid app list at $2.99 is not going to be like being in the top 100 paid apps on iOS by a extremely huge margin. Growl retails at $1.99. We are always around the top 20 paid apps and have been for a long time and even that rate, it's not really sustainable for multiple developers.

</comment><comment><USER28> Ahh, I hadn't realized Sparrow had taken funding. That explains a lot. Forget revenue, forget breaking even, forget being a well paid lifestyle business.. once you have that funding, you've gotta head for big profits or a big acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER29> The price of the desktop app seemed too cheap to me. Why only $10 for such great piece of software? So, it seems they made around $1,000k in two years. That's about $100k per employee per year. Google bought them for $25,000k which gives $5,000k per employee. That's 50 years of work at the rate they were.

</comment><comment><USER30> My takeaways from this article:

If you can't make it with a team of 3 or fewer, you're not going to have a sustainable business.

The community needs an "App Escrow" organization which developers can sign copyrights to their software over to. In the event of a "acquhire," the app developers won't be able to kill their app. In essence, the app developers who sign up for this "escrow" have made a precommitment to not killing their app. (Perhaps the app the software can be licensed to a new development team for a fee commensurate with the app's earnings history. Perhaps it could also be open sourced.)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precommitment>

</comment><comment><USER31> In March, I emailed the CEO of Sparrow begging him to offer premium SaaS features on a subscription basis that integrated the functionality of "was my email opened?" services like Toutapp.com and automated follow up services like followup.cc into the email client.

[http://mattmireles.com/post/27676258826/what-sparrow- could-h...](http://mattmireles.com/post/27676258826/what-sparrow-could-have- been)

The market wants it. I still believe.

<comment><USER32> I think you're right. It's really bazaar why Google hasnt implemented those features into Gmail, but if they were seamlessly integrated into Sparrow, I'd pay.

<comment><USER33> If gmail starts notifying people I've read their email I'll be switching email services...

At the last full-time gig I had we had a plugin installed on the mail server to strip out external read-receipts

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's not about SaaS vs one-time payments or anything like that. It's about how much value you provide.

Mail.app is free, Outlook is free. How much better is Sparrow? Is the improvement worth $60 a year? Cause if it's not worth even $5 a month to your users (2 cups of coffee) - then it's probably not worth doing.

No matter how much people say they love your product, if they aren't willing to pay $5 per month, $60 per year or $200 one-off - they are kidding themselves. Think everyone loves Facebook? How many of those folks love Facebook enough to pay $5 per month to use it?

People aren't stupid. They will pay for stuff that translates into the bottom line - just like businesses. They may pay for Photoshop - if that's their work tool. They'll pay for a Mac - cause it helps them be more productive and earn more money.

My personal benchmark is dating sites. When most guys in the world are prepared to pay north of $20 per month to access a dating site, and if you are charging less you have to ask yourself - if people don't value my product more than a dating site, should I be working on something else? It's kinda sad but true.

</comment><comment><USER35> How long until some team, with an acqui-hire offer in hand from one of the big boys, opens a Kickstarter campaign to collect a 'community crowdsourced counteroffer'?

<comment><USER36> A bird in the hand is worth a crowd in the bush?

<comment><USER37> I believe "flock" is the correct terminology

<comment><USER36> Well it's a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. At least where I grew up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Couple important caveats with the provided graphs:

The graphs are rankings not revenue (understandably he doesn't want to share). But this introduces the problem that a week in the top 10 and a week at #500 does not equal to two weeks at #250. Not even close.

Further 250th place today =/= 250th place in 2009 or 250th place in 2016 or 2030.

Ron Nicholson [1] roughly fits the following formula for app store sales:

unitSales = totalPaidApps * ((1 + rank) ^ -1.0) - 1.5

This suggests that a week at #5-10 is worth about 23-42 weeks at #250.

[1] [http://www.musingpaw.com/2011/04/estimating-iphone-app- store...](http://www.musingpaw.com/2011/04/estimating-iphone-app-store-sales- from.html)

</comment><comment><USER39> Yup a 3 dollar app will not make enough money to sustain a company. It seems foolish to think it would. Now if you sell 10 of those apps you are getting closer.

The app store and the mentality behind it is a race to the bottom. So unless you are insanely lucky (angry birds), app store devs will be living with their moms just like drug dealers. :)

</comment><comment><USER40> I generally agree that the email client market is a hard, hard market to be in.

One thing I think could have worked to bring in substantially more revenue is price differentiation.

A number of people have claimed that a significant number of Sparrow users were on paid Gmail plans. If Sparrow had split their pricing in a similar way (eg, $3 if you are on the free plan, $20 if you pay to use Gmail) then they might have brought in significantly more revenue. Additionally, the people paying for Gmail are already known to be to be people who spend money on email services.

Joel Spolsky's essay is the best resource on this: [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html)

Of course, some kind of recurring revenue is the real "solution" here.

</comment><comment><USER41> Eventual payout from Google aside, I wonder if the team ever regretted the fact that taking funding "changed the yardstick" for success. I'd guess that going back to work for a big company (even with a big payout) wasn't really the original goal.

But then again, maybe it was.

<comment><USER36> Remember. The "changed yardstick" is 100% conjecture. It's undeniable that taking outside investment increases the number of people who expect a return from your venture. However, we can't presume to know what the investors were really thinking. They may have known that a talented web and mobile email team will always be a talent buy irrespective of revenues and just sat back and waited to double or tripe their money in 12 - 24 months. Point is - we really don't know if that changed the game that much for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Another thing this OP leaves out is Sparrow was also probably running advertising, and thus burning more capital, to try to get their app store organic coefficient up. The peaks and valleys in the ranking numbers lead me down that train of thought.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think you can still do a one-time purchase app with support for the next X versions and still get the revenue model of a SaaS. Stop thinking about the app as the final product and start thinking about it as a platform.

Sell email client for X, then build additional plugins for client that solve a problem for a subset of users and offer that as an upsell. You avoid bloating the original app for those that want a sleek solution but offer enough plugin functionality to let users tailor to their purposes.

And each of those plugins can have a paid upgrade cycle as well, a long with the ability to bundle plugins with app for "Enterprise" or "Power User" price points.

</comment><comment><USER44> Was the title of this submission changed? I'm pretty sure I read this yesterday as "the gold rush is over" or something. If we are going this way why not simply grab page titles automatically and disallow edits? (because that sucks)

</comment><comment><USER45> I see it as something like the historical gold rush - developers flocked to the app store because they sensed there was a lot of money to be made. This vastly increased the supply of apps, which in turn decreased the demand per app, and so decreased revenue per developer. I think there will inevitably be a fall in the rate of apps being added to the app store, and sucesses will continue to be focused on a handful of publishers.

PS: This is probably wrong in some fundamental way (I'm not an economist)!

</comment><comment><USER46> I wonder if Sparrow had a subscription model... let's say you had to pay $2/month to use it across any platform. How many people would have signed up?

