When the reverse was true it really rubbed me the wrong way. Soybeans are dirt cheap and soybean meal (the defatted version) even more so. On agricultural markets soybean meal is around 300-400 dollars per metric ton. That means it’s traded for less than a dollar per kg. Yet soy based vegan products were for years more expensive than the meat alternative, and lots of these animals would have eaten more than 1kg of soy containing feed to produce each kg of meat. It makes no sense to me. Yes processing the soy meal into a tasty meat alternative is not cheap, obviously, but are you telling me the soy meal to meat conversion is cheaper than the soy meal to faux meat conversion? Really put me off from vegan products.

Same is true for things like oat milk. Oats in bulk cost pretty much nothing yet they managed to sell it for more than cow milk. What am I paying for? Marketing? Corporate profits? And don’t bring up the whole “animal proteins are subsidized” bit. I don’t know about the US but in the EU the subsidies are based on agricultural area. 1 hectare of soy plantation gets the same amount of subsidies as 1 hectare of any other animal feed crop. That’s not the explanation.

I see this as a huge improvement and if plant based products are to really take off they have to be an affordable alternative even to the non vegan.

There are many different kinds of farms and they all need different inputs. Most impacted would be the corn and soy farms who produce a low value good for a lot of inputs in the form of fertilizer, seeds, sprays, fuel for heavy machinery etc. Least impacted would be beef producers who use wild grazing. Almost no inputs as the land produced the grazing by itself, at the same time they produce a high value good.

Of course there are lots of intermediates but those would be the extremes.

4 most important parts of artificial fertiliser are nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and sulfur.

Nitrogen is Infinite. It’s made from the air which is 78% nitrogen. Energy is needed to fix it. Usually its natural gas but it doesn’t have to be. Electricity can also be used. There are real world plants who use hydro or wild energy to make it, even if they are few today.

Phosphorus is plentiful on Earth, both in soil, rock and sea water. However in most natural sources the concentration is too low to actually refine today. Phosphate rock which is the main source today is limited. 70% of the current Reserves are in one single country, Morocco. All world reserves combined should last for a our 300 years. After that we will either have to extract phosphorus from less phosphorus dense sources or we have to recycle it better from human excrete. Nevertheless we have plenty of time to come up with that technology. Main problem right now is not it running out but the risk of how concentrated it is. What if Morocco doesn’t want to share?

Potassium is extremely plentiful around the world. It’s 2,6% of the Earth’s mass and even the potassium rich minerals we currently use are expected to last hundreds if not thousands of years. Mined all over the world but mostly in Canada, china and Russia and Belarus. Not really a problem. Also plentiful in seawater.

Sulfur has many different sources and in most it’s a byproduct. Main source is as a biproduct of refining fossil fuels but it’s also created as a byproduct of mining for other minerals. The amount needed for agriculture is also comparably small. There is so much sulfur out there it’s even mixed into concrete just to get rid of it. I don’t see sulfur as a main concern.

So to summarize I’m really not concerned about any of them except for phosphorus and for that one it’s mostly the question of how willing Morocco is to share it. Long term when sulfate rock runs out 300 years I’m quite secure we have found out how to commercially extract it from a less dense mineral. Either that or we have finally started seriously recycling it from human excrete. Phosphorus is very easily recycled. The technology is already here. More sewage plants would just have to do it. And if we are starting to slowly reach peak phosphorus the pure financial incentives will make sewage plants start recovering it. Now it doesn’t happen because the mineral phosphorus is just too cheap and convenient.

They are by any metric very dense. According to population by area they are right between India and the Philippines, both highly dense countries. Another way would be by hectares of arable land per capita which would roughly indicate how large a population their agriculture could support. According to this they rank 137th and rank below countries like Japan and Norway, both known for being severely deficient in farmland. Only reason Israel gets by with their surprisingly high food self sufficiency is their use of highly advanced agricultural technology and intensive use of irrigation from both the Jordan river and desalination plants. However they are still unable to produce all the food they need and need imports.

The fact is that Israel is very small, especially for their population size. Occupying more land in Palestine and the Golan heights have therefore made strategic sense. And with the high fertility rate constantly increasing their population the land deficiency will only increase without occupying more territory. Look at Israel on satellite you quickly see how villages, towns and cities occupy a huge percentage of their land and this urban development is encroaching on their already limited farmland.

It’s true that this is very bad news for the moneyed class. But it can simultaneously also be bad news for normal people. A higher ratio of pensioners to tax payers will raise taxes for everyone which is a bad thing, to everyone. This is true for any economic system I can imagine. Even in an economic system without money having a high ratio of pensioners means a larger portion of working people have to be dedicated to taking care of the elderly which means less medical workers, less farmers, less social workers helping the non-pensioners etc, meaning worse living standards for the population.

Even in your preferred dream society and economic system (which I don’t know about) I can’t see an aging population being a good thing. If you have a suggestion for how it could be a good thing please enlighten me. And before you say we can just tax the rich to pay for pensions. You could also tax the rich to pay for better healthcare, which would be preferably for us non-pensioners would it not?