One major supermarket chain in my city has, in their biggest store, built a fairly sizeable vertical hydroponic garden room, where they grow lettuce and herbs. It looks like a big glass room full of greens right by the entrance. The motivation for building it in the first place (apart from green marketing attracting customers) was to cut down on shipping pollution and cost, making the store more self-sustainable and the produce to have longer shelf-life, meaning less food waste. I think it's pretty neat and seems like a good way to implement this kind of farming.
I would assume that such a vertical garden would either be south facing for the northern hemisphere or south facing for the southern hemisphere to make it energy efficient.
I'm in Ontario Canada, and our local compost services actually take meat, dairy, grease, fats, oils, etc. along with the usual good scraps. It's great. We have recycling and compost pick up each week and garbage pick up every other week. As a family of five, we rarely filled up one garbage bag most weeks, so it made a huge difference. 🤗🇨🇦
I've got a compost pile that will eat anything within a year except whole mango seeds, avocado peels and "biodegradable" plastics without any noticeable odour. I don't know why ppl say you can't throw meat or fat in a compost pile, some times it even eats the bones if you've got a hot, well established compost pile.
@@Mattle_lutrafor meat it's not that it can't be composted or rot, but that the bacteria in the area resulting from that compost can be dangerous for open wounds and such, and that if not handled with the proper care and procedures you in general shouldn't add them to your gardens as such. That being said having protein and calcium levels is good to have in soil in moderation for the plants.
I would really like a vid that touches on soil health. like the mycelium network between trees and truffles but also in a “grow winter crops so all the fertilizer doesn’t accumulate in local rivers and lakes”....
That part about the maximum pesticide thresholds should come with a major asterisk: Some poisons are a lot worse in really low doses than in higher doses. Some endocrine disruptors work like that, for example.
I like cold compost and composting fall leaves directly in my garden. As for pesticide, I have companion plants with marigold and rosemary. One day I want to plant my garden like a forest.
Yes forest gardens are the best! Plant once eat forever! Not like these annual crops that you slave over every year till the day you die! Living here is South Florida, theortically we could plant *tropical* food forest with almost unimaginable possibilities! Bread fruit, bread nut, peanut butter tree, scrambled egg tree, cow tree, chocolate pudding tree, butter pears, monkey nuts, snake fruit, spinach trees, drumstick trees, sea grapes, hog plums, june plums, java apples, sugar apples, sugar plums, sweet leaf, Barbados cherries, Suriname cherries, beach almonds, grape trees, cucumber tree, star fruit, bottle gourd tree, rain tree, sugar palm, wine palm, thatch palm, oil palm, timber bamboo, arrow bamboo, iron bamboo ... and not to mention all the other wonderful exotic crops either already more famous, or less descriptively named. I wish land wasn't going under hyper inflation. With how things are going, it's looking like by the time I can afford a little 1/4 acre that are at $0.5M right now, they will be going for $200M. I don't see a future for this country, and my area much less.
Great video. I work as a research and PhD student in agriculutre at a university in Canada. Happy to see some great sci-communication about the field (no pun intended).
Our chickens always get first crack at all scraps. They instantly clean up the meat scraps first and then follow us around like a dog looking for another treat. No meat no smelly compost if you have chickens, just excellent chicken manure for your compost.
they only address surface subjects that promote tech as god. they are not interested in real discussion of what really matters to successful sustainable farmers.
@@sasachiminesh1204 they only address “surface subjects” because this is a compilation and the actual vids are 10-15 mins long. Not long enough to dig deeply into the complexities and intricacies of the issues farmers in the US face today.
There was no talk about greenhouses, which are also a great benefit for farming, thanks to greenhouses a small country like the Netherlands can be the second largest food exporter in the world.
Chickens are awesome composters. We feed ours meat & veggie scraps, and cover their main run in free wood chips from the town transfer station. It doesn't smell because the C in the woodchips is more than enough to counter the N in the chicken poo (i.e. the composting process is N-limited).
I believe the future of food is removing lawns and having permaculture food forests that provide 80% of our food needs right at home. They are low maintenance and produce more food than any one family can eat which can be shared. Permaculture has also been proven to reverse desertification all over the world. If anyone is interested, give "Permaculture" a search. You won't be disappointed. (I recommend Geoff Lawton - Greening the Desert Project)
PaleGhost69 love permaculture. It’s not that hard to grow food if you’re smart. Problem is people want cheap, pretty fast food. And they don’t want to do it or see it. We love using our chickens to help grow our food.
I really like permaculture. The one big criticism I would have is that it is useful to do things on a large scale to make use of the efficiency that can bring. I think the future is more combining "factory farms" with permaculture principles and ideas. I guess the thing I'm less enthusiastic about is the idea that small scale is automatically better when if we spread everything out too much that can actually have a bad impact on the environment. Although food forests are obviously way better than lawns in most ways. I want a tech heavy future agriculture. Plant based and lab grown meat as well as milk made using yeast can help us cut down the absurd amount of cows running around now and all the fields dedicated to just that. Those could then be used for nature reserves, recreational green areas, food forests. Although maybe when our robots get good enough those could be used in your local garden. ;) Even then I'm wary of the focus a lot of people have on everyone living in single, separate homes(even if they're of the tiny kind), on their own small patch of land that is then supposed to provide them with their food. This is very inefficient from a land use perspective. I am more in favour of building green skyscrapers with gardens with plants and trees on every floor, probably including food production. As well as common areas on several floors, skyscrapers should be designed to be more supportive of community.
Absolutely. Permaculture maintains the soil much better, requires zero or close to zero pesticides, and nurtures biodiversity. It is more labor intensive, but well worth it. And it's not just permaculture. Soon the need for each household to be relatively self-sufficient will become even more obvious, and nanogrids (the production of electricity by the household for the household) will likely make out a good portion of the energy we make/use.
I had never done a garden before and I decided to do it this year. I dug two holes 3 feet apart, and put some trellises against the fence. Then I put a handful of compost in the hole, then some potting soil and then pushed a couple of seeds of cucumbers in each hole. I din't care if it came up or not... I was just curious if it would..There were more cucumbers that three or four families could handle. So this next Spring, I'll plant some tomatoes, carrots and green onions with the same attitude,.. not caring if they grow or not. It's all in the bar that you set.
Good luck! Just make sure you find out what can and can't be planted close together, since some plant combinations can lead to one or both plants dying, or it can attract harmful insects. Basil is actually pretty good for deterring aphids, from what I've discovered.
Cucumbers are one of the easiest things I've grown. I should have read more before planting 15. We were making pickles, cucumber onions and vinegar, and eating salad every day! We were keeping up until we went to the beach and came home to ~30lbs of cucumber.
Personal observation as an avid huckelberry hunter in western WA- they grow here at sea level and have berries for about 7-8 months out of the year. They are definitely smaller and less sweet by the middle of November, though. I know the red variety are rare at lower elevations, but the black ones are ten times more flavorful and they grow tens times more densely anyway... More dense?... It's definitely not "denser"... Maybe they can't be cultivated in the way we grow blueberries or strawberries, but my parents have managed huckleberry bushes around their yard that have been there since the '80s, at least. I remember when we transplanted a bunch of 4 footers so they could get more sun in the '90s and they still crank out big berries in clusters every summer. I'd really like to look into the ways huckleberries have been attempted and what exactly defines "cultivation" as they mean it.
Epcot in Disney world has a bad ass farming lab that grows a lot of the produce served throughout Disney world’s restaurants. The ride living with the land takes you through their general setup, and is really cool (even though as a kid it bored me to tears and I usually took a nap) You can pay to take a backstage tour, and it was well worth the 30 ish dollars I paid. It made me want to go home and set up a hydroponics farm immediately. They utilize every technology discussed near the end of this video.
Composting is so much easier than you think! I started looking into it because our dirt is awful and I wanted to revive the flower garden. So I checked it out, and I started making rows I dig out in between the flower rows, and I slowly fill each bit up every other day, I throw all our veggie and fruit trash in it. Only thing is, I obviously don't bust out the shovel every time I have a banana and chuck the skin in the garden from the door. So I wonder what the Amazon people think, seeing a hole with carrots and banana peels in it 😂😂 I hope they get what I'm doing!!
