4 ms·

Industrialized farming is only so efficient because we sacrifice everything from ecological sustainability to taste to get that efficiency. Their comparative ad

Industrialized farming is only so efficient because we sacrifice everything from ecological sustainability to taste to get that efficiency. Their comparative advantage is economical efficiency, which does far more damage than small scale agriculture. They are not ecologically efficient, which is what people mean when they talk about "saving the planet." (Medium to long term they're not economically efficient either - see the entire history of modern agriculture). Trading human labor for machine labor and increasing density (land use efficiency) is what got us into this mess in the first place. With integrative pest control, crop rotation, and composting a small farm can get well within the ballpark of industrialized farming without contributing further to our planet's decline (source: eight acres). Yes, it's "inefficient" by some arbitrary measure that makes no sense now that we're past 400 PPM. If anyone thinks we can survive the coming few centuries without some significant strategic deindustrialization or that any small group of people or issues will "save the planet", they're deluding themselves. Growing your own food, when done correctly on a few acres (especially if you grow your own meat), is one of the best ways to contribute now. We just have to throw away the efficiency metrics that got us here in the first place - it's our labor or the planet.

roboben 6y ago
Thanks for that! I agree 100% Another thought: 60-70 years ago almost every household in the US had their own chicken or rabbits. I assume also way more people were growing their own food. I think it is really bad that all that vanished and is one part in why our food system is currently so vulnerable: Having huge centralized industries makes it much more easy to wipe out whole harvest through pests or diseases. Let alone if there are production errors and products need to be called back etc. This is a price no one calculated in the so called "efficiency".
- jonfw 6y ago
  Centralized industry also makes it much easier to enforce regulations which control disease, and it justifies expensive research on things like pest and research prevention that wouldn't be economically feasible to generate returns on at smaller scales. Here's a good question- do you think that food-born illness is more or less common in countries that have more centralized their food production?
  - FooHentai 6y ago
    >do you think that food-born illness is more or less common in countries that have more centralized their food production? Tricky one to answer, since each country has a lot of counfounding factors (e.g. Use of pathogen-bearing 'night soil' as fertilizer, availability of refrigeration in warm and humid climates, potable water availability). Best measure IMO would be each country taken individually pre- and post-centralization of agriculture. What those figures seem to show (taking primarily the CDC figures for USA) is less frequent outbreaks, but greater spread when they occur, overall the number of impacted individuals looks similar if not slightly lower. This makes sense - centralized production and wide distribution means a single instance of contamination, though much lower in likelihood to occur, will reach out and touch more people than it otherwise would have when it occurs.
yourapostasy 6y ago
> Industrialized farming is only so efficient because we sacrifice everything from ecological sustainability to taste to get that efficiency. It gets worse. The fiscal payoffs of those productivity gains went overwhelmingly to capital holders, and many negative externalities (like massive abuse of antibiotics) produced by the system help maintain a dysfunctional US healthcare system where the extractive value again overwhelmingly goes to capital holders. I'm a lowercase capital holder myself, so I'm empathetic to their interests, but this systems design screams fragility to me. Unfortunately, I have no general prescriptives, only what I'm doing for my own situation.
saalweachter 6y ago
You've really got to distinguish between different types of agriculture when discussing efficiency, and specify the metrics you are optimizing for. Row crops/grains, fruits, vegetables, and meat all have different growing conditions, footprints, and shipping concerns. A tonne of wheat costs 0.05 tonnes of CO2 to ship from Kansas to New York, requires 0.6 acres to grow, and contains ~3,500,000 calories. A tonne of tomatoes costs 0.3 tonnes of CO2 to ship from California to New York, requires 0.06 acres to grow, and contains ~180,000 calories. The lowest-hanging fruit, so to speak, in food production is reducing beef production to pasture-raised beef on lands that can be sustainably ranched but are not suitable for other forms of agriculture. After that comes producing more (of some types of) vegetables locally, particularly ones that are mostly water and consumed for nutrients rather than calories, and eating fresh foods in-season. Any plan that tries to get rid of grains or other staples produced on massive scales in monoculture fields in the parts of countries best suited for them runs afoul of the "we need to produce enough food for 10 billion people for at least the next two centuries" constraint of agricultural planning.
Lazare 6y ago
> Industrialized farming is only so efficient because we sacrifice everything from ecological sustainability to taste to get that efficiency. Agreed. That's a point I touched on with my comment about industrial farming being, if anything, too efficient. There's concerns about water use, fertiliser use, carbon emissions, biodiversity, monocropping. Industrial farming is about the most efficient use of resources possible (ignoring any negative externalities; if it's not priced in - like, eg, the potential harm of fertiliser runoff to marine life - it's ignored). > They are not ecologically efficient ....well, no. That's just not true. Subject to the caveats above about exernalities (and the fix there would be better regulation, carbon taxes, etc.), industrial farming is about being efficient with everything. Yes, in many ways small scale agriculture is just as efficient; in others it's significantly less efficient. But there is no way it's more efficient. And keep in mind one of the most important ecological resources is land, and industrial farming is very land efficient. (Unused land is critical for regulating carbon, among other things. We need forests! There's a reason people get so wound up about Brazil.) Example: Organic farming (which is, these days, generally highly industrialised, but still a step closer to what you have in mind, I imagine) yields less food per acre - or to put it another way, uses more land per unit of food. Studies have shown a 20-40% gap between organic and conventional farming in practice. Worse, they show that the carbon footprint is the same; the lower carbon intensity is fully cancelled out by the lower efficiency. (See, eg, https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/05/26/organic-farms-use-more-land-and-dont-decrease-carbon-footprint-11338 https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/05/26/organic-farms-use-more-...) > Yes, it's "inefficient" by some arbitrary measure that makes no sense now that we're past 400 PPM. No, it's just inefficient. And it's inefficient that is more important in a high carbon world. The planet is not going to be saved by cutting down forests so we can grow food less efficiently. Even if we really, really wish it would be. You can't say "but carbon" and then push a solution that isn't any lower carbon. If we really care about the environment, we're talking about a shift to largely vegetarian diets, with the bulk of our calories grown in dense, super efficient ways. There's X billion people, we need Y trillion calories per day, how can we achieve this with the least amount of land, water, fertiliser, carbon, and labour? That probably looks a lot like massive industrial farms in places with good climates and spare water, being shipped to places with lots of people and little land and water.

