6 ms·

Local and organic is a romantic myth

32 points by nkurz 11y ago

Spooky23 11y ago
I live in upstate ny and get all of my seasonal vegetables from farms about 45m away. Sunday we got rutabagas about 5x the size of the supermarket versions for 1/2 the price. Bushel of broccoli for $10. Bushel of spaghetti squash for $20. (75% savings vs retail) So cheaper and it almost always of higher quality.
jmnicolas 11y ago
> But surely, you’ll object, tomatoes grown in small-scale gardens taste better. Not so! Double-blind tasting panels have been unable to pick out the greenhouse tomatoes as lacking in flavour, or tomatoes grown without fertiliser as more tasteful. Maybe ... but there's a big difference between a store bought tomato that was stored in a fridge for months and a fresh tomato that comes out of the garden of my parents. One is like eating cardboard with a strange texture, the other is actually an enjoyable experience even for someone that is not big on vegetables (OK fruits if you musts insist).
- squidfood 11y ago
  Yup, this is one case where the "double-blind" takes out the actual variance in the experiment. I don't care about the carefully-controlled studies. The practical effect of including all aspects of the supply chain is that my personal supermarket's tomatoes are bland and mealy; the ones from my local farmers' market aren't.
  - mistermann 11y ago
    Heirloom tomatoes from a farmers market cost 3x as much as grocery store tomatoes, and they're worth every penny.
- cc438 11y ago
  Did you miss the next sentence? "(T)aste is more dependent on the variety of tomato than on the way it is grown." The grocery store tomato is not the same varietal as the heirloom tomato grown in small scale gardens.
- Oletros 11y ago
  > but there's a big difference between a store bought tomato that was stored in a fridge for months and a fresh tomato that comes out of the garden of my parents. You're saying exactly the same that the article. It is not the way that it is grown, it tastes differently because they are picked before maturity. Take an organic tomato before it completely maturates and you will have the same insipid tomato.
OJFord 11y ago
I didn't make it beyond a few paragraphs, and I don't really have even 'semi-strong' views either way - but this reads like the author has never set foot in the country, nevermind lived there. The "there's still potential for spoils in transport" argument is laughable, insignificant, and I imagine less than that occurring in transport to a mass-packing facility!
msandford 11y ago
OK, then BY ALL MEANS please create a supply chain to supply me with delicious heirloom tomatoes that stretches a few thousand miles. I suspect if it were possible places like Whole Foods and the like would already be doing it and selling those tomatoes at $5-$10/lb year round. But since I can only get them in season, and rarely then, I suspect that there is something to the "local, organic" myth after all.
- johansch 11y ago
  You never realized it's all about the price point being combined with a story? Someone figured out you can make people pay quite a bit more for higher quality tomatoes if you can claim with some credibility that they are grown locally. How about the good quality tomatoes grown 1000 miles away, that could be economically shipped to you in a way that is less destructive to the environment than the first option, still taste as good and be cheaper? Not an option, because they don't conform to your arbitrarily chosen standard of being "local". You are no better than the luddites. There is nothing about mass production that lowers the quality. What lowers quality is the price point and the demand for the cheapest possible product. Shift it to some better balance between quality and price, and mass production would kill your cute little hobbyist farms in every single benchmark, including sustainability. At the moment the "ecological"/"locally grown" meme is blocking this development.
  - jonah 11y ago
    It's just not physically possible to ship a tomato that's been fully vine ripened for a thousand miles. Once they're fully ripe, they're too fragile to ship an appreciable distance. So, the big producers pick them hard and unripe and ship them. Yes, they'll continue to ripen off the vine, but once they've been cut off from their source of nutrients and water they're not going to get any more. It's the trade off necessary to have produce outside of the local season. (Greenhouses in upstate with grow lights would be a better alternative way to get tomatoes in New York City in January though.)
    - johansch 11y ago
johansch 11y ago
Well duh. (Although I have witnessed many otherwise smart people fall for this fallacy.)
- tehchromic 11y ago
  Probably the best evidence I have to support this "fallacy" is the couple hundred pounds of honey I harvest locally every year. So according to this article I should drop my beekeeping and just buy honey from Chinese suppliers who are operating at scale and using smarter ... technology? I dunno, but in the future I'd like my honey like my tomatoes: to continue to come from my neighborhood whenever possible.
  - johansch 11y ago
    I don't understand why the opposite to "local" has to be "halfway around the world". Why not do it in a scalable but sensible way? You know, like being able to address a market of millions instead of thousands, but perhaps not necessarily billions. You are of course welcome to pay extra for some sort of weird pleasure of having things made very close to where you live, but I think the taxation systems should punish you for the extra strain that makes you put onto the environment.
    - tehchromic 11y ago
      well i agree with you, and I wouldn't knock food transport and scale provided it is done in a sustainable and non toxic way. but i definitely take issue with the "weird pleasure" comment, as there is nothing weird about the pleasure of farming in the city and growing your own food. It's about one of the most engaging cultural practices in existence, and it's as old as people. But it takes learning and practice, and awareness of that value, which is clearly missing in modern culture which views farming as some sort of weird thing. A weird peasure indeed!
