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Kasz216 on 25 March 2011
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highwaystar101 said:
Kasz216 said:
highwaystar101 said:

It seems to me that producing plastic/potato rice would be more expensive and resource intensive than actually just producing real rice.

More expesive, but less time intensive and less enviromentally taxing.

China has been moving to try and wean people off rice and move them to Potatoes because Potatoes take much less water to grow.  It takes 1,900 liters to grow 1kg of rice... and only 500 liters to grow 1kg of Potatoes.  So it's a safer crop to avoid droughts

Additionally Rice farming takes many many hours of expert manpower... the more and more you alter your fields the higher yield... it's not uncommon for rice farmers to spend 8 hours on individual family sized field  while potatoes you stick in the ground and you have at most 2 hours work for a regular family sized farm.

Apparently China has been trying to move away from rice and too potatoes because of drought hitting a lot of their farmland... along with other reasons.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/30/AR2010053003751.html

I wouldn't be surprised if this was part of their misplaced idea to wean people off rice.

I figured that it would be less resource intensive to produce potatoes than rice, I was thinking more towards the production of plastics and the manufacturing process that is involved in combining the two.

I see your point about water, and saving water is an important aspect to consider in agriculture. On the other side of environmental concerns though, producing 1Kg of polyethylene (which I believe they used in this rice) requires 2Kg of oil, which isn't exactly environmentally sound.

As for time resources, it may take 2 hours to harvest a family size plot of potatoes,  but to produce rice from them with the method mentioned here still requires the oil to be cracked and processed, and also requires a factory to combine the plastics with the potatoes, all of which requires skilled labour and expensive machinery and these can add to the production time considerably.


Well I think China cares more about enviromental factors as they effect their country and making sure they can withstand a drought without needing food.  If long term this would get people to eat less rice and gain the "taste" of potatoes (dubious but it's not like they haven't had this kind of thinkng before.) it would be beneficial.