3 ms·

>there are plenty of farms that have switched to being fully organic while increasing yields and profits. But probably not corn or any of the other staple crop

by gph 8y ago

>there are plenty of farms that have switched to being fully organic while increasing yields and profits. But probably not corn or any of the other staple crops. It's going to be hard to get the same yields of those without using modern industrial monoculture techniques.

doctorpangloss 8y ago
We don't actually know if profits in real farms rise as much as agricultural tech sellers say they do. Bayer and Monsanto could just have really good sales teams. (They obviously do). Like with medicine, we'd expect the effects measured in lab of new pesticides on yields to be larger than their real impact in the wild. It just receives considerably less scrutiny than medicine, so really, it's hard to cut through all the bullshit. Despite what anyone's feel good story may bring up in rebuttal, there really isn't that much talent going into the buy-side of agricultural technology. So what if it turns out that industrial monoculture techniques are vastly oversold (they almost certainly are), and that the real math shows a slight benefit, but not one that outweighs environmental costs?
- gph 8y ago
  >So what if it turns out that industrial monoculture techniques are vastly oversold (they almost certainly are) Maybe some of the more recent techniques of industrial monoculture are oversold, but the steady rise of yields since the 1940s [1] make me feel like you're talking up a much bigger game than is actually the case. Perhaps the cost of some of Monsantos latest GMOs and pesticides isn't worth it. But throwing out the entire industrial monoculture paradigm is absolutely not cost effective. If it was more farmers would have figured it out by now. They aren't that dumb. [1] https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/CornYieldTrend_US.gif https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/Co...
AngryData 8y ago
Most of corn and other staple crops large yields have more to do with the excessive usage of fossil fuel derived fertilizer. There have been some gains in GMO to get slightly more efficient yields, but we already spent a few thousand years doing that by hand selection so any extra gains are pretty difficult. What we have largely been focusing on is making the plants resistant to pesticides so that the inevitable infection doesn't occur while you are dumping on crazy amounts of freely available energy as fertilizer. Basically we are turning natural gas into food, 60% of the worlds total crop yield in fact exists because of natural gas derived fertilizer, and when nature tries to take it's share of that free energy, we dump anything we can on it to prevent it from infecting our crops. Pump and dump the soil like that for 20 years until it is garbage, sell it off, buy out some poor struggling farmer that is doing sustainable practices, start over again with fresh 50-100 year maintained topsoil.

by gph 8y ago

doctorpangloss 8y ago

We don't actually know if profits in real farms rise as much as agricultural tech sellers say they do. Bayer and Monsanto could just have really good sales teams. (They obviously do). Like with medicine, we'd expect the effects measured in lab of new pesticides on yields to be larger than their real impact in the wild. It just receives considerably less scrutiny than medicine, so really, it's hard to cut through all the bullshit. Despite what anyone's feel good story may bring up in rebuttal, there really isn't that much talent going into the buy-side of agricultural technology. So what if it turns out that industrial monoculture techniques are vastly oversold (they almost certainly are), and that the real math shows a slight benefit, but not one that outweighs environmental costs?

gph 8y ago
>So what if it turns out that industrial monoculture techniques are vastly oversold (they almost certainly are) Maybe some of the more recent techniques of industrial monoculture are oversold, but the steady rise of yields since the 1940s [1] make me feel like you're talking up a much bigger game than is actually the case. Perhaps the cost of some of Monsantos latest GMOs and pesticides isn't worth it. But throwing out the entire industrial monoculture paradigm is absolutely not cost effective. If it was more farmers would have figured it out by now. They aren't that dumb. [1] https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/CornYieldTrend_US.gif https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/Co...

AngryData 8y ago

Most of corn and other staple crops large yields have more to do with the excessive usage of fossil fuel derived fertilizer. There have been some gains in GMO to get slightly more efficient yields, but we already spent a few thousand years doing that by hand selection so any extra gains are pretty difficult. What we have largely been focusing on is making the plants resistant to pesticides so that the inevitable infection doesn't occur while you are dumping on crazy amounts of freely available energy as fertilizer. Basically we are turning natural gas into food, 60% of the worlds total crop yield in fact exists because of natural gas derived fertilizer, and when nature tries to take it's share of that free energy, we dump anything we can on it to prevent it from infecting our crops. Pump and dump the soil like that for 20 years until it is garbage, sell it off, buy out some poor struggling farmer that is doing sustainable practices, start over again with fresh 50-100 year maintained topsoil.