Alex3917 11y ago
I'm all for technology, but this is just poorly written pro-agribusiness propaganda. It doesn't even address any of the most common criticisms of big agriculture, and instead is just attacking farmers markets for whatever reason.
sxcurry 11y ago
Now I feel really badly about buying the local organic produce at one of the many farmers markets near me. Even though the produce is fresh, delicious, and my $$$ stay in my local community, I now realize that I should have been paying for the tomato transported 1000 miles with a smart chip in the carton. Thanks for the wake up call!
ndespres 11y ago
As a farmer I'm biased, but there's a lot to be said for eating fresh, in-season foods produced by people in your community. The human and environmental costs of making sure tomatoes can reach you from 1000 miles away is sickening. We run a 50-member CSA. Produce is picked fresh weekly or bi-weekly from the garden and available for pickup by 50 local families. Are our yields as high as what we might get if robotic pickers and chemical fertilizers were used? No, but nobody is dying or being abused or getting cancer to make sure that a disgusting, mealy, colorless tomato can be on your cheeseburger.
- greggyb 11y ago
  The environmental cost tends to be lower with the 1000 mile food. Transportation efficiencies of freight trains and tractor trailers dwarf those of the pickups and small container trucks you see with local produce. The overall emissions per pound of produce transported end up lower with the distant food.
  - jonah 11y ago
    That's one metric. How about all the others?
    - roel_v 11y ago
      Which ones?
      - legulere 11y ago
        Heated greenhouses so that e.g. tomatoes can be grown out of season.
  - tehchromic 11y ago
    uh, what's the cost in fuel emissions when I get a veg from my front yard grown in mulch generated from my own tree?
    - 11y ago
tehchromic 11y ago
> But urban land is in short supply, expensive, often polluted, and unsuitable for horticulture. Nonsense. This is an argument for expanding access and cleaning up after ourselves - land that is too polluted to grow in is too polluted to live on. > So does the industrial washing of packed and cut vegetables, which also saves water, compared with household‑level processing. Also bullshit. People spend more water cleaning vegetables that have already been cleaned from industrial sources than from their yard. Growing vegetables close to home is a resource saver across the board, especially if it were smartly integrated with urban composting projects. >While ‘handpicked’ sounds attractive to the urban consumer or occasional gardener, this type of manual labour is backbreaking if done all day long. It is attractive to the urban consumer because if you are picking for yourself and family, the work isn't backbreaking and all day long. I fully believe in automated, roboticized food production as a replacement of slave labor, however it seems fairly sensible to me that, as labor becomes less of an imperative of class, that the quality of a person's labor will become more refined holistic and less machine-like, ie: farming and gardening for exercise instead of going to the gym. > To top it all, the yield from organic farming is low. Bullshit!! I don't have numbers handy, but I've been on farm tours, (granted organic is a misleading label these days) and the net yield from farms that depend on renewable, organic resources is higher than industrialized factory farmed produce, and the quality is higher. Only in the narrow calculus of unit per price is the yield higher, but we already know the dirty secret there: factory farmed, mass produced food is subsidized by oil and unsustainable resources, where the true cost is buried in diminishing returns over generational time spans. > ketchup haha! the great ketchup argument. Now we know this was ghost written by Ronald Raygunz ghost! > Double-blind tasting panels have been unable to pick out the greenhouse tomatoes as lacking in flavour, or tomatoes grown without fertiliser as more tasteful. Manure. Who does the testing? I can't think of an easier study to game. Plus "tomatoes grown without fertiliser" is a tell: not "fertilizer" as organic compost made from cow manure is "fertilizer", but inorganic fertilizer made from petroleum? - yeah, give me the manure tomatoes please. And here's the last straw in this troll article: >In complete contrast to the mantra of organic farming, modern greenhouses are now in the vanguard of sustainability. Because organic farmers have used greenhouses for decades and beyond, and there's nothing incompatible with the organic, sustainable, small-scale, local movements and the greenhouse. So this article can't maintain a consistent argument with respect to its own premise. No one is arguing that sustainability in farming shouldn't utilize the best tech possible, but attacking the best progressive pillars of the movement which are small scale, individual efforts on shoddy grounds to promote the benevolent promise of mass scale industrial agriculture - it's not good work. I will say that to the extend that these kinds of articles are meant to raise hackles and cause discussion among hipster urban farm types, then well done!
readams 11y ago
Many enjoy locally produced food and desire the freshness or access to heirloom varieties. But it's important to recognize that this isn't an environmentally friendly or especially sustainable pattern of consumption. Indeed these modes of production are less efficient and likely to be more damaging to the environment. Local and/or organic is a luxury consumption option. Much like buying a choice cut of meat or premium food brands. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that it's also more "green."
