The thing with conventional farming is that a lot of the costs (in terms of environmental damage which needs to be repaired) are currently externalized, i.e. payed for by the society, which indeed makes industrial farming more cost-effective than organic farming, at least for the farmer (though in many countries you can charge a good premium for organic food, which will often outweigh your additional cost). The same is true for the current industrialized way of raising livestock.
The real problem is properly accounting for all costs incurred by a given farming technique, which is difficult as the farming lobby seems to be one of the most effective ones in the world (at least judging from a European perspective).
In addition, the argument that industrial farming consistently produces higher yields than any organic farming technique seems at least a bit dubious to me, as there is a plethora of techniques that have been investigated over the years, and again the outcome of any study depends heavily on the timescale that you look at: Sure, heavy use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides will increase yield in the short run, it might actually decrease yields in the long term by degrading soil quality and triggering a biological arms race that makes it impossible to do farming without the use of heavy pesticides in the long run. Also, the external cost in terms of health effects on the population is still poorly researched and not accounted for in most cost calculations.
The criticisms of conventional farming are valid, but that doesn't mean that organic farming is any better.
I believe that organic farming is much more likely to cause soil degradation and environmental harm than conventional farming for several different reasons:
- organic farming's main tool to combat weeds and regrowth is tillage, which causes immense amounts of damage to the soil directly and allowing the soil to blow away or wash away. Conventional farmers know how damaging tillage is and are increasingly moving away from it as pesticide alternatives become available. It was tillage that turned the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia into the deserts of Iraq.
- Organic farmers still use pesticides and herbicides, but they are limited to those that are certified organic. Organic pesticides and herbicides aren't necessarily any safer for human consumption or for the environment, they're just "organic". For example, some organic farmers literally salt their soil. When the only thing you have in your toolbox is a hammer, that's what you use, even when the situation calls for a scalpel.
- Conventional farmers care far more about the value of their land than organic farmers do. Farmers don't have retirement funds, they've just got land on which they've spent the last 40 years paying off the mortgage. A conventional farmer with healthy soil can sell his land for a lot more than one with unhealthy soil. An farmer with land that's "certified organic" doesn't care, it's that "certified organic" stamp that he's getting paid for.
- Organic herbicides and pesticides are much less efficient than conventional ones. So they have to use much larger quantities. Which means more runoff. For instance, they sometimes spread massive amounts of manure on their fields, cause massive algal blooms in the waterways and destroying them.
- Conventional farmers are constrained by economics. They're selling a commodity, where price == marginal cost. So the only way to make a profit is to have lower costs per unit of output than your competitors. Their major costs are diesel, herbicides & pesticides -- minimizing those is both good for the farmer's pocketbook and the environment. An organic farmer's price is not set at the marginal cost, so it's often better for them to increase inputs to increase yields, even when it's not as efficient.
P.S. I gave 5 arguments. They are not equal. The first one (tillage) is orders of magnitude more significant than the other 4. Tillage destroys the soil, and is far more "unnatural" than any sort of herbicide or pesticide organic or conventional.
For my perspective in France, here the farming lobby is inexistant/inefficient, since farmers had to big pretty big actions all over France just to raise the price of milk. So I think it's not the farming lobby, but the fertilizers and pesticides lobby.
In many areas of northern Germany, even with the extremely strict limits on fertilizer and pesticides that Germany has, the drinking water, rivers and oceans are getting so massively polluted that we’re seeing massive algae blooms and drinking water slowly becoming undrinkable.
It’s a massive problem, and there’s no way to solve these without massively reducing fertilizer and pesticide use.
If the choice is between being able to feed less humans, and having no drinking water, I’m sure which one I’ll pick.
EDIT: Because I’m getting downvoted, here are some sources:
> EU sues Germany over water tainted by nitrate fertilizer
> The European Commission has lost patience with Germany over the high concentration of nitrate fertilizer in its ground water. Taxpayers could now end up paying hundreds of millions of euros in fines.
> The real problem is properly accounting for all costs incurred by a given farming technique, which is difficult as the farming lobby seems to be one of the most effective ones in the world (at least judging from a European perspective).
I think this a good moment to side-track a bit into agricultural history. While I'm generally not a fan of Great Man history, Sicco Mansholt seems to be a very interesting focal point in this case:
Mansholt, a former farmer himself, and politically so left he would be labelled a communist had he been in the US, was one of the founding fathers of the EU, specifically it's commissioner of agriculture. He created the Common Agricultural Policy in 1962. In 1972, near the end of his political career, he had an affair with Petra Kelly while she was still a member of the Social Democrats. He greatly influenced her line of thinking surrounding sustainability. Kelly left the SPD in 1979 to found the German Green Party, which was the first major green party in Europe.
Here's a documentary about him, but it's only in Dutch without subtitles, sadly, so I'll summarise it below:
After WWII, a big worry was creating a stable food supply to feed everyone. One major problem was that farmers were not paid enough to sustain themselves. It was clear this wouldn't change, because the only way to fix it was to raise food prices, which would have all kinds of negative consequences. The solution seemed to be a mix of subsidies, and having less farmers take care of larger areas of land. The idea was that the same amount of money would go to agriculture, but since it would be divided among fewer farmers they would be able to eke out a decent living.
Mansholt was originally a farmer himself, and also had a personal stake in this: after the famines in the war he wanted to prevent this from ever happening again, and he was aware about population growth. And he also did not want to have ten million farmers living in abject poverty - better to have half of them switch professions in that case.
Just some context: his policies suggested that farms should be at least 100 hectares. Back then it was very common for farms to be one, two hectares.
So Mansholt was one of the main architects of this Common European Agricultural Policy within the European Commission (the precursor to the EU). There obviously were lots of protests by farmers, Mansholt was threatened, etc, but in the end he got his policies through. In 1962 the CAP was first implemented[0]. Ever heard of "get big or get out"? That was a phrase used by Earl Butz, US Secretary of Agriculture from 1971 to 1976. A decade later.
