Warren Alphonso

Fertilizer is a tool for increasing yields, so we might expect demand for fertilizer to stop at the point cost of additional fertilizer matches cost of additional expected yield. Fertilizer's return on investment Here are some numbers: * Duflo08 claims maize sells at $0.60/kg maize. Statista agrees.

Fertilizer use is low Maize makes up 30% of SSA's caloric intake, but SSA has seen little improvement in its yields (source: FAOSTAT). One reason for the low yields might be low fertilizer use. The current amount of fertilizer use in SSA is suspiciously low for three reasons.

What if we just grow crops where they grow best and ship them to the rest of the world?

I started out trying to concretely answer: how can we make food cheaper? One clear way to do this is to increase the amount of food each seed can produce, or some finite set of inputs (eg fertilizer, water) can produce, or some area of land can produce. I wanted

We'll focus on calories consumed by people. 11e15 kcal/year consumption in 2050 sounds about right, which is a 40% increase from 2022. Total caloric consumption As people grow richer, they eat more: Total caloric consumption has grown from 6.5e15 kcal/year (2010) to 7.8e15 kcal/

This data is all from the 2023 International Fertilizer Association report "Medium-Term Fertilizer Outlook 2023-2027". It's a short report (11 pages) and I'm only extracting these numbers to make it easier to see the whole picture. Measures 1. capacity: theoretical supply based on typical