Sewage, and waste activated sludge isn't as pure as farmers would like, because it's not manufactured to spec. www.newscientist.com/article/2105426-myth-busted-dumped-pills-arent-main-source-of-drugs-in-sewage/#
Premium organics - Space poop. Just like beef, you have the normal beef, then there're A5 Kobe beef. Edit: Also astronauts are smart people, their poop makes you smarter.
I have actually visited a facility in Australia that was researching the commercial viability of tuna farming, or alternatively hatching them and releasing small tuna into the wild to bolster wild populations. They also had a separate tank just for blue fin tuna which was not shown during my tour. They probably didn't really worry that I'd be a commercial spy but they sure played things safe. It was really cool of them to show me around anyway, I ended up seeing the plant by accident during my year of work and travel and just asked if I could take a peek and was given a tour instead. They couldn't give me any fish to take back to my hostel but one of the workers invited me for fish and chips.
I worked weeding fields in Hollister and Gilroy California, 10 hours a day , in sometimes triple digits 😳 . I would walk , weeding these fields, over 5 miles a day at the age of 58 .
The pesticides I use in my organic garden are diluted cold pressed neem oil and diatomaceous earth. They are not perfect but with a little caution you can avoid harming any unintended pollinators by staying away from flowers and only applying at times of the day when bees are less active.
The future of farming is whatever you’re willing to pay for. Farming practices are a direct reflection of the consumers willingness to compensate a farmers investment.
Tell that to all the farmers who have gotten cancer due to glyphosate. Most consumers have no fckn idea of farming practices, and even less of the harmful ones.
I feel like the idea of vertical farming was around before 2009 or even 1999. Like, nobody thought of that before? I could point to Le Corbusier as an example.
Bro they literally made a whole video defending Roundup after first saying they were harmful... sponsorship changes everything.( they lost multiple court cases)
@@hibiscusdandelionlove7804 Wow, its almost like that video was made in 2018 with the current knowledge they had. I know its weird, but your allowed to receive new information and change your mind based on evidence. Scientists don't enjoy the omniscience you have to know the results of every court case, every pesticides side effects without having enough reliable peer reviewed articles to confidentally say. Sadly they are humans and not godlike in their knowledge.
I'm a fan of this channel and I enjoy your content. Although though you have a point about the relative danger of glyphosate in relation to other agrochemicals, the fact that you present this information without disclosing that glyphosate is a known carcinogen with US case law awarding damages for exposure constitutes misinformation. I'm stating this because I think that you guys are the type of channel to take this sort of comment seriously and reflect on it based on your other videos.
roundup "relatively safe" Bayer pays billions for cancer patients (you can be sure they did not do that without proof) So I grow as much of my own food as possible and let the bugs get what they get I even eat them on occasion(extra protein)
Great show guys 🙂 I really enjoyed this. I have to admit though I'm a little disappointed that when discussing pesticides and their dangers that even though DDT was brought up nothing was said on Agent Orange. It's use during Vietnam and the reoccurring fall out that has still affected the human population up until this day is largely unknown to most of the public. I know that the majority of the purpose of this particular programming is to make pesticides a little less scary and getting the right information and education around them then out there is super important. Agriculture education is extremely important so I understand. I do think it's warranted that that things like Agent Orange even though it's use was to kill vegetation for war purposes it still was a combination of pesticides that are still found in some hot zones today and people may be unaware that they've been affected by Agent Orange. I am a child of a parent that served in Vietnam and I did develop complications genetically directly due to that parent's first hand exposure. Those complications passed to my child and we are working with the VA and COVVHA making sure that proper researche is done, but I do wish AO problems were brought up a little bit more in programs like these since the effects are still current.
That would be a different topic, because herbicides are different than pesticides. But I, too, would be interested in episodes on Agent Orange. I'm particularly interested to see if any linkage has been shown in children of exposed veterans to less obvious birth defects like EDS.
Back in the day, my mom used to be a sales rep for Glysophate when it first came out, and part of their sales pitch was showing how safe it was by drinking it 😳 Happy to say she’s still healthy and thriving and experiences no weed competition!
"Our first example is catfish" Me: Oh I love catfish! "... to get those crispy fillets to our plates" Me: Wait what? We've been eating very different things. I've never had fillet catfish and I don't know why would I because the fins and the tails are like the absolute best. Seriously, you all are missing out so much
Ooh nice, a real long compilation to sooth my agriculture-related woes. I was so excited to go out and buy stuff to plant this year, but then everything happened and now I can't find any seeds or seedlings to buy...😔 All the dedicated garden stores are closed, and any other place that carries seeds are either not carrying them right now, or they're sold out.
Pixx look into regrowing food from food scraps. There’s a lot you can get from the store and grow again in your yard. Potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, celery, pineapple, & lettuce heads for starters. Just something to keep you busy while you wait for access to seeds & things. That’s how I started my first garden at my mom’s. Now I have more than 20 containers along her driveway. Also, if you’re able to harvest the seeds from your romaine lettuce plants & things (that you’ve regrown from scraps) you can plant those & they’ll grow better bc they’re acclimated to your environment.
@@pixx3461 I think MiGardener still has stock but I don't frequent his seed store that often since I save my own seed. He has really nice heirloom varieties.
@@PaleGhost69 Woah, they've got a lot of different stuff to choose from. I'll definitely look into buying stuff from there, but it looks like the website is having a little trouble.
Woah! I've been wanting to grow plants for a while. Been seriously considering it especially while walking my dogs and seeing all the spring plants. Come back inside and this is up. And its 40 minutes! More than enough time to eat while i watch.
Pyrethrins is one of those insecticides that sounds bad but as many do not know, it's made from Chrysanthemums (yes, the Flower), and has been used for a thousand years. They are extremely effective against pest but they don't last long in the environment before they break down. As far as I know, it is the only Fly and Mosquito spray that's allowed to be used in Dairy Farms.
Fulano de Tal an investment worth making. Growing food at home saves my family a ton of money. It takes a bit of research, time, energy, trial & error, elbow grease and determination... but it’s definitely worth it.
I been growing potatoes and peppers and sunflowers since November. Now I have tomatoes and cucumbers and squash alongside the others. Carrots, Onions, and Garlic are next. Everyone should be growing their own foods.
My one issue with what you guys talked about with lack of food production doesn't address the issue of distribution and waste. We currently produce plenty of food to feed people. Far, far too much of it is just thrown out or goes bad in stores. We don't need tech to produce more food. We need tech to distribute it better and better policies around all this.
Thanks for the video! It's a great summary of the current state of food production! However, there have been some alternative developments in understanding how to maximise productivity of land, to allow a future where we can simultaneously grow more food, whilst reducing total land use. And it doesn't rely on any fancy technology! In a nutshell, it works through feeding the soil rather than feeding the plants. This, combined with planning for succession, allows the creation of highly productive land from depleted soils. Allowing farms to become carbon sinks. A pioneer in this sphere is a biologist called Ernst Gotsch. His process is summarised in "Life in Syntropy" on the channel "Agenda Gotsch" on RUclips. As much as we all think technology will solve all our problems, sometimes a deeper understanding of the complexity of nature and how to work with it can work a lot better!
Human pee was also used for many different applications in the past. Things like tanning animal hides, as a whitening agent, and many other others. Quite fascinating actually
@Christian O. Holz, yes, I have seen a medieval history show that demonstrated how aged urine had a lot of ammonia and was used to clean and whiten freshly woven woolen cloth. Now, that was a stinky job stomping on cloth on a large wooden tub!
