9 ms·

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. pa

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...
- avar 10y ago
  Start by picking GMOs instead of the woo-woo that is organic farming. See e.g. a German-funded meta-analysis[1] that found that: "[...] the adoption of herbicide-tolerant (HT) soybean, maize, and cotton, and insect-resistant (IR) maize and cotton has resulted in a 22% increase in average yields, a 37% overall decrease in pesticide use, and a 68% increase in farmer profits.". 1. http://www.theskepticsguide.org/gm-impact-meta-analysis http://www.theskepticsguide.org/gm-impact-meta-analysis
  - voidz 10y ago
    How do these impact the insect world?
  - manmal 10y ago
    It is a meta study, but in this field I would take a hard look at the selected studies before I trust those results (I did not take a hard look, so I can't say). A 37% decrease of something that ruins drinking water is surely better than nothing, but only an incremental improvement. It can easily be offset by agriculture growth within the next decades.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - kuschku 10y ago
    That’s a nice meta study, but not a single one of those crops is grown in Germany.
  - KaiserPro 10y ago
    yes, but for those yields, you need to increase the use of herbicides. Which has unintended consequences. GMOs are currently faster horses.
  - riprowan 10y ago
    To accurately assess the long-term cost/benefit of GMOs vs organic farming, one would need to understand the long-term externalized costs of each. We understand the long-term impact of organic farming. We do not understand the long-term impact of many GMOs.
throwaway1892 10y ago
> Farming lobby in Europe For my perspective in France, here the farming lobby is inexistant/inefficient, since farmers had to big pretty big actions all over France just to raise the price of milk. So I think it's not the farming lobby, but the fertilizers and pesticides lobby.
- roel_v 10y ago
  It's a lot more complicated than that. There isn't one single 'farming lobby'. France, to take your example, has a highly inefficient agricultural system, heavily dependent on CAP subsidies. There has been massive pressure the last two decades to reduce that, but it hasn't happened yet and probably won't for years to come. This is a form of 'lobbying' (those farmers get benefits from those subsidies), even if those farmers didn't have the clout to set higher milk price floors (a weird concept in the first place, since this is a very basic supply/demand thing - the reason they don't make enough is because their per-liter cost is too high compared to the competition; sure you can say that that's because extra-EU farmers don't have to internalize environmental costs to the same degree the EU ones have to, but then it's a matter of setting import restrictions, not having an artificial price floor enforced. But I digress.) Of course fertilizers and pesticide produces are an aspect of the abstract concept of 'the Ag lobby', but it's much more nuanced than that.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > a weird concept in the first place, since this is a very basic supply/demand thing (...) but then it's a matter of setting import restrictions, not having an artificial price floor enforced I sometimes wonder if such concepts aren't simply the limits of human mind in action - price floor is simple, farmers can do some basic calculations and figure out that "if only milk costed at least €this, we could finally make a profit on it" (this is obviously ignoring all the clever ways markets can work around such increases, but that's complexity again). It's also a single thing to ask for. On the other hand, changing import tariffs is complicated, affects many things, and its effect on milk prices is indirect and therefore hard to predict. It's like two different perspectives - from God's eye view on the country as a system, it's obvious you have to tweak some internals to get the desired effect. But from the perspective of people on the sides of the system asking someone to change something, those internals may be unavailable and instead of picking what's best, they have to pick what's available.
bryanlarsen 10y ago
The criticisms of conventional farming are valid, but that doesn't mean that organic farming is any better. I believe that organic farming is much more likely to cause soil degradation and environmental harm than conventional farming for several different reasons: - organic farming's main tool to combat weeds and regrowth is tillage, which causes immense amounts of damage to the soil directly and allowing the soil to blow away or wash away. Conventional farmers know how damaging tillage is and are increasingly moving away from it as pesticide alternatives become available. It was tillage that turned the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia into the deserts of Iraq. - Organic farmers still use pesticides and herbicides, but they are limited to those that are certified organic. Organic pesticides and herbicides aren't necessarily any safer for human consumption or for the environment, they're just "organic". For example, some organic farmers literally salt their soil. When the only thing you have in your toolbox is a hammer, that's what you use, even when the situation calls for a scalpel. - Conventional farmers care far more about the value of their land than organic farmers do. Farmers don't have retirement funds, they've just got land on which they've spent the last 40 years paying off the mortgage. A conventional farmer with healthy soil can sell his land for a lot more than one with unhealthy soil. An farmer with land that's "certified organic" doesn't care, it's that "certified organic" stamp that he's getting paid for. - Organic herbicides and pesticides are much less efficient than conventional ones. So they have to use much larger quantities. Which means more runoff. For instance, they sometimes spread massive amounts of manure on their fields, cause massive algal blooms in the waterways and destroying them. - Conventional farmers are constrained by economics. They're selling a commodity, where price == marginal cost. So the only way to make a profit is to have lower costs per unit of output than your competitors. Their major costs are diesel, herbicides & pesticides -- minimizing those is both good for the farmer's pocketbook and the environment. An organic farmer's price is not set at the marginal cost, so it's often better for them to increase inputs to increase yields, even when it's not as efficient. P.S. I gave 5 arguments. They are not equal. The first one (tillage) is orders of magnitude more significant than the other 4. Tillage destroys the soil, and is far more "unnatural" than any sort of herbicide or pesticide organic or conventional.
