After a few busy weeks I've found a bit of time to continue work on Fugue. One of the last major questions content production, after writing, textures, and music, is character animation (this still leaves object and character modeling as the other two problem areas). While I believe I can get away with lower-poly models and crunchier photo-textures, I don't think that's the case with low-quality animation—it's too jarring. So I want to figure out a way to produce fairly good, realistic motion on the cheap.

There are a number of deep learning-based projects available for motion capture without a sophisticated tracking setup. Some are even monocular, requiring only one camera. There are some commercial offerings (such as deepmotion.com) but I want to see how far I can get with open source options. I'll be able to modify those as I need and they'll be easier to integrated into a more automated process than commercial options.

The open source projects are usually research projects, so they aren't polished/are somewhat janky and probably don't generalize very well. And their licenses often restrict usage to non-commercial purposes. For example, MocapNET, EasyMocap, and FrankMocap are all non-commercial uses only. I did find MotioNet which does allow commercial usage (under its BSD-2 license) and requires only one camera, so that was promising.

One alternative to the deep learning approach is to just use existing motion capture data and hope that covers all the animations I'd need. A great resource is the CMU Graphics Lab Motion Capture Database, which has generously been converted to .bvh by Bruce Hahne for easy usage in Blender. The collection encompasses 2,500 motions and is "free for all uses". The range of motions is expansive enough (including things like pantomiming a dragon) that it's possible it will have everything I need.

Still, I wanted to try out the deep learning approaches, in part because I was curious.

One note here is that these models typically output motions as .bvh files. These contain motion instructions addressed to a particular skeleton (where, for example, the left leg bone might be named LeftLeg). I used Mixamo's auto-rigger to rig my character and the resulting skeleton has a different naming system. Fortunately there is a Blender addon, "BVH Retargeter", that remaps a .bvh to a differently-named skeleton. It doesn't include a mapping for Mixamo by default, but I set one up myself (available here, it goes into the known_rigs directory).

On this note, there is also this Deep-motion-editing project which has a much more sophisticated retargeter:

I don't know yet if I'll have a need for this, but good to know it's there!

On to the tests:

I'm using a Kiros Seagill model (from FF8) for these tests.

Even though the MocapNET license is not what I need, I decided to try it anyways:

It looks ok, a little janky and all over the place though. And the hands aren't animated.

MotioNet looked promising but unfortunately did not have very good output. The output pose is upside-down for some reason (this is a known issue), which seems like an easy enough fix, but the joint movement is stiff and incorrect.

The CMU motion looks great of course, as it's actually captured properly. Again, the only concern here is that it doesn't have a wide enough range of motions.

The last software I tried is FreeMoCap, which is still in very early stages of development, but there's enough to try it out. It was quite a bit more complicated to set up as it works best with multiple cameras (they can still be fairly cheap, e.g. $20-30, webcams), and requires a charuco board for calibration, which I printed off at Kinko's. That cost me about $30 to get it on poster board, but you can probably make something cheaper with an old cardboard box and printing on large-sized computer paper. In total I spent ~$100 on equipment.

The most important thing is to get webcams that work for the size of your recording room, so get your full body in frame for all of them (which may require wide-angle cameras). Then you need to make sure that your charuco board is large enough that its patterns are clear on the webcams—the further you position the webcams, the larger the charuco board you'll need and the lower the resolution you record at, the larger the charuco board you'll need. Note that there's also a resolution/frame-rate trade-off: when running 3 cameras at 1080p I get about 14-15fps, but I needed to run at that size for my charuco board to render clearly. And as another note, the FPS can be bottlenecked if you use a USB hub to run your cameras through (some of the cameras may not even work in that case); I ended up plugging each camera into its own port for best performance.

Getting the program to work was tricky, which wasn't a surprise given the project is in an alpha state. I had to make a few changes to get it to run properly (mainly switching from multithreading to multiprocessing, since the threads were blocked on my system, and manually setting the FPS for my cameras, which for some reason would limit to 5FPS otherwise).

Below is an example of the program's output. My recording environment is less than ideal (my camera setup was super janky, attached to books or shelves in a haphazard way), but the output looks decent. It's jittery, and you'll notice the pose skeleton and camera footage are swapped in the first and last videos. I'm not sure if that's just a bug with this visualization or if it's happening deeper in the program, in which case it may be why there's that jitteriness and the skeleton angle is off.

The program can also output Blender files:

Here the issues are more apparent: the hands are especially all over the place. But even the limbs are too finicky. The demo video (above) has good limb motion, so maybe my setup is lacking (though the hands are also jittery).

FreeMoCap is a really promising project, but unfortunately it's at too early of a stage to be consistent and reliable. For now I'll probably develop the game using the CMU motion data, and then later, when I'm ready and FreeMoCap is likely much more mature I can go through and replace or refine with custom motions. Though at the rate development is going, there's a good chance that FreeMoCap will be much further along by the time I'm ready to start really working on character animations!

This is a draft (completed in October 2020) of a piece that was never published. I'm posting it here for anyone who might be interested. The food system is a massive and important topic, and here I've only scratched the surface of one small part of it. Researching and writing this shifted my thinking on many topics—I hope others will also get something from it.

Limit Break

Nowhere in the world do we see limitless growth. In agriculture, as in the broader natural world, there are nutritional limits that prevent plants and the life that depends on them from growing unbounded. Two limiting nutrients of special importance are nitrogen and phosphorus. Together these form a bottleneck for agricultural systems, with implications not only for food and other agricultural products but also for key features of a post-carbon world, such as bio-based alternatives to fossil fuels and their derivatives and afforestation.

Nitrogen is everywhere, making almost 80% of the air that surrounds us, which is why at first glance its role as a limiter might seem strange. Unlike carbon dioxide, the nitrogen in the air is inaccessible to plants. There are a variety of ways it can be made available to plants, such as through certain "nitrogen-fixing" bacteria or, much less commonly, lightning strikes, but something has to convert nitrogen into its inorganic form (e.g. ammonia) for plants to make use of it⁵³⁵⁴.

Phosphorus, more commonly a limiting factor in tropical areas⁵⁵, is not as abundant as nitrogen, circulating through the gradual weathering of rocks.

Though many cultures found ways to better conserve soil nutrients and modestly supplement the nutritional content of soils through manures or legumes (which host nitrogen-fixing bacteria)⁵⁶, it wasn't until the 19th century that a series of shifts occurred that effectively broke through these limits: the development of global fertilizer supply chains and the Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing nitrogen fertilizer at scale, named for Fritz Haber (sometimes called "the father of chemical warfare") who developed the process and Carl Bosch who later improved it. This process is still the basis for essentially all synthetic fertilizer production today. Nowadays the amount of reactive nitrogen and phosphorus circulating is more than double that of the pre-industrial world^57585960.

These developments proliferated over the past century—use rates of nitrogen fertilizer increased over 40 times in the US over this period⁶¹—massively increasing global agricultural productivity, tripling agricultural value since 1970 to $2.6 trillion⁶². In the US synthetic fertilizer may be responsible for anywhere from 30 to 60% of yields, and even higher in the tropics⁶³⁶⁴. One of the most important consequences of the surpassing of these limits has been exponential population growth. Some 40% to half of the world population may owe their existence to the Haber-Bosch process⁵⁴.

This massive nutritional increase comes at a substantial social and environmental cost and, at least in its current form, is unsustainable. The breaking of these nutrient limits is a major contributor to the breaking of planetary boundaries⁶⁵: a recent paper estimated that almost 50% of global food production violates planetary boundaries, with almost of half to that (25% overall) due nitrogen fertilizer¹⁷.

Nitrogen fertilizers are typically applied in excess⁵⁹; for cereal grain production only about a third of applied nitrogen is actually taken up the crop, amounting to \$90 billion of wasted nitrogen⁶⁶, with some estimates ranging from half⁵⁴ to 80%⁵⁷⁶⁷ being wasted across all crops. Similarly, estimates suggest only 15 to 30% of phosphorus is taken up⁶⁸⁶⁹⁶⁸. But a lot of this excess fertilizer leaches into water systems^5465707172, causing eutrophication that has contributed to over 400 marine dead zones⁶⁹. In the Gulf of Mexico such pollution from US agriculture costs the economy an estimated $1.4 billion annually by undermining fishing, recreation, and other marine activity⁷¹⁷³. This overflow also contributes to the flourishing of pathogens like the West Nile virus⁷⁴. Phosphorus fertilizers also contribute to heavy metal content in agriculture⁶⁹, as much as 60% of cadmium in crops and soil⁷⁵⁷⁶⁶⁸, some of which also makes it to water sources⁷⁶. In the US, agriculture is responsible for 70% of the total nitrogen and phosphorus pollution⁶⁷.

This water pollution also has direct effects on human health, rendering drinking water toxic⁶⁹⁶¹. Nitrate contamination is linked to many different diseases—blue baby syndrome, some cancers, and more. Violations of EPA limits of nitrate content in drinking water doubled from 650 in 1998 to 1,200 in 2008, while 2 million private wells are above the EPA-recommended standard⁷⁴. This pollution is expensive to treat and the cost is usually borne by the public. The cost of a treatment facility can be hundreds of millions of dollars; the estimated cost for agriculture's share of the pollution is around \$1.7 billion annually⁷⁴. The total cost of the environmental and health harm related to agricultural nitrogen in the US has been estimated at $157 billion per year⁷⁴.

Nitrogen fertilizer overapplication also contributes to agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, especially N2O⁷⁰⁶⁶⁵⁴ which is now the main contributor to ozone depletion⁶¹. The amount of these emissions is estimated to increase exponentially with increased fertilizer usage⁷⁷.

Other concerns regarding over-application—some also with any application of synthetic fertilizers—is their impact on soil health⁵⁴, such as soil acidification²⁸⁷¹ and net losses in soil nitrogen over time (meaning synthetic fertilizers' effectiveness decreases over time)⁶⁶⁷⁸. While disputed, some argue that synthetic fertilizer also inhibits soil's ability to sequester carbon^64787980. What is more accepted is that more traditional techniques of maintaining soil fertility, which are often abandoned with the introduction of synthetic fertilizer²⁸, improve carbon sequestration⁸¹⁸².

Of course, because the issue here is over-application—for example, China can use 30-50% less fertilizer and maintain the same yields and corn farmers in Minnesota reduced nitrogen use by 21% without a decrease in yield⁷¹—then the solution should be straightforward: use less of it. Recommendations to avoid fertilizer overapplication are generally about better management, more context-specific application (e.g. depending on what's already available in the soil and what the crop requires, carefully measuring out how much to apply)^{6028408371168485575474}. This approach has been successful—in Denmark, for example, nitrogen fertilizer application decreased 52% since 1985 following the Nitrate Directive in 1987 which prescribes specific nitrogen management practices⁷¹. Similarly, a simple one fertilizer management program based on color charts successfully reduced fertilizer N use by about 25%⁵⁷. The US has also seen improved nitrogen fertilizer efficiency through education initiatives⁵⁹, but stronger regulation regarding synthetic fertilizer application is typically met with fierce resistance from farm lobbying groups⁶¹.

Other recommendations look a bit more deeply into why farmers over-apply fertilizer to begin with, especially around risk and incentives. Crop insurance appears to have some effect on fertilizer application rates, though there isn't consensus around their types and strength. One position argues that crop insurance programs encourage the planting of more input-intensive crops because they are better covered by the insurance, thus increasing fertilizer application; another argues that fertilizer over-application is a risk mitigation strategy (better to over-apply than under-apply and have a small harvest) that becomes redundant with crop insurance^347274837186. Another position argues that crop insurance encourages agricultural expansion onto lands that are otherwise ill-suited for it—with greater environmental consequences—because crop insurance mitigates the risk of poor yields⁴¹. Some empirical studies have found that enrollment in crop insurance programs does increase the use of fertilizer³⁴⁸⁷ and water⁸⁸ and does influence land use and crop choice (e.g. towards more nutrient-demanding crops)⁹, but others have found no effect or the opposite effect on fertilizer use⁸⁸⁷².

In the case of the USDA, applications for assistance require that the applicant demonstrate genuine attempts to increase yields, which generally means applying fertilizers and adopting other conventional agriculture techniques. Such requirements are implemented out of concerns of gaming the system⁸⁹. Because crop insurance is subsidized in the US, taxpayers essentially finance the consequent environmental destruction, while also suffering the consequences of water pollution, depletion of fish stocks, and more⁷⁴⁸⁹.

There are, however, environmental concerns beyond over-application, especially around the production of both nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers.

Nitrogen fertilizer production—i.e. the Haber-Bosch process—is a large source of agriculture's environmental footprint⁸². The process requires a hydrocarbon source, usually natural gas, which is combined with nitrogen from the air^90919216 and is also used to provide the required heat and energy. The natural gas is supposed to be used up by the process, such that methane emissions are minimal—but the actual emissions have been found to be over 145 times higher than reported⁹³.

The production process also emits significant amounts of CO2⁹³; in 2011, this accounted for 25 million tons of greenhouse gases in the US, some 14% of the emissions for the entire chemical industry⁹². A huge chunk of agricultural emissions are actually attributable to fertilizer production due to these CO2 emissions - by one estimate, 30-33%⁹².

There are other problems from fertilizer production, such as pollution contributing to an estimated 4,300 premature deaths per year⁶¹ and substantial energy demands, accounting for an estimated third of total energy used in crop production¹⁶.

Phosphorus fertilizers have their own problems. The extraction and processing of the phosphate rock from which the fertilizer is produced come with the typical environmental issues of mining: water and air pollution, land degradation, erosion, toxic and occasionally radioactive byproducts (e.g. phosphogypsum)^{94952332966968}. However, compared to the nitrogen fertilizer production process, phosphorus fertilizer requires a relatively modest amount of energy (about five times less than nitrogen fertilizer)¹⁶. Like nitrogen fertilizer, however, the process is dependent on the fossil fuel industry for inputs, namely sulfuric acid supplied as a byproduct from the oil and gas industry⁵⁸. Both nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer productions keep agriculture tightly linked to the fossil fuel industries we need to move beyond.

With phosphorus fertilizers one impending issue is phosphate rock's finite availability. No equivalent to the Haber-Bosch process exists for phosphorus fertilizer⁴², so it will continue to rely mostly on mined phosphate rock—about 96% of mined phosphate rock goes to fertilizer⁷⁰¹⁰ and this accounts for about 60% of phosphorus applied to agriculture (the rest is from recycled sources like manure)¹⁰⁶⁸.