Sparrow seemed more complex than a typical 0.99c app, and it seems like they had their fans. I wonder if they followed the subscription model if their finances would have looked better and gave them the ground to stay independent.

</comment><comment><USER47> My team makes around $2 to $2.5 million a year on app sales.

I'll tell you one thing -- both of these guys and almost everyone I've met in the Valley deeply misunderstand how to make sustained profits in an app store. I'd say, from what I can tell, Gameloft (not my company) is one of the few companies that gets it.

<comment><USER48> What apps do you guys make? Are they games? I think the general consensus is that it is hard to make any decent money on the app store unless you are selling a game

<comment><USER47> The problem is, most people I've met don't understand that profitable apps, by and large, are not software platforms.

They are:

1) Disposable 2) Timely 3) Shallow 4) Impulsive

These can be games, but they can also be many other types of content. Everytime I see a guy betting on one app, on one platform, trying to make it perfect, I try to explain to him it has a snowballs chance in hell of working, he doesn't listen. No one wants to face that profitable apps are mass produced at medium to low quality on every platform.

<comment><USER48> So do you make games ?

<comment><USER47> We make some trivia games and simple word games. However our 3 top sellers in the Apple App Store make about 120k per year each and are simple reference content. The key is that it is branded with a well recognizable name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> It's a bit hard to buy the "never going to be a millionaire" thing when my friend joined a relatively new start-up and became one overnight. Yeah, I realize a lot of people don't become one, but I still have a good deal of optimism.

</comment><comment><USER50> I find these articles looking at the economics of the app store interesting.

I'm still learning mobile (iOS) development having got back to software development last year although I've been doing Rails contract work for much of the time. I released my first real experiment <http://itunes.com/apps/fastlists> (yes it's another lists app but it is currently free, with no ads and has a couple of useful features making it especially useful for reusable lists for shopping, packing etc. The design is functional rather than beautiful).

I'm currently adding some in-app purchase options to test the reactions of the users.

My current idea is to offer the following options:

1) No-ads (tier 1 price)

2) Privacy - No anonymous usage collection.(tier 1 price)

3) Raise item limit (by 100 to 200 items) (tier 1 price)

4) Unlimited items (tier 3 price)

5) Everything including future in-app features (tier 5)

For me option 5 is important because like several other commenters I hate feeling I will need to keep paying bit by bit for something. It will include everything that doesn't need server side support and expense. I actually hope most customers choose this, the other items are there largely to justify the pricing of this item.

Ads and anonymous usage monitoring will come in releases after the purchases have become available and for ads I will probably make the first month of use add free to try and get the user stuck in. I may also add some alternate skins as in-app purchases too later although that is lower priority than using the iOS 6 social framework as a way to try to get users promoting the app for me by sharing lists.

There is currently no item limit so I will allow users with more than 50 current items to have their initial limit be 50 higher than the current level.

At the moment this is just a small scale test because I haven't done any promotion for the app yet so the current numbers of users is small although the reviews are currently very good (despite a usability issue leading someone not to work out how to reorder items - but I'll add some help in the release after next).

To become self sustaining as an independent developer I'm expecting to need to keep a small suite of apps ticking over. Some will be more ambitious than this although others may be even simpler with different unique features or niche target markets.

Any thoughts on the pricing model? Or the app?

</comment><comment><USER51> What if the Sparrow problem was a too high burn rate ? Apparently they were planing to integrate ads in Sparrow, probably for a free version. This could have worked since the app was very popular.

</comment><comment><USER52> Interesting.

I may have to revise some of my opinions about Sparrow's sale. New data means new conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER53> nailed it. period</comment>


Can We Grow More Food on Less Land? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/climate/agriculture-food-global-warming.html <comment><USER3> There's a great method called Agroforestry that uses forest floors to produce more food:

Quick overview of a farmer's land that uses this method: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stABAx82TbY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stABAx82TbY) he harvest around 3x more cocoa per hectare than traditional methods and its one of the most valuable in the world right now.

Big producers joining to make it more scalable: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE)

<comment><USER4> I'm sorry but this fails reason on even a basic level and reminds me of something a snopes fact check would be needed for. There is x amount of energy in sunlight and if it is going through leaves it is not available to your crop to grow. Same goes for the nutrients fueling all those trees etc. He is doing a great job at making a forest web but I'd like some verified figures for that cocoa production vs a real cocoa farm.

<comment><USER3> The natural habitat of Cocoa tree as usually bellow other trees, like many other species, Coffee too, it likes to be a little shaded by others, and the main thing about this method shown in the videos is very regular pruning and by organizing the organic matter in the ground the nutrients gets available for other species as well as more sunlight, so making very good use of the ecological succession - soil gets better and better naturally with nature processes - which is something very well known and studied in Botany but very little applied to agriculture, this is the gap this farmer is filling. As shown a little in the video, when he's going to grow something very sun hungry like lettuce or corn he does that by opening a big area in the forest and together with the lettuce he introduces seeds of other trees for the next natural succession.

I don't have an actual verified study to show you :/ But I believe there are a bunch of studies, as I have seeing a few universities making them, but I don't know how to find them. All I have now is my own experience on this topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's slightly terrifying to see the data about the loss of nutrients in plants around the world due to climate change. On YouTube there was an interesting Veritasim story about plants and their mineral levels.

It seems plants have fewer minerals now compared to 100 years ago. Farmers have fertilizer and the plants grow but they don't have the same levels of nutrition even with all that help. Samples of weeds from the 1800s were compared to the same weeds now and even the weeds have fewer minerals, so it's all plants not just food crops.

Larger farms growing more food may not solve the problem it's the quality of the plant not just the quantity.

<comment><USER6> IIRC that youtube video concluded that the difference in nutrient content was because growth rates were accelerated by the increased CO2 in the atmosphere but the rate of extracting nutrients from the soil was not accelerated. This is then presumably related to the global greening phenomenon we've witnessed where the increased CO2 has lead to a large increase in forestation globally.

It's important to note that the video asserts that food is still plenty nutritious and if you eat a well balanced diet you're fine and my own note is that there is also probably a limit to this effect.

<comment><USER7> Is it possible that the soil is also depleted of interesting nutrients and that the fertilizer isn't providing them either?

Our understanding of what micronutrients humans need is not great. For plants, it may be even less understood.

<comment><USER8> Depending on what you mean, either yes or no :-) This is based on my poor understanding of the situation. Someone who is knowledgeable will hopefully be able to correct me.

I think there are actually _plenty_ of nutrients in soil (even many "poor" soils). The real problem is that they aren't bio-available. So you'll have lots of different mineral salts in the soil (usually one or two orders of magnitude more than you need, by weight), but it's not in a form that the plant can absorb by its roots.

I think the real problem is the kind of mono-culture cropping we do. Really you want a variety of plants pulling up nutrients out of the ground (because different varieties have different abilities to break down and convert the nutrients in the soil). Then you want those plants to break down and be reintegrated in the soil. Finally, you often want some of that happening in an anaerobic environment, so you don't bind oxygen to it.