- mjpuser 10y ago
  Can you give sources? These seem to all be backwards from some of my reading and experience. - Rodale Farm is all about no till - http://rodaleinstitute.org/our-work/organic-no-till/ http://rodaleinstitute.org/our-work/organic-no-till/ - Not sure about adding salt, unless you mean adding seaweed or ash? Salt is bad for the soil, and so it's known that those substances should be used prudently - As far as caring about the value of their land, it's valuable to have an organic farm since "organic" cows have to be raised on organic soil. Organic milk has higher retail value, which can be seen as adding value. You can also work with other farmers that want to produce organic milk, by helping them transition by using your own land [edit] for a fee... - "organic herbicides are less efficient, so organic farmers use more". Not sure this is true, my work with Rodale has mostly been towards trying to rid the farm of pesticides and finding natural ways around them. Not sure about big ag though.
vanderZwan 10y ago
> The real problem is properly accounting for all costs incurred by a given farming technique, which is difficult as the farming lobby seems to be one of the most effective ones in the world (at least judging from a European perspective). I think this a good moment to side-track a bit into agricultural history. While I'm generally not a fan of Great Man history, Sicco Mansholt seems to be a very interesting focal point in this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicco_Mansholt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicco_Mansholt Mansholt, a former farmer himself, and politically so left he would be labelled a communist had he been in the US, was one of the founding fathers of the EU, specifically it's commissioner of agriculture. He created the Common Agricultural Policy in 1962. In 1972, near the end of his political career, he had an affair with Petra Kelly while she was still a member of the Social Democrats. He greatly influenced her line of thinking surrounding sustainability. Kelly left the SPD in 1979 to found the German Green Party, which was the first major green party in Europe. Here's a documentary about him, but it's only in Dutch without subtitles, sadly, so I'll summarise it below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AniIokCHtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AniIokCHtk After WWII, a big worry was creating a stable food supply to feed everyone. One major problem was that farmers were not paid enough to sustain themselves. It was clear this wouldn't change, because the only way to fix it was to raise food prices, which would have all kinds of negative consequences. The solution seemed to be a mix of subsidies, and having less farmers take care of larger areas of land. The idea was that the same amount of money would go to agriculture, but since it would be divided among fewer farmers they would be able to eke out a decent living. Mansholt was originally a farmer himself, and also had a personal stake in this: after the famines in the war he wanted to prevent this from ever happening again, and he was aware about population growth. And he also did not want to have ten million farmers living in abject poverty - better to have half of them switch professions in that case. Just some context: his policies suggested that farms should be at least 100 hectares. Back then it was very common for farms to be one, two hectares. So Mansholt was one of the main architects of this Common European Agricultural Policy within the European Commission (the precursor to the EU). There obviously were lots of protests by farmers, Mansholt was threatened, etc, but in the end he got his policies through. In 1962 the CAP was first implemented[0]. Ever heard of "get big or get out"? That was a phrase used by Earl Butz, US Secretary of Agriculture from 1971 to 1976. A decade later. Funny enough, Butz did this thing around the same time the Club of Rome came out with "The Limits To Growth", in 1972. Mansholt was one of the early converts, going against his own earlier policies. The huge problems he saw with unexpected surpluses of food (in the Netherlands we even have words like "boterbergen" and "melkplassen" (buttermountains and milklakes) to describe this), grown unsustainably, were probably also a part of this. He saw the error of his ways and started lobbying for sustainable practices. Which, btw, did not align with the typical organic farming practices this article rails against. To make things even more complicated, he fell in love with a 39 years younger German politician, Petra Kelly[2], who was then a member of the German Social Democrats. They had a two year affair, and in all likelihood they greatly influenced each other's thinking. In 1979 Kelly left the SPD and become one of the founding members of Die Grünen. I find it very interesting to see how drastically agricultural practices have changed in the last century. While we talk about farming lobbies, it's easy to forget how big of a hand governments themselves had in creating these big farms. The story of Mansholt shows how hard it is to reverse the trend too: even the former chief architect of the policies that stimulated modernisation did not have enough political clout to get people to become more sustainable. Having said all of that, I really hope the type of organic farming described in this article will take off. We'll need to find a way around the existing power structures though. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra_Kelly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra_Kelly
mamcx 10y ago
From the old times exist the idea that is necessary to let the terrain to "rest" and let it to the nature mercy (in the bible was for a year each 7-years for example). Is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation So I wonder why not mix both?