As with other non-renewable resources, there are concerns around "peak phosphorus"⁴⁵¹⁰⁶⁸. This is an inevitability given that it is a finite resource, but of course when this will occur is difficult to predict as anticipating actual reserves of any mineral is hard and estimates change frequently and by large amounts and according to economic and technological circumstances^97451058. Estimates range from within a couple decades to hundreds of years⁶⁸⁴⁵¹⁰.

At present the US is a major producer of phosphate rock, primarily in Florida, but that supply is expected to be 60% depleted by 2030 and completely gone mid-century⁴⁵. China, another major producer, is expected to deplete in the near future as well¹⁰.

The Metabolic Rift

All of these issues of the present pour out of a deeper history of fertilizer that represents a more fundamental shift in our relationship with nature. This "metabolic rift" is the sundering of agriculture from its local ecological context⁹⁸, and has at its core exploitation, colonialism, and imperialism^2399100. The siphoning of fertility from the global periphery into Europe and its colonial descendants was foundational to pushing agricultural productivity beyond the limits of what the land could sustain.

Fertilizer itself was a common practice to maintain soil fertility while keeping it in production⁹⁹ but it took the form of night soil, ashes, bones, and other organic waste that were relatively local, often connecting rural and urban populations through substantial logistics systems²⁷⁵⁴⁶⁸. But such methods could only maintain continuous productivity for so long; nutrient recycling is not perfect⁸²⁵⁴, and indeed soil depletion became an issue in industrializing nations as populations grew⁵⁸. Alternative methods such as leaving land fallow or crop rotation did not fit the need for maximizing near-term productivity.

To resolve this dilemma, in the 19th century industrializing nations began sourcing fertilizer from distant places—mainly Peru, but also Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia, in the form of guano and later nitrates^996827100. This "Guano Age" saw a tremendous transfer of wealth to British business interests that essentially controlled this trade¹⁰⁰²⁷ as well as many deaths through horrendous slave-like working conditions of laborers from China and throughout Latin America^2710199 and through multiple wars, including one following Spain's seizures of guano-rich islands¹⁰⁰, a proxy war funded by the British so they could essentially annex Bolivian and Peruvian nitrate and guano producing regions¹⁰⁰²⁷, and a civil war in Chile also funded by the British to prevent Chile's nationalization of its fertilizer resources¹⁰⁰ (Gregory Cushman's Guano and the opening of the Pacific world: a global ecological history provides a detailed look into this history).

Many Pacific Islands also saw their share of dispossession and violence. The US sought to secure its own guano deposits, passing the Guano Islands Act in 1856 to unilaterally allow US entrepreneurs to claim new guano islands as US territories²⁷. Under this act 66 islands were claimed as US territory⁹⁹, with at least 8 still under claim or in dispute. Other colonial powers followed suit, compelling a flurry of claims throughout the Pacific⁹⁹ that devastated the islands unfortunate enough to be endowed with rich deposits. Two such islands, Banaba and Nauru, were key locations for the mining of phosphate rock. The Banabans, after years of violence and occupation, were eventually resettled after about 90% of their home island's surface was left mined and the trees they relied on for food essentially gone^2210210399. Nauru didn't fare much better, with 80% of the surface left looking like a 'moonscape'¹⁰⁴¹⁰². While Nauru achieved independence in 1968, they are left in a state of economic despair¹⁰³.

The picture looks very different for the beneficiaries of this extractivism. The vast majority of the nutrient wealth extracted from these regions went to European and descendant countries such as the US, Australia, and New Zealand. European-style agriculture was unviable in Australia and New Zealand until imports of fertilizer derived from the Pacific islands turned each into exporters of meat and wool⁹⁹¹⁰³ . The fertilizer that resulted allowed the agricultural expansion that supported the industrial development of these countries²⁷. Peru, like Nauru and Banaba, saw little benefit. With guano supplies basically depleted, Peru's farmers became dependent on different nutrient supply chains: imported synthetic fertilizers⁹⁹.

For nitrogen fertilizer the most egregious cases of this imperialist exploitation came to an end with the Haber-Bosch process²⁷, which as discussed above is not without its own significant problems and is still, with its reliance on fossil fuels, fundamentally extractivist. For other nutrients, especially phosphorus, this is not the case. While there Nauru and Banaba's phosphate resources are basically depleted, North Africa is still a site of phosphate mining to this day. In particular, the case of Morocco and Western Sahara shows a clear through-line from fertilizer's broader colonial history to its continuation in the present.

Under French control the region supplied phosphate for France's agriculture¹⁰¹. Morocco continues to be the leading exporter of phosphate with the largest reserves¹⁰⁵, with estimates of up to 75%-85% of the world total reserves^106426997 . Yet some of these reserves that are counted as Morocco's are not in fact in Morocco. They are in Western Sahara, what is sometimes called the "world's last colony"¹⁰⁷³⁹. Morocco has occupied Western Saharan since 1975⁴²¹⁰⁷, with about 80% of the country under Moroccan rule¹⁰⁸ under what is best described as a police state, with violence against and killings of activists, politically-motivated imprisonment, and other human rights violations^{4210911011110810739}, with hundreds of Sahrawi "disappeared" and tortured by the Moroccan government¹⁰⁸³⁹. Most Sahrawi fled to Algeria, where they still mostly live in refugee camps^4210810739.

This occupation is at least in part motivated by Western Sahara's phosphate reserves, which is of uniquely high quality¹⁰⁷¹⁰⁵. Some 10% of Moroccan phosphate income comes from the Bou Craa mine in Western Sahara⁴² and makes up most of the income Morocco gets from the region⁷⁵ (fishing is another big source^11210839). As of 2015, Morocco has made an estimated profits of $4.27 billion from Western Saharan phosphate rock mines⁶⁹.

The UN and the International Court of Justice both recognize Western Sahara's right to self-determination¹⁰⁸³⁹, and no country officially recognizes the Moroccan occupation as legitimate^75107105. Extraction of resources from an occupied territory is clear violation of international law¹⁰⁷, which determines that the Sahrawi people should have "permanent sovereignty over [their] resources"³⁹. Yet, over fifty years since this promise of self-determination, as countries continue to import Western Saharan exports¹⁰⁵⁷⁵, has not materialized in any meaningful way.

This is probably because several countries have a vested interest in Morocco. Morocco an important ally to US and the recipient of the most US foreign assistance in the region¹⁰⁸¹⁰⁷, including financial support and training for the Moroccan military and its operations against the Polisario Front¹⁰⁸¹⁰⁵, the Sahrawi nationalist movement. The US also helped plan the initial Moroccan invasion of Western Sahara; Kissinger feared communist activity in the area¹⁰⁸¹⁰⁵. Morocco has suggested using its phosphate production as a lever for protecting its claim to Western Sahara—to pressure Russia, for example⁷⁵. In 1985, India recognized the independent Sahrawi state, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), but withdrew recognition in 2000 when they established a joint venture with the Morocco phosphate industry¹⁰⁷.

Fertilizer production elsewhere also depends on phosphate exported from the area. 50% of the Bou Craa mine's output supplies fertilizer producers in North America, though in 2018 Canada-based Nutrien, the major North American importer, stopped accepting imports from the Bou Craa mine⁷⁵. Other major importing countries are India, New Zealand, and China⁷⁵. There have been some recent victories, however. In 2017, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic successfully asserted a claim to a cargo of Bou Craa phosphate rock which was sold to New Zealand-based Ballance Agri-Nutrients⁷⁵.

As phosphate rock supplies dwindle elsewhere, production from places like Morocco become even more important. Some projections say that Morocco's market share could increase to 80-90% by 2030⁶⁹¹⁰, effectively giving Morocco monopoly over the global phosphate market and a greater investment in maintaining control of Western Saharan deposits.

From all this it's clear that the current use of synthetic and non-renewable fertilizers is unsustainable. Yet at the start of the millennium Vaclav Smil concluded that we are fated, at least for the next century, to depend on Haber-Bosch⁵⁴, and presumably the system of agriculture that is built on it. Have things changed in the intervening decades? Do we have better options now?

There are not many options for substituting phosphate rock (for phosphorus fertilizers the main approaches are using less or exploiting excess accumulated "legacy" phosphorus¹¹³), so the focus here will be on nitrogen fertilizers. The main options can be roughly grouped into two categories. There are those which move away from synthetic inputs towards more "natural" approaches, such as organic farming systems, and those which more or less stick to the industrial-chemical model but substitute Haber-Bosch for different processes. Both of these feature into utopian visions of future food systems.

Fertilizers By Other Names

Natural Factories? Organic Systems

As alluded to above, the major differentiator of agricultural systems' impacts is nutrient management and the nutrient bottleneck^{6511482115116549955}. Organic systems forgo synthetic fertilizers and other synthetic chemical inputs (though there are circumstances where some may be allowed). Beyond that there can be quite a lot of variety among specific organic systems. More traditional techniques such as intercropping can be used, but aren't required for the organic label to apply¹¹⁴.

In lieu of synthetic fertilizers, other fertilizers like manure are used. These can be less consistent than synthetic fertilizers, as they can have a lot of variety in nutritional composition¹⁴ and also require additional microbial action before the nutrients are available to the plants (in synthetic fertilizers they're immediately available, for better or worse)¹⁶¹¹⁵. But, in addition to the lower environmental footprint, they have other advantages over synthetic fertilizers. Whereas synthetic fertilizers can lower the pest resistance of plants—thus requiring pesticides¹¹⁷¹¹⁸—organic fertilizers tend not to have this problem¹¹⁹¹²⁰. They may also better contribute to soil carbon sequestration⁸¹⁶⁵ and improve soil quality in other ways¹²¹.

The benefits of organic fertilizers are somewhat tempered when taking into account the impacts of collection and transportation. A farm using organic fertilizer produced on-site is going to require less energy than one that ships organic fertilizer from some distant elsewhere. The reduced nutritional density of organic fertilizers also means that transport energy expenditure on a nutritional basis can be higher as well. But in general because no energy-intensive production process is required, the energy requirements are still substantially less than synthetic fertilizers¹⁶.

The debate around the viability of wholesale replacement of conventional agriculture with organic systems inevitably ends up on the problem of the "yield gap"—that is, the difficulty organic systems have of matching the productivity of conventional systems.

Comparing organic and conventional agriculture systems is complicated. There are so many other context-specific factors that influence their relative performance, such as the particular crop, the growing environment, water availability, labor costs, and so on, and these factors may be related in zero-sum ways that by now are familiar: yield increases as N fertilizer use increases, but at cost of water pollution^12212355. Comparisons may use a variety of crop specifically bred to maximize productivity under conventional systems, at the expense of traits which make them more productive under organic systems¹¹⁴⁸². Comparisons can be further complicated by histories of colonialism and displacement, where the highest-quality land is captured by large-scale operations that also happen to utilize industrial agriculture techniques, thus further contributing to higher yields. Larger gaps are found when cereal crops are compared, but this might be because Green Revolution technologies have focused on improving cereal yields in particular¹¹⁴. This is part of a larger trend: agricultural research largely focuses on techniques and technologies applicable in conventional systems, whereas organic and sustainable techniques are relatively underfunded⁵⁸. The yield gap could be closed further with more research and funding.

One meta-analysis over several hundred agricultural systems—biased towards Western agricultural systems, including the most industrialized systems—concluded that organic systems fall short against conventional systems when compared on a yield basis; i.e. organic systems require more land, result in more eutrophication, and have similar greenhouse gas emissions per unit of food produced^6582124. The yield gap ranged from a concerning 50% to a more modest ~90% of conventional output⁸²¹¹⁴. Use of well-known techniques like cover cropping and intercropping can further close the gap^6511414, but the gap could also widen under the effects of climate change¹²⁴.

When this yield gap is taken into account, many of the environmental benefits of organic agriculture are severely reduced to the point where conventional agriculture looks more environmentally friendly. The difference is usually attributed to the fact that organic methods require much more land to achieve the same output¹²⁴. Thus, for example, benefits in soil carbon sequestration are offset by the increase in deforestation from expansion of agricultural lands^12565123. These comparisons, however, use life-cycle assessments (LCA) that are often biased towards the conventional conception of agriculture—that is, focused on agricultural outputs as products—failing to account for the very different conception from organic and other alternative forms that prioritize ecosystem health and have longer-term outlooks. For example, the effects of pesticides, though a key difference between organic and intensive systems, is often not considered¹²⁶. Land degradation is also generally not included in these assessments¹²⁶. On a long enough time scale the land degradation resulting from conventional agriculture undermines agricultural productivity (thus lowering these efficiency benefits from the LCA perspective)⁷⁹. We might also consider that, though perhaps industrial agriculture theoretically has lower land use requirements, the political economy of industrial agriculture is such that it will expand regardless of this land-use efficiency. Organic agriculture, as co-opted by existing agribusiness, is not itself necessarily immune to this.

Such results by no means indicate that conventional agriculture is "sustainable" (especially considering its dependency on finite resources such as phosphate rock) or that it's "low-impact" (still requiring more energy than organic and with human health consequences from pesticides, water pollution, and so on)⁶⁵. In any case, the prospect that industrial agriculture, which drives all the issues described above, is somehow better for the environment is a troubling if counterintuitive finding. Are there other newer approaches that resolve this dilemma? Ones that are both high-yielding and less harmful?

Take It Inside: Indoor Systems

One common proposal for improving agriculture—in terms of both yields and impacts—is to challenge its relationship to land. This set of agricultural systems fit neatly into narratives of high-tech progress, including hydroponics, aeroponics, aquaponics, and vertical farming. Hydroponics and aeroponics are two prevailing soil-less growing techniques, in which plants are grown out of water (in hydroponics and aquaponics) or nothing at all (aeroponics), and vertical farming can operate on either. These roughly all fall under the umbrella of indoor farming techniques (they don't need to be indoor, but they almost always are), which also encompasses more "traditional" greenhouse approaches, but has a more potent contemporary imaginary in the form of extremely high yield per acre operations on otherwise non-arable land, with tightly-controlled environments and factory-like efficiency (some of these methods are grouped under PFALs: "plant factories with artificial lighting"¹²⁷ or just "plant factories" as artificial lighting is usually a given).

Within the -ponic techniques is substantial variety: the exact method can vary (hydroponic, for example, includes "deep water culture" and "nutrient film technique" among others), as can specifics of the configuration (though these techniques are usually associated with artificial lighting, they can also use sunlight), and growing environment (higher energy requirements, for example, in a colder climate)¹²⁸⁶⁵, and the specific crop grown, so generalizations can be a little tricky. But there is enough in common across these approaches that some comparisons are possible.

