14 ms·

Yes, organic farming will kill us all

231 points by psiops 10y ago

grive 10y ago
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.
- azag0 10y ago
  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.
- loup-vaillant 10y ago
  > 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.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    I don't think the yields go back to pre-fertilizer levels, otherwise we wouldn't be able to sustain so many more mouths than before Haber-Bosch.
    - loup-vaillant 10y ago
      No they don't, not right away. You need that damn 3-years hiatus with zero yield before you can start over.
  - throwaway1892 10y ago
    The problem (here in France) is that the number of farmers is going down hard (with suicides every day). They are currently crushed by regulations, labor costs, undercuts by products from other countries with different labor costs and regulations and the supermarkets that make big margin on their back. So your solution is good, but it is not currently applicable here in France.
    - loup-vaillant 10y ago
      > but it is not currently applicable here in France. You point out a serious policy problem. Couldn't we apply that solution if we changed that policy?
      - throwaway1892 10y ago
        I hope that the solution is applicable, as I hope that the policy can be changed. But that's something on the long term.
    - rocqua 10y ago
      The rethoric I've heard here (Netherlands) is that France idealizes the small farm as a living unit, which leads to undersized and under-modernized farms. This is then being propped up by subsidies, but imports (and government budgets) are putting more pressure on these farms' inefficiencies than the subsidies can compensate. I am in no position to judge either way.
snovv_crash 10y ago
One thing I don't see him cover is how to deal with the "ecosystem" which will form around, and eventually consume, a fully organic permaculture farm. One of the big advantages of monoculture is that you usually only need to protect against a single class of pests in a specific area.
- odelomez 10y ago
  The ecosystem can be of great advantage, different crops can help themselves in warding off the intruders. As an example I mix tomato plants with french marigold and basil. Some farmers have built impressive ecosystem where everything makes sense, type of plant, seasons, minerals, nitrogen, etc
- kristopolous 10y ago
  A single point of failure is an advantage?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Yes? As a king, what would you prefer - to defend against one big kingdom that wants all of your land, or to defend against three big kingdoms that each want a third of your land? When number of points of failure trade off against your attack surface, you can't just say "more PoFs is better".
    - kristopolous 10y ago
      That analogy isn't correct. You've made it 1 thing against 1 versus 1 against 3. If we were to use that analogy, a more accurate metric would be either having 1 large centralized kingdom or 100 small, autonomous, independent kingdoms that each have fundamentally different weaknesses. If one fails, you still have 99. But even that fails to understand the dynamic of biological systems. There's mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationships between crops and many creatures (bees, worms, etc). Presenting it as always in conflict is inaccurate. The fundamentally different approach is to not look at pest solutions through a genocidal chemical warfare lens but instead to figure out how to maintain a sustainable relationship and have all of nature working for you instead of setting most of it as against you.
ThePhysicist 10y ago
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.
- kuschku 10y ago
  And there is a huge unspoken problem yet. 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://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-1453_en.htm http://www.dw.com/en/eu-sues-germany-over-water-tainted-by-nitrate-fertilizer/a-19225653 http://www.dw.com/en/eu-sues-germany-over-water-tainted-by-n... https://www.thelocal.de/20161107/eu-sues-germany-over-water-polluting-farming https://www.thelocal.de/20161107/eu-sues-germany-over-water-... https://www.euractiv.com/section/agriculture-food/news/eu-takes-germany-to-court-over-high-nitrate-levels/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/agriculture-food/news/eu-ta...
Quarrelsome 10y ago
so this entire article is based on the assumption that current farming practice is wholly unsustainable. I'm not sure I buy into this. Surely it can be adapted as opposed to rejected and completely changed, can't it?
- yoz-y 10y ago
  Marked will decide. In France I already see more Bio (Organic) shops around than those selling conventional food. I don't go there because of the price but the demand is clearly growing. Most of the organic food is produced by the same companies that do conventional farming anyways, shift will come.
  - jeromenerf 10y ago
    "Market will decide", as if. Governments can (and some do) help to bootstrap a saner "organic" economic landscape by creating demand through regulations such as "school restaurants food should be 50% local and organic by 2020, 100% by 2030".
    - yoz-y 10y ago
      Government could do that, but it should only be necessary if the claims that "you can produce more calories per acre of organic food compared to traditional agriculture" are false. If it is cheaper to produce more, of more expensive produce, you can bet that the agriculture industry will shift.
- loup-vaillant 10y ago