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...

avar 10y ago
Start by picking GMOs instead of the woo-woo that is organic farming. See e.g. a German-funded meta-analysis[1] that found that: "[...] the adoption of herbicide-tolerant (HT) soybean, maize, and cotton, and insect-resistant (IR) maize and cotton has resulted in a 22% increase in average yields, a 37% overall decrease in pesticide use, and a 68% increase in farmer profits.". 1. http://www.theskepticsguide.org/gm-impact-meta-analysis http://www.theskepticsguide.org/gm-impact-meta-analysis
- voidz 10y ago
  How do these impact the insect world?
- manmal 10y ago
  It is a meta study, but in this field I would take a hard look at the selected studies before I trust those results (I did not take a hard look, so I can't say). A 37% decrease of something that ruins drinking water is surely better than nothing, but only an incremental improvement. It can easily be offset by agriculture growth within the next decades.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- kuschku 10y ago
  That’s a nice meta study, but not a single one of those crops is grown in Germany.
- KaiserPro 10y ago
  yes, but for those yields, you need to increase the use of herbicides. Which has unintended consequences. GMOs are currently faster horses.
- riprowan 10y ago
  To accurately assess the long-term cost/benefit of GMOs vs organic farming, one would need to understand the long-term externalized costs of each. We understand the long-term impact of organic farming. We do not understand the long-term impact of many GMOs.

throwaway1892 10y ago

> Farming lobby in Europe For my perspective in France, here the farming lobby is inexistant/inefficient, since farmers had to big pretty big actions all over France just to raise the price of milk. So I think it's not the farming lobby, but the fertilizers and pesticides lobby.