In terms of yields, hydroponic systems can have higher yields than conventional open-field systems³⁶⁷. In the context of urban agriculture, a substantial amount of a city's food demand can be met with local rooftop farms: for example an estimated 77% of Bologna's food demand is met in this way¹²⁹. A recent study on urban horticulture in the UK (Sheffield) suggests that the expansion of rooftop farms could help meet a substantial amount of the city's fruit and vegetable needs¹³⁰.

With respect to fertilizer's environmental impacts, these configurations feature closed water systems, meaning that water is used more effectively and recycled. This reduces both water usage and nutrient runoff and improves nutrient efficiency compared to conventional systems^{31311326713313425127}. However, there is still potential for mismanagement and downstream pollution, as salt accumulation in the circulating nutrient solution still results in wastewater that must be properly disposed of¹²⁸¹²⁹.

A closed system can be more self-sustaining in other ways, such as using biomass waste to generate biogas to heat the greenhouse or using anaerobic digestion to produce fertilizer on-site¹²⁸. Aquaponics generally avoids the use of synthetic fertilizers because fish waste provides nutrients^13313567, though this does not necessarily mean a complete independence from synthetic fertilizers: fish feed is still an external input, and some setups may require nutritional supplements⁶⁷.

Advocates of these systems claim they don't require pesticides, but indoor livestock farming was pitched on similar promises that haven't panned out¹³⁶. Avoiding pesticide use is even more crucial when these farms are in cities¹²⁹, so this claim warrants even more scrutiny than in other contexts.

These systems can have lower emissions¹³²³, with most emissions coming from the facility structure (steel and concrete)¹³²¹²⁷, other fixed infrastructure (e.g. pipes)^1343129132, and energy use²⁵¹³⁷, though this varies with energy mix. One way to reduce emissions and other impacts from the facility structure is to re-use existing buildings, though this comes with penalties as the buildings are not tailored specifically for indoor agriculture¹²⁹²⁵.

Perhaps one of the most lauded benefits is versatility in location—indoor methods don't require arable land¹³⁷. Indeed, they can require substantially less land even when considering the land use for energy sources. One paper estimates 1:3 ratio of greenhouse area to solar panel area and assumes "a conversion efficiency of 14% and an average daily solar radiation value of 6.5 kWh per square meter per year"⁵. Using sunlight rather than artificial lighting is even better—one could imagine reclaiming the top floors of abandoned buildings to augment local food production.

From a financial perspective, these indoor systems tend to have high capital costs^{1371381331395}. This includes not only equipment costs, but also the land itself, which in urban centers are expensive compared to rural land, and operating costs¹³⁹—you pay for what is otherwise provided for free, e.g. sunlight. They tend to grow only leafy green and herbs for business model viability¹³⁸¹³⁶, especially because conventional agriculture can still produce the same food for much more cheaply.

Even though the arability of the farm site itself is less important, other geographical aspects still are. For example, where water is particularly expensive (e.g. in Egypt where deep wells must be dug and maintained¹³³), the cost of starting an aquaponics farm is still quite expensive¹³³. Of course, there are situations where the high cost may make sense if it's not possible to grow anything otherwise and other land uses don't make sense¹³⁹⁵.

The climate of the site is another important factor. Hydroponics systems can have tremendously more energy requirements compared to conventional agriculture, varying a lot by climate (cooler climates require more heating, for example), which can be disproportionate to yield increases^{56514013412867}. Lighting is the other big energy factor, but climate control is the cause for most of the variation between hydroponic systems^25512913767. If the system is such that it has exposure to natural light (e.g. rooftop gardens), then the energy demand is of course further reduced.

In urban environments, these systems can have several additional benefits, depending on how tightly they're integrated with existing urban processes^13712825127. The proximity to consumers can reduce impacts from packaging and transport¹²⁹¹²⁷, as well as minimizing food loss as well¹²⁹¹³⁷. Integration with rainwater harvesting systems can reduce draw on city water supplies¹²⁹⁶⁷, and wastewater systems can potentially be developed as nutrient solutions, rather than relying on synthetic fertilizers¹²⁸. This could reduce the energy used in wastewater treatment, as the nutrients currently processed out to avoid eutrophication can be used to feed plants instead¹⁴¹.

But the fact that indoor methods don't require arable land is a little deceiving. Like conventional agriculture, arability still must be "imported" via inputs like synthetic fertilizers, so in some respects environmental impacts are merely dislocated from the site of production rather than altogether eliminated. Indoor methods are generally not designed to use organic fertilizers, as organic fertilizers are less consistent, less nutritionally dense, and often require some kind of microbial action to make the nutrients available to the plant (the exception here is aquaponics, which is designed around fish waste as fertilizer). For indoor systems, fertilizer production is still the major contributor to eutrophication^1293132137. Even though less of this occurs at the site of use, plenty still occurs along the production and distribution chain.

So while these indoor approaches appear to have many benefits and may have a role to play in food production for a limited set of contexts¹⁴⁰ (where energy costs are favorable, renewable energy sources are used, the high capital requirements are manageable, and to supplement the diets of land-scarce urban centers), but we shouldn't expect them to replace agriculture wholesale. And they do not necessarily lend themselves to socially-desirable models of production. One could imagine a near future in which insolvent smallholder farms on already marginal lands are displaced for investors to build towering vertical farms in their place.

With regards to fertilizer, they're still held back by many of the problems with synthetic fertilizers—especially their production. Are we stuck with the Haber-Bosch process? Is there a cleaner way of producing them?

Other Routes to Nitrogen

Though the Haber-Bosch process is the dominant way of producing nitrogen fertilizer, there are a variety of potential alternatives¹⁴²³⁰. These alternatives usually focus on Haber-Bosch's use of fossil feedstock and high energy requirements, stemming from its need for very high temperatures (300-500C) and pressures (200-300atm)³⁷—"the single most energy-guzzling element of farming"¹⁴³. These intense demands contrast to the microbes that fix nitrogen under far less extreme temperatures and pressures due to nitrogenase enzymes³⁷.

Naturally, the promise of these nitrogenase enzymes has attracted research interest. One direction is focused on producing nitrogen fertilizer with solar power, at room temperature and normal pressure using these enzymes ¹⁴³¹⁴⁴, though at present the process is slower than the Haber-Bosch process²⁴. There is also more recent research into methods using primarily water (for the hydrogen, that is normally supplied by fossil fuels in the Haber-Bosch process⁵⁸³⁷), air, and electricity ("primarily" because the process may require expensive metals like palladium as a catalyst¹⁴⁵) to create small fertilizer synthesizing devices. Other "solar" fertilizers are similarly produced from water and air but use solar energy directly, rather than through electricity. These also tend to produce more dilute fertilizers that can help avoid overapplication¹⁴⁶. This could take the form of relatively small, low-maintenance devices—"artificial leaves"¹⁴⁷—that are amendable to decentralized production^{146 37}. A decentralized model has several advantages, such as reducing transportation needs, which can make up a significant portion of fertilizer costs, especially for areas with poor infrastructure¹⁴⁶. It may also offer an alternative to the existing capital-intensive, highly-concentrated world of fertilizer production, with its deeply entrenched interests and commitment to the Haber-Bosch status quo.

The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), an agriculture industry lobbying group, is deeply committed to the fossil fuel-based method. The AFBF has a long history of working closely with the fossil fuel industry, supporting oil and gas domestic extraction (e.g. fracking), and even coal (which can be used as an input into fertilizer production⁹¹, and common in Chinese ammonia production⁹²). This support has sometimes taken the form of outright climate change denial⁴³. The Fertilizer Institute, a lobbying group for the fertilizer industry, is also closely connected to the fossil fuel industry, supporting expanded natural gas production, framing it explicitly as necessary for national food security and threatened by climate change policy¹⁴⁸. This allegiance is likely only to grow stronger as pressure grows against the fossil fuel industry.

Questions of industry power aside, there is a lot of uncertainty about the viability of these alternative technologies^2437145. A handful of companies cropped up a few years ago trying to produce net-zero emissions fertilizer by replacing Haber-Bosch fossil feedstocks with biomass and switching to renewable energy¹⁴⁹, but none of the plants ever went through and the companies all went bankrupt¹⁵⁰¹⁵¹. The available information seems to indicate mismanagement as a big contributor to these failures but it seems reasonable that the recent decline in natural gas prices—which has led to conventional nitrogen fertilizer production in the US to expand⁹²⁹³—is likely a large factor as well. The economics continue to favor fossil feedstocks.

Finally, changing the production process doesn't necessarily help address many of the other downstream effects of nitrogen fertilizer. What room is there then for innovating on fertilizer? Is there something with the productivity of synthetic fertilizer but with less of the harm?

"A Sewer is a Mistake"

A handful of social reformers lamented this partition, begging their fellow citizens to bridge the expanding chasm between city and farm. In his 1862 novel Les Misérables, Victor Hugo wrote, "There is no guano comparable in fertility with the detritus of a capital. A great city is the most mighty of dung-makers. Certain success would attend the experiment of employing the city to manure the plain. If our gold is manure, our manure, on the other hand, is gold."²⁷

One option is to return to the older way of thinking: nutrients not as something to be produced but as something to be reused. The use of animal manure is a common example. If animal wastes can be used as fertilizer, then why not human waste too? 75 to 90% of nitrogen intake is excreted as urine⁵⁴, which is also responsible for more than half of both the phosphorus and potassium in domestic wastewater (an estimated 16% of all mined phosphorus passes through the wastewater system) while constituting less than 1% of its volume¹⁵². In fact, recycling of human waste into fertilizer was once a key part of the agricultural nutrient cycle, until demand outpaced the recycled nutrients, more powerful fertilizers were introduced, and waste became seen as less of a resource and more of a problem (e.g. because of diseases) to be managed¹⁵³¹⁵⁴. Subsequent sanitation innovations responding to this conception of waste-as-problem such as flush toilets and more sophisticated sewage systems with the purpose of moving waste away from people also contributed to the disruption of these older "circular economies"⁶⁸.

That such a system worked in the past means that we could try to restore it, and there is a renewed interest in recycling human waste into fertilizer¹⁵⁵. Phosphorus can be recovered from wastewater through a variety of means, such as using sewage sludge, which has been used to generate high yields¹⁴. Or the nutrient-rich wastewater can be used directly as a medium to grow microalgae to treat the wastewater and harvest nitrogen and phosphorus to produce fertilizers¹⁵⁶. We excrete almost all of the phosphorus we ingest⁶⁸, and it can be recovered from wastewater⁶⁹¹⁵⁷. One study finds that some 40% of Australian phosphorus use can be fulfilled with a sewage recovery system⁹⁶. The value of waste takes other forms too. Biochar is another soil amendment that can be produced from sewage sludge, which does not work well as a nitrogen fertilizer but can have other benefits such as increasing soil carbon sequestration and preventing nutrient leaching^1581464158.

Unfortunately the valorization of wastewater for fertilizer is not without problems. The removal of nitrogen and phosphorus are both energy-intensive¹⁵² and the scalability of these systems are still uncertain⁶⁸.

One key complication is waste contamination. Even in the past nightsoil required treatment to be safe⁵⁴, and now we face a substantially more diverse set of chemicals, including pathogens, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and heavy metals from automotive and industrial runoff^159115152. This is true even of animal wastes. Manure from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs, i.e. "factory farms"), which, though massive in volume and thus an ample supply of nutrients, suffers from these problems of contamination¹⁶⁰. This question of contamination has meant that these human waste-derived fertilizers aren't yet permitted for organic farms⁸². However, processes like vermicomposting, which uses earthworms to digest waste into more nutritious—potentially increasing some mineral concentration (phosphorus, for example) by up to 120% percent¹⁵⁶, can reduce the content of some of these contaminants¹⁵⁹¹⁴. However, the economics are again unfavorable: mining phosphate rock is cheaper than recovered phosphorus.

Reusing excreted nutrients rather than dumping them into the environment is a clear improvement to our current system, but the biggest limitation is that no nutrient recycling process will be able to recover all of the incoming nutrients. We couldn't rely on it alone: even a high-efficiency waste nutrient recycling system will still need to be supplemented.

Little Helpers: Biofertilizers

There is a class of fertilizers called "smart fertilizers" which usually refer to some slow-release mechanism so that nutrients are released more synchronously with plant uptake (i.e. released as plants need, instead of all at once). The mismatch of nutrient availability and plant need is a large factor in why fertilizer runoff and N2O emissions are as bad as they are; if plants used more of the nutrients then less would make it to waterways⁶⁴⁴⁷. This category encompasses a number of different methods, including organic wastes⁶⁴, using slow-release casing, and biofertilizers.

Biofertilizers are fertilizers based on microbes; for example, nitrogen biofertilizers take advantage of existing nitrogen-fixing microorganisms such as cyanobacteria^{161162163164165}. Like other fertilizers, they increase yields^163164159166, and like the naturally-occurring instances of these microbes, biofertilizers may provide additional benefits such as pest protection^{161167163164168165}, reduced soil erosion⁶¹⁶⁵, additional growth beyond just that from the increased nutrient supply^164159168165, and additional carbon sequestration¹⁶⁵. The production process can involve fermentation (e.g. with yeast¹⁶⁴¹⁶⁸) or vermicomposting (i.e. the use of worms) from agricultural waste or wastewater^16415914. These processes are accessible even in conditions of low capital (they are substantially cheaper than synthetic fertilizers¹⁶⁹¹⁶⁸) or without additional energy sources.

The use of such "plant probiotics"¹⁶³ is not itself new^163614170—for example, use of manures also introduces these microbes¹⁶⁴⁶ and some are already commercialized on a small scale¹⁶³. Environmental concerns around the Haber-Bosch process and other extractive fertilizer production processes, along with advances in biotechnology¹⁶⁴, are drawing a renewed interest in commercializing the technology on a larger scale. There are however issues with scaling this to an industrial model: for example, transport and storage of living organisms is more complicated than relatively inert chemical fertilizers^16116414.

However, again these biofertilizers are being developed within the context of the prevailing agrochemical industrial regime; companies like Bayer (who purchased Monsanto in 2018) and Nutrien (a $34-billion fertilizer company and second-largest producer of nitrogen fertilizer in the world¹⁷¹) are partnering with startups developing this biofertilizer technology, which is also focusing more on developing novel microbes rather than adapting existing ones¹⁶⁷¹⁷².

The homemade biofertilizer Super Magro is one example of the more promising route biofertilizers could take. It consists of a simple, low-cost fermentation process and was released as an open source recipe for other farmers to use freely and augment¹⁶⁹¹⁷³.

What do we do?