There are some new (old? ha ha) techniques being developed to build fertility (really just making existing nutrients bio-available) in the soil. Avoiding tilling, building up micro-organisms and insects to distribute the soil, allowing a variety of plants to grow (some long roots, some short roots, etc, etc). It's pretty complicated, though and I expect that it will take us a very long time to learn how to do these things effectively.

It definitely seems easier to just add what you think the soil is missing, but there are many disadvantages to that approach as we see over time. I did some experiments in containers a while ago. My idea was to see what kind of production I could get without adding any inputs to the soil at all (just water), and harvesting as much food as I could.

I had some experience from doing planted fish tanks with really intense planting (every single space possible occupied with a plant) and knew that it was reasonable to assume that plants can grow really well being very crowded as long as nutrients are available. I planted my containers so that light was the limiting factor, but grew a lot of local weeds that grew in poor soil as well as food on the assumption that they would build fertility fastest. I ran my experiment over 5 years and was really surprised at my results -- my production increased over time. One year, I even got 5 (!) harvests of potatoes from the same container -- I've never even come close to that level of production doing it more traditionally.

It was all very unscientific and I was really doing it out of curiosity more than trying to prove anything. In the end, it seems my neighbor didn't like my container garden of weeds and he convinced my gas man to apply herbicide to it. That was the end of my experiment (I caught him in the act as I came home from work a little bit early that day -- one of the few times I've really blown my top).

Anyway, I don't think we really have to worry over much about actually depleting our soils. I think they can rebound fairly quickly with the right approach. However, I think it _is_ possible that our current intensive farming approaches do not produce the most nutrient rich produce possible.

<comment><USER9> >Really you want a variety of plants pulling up nutrients out of the ground (because different varieties have different abilities to break down and convert the nutrients in the soil)

That doesn't appear to be needed. The plants don't have the ability at all, the microorganisms they attract and feed do it. You can build fertility while growing a single crop year after year, Fukuoka did rice and wheat every year for decades on the same land just fine. As long as you keep the microorganisms fed and don't insist on a program of routinely killing them, they'll break down the minerals that the plants need and make them available.

>Finally, you often want some of that happening in an anaerobic environment, so you don't bind oxygen to it.

No you don't. When it happens in an anaerobic environment you get end products that hinder plant growth instead of helping it. This is the main reason soil compaction is a problem, you get pooled water in the ground creating anaerobic conditions which kill off all the good bacteria and fungi.

<comment><USER8> > Fukuoka did rice and wheat every year for decades on the same land just > fine.

Fukuoka also used wild carrots and daikon to bring up nutrients from lower down (source: My friend studied with him). Also white clover to fix nitrogen (and even went so far as to say, "Don't bother experimenting with anything else. I've tried everything and white clover is the best."). Rice is a summer crop and in most places in Japan you can have a winter crop as well, which you use for nutrient migration. Fukuoka's techniques work very well around where I like (my friend's fields are fantastic), but apparently don't work very well in more temperate climes (just from what I've heard).

<comment><USER9> >Fukuoka also used wild carrots and daikon to bring up nutrients from lower down (source: My friend studied with him).

Not according to him he didn't. Read his books, he was very clear about everything he did. He grew vegetables to eat, in a completely different area, it had nothing to do with the grain field.

>Also white clover to fix nitrogen

Nitrogen is a non-issue precisely because you can pull it out of the air for free. You said you want a variety of plants to pull nutrients from the ground. Clover pulling nitrogen from the air is not support for that idea.

>Rice is a summer crop and in most places in Japan you can have a winter crop as well, which you use for nutrient migration.

But he didn't do that, he used it for a crop. He did rice and wheat, like I said. Both were crops, he sold the harvests. He did it for decades without any decline in yields. The idea that you need a "diverse polyculture" of plants as the current fad calls it is completely unsupported by evidence. They just need a healthy ecosystem to grow in, not necessarily different plants.

>Fukuoka's techniques work very well around where I like (my friend's fields are fantastic), but apparently don't work very well in more temperate climes

The techniques and ideas work fine, but you can't blindly copy his setup as it was. You don't have the season for two crops, so you don't do rice and wheat. You just do wheat. Marc Bonfils has grown winter wheat every year in the same field for over a decade with no inputs, no rotation, and yields increased each year as the soil was restored. If you are in a cold enough climate it might even make sense to compost your straw in the spring in order to warm your soil up earlier, but I am not sure about that yet, I'll be testing it this spring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Let's try to break this problem down to first principles:

\- Humans need food to live because it provides energy and nutrients.

\- From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don't need that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let's assume food energy is the real limiting factor here.

\- The energy in most food comes from photosynthesis (either directly, in the case of eating plants, or indirectly, in the case of feeding plants to animals for growing meat).

\- Photosynthesis is an _extremely_ inefficient way to turn solar radiation into chemical energy. Only about 3 to 6 percent of incoming solar energy is used by plants to create biomass, and not all of that biomass necessarily equates to calories we can digest and absorb.

So, while this isn't a particularly appetizing future to imagine living in, I don't know of any fundamental reason why artificially producing edible calories via solar electricity and chemical processes couldn't vastly exceed the efficiency of natural-grown food. It might be tricky getting to the point where fake food like this is healthy and tastes good...but if it saves the world from starving and stops civilization from collapsing then hey, it's not a bad fallback plan.

Besides being a big jump in efficiency, this type of tech could also enable the use of non-arable land for food production, since presumably you could set up the necessary manufacturing facilities anywhere you want.

<comment><USER11> > From a fundamental standpoint of physics and available materials, nutrients > are relatively easy to get; as far as I know, most vitamins and minerals are > pretty cheap to either come by naturally or manufacture, and you don't need > that much of any of them to keep a person healthy, so let's assume food > energy is the real limiting factor here.

Food is more complicated than this picture. So much that nutritionists have major differences over which basic materials are beneficial in bulk and which cause health problems. Vitamins, minerals and medicines are not automatically absorbed well by our digestive system. The many biological foibles of human metabolism and our symbiotic gut flora, still confounds expectations about what food can be and can do to health.

There have been many, perhaps endless attempts to synthesize a wholesome food product - it would be worth a fortune. I am aware of zero successes to date and this shouldn't be the case if its not very difficult. We don't even synthesize sugar for consumption - maybe start there, but it is not even clear if/how much it causes diabetes or other diseases.

We might be stuck for a while longer with reliance on foods that needs to live for bit (plant or animal) before we can sustain our own lives with them - seems to be a very old system requirement of multicellular life, and one that has not been cracked yet.

<comment><USER12> > There have been many, perhaps endless attempts to synthesize a wholesome > food product - it would be worth a fortune. I am aware of zero successes to > date and this shouldn't be the case if its not very difficult. We don't even > synthesize sugar for consumption - maybe start there, but it is not even > clear if/how much it causes diabetes or other diseases.