- jonah 11y ago
  How is small-scale organic farming not "environmentally friendly or especially sustainable"?
  - readams 11y ago
    To produce the same amount of food will require more total resources, including land area, energy, and environmental damage. Your small-scale organic farm-produced product is a luxury good, with luxury inputs.
    - tehchromic 11y ago
      How is your factory farmed tomato that depends on buried costs of fossil fuel, and inorganic fertilizers, and unsustainable resources not a luxury good? The luxury is the cheap price, which is not sustainable. Truly organic local food has been produced sustainably for millennia, so to call that a luxury while wallowing in cheap oil subsidized corn food is totally backwards.
      - roel_v 11y ago
        Greenhouses produce energy, with solar panels on their roof, even when amortizing all production costs. Inorganic fertilizers are much more efficient than other methods; greenhouses need no pesticides because the environment can be controlled, and use friendly insects that eat the few bad ones there are. Did you even read the article?
alisson 11y ago
> But urban land is in short supply, expensive, often polluted, and unsuitable for horticulture. We should stop focusing on the plants and focus more on the soil. Better soil = better water retention = less work with irrigation = healthy plants = healthy planet. > The belief that only small-scale, non-mechanised agriculture without the use of chemicals respects biodiversity, and that tradition is key to the future, is illusory. In reality, small-scale unfertilised farming of annual crops or unregulated grazing in the tropics are major causes of destruction of soils and forests. The only problem here is the "annual crops or unregulated grazing" because on a diverse agroforestry the trend is the opposite, the soil gets better and better as years goes on. More organic matter falling on the soil = better soil, as long as you don't remove the organic matter you're good to go! The main problem lives here, a lot of people clean the grass and burn it, the soil should never be uncovered, you can cut the grass no problem but leave it there to compost and improve your soil, just like happens in a forest. > Chemical use is still, for the most part, equated with environmental destruction. This is a false image, one that leads people to turn away from science and technology. We cannot go back to the ill-designed agricultural systems of past centuries with their famines and harvest failures. Sure, this so called "science and technology" is what made the land "often polluted, and unsuitable for horticulture" in the first place. Grow food forests, build forest soil! The forest never needs any chemical added by humans, it doesn't have pest problems, why? It's diverse. Diversification guarantees your surviving, when you have only one source of food (or money, or anything) and it dries out you starve, but if you have multiple sources you can not only survive but have more colorful plate too. Sure it's more laboring to do forest, but we can change our machines to work with forests instead of mono-cultures, that's the way to go, the more mature a forest gets the less human intervention it needs. Here in Brasil I'm seeing a few people starting to develop machines to work with agroforestry, that's the future of food IMHO: forests! Well, maybe I'm biased, since I found out permaculture and agroforestry I'm in love, couldn't be happier :)
- readams 11y ago
  What is the yield from your agriforest? Will your forests feed 7 billion people? Of course not. It's perfectly fine to desire luxury goods like local or heirloom varieties when you buy your food. But you are trying to propose a model for feeding the world, and using this approach the world would starve.
jonah 11y ago
In about 15 minutes, I'm going to get up from my desk, go outside and walk two blocks. There I'll arrive at one of the 8 weekly farmers markets in my area. It takes up two city blocks of the main street, every Tuesday evening year-round. There, I'll visit with the farmers I know by name and buy produce that was grown on farms a half-an-hour away. The tomatoes I'll pick up will be one of may varieties available and so ripe that I'll need to eat them in the next couple days. That's OK because I can get more at the Saturday market. They'll also taste amazing and better than what I can get at the grocery store at any time. They'll also be very close to the same price. I'm extremely thankful that I live in a place where this is possible and fully intend to continue doing so for multiple reasons - eating tastier food, supporting the local economy, experiencing exotic varieties, and participating in my local community.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mattupstate 11y ago
If this type of subject is interesting to you then you should some of Rachel Laudan's work. She's a food historian but is very in tune with this topic. Here's a brief interview with her: http://www.washingtonian.com/blogs/bestbites/todd-kliman-otherwise/rachel-lauden-how-michael-pollan-alice-waters-got-everything-wrong.php http://www.washingtonian.com/blogs/bestbites/todd-kliman-oth...
apsec112 11y ago
A lot of people don't realize that shipping is incredibly cheap now, in both money and energy. It takes less fuel to ship a car from London to New York by container ship than it does to drive that car fifty miles.
alisson 11y ago
Agroforest on a intense farmed land: https://vimeo.com/136423275 https://vimeo.com/136423275 How is it not sustainable? How can it not feed the world?
tabrischen 11y ago
I don't understand why this is not scalable. Even in the bay area, where there is high population density and the price of living is one of the highest in the world, there are tons of farmer's markets everywhere. Technology which improves transportation aid local food production even more.