@@fredericapanon207 indeed :) It did make pee (ammonia) quite a valuable commodity due its many uses. This chemical is still used today in a wide variety of production processes Hats were also made using a somewhat toxic substance when inhaled (I forget the exact name of it right now), which caused neurological damage after prolonged exposure. It literally drove the workers mad giving rise to the term "mad hatter"
I think the biggest problem with our quest to produce food more efficiently is that we often forget that we ultimately eat what we are feeding our food - flora or fauna. If we're cherry picking nutrients for fast growth, we're bound to miss essential micronutrients and we end up not getting what we need from our food or getting it in such small quantities that we would need to consume so much food it's no longer efficient and becomes unhealthy. Take, for example, selenium. Humans don't need a lot of it but, without it, our bodies don't work properly the the point that we can't absorb and process other nutrients. If selenium and a whole host of other micronutrients we may not even be aware of yet aren't getting into our food, they aren't getting into us. By isolating food from the environment it evolved to thrive in (like most plants in soil) and trying to provide it with everything it needs to flourish in a controlled environment, we run the risk of missing out on key components it needs to become the food we need. We may need less pesticides and herbicides but do we really get the full spectrum of nutrition we need to thrive? I think thriving is more about balance and nurturing an organism strong enough to contend with any challenges in its environment. That's going to be difficult in mass production of monoculture crops or in highly controlled environments. We thrive best on a variety of foods. So, too, does our food.
Olivia: Could you do a show on co-planting or alternative ways of undermining pests targeting garden insects??? Thanks 🇨🇦... Your buddies to the North.
I live about 15 miles from Salinas California. Which is the salad bowl of the state. And on multiple occasions I saw farmers driving their tractors through their fields in hazmat suits and gas masks. Kinda freaked me out because that’s one of our nations biggest supply of food
"Hanky-Poo, help us out!" I love these guys oh so so much! Greetings from just north of you guys in Montana from Alberta Canada! Been down there in Shelby, Conrad, Butte and all the charming towns and cities along highway 15! For anybody looking for a memory road trip....do make the must-have experience of driving down and visiting a blend of old rustic town America as well as the more beautiful and interestingly laid out urban centers of Great Falls and Helena. Also visit the Museam of the Rockies in Boseman. Or the super charming and fun "The Montana Dinosaur Center" in Bynum. Perhaps the best fossil-visiting experience I've had outside of the "Royal Tyrrell Museum" in Drumheller Alberta Canada. Lots of love to the Scishow team! Oh how I would love to visit that marvelous team of creators and get their autographs and perhaps a few pictures!!
The entire ocean is microplastics. Salt made from the sea is dried salt plus microplastics! Buy your salt which is buried and presently mined, as in Himalayan pink salt.
Vertical agriculture in interurban or urban areas. I think you guys gave this too little attention in this video. Thinking about the future of food while discussing fish is probably not the best way to really talk about what we'll be eating in the future. I don't really care what someone eats, but we will be eating less from the sea, fewer animals (on average), and we will be replacing that with things grown in dirt or in a similar situation. The problems with supply chains have been exposed recently, and using existing space near urban areas would answer a lot of those problems. Old malls could become the new farms, and they could have nearly direct lines into cities for distribution. Not only would this work for business, but it would work when the product literally needs to be given away or let go to waste. An automated agricultural building with renewable energy generated on site. I'm planning on find a way to finish out my working life in helping such an industry grow. We've been watching a whole bunch of stuff die in the fields in the US over the past few years, but if those things were being grown near cities and if the harvesting were automated, and there was nearly a direct line to the nearby consumer market, that type of waste would be far less likely to happen.
@@MrOttopants If you want adequate access to sunlight, you will require some kind of mechanical system to physically move the crop (maybe a mirror based system could be used but damn that is an expensive engineering project to construct) which will require power, probably more than what solar power from the same building (remember, the same resource the plants need!) can produce. If you decide to use lamps instead, that again will be a significant amount of power and considering the inefficiency of solar power, you're better of using sunlight itself in the first place. Mechanical maintenance costs over time would also be a factor to consider. My point with this is, many ideas seem good at a glance but once you break down the factors behind the idea, you really need to examine if it's worth the trouble. The goal is as much food as possible for as little cost and space as possible. The agricultural industry is getting better and producing more food on less land. I don't know the current numbers but I remember a few years ago reports of agricultural land usage actually decreasing. Other industries, like biofuels, are among the reasons why land usage overall is still increasing. If you really want to help, get into engineering, something like sustainable development, electrical engineering or similar and start crunching the numbers!
@@MrOttopants I should add to that, most cities already have many highrises so optimal placement would be difficult. Especially given many cities having heigh restriction laws or local communal issues with their placement!
@@sebastianjovancic9814 This is why I said "interurban" areas. Some urban areas are available. It depends which cities we're talking about. That's why interurban areas are ideal, but it would also depend on the size of the city. If you have a sprawling city, and the cost of transporting a product from hundreds of miles is the same as paying higher costs for urban location, then that's just a dollars and cents issue. But you also can't assume that the population density of today will be the same as population density issues of the future. We may be facing much different issues about population in 50 years, and it may be financially feasible to grow in designated city areas.
Damn it man, this tricked me into thinking you had new content for almost a minute. I hate these compilations of old stuff that I've already watched that aren't labeled as such.
I'm surprised they didn't talk about replacing cows with bugs. Bugs are extremely good sources of protein, & take WAY less space to produce a similar amount of protein. Entomophagy is also already common around the world, we'd just need to scale it up. There are lots of ways to make bugs just as tasty as a hamburger, & they can be turned into a flour-replacement/supplement, ground up into powder to hide their buggy appearance. When doing blind studies on food made from bugs compared to the same food made from traditional means, most people couldn't tell the difference, or even preferred the bug-sourced food, so for most people, the only real issue is the mental squick factor, which again, can be worked around.
I appreciate that the information on pesticides, etc. was given in a fair way without the usual bias. Realistic solutions to the problems we face are only worsened when we aren't willing to listen to each other.
Here a number of years ago there was a Hepatitis outbreak (my next door neighbor got it), which was traced down to restaurants using lettuce from Mexico that had been sprayed with liquefied Human waste fertilizer (law suits that came from that closed down many good restaurants).
If we are to go into space for extended periods of time, I think that we would have to become vegan. As much as I am not a fan of the vegan diet, with modification I think it is one that best lends itself to space travel. It is much easier and cost-effective to use a hydroponics style system to (or even aquaponics, just replacing fish with people) than to care for animals in space. You also get the added benefit of oxygen production and waste filtration. But since I'm not going to space any time soon...
Insect farming could and should be used in space. They can digest part of the crops that we can't, their poop is a better way to close that loop than composting. The feed conversion is much higher than larger animals. They are nutritionally a good complement to a plant diet. I have never had them but I heard that crickets taste good. Earthworms might also be another option. They can eat poop, vegetable scraps and pretty much anything biological and turn it into more worms and the best plant fertilizer ever. Test tube meats are another thing that should be developed for space but we aren't ready to produce them in bulk yet. Yeast and bacteria can be convinced to make milk and egg proteins through genetic engineering. We can already do that. They would be technically vegan as would test tube meats but they would provide some of the nutrition that plants don't. I believe that we could do that for every nutrient too. A somewhat sustainable vegan diet requires a wide variety of plants that would also be hard to grow in space while if you ate only spinach, crickets and high oleic sunflower seeds (fat is needed to prevent rabbit starvation, high oleic because too much omega6 is quite bad) you would have a really complete diet. It lacks carbohydrates but those are not needed and would only require adding a cereal. Crickets are high in the essential aminoacids that plants lack, on an omega 3 form that is usable for humans (we can barely use the GLA in plants) , on vitamin B12 and on minerals like iron and zinc that while also abundant in the choosen plants they come with things like phytic acid that hamper their absorption. Spinach and sunflower seeds are quite complementary in the vitamins they provide. The only thing I can think of that would be lacking is creatine which although non essential the lack of it in the diet increases the demands on the methylation cycle which depending on your genes is totally ok or a disaster brewing.
Assuming long-term space habitation becomes normalized I can see animal proteins being slowly introduced into habitat farming programs as the programs mature and diversify, starting with high-density sources like invertebrates and fish, then eventually moving up to larger animals like pigs, sheep and goats (the last two are also valuable for textiles and dairy). I don't think we'll ever see cows or horses in space outside of some private collections, they're just too inefficient a food or work source until you get up to Island-Three O'Neill cylinder scale and the biosphere is at the scale of a small country. Initially though, I think you're onto something. Going vegan, or at least meatless, would simplify resupply from Earth as the habitat itself grows the majority of its own food.