  This particular assumption is pretty safe: current farming practice depends heavily on oil. For energy of course, but also for chemicals. Nothing that depends that heavily on fossil fuels is sustainable in the long run. Whatever change we devise, we need to weaken that dependency. > Surely it can be adapted as opposed to rejected and completely changed, can't it? Personally, I see organic agriculture as a modernization: it's healthier (no poisonous pesticide in my apple!), easier on the soil, but it's not easier. The knowledge required to grow food organically is quite precise, and research is still ongoing.
justin_vanw 10y ago
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.
- kristopolous 10y ago
  Sure but if this was the 1950s and the article was about abstaining from smoking, you could have made similar arguments. The people of tomorrow will not think like the people of today.
- loup-vaillant 10y ago
  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.
  - geon 10y ago
    Please don't use the word "chemical" like it is something unnatural or harmful. Water is a chemical. The active ingredients of natural fertilizer are chemicals.
    - grzm 10y ago
SeanDav 10y ago
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.
- loup-vaillant 10y ago
  It's not a simple issue. A proper argument would require a few hours.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    I for one would happily read it. Do you know of any?
    - loup-vaillant 10y ago
      I have seen a number of documentaries, but they're all in French. "Solutions locales pour un désordre global" and "Alerte à Babylone" come to mind.
    - Noseshine 10y ago
      I just posted this above, try https://www.edx.org/course/sustainable-soil-management-soil-life-wageningenx-soilx-0 https://www.edx.org/course/sustainable-soil-management-soil-...
avar 10y ago
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.
- geon 10y ago
  "just fine with irradiating large fields full of plants" Are you referring to UV/cosmic radiation?
  - KaiserPro 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening and http://www.ediblegeography.com/strange-and-beautiful-seeds-from-the-atom/ http://www.ediblegeography.com/strange-and-beautiful-seeds-f...
- loup-vaillant 10y ago
  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.
  - 7sigma 10y ago
    "It's because they're optimised to withstand heavy pesticide use" Actually, GMOs need less pesticides than non GMO crop. Some of them produce their own pesticide (BT corn and BT cotton). "Pesticides are bad." Thats kind of the point, they are bad to pests that try to eat the crop "GMO are generally sterile" You are confusing GMO with hybrids and no they are not sterile, the just lose vigour after a few generations, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_hybrid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_hybrid ", so you have to buy seeds every year from Monsanto. Great business model for Monsanto, not so much for the farmer." Most farmers in the developed world buy new seed every year because of the hybrid thing, and do so because its convenient. At the end of the day its a choice the farmer makes: they could re use their own seeds and hybridise them, but for most its not worth the hassle.
jaimebuelta 10y ago
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.
- jeromenerf 10y ago
  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"?
TeMPOraL 10y ago
> global soil deterioration 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 10y ago
  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.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  Oh no. It's blindingly complex. The Dust Bowl happened well after Haber-Bosch.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  Seriously, try this: https://www.edx.org/course/sustainable-soil-management-soil-life-wageningenx-soilx-0 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.
KaiserPro 10y ago
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
- roel_v 10y ago
  "Now, this is where my thoughts get controversial:" This is not controversial. It's widely recognized (even by conventional farming bodies) that soil degradation is a major environmental threat. At the EU level, while the Soil Directive proposal was withdrawn a few years ago, much other environmental work and legislation is about mitigation and monitoring of soil degradation / threats. There are different schools of thought on how to deal with it though; the 'let's go back to subsistence farming' idea isn't the only way.
  - KaiserPro 10y ago
    oh, I'm not suggesting subsitance farming, that just sucks balls. Have you ever tried to plough furrows with horses? that shits hard. we need to be dumping literal mountains of shit on the fields again. we also need to stop killing the soil ecosystem, so that fungus, worms and all manner of other things can grown and break the soil up
leecarraher 10y ago
so what would this rube goldbergian harvester machine look like that could be capable of efficiently farming such a dynamic landscape as a multistory(already sounding like we got some marketing terms in the works here) farm... my guess is about 5'10", over worked and from some economically depressed country. yay organic
- codingdave 10y ago
  As opposed to the 5'10" rube goldbergian harvester machine that selects your products at the grocery store, moves them around in a cart for 20 minutes, then stands in line to purchase them? Somewhere along the line, you as a person will always walk around and pick up your own food. (Unless you pay someone to do that for you, too.) Doing it direct from a local food forest, or a farmers market, will always involve less transportation and labor cost than a grocery store.
  - leecarraher 10y ago