32 points by nkurz 11y ago

I live in upstate ny and get all of my seasonal vegetables from farms about 45m away. Sunday we got rutabagas about 5x the size of the supermarket versions for 1/2 the price. Bushel of broccoli for $10. Bushel of spaghetti squash for $20. (75% savings vs retail) So cheaper and it almost always of higher quality.

jmnicolas 11y ago

> But surely, you’ll object, tomatoes grown in small-scale gardens taste better. Not so! Double-blind tasting panels have been unable to pick out the greenhouse tomatoes as lacking in flavour, or tomatoes grown without fertiliser as more tasteful. Maybe ... but there's a big difference between a store bought tomato that was stored in a fridge for months and a fresh tomato that comes out of the garden of my parents. One is like eating cardboard with a strange texture, the other is actually an enjoyable experience even for someone that is not big on vegetables (OK fruits if you musts insist).

squidfood 11y ago
Yup, this is one case where the "double-blind" takes out the actual variance in the experiment. I don't care about the carefully-controlled studies. The practical effect of including all aspects of the supply chain is that my personal supermarket's tomatoes are bland and mealy; the ones from my local farmers' market aren't.
- mistermann 11y ago
  Heirloom tomatoes from a farmers market cost 3x as much as grocery store tomatoes, and they're worth every penny.
cc438 11y ago
Did you miss the next sentence? "(T)aste is more dependent on the variety of tomato than on the way it is grown." The grocery store tomato is not the same varietal as the heirloom tomato grown in small scale gardens.
Oletros 11y ago
> but there's a big difference between a store bought tomato that was stored in a fridge for months and a fresh tomato that comes out of the garden of my parents. You're saying exactly the same that the article. It is not the way that it is grown, it tastes differently because they are picked before maturity. Take an organic tomato before it completely maturates and you will have the same insipid tomato.

