Claims

The main limitation of multi-grafted fruit trees from an industrial agriculture perspective is that they produce a limited number of fruit continuously across a 4-5 month season (June through early October) rather than a large uniform harvest all at once, making them impractical for mass agriculture but ideal for home gardeners who can pick 20 pieces of fruit per week at peak and have fresh fruit for 12 weeks.

In China, commercial warehouse operations successfully grow two crops of peaches annually by artificially controlling weather conditions inside warehouses, demonstrating that technology can override natural seasonal constraints.

Even if the Strait of Hormuz returns to normal operations immediately, the impact on agricultural supply disruption is not over because the supply chain damage is already baked in from the weeks of closures.

Fewer than 1% of animal products in the United States and other affluent countries meet the criterion of being from animals raised with genuinely good lives, likely far fewer than 1%, meaning conscientious omnivores cannot sustain a normal diet on such sources alone and would need to drastically reduce consumption.

Grass-fed cattle produce more methane than grain-fed cattle due to bacterial fermentation of grass (not the cow belching), but grain-fed cattle finish faster, requiring less time to reach market

Only 7% of U.S. corn is fed to cattle; 40% is used for ethanol fuel production and 15% for high-fructose corn syrup, making these non-nutritional uses significant drivers of corn production

Industrialization plus technology introduced synthetic fertilizer, which was applied at scale and increased the amount of land that could be cultivated by a factor of three, keeping humanity alive. As long as there is no disruption to the synthetic fertilizer supply chain, we're good. China is the single largest source of phosphate, Belarus and Russia are the largest source of potash, nitrogen is a natural gas derivative, and we will lose access from Russian space and the Middle East. We will have to hack the plant genome to grow more food with less fertilizer, and it is a race whether we can improve yields genetically faster than we lose synthetic fertilizer production.

A new species of rice is being developed that can have multiple crops per planting season, and soy (a protein plant rather than starch plant) is going to be a real game changer. Growing an entire cow just to get meat will eventually be seen as insane when you can just grow the protein needed for a good burger through cultivated meat.

Thallium contamination is found in California groundwater due to fertilizer use, contaminating vegetables grown in that soil, and many fertilizers are relatively toxic, therefore significant portions of the food supply are contaminated with heavy metals from agricultural practices.

It takes nearly 600 gallons of water to produce one pound of pork, but just over one gallon of water to grow a pound of mycelium bacon, showing massive water savings from mycelium-based protein.

Aside from energy, Bon Pali's biogas plant creates a valuable by-product: fertilizer that farmers buy back and spread on the same fields where their vegetables grow, which improves soil health, increases crop yields, and allows farmers to sell crops at higher prices as organic vegetables.

Researcher John Bennemann points out that algae farming would need to increase by 100 times to support mass production of items like shoes, suggesting this may not be practical and making biodegradable shoes from widely available crops like soybeans could be more practical and profitable.

Mexico exports about half of the world's avocados, and a single worker at a plantation in Michoacan can cut over 800 pounds of fruit per day.

Bananas are one of the world's most wasteful crops, with farmers typically burning banana stems which pollutes the air, and for every ton of fruit plantations produce, they generate two tons of debris.

Environmentalists argue that composting banana stems into fertilizers would be a more immediate solution than making textiles, as it prevents dehydration, prevents deforestation, and improves soil, though it requires tough manual labor.

Steve Mayfield argues that algae is better than soybeans because growing it requires less land and water than plants, and he contends that the argument that algae has a specific competitive advantage still needs to be developed.

Poor establishment is causing Australian farmers two major problems: hundreds of dollars per hectare of wasted money in seed/preparation costs, and a resulting lower productivity per hectare due to failed plants, compounding the total farm impact.

The goal of Rainstick's treatment is to give seedlings a stronger start that could last their entire growth cycle.

In a leafy greens trial, farmers noticed that caterpillars did not eat the treated plants compared to the untreated control, and the farmers were not told in advance which plants were treated, suggesting the pest resistance effect is real and not a farmer expectation bias.

In field trials, the treated canola plants showed visibly larger tap roots in the 2 to 4 week establishment period compared to untreated control plants, and the treated plants showed more vigor in root growth.

Rainstick believes their electrical seed treatment technology can be applied beyond agriculture to help with reforestation projects, both for reforesting mines and globally to help with climate variation.

Rainstick is conducting reforestation trials with native Australian species, specifically gravil (Pilra region, poor establishment iconic species with relevance to traditional owners) and Darwin stringy bark (northern Australia species with relevance across the Kimberley and northern Australia, both with significant establishment challenges).

Early reforestation results with Rainstick's treatment show progress in improving establishment rates of native species, and more work is still needed to fully validate the approach.

Work from CSIRO and the grains research and development corporation has estimated that poor crop establishment rates in Australian canola alone cost the cropping industry over $100 million annually.

Rainstick applies an electric field similar to what happens during a thunderstorm to seeds, which is a specially tuned electric field, and then those seeds get shipped out to the producer for them to grow without requiring any change to on-farm processes because the seeds have already been altered.