Funny enough, Butz did this thing around the same time the Club of Rome came out with "The Limits To Growth", in 1972. Mansholt was one of the early converts, going against his own earlier policies. The huge problems he saw with unexpected surpluses of food (in the Netherlands we even have words like "boterbergen" and "melkplassen" (buttermountains and milklakes) to describe this), grown unsustainably, were probably also a part of this.
He saw the error of his ways and started lobbying for sustainable practices. Which, btw, did not align with the typical organic farming practices this article rails against. To make things even more complicated, he fell in love with a 39 years younger German politician, Petra Kelly[2], who was then a member of the German Social Democrats. They had a two year affair, and in all likelihood they greatly influenced each other's thinking. In 1979 Kelly left the SPD and become one of the founding members of Die Grünen.
I find it very interesting to see how drastically agricultural practices have changed in the last century. While we talk about farming lobbies, it's easy to forget how big of a hand governments themselves had in creating these big farms. The story of Mansholt shows how hard it is to reverse the trend too: even the former chief architect of the policies that stimulated modernisation did not have enough political clout to get people to become more sustainable.
Having said all of that, I really hope the type of organic farming described in this article will take off. We'll need to find a way around the existing power structures though.
From the old times exist the idea that is necessary to let the terrain to "rest" and let it to the nature mercy (in the bible was for a year each 7-years for example). Is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation
> we should be TERRIFIED that fewer than 1 in 100 Americans actually knows how to grow enough food to feed a family or more
Am I the only one that found this to be high, and comforting?
I looked up how many software engineers there are in the US, it's also around 1% (3.6m) [1]
About 0.5% of us are lawyers [2]
Double-checking the farmers stat, it seems there are 2.1m farms [3], each must be manned by at least several people that know stuff. This does not count casual horticulturists. I'd guess that at least over 10% of the population would know how to grow food to feed a family.
In addition to that, it's rather easy to learn how to feed a family, if your goal is not to be cost efficient or have a very balanced diet. I guess most people could learn rather quickly how to grow enough potatoes to feed several people. You won't reach the same yield as a professional farmer, but if you had to, you could probably survive without extensive training (if you have the seed to start with).
Yeah, I couldn't figure out why I was supposed to be terrified by that. Yeah, man, civilization and specialization. Sounds like progress to me. What's the concern? A Lucifer's Hammer style apocalypse? Failure of society at large to adequately meddle in the affairs of farmers?
Maybe only a fraction of farm workers understand the entire process at their farm, i.e. some drive tractors, some stick milking machines to cow udders, some are itinerant workers following crop harvests, some fly crop dusters, and none of these groups would be able to run the entire farm on their own.
Organic isn't the answer, it's trying to address some legitimate concerns, but it's a movement full of scientific woo-woo that's been legislated.
For instance, organic farming thinks GMO's are bad, but is just fine with irradiating large fields full of plants to accomplish random mutations through radiation breeding.
This article is one example of this, the author decries traditional corn fields, and as a counterexample wants us to believe that some hilly permaculture farm in Austria which just from the looks of it obviously has to be harvested & maintained by hand would be a viable replacement.
Organic is largely just a western luxury product supported by people with no concern about producing food at true scale, and how we can satisfy the global food supply without impoverishing a large part of the population by doing manual labor on farms.
There's no panacea when it comes to farming, but GMOs seem to be the best shot we have.
The current definition of what "organic farming" is has been obviously corrupted by the current farming industry. In the end it's just a label.
But the question remains: how can we do sustainable farming, without polluting the soil and the water and without poisoning humans?
If we can't find a way to make that work, then we are all heading towards an apocalypse, because what we are doing currently isn't sustainable.
And no, GMOs are not an answer because efficiency is not our current problem. Pesticides are only needed because of mono-cultures, a problem that is only relevant in the context of current industrial farming practices. Even more aggravating is that we live in the information age, we can now build the proper tools to do industrial-scale farming without making use of mono-cultures or pesticides. We can have robots to do all the hard work, we can use AI for rotating crops in order to keep the soil healthy, etc. And GMOs would not help much, because you're not addressing the problem of raising mono-cultures and for example it will not lead to much healthier soils and would do nothing to help the bees.
Sadly, even though mother nature is proving how extremely dumb and primitive we are, we are still not learning ;-)
The reason why GMO is bad is probably not because of the "Modified" part. It's because they're optimised to withstand heavy pesticide use. Pesticides are bad.
Also, that freedom thing: GMO are generally sterile, so you have to buy seeds every year from Monsanto. Great business model for Monsanto, not so much for the farmer.
For mass producing food, GMOs can be good. They increase yield. Then again, at the same time, look at all the food we throw away in the western world. Do we actually need to increase crop yield in the developed world?
You may call it a luxury product, but I will personally pick true organic food any day of the week. Pesticides are bad and unhealthy. Organic food is even already somewhat being exposed to pesticides through historical pollution. I only have one life.
Given the amount of lobbying multinational companies are able to do and the fact most politicians can be bought for a relative pittance, you have to be a fool to believe you aren't being exposed to harmful pesticides year round. Just look at the whole Monsanto / glyphosate / roundup discussion.
If the alternative is losing a billion dollar a year business, how much would a multinational company be willing to pay to politicians and scientists (above or under the table) to make sure a certain substance doesn't get banned? A lot, I would reckon. Tens of millions easily, hundreds if required.
most subsistence farmers will never be able to use GMOs. It requires capital outlay that is just not possible.
> For instance, organic farming thinks GMO's are bad
No, I think modern GMOs are going in the wrong direction. Modern wheat varieties have shrunk from being ~1.2 meters to not very high, through the use of selection, as has herbicide/pesticide tolerance. GMOs just make it faster.
All of this means that you don't have to look after the soil. Which is great, but then you have to irrigate it. but then that become expensive. Then you have to fertilise it, and that become increasingly expensive.