OJFord 11y ago

I didn't make it beyond a few paragraphs, and I don't really have even 'semi-strong' views either way - but this reads like the author has never set foot in the country, nevermind lived there. The "there's still potential for spoils in transport" argument is laughable, insignificant, and I imagine less than that occurring in transport to a mass-packing facility!

msandford 11y ago

OK, then BY ALL MEANS please create a supply chain to supply me with delicious heirloom tomatoes that stretches a few thousand miles. I suspect if it were possible places like Whole Foods and the like would already be doing it and selling those tomatoes at $5-$10/lb year round. But since I can only get them in season, and rarely then, I suspect that there is something to the "local, organic" myth after all.

johansch 11y ago
You never realized it's all about the price point being combined with a story? Someone figured out you can make people pay quite a bit more for higher quality tomatoes if you can claim with some credibility that they are grown locally. How about the good quality tomatoes grown 1000 miles away, that could be economically shipped to you in a way that is less destructive to the environment than the first option, still taste as good and be cheaper? Not an option, because they don't conform to your arbitrarily chosen standard of being "local". You are no better than the luddites. There is nothing about mass production that lowers the quality. What lowers quality is the price point and the demand for the cheapest possible product. Shift it to some better balance between quality and price, and mass production would kill your cute little hobbyist farms in every single benchmark, including sustainability. At the moment the "ecological"/"locally grown" meme is blocking this development.
- jonah 11y ago
  It's just not physically possible to ship a tomato that's been fully vine ripened for a thousand miles. Once they're fully ripe, they're too fragile to ship an appreciable distance. So, the big producers pick them hard and unripe and ship them. Yes, they'll continue to ripen off the vine, but once they've been cut off from their source of nutrients and water they're not going to get any more. It's the trade off necessary to have produce outside of the local season. (Greenhouses in upstate with grow lights would be a better alternative way to get tomatoes in New York City in January though.)
  - johansch 11y ago

johansch 11y ago

Well duh. (Although I have witnessed many otherwise smart people fall for this fallacy.)

tehchromic 11y ago
Probably the best evidence I have to support this "fallacy" is the couple hundred pounds of honey I harvest locally every year. So according to this article I should drop my beekeeping and just buy honey from Chinese suppliers who are operating at scale and using smarter ... technology? I dunno, but in the future I'd like my honey like my tomatoes: to continue to come from my neighborhood whenever possible.
- johansch 11y ago
  I don't understand why the opposite to "local" has to be "halfway around the world". Why not do it in a scalable but sensible way? You know, like being able to address a market of millions instead of thousands, but perhaps not necessarily billions. You are of course welcome to pay extra for some sort of weird pleasure of having things made very close to where you live, but I think the taxation systems should punish you for the extra strain that makes you put onto the environment.
  - tehchromic 11y ago
    well i agree with you, and I wouldn't knock food transport and scale provided it is done in a sustainable and non toxic way. but i definitely take issue with the "weird pleasure" comment, as there is nothing weird about the pleasure of farming in the city and growing your own food. It's about one of the most engaging cultural practices in existence, and it's as old as people. But it takes learning and practice, and awareness of that value, which is clearly missing in modern culture which views farming as some sort of weird thing. A weird peasure indeed!

Alex3917 11y ago

I'm all for technology, but this is just poorly written pro-agribusiness propaganda. It doesn't even address any of the most common criticisms of big agriculture, and instead is just attacking farmers markets for whatever reason.

sxcurry 11y ago

Now I feel really badly about buying the local organic produce at one of the many farmers markets near me. Even though the produce is fresh, delicious, and my $$$ stay in my local community, I now realize that I should have been paying for the tomato transported 1000 miles with a smart chip in the carton. Thanks for the wake up call!

ndespres 11y ago

As a farmer I'm biased, but there's a lot to be said for eating fresh, in-season foods produced by people in your community. The human and environmental costs of making sure tomatoes can reach you from 1000 miles away is sickening. We run a 50-member CSA. Produce is picked fresh weekly or bi-weekly from the garden and available for pickup by 50 local families. Are our yields as high as what we might get if robotic pickers and chemical fertilizers were used? No, but nobody is dying or being abused or getting cancer to make sure that a disgusting, mealy, colorless tomato can be on your cheeseburger.