Comparisons of these options are usually stated in terms of crop yield. Though some are still in development, these alternatives generally have yields that are worse than or only comparable to the prevailing synthetic fertilizer regime. There are cases where lower yields might be acceptable, such as with hydroponic urban agriculture where no food would be grown otherwise¹³⁶. But in general, when viewed through crop yields, many analyses find these alternatives to be more environmentally damaging because of their lower yields.

Generally the emissions of agriculture are tied to yield¹⁷⁴⁴⁰; systems that are more intensive and produce higher yields end up having lower emissions per output. For example, organic systems have lower yield per hectare so they require more land to produce the same amount of food that an industrial farm would, which then leads to more deforestation and greater carbon emissions⁴⁰. The worrying trade off between feeding people and reducing environmental impact seems to dissipate: industrial agriculture surprisingly gives us the best of both worlds. But this doesn't make any sense—we know that approach to agriculture has substantial harms.

This apparent paradox becomes resolvable by examining its key assumption: that feeding everyone necessarily requires absolutely maximizing agricultural productivity, which at present means widespread synthetic fertilizer use. This is the mainstream framing of the problem, advocated by organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation¹⁷⁵. That is, the core cause of inadequate nutrition and starvation is taken to be that we aren't growing enough food. Therefore we need powerful synthetic fertilizers to help us grow enough.

But are we really not growing enough food?

Food Waste

If we focus on food production we end up overlooking another important aspect: food waste. Consensus on exactly how much food is wasted is difficult because of lack of comprehensive data; estimates usually rely on surveys, looking through trash, or inferring through some other model. What is defined as food waste also varies. It can be simply the food that could have been eaten but is not (some definitions require that the food be eaten by a person, e.g. not a pet). or include food eaten in excess of nutritional requirements³³¹⁷⁶, or include that can no longer be sold, even if it still edible¹⁵⁴, or still further be complicated by cultural differences, where food in one culinary tradition is considered waste in another¹⁵⁴.

What is consistent across these definitions and data is that there is a lot of food wastage. Estimates of food waste range from 20% to 50%³³¹⁷⁷ (the wide variation is due to the differing definitions of food waste and outdated or lack of comprehensive data¹⁷⁶), and appears to be growing¹⁹, even as agricultural output also grows¹⁷⁸. In North America and Europe alone, where most of the waste occurs (twice as much as in Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia), this waste could "feed the world's hungry three times over"³³.

Accounting for food waste dramatically increases the impact of each calorie of food consumed. Food waste accounts for as much as 38% of energy in the food system¹⁷⁸; in the US this amounts to at least 2% of overall annual energy consumption¹⁷⁹. This translates to a large amount of carbon emissions: in the UK, some 17 million tonnes CO2 emissions are attributable to food waste¹⁸⁰; globally this figures to about 8 to 10% of GHG emissions (25-30% of food production's emissions)³⁵. These impacts include not only the emissions from production, but also that food waste that ends up in landfill emits CO2 and methane¹⁹. For the UK, an estimated half of waste emissions comes from food waste³³. Clearly if our concern is the environmental impact of food production, then food waste represents wasted harm. Reducing food waste not only reduces the impact per calorie from our existing food system, but makes a transition to a less harmful system more feasible in general because less overall output is required¹²⁴.

Food waste is, on one end, usually framed as a technical problem for developing countries, and on the other, a behavioral one for developed countries. In developing countries, most food waste is attributed to lack of adequate technology and infrastructure. This might include poor transportation infrastructure that leads to food lost in transit, lack of well-sealed or cold storage leading to increased spoilage or infestation, crude harvesting equipment that leaves edible material behind^33181154. In wealthier countries, more food waste occurs closer to the consumer^18018117633, in part because improved production, storage, and distribution infrastructure reduces the share of waste at earlier points in the chain but also because higher incomes entail more wasteful habits¹⁸², such as an avoidance of "ugly" produce^181183176182, excessive portion sizes¹⁸¹, and poor meal planning¹⁸¹¹⁷⁶. Confusing, inconsistent, or outright arbitrary best-by/best-before/expiration date language is also an issue^181184183, as are promotions encouraging larger purchases. There may also be legal obstacles preventing the distribution of excess food. The spatial organization of the global food system also drives waste: the more sprawled out a food system is, the farther food has to travel, which means more opportunities for food to be lost or spoiled along the way¹⁷⁶.

With this understanding the policy recommendations are usually straightforward. For developing countries solutions focus on technology and infrastructure, which can be as simple as sealed storage drums¹⁷⁶. Developed countries food waste policies focus around consumer education and behavior change^18033181154 and removing hurdles to distributing surplus food³⁵. For example, in France there is legislation from 2016 that fines groceries from throwing away food that's still good, which has resulted in more food donations and less food waste¹⁸⁵. There are also community-based solidarity groups such as Food Not Bombs that try to ensure that food is being used to feed people.

But this analysis and its consequent policy solutions overlook how endemic these problems are to the political economy of food production—not just technical or behavioral problems—and how developing and developed food waste is deeply interconnected, where food waste is in fact structurally rational.

For example, consider the avoidance of "ugly" produce. It is not only consumer preference at point of purchase that leaves "ugly" produce behind but the decisions of retailers as well. For example, Walmart sets standards about carrot straightness and color, causing one supplier to discard as much as 30% of its carrots that do not meet these standards¹⁷⁸. The EU used to have regulations specifying standards around the curvature of bananas¹⁵⁴ among many other standards regarding other produce¹⁸³. The cost of such standards are borne by smaller farmers, especially those in the Global South who have no influence over such decisions¹⁸³ and often can't afford the more sophisticated harvesting technologies that reduce bruising¹⁷⁶. In these cases the absence of demand leaves food to spoil¹⁵⁴.

Yet, despite the narrative that producer waste is less of an issue in wealthier countries, similar dynamics are found. In California, for example, on average 24% of perfectly good food is left on fields unharvested⁴. Crop varieties, labor costs, and environmental factors all play a role, but so too do consumer preferences (leaving blemished food behind) and market prices—when prices are low, more may be left unharvested.⁴

Questions around food production really obscure two issues at play here: one is the question of whether or not we produce enough food to meet everyone's dietary needs, and another is whether or not that produced food is accessible to everyone. Looking more closely, our food production system blows past the first issue, and the problems of hunger and malnutrition have much less to do with sheer agricultural productivity and more to do with how food is production is governed and how food is distributed^{11412455186187}. The need for the environmentally-damaging acceleration of agricultural output becomes murkier.

The Contradiction of Cheap Food

You could argue that productivity and access are actually closely linked. According to the laws of supply and demand, increasing productivity increases access because it will drive the prices of food down. The massive productivity increases in agriculture over the past century has seen an equally massive decrease in food prices, with many food commodities at 67-87% of their 1900 price¹⁸². It's hard to dispute that food prices are an important factor in food security; rising prices of food are not ever really thought of as a good sign precisely because it points to a decreased access to food.

With the hopes of avoiding high food prices and creating caloric abundance countries then would have an interest in developing agricultural productivity as much as possible, if not the farmers themselves. Yet then a crisis of overproduction occurs, in which a massive surplus of food does indeed drive prices down, but to the point where farmers are unable to recoup the costs of production.

A great deal of US agricultural policy over the past century is precisely about managing this overproduction. In the US, during downward prices and overproduction in the lead up to the Great Depression, the US had "breadlines knee-deep in wheat"⁴⁹. The US government paid farmers leave land idle during the Great Depression to avoid overproduction and consequent price drops. Controversy around the policy in 1949—framed as paying farmers to not work—led to a different system establishing price floors, guaranteeing farmers a minimum price for their product, thus encouraging them to maximize use of their land¹⁸⁸. This also meant that these downstream industries paid the farmers' incomes—and included conservation incentives which discouraged intensified exploitation of more and more land¹⁸⁹. Some farmers support a return to these policies^190191189, with a recognition that the drastically low prices contemporary subsidies enable also undermine the livelihoods of farmers in other countries—because cheap US exports set the price for other countries' agricultural products and enable a dependency on imports to the detriment of self-sufficient agriculture, which then allows agribusiness to buy up unused land to produce cash crops for export¹¹⁹².

One of the consequences of overproduction is a squeeze where farmers can't recoup their costs of production. In the US, the 1970 price of corn was about $8 a bushel in today's dollars. Today it's about $4 a bushel. At the same time, the price of fertilizers have doubled¹⁹³. Trends like this mean that, for many crops, prices have been below production costs for decades¹⁹¹. The subsidies which are meant to compensate for the lost income from these lower prices do not adequately fill the gap, with farm incomes—with subsidies included—seeing large declines¹⁹¹. US farm income has been decreasing⁸, down to 50% of 2013 income in 2018¹⁹⁴. In Canada, farmer market net income—income after subtracting government payments, has been negative at least as of 2010¹⁹⁵.

Debt has long played a big role in agriculture, helping to smooth out the staggered nature of farm expenditure and income—many expenses are upfront, but income isn't realized until after the harvest¹⁹⁶. This difference is especially large in input-intensive agriculture, with the amount of chemicals used. A bad harvest can disrupt this cycle, leading to falling behind on loans and jeopardizing future access to capital¹⁹⁶.

Against the backdrop of this price-cost squeeze, this debt can only accumulate. In the US, farm debt has been increasing since 2013¹⁹⁴. At the same time the business of farm loans is expanding—the fertilizer company Nutrien expanded its farm loan program threefold to $6 billion¹⁹⁷, further profiting off of a problem their expensive input regime created in the first place. Because incomes have been declining, farm loan delinquencies have hit a 9 year high¹⁹⁸.

At the same time, these low prices, which are encouraged by subsidies and crop insurance guarantee an income to farmers, are to the benefit of downstream industries, such as livestock and snack/beverage/food processing companies, lowering the costs of their inputs. Effectively, taxpayers provide discounts for these businesses¹⁹¹, saving them some $3.9 billion per year^199200190. With these low prices, the corn for a box of Kellog's Corn Flakes—which makes up 88% of the product—represents only 2.4% of the retail price⁵¹. These downstream companies—as well as the input companies, i.e. those that provide fertilizer, chemicals, seeds, machinery, etc—have seen record profits²⁰¹ and provided massive payouts to shareholders:

As revealed in a recent report conducted by TUC and the High Pay Center on the behaviors of FTSE100 companies in the last 5 years, listed retailers paid over £2bn to shareholders in 2018, despite none of them being Living Wage Foundation accredited, while listed Food & drinks companies paid almost £14bn – more than they made in net profit (£12.7bn). To put that into perspective, just a tenth of this shareholder pay-out is enough to raise the wages of 1.9 million agriculture workers around the world to a living wage, for example those who produce food at the origin of the food chains that they coordinate as lead firms.²⁰

In addition to cheaper inputs, overproduction gives these downstream companies more discretion over what they will and won't accept. For example, companies adopt stricter quality standards¹⁸³ and retailers can return whatever they don't want or fails to sell in time, at no cost¹⁷⁶, making farming even riskier than before.

For the farmer in this trap, there appear to only be a handful of options. One standard practice is to suppress the wages of farm workers, who are already among the most precarious group of workers. In the US, the H-2A visa system is used to keep wages low for migrant labor, to the point where a quarter to almost a third of such families are below the federal poverty line¹⁸²⁰² and lowers wages for domestic farm labor as well²⁰³.

Another option is to expand markets for food. The problem with food is that it is relatively inelastic in demand; but one argument sees food waste against a backdrop of increasing food consumption in the US, with marketing that tries to enlarge the American appetite to offload an oversupply of cheap food¹⁹¹⁷⁸. Farmers themselves do not typically have a role in this expansion; and most marketed food is in the form of snacks and processed foods of that nature; i.e. products of companies downstream from farming.

The other is to increase production. The low prices mean that productivity and volume is all the more important to make a living, which encourages environmentally harmful but output maximizing processes and the expansion of agricultural land¹⁸⁹⁴⁹. This only makes the problem worse—as farmers attempt to stay afloat by accelerating production, the markets for their crops end up flooded, further driving prices down.

The other is to overproduce to hedge against small harvests but withhold excess to keep prices high¹⁸³. This is why we see for example perfectly good food left unharvested to rot. This behavior seems unreasonable—it is in many ways—but is rational, considering the farmer's position. When dealing with large retailers, the situation is such that if they fail to supply the agreed amount, they are dropped as a supplier¹⁷⁶¹⁸³, so the rational move is to overproduce just in case.

All of this is made easier to endure or even profit from with scale. The high costs of inputs and low prices of output are especially felt by smaller farms. We see this in US farming: almost 80% of small family farms' operating profit margin are in the "high risk level". In contrast, large-scale farms tend to be at a "low risk level"⁸⁸⁹. Larger farms gain better access to loans and better prices²⁰⁴. The current subsidy system exacerbates this, disproportionately benefiting larger farms who aren't struggling in the price-cost squeeze^891887427205 and also tend to be more environmentally destructive⁷⁹, even when accounting for the larger cropland⁸. Numbers range from 75-85% of farm subsidies going to only 10-15% of farms²⁰⁶⁸⁶, and the 2018 Farm Bill has not really altered this dynamic²⁰⁷. The advantages of highly-capitalized, larger farms contributed to the consolidation of farming into fewer bigger farms²⁰⁴. In the US some 3 million farms went out of business in the postwar period²⁰⁸.

Even though dealing with agricultural overproduction has been a chronic problem of US agriculture, it came to have its usefulness in achieving US geopolitical goals. Harriet Friedmann¹⁹² and Philip McMichael¹⁸⁷ outline a succession of "food regimes" where agricultural power is applied to capitalist expansion. Following World War II, the US instrumentalized its agricultural surplus by directing it towards contributing to European reconstruction and using food aid to slow the spread of communism^78192187. Later, finding outlets for this surplus itself became a geopolitical goal. For example, developing markets for agricultural products through World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs and WTO free-trade agreements in the Global South^20978187210 . The development of such markets is itself partly accomplished by the surplus of US agricultural overproduction, which undermines local agriculture with low prices and disrupting food security. Rather than developing food self-sufficiency, the focus is on economic development to increase the affordability of imported food²¹¹¹⁹². In a strangely circular way, agriculture is no longer for growing food, but for growing commodities with which to buy food.

Part of these economic development programs is the consolidation of productive land and its re-orientation towards cash crops, further undermining food security²¹². This is the case in Zimbabwe, where the areas with the highest agricultural productivity also have the worst chronic malnutrition²¹³. At the same time, the use of non-tariff barriers, such as sanitary and phytosanitary measures, effectively allow exporting nations to protect their own markets and make it so that only highly-capitalized operations can absorb the costs these additional measures require²¹⁴.