> some hilly permaculture farm in Austria
I can't see a combine getting up there, can you?
> impoverishing a large part of the population by doing manual labor on farms.
Thats what subsistence farming does. They can't afford mechanisation, so have to manually plough and weed.
Ofcourse weeding is greatly simplified if you grow your seeds in rows. We've known that since jethro tull's days.
GMOs are basically a sticky plaster. Yes, they can be more drought resistant, but why are there droughts? perhaps, just perhaps removing the spongy organic layer of soil that trapped the water might be the answer. increasing drainage so that floods dont happen, might also be a cause.
Farming is fucking complex, I'd suggest you go and work on a permaculture and "modern" farm, to see just what's required.
I spent most of my early childhood (0-7) on an "allotment" it measured 90 rods by 10 feet, or some other useless unit of measurement.
Next to the allotment is a standard farmers field. It was earmarked for housing about 10 years ago, and it was abandoned as an crop growing device there and then.
There are two obvious features of this field:
1) its much lower than the allotment
2) it only grows algae.
The soil in the field is now basically sand. Most of the organic matter having dried out and blow away.
There are no worms, because there is nothing for them to eat. Even if there were, they would have been killed by the pesticides long ago.
Basically modern farming techniques sacrifice soil quality for current yield.
Decent soil is needed to retain moisture. Decent soil requires much less in organic fertilisers, which greatly reduces phosphate run-offs.
Now, this is where my thoughts get controversial:
modern farming requires empty soils. Empty, poor quality soil does not retain water. This leads to run off, flooding and droughts. I would also suggest that it contributes directly to global warming, as bare soil retains its heat much better than dense vegetation.
For the water retention, thats easy to prove, for temperatures, much harder
The general gist is interesting in order to captive the intended audience of sceptics, and the clickbait title is effective in that way.
Still, though, a clickbait title.
Furthermore, the usual consensus I hear is that we will need to change our practices drastically, we cannot let the "conventional" farming on life support indefinitely and we cannot let it destroy our sustenance. Organic farming is however still far from being enough to make us live.
The road is probably a reasonable mix of the two, which is actively researched.
> Organic farming is however still far from being enough to make us live.
What I have seen says otherwise. There's a thing about chemical agriculture: when you first implement it, you get incredible yields. Then the soil starts dying (no more acari, no more fungi, compressed soil…), and the yields slowly go back to roughly the previous levels, only this time you need all the chemicals to sustain it.
If you suddenly say "let's go organic", you're in for a disappointment: the soil is dead, the yields you get will be terrible. Indeed not enough to feed the world. Fortunately, soils can be resuscitated. One component is rotting pieces of wood, that bring back fungi. You need other things I'm not aware of, but the idea is, in 3 years, your soil is good as new. Mostly. While you now can go organic with good yields, you still have the old chemicals dwelling in that soil. It will take 15 years before you're really free from them.
With a good (or properly resuscitated) soil, it appears organic agriculture have higher yields per unit of surface than chemical agriculture. However, it requires more labour. It would seem the yield per man-month may actually be lower.
We don't need more farming surface. We need more farmers.
Clickbaity, yes, but in an obvious way. The article is a response to a criticism, and the title conveyed that well. As much as I dislike click baits, I didn't mind this one.
IMHO it's simple: current farming depends on oil. Oil will, sooner or later, be very expensive. If nothing changes, food will by extension become very expensive too: sooner or later we will need to grow food without the use of oil.
Now the question is:
* should we learn how to do this now, at a comfortable pace while we still have oil-based food as a backup, where wealthy individuals can opt to support this essential research by buying organic food,
* or should we wait until the oil's all but gone and there's a Malthusian event looming?
To me the choice is easy. At worst I'm paying more than "needed" to eat, at best we're able to phase out another reliance on oil in an orderly manner.
I think this is just an example of 'elitism' on the part of the author. It is ludicrous to think that there is a chance that the 'local/organic' movement will ever capture more than 1%-2% of food production. Most people don't care, and some fraction of people that do care are intelligent enough to decide that additional cost for no increase in quality is not worth it.
So this is 'elitism' because people think that a very high-cost, niche, atypical behavior is in some way a 'threat' because 'everyone will do it'. Maybe everyone the author knows, but only a tiny percentage of people overall.
It's only your preconceptions that are ludicrous. In 1990s agriculture in Russia partially collapsed, so people turned to their small plots of land and "captured the food production". They were lucky they knew how - the communist government-managed centralized distribution was unreliable so the skill was handy. Of course, there's no hard data from this chaotic period, but being from eastern european country myself, it is fully conceivable. There's widespread home food gardening culture (only we don't call it "organic", just "how it was always done").
You seem to assume organic food is much more expensive to produce than chemical food. You'll need to justify that assumption, especially in the face of hidden costs: scorched soils (that require chemicals to grow anything), light but pervasive food poisoning (pesticides), growing resistances to our pesticides and antibiotics, heavy dependence on fossil fuels, as well as quite a bit of oil for chemicals.
As a not so separate issue, there is the cost of distribution. Carrying food across the country, across the world, has costs: more need for energy, and degradation of the food (fresh is better). Such costs could be lowered right now, but cannot be eliminated as long as we keep large monocultures: with them, you don't get any diversity without moving lots of food around.
We first should get a good definition of what "organic food" is, as currently (at least in Europe) is, more or less, equivalent to "crops grow using tradicional methods". The "tradicional methods" is very vague, but gets described in some laws. That's the main reason why is less efficient, is not using the latest improvements.
"Organic food" is also an incredibly silly name, as there are no "inorganic food", but whatever.