greggyb 11y ago
The environmental cost tends to be lower with the 1000 mile food. Transportation efficiencies of freight trains and tractor trailers dwarf those of the pickups and small container trucks you see with local produce. The overall emissions per pound of produce transported end up lower with the distant food.
- jonah 11y ago
  That's one metric. How about all the others?
  - roel_v 11y ago
    Which ones?
    - legulere 11y ago
      Heated greenhouses so that e.g. tomatoes can be grown out of season.
- tehchromic 11y ago
  uh, what's the cost in fuel emissions when I get a veg from my front yard grown in mulch generated from my own tree?
  - 11y ago

tehchromic 11y ago

> But urban land is in short supply, expensive, often polluted, and unsuitable for horticulture. Nonsense. This is an argument for expanding access and cleaning up after ourselves - land that is too polluted to grow in is too polluted to live on. > So does the industrial washing of packed and cut vegetables, which also saves water, compared with household‑level processing. Also bullshit. People spend more water cleaning vegetables that have already been cleaned from industrial sources than from their yard. Growing vegetables close to home is a resource saver across the board, especially if it were smartly integrated with urban composting projects. >While ‘handpicked’ sounds attractive to the urban consumer or occasional gardener, this type of manual labour is backbreaking if done all day long. It is attractive to the urban consumer because if you are picking for yourself and family, the work isn't backbreaking and all day long. I fully believe in automated, roboticized food production as a replacement of slave labor, however it seems fairly sensible to me that, as labor becomes less of an imperative of class, that the quality of a person's labor will become more refined holistic and less machine-like, ie: farming and gardening for exercise instead of going to the gym. > To top it all, the yield from organic farming is low. Bullshit!! I don't have numbers handy, but I've been on farm tours, (granted organic is a misleading label these days) and the net yield from farms that depend on renewable, organic resources is higher than industrialized factory farmed produce, and the quality is higher. Only in the narrow calculus of unit per price is the yield higher, but we already know the dirty secret there: factory farmed, mass produced food is subsidized by oil and unsustainable resources, where the true cost is buried in diminishing returns over generational time spans. > ketchup haha! the great ketchup argument. Now we know this was ghost written by Ronald Raygunz ghost! > Double-blind tasting panels have been unable to pick out the greenhouse tomatoes as lacking in flavour, or tomatoes grown without fertiliser as more tasteful. Manure. Who does the testing? I can't think of an easier study to game. Plus "tomatoes grown without fertiliser" is a tell: not "fertilizer" as organic compost made from cow manure is "fertilizer", but inorganic fertilizer made from petroleum? - yeah, give me the manure tomatoes please. And here's the last straw in this troll article: >In complete contrast to the mantra of organic farming, modern greenhouses are now in the vanguard of sustainability. Because organic farmers have used greenhouses for decades and beyond, and there's nothing incompatible with the organic, sustainable, small-scale, local movements and the greenhouse. So this article can't maintain a consistent argument with respect to its own premise. No one is arguing that sustainability in farming shouldn't utilize the best tech possible, but attacking the best progressive pillars of the movement which are small scale, individual efforts on shoddy grounds to promote the benevolent promise of mass scale industrial agriculture - it's not good work. I will say that to the extend that these kinds of articles are meant to raise hackles and cause discussion among hipster urban farm types, then well done!

readams 11y ago

Many enjoy locally produced food and desire the freshness or access to heirloom varieties. But it's important to recognize that this isn't an environmentally friendly or especially sustainable pattern of consumption. Indeed these modes of production are less efficient and likely to be more damaging to the environment. Local and/or organic is a luxury consumption option. Much like buying a choice cut of meat or premium food brands. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that it's also more "green."

jonah 11y ago
How is small-scale organic farming not "environmentally friendly or especially sustainable"?
- readams 11y ago
  To produce the same amount of food will require more total resources, including land area, energy, and environmental damage. Your small-scale organic farm-produced product is a luxury good, with luxury inputs.
  - tehchromic 11y ago
    How is your factory farmed tomato that depends on buried costs of fossil fuel, and inorganic fertilizers, and unsustainable resources not a luxury good? The luxury is the cheap price, which is not sustainable. Truly organic local food has been produced sustainably for millennia, so to call that a luxury while wallowing in cheap oil subsidized corn food is totally backwards.
    - roel_v 11y ago
      Greenhouses produce energy, with solar panels on their roof, even when amortizing all production costs. Inorganic fertilizers are much more efficient than other methods; greenhouses need no pesticides because the environment can be controlled, and use friendly insects that eat the few bad ones there are. Did you even read the article?