Figures like Thomas Sankara saw how food aid was exploitative and that self-sufficiency the route that preserved autonomy:

However, major organizations like the UN's FAO, World Bank, and the IMF and foundations like the Gates Foundation continue to press that low productivity is the main problem with food security and thus synthetic fertilizer, high-yielding varieties, and other Green Revolution technologies need greater levels of adoption in developing countries ²¹⁵²¹⁶.

Fanning the Flames

Mexico

The Green Revolution was first coordinated as a development strategy in Mexico. David Barkin describes how these programs saw an increase in dependency on food imports²¹⁷⁷⁸, even though Mexico has all it needs for food self-sufficiency²¹⁸. Even worse, the expansion of the agricultural industry is in parallel with decreasing food consumption. These programs of productivity increases are driven with a focus on increasing export-oriented crops, crops for markets, rather than for improving self-sufficiency²¹⁸²⁰⁵. Achieving the maximum productivity of a land isn't possible without the capital required for the purchase of synthetic fertilizer, pesticides, high-yielding variety seeds, and so on. Poorer farmers are displaced by those with that necessary capital, instead needing to find off-farm work to buy the imported food^{27218204219205}.

This process of undermining self-sufficiency has the consequence of creating new markets for countries to sell their food surpluses to, and facilitates the process of proletarianization, creating a pool of cheap labor²¹⁸²¹⁵. It also serves other geopolitical goals as well. Barkin quotes one American diplomat commenting on Micronesia, who plainly put it:

If we examine our effects on the island culture, we see they have a real case. Before the U. S. arrived, the natives were self-sufficient, they picked their food off the trees or fished. Now, since we have them hooked on consumer goods, they'd starve without a can opener. Some of the radical independence leaders want to reverse this and develop the old self-sufficiency. We can't blame them. However, we can't leave. We need our military bases there. We have no choice. As some of my friends in Washington say, you've got to grab them by the balls, their minds and hearts will follow ²¹⁸

Viewed this way, the Green Revolution in Mexico has a continuity with the colonization of Latin America, in which colonists monopolized the most fertile land, away from their function of sustaining the local population and instead towards producing profitable crops for export. Those who used to farm those lands are marginalized—if they weren't outright killed—towards less productive lands with greater water scarcity²¹⁵.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is constant target for Green Revolution development²²⁰. Food imports in SSA have increased for decades²¹⁹, and part of this is blamed on low productivity due to low fertilizer usage²²¹⁶⁰ and high levels of soil degradation and erosion²²². Fertilizer is especially expensive in SSA, in large part due to high transportation costs²²¹ (some of this might be addressed by recent development of domestic production capacity²²³) ; farmers there can pay as much as five times as a farmer in Europe⁶⁹⁶⁸. Because of the overapplication of fertilizers elsewhere, and the accompanying environmental harm, some call for increasing fertilizer use in SSA with a corresponding or larger decrease elsewhere (for example, 588kg nitrogen fertilizer/ha/year in northern China vs 7kg in Kenya)²²⁴.

The soil degradation which supposedly necessitates synthetic fertilizer in SSA is often attributed to poor management, a form of development rhetoric that frames peasants as ignorant about how best to work their land^{215205212222216}. More recent degradation looks to have more to do with climatic and biophysical factors²²², but the farming of soil eroded lands has more to do with a process of marginalization—the original farmers had developed their methods of effective soil conservation²²²²¹³—where larger landholders, European colonists, and transnational corporations monopolize the highest quality land and displace other farmers to smaller and smaller holdings, where the land has to be worked harder to meet the same needs^205204213. In some cases, it is these transnational companies that overwork the soil, moving on to other fertile land once it's been exhausted²⁰⁵.

The increased adoption of synthetic fertilizers might only accelerate this soil degradation. One study looked at Zambia's input subsidy program and found that the introduction of fertilizer subsidy programs does in fact increase fertilizer usage, which subsequently leads to a reduction in traditional low- or no-input fertility-management methods such as fallowing and intercropping and an increase in continuous cropping—that is, a shift towards more intensive agriculture that disrupts natural cycles of soil restoration^38225226. This shift in turn contributes to reduced levels of soil organic matter, which is important for maintaining soil health, which decreases the soil quality. Though there was a short-term boost in productivity, the resulting soil degradation could lead to a net decline in the long run which can only be delayed by further increasing the usage of expensive fertilizer²²⁵.

A review of eighty studies on fertilizer subsidies in Africa found that these subsidies are more likely to go to households with larger landholdings, greater wealth, and/or connections to the government, even if programs are ostensibly deliberately designed to avoid such outcomes²²⁴²²⁷. Fertilizer use stops once subsidies are withdrawn, so farmers are left with degraded soil and unable to afford the now necessary inputs to stabilize yields. Ultimately, productivity increases peter out after a few years, and there are only negligible effects on improving self-sufficiency, reducing import dependency, and alleviating poverty²²⁷.

These subsidies are expensive: African governments devote a large part of their budgets to these input subsidies, some $1 billion a year²²⁵²²⁰. For Zambia, as much as 35% of the country's agricultural budget was going towards fertilizer subsidies²²⁴. At one point, 9% of the Malawi's entire budget went to these subsidies²¹². This is more or less a transfer of public funds to fertilizer producers like Bayer/Monsanto²¹²²²⁰.

As high as these subsidies are, they can't compete with those in wealthier countries. OECD countries provide subsidies to their own farmers of about $1 billion per day²²⁸, and such financial support encompassed 30% of all farm receipts from 2003-2005¹⁷⁸.

This is compounded by the fact that Green Revolution technologies often come as a package. Specific varieties of crops are necessary to achieve the full yield improvements of synthetic fertilizer use (this varieties are usually intellectual property), and increased sensitivity to pests from fertilizer user necessitates the use of pesticides^38119229. Higher productivity can also require more water, beyond what the water cycle normally provides, so irrigation also increases²⁷.

In the case of Malawi, the suggested alternative to fertilizer subsidies is addressing underlying issues:

policies aimed at relieving the key constraints that our model tries to capture—such as land, credit and labor availability—might go further towards addressing the bottlenecks to on-farm intensification that smallholders in Malawi encounter, and could lead to the adoption of better on-farm practices that reverse soil degradation and improve the long-term viability of small-holder agriculture.²²⁶

Interestingly, many countries in SSA are agricultural exporters while being net food importers. That is, SSA's dependency on food imports is in part due to agricultural land and resources being directed for export-oriented production (in a form reminiscent of their colonial histories²³⁰) rather than supplying the country's food needs—"even a small substitution in their agricultural export products into food would eliminate their deficits"²¹⁰.

This push towards agricultural production for export is in part driven by this need for income to purchase food imports and in part to manage national debts. The 1990s, Malawi, under the advisement of USAID and the tobacco industry, re-oriented production from food crops to tobacco crops with the goal of paying off its debt, with part of the rationale being that revenue from tobacco exports would be plenty to purchase the food needed to account for reduced production. The consequence, however, was that the ability for Malawian farmers to feed themselves was no longer dependent on their own agricultural ability, but rather on market prices for tobacco—which fell by 37% in 2009, and made it difficult for farmers to feed themselves²¹².

Sometimes this shift to export-oriented cash crops is further frustrated by the surpluses of major producers. Where some countries had advantages in producing things like sugar, the rise of processed foods meant fewer people were consuming sugar directly, instead mediated by processed foods—and as such, that opened up the possibility of sugar substitutes, i.e. HFCS, which then undermined countries with the comparative advantage for sugar production, as corn was overproduced and very cheap. Thus these countries were in a double-bind: food import dependency plus declining revenues from crop exports¹⁹².

These dynamics appear elsewhere too. In Nepal, though fertilizer subsidies do tend to increase crop yields, environmental problems are exacerbated²³¹, and the subsidies may disproportionately benefit farmers who are more connected to the state and/or wealthier to begin with²³¹²²¹. In India, initial bumper crops from subsidized fertilizer application then gave way to crop failures and soil depletion³⁸²³², saw a move away from traditional techniques like crop rotation towards continuous cultivation of export-oriented crops³⁸, and increased stratification between farmers who could afford the Green Revolution technologies and those who could not afford to stay on their land³⁸²⁰⁵. Vandana Shiva describes deeper social shifts these technologies fomented:

The shift from internal to externally purchased inputs did not merely change ecological processes of agriculture. It also changed the structure of social and political relationships, from those based on mutual (though asymmetric) obligations—within the village to relations of each cultivator directly with banks, seed and fertilizer agencies, food procurement agencies, and electricity and irrigation organisations.³⁸

Hand to Mouth

Content warning: There is some mention of suicide in this section.

This high-input and market-dependent form of agriculture puts farmers into a double-bind: they are both exposed to the impacts of fertilizer prices on their own production costs but also on the costs of their food¹⁵⁶⁹. One study finds that increasing fertilizer prices would decrease crop yields by up to 13%⁷, reducing income.

In addition to the typical weather and climatic risks of agriculture, they are now exposed to the volatility of export restrictions, financial speculation, as well as the weather and climactic risks of wherever they import food from^2334815! Risk has magnified, rather than diffused, through this system^23415233212.

Arrangements such as contract farming integrate smaller farmers into global agricultural industrial supply chains through arrangements that ensure buyers (with substantially more market power, who do not need contribute to the costs of production, also ways around labor laws) bear little of this risk⁷⁸²¹², much like the increasing use of contract workers throughout other industries.

Scalability becomes absolutely vital to generate enough revenue to remain solvent. Farmers with lower yields—i.e. subsistence farmers and those with less access to the capital necessary for scaling up—are the ones at the greatest risk^19882235. Agricultural finance recognizes this, compounding the effect by giving larger farms cheaper loans, along with other advantages such as more opportunities to exploit cheap labor²⁰⁴. The trap is intensified due to the declining effectiveness of inputs, which have the effect of degrading the soil²³². The general necessity of absolutely maximizing output for a piece of land encourages the extractivist model of agriculture, in which the soil is "mined", with nutrients pulled out faster than they can be naturally replaced⁷⁸; sometimes even faster than they can be "unnaturally" replaced. In India, farmers require three times the fertilizer to achieve the same yields as they used to, while the prices for those crops remain the same or decline²³². Insolvency is basically inevitable.

When farmers try to re-integrate traditional practices or develop systems parallel to conventional inputs, they are shut down. In Zimbabwe, farmers could not sell their own seeds as alternatives to the engineered hybrids—the practice was made illegal²¹³.

What are the consequences of this precarity and lack of control over one's life? One may be an increase in farmer suicides²¹—farming is the profession most at-risk for suicide²³⁶. The farmers most likely to commit suicide are those who have marginal landholdings, focus on cash crops, and are indebted, which are exacerbated by all of the dynamics described above^213821652.

Another consequence of this precarity is the increasing concentration of agricultural land and production.

Land Grabbing

Farmers, now unable to support themselves on the land, have no choice but to sell it. Agricultural land concentrates into fewer and fewer hands, contiguous with the dispossessions that occurred with colonization. Here, however, these dispossessions result from a mix of economic factors, driven by overproduction, and legal means, with post-colonial states, under the direction of development organizations like the US's Millennium Challenge Corporation, often facilitating the process by unilaterally replacing traditional land right systems with ones more amenable to foreign investment and ownership^212218237.

More recently foreign acquisition of agricultural land, called "land grabs", have attracted a lot of attention. These acquisitions may be about food, water, and energy security^238239240, just about expanding agribusiness amidst rising demand for biofuels and other cash crops²³⁹, and for financial speculation²¹²²⁴¹, faciliated by technologies that make their agricultural development easier to manage remotely as financial assets²⁴². The countries where these land grabs are most common in recent years are Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia²⁴³. In Ethiopia, some 10% of the country's agricultural land has been handed to foreign investors for commodity crops for export²¹². The World Bank and FAO has framed these as "win-win" opportunities for economic development¹³²⁴⁴ . In Sudan this export-oriented appropriation of land saw higher food prices, monopolized water usage, and resistance from the local population that was met with violence²³⁷.

Sometimes farmers aren't displaced but are actively involved in the investment process, seeking capital to stay afloat²⁴². Otherwise farmers are displaced²⁰⁴²³⁷: for example, a British firm acquired 9,000 ha of land in Tanzania, potentially displacing over 11,000 people for biodiesel production²⁴⁵. The newly managed farms may be highly automated so that there isn't even much promise of any employment²⁴⁰, so these displaced people constitute a "surplus" population often relegated to slums²⁰⁴. Foreign workers are brought in to work the land with relatively little interaction with the local population²⁴³; the land is meant to operate, it seems, as a virtual extension of the country that owns it.

This is also occurring throughout the global North, where agricultural productivity tends to be higher and property rights are less risky for investors²⁴², though the Food Security is National Security Act was introduced in 2017 to prevent foreign control of US agricultural land²⁴⁶. In the EU, millions of farms were lost over the past decades²¹². In the US, there is the original and ongoing dispossession of indigenous lands and subsequent and ongoing dispossession of black farmers' land^24724189. US agriculture is already highly concentrated: some 3% of farms in the US are responsible for 50% of the value of all agricultural production⁵⁰⁸⁹.

Often this land remains idle. For example, biofuel production slowed when oil became cheap again, and it wasn't worth developing the land².

Back to Biomass

Agricultural products encompass much more than just food; they are also produced as fuel, pharmaceuticals, bioplastics, and so on. Even within the category of "food" there are agricultural products for direct human consumption, those that are used as animal feed, and that used for food processing (e.g. snacks, beverages, oils). These categories are not clear cut either: corn may be grown for any of these, but corn itself is a heterogeneous crop and individual corn varieties are not necessarily fungible. Corn grown for animal feed, for instance, will be starchier than that grown for direct human consumption. Cane or beet sugar, though something we use in cooking directly, is more commonly an input into the snack and beverage industry (where it hasn't been out competed by corn-derived high fructose corn syrup). The same is true for other such "flex crops", which have a variety of possible end-uses.

The sustainability of food production and its ability to actually feed people then is deeply connected to these alternative uses of agricultural capacity. For example, expanded demand for biofuels may cause food prices to rise (30% of grain price increases during the 2007-2008 global price food spike is attributed to biofuel demand²⁴⁸) and encourage deforestation from agricultural expansion ^24925015. Here food's market value dictates whether or not it's grown instead of potentially more profitable alternatives. But there are many things we can do to reduce the necessity of fuels; we cannot reduce our need for food to live.

Agroecology and Technology

What alternative is there to all of this? The commodification of food—seeing it as something to be produced and sold like factory goods—drives a lot of the dynamics described above. Agroecology that sees food not as something to be manufactured and agriculture not as a factory-like process but as a scaffolding for relationships and a source of autonomy.