What is NOT guaranteed by those laws is that the food is:
- More ecologically friendly (some tradicional pesticides or fertiliser are quite nasty, and you may need to use much more)
- Better (either as more nutrients or tastier)
- Locally produced (and Co2 emissions can be high when you purchase an organic crop produced in Australia)
- Produced in small farms (there are big corporations as well)
- Rigorously following the rules, as inspections are small
Again, the key word here is GUARANTEED. Some organic farms may be doing things is a good way, but most are not improving anything, and there's nothing in the "organic food" industry as a whole that promotes a good analysis.
Given that they are "tradicional methods", I find difficult to change into a more "let's try to improve farming into a more sustainable and less aggressive endeavour". Which I think is what we all want. And I think the "conventional farming" is, at least, in a better position to approach this problem.
There are very little guarantees in the "conventional farming" either and I find it more disturbing.
"Organic farming" doesn't mean a lot since there is no clear agreement on the definition. However, considering it should use less and safer inputs, why should it provide more guarantees than "conventional farming"?
... but will unsustainable farming not kill us all by definition too?
I realize sustainable and organic are not the same. I am actually, not sure if organic is sustainable or indeed what is required across the world for a farm to be deemed organic.
However, I have always been under the impression, that conventional (non organic) farming is unsustainable in the long term due to the environmental impact, which we'll have to pay for at a later time.
Are we already seeing some of the impact from both European and US farms (pollution of oceans and e.g. Colorado river drying up)?
To me it seems like we are in trouble either way, if we wish to continue with our current consumption of meat.
I learned something new and important today. For some reason, I thought this was a solved problem since Haber–Bosch process was invented. Apparently it isn't so.
The "soil" is more complex than its mineral characterization. Depth, texture, organic components, life, elasticity ... The more we study it, the more amazing it gets.
There is a lot of discussion in generalities in this article and precious few hard facts. I would love to see a less chemical approach to farming but articles like this are not going to convince very many people that organic is a viable method of feeding the masses.
> we should be TERRIFIED that fewer than 1 in 100 Americans actually knows how to grow enough food to feed a family or more.
This seems rather besides the point. If we all had to live in economically and technologically isolated families the amount of people that can be sustained by the earth would be allot lower ... and the quality of life of each of those families will likely be worse than any person living today.
"It pretends that vanishing institutional knowledge of growing food isn’t a problem; we should be TERRIFIED that fewer than 1 in 100 Americans actually knows how to grow enough food to feed a family or more."
Why? There are many other vital survival tasks that the overwhelming majority of the world's population cannot perform. This is merely the consequence of living in modern society; such efforts are abstracted away from the consumer. People will educate themselves when such information becomes necessary.
Also, fabricating dramatic statistics doesn't help anyone. I can quote a Farm and Dairy article from three years ago which stated, "One in 3 households are now growing food — the highest overall participation and spending levels seen in a decade." And that, "Households with incomes under $35,000 participating in food gardening grew to 11 million — up 38 percent from 2008."
The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most
significant contributors to the most serious environmental
problems, at every scale from local to global. The findings of
this report suggest that it should be a major policy focus when
dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air
pollution, water shortage and water pollution and loss of
biodiversity.
Organic in my place(South of India) means no chemical and only used cattle dung/ food waster / or plant itself as manure/Fertilizer. No other chemical used but in my experience we made only 10 bags of paddy per acre while if we use Urea / Potasium + pesticides we managed up to 30 to 35 bags of paddy. I am not sure why in use organic farm still uses any chemical. There are good techniques to deal with pest though not very effective.
Personally, I think organic is mostly bullshit. I believe a lot in local. I'd prefer my money to work for smaller entities closer to home.
For example we buy 75lbs of onions in October and keep them in the basement. The total cost is about $30 vs. $500 at retail and I'm doing business with a guy 30 miles away instead of buying Chilean onions shipped by a Georgia grower and passing through a half dozen middlemen.
Currently, right now 60% of the produce available in the US comes from a single region -- the imperial valley in California. We're watering the desert, which comes with some obvious long term risks.
We're lucky enough to live in an area in the Northeast that still has some local vegetable agriculture. Business is picking up enough for them locally that some local family farms are doing year round operations. The first crop of high tunnel greens will be for sale February 1.
'Soil degradation' - is that a thing? See, with the advent of spray-on fertilizers the state of the soil is nearly irrelevant to crop yield. The best corn grows on eroded clay hillsides at present (because it doesn't saturate and has better sun). Soil is just a medium for holding the roots at present. Look at hydroponic farms -they grow plants in a gravel medium.
This article is a reasonable rebuttal to the usual chicken little statements by people pushing industrial farming of GMO crops as the only way to "feed the world", but there are a couple of things this response misses.
1. If we stop eating so much beef, we really, really don't need to grow so much corn. Cattle feed accounts for an astronomical percentage of the need to grow so much acreage. Dropping the ethanol boondoggle (it is not a real solution to our problems with oil, it is not scalable or efficient) would make a lesser but still significant impact in freeing up existing farm acreage for edible crops.
2. These people tend to compare farms that are making no real attempts at maximizing for profitability against industrial farms that are totally maximized for profitability (in both cases here profitability can be considered a synonym for efficiency.) Making money is of course on the list of priorities for local farms, but it's not their primary goal. Most of the people I know who are running local farms in my area either inherited the farm from their family or left lucrative careers in other areas to become farmers. Money is not the primary driver of their actions as it is with an industrial farm. So of course they don't compete on that level. They are not trying to.
3. I don't buy local because I believe it is "more nutritious". I buy local for a few reasons. First, the food tastes better. Garlic is a great example. Store garlic that often comes from Mexico is very dry and the individual cloves are usually very small. They grow varietals that are maximized for number of cloves. My local garlic has larger bulbs and it is fresher because it hasn't taken a long voyage from Mexico. Because it has fewer individual bulbs, the volume of the head is more usable garlic and less paper. This applies to most produce I get from local sources. Tomatoes are another prime example. Mass produced tomatoes are picked before they are ripe and gassed to give them their color. Local tomatoes are red all the way through and taste way, way better.