Pip and her team at Riverine Plains co-designed the trial protocol with Rainstick's bioelectric team engineers and company founders to test the seed treatment on broadacre crops, setting up 48 plots to monitor different growth stages through to harvest.

Food availability per capita has increased on every continent and in every decade, and nutrition has improved globally (e.g., average children in India are taller than they were decades ago and have less disease), contradicting the Malthusian prediction of hard limits on population-supporting capacity.

Jeremy Clarkson (age ~70) can operate a Lamborghini tractor to perform the work of hundreds of human man-hours, demonstrating that modern agricultural automation has already achieved massive labor productivity improvements.

Russian population will not face meaningful food shortages in terms of starvation because Russia is a large food exporter; however, they import everything except wheat and potatoes (cold climate crops), so the collapse of imports means reversion to a monochromatic, high-saturated-fat diet, and distribution will degrade as logistics/tech companies depart, creating distribution (not production) problems.

The world has eroded 90% of its soil safety margin in major growing areas; historically there was a foot or so of extra soil buffer, now only an inch or two remains, and soil is being lost at approximately 1% per year, leaving only 40-70 years of viable agriculture under current practices depending on location.

Potash (potassium) is a finite, non-renewable element essential to all agriculture with no substitute; 70% of the world's 150-year supply of phosphate reserves are in Morocco, and potash is largely concentrated in Belarus and Russia, creating geopolitical vulnerability and causing African food shortages when supply is disrupted by war.

The food supply in America has been taken over by one company that owns seed rights, forced out independent farmers, and can sue farmers if the company's seeds blow onto their property—media ignores this because they are paid by that company.

Fertilizer production is the binding constraint on global food supply: potash mines take 10 years to bring online, nitrogen/phosphate systems take 3+ years; China has cut phosphate exports for food security; this decade's planting season already cannot access needed fertilizer, making harvest shortfalls guaranteed.

China used to be the world's largest phosphate exporter; potash comes primarily from Belarus and Russia; Canada is a large potash supplier; this geography concentrates fertilizer supplies and creates winners (US, Canada) and losers (everyone else).

Fertilizer prices have increased 50-200% depending on type; US farmers can finance crop switching to lower-input crops; most of the world lacks farm credit and cannot make this shift, forcing them to use less fertilizer or abandon marginal lands.

Digital gardening with AI-guided tractors and fertilizer application can double crop yields while using quarter of inputs within a decade; this technology is past prototyping and ready for deployment.

Food insecurity is the biggest concern; globalization allowed specialization so avocados grow in North Carolina and corn in Iowa/California/Florida, but deglobalization will force each country to feed itself with less specialization, reducing total global calories produced by more than half.

Even in the best case scenario with no wars and technology gains in food production, simply reducing each country's agricultural output to match its domestic needs will result in 3 billion more people than the system can support; with plausible switching to plant protein and countries like US, France, Australia working to maintain broad production, the deaths from famine will likely number around 1 billion.

Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia collectively are the world's largest suppliers in the first column of fertilizer and second or more in the next columns; because of sanctions and war, global supply of potash (40% from Russia/Belarus), nitrogen, and phosphate have been severely disrupted, forcing global food producers to face shortage of the three key nutrients that allow people to grow their own food.

Bragg bought approximately 3,000 acres of carrot land in the Annapolis Valley at premium prices (in some cases twice market value) to secure the supply base needed to double carrot production, treating land as a one-time acquisition opportunity rather than a commodity purchase.

The biggest single input cost for blueberry production is the rental of honeybees for pollination; without imported honeybees, yields would be approximately 1,000-1,500 pounds per acre, but with four to five hives (considered high usage), yields reach 8,000-9,000 pounds per acre.

Wild blueberries have antioxidant levels double those of cultivated blueberries and significantly better flavor, making them the preferred ingredient for premium jam manufacturers like Andros in France, despite their higher cost.

The food business is inherently unpredictable because weather affects crop outcomes, making performance projections unreliable; the only viable strategy is to manage through cycles by farming professionally while hoping for favorable conditions and benefiting when competitors' crops fail.

The blueberry industry in the Acadian Peninsula has potential to surpass New Brunswick's potato production in acreage; this represents a major economic transformation of the region.

Lake St. John in Quebec is a major wild blueberry production region alongside Nova Scotia and Maine, representing the geographic breadth of North American wild blueberry production.

Research and development conducted by Oxford (with Dr. Pibble at the agricultural college) improved blueberry plant productivity through selection and fungicide/fertilizer optimization, enabling higher yields when combined with proper pollination.

When Bragg entered the wild blueberry industry in 1968, it was a cottage industry of 4 million pounds total production; today the industry is over 300 million pounds and Oxford produces approximately half of it.

Precision agricultural technology would require only 2-3 passes over a field for an entire season compared to 16 passes for organic farming, representing a massive reduction in fuel, labor, and time inputs.

A starvation crisis caused by food shortages cannot be reversed quickly because food can't be produced in an instant—you have to wait for it to grow.

Brazil's agricultural production system is the most expensive input cycle in the world because the tropical cerrado requires clearing fibrous trees, poisoning soil with lime for 20 years, and then using 3-4x fertilizer per crop compared to temperate zones.