    seriously your plan is for people to harvest their own food? your comparison is grossly disproportionate, how does 20 minutes at the super market compare to the months of labor required to grow, store, process and plant ones own food. this is the kind of blind zealotry that makes organic farming seem like a ridiculous prospect.
thinkloop 10y ago
> 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. 1. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2483690/it-careers/india-to-overtake-u-s--on-number-of-developers-by-2017.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2483690/it-careers/indi... 2. https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/05/09/the-lawyer-bubble-pops-not-moment-too-soon/qAYzQ823qpfi4GQl2OiPZM/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/05/09/the-lawyer-bu... 3. https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Preliminary_Report/Highlights.pdf https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Preliminary_...
- XorNot 10y ago
  Also that's a stupid metric: subsistence farming is wildly inefficient and cannot sustain the population of any country today.
  - swegg 10y ago
    Not knowing where your food comes from makes you unable to make an informed choice about what you consume. It is a tragedy.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      Knowing how to run a micro farm doesn't help you know where your food comes from.
    - Ensorceled 10y ago
      Being a farmer doesn't mean you understand global food markets. Not knowing how to properly hill potatoes doesn't mean you can't understand global food markets.
m_eiman 10y ago
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.
- jeromenerf 10y ago
  > IMHO it's simple: current farming depends on oil Valid point, though everything depends on energy, oil being one of the main sources. Not the only matter at hand though soil degradation, pesticide resistant pests, water pollution, ... We actually have no quantitative problems for now: we waste over 30% of the food production, part of it being expensive food (meat, bananas, etc). See http://www.fao.org/save-food/en/ http://www.fao.org/save-food/en/ So yeah, we can afford some optimizations while researching for sustainable solutions.
JulianMorrison 10y ago
You want organic and efficient? How about hermetically sealed "vertical" robot-operated farms in skyscrapers? No pests, so no pesticides.
- D_Alex 10y ago
  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.
  - JulianMorrison 10y ago
    Well, the atmosphere only has to be non-toxic to plants, if you are actually using robots to sow, tend, and harvest. CO2/Nitrogen mix perhaps? Compartmentalization and lack of toing-and-froing by humans would help too.
    - ddebernardy 10y ago
      Plants need oxigen to breath, too.
- roel_v 10y ago
  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)
knutin 10y ago
The big issue with agriculture, both organic and conventional, is what we farm. According to who? The World Bank, the EU and the UN: http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM 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.
joakleaf 10y ago
... 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.
jsudhams 10y ago
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.
Stauche 10y ago
Why does every article that bashes organic foods say they are not nutritionally superior to conventional foods? Who cares if they aren't!? I'm not eating them because of that. I'm eating them because of less/safer pesticide use.
Mendenhall 10y ago
What they will all admit one day is that there are too many people and not enough resources. Till then they will create songs and dances that wont fix the problem at all. It is a hard pill to swallow for humanity.
ebbv 10y ago
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.
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
'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.
ailideex 10y ago
> 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.
msimpson 10y ago
"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." Should I be less "TERRIFIED" now?
- CuriouslyC 10y ago
  > 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. Depending on your climate, food is one of the most pressing thing to acquire if you don't have it. Our human system right now is becoming fragile, because having such a large apparatus around food production and such a small number of people who practice it, a disruption could cause massive starvation. I personally would prefer not to see our species decimated as a result of insufficient latent food production ability not dependent on a massive industrialized base. It is not sufficient for people to learn how to grow in the event of an emergency; you need practice, growing food is not as easy as it seems. In addition to making our species less fragile, it forces people to eat better, encourages diversity of life, and done properly it makes the environment more attractive. Would you rather have more people trying to sell you shit?
  - msimpson 10y ago
    You can apply the same argument to fresh water access. Urbanization is not conducive to individualized sustainability. You either come to terms with that or move out to the sticks and adopt a DIY attitude toward survial.
mmargerum 10y ago
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.
speedygrowth 10y ago
Here's a nice thread with some debate on the subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1h9hye/i_believe_organic_food_production_is_a_dangerous/ https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1h9hye/i_beli... Worth reading for those looking for both sides of the story.
Spooky23 10y ago
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.