4. Animal welfare isn't even mentioned in the article that I saw. But it is a big reason I try to buy my meat and dairy locally. I've seen what happens at industrial farms, and I've visited my local farms. It's night and day. I am comfortable with how the animals are cared for and live their lives at my local farms. I think anyone with a heart has a hard time watching footage of industrial farms and knowing we contribute to that horror.
5. Lastly it presupposes an all or nothing world. This is the biggest piece of bullshit that the "We have to pursue industrial farming at all costs!" folks push. Their argument imagines only a world where we are 100% local organic farms that care nothing for efficiency or only 100% industrial farms that are super efficient (but care nothing for animal welfare and quality of the end produce.) This of course is ridiculous. It's never going to be all or nothing. The future will be some version of what we have now; a mixture.
I think this is the best comment in the entire thread.
I'd like to add one more point, which is that some folks argue we would be going back to a world of sustinence farming without GMOs, ignoring that much of the improvements in agricultural output have come from developments that can also benefit organic farming, such as land use reform, crop rotation, improved equipment, better irrigation, etc.
Robotics will revolutionize farming and make organic sustainable. Weed and pest killing robots will obviate the need for chemical herbicides and pesticides as well as Genetic alterations.
You would not believe how hard the "no pests" thing is in real life. It only takes a few insect eggs to start an infestation. It is hard enough to do that on a "sack of grain" scale, let alone on industrial farm scale.
Only way AFAIK that pest infestation are successfully forestalled in large food storages are through refrigeration or inert or even toxic atmospheres. Both of these will not work if you are actually trying to produce food.
The whole question is whether, when you include the energy inputs such a system require, it's more efficient. The jury's still out. Many people don't consider food grown in substrates with 'artificial' (concentrated) nutrients to not be 'organic'. I don't personally care about labels so much, but my point is that it's not clear at this point which direction is a) viable, in the long term and b) the 'best' (or rather, we don't even know what our optimum function looks like, let alone that we know what system is best)
[+] [-] ThePhysicist|9 years ago|reply
The real problem is properly accounting for all costs incurred by a given farming technique, which is difficult as the farming lobby seems to be one of the most effective ones in the world (at least judging from a European perspective).
In addition, the argument that industrial farming consistently produces higher yields than any organic farming technique seems at least a bit dubious to me, as there is a plethora of techniques that have been investigated over the years, and again the outcome of any study depends heavily on the timescale that you look at: Sure, heavy use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides will increase yield in the short run, it might actually decrease yields in the long term by degrading soil quality and triggering a biological arms race that makes it impossible to do farming without the use of heavy pesticides in the long run. Also, the external cost in terms of health effects on the population is still poorly researched and not accounted for in most cost calculations.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|9 years ago|reply
I believe that organic farming is much more likely to cause soil degradation and environmental harm than conventional farming for several different reasons:
- organic farming's main tool to combat weeds and regrowth is tillage, which causes immense amounts of damage to the soil directly and allowing the soil to blow away or wash away. Conventional farmers know how damaging tillage is and are increasingly moving away from it as pesticide alternatives become available. It was tillage that turned the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia into the deserts of Iraq.
- Organic farmers still use pesticides and herbicides, but they are limited to those that are certified organic. Organic pesticides and herbicides aren't necessarily any safer for human consumption or for the environment, they're just "organic". For example, some organic farmers literally salt their soil. When the only thing you have in your toolbox is a hammer, that's what you use, even when the situation calls for a scalpel.
- Conventional farmers care far more about the value of their land than organic farmers do. Farmers don't have retirement funds, they've just got land on which they've spent the last 40 years paying off the mortgage. A conventional farmer with healthy soil can sell his land for a lot more than one with unhealthy soil. An farmer with land that's "certified organic" doesn't care, it's that "certified organic" stamp that he's getting paid for.
- Organic herbicides and pesticides are much less efficient than conventional ones. So they have to use much larger quantities. Which means more runoff. For instance, they sometimes spread massive amounts of manure on their fields, cause massive algal blooms in the waterways and destroying them.
- Conventional farmers are constrained by economics. They're selling a commodity, where price == marginal cost. So the only way to make a profit is to have lower costs per unit of output than your competitors. Their major costs are diesel, herbicides & pesticides -- minimizing those is both good for the farmer's pocketbook and the environment. An organic farmer's price is not set at the marginal cost, so it's often better for them to increase inputs to increase yields, even when it's not as efficient.
P.S. I gave 5 arguments. They are not equal. The first one (tillage) is orders of magnitude more significant than the other 4. Tillage destroys the soil, and is far more "unnatural" than any sort of herbicide or pesticide organic or conventional.
[+] [-] throwaway1892|9 years ago|reply
For my perspective in France, here the farming lobby is inexistant/inefficient, since farmers had to big pretty big actions all over France just to raise the price of milk. So I think it's not the farming lobby, but the fertilizers and pesticides lobby.
[+] [-] kuschku|9 years ago|reply
In many areas of northern Germany, even with the extremely strict limits on fertilizer and pesticides that Germany has, the drinking water, rivers and oceans are getting so massively polluted that we’re seeing massive algae blooms and drinking water slowly becoming undrinkable.
It’s a massive problem, and there’s no way to solve these without massively reducing fertilizer and pesticide use.
If the choice is between being able to feed less humans, and having no drinking water, I’m sure which one I’ll pick.
EDIT: Because I’m getting downvoted, here are some sources:
> EU sues Germany over water tainted by nitrate fertilizer
> The European Commission has lost patience with Germany over the high concentration of nitrate fertilizer in its ground water. Taxpayers could now end up paying hundreds of millions of euros in fines.
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-1453_en.htm
http://www.dw.com/en/eu-sues-germany-over-water-tainted-by-n...
https://www.thelocal.de/20161107/eu-sues-germany-over-water-...
https://www.euractiv.com/section/agriculture-food/news/eu-ta...