alisson 11y ago

> But urban land is in short supply, expensive, often polluted, and unsuitable for horticulture. We should stop focusing on the plants and focus more on the soil. Better soil = better water retention = less work with irrigation = healthy plants = healthy planet. > The belief that only small-scale, non-mechanised agriculture without the use of chemicals respects biodiversity, and that tradition is key to the future, is illusory. In reality, small-scale unfertilised farming of annual crops or unregulated grazing in the tropics are major causes of destruction of soils and forests. The only problem here is the "annual crops or unregulated grazing" because on a diverse agroforestry the trend is the opposite, the soil gets better and better as years goes on. More organic matter falling on the soil = better soil, as long as you don't remove the organic matter you're good to go! The main problem lives here, a lot of people clean the grass and burn it, the soil should never be uncovered, you can cut the grass no problem but leave it there to compost and improve your soil, just like happens in a forest. > Chemical use is still, for the most part, equated with environmental destruction. This is a false image, one that leads people to turn away from science and technology. We cannot go back to the ill-designed agricultural systems of past centuries with their famines and harvest failures. Sure, this so called "science and technology" is what made the land "often polluted, and unsuitable for horticulture" in the first place. Grow food forests, build forest soil! The forest never needs any chemical added by humans, it doesn't have pest problems, why? It's diverse. Diversification guarantees your surviving, when you have only one source of food (or money, or anything) and it dries out you starve, but if you have multiple sources you can not only survive but have more colorful plate too. Sure it's more laboring to do forest, but we can change our machines to work with forests instead of mono-cultures, that's the way to go, the more mature a forest gets the less human intervention it needs. Here in Brasil I'm seeing a few people starting to develop machines to work with agroforestry, that's the future of food IMHO: forests! Well, maybe I'm biased, since I found out permaculture and agroforestry I'm in love, couldn't be happier :)

readams 11y ago
What is the yield from your agriforest? Will your forests feed 7 billion people? Of course not. It's perfectly fine to desire luxury goods like local or heirloom varieties when you buy your food. But you are trying to propose a model for feeding the world, and using this approach the world would starve.

jonah 11y ago

In about 15 minutes, I'm going to get up from my desk, go outside and walk two blocks. There I'll arrive at one of the 8 weekly farmers markets in my area. It takes up two city blocks of the main street, every Tuesday evening year-round. There, I'll visit with the farmers I know by name and buy produce that was grown on farms a half-an-hour away. The tomatoes I'll pick up will be one of may varieties available and so ripe that I'll need to eat them in the next couple days. That's OK because I can get more at the Saturday market. They'll also taste amazing and better than what I can get at the grocery store at any time. They'll also be very close to the same price. I'm extremely thankful that I live in a place where this is possible and fully intend to continue doing so for multiple reasons - eating tastier food, supporting the local economy, experiencing exotic varieties, and participating in my local community.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

mattupstate 11y ago

If this type of subject is interesting to you then you should some of Rachel Laudan's work. She's a food historian but is very in tune with this topic. Here's a brief interview with her: http://www.washingtonian.com/blogs/bestbites/todd-kliman-otherwise/rachel-lauden-how-michael-pollan-alice-waters-got-everything-wrong.php http://www.washingtonian.com/blogs/bestbites/todd-kliman-oth...

apsec112 11y ago

A lot of people don't realize that shipping is incredibly cheap now, in both money and energy. It takes less fuel to ship a car from London to New York by container ship than it does to drive that car fifty miles.

alisson 11y ago

Agroforest on a intense farmed land: https://vimeo.com/136423275 https://vimeo.com/136423275 How is it not sustainable? How can it not feed the world?

tabrischen 11y ago

I don't understand why this is not scalable. Even in the bay area, where there is high population density and the price of living is one of the highest in the world, there are tons of farmer's markets everywhere. Technology which improves transportation aid local food production even more.