There are lots of synthetic foods. The main problem is marketing. How are you going to sell your lab food when "processed" is bad and "natural" is good? The organic movement has taught people to distrust science in food, and its not something that is going to easily be reversed. The fact that most synthetic advances are used for cost reduction - not health doesn't help here either.

The only place where this has seen any adoption is synthetic meats. But I expect vegetable replacements to be many decades off - if ever.

<comment><USER13> Could you cite studies and give examples?

<comment><USER12> What specifically are you looking for? That synthetic foods exist? Google provides many results on the subject. You probably have already eaten some synthetic ingredients.

For a real world example sugar was first synthesized in 1953 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose#Chemical_synthesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose#Chemical_synthesis)

Carbohydrate synthesis is also a well studied field. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate_synthesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate_synthesis)

Many vitamin additives today are artifical. And of course artificial flavoring has vast commercial adoption. In the case of McDonald's french fries this was used to dramatically reduce the amount of saturated fat while maintaining the beef flavor - they are no longer deep fried in beef talow.

We can't yet recreate the texture of a pepper, but we can certainly create a synthetic smoothie with the necessities of life. Organic chemistry is a rich field of study.

<comment><USER11> You didn't referenced anything approaching wholesome food.

Of course there are a few simple compounds which are edible, but most artificial additives are extracted and processed from grown inputs, and this is susceptible to unexpected health problems as happened with exposure to trans fats for decades - now banned.

> we can certainly create a synthetic smoothie with the necessities of life

That is a low bar - being capable at any cost to synthesis a smoothie with 'the necessities of life' including growth? good health? You didnt even reference that.

<comment><USER12> "Wholesome" is not a scientific term.

The food landscape is filled with pseudoscience, and whether a compound is synthesized or extracted is more of an economic decision not a scientific one.

<comment><USER11> It is a plain language term, pseudoscience most often alludes to science by misrepresenting scientific terms. In this context "wholesome" plainly refers to foods which provide broad but not necessarily complete nutrition, so they can be eaten perfectly safely in bulk like potatoes and rice (note the objective of this thread).

Small amounts of almost anything can be synthesized at great expense, but you should have provided an example of a wholesome food which would not be completely uneconomical to synthesize (and purify) in bulk, to support a claim that there exists such a potential economic possibility. Even how much for example, it costs to synthesize food grade sugars would be a start on showing your advice on this subject is grounded in reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Recently posted on HN, under the thread "A remote UK community living off-grid (bbc.co.uk)":

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18498110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18498110)

Excerpt from the comment:

[ A political science graduate of Yale University, Jeavons worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Stanford University before launching his career in small-scale agriculture education. He is the author of the best-selling sustainable farming handbook How to Grow More Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine, now in its 8th edition in eight languages ]

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't consider the market gardener to be in the same area as grow biointensive. Jeavons has a strong focus on self-sufficiency and sustainability in his system and goals. Fortier does not, he's only interested in organic as gimmick to make money. Also his book is pretty deceptive compared to what he really does on his "farm", which wasn't actually profitable until after he released the book and got "famous", which is what sell the overpriced lettuce that finally got him profitable.

I think the biointensive system Jeavons promotes gives you a pretty good starting place, but it does promote a bit of needless work. Skip the composting and just use the compost crops as a mulch. There's no need to build piles and turn them and then spread the compost, you can just let it compost in place on the garden where it will end up. You can skip growing the compost crops too if you have trees to collect leaves from in the fall. And save your back and skip the double digging, or any digging at all for that matter. All it does is set you back in your first couple of years for no reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Growing vegetables in greenhouses can be done very efficiently. The Wageningen University researched high-tech greenhouses in Riyad (Saudi Arabia) and found that it only required 5 liter fresh water per kg tomatoes, compared to 168 liters in a low-tech greenhouse [1]. This is possible using a closed system that recycles the water that evaporates in the greenhouse. The low-tech example is a plastic tunnel without such facilities (the most commonly used type of Greenhouse in the Middle East). The yield per square meter was also 50% higher for the high-tech greenhouse compared to the low-tech greenhouse.

[1] [https://www.wur.nl/nl/nieuws/Nieuwe-onderzoekskas-in- Riyad-m...](https://www.wur.nl/nl/nieuws/Nieuwe-onderzoekskas-in-Riyad- maakt-30-90-waterbesparing-mogelijk.htm) (in Dutch only)

</comment><comment><USER16> There is also the problem of food distribution. Ignoring future population growth, the world does produce enough food to people everyone [0] (obtained from the first sentence of [1]). If we are collectively unwilling to solve the distribution problem today, then it there is a good chance that we won't do much about the shortage tomorrow. In addition, unconsumed food waste is also problem, and probably does have some correlation with the unequal distribution.

An article with the headline "Can we share food more fairly today?" does have a simple answer, but would rock the political establishment uncomfortably, so has little chance of ever being published.

[0] Leathers, H., & Foster, P. (2009). The world food problem: toward ending undernutrition in the third world. Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers Inc.

[1] [http://12.000.scripts.mit.edu/mission2014/problems/inadequat...](http://12.000.scripts.mit.edu/mission2014/problems/inadequate- food-distribution-systems)

<comment><USER17> We are missing a bit of humility. Just because an apple can be gotten in February doesn't mean you should. It stretches, complicates, and reduces the efficiency of the supply chain immensely.

I heard some advice years ago that one of the better things you can do as an environmentalist is teach your kids about the seasonality of foods. Make a big deal about it being orange or pear or cherry season, cut back on buying these fruits the rest of the year, even if you can afford it. Eat something else instead of making the world bend to your craving.

<comment><USER18> By March in 18th century New Hampshire, the pickings were getting pretty lean. You might be able to go down into the cellar and get a soft apple or a potato out of a barrel, and you would have wheat, oats, and barley. Maybe there was still some kale under the snow in the garden. Beyond that, you killed a chicken or went out to hunt some game. So when the raspberries came into season, it was indeed a treat.

<comment><USER19> By the 19th century, canning allowed for a greater variety of perhaps less nutritious food.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is called Permaculture, it maximizes yield using natural methods (i.e. avoid tiling the soil, herbicides, etc) and results in an "edible forest"

From the wikipedia: 4 Common practices 4.1 Agroforestry 4.2 Hügelkultur 4.3 Natural building 4.4 Rainwater harvesting 4.5 Sheet mulching 4.6 Intensive rotational grazing 4.7 Keyline design 4.8 Fruit tree management

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture)

<comment><USER9> Permaculture doesn't mean food forest. A food forest is one form of permaculture, but it is by no means the only form, or even the ideal one. The hype about food forests comes from how effective they are in tropical climates. But it isn't actually very efficient in temperate climates. Temperate climates do need to rely heavily on annual crops. Those crops can be grown using permaculture, we don't have to trade our potatoes for chestnuts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Don't we already know how to do this? For example, the concept of companion planting — growing plants which behave symbiotically together — is a centuries old idea. The issue is whether we have an economic incentive to.