roel_v 10y ago
It's a lot more complicated than that. There isn't one single 'farming lobby'. France, to take your example, has a highly inefficient agricultural system, heavily dependent on CAP subsidies. There has been massive pressure the last two decades to reduce that, but it hasn't happened yet and probably won't for years to come. This is a form of 'lobbying' (those farmers get benefits from those subsidies), even if those farmers didn't have the clout to set higher milk price floors (a weird concept in the first place, since this is a very basic supply/demand thing - the reason they don't make enough is because their per-liter cost is too high compared to the competition; sure you can say that that's because extra-EU farmers don't have to internalize environmental costs to the same degree the EU ones have to, but then it's a matter of setting import restrictions, not having an artificial price floor enforced. But I digress.) Of course fertilizers and pesticide produces are an aspect of the abstract concept of 'the Ag lobby', but it's much more nuanced than that.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > a weird concept in the first place, since this is a very basic supply/demand thing (...) but then it's a matter of setting import restrictions, not having an artificial price floor enforced I sometimes wonder if such concepts aren't simply the limits of human mind in action - price floor is simple, farmers can do some basic calculations and figure out that "if only milk costed at least €this, we could finally make a profit on it" (this is obviously ignoring all the clever ways markets can work around such increases, but that's complexity again). It's also a single thing to ask for. On the other hand, changing import tariffs is complicated, affects many things, and its effect on milk prices is indirect and therefore hard to predict. It's like two different perspectives - from God's eye view on the country as a system, it's obvious you have to tweak some internals to get the desired effect. But from the perspective of people on the sides of the system asking someone to change something, those internals may be unavailable and instead of picking what's best, they have to pick what's available.

bryanlarsen 10y ago

The criticisms of conventional farming are valid, but that doesn't mean that organic farming is any better. I believe that organic farming is much more likely to cause soil degradation and environmental harm than conventional farming for several different reasons: - organic farming's main tool to combat weeds and regrowth is tillage, which causes immense amounts of damage to the soil directly and allowing the soil to blow away or wash away. Conventional farmers know how damaging tillage is and are increasingly moving away from it as pesticide alternatives become available. It was tillage that turned the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia into the deserts of Iraq. - Organic farmers still use pesticides and herbicides, but they are limited to those that are certified organic. Organic pesticides and herbicides aren't necessarily any safer for human consumption or for the environment, they're just "organic". For example, some organic farmers literally salt their soil. When the only thing you have in your toolbox is a hammer, that's what you use, even when the situation calls for a scalpel. - Conventional farmers care far more about the value of their land than organic farmers do. Farmers don't have retirement funds, they've just got land on which they've spent the last 40 years paying off the mortgage. A conventional farmer with healthy soil can sell his land for a lot more than one with unhealthy soil. An farmer with land that's "certified organic" doesn't care, it's that "certified organic" stamp that he's getting paid for. - Organic herbicides and pesticides are much less efficient than conventional ones. So they have to use much larger quantities. Which means more runoff. For instance, they sometimes spread massive amounts of manure on their fields, cause massive algal blooms in the waterways and destroying them. - Conventional farmers are constrained by economics. They're selling a commodity, where price == marginal cost. So the only way to make a profit is to have lower costs per unit of output than your competitors. Their major costs are diesel, herbicides & pesticides -- minimizing those is both good for the farmer's pocketbook and the environment. An organic farmer's price is not set at the marginal cost, so it's often better for them to increase inputs to increase yields, even when it's not as efficient. P.S. I gave 5 arguments. They are not equal. The first one (tillage) is orders of magnitude more significant than the other 4. Tillage destroys the soil, and is far more "unnatural" than any sort of herbicide or pesticide organic or conventional.

mjpuser 10y ago
Can you give sources? These seem to all be backwards from some of my reading and experience. - Rodale Farm is all about no till - http://rodaleinstitute.org/our-work/organic-no-till/ http://rodaleinstitute.org/our-work/organic-no-till/ - Not sure about adding salt, unless you mean adding seaweed or ash? Salt is bad for the soil, and so it's known that those substances should be used prudently - As far as caring about the value of their land, it's valuable to have an organic farm since "organic" cows have to be raised on organic soil. Organic milk has higher retail value, which can be seen as adding value. You can also work with other farmers that want to produce organic milk, by helping them transition by using your own land [edit] for a fee... - "organic herbicides are less efficient, so organic farmers use more". Not sure this is true, my work with Rodale has mostly been towards trying to rid the farm of pesticides and finding natural ways around them. Not sure about big ag though.