@@Vespuchian I agree with you once we hit the destination, but en route I think plants are the way to go. Once we are settled though, no reason not to start raising chickens and letting that be a stepping stone into possibly cows, goats, etc. I fully agree.
@@eruiluvatar236 I agree, though I wouldn't try to raise different plants but rather raise calories and supplement the nutrition. Insects may be necessary regardless as pollinators. That and worms for the soil, etc. Right now, fake meat (the one made from fungus) takes quite a bit of energy to make, so probably not feasible at this point. And though insects are a great idea for protein, not sure if that would be needed. With slight modification and supplementation, you could get away with a vegan diet. I mean wheat is the leading source of protein for a good part of the world. But if, for example, the insects start getting overpopulated, absolutely no reason to waste them.
My dad worked at Geigy Industrial Chemicals back in the sixties and seventies. I clearly remember having one of his business cards that proudly stated: “Originators of DDT”. Geigy merged with Ciba and became Ciba-Geigy, then Syngenta (today). My dad’s specialty was plastics, so he had no involvement in DDT R&D. But that memory of his old business card stayed with me.
You should be able to grow truffles indoors in a similar manner as the psychedelic truffles. Use a wood based substrate in a sealed container and inoculate with spores or active mycelium.
yeah it's true. most of that 40% even goes to cattle farms, which is not efficiënt at all (amazon fires are done mainly for cattle farms). cattle have a food conversion rate of 8, while chickens have 2. This means you need 8kg of calorie dense food for 1kg of cow meat and 2kg of food for 1 kg of chicken meat. Also the most fertile lands are used within that 40% and those lands happen to be the ones with more biodiversity (so more species suffer from it)
But what is it when you rate the calories out versus the calories a HUMAN puts in. I bet the human puts in very little calories per calories they get out, of course that is you have cattle on pasture with no further input from humans.
@@Dslayer5511 Is it proven that Amazon fires are happening because of the demand for larger cattle farms? I think this needs a large research. Where does Brazil exports meat mostly?
The Picts would use feces as part of their house building, many cultures have used feces for more than just fertilizer, it used to aid the tanning process in leather making if I remember right
If there's a spider within 20 ft, I will find it. They're usually cool, but scare the crap out of me when they try to descend onto my head/face from the ceiling. It happened like 5 times last year.
My city has a program that uses yard waste, food scraps, and yes, biosolids, to make compost that citizens can use in their own yards. Let me tell you, it grows the best food you’ve ever seen. My tomatoes are super productive.
My grandmother who is bored in the 1800s, had in the backyard two pets, Very little meats, meat (but meat never the less. If I came out of the kitchen it was composted. She also had a pile above ground were leaves and yard trimmings would go plus vegetable trimmings. When we were there with our dog she would have the dog extra minutes also placed on that pile. Nothing went to wast. This pile should only turn over occasionally. This pile she used whenever she needed something for the garden. You dig down in the piles warm. It would take a long time for snow to cover it, and it would melt quickly. The one in the ground she didn’t always empty every year. Sometimes she would use it until it was full and then seal it and go and empty the other pit. It was quite deep. This means sometimes the pit compost would be several years old by the time she dug it up. For a long time I think it kept getting deeper and deeper as she tried to get every bit of nutrients out of that pit. Even the bones were disintegrate. This added calcium along with egg shells for the garden. I do not remember much older from these pits. Of course I never opened the one that was sealed. But the active pit didn’t seem to have any bad orders. She did add ash and sometimes lawn cuttings. I wonder if the ash was a secret to the pit compost?
One major supermarket chain in my city has, in their biggest store, built a fairly sizeable vertical hydroponic garden room, where they grow lettuce and herbs. It looks like a big glass room full of greens right by the entrance. The motivation for building it in the first place (apart from green marketing attracting customers) was to cut down on shipping pollution and cost, making the store more self-sustainable and the produce to have longer shelf-life, meaning less food waste.
I think it's pretty neat and seems like a good way to implement this kind of farming.
There's one where my sister's parents in law live that has a hydroponic farm on their roof - fish and mostly herbs
How Cool! May I ask what city or store this is? 🌱
There’s grocery stores here that do this as well. It’s really nice buying such fresh herbs.
I would assume that such a vertical garden would either be south facing for the northern hemisphere or south facing for the southern hemisphere to make it energy efficient.
I just wanna know if anyone listens to these compilations and falls asleep I actually did it on accident and now I can't stop lol
This and PBS space time is how I fall asleep everyday night
Every night
+1 for every night. Vsauce, mothlightmedia, PBS eons, PBS spacetime, veritasium, timeline, Mark Felton productions, etc.
Yes yes I have
Every day
I'm in Ontario Canada, and our local compost services actually take meat, dairy, grease, fats, oils, etc. along with the usual good scraps. It's great. We have recycling and compost pick up each week and garbage pick up every other week. As a family of five, we rarely filled up one garbage bag most weeks, so it made a huge difference. 🤗🇨🇦
I've got a compost pile that will eat anything within a year except whole mango seeds, avocado peels and "biodegradable" plastics without any noticeable odour. I don't know why ppl say you can't throw meat or fat in a compost pile, some times it even eats the bones if you've got a hot, well established compost pile.
Over here in BC, our compost services do the same. It's awesome, since it means we don't have to smell rotting meat in 35+ weather.
@@Mattle_lutrafor meat it's not that it can't be composted or rot, but that the bacteria in the area resulting from that compost can be dangerous for open wounds and such, and that if not handled with the proper care and procedures you in general shouldn't add them to your gardens as such.
That being said having protein and calcium levels is good to have in soil in moderation for the plants.
I would really like a vid that touches on soil health. like the mycelium network between trees and truffles but also in a “grow winter crops so all the fertilizer doesn’t accumulate in local rivers and lakes”....
+
Add
B
☝🏼
Yes please!
That part about the maximum pesticide thresholds should come with a major asterisk: Some poisons are a lot worse in really low doses than in higher doses. Some endocrine disruptors work like that, for example.
I'm starting to like watching these longer "episodes" of SciShow while doing chores. They are both entertaining and educational!
Better than trashy TV. I love to listen to these!
Same, I'm doing my homework right now, and just listening to it in the background.
Me, too
I like cold compost and composting fall leaves directly in my garden. As for pesticide, I have companion plants with marigold and rosemary. One day I want to plant my garden like a forest.
I have the same wants! I’d love a mini oak forest in my backyard!
There is a youtube channel that really gets into the food forest. I think he is in N.J.
You tuber...lames Prigioni....food forest
Yes forest gardens are the best! Plant once eat forever! Not like these annual crops that you slave over every year till the day you die! Living here is South Florida, theortically we could plant *tropical* food forest with almost unimaginable possibilities!
Bread fruit, bread nut, peanut butter tree, scrambled egg tree, cow tree, chocolate pudding tree, butter pears, monkey nuts, snake fruit, spinach trees, drumstick trees, sea grapes, hog plums, june plums, java apples, sugar apples, sugar plums, sweet leaf, Barbados cherries, Suriname cherries, beach almonds, grape trees, cucumber tree, star fruit, bottle gourd tree, rain tree, sugar palm, wine palm, thatch palm, oil palm, timber bamboo, arrow bamboo, iron bamboo ... and not to mention all the other wonderful exotic crops either already more famous, or less descriptively named.
I wish land wasn't going under hyper inflation. With how things are going, it's looking like by the time I can afford a little 1/4 acre that are at $0.5M right now, they will be going for $200M. I don't see a future for this country, and my area much less.
I really enjoy theses compilations where you take several shorter videos and combine them into a longer one with a theme.
I don't watch them a lot but they sure are a great ressource for when I clean my apartment.
Great video. I work as a research and PhD student in agriculutre at a university in Canada. Happy to see some great sci-communication about the field (no pun intended).
Nice 😋
Let's not 'beat around the bush' - that pun made you pleased as a pineapple
Guelph?
Coward. Always mean your puns
Our chickens always get first crack at all scraps. They instantly clean up the meat scraps first and then follow us around like a dog looking for another treat. No meat no smelly compost if you have chickens, just excellent chicken manure for your compost.
I wish you had addressed evolved resistance to pesticides. Also the degradation of soil and how much topsoil we've lost in the last 100 years.