<comment><USER22> I am not an agronomist, but my instinct is that companion planting interferes with large-scale farming, where machines or poorly paid humans in a hurry need to easy access to a single crop to harvest, and often destroy the field as they work. I'd like to think if the yields were worth it we'd have worked around that, but possibly robotic harvesters can take us there.

<comment><USER23> And that is the crux of the entire question. You get what you incentivize. Current US Farming practices are extremely incentivized towards singular homogenous products using an absolute minimum of human labor.

<comment><USER24> Eh, grains are never the problem. Essentially none of the problems you hear about in agriculture apply to grains.

We can produce just staggering amounts of grain on a per-acre basis, and we can ship them without refrigeration and store them for long periods of time without any significant loss of nutritional value. The carbon, energy and monetary cost of shipping huge quantities of grain from the center of the US to the coasts where people live is negligible.

You don't have the complex social issues of migrant and immigrant labor with grain production; I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if there's some, but it's definitely not a necessary component the way it is in current vegetable production and in meat processing.

There's some potential problems in water usage in some places grains are produced, you can have some good conversations about fertilizer and pesticide production, and about soil maintenance, and we continually want to be working to improve the resiliency and productivity of the crop varieties, but grains are in pretty good shape and there's a clear road map for future work, with lots of incremental progress being made every day.

Produce and meat production is where the big gains are to be had, for the environment, food security, and improving the conditions of working people. Just bank on having half our calories coming from massive grain farms located at great distance from the population centers and try to figure out how to fix the rest, and then maybe it will be time to revisit grains.

<comment><USER25> Isn't that exactly what we're doing, though? The essence of cheap junk calories is grain (flour), soybean oil (another plant with similar growing needs), sugar (largely from grain in the US - high fructose corn syrup - <USER2> sugarcane is also easy to grow at scale), and meat from grain-fed chickens and cows.

All this stuff is shipped to factories, where it is broken down into refined materials for other factories, that make the junk food - burgers, sliced bread, candy bars, whatever - that are sealed or frozen for portability and shelf stability.

This is how we've doubled the population of the planet in 50 years, while bringing per-capita food cost to the lowest point in human history.

<comment><USER24> Well, yeah. I'm just saying we should keep doing it.

People whine about high fructose corn syrup, but it's not like it's a plot or something; people really like sweet things, and HFCS is a really efficient way to produce sweet stuff. If you restricted the sale of sweet stuff to help combat obesity, it might have an impact on the corn market, but corn would still be an amazing, important, huge part of out food supply.

On the other hand, consider grain-fed chickens. Factory farmed chicken is fantastic from an environmental and a dietary standpoint, it is extremely space efficient; even when the land used to grow the grains is considered, it is still competitive with plant sources of protein, and it's a lean, versatile meat. It's even a major source of organic fertilizer.

Meanwhile, it's pretty bad from an animal welfare perspective, and it is just awful from a labor standpoint. Meat processing at scale is one of the greatest cesspools of human misery in the US, and has been for over a century. A huge number of people make a pittance of a wage doing unpleasant, dangerous, body- breaking work, and it is a big consumer of illegal immigration as a source of cheap, exploitable labor.

Fixing meat processing, through technology, regulation or labor organization, would be HUGE.

<comment> barry-cotter > HFCS is a really efficient way to produce sweet stuff.

Nowhere near as efficient as sugarcane. HFCS would not be produced, sold or consumed at anything approaching current levels without tariffs preventing the import of sugarcane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What would make people eat less beef? Since taxes seem a hard sell, would subsidizing chicken + non-meat protein help? As a vegetarian I'm trying to get my head around what would help change the behaviour of the meat eating HN members.

<comment><USER27> I have a mirror-image question:

What will it take to convince vegetarians that a meat-based diet is actually the healthiest way to eat, and that meat can be raised in humane, environmentally-friendly ways?

:-)

Edit: This a serious question. Down voting is hardly a productive form of dialog.

<comment><USER28> I imagine it depends on the vegetarian.

And not all meats/animals are the same. I myself eat meat, but do not eat mammals. I am looking forward to the widespread availability of safe, delicious, lab-grown meats.

> the healthiest way to eat

I suspect that, for most people, the best plant-based diet is equal to the best omnivorous diet in terms of nutrition. Admittedly, it can take more effort to get your protein.

> meat can be raised in humane ways

"Humane" is a vague word. Some will tell you that slaughtering an animal at all in not humane.

> can be raised in environmentally-friendly ways

This would be really hard for many animals. Show me a carbon-neutral cow.

The ones that live in tiny spaces and eat corn have high carbon footprints because of all the farming that has to happen to feed them and all the land that is prevented from being forest to serve that need.

We don't spend nearly as much energy feeding the free-range ones, but the land-footprint needed to serve them is even greater.

<comment><USER29> >Show me a carbon-neutral cow.

Any purely grass fed cow should be close, no? They're part of the normal carbon cycle, and that carbon is pulled back in when the grass regrows. The problem is when you bring sequestered carbon (fossil fuels) into the mix.

<comment><USER28> No, because that land could be be reforested if it weren't kept for the cattle.

<comment><USER29> A lot of grassland can't support a forest. Cattle are able to survive on land that is otherwise too marginal to do much of anything but grow grass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> From a recent Bloomberg article[1]

The last two graphs show that 41% of the land in the contiguous 48 states is used for feeding livestock. More than 33% of the 48 states is just pasture, most of which I believe is used by cattle.

What would it take to shift protein consumption from beef (3% efficient) to products like poultry (21%) and eggs (31%)? [2]

I think we have to take a hard look at taxes, fees, and subsidies for land use and agricultural products, but there's not much political pressure to do so right now.

1: [https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land- use/](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/)

2: [http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/10...](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/105002)

<comment><USER31> wow. those numbers are so cool. never knew poultry was so efficient. No wonder it's so much cheaper.

What would it take to make beef production more efficient? genetic engineering perhaps.

People wil naturally switch to more efficient food as population goes up and food resources become more scarce.

<comment><USER32> It's not exactly surprising, is it? Besides efficiency, what would increase the price of a piece of food? (In the long run I assume supply would match demand so a mismatch there wouldn't be the cause.)

So I think the answer to your question about increasing efficiency is probably pretty difficult. There's already a huge profit motive to increase efficiency, so if a few labcoats could easily solve the problem I'm sure they would have by now. I think the answer is to eat animals who reach maturity faster (or just grow more per unit time?). Like insects :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> What if we all had a green wall with aquaponics ?

<comment><USER34> I think this is what it has to eventually be. We all have a garden in our garage. We save tons on transportation costs throughout the chain. It has to be near zero work. People used to _all_ have gardens in their backyard but stopped when they could afford the cheap produce at the store.

<comment><USER35> This is a horribly inefficient way to grow food.

The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could.

If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death.

The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that just _sounds_ nice, but would actually be horrible.

<comment><USER9> >The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could.