231 points by psiops 10y ago

grive 10y ago

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.

azag0 10y ago
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.
loup-vaillant 10y ago
> 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.
- adrianN 10y ago
  I don't think the yields go back to pre-fertilizer levels, otherwise we wouldn't be able to sustain so many more mouths than before Haber-Bosch.
  - loup-vaillant 10y ago
    No they don't, not right away. You need that damn 3-years hiatus with zero yield before you can start over.
- throwaway1892 10y ago
  The problem (here in France) is that the number of farmers is going down hard (with suicides every day). They are currently crushed by regulations, labor costs, undercuts by products from other countries with different labor costs and regulations and the supermarkets that make big margin on their back. So your solution is good, but it is not currently applicable here in France.
  - loup-vaillant 10y ago
    > but it is not currently applicable here in France. You point out a serious policy problem. Couldn't we apply that solution if we changed that policy?
    - throwaway1892 10y ago
      I hope that the solution is applicable, as I hope that the policy can be changed. But that's something on the long term.
  - rocqua 10y ago
    The rethoric I've heard here (Netherlands) is that France idealizes the small farm as a living unit, which leads to undersized and under-modernized farms. This is then being propped up by subsidies, but imports (and government budgets) are putting more pressure on these farms' inefficiencies than the subsidies can compensate. I am in no position to judge either way.

snovv_crash 10y ago

One thing I don't see him cover is how to deal with the "ecosystem" which will form around, and eventually consume, a fully organic permaculture farm. One of the big advantages of monoculture is that you usually only need to protect against a single class of pests in a specific area.

odelomez 10y ago
The ecosystem can be of great advantage, different crops can help themselves in warding off the intruders. As an example I mix tomato plants with french marigold and basil. Some farmers have built impressive ecosystem where everything makes sense, type of plant, seasons, minerals, nitrogen, etc
kristopolous 10y ago
A single point of failure is an advantage?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Yes? As a king, what would you prefer - to defend against one big kingdom that wants all of your land, or to defend against three big kingdoms that each want a third of your land? When number of points of failure trade off against your attack surface, you can't just say "more PoFs is better".
  - kristopolous 10y ago
    That analogy isn't correct. You've made it 1 thing against 1 versus 1 against 3. If we were to use that analogy, a more accurate metric would be either having 1 large centralized kingdom or 100 small, autonomous, independent kingdoms that each have fundamentally different weaknesses. If one fails, you still have 99. But even that fails to understand the dynamic of biological systems. There's mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationships between crops and many creatures (bees, worms, etc). Presenting it as always in conflict is inaccurate. The fundamentally different approach is to not look at pest solutions through a genocidal chemical warfare lens but instead to figure out how to maintain a sustainable relationship and have all of nature working for you instead of setting most of it as against you.

ThePhysicist 10y ago

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.

kuschku 10y ago
And there is a huge unspoken problem yet. 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://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-1453_en.htm http://www.dw.com/en/eu-sues-germany-over-water-tainted-by-nitrate-fertilizer/a-19225653 http://www.dw.com/en/eu-sues-germany-over-water-tainted-by-n... https://www.thelocal.de/20161107/eu-sues-germany-over-water-polluting-farming https://www.thelocal.de/20161107/eu-sues-germany-over-water-... https://www.euractiv.com/section/agriculture-food/news/eu-takes-germany-to-court-over-high-nitrate-levels/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/agriculture-food/news/eu-ta...

Quarrelsome 10y ago

so this entire article is based on the assumption that current farming practice is wholly unsustainable. I'm not sure I buy into this. Surely it can be adapted as opposed to rejected and completely changed, can't it?

yoz-y 10y ago
Marked will decide. In France I already see more Bio (Organic) shops around than those selling conventional food. I don't go there because of the price but the demand is clearly growing. Most of the organic food is produced by the same companies that do conventional farming anyways, shift will come.
- jeromenerf 10y ago
  "Market will decide", as if. Governments can (and some do) help to bootstrap a saner "organic" economic landscape by creating demand through regulations such as "school restaurants food should be 50% local and organic by 2020, 100% by 2030".
  - yoz-y 10y ago
    Government could do that, but it should only be necessary if the claims that "you can produce more calories per acre of organic food compared to traditional agriculture" are false. If it is cheaper to produce more, of more expensive produce, you can bet that the agriculture industry will shift.
loup-vaillant 10y ago
This particular assumption is pretty safe: current farming practice depends heavily on oil. For energy of course, but also for chemicals. Nothing that depends that heavily on fossil fuels is sustainable in the long run. Whatever change we devise, we need to weaken that dependency. > Surely it can be adapted as opposed to rejected and completely changed, can't it? Personally, I see organic agriculture as a modernization: it's healthier (no poisonous pesticide in my apple!), easier on the soil, but it's not easier. The knowledge required to grow food organically is quite precise, and research is still ongoing.