Agroecology has some overlap with practices like organic and regenerative agriculture, at least in terms of focusing on environmentally-friendlier techniques, but where it differs is its commitment to social and economic issues outside of the specific production process (sometimes contrasted with a "input substitution" approach to agriculture²⁰⁸). An organic or a regenerative farm's efforts at sustainable or remediative production might be hampered by market demands, for example²⁵¹. That's sort of reflective of organic agriculture's trajectory. As Julie Gutman describes in Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California, organic agriculture originally encompassed more radical notions of food system change but was over time shaped to be focused on very specific aspects of the production process and integrated into the existing agribusiness industry²⁵². Agroecology is not itself immune to this kind of co-optation, as a recent report on "junk agroecology" describes²⁵³.

Peter Rosset and Miguel Altieri outline agroecological production principles:

The production system must (1) reduce energy and resource use and regulate the overall energy input so that the output:input ratio is high; (2) reduce nutrient losses by effectively containing leaching, runoff, and erosion, and improve nutrient recycling through the use of legumes, organic manure and compost, and other effective recycling mechanisms; (3) encourage local production of food items adapted to the natural and socioeconomic setting; (4) sustain desired net output by preserving natural resources (by minimizing soil degradation); and (5) reduce costs and increase the efficiency and economic viability of small and medium-sized farms, thereby promoting a diverse, potentially resilient agricultural system.²⁰⁸

Actual techniques can encompass many things, such as re-integrating rural-urban nutrient cycles²⁵⁴, using natural fertilizers and nitrogen-fixing cover crops like legumes, soil-conserving and soil-building practices, ecologically-rooted pest management practices, and so on²⁰⁸. These have both environmental and economic benefits. For example: a system integrating perennial native prairie plants can reduce fertilizer use and runoff, saving more than $850 million per year in costs and damage⁷⁴, and can increase yields by improving soil health, such as with the use of "fertilizer trees" as in parts of Africa (a practice called "evergreen agriculture")²⁵⁵²⁵⁶. These techniques can be used while considering their social and political effects. George Washington Carver, for example, advocated the use of legumes (such as peanuts) both as a way of maintaining soil health but also as part of a program for economic and political autonomy²⁵⁷. Agroecological soil management practices can improve fertility without needing to resort to subsidized inputs²⁵⁸, helping break the debt cycle. In general, these approaches have been found to improve crop yields while reducing inputs²⁵⁸.

The acroecology movement is led by peasants and peasant organizations like the Landless Workers Movement (MST), the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (ELZN), and La Via Campesina, with networks encompassing thousands and thousands of small producers across continents^78259260. Peasants are a powerful force; despite centuries of dispossession, over half of the world's arable land is still under their ownership⁷⁸, and, despite industrial agriculture's dominance in our food system, are major producers of food.

Smallholders (farmers with <2ha of land) produce about a third of the world food supply (measured as calories) on about a quarter of the agricultural area (close to half of the food supply if farms <5ha of land are included)²⁶¹. What this implies is that smallholders already have productivity that out pace larger-scale operations, even on land that may be marginal. Further research and development of agroecological, low-input methods have the possibility to increase this number even more. However, funding tends to disappear for researchers developing these techniques²²⁸²⁶². One example is that, following a $1.7 million donation to Iowa State University by the Koch Foundation (the Koch brothers own Koch Fertilizer), the university's Aldo Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture had its funding pulled after 30 years²⁶³. Despite this, agroecological innovation happens outside of formal research settings through peer-to-peer knowledge exchange and development. Unlike the agricultural input industry, which is top-down and where products are pushed onto farmers who have essentially no input in their design, agroecological techniques are often co-created by peasants and refined to their own specific contexts⁷⁸.

Agroecology is sometimes characterized as a romanticization of labor-intensive subsistence farming²⁶⁴. A lot of labor-saving technologies basically work by substituting human labor with fossil fuels. If we look at the energy efficiency of these technologies, we see a different picture: about five times energy (fossil fuels, mostly) go into one kg of cereal in industrialized countries vs farmers in Africa, with more drastic differences on a crop-by-crop comparison, such as 33 times energy in the US to produce one kilo of maize as a traditional farmer in Mexico²¹². There are similar estimates for industrial food production more generally, 3kcal fossil fuel for 1kcal food¹⁹, with estimates as high as 7kcal for 1kcal¹⁷⁸ or 10kcal²²⁹²⁶⁵. That the industrial-style of agriculture (input-heavy) is a net negative in terms of energy has been demonstrated since at least 1960s; which is characterized in terms of crops that are bred to maximize productivity in terms of the valuable parts of the crop (e.g. what is edible) at the expense of other functions, such as pest resistance, which are instead externalized to, for example, pesticides²⁶⁶.

Similarly, agroecological methods have been characterized as equivalent to traditional subsistence practices or the movement as anti-technology²⁶⁷. It may be more appropriate to say that it has a different understanding of technology, measuring it not only by how useful it is in the field, but by what impacts it has on relationships. Does it create a dependency on finite resources and empower large companies? Does it involve buying into a system of debt²⁶²? "Technology" is also often conflated with industrial, large-scale, and energy-intensive processes, but traditional labor-saving practices like coppicing²⁶⁸or the ongoing development of perennial grains²⁶⁹ can also be considered technologies of sorts. The previously mentioned fertilizer tree system is itself an outcome of research starting in the 1980's on nitrogen fertilization alternatives, conducted with the participation of farmers²⁵⁶, offering an example of productive agroecological research. The Out of the Woods collective also describe "cyborg ecology", where technology adoption should not be out of some binary commitment to a constructed purity around traditional techniques or modern technologies but out of evaluating what works without sacrificing ecological and social priorities²⁵⁹. The distributed production of solar fertilizers mentioned much earlier might fit this criteria.

Cuba is sometimes pointed to as an example of what agroecological practices could make possible on a larger scale. Cuban agriculture was once more akin to industrial, Green Revolution agriculture found elsewhere, supported by trade deals with the Soviet Union which supplied the necessary inputs: fossil fuels, fertilizers, machinery, etc.¹⁷⁰²⁶⁰ When the Soviet Union collapsed, these inputs were suddenly unavailable, resulting in GDP and calorie consumption each plummeting by one-third^{27027123544186}. Ongoing US blockades prevented dumping of cheap food into the Cuban market, further forcing Cuba to develop its own self-sufficiency in the absence of these inputs²³⁵.

Through this "Special Period", land reform redistributed over 1 million hectares of state-owned land to a variety of cooperatives and individuals^{27027117026044} (under usufruct terms, so most of the land is still state-owned¹⁸⁶). Cuba went on to achieve the highest per capita food growth rates in Latin America²⁶⁰, facilitated by the land reform and the adoption and peer-to-peer transmission of agroecological techniques via peasant movements such as Campesino-a-Campesino^26023517078—the latter of which was ongoing, but provided an opportunity to expand after the forced withdrawal of the industrial regime¹⁸⁶. Over 65% of the country's food is produced by peasant family farms on 35% of the total arable land.¹⁸⁶Cuban urban gardens, organopónicos, also a legacy of the post-Soviet "Special Period", produce as much as 70% of the fresh vegetables consumed in cities²⁷⁰²⁷¹ and 50% of the produce for the entire country¹⁸⁶. Lower levels of dissolved nitrogen in the island's rivers, compared to the US's Mississippi River Basin, is speculated to be a consequence of this shift in farming practices²⁷².

This is not to say Cuban agriculture is fully agroecological—there are still conventional farms (usually state-run) and varying adoption of agroecological techniques¹⁸⁶. There is still some dependency on oil for agriculture, though those who have adopted agroecology are more resilient to its absence, such as from US sanctions this past year²⁷³.

Cuba's food system still has other issues, such as with food waste, which is comparable to rates elsewhere, and generally attributed to infrastructural inadequacies rather than the overproduction and market-driven causes in the global north¹⁸⁶. Yet this still results in inadequate food for many.

Pressure from agribusiness entering into Cuba²⁷⁴, especially with opening Cuba-US relations (for example: a Cargill-associated "US Agriculture Coalition for Cuba" seeks to "to lift the embargo in order to liberalize trade and investment and reestablish Cuba as a market for US products"¹⁸⁶), and tensions within the country with some leaders advocating for higher-input/more conventional systems²⁷¹. Changing relationships with the US may be the largest determinant of how Cuban agriculture changes in the future, with fears that it may become more focused on export for organic food markets and less on supplying domestic needs¹⁸⁶.

Cuba's dependency on expensive food imports has also increased¹⁷⁰ which has made expanded self-sufficiency a priority. Laws were passed in 2008 and 2012 to enact a further distribution of 1.7 million hectares of land to over 200,000 farmers, with roughly an additional 900,00 hectares up for distribution in 2017¹⁸⁶. The impacts so far are unclear — the overall amount of food imports is contested, with one figure placing it at 40%¹⁸⁶. Hurricanes increase Cuba's dependency on food imports, though the agroecological farms tend to recover more quickly than monoculture farms²⁷¹¹⁸⁶. Though Cuba's food system is not perfect, it shows that an agroecological system is worthwhile and achievable.

Conclusion: Healing the Rift

The focus here has been on food, but these issues will become more pressing as the economy—if we are to adequately address climate change—shifts back to one with greater dependence on biomass for materials. Consider that a tremendous amount of materials are petroleum-derived or otherwise produced from non-renewable resources²⁵⁴—including those that industrial agriculture rely on⁷⁸. Switching to bioplastics, for instance, can have greater environmental impacts and greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum-based plastics due to land use change²⁷⁵.

Climate change will lead to an aggregate decrease in agricultural productivity^27621262, increasing the number and scale of droughts and heatwaves²⁹ and eroding and submerging productive land²⁷⁷. Food prices would rise and possibly encourage an influx of investors and speculation. We could see climate change and its effects on food production used to increase pressure of technocratic development authorities to act with a stronger mandate to implement Green Revolution-style programs and strengthen the narrative of peasants using land unproductively and as justification for land grabs. Climate change is already having an effect on displacing farmers²³⁹.

The key cause for these issues with conventional agriculture stem from the fact that it is not designed to fulfill a need—i.e. sustenance and nutrition, though it is often spoken as such in policy and popular discourse—but rather, it is designed to produce and sell commodities. There is a huge dissonance between the refrain of FAO population projections and the need to increase food production to feed them, when the current system of tremendous output fails to feed even the people we have now.

A report from Nature notes that, "[p]roducing enough food for the world's population in 2050 will be easy."²²⁸. The report goes on to note, the more urgent challenges are sustainable productivity and, more importantly, poverty—poverty that is itself produced by this productivist agricultural regime. As the authors note:

The 2008 food crisis, which pushed around 100 million people into hunger, was not so much a result of a food shortage as of a market volatility — with causes going far beyond supply and demand — that sent prices through the roof and sparked riots in several countries.²²⁸

A recent paper similarly suggests that almost 11 billion people can be adequately fed within planetary boundaries, but it requires a radical restructuring of global agriculture¹⁷.

One way to support this restructuring is to return wealth that has been extracted from these post-colonial nations and invest it in agricultural infrastructure that support greater food autonomy. It can mean increasing public research for agroecological methods and land reform, such as redistributing land back to those who have stewarded it for generations²¹⁵. It requires moving on from the concept of food security—market access to food—to food sovereignty: producing food for need, prioritizing agroecological methods, local production and control^212278178, and restoring more context-appropriate traditional crops where they have been displaced by commodity crops²¹³.

The problems of fertilizer are inseparable from the broader political and economic problems of food production. Throughout history people have recognized how a community's control over their own means of living is a prerequisite for flourishing and self-determination. As Vann R. Newkirk II notes in his "The Great Land Robbery":

There’s a reason the fabled promise that spread among freedmen after the Civil War was not a check, a job, or a refundable tax credit, but 40 acres of farmland to call home.

Modeling demonic divinities

Growing up I was very fond of Buddhist art and I would make an effort to visit various Buddhist temples whenever my family would go to China to see my grandparents. I found the paintings and sculptures of terrifying figures to be strangely calming, and only later did I learn that these fearsome beings are in fact benevolent, wrathful "protectors".

While visiting Kira's parents last week I had the opportunity to read through the catalogue for one of the Rubin Museum's opening exhibitions, "Demonic Divine" which was exactly on this topic. I've wanted to find some way to draw from this tradition of "divine demons" for Fugue and reading through the catalogue helped me figure out how I could do that.

Without going into too much detail, one fundamental Fugue world-element is the phenomenon of "hauntings", which are mental blocks and fears that characters experience. The character progression system is based around confronting and resolving these hauntings (perhaps in addition to a simpler experience-based system, not really sure yet). The way I've pictured this is that progression happens along a path (the character's "道"/"way" in a sense) and these hauntings are literal roadblocks, represented by these demons, along this path. So a key question is how exactly does this process of resolving hauntings¹ work?

One other feature I want to include is an in-game game (tentatively called "Gem"), sort of like Triple Triad in Final Fantasy VIII. Including something like that lets you do a lot of interesting things: explore its cultural significance, show how different places and people interpret the game (perhaps with different house rules and variations), explore all the infrastructure that comes up around a relatively simple game once it becomes a major phenomenon (rules committees, judges, player associations, its role in national conflict, etc), and in general be a means of showing different value systems, thought processes, philosophies, etc, like Azad in Iain M. Banks' The Player of Games. I'm still working out Gem's design, but so far it's like some combination of chess, checkers, and Chinese checkers, with the variability of a card game—i.e. many different pieces with different abilities, and players can build a "deck" of pieces to play with like they might build a deck in Magic: The Gathering.

My current thinking is that to get through a demonic roadblock you challenge the demon to a game of Gem, in a "chess with death" style. The demon itself is represented as a piece on the game board that you need to remove, sort of like the king in chess. However the goal of the game is not necessarily to "defeat" the demon. Each demon represents a mental block/fear that has a complementary virtue; the point is not to excise the demon from your mind but to recognize its value as an ally. In the context of Gem, this means capturing the demon instead of destroying it. If I design Gem right, then capturing the demon will be comparatively difficult to destroying it. If you're able to capture it (maybe "convert" is a better term) then you have access to that piece for future games of Gem and perhaps some kind of bonus "blessing" for the character outside of Gem.