I was hoping someone mentioned this!
they only address surface subjects that promote tech as god. they are not interested in real discussion of what really matters to successful sustainable farmers.
@@sasachiminesh1204 they only address “surface subjects” because this is a compilation and the actual vids are 10-15 mins long. Not long enough to dig deeply into the complexities and intricacies of the issues farmers in the US face today.
There was no talk about greenhouses, which are also a great benefit for farming, thanks to greenhouses a small country like the Netherlands can be the second largest food exporter in the world.
It should be noted however that this is not by quantity, but by monetary value. The Netherlands specializes more in 'luxury' crops.
A what???
Zijn we niet ook een van de grootste importeurs? Dus kan je de havens van rotterdam bedanken. Ook is onze grootste klant duitsland
Large scale rooftop greenhouses in urban areas are profitable
@@thiskal this is an interesting point. I also wager the margins have to be relatively low, given the high relative input per plant?
Chickens are awesome composters. We feed ours meat & veggie scraps, and cover their main run in free wood chips from the town transfer station. It doesn't smell because the C in the woodchips is more than enough to counter the N in the chicken poo (i.e. the composting process is N-limited).
I believe the future of food is removing lawns and having permaculture food forests that provide 80% of our food needs right at home. They are low maintenance and produce more food than any one family can eat which can be shared. Permaculture has also been proven to reverse desertification all over the world.
If anyone is interested, give "Permaculture" a search. You won't be disappointed. (I recommend Geoff Lawton - Greening the Desert Project)
PaleGhost69 love permaculture. It’s not that hard to grow food if you’re smart. Problem is people want cheap, pretty fast food. And they don’t want to do it or see it. We love using our chickens to help grow our food.
I really like permaculture. The one big criticism I would have is that it is useful to do things on a large scale to make use of the efficiency that can bring. I think the future is more combining "factory farms" with permaculture principles and ideas. I guess the thing I'm less enthusiastic about is the idea that small scale is automatically better when if we spread everything out too much that can actually have a bad impact on the environment.
Although food forests are obviously way better than lawns in most ways.
I want a tech heavy future agriculture. Plant based and lab grown meat as well as milk made using yeast can help us cut down the absurd amount of cows running around now and all the fields dedicated to just that. Those could then be used for nature reserves, recreational green areas, food forests.
Although maybe when our robots get good enough those could be used in your local garden. ;)
Even then I'm wary of the focus a lot of people have on everyone living in single, separate homes(even if they're of the tiny kind), on their own small patch of land that is then supposed to provide them with their food. This is very inefficient from a land use perspective. I am more in favour of building green skyscrapers with gardens with plants and trees on every floor, probably including food production.
As well as common areas on several floors, skyscrapers should be designed to be more supportive of community.
I've been won over to this idea. Most definitely
PaleGhost69 permaculture is not an all in one bandaid solution. Your issue is water, and no amount of wishful thinking is going to make it rain
Absolutely. Permaculture maintains the soil much better, requires zero or close to zero pesticides, and nurtures biodiversity. It is more labor intensive, but well worth it. And it's not just permaculture. Soon the need for each household to be relatively self-sufficient will become even more obvious, and nanogrids (the production of electricity by the household for the household) will likely make out a good portion of the energy we make/use.
I had never done a garden before and I decided to do it this year. I dug two holes 3 feet apart, and put some trellises against the fence. Then I put a handful of compost in the hole, then some potting soil and then pushed a couple of seeds of cucumbers in each hole. I din't care if it came up or not... I was just curious if it would..There were more cucumbers that three or four families could handle. So this next Spring, I'll plant some tomatoes, carrots and green onions with the same attitude,.. not caring if they grow or not. It's all in the bar that you set.
Once you grow multiple plants within a smaller area, you might need to water more than last year. Good luck!
Good luck! Just make sure you find out what can and can't be planted close together, since some plant combinations can lead to one or both plants dying, or it can attract harmful insects. Basil is actually pretty good for deterring aphids, from what I've discovered.
Cucumbers are one of the easiest things I've grown. I should have read more before planting 15. We were making pickles, cucumber onions and vinegar, and eating salad every day! We were keeping up until we went to the beach and came home to ~30lbs of cucumber.
Verticle farming goes much before 2006. In fact it was a feature of some of the advanced buildings in the SIM City game released in 1989.
41 minutes and not a single add.
Wow. Love u guys
yeah but no adds equals no money for SciShow. and besides they are only allowed to place 1 add, all the other adds are generated via you tube.
Hi! Happy to see you all. Long live the nourishing land. Human have take care of it.
I really fall in love with catfish.
Yeah, because Monsanto paid for all of it.
Personal observation as an avid huckelberry hunter in western WA- they grow here at sea level and have berries for about 7-8 months out of the year. They are definitely smaller and less sweet by the middle of November, though. I know the red variety are rare at lower elevations, but the black ones are ten times more flavorful and they grow tens times more densely anyway... More dense?... It's definitely not "denser"... Maybe they can't be cultivated in the way we grow blueberries or strawberries, but my parents have managed huckleberry bushes around their yard that have been there since the '80s, at least. I remember when we transplanted a bunch of 4 footers so they could get more sun in the '90s and they still crank out big berries in clusters every summer. I'd really like to look into the ways huckleberries have been attempted and what exactly defines "cultivation" as they mean it.
Epcot in Disney world has a bad ass farming lab that grows a lot of the produce served throughout Disney world’s restaurants. The ride living with the land takes you through their general setup, and is really cool (even though as a kid it bored me to tears and I usually took a nap) You can pay to take a backstage tour, and it was well worth the 30 ish dollars I paid. It made me want to go home and set up a hydroponics farm immediately. They utilize every technology discussed near the end of this video.
Disney is a totally unsustainable fantasy outfit. Nothing there is functional in the real world.
Composting is so much easier than you think! I started looking into it because our dirt is awful and I wanted to revive the flower garden. So I checked it out, and I started making rows I dig out in between the flower rows, and I slowly fill each bit up every other day, I throw all our veggie and fruit trash in it.
Only thing is, I obviously don't bust out the shovel every time I have a banana and chuck the skin in the garden from the door. So I wonder what the Amazon people think, seeing a hole with carrots and banana peels in it 😂😂 I hope they get what I'm doing!!
The amazon people are like "yay its that house with the food-moat" 😂
Me, agricultural college student : *write note franticaly*
Cath Amartya hey there, are you taught about regenerative ag / agroecology?
Also interest in what job fields there are in this area lol
Lemme guess . . . CSU ?
Sewage, and waste activated sludge isn't as pure as farmers would like, because it's not manufactured to spec. www.newscientist.com/article/2105426-myth-busted-dumped-pills-arent-main-source-of-drugs-in-sewage/#
Allan peda, im pretty sure they've talked about potential contaminants due to household items...
I love Olivia’s nerdy look it’s adorable and she rocks it so well
I haven’t seen her in videos lately, I wonder what happened to her
I love how this channel feeds my science tidbits cravings
Aquaponic and vertical Farms are the future :D
Especially if we can put one in every community
4:45 - But... but.. what are astronauts _for_ then?! I mean, if just anybody's poop can grow vegetables... I don't see the point of astronauts.
Premium organics - Space poop.
Just like beef, you have the normal beef, then there're A5 Kobe beef.
Edit: Also astronauts are smart people, their poop makes you smarter.
Eric Hopper 🤣🤣
So they’re good at withstanding the urge to pass out, I mean, big deal!
#MarkWatneySpaceBotanist
I think they float around and stuff
Low gravity poop forms more evenly and spreads more easily
I have actually visited a facility in Australia that was researching the commercial viability of tuna farming, or alternatively hatching them and releasing small tuna into the wild to bolster wild populations.
They also had a separate tank just for blue fin tuna which was not shown during my tour. They probably didn't really worry that I'd be a commercial spy but they sure played things safe. It was really cool of them to show me around anyway, I ended up seeing the plant by accident during my year of work and travel and just asked if I could take a peek and was given a tour instead. They couldn't give me any fish to take back to my hostel but one of the workers invited me for fish and chips.
