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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 f

by 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?
      - tehchromic 11y ago
        who is arguing against greenhouses? the article sets up a false dichotomy between local organic produce, which is more efficient by any measure that includes the cost of doing business, and greenhouses, which are not at all incompatible.
tehchromic 11y ago
Back up your claims! You might also say: access to clean air and unpolluted drinking water is a luxury which is not particularly environmentally friendly or sustainable. Keep in mind when you are breathing and drinking clean air and water, that it's gonna be that way forever, and you're gonna be drinking mud and breathing soot in the long term because you're living in a "green" fantasy. That'd be kinda setting the status quo for everyone based on your own low standards I think.
- readams 11y ago
  This makes no sense. The whole point is to find a model for feeding 7 billion people that preserves the environment. Local and organic do _more_ damage to the environment than producing the same equivalent amount of food industrially. They use more land and more energy. A solution for the environment cannot involve starving the world, or needing to allocate even more huge swaths of it for agriculture.
  - tehchromic 11y ago
    "do more damage" sorry, that's the claim that is not substantiated by evidence and it isn't close to being accurate. Conventional farming is a toxic mess, and it's heavily subsidized by unsustainable resources and practices at every level. It may be the case that the cost of doing farming right is high (and that is not necessarily meeting the "organic" standards which are themselves heavily biased by conventional interests, but by farming using truly organic methods) but that's because it tends to include costs to the planet, or not include cost savings that are causing extinction level changes to the planetary chemistry. There are people who will tell you that sustaining our population is not possible and that we are headed for an extinction event, however other people say that it is possible to live within our means, if we start factoring in the real cost of things like conventional farming, and therefore change our practice. And technology is definitely a factor in that transition, so if you buy the phony trolling argument going on here that greenhouses, and automation is incompatible with sustainable, organic, local farming practice, then you are being sold a bill o' goods!
- roel_v 11y ago

by readams 11y ago

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?
    - tehchromic 11y ago
      who is arguing against greenhouses? the article sets up a false dichotomy between local organic produce, which is more efficient by any measure that includes the cost of doing business, and greenhouses, which are not at all incompatible.

tehchromic 11y ago

Back up your claims! You might also say: access to clean air and unpolluted drinking water is a luxury which is not particularly environmentally friendly or sustainable. Keep in mind when you are breathing and drinking clean air and water, that it's gonna be that way forever, and you're gonna be drinking mud and breathing soot in the long term because you're living in a "green" fantasy. That'd be kinda setting the status quo for everyone based on your own low standards I think.

readams 11y ago
This makes no sense. The whole point is to find a model for feeding 7 billion people that preserves the environment. Local and organic do _more_ damage to the environment than producing the same equivalent amount of food industrially. They use more land and more energy. A solution for the environment cannot involve starving the world, or needing to allocate even more huge swaths of it for agriculture.
- tehchromic 11y ago
  "do more damage" sorry, that's the claim that is not substantiated by evidence and it isn't close to being accurate. Conventional farming is a toxic mess, and it's heavily subsidized by unsustainable resources and practices at every level. It may be the case that the cost of doing farming right is high (and that is not necessarily meeting the "organic" standards which are themselves heavily biased by conventional interests, but by farming using truly organic methods) but that's because it tends to include costs to the planet, or not include cost savings that are causing extinction level changes to the planetary chemistry. There are people who will tell you that sustaining our population is not possible and that we are headed for an extinction event, however other people say that it is possible to live within our means, if we start factoring in the real cost of things like conventional farming, and therefore change our practice. And technology is definitely a factor in that transition, so if you buy the phony trolling argument going on here that greenhouses, and automation is incompatible with sustainable, organic, local farming practice, then you are being sold a bill o' goods!
roel_v 11y ago