[+] [-] vanderZwan|9 years ago|reply
I think this a good moment to side-track a bit into agricultural history. While I'm generally not a fan of Great Man history, Sicco Mansholt seems to be a very interesting focal point in this case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicco_Mansholt
Mansholt, a former farmer himself, and politically so left he would be labelled a communist had he been in the US, was one of the founding fathers of the EU, specifically it's commissioner of agriculture. He created the Common Agricultural Policy in 1962. In 1972, near the end of his political career, he had an affair with Petra Kelly while she was still a member of the Social Democrats. He greatly influenced her line of thinking surrounding sustainability. Kelly left the SPD in 1979 to found the German Green Party, which was the first major green party in Europe.
Here's a documentary about him, but it's only in Dutch without subtitles, sadly, so I'll summarise it below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AniIokCHtk
After WWII, a big worry was creating a stable food supply to feed everyone. One major problem was that farmers were not paid enough to sustain themselves. It was clear this wouldn't change, because the only way to fix it was to raise food prices, which would have all kinds of negative consequences. The solution seemed to be a mix of subsidies, and having less farmers take care of larger areas of land. The idea was that the same amount of money would go to agriculture, but since it would be divided among fewer farmers they would be able to eke out a decent living.
Mansholt was originally a farmer himself, and also had a personal stake in this: after the famines in the war he wanted to prevent this from ever happening again, and he was aware about population growth. And he also did not want to have ten million farmers living in abject poverty - better to have half of them switch professions in that case.
Just some context: his policies suggested that farms should be at least 100 hectares. Back then it was very common for farms to be one, two hectares.
So Mansholt was one of the main architects of this Common European Agricultural Policy within the European Commission (the precursor to the EU). There obviously were lots of protests by farmers, Mansholt was threatened, etc, but in the end he got his policies through. In 1962 the CAP was first implemented[0]. Ever heard of "get big or get out"? That was a phrase used by Earl Butz, US Secretary of Agriculture from 1971 to 1976. A decade later.
Funny enough, Butz did this thing around the same time the Club of Rome came out with "The Limits To Growth", in 1972. Mansholt was one of the early converts, going against his own earlier policies. The huge problems he saw with unexpected surpluses of food (in the Netherlands we even have words like "boterbergen" and "melkplassen" (buttermountains and milklakes) to describe this), grown unsustainably, were probably also a part of this.
He saw the error of his ways and started lobbying for sustainable practices. Which, btw, did not align with the typical organic farming practices this article rails against. To make things even more complicated, he fell in love with a 39 years younger German politician, Petra Kelly[2], who was then a member of the German Social Democrats. They had a two year affair, and in all likelihood they greatly influenced each other's thinking. In 1979 Kelly left the SPD and become one of the founding members of Die Grünen.
I find it very interesting to see how drastically agricultural practices have changed in the last century. While we talk about farming lobbies, it's easy to forget how big of a hand governments themselves had in creating these big farms. The story of Mansholt shows how hard it is to reverse the trend too: even the former chief architect of the policies that stimulated modernisation did not have enough political clout to get people to become more sustainable.
Having said all of that, I really hope the type of organic farming described in this article will take off. We'll need to find a way around the existing power structures though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra_Kelly
[+] [-] mamcx|9 years ago|reply
So I wonder why not mix both?
[+] [-] thinkloop|9 years ago|reply
Am I the only one that found this to be high, and comforting?
I looked up how many software engineers there are in the US, it's also around 1% (3.6m) [1]
About 0.5% of us are lawyers [2]
Double-checking the farmers stat, it seems there are 2.1m farms [3], each must be manned by at least several people that know stuff. This does not count casual horticulturists. I'd guess that at least over 10% of the population would know how to grow food to feed a family.
1. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2483690/it-careers/indi...
2. https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/05/09/the-lawyer-bu...
3. https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Preliminary_...
[+] [-] XorNot|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dx034|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dove|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strken|9 years ago|reply
Even so, it seems a strange thing to worry about.
[+] [-] avar|9 years ago|reply
For instance, organic farming thinks GMO's are bad, but is just fine with irradiating large fields full of plants to accomplish random mutations through radiation breeding.
This article is one example of this, the author decries traditional corn fields, and as a counterexample wants us to believe that some hilly permaculture farm in Austria which just from the looks of it obviously has to be harvested & maintained by hand would be a viable replacement.
Organic is largely just a western luxury product supported by people with no concern about producing food at true scale, and how we can satisfy the global food supply without impoverishing a large part of the population by doing manual labor on farms.
There's no panacea when it comes to farming, but GMOs seem to be the best shot we have.
[+] [-] bad_user|9 years ago|reply
But the question remains: how can we do sustainable farming, without polluting the soil and the water and without poisoning humans?
If we can't find a way to make that work, then we are all heading towards an apocalypse, because what we are doing currently isn't sustainable.
And no, GMOs are not an answer because efficiency is not our current problem. Pesticides are only needed because of mono-cultures, a problem that is only relevant in the context of current industrial farming practices. Even more aggravating is that we live in the information age, we can now build the proper tools to do industrial-scale farming without making use of mono-cultures or pesticides. We can have robots to do all the hard work, we can use AI for rotating crops in order to keep the soil healthy, etc. And GMOs would not help much, because you're not addressing the problem of raising mono-cultures and for example it will not lead to much healthier soils and would do nothing to help the bees.
Sadly, even though mother nature is proving how extremely dumb and primitive we are, we are still not learning ;-)
[+] [-] loup-vaillant|9 years ago|reply
Also, that freedom thing: GMO are generally sterile, so you have to buy seeds every year from Monsanto. Great business model for Monsanto, not so much for the farmer.
[+] [-] charlesdm|9 years ago|reply
You may call it a luxury product, but I will personally pick true organic food any day of the week. Pesticides are bad and unhealthy. Organic food is even already somewhat being exposed to pesticides through historical pollution. I only have one life.