roboben 6y ago

Thanks for that! I agree 100% Another thought: 60-70 years ago almost every household in the US had their own chicken or rabbits. I assume also way more people were growing their own food. I think it is really bad that all that vanished and is one part in why our food system is currently so vulnerable: Having huge centralized industries makes it much more easy to wipe out whole harvest through pests or diseases. Let alone if there are production errors and products need to be called back etc. This is a price no one calculated in the so called "efficiency".

jonfw 6y ago
Centralized industry also makes it much easier to enforce regulations which control disease, and it justifies expensive research on things like pest and research prevention that wouldn't be economically feasible to generate returns on at smaller scales. Here's a good question- do you think that food-born illness is more or less common in countries that have more centralized their food production?
- FooHentai 6y ago
  >do you think that food-born illness is more or less common in countries that have more centralized their food production? Tricky one to answer, since each country has a lot of counfounding factors (e.g. Use of pathogen-bearing 'night soil' as fertilizer, availability of refrigeration in warm and humid climates, potable water availability). Best measure IMO would be each country taken individually pre- and post-centralization of agriculture. What those figures seem to show (taking primarily the CDC figures for USA) is less frequent outbreaks, but greater spread when they occur, overall the number of impacted individuals looks similar if not slightly lower. This makes sense - centralized production and wide distribution means a single instance of contamination, though much lower in likelihood to occur, will reach out and touch more people than it otherwise would have when it occurs.

