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 worl

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.