justin_vanw 10y ago

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.

kristopolous 10y ago
Sure but if this was the 1950s and the article was about abstaining from smoking, you could have made similar arguments. The people of tomorrow will not think like the people of today.
loup-vaillant 10y ago
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.
- geon 10y ago
  Please don't use the word "chemical" like it is something unnatural or harmful. Water is a chemical. The active ingredients of natural fertilizer are chemicals.
  - grzm 10y ago

SeanDav 10y ago

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.

loup-vaillant 10y ago
It's not a simple issue. A proper argument would require a few hours.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  I for one would happily read it. Do you know of any?
  - loup-vaillant 10y ago
    I have seen a number of documentaries, but they're all in French. "Solutions locales pour un désordre global" and "Alerte à Babylone" come to mind.
  - Noseshine 10y ago
    I just posted this above, try https://www.edx.org/course/sustainable-soil-management-soil-life-wageningenx-soilx-0 https://www.edx.org/course/sustainable-soil-management-soil-...

avar 10y ago

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.

geon 10y ago
"just fine with irradiating large fields full of plants" Are you referring to UV/cosmic radiation?
- KaiserPro 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening and http://www.ediblegeography.com/strange-and-beautiful-seeds-from-the-atom/ http://www.ediblegeography.com/strange-and-beautiful-seeds-f...
loup-vaillant 10y ago
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.
- 7sigma 10y ago
  "It's because they're optimised to withstand heavy pesticide use" Actually, GMOs need less pesticides than non GMO crop. Some of them produce their own pesticide (BT corn and BT cotton). "Pesticides are bad." Thats kind of the point, they are bad to pests that try to eat the crop "GMO are generally sterile" You are confusing GMO with hybrids and no they are not sterile, the just lose vigour after a few generations, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_hybrid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_hybrid ", so you have to buy seeds every year from Monsanto. Great business model for Monsanto, not so much for the farmer." Most farmers in the developed world buy new seed every year because of the hybrid thing, and do so because its convenient. At the end of the day its a choice the farmer makes: they could re use their own seeds and hybridise them, but for most its not worth the hassle.

jaimebuelta 10y ago

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.

jeromenerf 10y ago
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"?

TeMPOraL 10y ago

> global soil deterioration 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 10y ago
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.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
Oh no. It's blindingly complex. The Dust Bowl happened well after Haber-Bosch.
Noseshine 10y ago
Seriously, try this: https://www.edx.org/course/sustainable-soil-management-soil-life-wageningenx-soilx-0 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.

KaiserPro 10y ago

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

roel_v 10y ago
"Now, this is where my thoughts get controversial:" This is not controversial. It's widely recognized (even by conventional farming bodies) that soil degradation is a major environmental threat. At the EU level, while the Soil Directive proposal was withdrawn a few years ago, much other environmental work and legislation is about mitigation and monitoring of soil degradation / threats. There are different schools of thought on how to deal with it though; the 'let's go back to subsistence farming' idea isn't the only way.
- KaiserPro 10y ago
  oh, I'm not suggesting subsitance farming, that just sucks balls. Have you ever tried to plough furrows with horses? that shits hard. we need to be dumping literal mountains of shit on the fields again. we also need to stop killing the soil ecosystem, so that fungus, worms and all manner of other things can grown and break the soil up

leecarraher 10y ago

so what would this rube goldbergian harvester machine look like that could be capable of efficiently farming such a dynamic landscape as a multistory(already sounding like we got some marketing terms in the works here) farm... my guess is about 5'10", over worked and from some economically depressed country. yay organic

codingdave 10y ago
As opposed to the 5'10" rube goldbergian harvester machine that selects your products at the grocery store, moves them around in a cart for 20 minutes, then stands in line to purchase them? Somewhere along the line, you as a person will always walk around and pick up your own food. (Unless you pay someone to do that for you, too.) Doing it direct from a local food forest, or a farmers market, will always involve less transportation and labor cost than a grocery store.
- leecarraher 10y ago
  seriously your plan is for people to harvest their own food? your comparison is grossly disproportionate, how does 20 minutes at the super market compare to the months of labor required to grow, store, process and plant ones own food. this is the kind of blind zealotry that makes organic farming seem like a ridiculous prospect.