This is helpful. I’ve gotten a sudden increase of free time for whatever reason, so I’ve got some ideas for my garden 😆
Please don't take a dump on your garden compost 😁🤭
I worked weeding fields in Hollister and Gilroy California, 10 hours a day , in sometimes triple digits 😳 . I would walk , weeding these fields, over 5 miles a day at the age of 58 .
"We could all eat less meat, and more mushrooms" Amen brother
😁
Hell I'm already half way there lol. Next time I'm tripping I'll remember this
Porque no los dos
Or we can eat a lot of both
I can see the soy coming off your tiny display picture
“We just have to collect more! Data, not poop! We got plenty of poop!” Omg this line made me laugh so hard 😂😂😂
"If you toss your meat into your compost pile, you'll end up with..." ... a possible conviction for indecent exposure.
Rule 34, lol.
The pesticides I use in my organic garden are diluted cold pressed neem oil and diatomaceous earth. They are not perfect but with a little caution you can avoid harming any unintended pollinators by staying away from flowers and only applying at times of the day when bees are less active.
The downside to diatomaceous earth is that it kills arthropods indiscriminately. Good and bad bugs can be killed.
Why do potatoes make good detectives?
Because they keep their eyes peeled...
Thank you :D
You’ve gotta be chitting me.
Why do potatoes make bad heads of state?
-
-
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Cause they usually turn into dic-tators.
Why did the tomato blush?
.
.
.
.Because it saw the salad dressing.
@@anger_birb Hey 'Pratie' good joke. (Maybe just in Ireland.)
The future of farming is whatever you’re willing to pay for. Farming practices are a direct reflection of the consumers willingness to compensate a farmers investment.
Tell that to all the farmers who have gotten cancer due to glyphosate. Most consumers have no fckn idea of farming practices, and even less of the harmful ones.
“Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.”
Perfect description of weeds 😂
I believe the correct quote is _"Life finds, uh, a way"_
I feel like the idea of vertical farming was around before 2009 or even 1999. Like, nobody thought of that before? I could point to Le Corbusier as an example.
I find it interesting that y'all mentioned Roundup as being pretty safe when they lost the court case...
Bro they literally made a whole video defending Roundup after first saying they were harmful...
sponsorship changes everything.( they lost multiple court cases)
ruclips.net/video/sH4bi60alZU/видео.html
@Max Powers thank goodness, you, a rando (is chiming in with little to no knowledge) to save us all.
@@hibiscusdandelionlove7804 Wow, its almost like that video was made in 2018 with the current knowledge they had. I know its weird, but your allowed to receive new information and change your mind based on evidence. Scientists don't enjoy the omniscience you have to know the results of every court case, every pesticides side effects without having enough reliable peer reviewed articles to confidentally say. Sadly they are humans and not godlike in their knowledge.
Like most propaganda, they lead wit good info then bam, round-up is fine.
I have used biosolids from the city municipal.
It is very good stuff! Highly recommended 👍👊
41 minutes!
Lucky for you I really like gardening!
Yippy!
I'm a fan of this channel and I enjoy your content. Although though you have a point about the relative danger of glyphosate in relation to other agrochemicals, the fact that you present this information without disclosing that glyphosate is a known carcinogen with US case law awarding damages for exposure constitutes misinformation. I'm stating this because I think that you guys are the type of channel to take this sort of comment seriously and reflect on it based on your other videos.
roundup "relatively safe" Bayer pays billions for cancer patients (you can be sure they did not do that without proof) So I grow as much of my own food as possible and let the bugs get what they get I even eat them on occasion(extra protein)
Olivia, so talented! Miss her!
Great show guys 🙂 I really enjoyed this. I have to admit though I'm a little disappointed that when discussing pesticides and their dangers that even though DDT was brought up nothing was said on Agent Orange. It's use during Vietnam and the reoccurring fall out that has still affected the human population up until this day is largely unknown to most of the public.
I know that the majority of the purpose of this particular programming is to make pesticides a little less scary and getting the right information and education around them then out there is super important. Agriculture education is extremely important so I understand.
I do think it's warranted that that things like Agent Orange even though it's use was to kill vegetation for war purposes it still was a combination of pesticides that are still found in some hot zones today and people may be unaware that they've been affected by Agent Orange. I am a child of a parent that served in Vietnam and I did develop complications genetically directly due to that parent's first hand exposure. Those complications passed to my child and we are working with the VA and COVVHA making sure that proper researche is done, but I do wish AO problems were brought up a little bit more in programs like these since the effects are still current.
I mean Agent Orange was known to be dangerous. The US didn't care. It was meant to cause suffering. War.
That would be a different topic, because herbicides are different than pesticides. But I, too, would be interested in episodes on Agent Orange. I'm particularly interested to see if any linkage has been shown in children of exposed veterans to less obvious birth defects like EDS.
I think that growing food should be part of school programs everywhere. It has always been an essential skill.
This was a very good video, we found it very informative. Thank you so much for sharing!
It's time, It's adventure.
Back in the day, my mom used to be a sales rep for Glysophate when it first came out, and part of their sales pitch was showing how safe it was by drinking it 😳
Happy to say she’s still healthy and thriving and experiences no weed competition!
"Our first example is catfish"
Me: Oh I love catfish!
"... to get those crispy fillets to our plates"
Me: Wait what? We've been eating very different things.
I've never had fillet catfish and I don't know why would I because the fins and the tails are like the absolute best. Seriously, you all are missing out so much
Do you happen to be of East Asian ethnicity?
You want to rotate piles if you put those fast decomposes in there. It’s high temp that kills the aerobic and lets the anaerobic bacteria dominate.
Ooh nice, a real long compilation to sooth my agriculture-related woes. I was so excited to go out and buy stuff to plant this year, but then everything happened and now I can't find any seeds or seedlings to buy...😔 All the dedicated garden stores are closed, and any other place that carries seeds are either not carrying them right now, or they're sold out.
Pixx look into regrowing food from food scraps. There’s a lot you can get from the store and grow again in your yard. Potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, celery, pineapple, & lettuce heads for starters. Just something to keep you busy while you wait for access to seeds & things. That’s how I started my first garden at my mom’s. Now I have more than 20 containers along her driveway. Also, if you’re able to harvest the seeds from your romaine lettuce plants & things (that you’ve regrown from scraps) you can plant those & they’ll grow better bc they’re acclimated to your environment.
@@DiscoChixify Interesting stuff, I'll give it a shot! Thanks for the info.
@@pixx3461 I think MiGardener still has stock but I don't frequent his seed store that often since I save my own seed. He has really nice heirloom varieties.
@@PaleGhost69 Woah, they've got a lot of different stuff to choose from. I'll definitely look into buying stuff from there, but it looks like the website is having a little trouble.
@@pixx3461 His RUclips Channel is pretty good too. Lots of great info and crop guides
SciShow always on point and scientific accurate 😊🎉
Woah! I've been wanting to grow plants for a while. Been seriously considering it especially while walking my dogs and seeing all the spring plants. Come back inside and this is up. And its 40 minutes! More than enough time to eat while i watch.
Pyrethrins is one of those insecticides that sounds bad but as many do not know, it's made from Chrysanthemums (yes, the Flower), and has been used for a thousand years. They are extremely effective against pest but they don't last long in the environment before they break down. As far as I know, it is the only Fly and Mosquito spray that's allowed to be used in Dairy Farms.
I think my whole "stimulus" check went into my garden
Fulano de Tal an investment worth making. Growing food at home saves my family a ton of money. It takes a bit of research, time, energy, trial & error, elbow grease and determination... but it’s definitely worth it.
Stimulus check is a hoax, so is your poop
Indoor farming will be revolutionary.
Complete 24/7 growth control without influence of the weather.
Also massively less water usage.
This episode is a treasure ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Some things are just not going to be able to be farmed they just have to be left to the Wild and protected
I live in a warmer climate so I have been growing for a couple months
I have a bumper crop of dandelions.
Lol i just started a month ago germinating my seeds hope you get a good harvest!
I been growing potatoes and peppers and sunflowers since November. Now I have tomatoes and cucumbers and squash alongside the others. Carrots, Onions, and Garlic are next. Everyone should be growing their own foods.
