What is the most stable food production method?

Diversity of food sources.

This reads like a Rimworld post.

I don't think there's a Rimworld community on Lemmy and I'm not going on Reddit anymore so I'll just throw this comment into the void and hope some fans are out there. 👋

Also in Rimworld terms the answer is corn (if monoculture) and send everyone to harvest at the first sign of blight.

But in both Rimworld and real life, a monoculture strategy isn't sustainable. Diversifying via multiple food sources reduces your risk of disaster leading to starvation.

Diversity is the most stable plan. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Get food from multiple sources.

Likely Algae. Good luck intentionally getting less

Aeroponics, under a controlled greenhouse environment, is technically the most stable food production method, assuming you have the ability to maintain the systems supporting it, and of course a good knowledge of a particular plant's requirements and growth habits.

Pros:

1. Water Efficiency: Uses up to 98% less water compared to traditional farming.
2. Space Efficiency: Can be used in vertical farming setups, making it ideal for urban areas.
3. Growth Speed: Crops can grow faster due to higher oxygen levels and nutrient delivery.
4. Reduced Pesticide Need: Since plants aren't grown in soil, there's a lower risk of soil-borne diseases.

Aeroponics, when done correctly, can yield impressive results in terms of growth speed and resource efficiency compared to traditional farming.

I think the answer is potatoes. Other root vegetables might be equally reliable.

Intercropping, preservation of biodiversity, rotation of crops... There is no magic bean, but in the long run basic conservation combined with advancement of plant genetics is the only realistic path forward, in my professional opinion

Cockroaches. They can survive nuclear events and will eat almost anything. They multiply faster than plants too.

Probably not the answer you're looking for: Afaik if you store grain properly it can last over 30 years. So as long as you're growing too much to keep your silos full and save, and you store enough, it should be incredibly reliable.

One possibility is breadfruit. We, realistically, can't depend on one though. Even the most robust staple food will still have some sort of vulnerability so it will always be of benefits to have several.

Crops, but not unbelievably large monocrop farms. Diverse, rotated soil in reasonably sized fields, widely distributed. A variety of different crops mitigates blights, and they’re the most efficient food source, in terms for how much food produced based on the inputs (amount of land, water, energy, etc.) and other considerations (land used, greenhouse gas emissions!

Anything living can get diseases. I'd still go for crops grown in a controlled, indoor environment.

There's a way to grow bacteria on natural gas if you don't have grow lights, and they used it to make fish feed for at least a while, as well as some lab work on electricity-eating bacteria. If you don't care about your liver I guess this drink is also technically a source of calories with no biological production needed.

I would sort of expect it to be the stuff we struggle to get rid of, like fungi and weeds. So maybe mushrooms and dandelions? This is just a wild guess, and obviously you couldn't live off them forever.

Seize people's grass lawns and tear out 2/3 of roadways and convert the land into community gardens and ponds, grow food where the people are. Probably some form of population control.

Pie in the sky though. We'll probably just start eating bugs by the container ship load and then go extinct instead

Probably soon it will be some form of single cell protein like methanogen. Being able to grow with less sunlight is pretty valuable.

Stuff like mealworms or soldierfly larvae can be grown easily, using almost anything. Don’t know how big of a problem diseases can get though.

The things that cause famines are lack of diversity.

Every form of production will have defects. The goal of perfecting production is one to be sought, but never achieved. We should always try to make food production more efficient with less loss, but there will always be loss, and always be waste.

Even new means of production like lab grown beef can have waste and loss in batches that don’t “grow” properly because they didn’t mix hormones correctly or whatever. I actually don’t know how the science behind that works, but I do know it’s a process. And where there’s a process there’s room for error. That’s where we get loss from.

We’ll never make something fool proof. Perhaps lab grown meats will be the most efficient form of product in that they have the lowest loss and production can be tweaked fairly quickly so there’s not a lot of loss and ramped up for shipments to areas with food shortages. Honestly, lab grown in my opinion has the best chances of being a major breakthrough but it’s still too early to be sure.

Cells in agar in an incubator. Anything above that scale is bound to have losses and fails. How much depend on how controlled your environment is.

Cannibalism.

To answer your question. When Agriculture was first "discovered" by humans ~20,000 years ago, the most stable production method was diversification. You should have a variety of crops with overlapping growing seasons and overlapping macro nutrients. For even more security, introduce animal husbandry that can graze on your fallow land and if you have enough land make sure to have multiple distinct herds that never interact with each other except for breeding every few years.

Additionally ensure your food production isn't dependent on a single harvest season, nor a single climate. Have fruits/legumes/etc other lower yield crops that can be substituted in case your primary grains are hit with blight, or some other environmental factor.

Now let's introduce some technology. Create several fast growing monocultures that allows you to get multiple harvests in a season that can be used for animal feed, storage and supplementing any deficiencies in the primary human food supply.

tl;dr. Make sure you have multiple methods of food production that are all viable at different times of the year. Ensure that the failure of any one or two of them isn't a problem for overall yearly production, and ensure that they are independent on each other.

Photosynthesis

Foraging if done in a low density area. Natural food sources grow in an extremely diverse way and any blight or parasite will only ever effect a portion of edibles around you.