No, it is because people don't want to grow food. My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time. I don't know how much you want to value my time at, but lets say I am pretty awesome and deserve $100/hour. That's $3.33 cents for all the tomatoes I can eat. Where are the industrial farming companies producing tomatoes for 3.3 cents per 100 pounds?

>If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death.

If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other jobs, humans predate tractors.

>The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that just sounds nice, but would actually be horrible.

It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.

<comment><USER35> > If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for > thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. > All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other > jobs, humans predate tractors.

This works when everyone owns many acres of land per person, and is spending their entire life working the fields, doing hard labor, and doing very little else with their life yes. We don't live in that world anymore, though.

I suspect there isn't even enough physical land on the earth to support this inefficient method of farming.

We have significant evidence of how this worked out for people. That world that you are describing, where everyone spent their entire life just trying to barely feed themselves, was a horrible place, for everyone.

This period of time was called "the history of the world before the industrial era". And lots and lots of people died. So no, they were not fine.

> It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.

By "a lot" do you mean a very small percentage of the total population?

> My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time.

What you do with your tiny backyard garden is irrelevant. It is mathmatically impossible for you to be feeding yourself entirely on that, unless you have multiple acres of land, which I doubt is what you are describing. Your anecdote does not overrule physics.

<comment><USER9> >We don't live in that world anymore, though.

Exactly, we live in a world with machines. Making it _easier_ , not harder.

>I suspect there isn't even enough physical land on the earth to support this inefficient method of farming.

The calories produced per acre is higher, not lower. We need less land, not more. Why do you think it is inefficient?

>That world that you are describing, where everyone spent their entire life just trying to barely feed themselves, was a horrible place, for everyone.

That's a modern myth. We have detailed records of rural life in the 1500s. People worked fewer hours than they do now.

>By "a lot" do you mean a very small percentage of the total population?

Yes. It only takes one person doing it to prove your claim that is impossible is false.

>What you do with your tiny backyard garden is irrelevant

No it is not, it is the entire point.

> It is mathmatically impossible for you to be feeding yourself entirely on > that, unless you have multiple acres of land

It takes less than half an acre of land to feed a person growing food for yourself.

>Your anecdote does not overrule physics.

Please point me to the law of physics which states plants don't grow if stale2002 doesn't want them to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> There is a lot of innovation around high tech farming in places other than than the country side. With hydroponics, you can grow all sorts of stuff anywhere you can supply water, energy, and the right nutrients. People are growing herbs in underground abandoned subway stations, old industrial facilities, on roofs, deserts, etc. The reason is that it works really well and you can get great yields if you can micromanage the conditions in which plants grow.

Food production is fundamentally an energy problem; not a land problem. Using cheap electricity, you can desalinate water, pump nutrients around, generate light and control the temperature.

Eating meat is a problem given the vast resources needed to produce it. However, there's a lot of innovation in developing synthetic meats. Lab grown meat is becoming a thing. I'm talking about actual muscle tissue grown in labs. There are also many plant and mushroom based meat alternatives that are getting better and more popular. In short, we might eat a proper steak for nostalgic reasons once in a while in a few decades but we'll have plenty of alternative protein sources to supplement our diet with on a day to day basis. And making out-competing popular meat products like a big mac isn't exactly rocket science. The whole point of stuff like that is that it is industrialized low quality stuff. Most of the meat we're eat isn't exactly high quality stuff.

</comment><comment><USER37> Or we could stop throwing away nearly 1/3 of the food we produce...

<comment><USER14> Great point. As a kid growing up in India, reading about recurring starvation / famine there, and in Africa, etc., I also read about some European countries dumping mountains of butter and other edibles into the sea, due to surpluses, and maybe to keep the price up.

I mean, I understand it is about economics, supply and demand, profits, etc., but still,

 _shudder_

<comment><USER38> Instead of making the famous mountain of butter (beside a lake of milk) they now pay famers not to farm, which has its own oddities. Including discouraging of re-wilding I think, as the land has to be plausibly farm-able to get the cash.

This aside, it's worth knowing that developed countries typically throw away much less food than developing ones. Basically because Tesco is much better at logistics than a million guys trying to drive into Delhi. I don't have the link to hand but there was a nice comparison US vs Mexico on this somewhere.

<comment><USER14> >Instead of making the famous mountain of butter (beside a lake of milk) they now pay famers not to farm, which has its own oddities.

Crazy world we live in, where being (over-)efficient has to be subsidized. There may be a thing such as being too efficient for our own good. Also, the efficiency as measured, only relates to money / profits / maximizing use of resources in industrial (including food) production, and often does not take a holistic view, which should include sustainability of resources, quality of life (not just economic standard of living) and sustainability of the planet.

I had read E. F. Schumacher's book "Small is Beautiful" when a teenager, when I was more into these sorts of things (did organic vegetable gardening and dairy farming, used a biogas plant, etc.), before I got into the software field full-time. I still recommend his ideas and book about appropriate technology to interested people - the concepts and principles have not changed, though technologies have evolved, and a hybrid model may be needed:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Schumacher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Schumacher)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technology)

>Including discouraging of re-wilding I think, as the land has to be plausibly farm-able to get the cash.

Yes, re-wilding is a good idea.

>This aside, it's worth knowing that developed countries typically throw away much less food than developing ones. Basically because Tesco is much better at logistics than a million guys trying to drive into Delhi. I don't have the link to hand but there was a nice comparison US vs Mexico on this somewhere.

Possibly. I do know that plenty of waste happens in India too. In fact, Schumacher's ideas are very much suited to and applicable to developing countries. IIRC he was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi some, and Gandhi also had done significant work in this area, in practice, not just talking about it, either - including hugely encouraging Indian people to do naturopathy, nature cure, small scale industry work like traditional means of spinning and weaving for khadi (a great hand-made Indian cotton textile), etc. We still have Khadi & Village Industries Emporiums here, where one can buy clothing made of khadi:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khadi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khadi)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khadi#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khadi#History)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wheel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wheel)

[http://www.kvic.org.in/kvicres/index.php](http://www.kvic.org.in/kvicres/index.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> 1/4 of the worlds for ends up spoiled.

198 million: The number of hectares used to produce food that is lost or wasted each year. This is about the size of Mexico

$1,600: The annual amount the average American family of four spends on food that doesn't get eaten

53 percent: The amount of all food lost or wasted that is comprised of cereals, such as wheat, maize, and rice

64 percent: The share of loss or waste in the developing world that occurs before the food is even processed or sent to market

[https://www.wri.org/blog/2013/06/numbers-reducing-food- loss-...](https://www.wri.org/blog/2013/06/numbers-reducing-food-loss-and- waste)

</comment><comment><USER40> We don't need to.

\- The part of the world that consumes the most eats too much. A balanced diet would reduce greatly the food consumption.

\- The part of the world that consumes the most wastes a huge quantity of the food it produces.