My one issue with what you guys talked about with lack of food production doesn't address the issue of distribution and waste. We currently produce plenty of food to feed people. Far, far too much of it is just thrown out or goes bad in stores. We don't need tech to produce more food. We need tech to distribute it better and better policies around all this.
SciShow always makes my day better and smarter :)
I gardened organically since the '50s. If you focus on building rich topsoil no chemicals are necessary. Growing starts with the soil.
what about regenerative agriculture?
I’m really enjoying these scishow videos. Really great engaging and educational material! Thank you!
Thanks for the video! It's a great summary of the current state of food production!
However, there have been some alternative developments in understanding how to maximise productivity of land, to allow a future where we can simultaneously grow more food, whilst reducing total land use. And it doesn't rely on any fancy technology!
In a nutshell, it works through feeding the soil rather than feeding the plants. This, combined with planning for succession, allows the creation of highly productive land from depleted soils. Allowing farms to become carbon sinks.
A pioneer in this sphere is a biologist called Ernst Gotsch. His process is summarised in "Life in Syntropy" on the channel "Agenda Gotsch" on RUclips.
As much as we all think technology will solve all our problems, sometimes a deeper understanding of the complexity of nature and how to work with it can work a lot better!
Bokashi seems to solve a lot of composting problems. You sprinkle a bit of that, you can chuck ANYTHING on your pile :)
Human pee was also used for many different applications in the past. Things like tanning animal hides, as a whitening agent, and many other others. Quite fascinating actually
@Christian O. Holz, yes, I have seen a medieval history show that demonstrated how aged urine had a lot of ammonia and was used to clean and whiten freshly woven woolen cloth.
Now, that was a stinky job stomping on cloth on a large wooden tub!
@@fredericapanon207 indeed :)
It did make pee (ammonia) quite a valuable commodity due its many uses. This chemical is still used today in a wide variety of production processes
Hats were also made using a somewhat toxic substance when inhaled (I forget the exact name of it right now), which caused neurological damage after prolonged exposure. It literally drove the workers mad giving rise to the term "mad hatter"
I think the biggest problem with our quest to produce food more efficiently is that we often forget that we ultimately eat what we are feeding our food - flora or fauna. If we're cherry picking nutrients for fast growth, we're bound to miss essential micronutrients and we end up not getting what we need from our food or getting it in such small quantities that we would need to consume so much food it's no longer efficient and becomes unhealthy. Take, for example, selenium. Humans don't need a lot of it but, without it, our bodies don't work properly the the point that we can't absorb and process other nutrients. If selenium and a whole host of other micronutrients we may not even be aware of yet aren't getting into our food, they aren't getting into us. By isolating food from the environment it evolved to thrive in (like most plants in soil) and trying to provide it with everything it needs to flourish in a controlled environment, we run the risk of missing out on key components it needs to become the food we need. We may need less pesticides and herbicides but do we really get the full spectrum of nutrition we need to thrive?
I think thriving is more about balance and nurturing an organism strong enough to contend with any challenges in its environment. That's going to be difficult in mass production of monoculture crops or in highly controlled environments. We thrive best on a variety of foods. So, too, does our food.
Olivia: Could you do a show on co-planting or alternative ways of undermining pests targeting garden insects??? Thanks 🇨🇦... Your buddies to the North.
I live about 15 miles from Salinas California. Which is the salad bowl of the state. And on multiple occasions I saw farmers driving their tractors through their fields in hazmat suits and gas masks. Kinda freaked me out because that’s one of our nations biggest supply of food
I use Good insects to fight the Nasty pests in my garden
"Hanky-Poo, help us out!" I love these guys oh so so much! Greetings from just north of you guys in Montana from Alberta Canada! Been down there in Shelby, Conrad, Butte and all the charming towns and cities along highway 15! For anybody looking for a memory road trip....do make the must-have experience of driving down and visiting a blend of old rustic town America as well as the more beautiful and interestingly laid out urban centers of Great Falls and Helena. Also visit the Museam of the Rockies in Boseman. Or the super charming and fun "The Montana Dinosaur Center" in Bynum. Perhaps the best fossil-visiting experience I've had outside of the "Royal Tyrrell Museum" in Drumheller Alberta Canada.
Lots of love to the Scishow team! Oh how I would love to visit that marvelous team of creators and get their autographs and perhaps a few pictures!!
DDT was especially harmful to all of Jake the Snake's opponents.
Love that pic of Vivi
How do you filter microplastic compounds and poisonous chemicals out of the sewage, before turning them into biosolids for fertilisation?
The entire ocean is microplastics. Salt made from the sea is dried salt plus microplastics! Buy your salt which is buried and presently mined, as in Himalayan pink salt.
Vertical agriculture in interurban or urban areas.
I think you guys gave this too little attention in this video. Thinking about the future of food while discussing fish is probably not the best way to really talk about what we'll be eating in the future.
I don't really care what someone eats, but we will be eating less from the sea, fewer animals (on average), and we will be replacing that with things grown in dirt or in a similar situation.
The problems with supply chains have been exposed recently, and using existing space near urban areas would answer a lot of those problems.
Old malls could become the new farms, and they could have nearly direct lines into cities for distribution. Not only would this work for business, but it would work when the product literally needs to be given away or let go to waste.
An automated agricultural building with renewable energy generated on site.
I'm planning on find a way to finish out my working life in helping such an industry grow.
We've been watching a whole bunch of stuff die in the fields in the US over the past few years, but if those things were being grown near cities and if the harvesting were automated, and there was nearly a direct line to the nearby consumer market, that type of waste would be far less likely to happen.
One day. While you keep waiting I'll keep growing.
@@coleweede1953 Good.
This video is about the future of food, not how food is grown and produced in the present.
@@MrOttopants If you want adequate access to sunlight, you will require some kind of mechanical system to physically move the crop (maybe a mirror based system could be used but damn that is an expensive engineering project to construct) which will require power, probably more than what solar power from the same building (remember, the same resource the plants need!) can produce. If you decide to use lamps instead, that again will be a significant amount of power and considering the inefficiency of solar power, you're better of using sunlight itself in the first place.
Mechanical maintenance costs over time would also be a factor to consider.
My point with this is, many ideas seem good at a glance but once you break down the factors behind the idea, you really need to examine if it's worth the trouble. The goal is as much food as possible for as little cost and space as possible.
The agricultural industry is getting better and producing more food on less land. I don't know the current numbers but I remember a few years ago reports of agricultural land usage actually decreasing. Other industries, like biofuels, are among the reasons why land usage overall is still increasing.
If you really want to help, get into engineering, something like sustainable development, electrical engineering or similar and start crunching the numbers!
@@MrOttopants I should add to that, most cities already have many highrises so optimal placement would be difficult. Especially given many cities having heigh restriction laws or local communal issues with their placement!
@@sebastianjovancic9814 This is why I said "interurban" areas.
Some urban areas are available. It depends which cities we're talking about.
That's why interurban areas are ideal, but it would also depend on the size of the city.
If you have a sprawling city, and the cost of transporting a product from hundreds of miles is the same as paying higher costs for urban location, then that's just a dollars and cents issue.
But you also can't assume that the population density of today will be the same as population density issues of the future.
We may be facing much different issues about population in 50 years, and it may be financially feasible to grow in designated city areas.
Man. This episode reminded me on my best bud and his dad. Marine in Vietnam. Died from Agent Orange related complications a few years ago. Good man
Damn it man, this tricked me into thinking you had new content for almost a minute. I hate these compilations of old stuff that I've already watched that aren't labeled as such.
I'm surprised they didn't talk about replacing cows with bugs. Bugs are extremely good sources of protein, & take WAY less space to produce a similar amount of protein. Entomophagy is also already common around the world, we'd just need to scale it up. There are lots of ways to make bugs just as tasty as a hamburger, & they can be turned into a flour-replacement/supplement, ground up into powder to hide their buggy appearance. When doing blind studies on food made from bugs compared to the same food made from traditional means, most people couldn't tell the difference, or even preferred the bug-sourced food, so for most people, the only real issue is the mental squick factor, which again, can be worked around.
18:41 , "isn't perfect" rofl, the EPA has been maimed, gutted, & then drawn'n quartered just to disrespect it. smh.