Given the amount of lobbying multinational companies are able to do and the fact most politicians can be bought for a relative pittance, you have to be a fool to believe you aren't being exposed to harmful pesticides year round. Just look at the whole Monsanto / glyphosate / roundup discussion.
If the alternative is losing a billion dollar a year business, how much would a multinational company be willing to pay to politicians and scientists (above or under the table) to make sure a certain substance doesn't get banned? A lot, I would reckon. Tens of millions easily, hundreds if required.
[+] [-] KaiserPro|9 years ago|reply
> For instance, organic farming thinks GMO's are bad
No, I think modern GMOs are going in the wrong direction. Modern wheat varieties have shrunk from being ~1.2 meters to not very high, through the use of selection, as has herbicide/pesticide tolerance. GMOs just make it faster.
All of this means that you don't have to look after the soil. Which is great, but then you have to irrigate it. but then that become expensive. Then you have to fertilise it, and that become increasingly expensive.
> some hilly permaculture farm in Austria
I can't see a combine getting up there, can you?
> impoverishing a large part of the population by doing manual labor on farms.
Thats what subsistence farming does. They can't afford mechanisation, so have to manually plough and weed.
Ofcourse weeding is greatly simplified if you grow your seeds in rows. We've known that since jethro tull's days.
GMOs are basically a sticky plaster. Yes, they can be more drought resistant, but why are there droughts? perhaps, just perhaps removing the spongy organic layer of soil that trapped the water might be the answer. increasing drainage so that floods dont happen, might also be a cause.
Farming is fucking complex, I'd suggest you go and work on a permaculture and "modern" farm, to see just what's required.
[+] [-] geon|9 years ago|reply
Are you referring to UV/cosmic radiation?
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stefantalpalaru|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] specialist|9 years ago|reply
Patenting life is bad.
Using your patents to then economically enslave the developing world is bad.
If you call all that GMO, then GMO is bad.
Objectively, empirically, morally, ethically. Bad.
I know, facts are second millennium woo woo. Sorry, I just haven't been able to let go. Must make me bad too.
[+] [-] KaiserPro|9 years ago|reply
Next to the allotment is a standard farmers field. It was earmarked for housing about 10 years ago, and it was abandoned as an crop growing device there and then.
There are two obvious features of this field:
1) its much lower than the allotment 2) it only grows algae.
The soil in the field is now basically sand. Most of the organic matter having dried out and blow away.
There are no worms, because there is nothing for them to eat. Even if there were, they would have been killed by the pesticides long ago.
Basically modern farming techniques sacrifice soil quality for current yield.
Decent soil is needed to retain moisture. Decent soil requires much less in organic fertilisers, which greatly reduces phosphate run-offs.
Now, this is where my thoughts get controversial:
modern farming requires empty soils. Empty, poor quality soil does not retain water. This leads to run off, flooding and droughts. I would also suggest that it contributes directly to global warming, as bare soil retains its heat much better than dense vegetation.
For the water retention, thats easy to prove, for temperatures, much harder
[+] [-] grive|9 years ago|reply
Still, though, a clickbait title.
Furthermore, the usual consensus I hear is that we will need to change our practices drastically, we cannot let the "conventional" farming on life support indefinitely and we cannot let it destroy our sustenance. Organic farming is however still far from being enough to make us live.
The road is probably a reasonable mix of the two, which is actively researched.
[+] [-] loup-vaillant|9 years ago|reply
What I have seen says otherwise. There's a thing about chemical agriculture: when you first implement it, you get incredible yields. Then the soil starts dying (no more acari, no more fungi, compressed soil…), and the yields slowly go back to roughly the previous levels, only this time you need all the chemicals to sustain it.
If you suddenly say "let's go organic", you're in for a disappointment: the soil is dead, the yields you get will be terrible. Indeed not enough to feed the world. Fortunately, soils can be resuscitated. One component is rotting pieces of wood, that bring back fungi. You need other things I'm not aware of, but the idea is, in 3 years, your soil is good as new. Mostly. While you now can go organic with good yields, you still have the old chemicals dwelling in that soil. It will take 15 years before you're really free from them.
With a good (or properly resuscitated) soil, it appears organic agriculture have higher yields per unit of surface than chemical agriculture. However, it requires more labour. It would seem the yield per man-month may actually be lower.
We don't need more farming surface. We need more farmers.
[+] [-] azag0|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m_eiman|9 years ago|reply
Now the question is:
* should we learn how to do this now, at a comfortable pace while we still have oil-based food as a backup, where wealthy individuals can opt to support this essential research by buying organic food,
* or should we wait until the oil's all but gone and there's a Malthusian event looming?
To me the choice is easy. At worst I'm paying more than "needed" to eat, at best we're able to phase out another reliance on oil in an orderly manner.
[+] [-] justin_vanw|9 years ago|reply
So this is 'elitism' because people think that a very high-cost, niche, atypical behavior is in some way a 'threat' because 'everyone will do it'. Maybe everyone the author knows, but only a tiny percentage of people overall.
[+] [-] rini17|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loup-vaillant|9 years ago|reply
As a not so separate issue, there is the cost of distribution. Carrying food across the country, across the world, has costs: more need for energy, and degradation of the food (fresh is better). Such costs could be lowered right now, but cannot be eliminated as long as we keep large monocultures: with them, you don't get any diversity without moving lots of food around.
[+] [-] jaimebuelta|9 years ago|reply
What is NOT guaranteed by those laws is that the food is:
- More ecologically friendly (some tradicional pesticides or fertiliser are quite nasty, and you may need to use much more)
- Better (either as more nutrients or tastier)
- Locally produced (and Co2 emissions can be high when you purchase an organic crop produced in Australia)
- Produced in small farms (there are big corporations as well)
- Rigorously following the rules, as inspections are small
Again, the key word here is GUARANTEED. Some organic farms may be doing things is a good way, but most are not improving anything, and there's nothing in the "organic food" industry as a whole that promotes a good analysis.