yourapostasy 6y ago

> Industrialized farming is only so efficient because we sacrifice everything from ecological sustainability to taste to get that efficiency. It gets worse. The fiscal payoffs of those productivity gains went overwhelmingly to capital holders, and many negative externalities (like massive abuse of antibiotics) produced by the system help maintain a dysfunctional US healthcare system where the extractive value again overwhelmingly goes to capital holders. I'm a lowercase capital holder myself, so I'm empathetic to their interests, but this systems design screams fragility to me. Unfortunately, I have no general prescriptives, only what I'm doing for my own situation.

saalweachter 6y ago

You've really got to distinguish between different types of agriculture when discussing efficiency, and specify the metrics you are optimizing for. Row crops/grains, fruits, vegetables, and meat all have different growing conditions, footprints, and shipping concerns. A tonne of wheat costs 0.05 tonnes of CO2 to ship from Kansas to New York, requires 0.6 acres to grow, and contains ~3,500,000 calories. A tonne of tomatoes costs 0.3 tonnes of CO2 to ship from California to New York, requires 0.06 acres to grow, and contains ~180,000 calories. The lowest-hanging fruit, so to speak, in food production is reducing beef production to pasture-raised beef on lands that can be sustainably ranched but are not suitable for other forms of agriculture. After that comes producing more (of some types of) vegetables locally, particularly ones that are mostly water and consumed for nutrients rather than calories, and eating fresh foods in-season. Any plan that tries to get rid of grains or other staples produced on massive scales in monoculture fields in the parts of countries best suited for them runs afoul of the "we need to produce enough food for 10 billion people for at least the next two centuries" constraint of agricultural planning.

Lazare 6y ago

> Industrialized farming is only so efficient because we sacrifice everything from ecological sustainability to taste to get that efficiency. Agreed. That's a point I touched on with my comment about industrial farming being, if anything, too efficient. There's concerns about water use, fertiliser use, carbon emissions, biodiversity, monocropping. Industrial farming is about the most efficient use of resources possible (ignoring any negative externalities; if it's not priced in - like, eg, the potential harm of fertiliser runoff to marine life - it's ignored). > They are not ecologically efficient ....well, no. That's just not true. Subject to the caveats above about exernalities (and the fix there would be better regulation, carbon taxes, etc.), industrial farming is about being efficient with everything. Yes, in many ways small scale agriculture is just as efficient; in others it's significantly less efficient. But there is no way it's more efficient. And keep in mind one of the most important ecological resources is land, and industrial farming is very land efficient. (Unused land is critical for regulating carbon, among other things. We need forests! There's a reason people get so wound up about Brazil.) Example: Organic farming (which is, these days, generally highly industrialised, but still a step closer to what you have in mind, I imagine) yields less food per acre - or to put it another way, uses more land per unit of food. Studies have shown a 20-40% gap between organic and conventional farming in practice. Worse, they show that the carbon footprint is the same; the lower carbon intensity is fully cancelled out by the lower efficiency. (See, eg, https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/05/26/organic-farms-use-more-land-and-dont-decrease-carbon-footprint-11338 https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/05/26/organic-farms-use-more-...) > Yes, it's "inefficient" by some arbitrary measure that makes no sense now that we're past 400 PPM. No, it's just inefficient. And it's inefficient that is more important in a high carbon world. The planet is not going to be saved by cutting down forests so we can grow food less efficiently. Even if we really, really wish it would be. You can't say "but carbon" and then push a solution that isn't any lower carbon. If we really care about the environment, we're talking about a shift to largely vegetarian diets, with the bulk of our calories grown in dense, super efficient ways. There's X billion people, we need Y trillion calories per day, how can we achieve this with the least amount of land, water, fertiliser, carbon, and labour? That probably looks a lot like massive industrial farms in places with good climates and spare water, being shipped to places with lots of people and little land and water.