I appreciate that the information on pesticides, etc. was given in a fair way without the usual bias. Realistic solutions to the problems we face are only worsened when we aren't willing to listen to each other.
@18:00 Not so much in the US government presently. For the most part no one is "minding the store". It's cheaper that way.
Here a number of years ago there was a Hepatitis outbreak (my next door neighbor got it), which was traced down to restaurants using lettuce from Mexico that had been sprayed with liquefied Human waste fertilizer (law suits that came from that closed down many good restaurants).
*improperly prepared human waste fertilizer
Am I the only one who is still stuck on “Hanky-poo”?
I live in Arizona and surprisingly we have a lot of lush, green golf courses. I know that they spray them down with the treated sewerage water
If we are to go into space for extended periods of time, I think that we would have to become vegan. As much as I am not a fan of the vegan diet, with modification I think it is one that best lends itself to space travel. It is much easier and cost-effective to use a hydroponics style system to (or even aquaponics, just replacing fish with people) than to care for animals in space. You also get the added benefit of oxygen production and waste filtration. But since I'm not going to space any time soon...
Insect farming could and should be used in space. They can digest part of the crops that we can't, their poop is a better way to close that loop than composting. The feed conversion is much higher than larger animals. They are nutritionally a good complement to a plant diet. I have never had them but I heard that crickets taste good.
Earthworms might also be another option. They can eat poop, vegetable scraps and pretty much anything biological and turn it into more worms and the best plant fertilizer ever.
Test tube meats are another thing that should be developed for space but we aren't ready to produce them in bulk yet.
Yeast and bacteria can be convinced to make milk and egg proteins through genetic engineering. We can already do that. They would be technically vegan as would test tube meats but they would provide some of the nutrition that plants don't. I believe that we could do that for every nutrient too.
A somewhat sustainable vegan diet requires a wide variety of plants that would also be hard to grow in space while if you ate only spinach, crickets and high oleic sunflower seeds (fat is needed to prevent rabbit starvation, high oleic because too much omega6 is quite bad) you would have a really complete diet. It lacks carbohydrates but those are not needed and would only require adding a cereal. Crickets are high in the essential aminoacids that plants lack, on an omega 3 form that is usable for humans (we can barely use the GLA in plants) , on vitamin B12 and on minerals like iron and zinc that while also abundant in the choosen plants they come with things like phytic acid that hamper their absorption. Spinach and sunflower seeds are quite complementary in the vitamins they provide. The only thing I can think of that would be lacking is creatine which although non essential the lack of it in the diet increases the demands on the methylation cycle which depending on your genes is totally ok or a disaster brewing.
Assuming long-term space habitation becomes normalized I can see animal proteins being slowly introduced into habitat farming programs as the programs mature and diversify, starting with high-density sources like invertebrates and fish, then eventually moving up to larger animals like pigs, sheep and goats (the last two are also valuable for textiles and dairy). I don't think we'll ever see cows or horses in space outside of some private collections, they're just too inefficient a food or work source until you get up to Island-Three O'Neill cylinder scale and the biosphere is at the scale of a small country.
Initially though, I think you're onto something. Going vegan, or at least meatless, would simplify resupply from Earth as the habitat itself grows the majority of its own food.
@@Vespuchian I agree with you once we hit the destination, but en route I think plants are the way to go. Once we are settled though, no reason not to start raising chickens and letting that be a stepping stone into possibly cows, goats, etc. I fully agree.
@@eruiluvatar236 I agree, though I wouldn't try to raise different plants but rather raise calories and supplement the nutrition. Insects may be necessary regardless as pollinators. That and worms for the soil, etc. Right now, fake meat (the one made from fungus) takes quite a bit of energy to make, so probably not feasible at this point. And though insects are a great idea for protein, not sure if that would be needed. With slight modification and supplementation, you could get away with a vegan diet. I mean wheat is the leading source of protein for a good part of the world. But if, for example, the insects start getting overpopulated, absolutely no reason to waste them.
Use the walking catfish for farming, they might be a bit small but they can be battered and deep fried whole, the taste is out of this worldd
Hankypoo?
My dad worked at Geigy Industrial Chemicals back in the sixties and seventies. I clearly remember having one of his business cards that proudly stated: “Originators of DDT”. Geigy merged with Ciba and became Ciba-Geigy, then Syngenta (today). My dad’s specialty was plastics, so he had no involvement in DDT R&D. But that memory of his old business card stayed with me.
use poop to grow something else, then compost that and use the compost. problem solved.
You should be able to grow truffles indoors in a similar manner as the psychedelic truffles. Use a wood based substrate in a sealed container and inoculate with spores or active mycelium.
Monsanto got to scishow too. “Glysophate isn’t that bad to ingest” smh
Girl with glasses is so cute. Plus fish are awesome! Thanks for the info
37:34 is that really true? 40% of earth's land used for agriculture??
yeah it's true. most of that 40% even goes to cattle farms, which is not efficiënt at all (amazon fires are done mainly for cattle farms). cattle have a food conversion rate of 8, while chickens have 2. This means you need 8kg of calorie dense food for 1kg of cow meat and 2kg of food for 1 kg of chicken meat. Also the most fertile lands are used within that 40% and those lands happen to be the ones with more biodiversity (so more species suffer from it)
Yup. Probably more tbh
But what is it when you rate the calories out versus the calories a HUMAN puts in. I bet the human puts in very little calories per calories they get out, of course that is you have cattle on pasture with no further input from humans.
@@Dslayer5511 I've never heard of the conversion rate before. Thanks for teaching me something new!
@@Dslayer5511 Is it proven that Amazon fires are happening because of the demand for larger cattle farms? I think this needs a large research. Where does Brazil exports meat mostly?
Huckleberries grow wild on the Oregon coastline, which as you probably can figure out, is at sea level.
So blue fin tuna farms are out if the question. But what about lab-grown blue fin tuna flesh, like lab-grown meat?
+
Bluefintuna is eaten as luxury food, they want it tasty and they want the real bluefin tuna.
Just paint the fins of regular tuna blue smh
The Picts would use feces as part of their house building, many cultures have used feces for more than just fertilizer, it used to aid the tanning process in leather making if I remember right
Instead Killing spiders why not release them in your garden along with lizards and frogs. Or salt
Ah yes, salt. My favourite animal.
@@ataphelicopter5734 my cousin has a salt mixed with a black pepper. So....seasoned. i love to pet my cousins salt. So cute lol
spiders are fantastic. people really should stop killing them in general.
You need to catch yourself a Himalayan Pink Salt. They are really good at fertilising
If there's a spider within 20 ft, I will find it. They're usually cool, but scare the crap out of me when they try to descend onto my head/face from the ceiling. It happened like 5 times last year.
Facts without hysteria. Nice!
What if we turn the death valley into a big landfill ?
How about no
My city has a program that uses yard waste, food scraps, and yes, biosolids, to make compost that citizens can use in their own yards. Let me tell you, it grows the best food you’ve ever seen. My tomatoes are super productive.
My towns streams have no little fish or frogs anymore 😞 sad ...Lincolnshire has the most farmed land that's probably why
My grandmother who is bored in the 1800s, had in the backyard two pets, Very little meats, meat (but meat never the less. If I came out of the kitchen it was composted. She also had a pile above ground were leaves and yard trimmings would go plus vegetable trimmings. When we were there with our dog she would have the dog extra minutes also placed on that pile. Nothing went to wast. This pile should only turn over occasionally. This pile she used whenever she needed something for the garden. You dig down in the piles warm. It would take a long time for snow to cover it, and it would melt quickly.
The one in the ground she didn’t always empty every year. Sometimes she would use it until it was full and then seal it and go and empty the other pit. It was quite deep. This means sometimes the pit compost would be several years old by the time she dug it up. For a long time I think it kept getting deeper and deeper as she tried to get every bit of nutrients out of that pit. Even the bones were disintegrate. This added calcium along with egg shells for the garden. I do not remember much older from these pits. Of course I never opened the one that was sealed. But the active pit didn’t seem to have any bad orders. She did add ash and sometimes lawn cuttings.
I wonder if the ash was a secret to the pit compost?