I've been working on modeling the first demon, based on Chitipati. Chitipati is two skeletons depicted with a frame of flames which acts as a memento mori and more generally represent endless change:

The first part I tried to model is the flame halo. Similar features are common in wrathful diety iconography so this model would be useful for other demons too. I made several attempts at modeling these flames using only Blender's geometry nodes with the hope of generating them procedurally, but they never came out well (maybe because of my inexperience with geometry nodes). In the end I hand-modeled five flames and use geometry nodes to distribute them in an arch, which I'm happy with:

When I moved on to modeling Chitipati I started with a fair amount of detail. It did not look very good, so I gave it another shot from scratch using a rougher approach, and it looked a lot better (though the hands look TERRIBLE...I'll give them more attention later maybe, to organize them as particular mudras). Relying on textures for detail rather than capturing it in the mesh makes a lot more sense for this game, especially if I'm using photo-textures. And because I'm rendering out at a lower resolution, finer mesh detail won't really show up anyways.

A side note: I'm modeling this demon as only one skeleton, rather than Chitipati's two.

This test render's resolution is high enough where the lack of mesh detail is apparent (pretty boxy looking in some parts). When rendered in-game the low detail looks more appropriate:

Infilling and seamless tiling with GIMP

One idea for the flame halo was to use content-aware fill or a similar infilling algorithm to generate a full image of the flame background and then some how turn that into a 3d model. That route didn't really work—I couldn't make it look good; it just looked flat and janky—but I did find an infilling plugin for GIMP called Resynthesizer that is really promising. It didn't work very well for the flame frame (perhaps because it's an illustration or because there isn't a lot of content to reference for the infilling) but it works much better with texture photography. Here's an example using an image of some overgrowth:

After applying the Resynthesis plugin (using Filters > Map > Resynthesize) and checking "Make horizontally tileable" and "Make vertically tileable":

That result looks great, but it wasn't actually seamlessly tileable. Fortunately there is another filter, Filters > Map > Tile Seamless, that handles that:

It looks really good tiled:

This texture has a lot going on so it may be an easier example. If you look closely at the seamless tile version you can see some ghost leaves overlapping other leaves, which might be more noticeable in a sparser texture.

It's more apparent in these textures:

You can see some mushiness/blurriness/choppiness in the patterns from the overlapping areas. It's not terrible, especially for textures you won't look closely at and in the context of the game's downsampled resolution. Again, part of the game's aesthetic is about giving a big margin of error for quick-and-dirty assets, whether through low poly modeling or iffy automated tools.

When I have more time I want to see about integrating this directly into the Texture Editor from the last post; it would be nice to not have to open up GIMP every time to process images this way.

As a side note, it's been awhile since I've used GIMP and I'm impressed by this latest version! Feels like it had a big glow up like Blender did.

For the past year I worked on Half-Earth Socialism, an online game accompanying the book of the same name by Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese (Verso 2022). The game launched at the beginning of May; you can play it here. This post will make more sense after you've played the game!

This post is adapted from a talk I gave at Trust (who organized the project) and goes a bit into the design and development process of the game.

Genesis

Trust was approached early in 2021 about developing a website to accompany the forthcoming book Half-Earth Socialism, which would be published a little more than a year later. To very, very briefly summarize the book (the book itself is a quick read so I encourage you to give it a look!): the authors focus on land use as the central variable of concern for the health of the planet (hence the name "Half-Earth" socialism, building off of E.O. Wilson's idea of the same name) and emphasize the need for rational democratic planning to make decisions around the future of the world. For example: how much land should be devoted to energy production, and how much to food?

Democratic planning requires some way for people to meaningfully engage with plans: to understand them, evaluate them, and make their own plans. The original proposal for the site was based around a linear programming calculator where people could play with the parameters of a model that Drew wrote. I imagined it as something akin to Chris Crawford's Balance of the Planet (1990), where the player is similarly adjusting parameters of a global model to influence planetary health.

In this original version you could choose your energy mix, energy use levels, meat consumption, and so on. The model would figure out the allocation of land, emissions, and so on that were required. Using this model you can easily compare results and see, for example, that veganism opens up quite a lot of land for energy production. But part of the book's appeal is the vignettes throughout that imagine what life might be like under Half-Earth socialism or what it might be like were it not to happen. We wanted to take this model and build a richer, more narrative experience around it to reflect some of the feeling those vignettes evoked: the pacing of such a world, people's concerns and values, and the social fabric of their lives.

Reading Group

Before any development began we first participated in a reading group, organized by Chiara Di Leone, covering topics like: socialist cybernetics, cybernetic planning, complex systems management interface design, climate modeling, and games that we found interesting or related to the these topics. These helped us coalesce on a set of mechanics, design elements, constraints, and feelings to develop the game around.

Two games that we looked closely at were 11 Bit Studio's Frostpunk and Nerial's Reigns. Frostpunk's gameplay is centered around one primary variable (heat) and is filled with many brutal, no-win policy decisions around managing morale. The game is really well organized around its primary variable—it's very easy to see how heat is distributed, what's producing it, how it decays, and so on, so even though the decisions can be difficult, you're seldom disoriented or confused about what your priorities are. The game is, however, very dark and depressing. In contrast to Half-Earth Socialism's more utopian outlook, Frostpunk is a never-ending crisis. We knew that we wanted our game's arc to be different: the beginning is a difficult struggle to get through, but if you do well the game opens up into a world better than the pre-crisis past. There's light on the other side!

We knew early on that we wanted the game to be a web game, keeping in line with the original website idea and making sure that it's easy to access. If you're making a web game then you really need to consider mobile usage. We expected that most people would share the game on Twitter and thus others would likely encounter it on their phones and want to give it a try right there. That assumption's held: the majority of plays so far have been on mobile resolutions. Reigns was a main inspiration of how you could make a simple yet deeply engaging game for mobile. It has one main interaction—swiping left or right—but it's enough to support a great branching narrative. It's also very flexible in terms of time commitment: you can play a session for a few minutes or an hour if you want. That's something we wanted to replicate in our game—players could finish a run in 5 to 10 minutes, do something else, and come back and try a different approach later. That isn't how things turned out (people have spent 30 minutes just reading the starting cards) and in the end the scope of our game was just too complex to really reproduce these elements of Reigns.

From the whole reading group process came a few orienting values:

• Accuracy: Most games prioritize a fun and engaging experience, and often systems that have real-world correlates are simplified in service of this priority. But because of the nature of the book and the weight of the subject, we wanted to prioritize rigor and accuracy a bit more than a typical game would. This was a huge challenge because representing something as complicated as the planet and human economic activity requires a great deal of simplification regardless of commitment to accuracy, and with the complexity of the planet and the global economy, details matter a lot. And often details that don't seem to matter end up becoming quite important later on.
• Amusing: Climate change and ecological disaster are already very weighty topics without us needing to exaggerate it. We wanted to bring some levity to the game so that the player doesn't feel pummeled by depressing thing after depressing thing (although it does kind of happen because of the subject matter). So using dialogue, character design, etc, as outlets to lower the "seriousness" of the game and leave plenty of space for the content to do that.
• Expressive: Another goal was for the game to play like a political compass quiz, in a way. We had a few player "builds" (above) in mind that made play feel expressive.
• Quick: Shorter games that you play in rapid succession, to try different things. I think originally we wanted a session to be 5-10min...but sessions last far longer now. It takes at least 5 minutes just to soak in the game's starting content!

As mentioned above, take a cue from the book and convey the feeling of living under HES through dialogue and other narrative elements.

Development proceeded in roughly five categories:

• Story: the main beats of the game and game dialogue.
• Art Direction: character design, graphics, game feel, and so on.
• Game Design: the game's primary mechanics and interactions.
• Legibility: the game's information design, how players access/read the information they need to make decisions and how they make those decisions.
• Technical Requirements: various constraints around the game's technical infrastructure and architecture

Story

We wanted to give the game world a richer feel through events, which give us opportunities to world-build and develop character personalities. They're also one main way players get feedback about their plans. More importantly they allow us to represent way more than we could with the core game model alone, which focuses on a relatively limited set of variables (water usage, land usage, electricity production, fuel production, etc). With a very simple probability system we can represent a much wider range of events like mass coral bleaching events or cultural changes like a new cuisine trend of eating invasive jellyfish, without needing to make the model itself much more complex.

Of course, the events we have in the game pale in comparison to all the possible events one might think of for the future. They allow us to represent more detail than we could otherwise but open up an overwhelming amount of things we could represent. It's one of those areas where we had to just stop adding things at some point, even though we probably could have added hundreds more.

Technical Requirements

Mobile and web support were the primary technical constraints, and those came with their usual challenges (mostly cross-browser compatibility). The more interesting technical requirements were related to the models and data that we needed.

Early on we knew we wanted to have some kind of climate model running, but climate models are usually huge, requiring supercomputers long periods to run. Drew suggested Hector, which is a "simple climate model". It runs quickly on commodity hardware, but of course lacks the depth and detail of its massive counterparts. From a technical standpoint I didn't really want to have a server crunching a climate model for several players at once, even if it's a relatively simple one. We managed to get it to run directly in the browser so that each player runs their own model independently.

We have some other models running too:

• a biome model, not running on mobile but on desktop, which colors the world according to temperature and precipitation changes over time.
• a linear programming model for determining production resource allocation and guided assistance in planning. This ended up being reduced to a much simpler form because there weren't models available for the browser that handled the kind of optimization we needed.

The other major set of requirements were data requirements. For processes there were input requirements per unit output, impacts (e.g. CO2 emissions) per unit output, and current global process mixes. We also needed current emissions, current biodiversity loss, population projections aggregated for each region, global per-capita demand for each of our outputs, estimate per-capita impacts based on regional income levels, and impacts and inputs for different sectors/industries.

It's often very difficult to track down good numbers for these. Data may be available at regional or national levels, but not globally. Or there may be a lot of variability in estimates. Some technologies like vertical farming and cellular agriculture are very new, so there are only estimates for very limited cases, if at all. For example with vertical farming we could only find a couple sources that on a one or two crops published by vertical farming startups (so very unclear how trustworthy the numbers are), and instead relied more on values from more general indoor greenhouse farming.

Art Direction

The game's art direction is mostly Son La's department but I'll briefly mention my two main contributions.

The first is the globe's design, which took an embarrassingly long time (I'm really inexperienced with shaders). Our main aesthetic reference was a sort of retro-computing, so we played a lot with poorer color representation (dithering) and lower resolutions (pixelation).

The final version drew from this graphic that was produced for an article about the book:

And here's the final version:

One major element of the game's feel was the imagery we used to represent projects, processes, and events. We had a very small team, and it was really only Son La creating visual content (and also working on the UI development). We ended up with 238 events, 123 projects, 29 processes, 9 industries, and 20 regions, all of which needed images, so ~420 images total. There was no way we could create all of that on our own, so we looked at CC-licensed and public domain imagery. The problem with sourcing images that way is that they vary a lot in quality and style, and they kind of just look like digital photos. We played around with ways to process them so that they were more interesting and consistent and ended up with the following line:

Legibility

There is a lot to consider when assembling your plan and so a major challenge was making information available and clear to the player. All throughout the interface are tooltips and "factors" cards that breakdown what's contributing to whatever variable you clicked on. The hope is that whatever info you need to make a decision is available quickly, but it still is and feels like a lot of information!

Game Design

The most challenging part of the project was the game design. There were a lot of different things we wanted to communicate, different feelings we wanted to evoke, and so that led us down a few different design paths. But the biggest difficult was that the game is meant to somewhat accurately represent a set of very complex systems—we wanted some legitimacy and rhetorical weight behind what happens in the game. This commitment to accuracy of complexity is directly at odds with making an entertaining and accessible game. Most games are not complex in terms of their mechanics. Even games that are very deep do not have to be complex, and they often aren't. Truly complex systems make for unfun games because they in their very nature inscrutable, so they become a very frustrating experience. You never quite know why something is happening: is it because of something you did, is it because of something you didn't do, or did it have nothing to do with you at all? Part of what makes a game fun is learning its rules and systems, and one reasonably expects consistency, predictability, and legibility in how the game responds to your actions. Complex systems don't care.

Balancing was also very difficult to do with such a complex game. We couldn't anticipate all the paths or strategies a player might try. Ultimately we hoped to avoid players finding a strategy that works in the game that wouldn't work in the real world because of some detail we left unmodeled, but it would require a lot more testing to have some assurance that we succeeded.

I'll briefly describe two sets of ideas we had that I really liked but got cut for one reason or another.

Regional System

I remember "space" being a big concern. Given the book's focus on land use, how we deal with space is really important. But it came in conflict with priorities like accuracy. Games might abstract space to make it more manageable, like using larger units of space which then reduces the level of detail you can represent spatially; or they might limit their focus e.g. to a single region or map or level. The earth is really big. We can't really represent it in great detail without just blasting the player with stuff to manage. So we could limit the player's focus at a given time to a single region. That's basically where this design came from.

One bonus was the opportunity for more visual feedback/eye candy: you could zoom into a region and see wildlife return, to make your impacts on the world feel rewarding and more obvious.

But there was a more important game design element to this regional system. We wanted to avoid was the "god view" in games, where the player unilaterally makes decisions of all kinds, which is contra the democratic planning that's emphasized in the book. It's very challenging to design a game about global planning without making it a god game! Games are often fantasies of control...representing democracy in a game very difficult because it can disrupt that fantasy and make the game a frustrating experience. It's interesting how certain kinds of friction are expected in a game, like a hard boss fight being difficult, but others, like having your decisions questioned or ignored, are not.

I don't think we succeeded in avoiding the god view. The parliamentary system is supposed to represent that to some degree, and you can be ousted from power if you're too unpopular. But that's not quite the same as democratic planning. One iteration of this regional system idea had a greater and more autonomous role for individual regions (in the current game they mostly just exist to spatialize the game a bit, but they don't really do much on their own). The player would set targets and maybe some specific policies/projects but regions would go and figure out how to achieve those targets on their own. There would be more bargaining with regions to accept targets or to achieve them in a particular way.

A further iteration on this idea—which was definitely out of reach given our constraints—was a multiplayer regional system. Different people play different regions, and perhaps elect one player to be a global planner for a term. The global planner mediates regional relationships: regions have to negotiate with one another, like if I'm representing East Asia I want North America to reduce their energy usage in exchange for reducing my coal usage or something.

Turn-based System

The other major concept was a turn-based game, similar to Into the Breach. Each turn is some fixed time amount, and you have a preview of everything that will happen in the next turn or next n turns. For example: this natural gas plant will emit this much methane next turn, this patch of permafrost has 50% chance of melting by next turn, this hurricane will move left 2 tiles next turn, etc. It doesn't really work for the global scale, since you can't deal with things like an individual power plant, but I still think you could make a fun and interesting game this way if you could get away with more simplifications. And it's not clear what amount of time a turn should represent. The hurricane movement, for example, requires a much shorter turn time, but other decisions like building new power plants are better suited to turns of a year or more. Similarly, it's not clear what the spatial resolution should be. How many hexagons should the globe be divided into? A hurricane and a power plant are on two different scales.

