The true cost of a lawn

The bottleneck in nitrogen fertilizer distribution due to the issues transiting the Straits of Hormuz is already impacting the Southern Hemisphere.

This video is by an agronomist in South Africa and he points out that farmers in South Africa were already side-lining marginal production areas BEFORE the Straits of Hormuz was closed. That was due to high input costs and low prices for what they produce.

Since then, the price of diesel and nitrogen based fertilizer doubled and increased their input costs by the equivalent of $1000 an acre.

Near the end of the video, the narrator shares that South Africa produces about half of the calories eaten by the 500,000,000 Africans who live south of the equator. 500,000,000 is more than the population of the European Union which is more than the population of the US.

Once those 500,000,000 people get hungry, they are NOT going to passively starve to death in their squalid huts. Nope. They are going to bee-line to the places where there is food and demand that they be fed.

The little boy who cried wolf

"Yeah, sure. We heard that story before".

"And besides, there is nothing I can do about it."

Maybe. Maybe not.

Lawns

Lawns as grown in North America are markers of wealth. HOA have rules about how they are cared for because...well...it signals that "our kind of people" live here and is good for resale prices.

A well cared for lawn consumes 4 pounds of nitrogen per 1000 square feet per year in the North and up to twice that for Bermuda grass in the South.

Admittedly, there is a lot of lawn that doesn't get any fertilizer at all.

So, the average nitrogen application might be 2 pounds per 1000 square feet nationwide.

First-order-approximation 

Since nature is very efficient and there is little waste, the fact that maize is about 8% protein (protein is 1/6th nitrogen by weight) means that one pound of corn (which will keep a human alive for a day in terms of calories) requires 0.0133 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer. In round numbers, that is the amount of fertilizer spread on about 6 square-feet of average lawn or 3 square-feet of HOA lawn over the course of the year (in the North).

Looking at a full year's worth of food, the fertilizer used on 1200 square-feet of HOA lawn will grow an incremental amount of corn (maize) that is enough to keep one person who is starving to death alive for a year.

Running the same math for rice the number becomes 1360 square-feet of HOA lawn. That is because rice has slightly more protein than corn.

For wheat the number is 1825 square-feet. 

The paradox

The paradox is that the resources will flow to the high-bidder. And if one HOA decides to reduce or forego nitrogen fertilizer then the HOA next door will use just that much more. Fertilizer is a fungible commodity.

So, unless there is a shift in societal norms and lush, dark-green lawns because a sign of shame ("You starved a baby"), then the needle will not move very much.

And even if the HOA Karens are unmoved by pictures of babies with distended bellies, they should consider the specter of 100,000,000 Africans who cannot speak English moving the the US and camping out on their HOA lawns and eating their pets. 

You can scream that I am a xenophobe because of that argument. Whatever. If appealing to the Karens self-interests increases food production in the Southern Hemisphere when appealing to their better human nature fails, then I will risk being called a xenophobe.