\- Human don't need to eat meat to be healthy and we are past the need for hunting for survival. We can even produce non animal b12 supplements if we ever need to. Since most food are grown to be fed to cattle, if we stop eating meat, we suddently multiply our food flow by a huge amount while diminushing the water consumption, pollution, and a lot of public health issues.

Food is not a production problem anymore. It's a social and political one.

<comment><USER41> There is no shortage of food. Even with the Western world eating a rich, meat based diet, there's plenty of food; no need for everyone to go vegan.

What there is, is a problem with distribution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Luckily we have already solved this problem, we just need to distribute the solution to the developing world. Better crops and machinery result in much higher yields. If you are a small farmer and you are using livestock for labor something like 40% of your land has to be devoted to growing food for the animals to do the work. We must continue to innovate for that is the only way that everyone can win.

</comment><comment><USER43> I recently conducted a report and presentation about reducetarianism (though in my own language).

There are 3 main reasons why people go vegetarian, vegan, or reducetarian (the former 2 are a subset of reducetarianism): environment, animal welfare, and health.

Re: "Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?". My conclusion to based on the research I performed is:

Yeah, we can, and not only that we can also reduce the Co2 footprint by avoiding eating cattle. Alternatives which are size efficient are chicken and insects (such as grasshoppers and mealworms). However, chicken have a CNS, and if you grow more chicken, more chicken suffer, so this is a pro environment yet anti animal welfare argument.

What is going to be good for the environment is using solar energy, using electric cars (to go to the grocery store). Because the transport from (very efficient, huge) transport ships has less impact on environment than you going to/from grocery store by (conventional) car.

What is going to be good for animal welfare is growing & consuming less animals with a CNS. Alternatives such as insects or lab meat.

<comment> Joe-Z Would you care to explain what 'CNS' is?

<comment><USER43> In this context, it stands for Central Nervous System [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_nervous_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_nervous_system)

<comment> Joe-Z Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> We can grow food in buildings with hydrophonic systems. The problem is not land but energy.

</comment><comment><USER45> Why is food grow not stuck up vertically? I mean let's go 3D, since at least majority of vegetables and most fruits do not need more than height of 2 feet of space.

It also surprised me how old school modern farming still remains. Look at the first picture from this article: a bunch of modern tractors unnecessarily burning oil, unnecessarily operated by humans. By now this should be three times the size field with 15 levels up, run by 3D seeds/soil/water/plants/etc sampling throw out from automatically replaceable cartridge/dispenser.

We have long way to go, but certainly we don't need more land to grow; we need more technology in place!

Edit: should have mentioned it - even going vertical you can still use natural light! Its a matter of setting up bunch of mirrors reflecting sunlight. Of course you need sun to grow.

<comment><USER46> "Its a matter of setting up bunch of mirrors reflecting sunlight. Of course you need sun to grow."

Doesn't work > see thermodynamics.

The mirror you'd be setting up would have to set up away from the building where the food is grown and therefore occupy space.

In agronomy there is a concept that the rate of growth is set by whichever one necessary nutrient is limited. Since we fertilize and pump water, the limiting factor is sunlight.

EDIT: 1. This is why Brazil gasohol is the only net positive bio-fuel

2\. Manual picking of produce is far superior to mechanized harvest. Tomatoes in the US are large and tasteless because they've been bread to be easily picked by machine. ( A lot of thought goes into picking a ripe fruit. It's not obvious AI can do that. Or that the robots can ever grab fruit with dexterity and w/out crushing)

3.What energy source do you want to run your automatic tractors off of? Diesel for agriculture is arguably the segment that should be given the most slack when transitioning to "green" alternatives.

<comment><USER24> As an aside, while we're still a ways off from battery-electric farm vehicles (cost/weight of batteries is still just too high to meet the same parameters as diesel tractors, even with very generous assumptions the last time I ran the numbers), I still like the idea of electric farm equipment hardwired to the grid and dragging giant electric cords behind them like really boring EVAs.

(Sure, you'd still want batteries to drive the machinery between fields, and you'd need a way to keep the cords from damaging crops or disrupting the plowing when you're dragging them around, and you'd need to put a huge "tractor electric outlet" by every cluster of fields you're working with, but these are all engineering challenges that could be met with current technology.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Didn't Mao Tse Tung have some sort of failed high density agriculture experiment leading to famine? Let's not repeat that particular bit of history.

</comment><comment><USER48> The Netherlands!

It's a small country that grows a lot of food!

Final answer.

Now let's read the article and sees what it says.

Edit: ah it's more about cattle.

<comment><USER9> Not really. The Netherlands has a high dollar value of "agricultural exports" which includes flowers at 10% of that value and equipment and machinery at another 10%. Of the 80% that is actually food, a lot of it is high value low calorie food. And the methods used to produce that food are horribly destructive, not sustainable, and will cost future generations untold hardship to deal with: [https://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2018/03/dutch- agriculture-...](https://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2018/03/dutch-agriculture- is-not-a-beacon-of-good-farming-practice-to-the-world/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> We could just grow plants instead of animals, then problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER50> Maybe Boring Co and Square Roots can do some underground vertical farming so we don't keep running out of romaine.

<comment><USER51> Topsoil is needed for plants, which won't grow underground without it. And if you're going to carry soil underground, might as well do it in an above ground building. Or try hydro ponics

<comment><USER50> I was thinking more like a 10 foot wide hole, 1 mile deep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> if not we're fucked, no?

</comment><comment><USER53> This is touched on in Pinker's "Enlightenment Now." The current trendy "organic" label requires more land to grow the same amount of food. Whatever benefits of so-called organic farming you perceive, if any, it is a regression in terms of feeding the world's growing population.

<comment><USER54> >if any, it is a regression in terms of feeding the world's growing population.

Food security is a distribution problem, not a production problem. We're already producing far far more food than we consume or would even need to consume. Big Ag likes to pretend they need higher yields in order to feed the hungry but they're full of it. They want to produce more for cheaper and pocket the margin, but they're not going to do jack squat to get that production out to the people who need it.

<comment><USER53> Both can be problems at the same time. I think you raise a valid concern, but I don't believe it dismisses the yield/density problem in any way.

I don't think there's any reason to vilify agricultural businesses in particular for being profit-seeking capitalist corporations.

<comment><USER54> >I don't think there's any reason to vilify agricultural businesses in particular for being profit-seeking capitalist corporations.

It's not about the line of business. It's about disingenuously gussying up the marketing around their own profit maximization by pretending they're being humanitarian. Sort of like "Greenwashing."

Everyone does it, but so many people depend on subsistence farming that it comes across as especially crass. Sure they're not alone, but there is plenty of scorn to go around for bottling companies taking up all the ground water, Pharma companies abusing IP law to fleece sick people, etc. There's no reason to be stingy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Must see areas/things to do in San Francisco for hackers? - <AUTHOR>

I am going to be in San Francisco for a few days in February for the very first time. What are some must see areas/things to do for a hacker/programmer. <comment><USER2> I third Mountain View, and the computer history museum. Also, while you are there, check out Hacker Dojo. If you need a lift anywhere I live a block from the train station in MV and never mind a quick siteseeing tour.