vanderZwan 10y ago

> The real problem is properly accounting for all costs incurred by a given farming technique, which is difficult as the farming lobby seems to be one of the most effective ones in the world (at least judging from a European perspective). I think this a good moment to side-track a bit into agricultural history. While I'm generally not a fan of Great Man history, Sicco Mansholt seems to be a very interesting focal point in this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicco_Mansholt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicco_Mansholt Mansholt, a former farmer himself, and politically so left he would be labelled a communist had he been in the US, was one of the founding fathers of the EU, specifically it's commissioner of agriculture. He created the Common Agricultural Policy in 1962. In 1972, near the end of his political career, he had an affair with Petra Kelly while she was still a member of the Social Democrats. He greatly influenced her line of thinking surrounding sustainability. Kelly left the SPD in 1979 to found the German Green Party, which was the first major green party in Europe. Here's a documentary about him, but it's only in Dutch without subtitles, sadly, so I'll summarise it below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AniIokCHtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AniIokCHtk After WWII, a big worry was creating a stable food supply to feed everyone. One major problem was that farmers were not paid enough to sustain themselves. It was clear this wouldn't change, because the only way to fix it was to raise food prices, which would have all kinds of negative consequences. The solution seemed to be a mix of subsidies, and having less farmers take care of larger areas of land. The idea was that the same amount of money would go to agriculture, but since it would be divided among fewer farmers they would be able to eke out a decent living. Mansholt was originally a farmer himself, and also had a personal stake in this: after the famines in the war he wanted to prevent this from ever happening again, and he was aware about population growth. And he also did not want to have ten million farmers living in abject poverty - better to have half of them switch professions in that case. Just some context: his policies suggested that farms should be at least 100 hectares. Back then it was very common for farms to be one, two hectares. So Mansholt was one of the main architects of this Common European Agricultural Policy within the European Commission (the precursor to the EU). There obviously were lots of protests by farmers, Mansholt was threatened, etc, but in the end he got his policies through. In 1962 the CAP was first implemented[0]. Ever heard of "get big or get out"? That was a phrase used by Earl Butz, US Secretary of Agriculture from 1971 to 1976. A decade later. Funny enough, Butz did this thing around the same time the Club of Rome came out with "The Limits To Growth", in 1972. Mansholt was one of the early converts, going against his own earlier policies. The huge problems he saw with unexpected surpluses of food (in the Netherlands we even have words like "boterbergen" and "melkplassen" (buttermountains and milklakes) to describe this), grown unsustainably, were probably also a part of this. He saw the error of his ways and started lobbying for sustainable practices. Which, btw, did not align with the typical organic farming practices this article rails against. To make things even more complicated, he fell in love with a 39 years younger German politician, Petra Kelly[2], who was then a member of the German Social Democrats. They had a two year affair, and in all likelihood they greatly influenced each other's thinking. In 1979 Kelly left the SPD and become one of the founding members of Die Grünen. I find it very interesting to see how drastically agricultural practices have changed in the last century. While we talk about farming lobbies, it's easy to forget how big of a hand governments themselves had in creating these big farms. The story of Mansholt shows how hard it is to reverse the trend too: even the former chief architect of the policies that stimulated modernisation did not have enough political clout to get people to become more sustainable. Having said all of that, I really hope the type of organic farming described in this article will take off. We'll need to find a way around the existing power structures though. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra_Kelly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra_Kelly

mamcx 10y ago

From the old times exist the idea that is necessary to let the terrain to "rest" and let it to the nature mercy (in the bible was for a year each 7-years for example). Is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation So I wonder why not mix both?