One advantage of this design was that scientific uncertainty can more easily be a bigger part of the game. That natural gas plant might emit this much methane, but you don't really know without better sensors. That 50% estimate for that patch of permafrost is based on your best climate models, but if you invest in improving them and training more climate scientists you'd have a better estimate. In this way the benefits of good long-term planning manifest as "powerups" in a sense that make the shorter game loop easier.

Card System

We ended up settling on a card-based system. It felt more familiar and easier conceptually, giving players something to hold on to while we barraged them with other new information to absorb. Cards also provide a convenient way to compartmentalize "abilities" and a give players a discrete object to think with. Basically all player actions are expressed through manipulating cards in some way.

There are still a lot of ways to use cards. One idea was to have your plan be something like equipment slots in an RPG, like Diablo (on the left here). But instead of a head slot for your helmet you'd have a concrete slot for your concrete production technology, and another one for your transport policy, and so on.

This is kind of how it works in Civilization 6 (on the right). This form ended up being too limiting because there are many projects we wanted to include that don't fit neatly into an existing slot, thus requiring many single-purpose slots, and just making the whole thing clunky and confusing.

Above are a couple other ideas—on the left we have something based around a deck. One idea was that your "plan" is a deck of cards that you assemble and use to react to events, under the idea that a good plan prepares you for the future. So if your scientists are telling you a major heatwave is likely, you'd have a mass cooling center policy prepared to respond to that heatwave, if it does happen.

This ended up not really working because it feels like busywork for the player—you're making two redundant decisions, the decision to establish the cooling centers, and the decision to use them when the heatwaves occurs. In trying to minimize extra actions, we'd assume that if you have the cooling centers in place, you'd want to use them.

Above is one of our prototypes for card interactions. This one is a Reigns-like interface, with four directions instead of two. We ditched it because as I mentioned the Reigns reactive playstyle didn't quite fit what we needed.

We settled on this "scanning" interaction, which has a retro computing punchcard-like vibe. Conceptually this is like the deck idea without the redundancy: in a way you're scanning cards to add them to your deck (plan) so they make bad future events less likely.

We also wanted to add a political aspect to the game, in part to make gameplay more interesting (the player can't just do everything they want to do—to lessen the "god view" problem) and also add some drama and an opportunity to develop the world through some strong personalities. They also give players some scaffolding to develop playstyles. There's more clear guidance on what an accelerationist might want, for example, to nudge the player towards using those cards. The parliament system was also conceived to bring some of the "democratic" side of "democratic planning", but I don't think we succeeded in that. It's my main regret of the game. I feel that we would have needed to design the game very differently for that to have worked, and at that point it was too late to make such major changes.

Tooling

One last thing I want to show off is the Half-Earth editor, where all the content (dialogue, events, regions, projects, processes, and so on) and model parameters are written. Whenever I embark on a project like this, one of the first things I do (once the main architecture/schemas are sorted out) is build content authoring tools. It makes later work much quicker, makes it easier to experiment with the content, helps me think through more ideas and possible conflicts in that level of the design, and makes it much easier to bring on others (like writers/researchers Lucy Chinen and Spencer Roberts) to contribute without needing to muck about in the code.

Final note

Half-Earth Socialism was one of the bigger projects I've worked on, and I'm proud of what we accomplished with such a small team. Our ultimate ambition was way beyond our capacity and resources, but we managed to achieve quite a lot of it. The game was made possible because of these people:

Wow, it's been almost a year since I last updated this blog.

I haven't had time to work on Fugue until a month or so ago. Since then I've been chipping away at more tooling. Once the core game mechanics/systems are in place, I'm expecting that most of the time will be spent creating content for the game: writing, modeling, environment design, etc. So I'm building out tooling and figuring out strategies to streamline all of these processes.

Godot makes it easy to develop editor plugins that integrate relatively seamlessly. It's not without its challenges and frustrations but those are more to do with Godot in general than specifically about their plugin development process (see below).

Writing

The game will play out mostly through characters saying and doing things, and these actions need to be specified in a way where I don't need to meticulously program each one. Previously the game's narrative elements used "Dialogue" as the main organizing element, focusing on spoken dialogue, and let me write "scripts" of spoken dialogue lines with a playback system to have the appropriate characters say their lines in order. That ended up being too limiting because I want to write not only dialogue but to specify various actions/stage directions to write scripts that basically describe entire scenes, including character movement and animation, sound and environmental cues, and so on. So I restructured that whole system around "Sequence" as the main organizing element, with "Dialogue" as a sub-component.

A Sequence is composed of "Actions", which include dialogue lines, choice prompts, animation triggers, game variable setting, character movement and rotation, etc. At the time of writing the following actions are available:

• Line (L): A line of dialogue, spoken by a single Actor.
• Decision (%): A set of choices that the player must choose from.
• VoiceOver (V): A line of voice-over dialogue. The difference between this and Line is that it does not require the speaking actor to be present and shows in a fixed position on screen.
• Prompt (?): Basically a combination of Line and Decision. A line of dialogue is displayed with the decision's choices.
• Pause (#): A blocking pause in the sequence
• SetVar (=): Set a state variable to the specified value (strings only). There are a number of targets
  • Global: Set it on the global state
  • Sequence: Set it on the local state (local to the current sequence). These values persist through multiple executions of the same sequence (i.e. they aren't reset whenever the sequence is run again).
  • An Actor: Set it on the local state (local to a specific actor).
• PlayAnimation (>): Play an animation with the specified for the specified Actor
• MoveTo (->): Move the Actor to the specified target
  • You can use this to "bounce" the player character if they enter somewhere they aren't supposed to.
• LookAt (@): Have the Actor look at the specified target
• ToggleNode (N): Toggle the visibility of the specified node. Can fade it in/out (but looks quite janky)
• RepositionNode (>N): Move a node to the position and rotation of the specified target. This happens instantaneously...so you could use it for teleportation; but more likely you'd use it to rearrange a scene while it's faded out.
• TogglePortal (P): Enable/disable the specified portal.
• AddItem (+): Add an item to the player's inventory
• PlaySound ())): Play a sound
• Parable (~): Start or end a Parable (Quest)
• Fade (F): Complete fade the scene in or out
• ChangeScene (>S): Change the scene. Because sequences are associated with one scene, this will end the sequence!

Sequences may be triggered in one of three ways: the player interacting with an object (such as talking to an NPC), the player entering a zone/area, or they automatically start when a scene loads ("ambient" sequences).

A "Sequence Script" is a graph of two types of nodes: "Verses", which are lists of actions, and "Forks", which include one or more "Branches" that each have a set of conditions. If a branch's conditions are true then its child verses are executed.

Sequences are associated with only one scene. Generally multiple sequences will be related in some way: the might be part of the same narrative arc, for example. So Sequences can be further organized into "Stories" which is basically just a grouping of Sequences, without any significant additional functionality.

The Sequence and Story Editors both make it very easy to quickly sketch out scripts and later refine them. They both have built-in validators to ensure that scripts are correctly specified, i.e. they don't refer to any objects that aren't in the scene, aren't missing any required data, etc.

Sequences and Stories are just stored as relatively simple JSON so they can be further processed/analyzed outside of Godot easily.

I expect that as the game's writing and development continues more actions will be needed. But for now this set has been comprehensive enough.

Textures

Finding source images that fit my licensing requirements and then editing them into textures is a very tedious process. I built a web tool that makes it much easier to find public domain and CC source images (vastly simplified by Openverse), cut out clippings from them and pack those clippings into textures or generate seamless textures by wrapping and blending their edges. It tracks where the clips were sourced from so that attribution is much easier to manage.

Music

I'm not at the point where I've given a ton of thought to the game's music, but I do have one tool, dust, that I developed to help sketch out musical ideas. I didn't develop it specifically for this game but it'll be useful here too. It's a chord progression generator/jammer that outputs MIDI so it can be used as an input to most DAWs (tested with Bitwig Studio and Live 11). It helps to get around blank-canvas-syndrome by giving you a chord base to start working with.

Miscellaneous

Items

I've started working on the item system, which is very simple at the moment (and hopefully will stay that way). To manage the items I created an Item Editor, which, though a lot simpler than the Sequence Editor, is just as useful.

Blender scripts and templates

Blender's also been nice to work with because of its support for Python scripts. It's a little clunky to get things integrated, but can be powerful once you're going. In my case I'm mostly using a "quick export" script that helps me avoid the tedious work of keeping exported files organized (navigating to the correct folder, setting the filename, etc) and double-checking my export settings are correct. In the case of items, which require a static icon to show in the UI, the export script automatically exports a properly-cropped render of the item to the item icons folder so I don't have to bother with that at all.

Another small but immensely helpful thing is having a specific template for Fugue modeling work, with materials, cameras, and what not preconfigured. My material settings change very infrequently; I'm usually just swapping out textures, so this saves me a lot of time configuring materials over and over again.

Dialogue Layout System

Not really a tool, but something I've been refining for awhile now. This is the system that determines where dialogue boxes are placed on screen. Many games have a fixed dialogue box, e.g. at the center bottom of the screen, but I want it to feel more spatial, especially as there won't be any voiced lines in the game (too expensive/too much work/difficult to change and iterate on) so there won't be any 3d audio to offer that auditory depth.

As far as I know there is no easy or reliable way to layout rectangles in a 2d space to guarantee that there are no overlaps. Not only should there be no overlaps, but each dialogue box should be reasonably close to its "host" (the actor that's speaking) so that it's clear who's speaking. I have a reasonable expectation/constraint for myself that something like five at most actors should be speaking at once and the game has a minimum viewport size to ensure there's a reasonable amount of space. That is, I'm not expecting that overlaps will be impossible, only that they are unlikely given these constraints.

The approach I'm using now is using a fixed set of anchors for each object and a quadtree to detect collisions. We just try placing a box at one of an object's anchors, and if it collides with an existing dialogue box or object, try the next anchor.

As you can see from the prototype above (on-screen objects are beige, off-screen objects are grey, and dialogue boxes are black), it's not perfect. The box 8 at the top overlaps a bit with object 2 — this is due to how dialogue boxes for off-screen objects are handled, which could be refined, but I'm treating as an acceptable edge case for now.

Another shortcoming is how 2d bounding boxes are calculated from 3d objects. Basically I compute the bounding rectangular prism around the object and project that to 2d space. Depending on the shape of the object that may work well or it may end up placing an anchor far-ish from the object's mesh. You can kind of see it in the screenshot below, the "I'm on the move" dialogue box is meant to accompany the smaller NPC, but it's kind of far away. Tighter bounding boxes might be possible but I'm worried about the overhead they'd require. Something to look more into.

Unit Testing

Godot doesn't have its own unit testing framework but there are two popular third-party options: gdUnit3 and Gut. They both seem fairly powerful but Gut felt a bit clunky and I couldn't get gdUnit3 to work properly (compile errors, which I chalk up to Godot's weird stochastic-feeling nature, more on that below). I ended up writing my own very simple testing framework instead. It lacks basically all of the advanced features present in other testing frameworks (spies, mocks, etc), but for my needs it's working great.

Things not covered here

There are still a few key content areas that I don't have a good approach for:

• Character animation. This is something I'm not very good at and a huge factor in the visual quality of the game. Crunchy textures and low-poly models are a lot more forgiving than terrible animations. There are now deep learning motion capture tools that might work with a commodity web camera, but I haven't tried them yet so I don't know if their output is good and what the workflow is like.
• Mapping textures. Taking a texture and then adjusting a model's UV map so that it doesn't look warped is also really, really tedious. No idea how to streamline that.
• Object modeling. This is harder to streamline/automate because there's so much variation. Some categories like buildings and plants could be streamlined through procedural generation via Blender's geometry node system. Fortunately I enjoy modeling so I don't really mind doing this, it'll just be very time consuming. One more general possibility is to figure out a decent processing pipeline for taking free models and converting them into an polygon count that matches everything else. But finding an approach that is robust enough seems unlikely.
• Character modeling. To make the world feel lively I'd like to have many, many background characters and a fair amount of more important NPCs. This might be doable with some kind of procedural/parameter character variation system (i.e. creating a few key archetype models, then having a script to vary some vertices, scales, etc) alongside with a procedural texture generation system (for clothing, etc). Again, this might be doable with Blender's geometry node system.

Thoughts on working with Godot

I've spent a far amount of time with Godot while working on all of this. My only reference point is Unity, which was very unpleasant to work with. Everything felt so fragile. Small changes can break tons of other things, with no easy way to undo the damage. Kind of like how in Microsoft Word adding a space can mess up your whole document's layout.

Godot has overall felt better than this, but it still has a similar, if reduced, fragility. I've felt discouraged to experiment with new ideas out of the fear that I will just break a bunch of existing code/scenes and have to manually fix everything. I've found that even just opening a scene file can alter its contents—not yet in a way that has caused me trouble, but it's still very different than other programming work I've done, where things really only change if you change them. It's like trying to build a house on moving ground. Version control is a bit of a safety blanket but its effectiveness depends on what changes I can revert to.

GDScript has been a surprisingly pleasant language. It still lacks many features I'd like like sets, first class functions, and iterators (all of which I believe are coming in Godot 4) but usually those haven't been an issue. What has been very frustrating is how Godot parses/compiles scripts. If you have a syntax error in one file it ends up breaking a bunch of other files that depend on it (which is to be expected) but it reports these issues as obscure errors that don't point to the originating error. I'll be inundated with messages like The class "YourClass" couldn't be fully loaded (script error or cyclic dependency). (it will not point you to what this error might be) or mysterious errors like Cannot get class '_'. repeating several times. Then it requires a painful process of trying to figure out where the syntax error actually is by opening scripts one-by-one until I stumble upon it.

This is less likely to happen if you're using Godot's built-in script editor because you're more likely to catch the syntax error before it causes too much trouble. However Godot's built-in editor is really lacking, mainly because you can only have one script open at a time and if you need to edit multiple files at once it requires a very tedious process of manually jumping between files one at a time. So I use an external editor, which does have a language server integration with Godot—so it does catch syntax errors, but sometimes I don't catch them in time, and then these dizzying cascading errors happen.

I've also noticed that sometimes there will be compile errors that are fixed by reloading the project. It feels like these happen because of an unusual (sometimes seemingly random) parse order for scripts, like classes are found as undeclared when in fact they are. I haven't looked into it too much.

That all being said, Godot has been wonderful to work with overall. These frustrating experiences are infrequent, and it sounds like many of them are being addressed in Godot 4. I've enjoyed it way more than Unity and it's an amazing privilege to have access to such a powerful open-source project!