thinkloop 10y ago

> 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. 1. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2483690/it-careers/india-to-overtake-u-s--on-number-of-developers-by-2017.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2483690/it-careers/indi... 2. https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/05/09/the-lawyer-bubble-pops-not-moment-too-soon/qAYzQ823qpfi4GQl2OiPZM/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/05/09/the-lawyer-bu... 3. https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Preliminary_Report/Highlights.pdf https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Preliminary_...

XorNot 10y ago
Also that's a stupid metric: subsistence farming is wildly inefficient and cannot sustain the population of any country today.
- swegg 10y ago
  Not knowing where your food comes from makes you unable to make an informed choice about what you consume. It is a tragedy.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    Knowing how to run a micro farm doesn't help you know where your food comes from.
  - Ensorceled 10y ago
    Being a farmer doesn't mean you understand global food markets. Not knowing how to properly hill potatoes doesn't mean you can't understand global food markets.

m_eiman 10y ago

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.

jeromenerf 10y ago
> IMHO it's simple: current farming depends on oil Valid point, though everything depends on energy, oil being one of the main sources. Not the only matter at hand though soil degradation, pesticide resistant pests, water pollution, ... We actually have no quantitative problems for now: we waste over 30% of the food production, part of it being expensive food (meat, bananas, etc). See http://www.fao.org/save-food/en/ http://www.fao.org/save-food/en/ So yeah, we can afford some optimizations while researching for sustainable solutions.

JulianMorrison 10y ago

You want organic and efficient? How about hermetically sealed "vertical" robot-operated farms in skyscrapers? No pests, so no pesticides.

D_Alex 10y ago
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.
- JulianMorrison 10y ago
  Well, the atmosphere only has to be non-toxic to plants, if you are actually using robots to sow, tend, and harvest. CO2/Nitrogen mix perhaps? Compartmentalization and lack of toing-and-froing by humans would help too.
  - ddebernardy 10y ago
    Plants need oxigen to breath, too.
roel_v 10y ago
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)

knutin 10y ago

The big issue with agriculture, both organic and conventional, is what we farm. According to who? The World Bank, the EU and the UN: http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM 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.

joakleaf 10y ago

... 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.

jsudhams 10y ago

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.

Stauche 10y ago

Why does every article that bashes organic foods say they are not nutritionally superior to conventional foods? Who cares if they aren't!? I'm not eating them because of that. I'm eating them because of less/safer pesticide use.

Mendenhall 10y ago

What they will all admit one day is that there are too many people and not enough resources. Till then they will create songs and dances that wont fix the problem at all. It is a hard pill to swallow for humanity.

ebbv 10y ago

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.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago

'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.

ailideex 10y ago

> 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.

msimpson 10y ago

"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." Should I be less "TERRIFIED" now?

CuriouslyC 10y ago
> 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. Depending on your climate, food is one of the most pressing thing to acquire if you don't have it. Our human system right now is becoming fragile, because having such a large apparatus around food production and such a small number of people who practice it, a disruption could cause massive starvation. I personally would prefer not to see our species decimated as a result of insufficient latent food production ability not dependent on a massive industrialized base. It is not sufficient for people to learn how to grow in the event of an emergency; you need practice, growing food is not as easy as it seems. In addition to making our species less fragile, it forces people to eat better, encourages diversity of life, and done properly it makes the environment more attractive. Would you rather have more people trying to sell you shit?
- msimpson 10y ago
  You can apply the same argument to fresh water access. Urbanization is not conducive to individualized sustainability. You either come to terms with that or move out to the sticks and adopt a DIY attitude toward survial.

mmargerum 10y ago

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.

speedygrowth 10y ago

Here's a nice thread with some debate on the subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1h9hye/i_believe_organic_food_production_is_a_dangerous/ https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1h9hye/i_beli... Worth reading for those looking for both sides of the story.

Spooky23 10y ago

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.