Comment by defrost
17 hours ago
Farms - with a near infinitesimal number of farmers compared to the numbers living in cities .. exactly as things are trending now.
It's common enough, here at least, to have a small family cropping 13,000 old school acres - tilling, seeding, waiting, harvesting, etc with big machines and Ag-bots.
So not really "fairly untouched", then.
You're going to need more farms and more farmers, and no-one can afford to be shipping food halfway round the planet.
Let's see, I didn't make any claim about untouched - although I do have some strong positions on wetlands cover, corridors, wild old forrest, et al but that's a whole other aside.
I'm just here to point out farming and livestock at suprisng to many scales can be operated by fewer people than you might expect.
as for: > no-one can afford to be shipping food halfway round the planet.
what does the Atlas of Economic Complexity type datasets currently say about food volume tonnages and trip lengths? I know that our local farmers co-op
( from: https://www.cbh.com.au/exports-overview )
and there are other grain basins about the globe.
The challenges for grain shipping going forward likely fall about getting sufficient production of non fossil origin methanol fuel variations for shipping engines.
That and making sure the front doesn't fall off.
And yet, farmers still need roads, and hardware stores, and grocery stores, and hospitals, and HVAC and plumbers and before you know it, you need villages for all the people those people depend on, along with their families.
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It is often costlier and worse for the environment to ship locally than across the world.
https://www.wpr.org/news/locally-grown-fruits-veggies-expens...
But it's more ecologically sustainable to eat what grows where you live.
We do not have the capacity to ship food halfway round the world because picky eaters don't like the idea of eating meat and potatoes.
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