In the city, check out Tech Shop if you have any maker inclinations.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're going to head to Mountain View, visit the Computer History Museum. It's nice to know from whence we all came.

Though the place makes me feel particularly old when I realize how much gear in the museum is stuff I've worked on in the past...

</comment><comment><USER4> Union Square. Ride the trolley, and visit The Chancellor (of Sliders fame). Also, you can visit all the hot new startups on the Mission and in SoMA.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you can, ride the CalTrain down to Mountain View. There are lots and lots of places to visit there, including the GooglePlex.</comment>


Only Technology Will Save Us - barry-cotter http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2010/03/only_technology_will_save_us.php

<comment><AUTHOR> Experimenting with governments is dangerous and can have percussion of biblical proportion. Meanwhile, our current form of "government" continue its path toward oblivious social upheaval because we could not fix the engineering flaws even if we want to. Not to mention our ability to notice societal causation and effect is stretched to its limits as social policies took decades and years to realize their terrible effects, making it difficult for us to accumulate knowledge about the design of human institutions.

Meanwhile, technologies has increase our ability to grow and feed the parasitism that exists within our stagnating social system. However, technologies have the ability to speed up social evolution and increase our ability to create new social institutions. This in turn, may allow us to experiment with better social institutions and crush old malfunctioning ones. More dynamics in governmental system mean economic growth can accelerate to levels undreamed of.

This is why the sea-steading movement is immensely important. If we can generate dynamicism in the government market, we can increase competition and generate better designs. Revolutions of the bloody scale would be kept in check with increased physical mobility and increased pressure to improve.

In other words, it's technology or bust.</comment>


Where even Walmart won't go: how Dollar General took over rural America - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/13/dollar-general-walmart-buhler-haven-kansas <comment><USER2> Just walked through a Dollar General store today while waiting for lunch. They make Big Lots stores feel like Nordstrom.

If you are struggling I can see the appeal of the "low prices" but the value of what you can get there isn't so great.

<comment><USER3> True, also the packaging is slightly smaller than in regular stores. E.g.: 7 oz cans instead of 8 oz cans. But the price is just enough less than the 8 oz size price to make the consumer feel they are getting a good deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is rural America declining, or simply not improving the way the rest of America is in the last 100 or so years?

<comment><USER2> America is developing in exactly the way the systems we like to use dictate they should grow.

Here it is a transportation issue--in the opposite way you might think. Older towns in the mid-west are spaced apart roughly 6-miles because you would only be able to travel by horse about 20-miles in a day. Naturally, you would want to be able to do "things" in the next town so you don't travel the entire day just to turn around and go back home. So, towns spread out about 6-miles and slowly grow. Bigger towns grew faster and smaller towns stayed the way they are. Bring in interstates and railroads and suddenly some towns, if they had nothing "going for them" never grow again or shrink--they're completely bypassed.

People leave town for the opportunities, so opportunities have little need for these towns except for the occasional externality: e.g. a massive chicken processing or pet-food rendering plant no one wants to live near.

Dollar General has found a dirt-easy strategy and picks up this easy money because this is essentially a structural problem with people who have tied themselves too closely to the land and governments that can't solve their problems.

<comment><USER3> Its only a problem for the low income to welfare range of folk. People who have a better income usually have transportation and use it to shop in bigger cities where the savings pays for the trip. Also, the trip doubles as a social outing, where the folk eat out, go to a movie, etc.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you handle talking to your manager after missing a promotion? - <AUTHOR> I have been with my company for a few years.  Over the past year or so, there's been a huge management change.
We had been a small agile team and have grown like crazy with a bunch of new processes and managers added into the mix. I recently learned that I was not given a promotion due to reasons outside of my technical ability or developer velocity.  During my previous reviews leading up to this, there was never any indication that those reasons would hold me back and I specifically talk to my manager a few months ago telling them I want to get to the next level, and they told me they didn't see any reason why I wouldn't.
The new management that came in are making a huge push for diversity and most of the promotions were diverse co-workers, which is great.
But now I'm not sure what direction to go in?  It's obvious to me that I'm not respected at the company.  I'm not a 10x developer.  I'm not diverse.  My big skill is that I can get features working and I volunteer to work on hard problems that have no clear solutions.
I still like my company and I do enjoy working with my co-workers.
I'm planning on talking to my manager about what I can do better, but its really obvious to me now that my company just sees me as just a worker cog that is probably a dime a dozen.
I'm not 100% sure how to handle the talk with my manager and how do I make myself more indispensable from here on out? <comment><USER2> If company policy is going in the direction you don't prefer - I think you may want to start looking for alternatives.

Priority in diversity usually means that technical skills and capabilities of workers will be considered after "diversity quota" matching.

You may find yourself in uphill battle going forward.

That said you have skills and abilities to build products that solve problems for everyone regardless of race/gender/color - which means you just need to move toward environment that support what is really important: skills, creativity and productivity.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't blame your lack of promotion on a diversity drive.

If the company does not respect you and thinks you are "just a worker cog that is probably a dime a dozen", as you wrote, then you probably won't get promoted whether there is a diversity drive or not.

Getting promoted is not really about being indispensable either. I know plenty of indispensable people who don't get promoted.

Getting promoted is about proving you are ready to take on more responsibility than you currently have -- leadership of a team, or technical responsibility for more important projects, for example. Expectations will be higher if you get promoted. Somebody thinks you won't be able to meet those expectations. That is what you need to change.

When you talk to your manager about this, you should focus only on your own ability to meet the expectations for a promotion. Do not mention the diversity drive or compare your job skills to anyone else's in the company -- that is not going to get you anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER4> You should mention that you feel you are ready for a promotion as soon as you have that feeling. If you feel that you have been passed over you should ask what made you less qualified for promotion. Eventually you are either being lied to or you are promoted. Unless you have been told that your being white has disqualified you then you have no reason to think that you are simply not the most qualified candidate.

Also, referring to non-white people as "diverse people" is incredibly tone deaf and your lack of ability to address race in a responsible manner may be seen as a liability were you given a more prominent role. That specific phrasing has been dragged through the mud repeatedly. Don't talk like this: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nlXKZHeghcY](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nlXKZHeghcY)

<comment><USER5> Where did OP imply that they are white, or that non-white people are diverse? Apologies if I missed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > how do I make myself more indispensable from here on out?

Don't ever do that. Managers pigeonhole indispensable people.

</comment><comment><USER7> > how do I make myself more indispensable from here on out?

The only way to make yourself truly indispensable is start your own company. No-one can fire you or treat you bad when you're your own boss.

Regarding your current situation it's pretty clear they shit all over you, it's time to move on.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sounds like it's time to look elsewhere. The fact that this "huge push" wasn't made clear to you prior to the promotion process sounds like your manager really dropped the ball.</comment>