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submitted 11 months ago by TotallyHuman@lemmy.ca to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

Crops can blight, animals can get diseases. I don't know much about hydroponics but I know that bacteria are a concern. What food source is the most reliable, the least likely to produce less food than expected?

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[-] Uprise42@artemis.camp 2 points 11 months ago

Every form of production will have defects. The goal of perfecting production is one to be sought, but never achieved. We should always try to make food production more efficient with less loss, but there will always be loss, and always be waste.

Even new means of production like lab grown beef can have waste and loss in batches that don’t “grow” properly because they didn’t mix hormones correctly or whatever. I actually don’t know how the science behind that works, but I do know it’s a process. And where there’s a process there’s room for error. That’s where we get loss from.

We’ll never make something fool proof. Perhaps lab grown meats will be the most efficient form of product in that they have the lowest loss and production can be tweaked fairly quickly so there’s not a lot of loss and ramped up for shipments to areas with food shortages. Honestly, lab grown in my opinion has the best chances of being a major breakthrough but it’s still too early to be sure.

[-] Blake@feddit.uk 1 points 11 months ago

There’s no way that lab grown meat would be more efficient than just growing vegetables,

[-] PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago

To answer your question. When Agriculture was first "discovered" by humans ~20,000 years ago, the most stable production method was diversification. You should have a variety of crops with overlapping growing seasons and overlapping macro nutrients. For even more security, introduce animal husbandry that can graze on your fallow land and if you have enough land make sure to have multiple distinct herds that never interact with each other except for breeding every few years.

Additionally ensure your food production isn't dependent on a single harvest season, nor a single climate. Have fruits/legumes/etc other lower yield crops that can be substituted in case your primary grains are hit with blight, or some other environmental factor.

Now let's introduce some technology. Create several fast growing monocultures that allows you to get multiple harvests in a season that can be used for animal feed, storage and supplementing any deficiencies in the primary human food supply.

tl;dr. Make sure you have multiple methods of food production that are all viable at different times of the year. Ensure that the failure of any one or two of them isn't a problem for overall yearly production, and ensure that they are independent on each other.

[-] DrBob@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

10,000 BCE unless something dramatic happened this year.

[-] KeisukeTakatou@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

Cells in agar in an incubator. Anything above that scale is bound to have losses and fails. How much depend on how controlled your environment is.

[-] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago
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[-] Fleur__@lemmy.world -2 points 11 months ago

Photosynthesis

[-] xmunk@sh.itjust.works -2 points 11 months ago

Foraging if done in a low density area. Natural food sources grow in an extremely diverse way and any blight or parasite will only ever effect a portion of edibles around you.

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this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
90 points (97.9% liked)

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