Given that they are "tradicional methods", I find difficult to change into a more "let's try to improve farming into a more sustainable and less aggressive endeavour". Which I think is what we all want. And I think the "conventional farming" is, at least, in a better position to approach this problem.
[+] [-] jeromenerf|9 years ago|reply
"Organic farming" doesn't mean a lot since there is no clear agreement on the definition. However, considering it should use less and safer inputs, why should it provide more guarantees than "conventional farming"?
[+] [-] joakleaf|9 years ago|reply
I realize sustainable and organic are not the same. I am actually, not sure if organic is sustainable or indeed what is required across the world for a farm to be deemed organic.
However, I have always been under the impression, that conventional (non organic) farming is unsustainable in the long term due to the environmental impact, which we'll have to pay for at a later time.
Are we already seeing some of the impact from both European and US farms (pollution of oceans and e.g. Colorado river drying up)?
To me it seems like we are in trouble either way, if we wish to continue with our current consumption of meat.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|9 years ago|reply
I learned something new and important today. For some reason, I thought this was a solved problem since Haber–Bosch process was invented. Apparently it isn't so.
[+] [-] jeromenerf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Noseshine|9 years ago|reply
https://www.edx.org/course/sustainable-soil-management-soil-...
Sustainable Soil Management: Soil for life
Learn why soil is so important, how it’s being threatened and what we can do to protect this natural resource so vital to our lives.
[+] [-] ArkyBeagle|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SeanDav|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ailideex|9 years ago|reply
This seems rather besides the point. If we all had to live in economically and technologically isolated families the amount of people that can be sustained by the earth would be allot lower ... and the quality of life of each of those families will likely be worse than any person living today.
[+] [-] msimpson|9 years ago|reply
Why? There are many other vital survival tasks that the overwhelming majority of the world's population cannot perform. This is merely the consequence of living in modern society; such efforts are abstracted away from the consumer. People will educate themselves when such information becomes necessary.
Also, fabricating dramatic statistics doesn't help anyone. I can quote a Farm and Dairy article from three years ago which stated, "One in 3 households are now growing food — the highest overall participation and spending levels seen in a decade." And that, "Households with incomes under $35,000 participating in food gardening grew to 11 million — up 38 percent from 2008."
Should I be less "TERRIFIED" now?
[+] [-] knutin|9 years ago|reply
The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. The findings of this report suggest that it should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution and loss of biodiversity.
[+] [-] jsudhams|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|9 years ago|reply
For example we buy 75lbs of onions in October and keep them in the basement. The total cost is about $30 vs. $500 at retail and I'm doing business with a guy 30 miles away instead of buying Chilean onions shipped by a Georgia grower and passing through a half dozen middlemen.
Currently, right now 60% of the produce available in the US comes from a single region -- the imperial valley in California. We're watering the desert, which comes with some obvious long term risks.
We're lucky enough to live in an area in the Northeast that still has some local vegetable agriculture. Business is picking up enough for them locally that some local family farms are doing year round operations. The first crop of high tunnel greens will be for sale February 1.
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebbv|9 years ago|reply
1. If we stop eating so much beef, we really, really don't need to grow so much corn. Cattle feed accounts for an astronomical percentage of the need to grow so much acreage. Dropping the ethanol boondoggle (it is not a real solution to our problems with oil, it is not scalable or efficient) would make a lesser but still significant impact in freeing up existing farm acreage for edible crops.
2. These people tend to compare farms that are making no real attempts at maximizing for profitability against industrial farms that are totally maximized for profitability (in both cases here profitability can be considered a synonym for efficiency.) Making money is of course on the list of priorities for local farms, but it's not their primary goal. Most of the people I know who are running local farms in my area either inherited the farm from their family or left lucrative careers in other areas to become farmers. Money is not the primary driver of their actions as it is with an industrial farm. So of course they don't compete on that level. They are not trying to.
3. I don't buy local because I believe it is "more nutritious". I buy local for a few reasons. First, the food tastes better. Garlic is a great example. Store garlic that often comes from Mexico is very dry and the individual cloves are usually very small. They grow varietals that are maximized for number of cloves. My local garlic has larger bulbs and it is fresher because it hasn't taken a long voyage from Mexico. Because it has fewer individual bulbs, the volume of the head is more usable garlic and less paper. This applies to most produce I get from local sources. Tomatoes are another prime example. Mass produced tomatoes are picked before they are ripe and gassed to give them their color. Local tomatoes are red all the way through and taste way, way better.
4. Animal welfare isn't even mentioned in the article that I saw. But it is a big reason I try to buy my meat and dairy locally. I've seen what happens at industrial farms, and I've visited my local farms. It's night and day. I am comfortable with how the animals are cared for and live their lives at my local farms. I think anyone with a heart has a hard time watching footage of industrial farms and knowing we contribute to that horror.
5. Lastly it presupposes an all or nothing world. This is the biggest piece of bullshit that the "We have to pursue industrial farming at all costs!" folks push. Their argument imagines only a world where we are 100% local organic farms that care nothing for efficiency or only 100% industrial farms that are super efficient (but care nothing for animal welfare and quality of the end produce.) This of course is ridiculous. It's never going to be all or nothing. The future will be some version of what we have now; a mixture.
[+] [-] akamaka|9 years ago|reply
I'd like to add one more point, which is that some folks argue we would be going back to a world of sustinence farming without GMOs, ignoring that much of the improvements in agricultural output have come from developments that can also benefit organic farming, such as land use reform, crop rotation, improved equipment, better irrigation, etc.
See here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolut...
[+] [-] mmargerum|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JulianMorrison|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] D_Alex|9 years ago|reply
Only way AFAIK that pest infestation are successfully forestalled in large food storages are through refrigeration or inert or even toxic atmospheres. Both of these will not work if you are actually trying to produce food.
[+] [-] roel_v|9 years ago|reply