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All posts I'm seeing here are highly critical of organic farming. And most are based on a very short-term picture, which ignores the long-term costs of chemica

All posts I'm seeing here are highly critical of organic farming. And most are based on a very short-term picture, which ignores the long-term costs of chemical-based farming: the incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion. Chem-based clearly gives higher yields for a period of 50-80 years, but what happens after that? Organic/permaculture is sustainable and possible even for our large populations. It presents challenges to some other assumptions of our highly industrialized food supply chain, but that doesn't mean it can't feed the globe. It just makes it harder for one or two companies to monopolize everything.

COGlory 5y ago
Organic and permaculture are very different things. Studies have shown organic farms use more fertilizer than non-organic to produce the same yield.
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  These results may be skewed by use of non-GMO/GMO crops, which tend to correlate with organic/non-organic farming. Organic farming methods can be used with GMO crops, however. Important note: not all GMO is done to vendor lock farmers, most of it is actually beneficial to food quality and availability
  - simiones 5y ago
    I think studies in the EU, which bans GMOs but does plenty of non-organic farming, should address this. However, I don't know of any to cite, or what the results may be.
  - pueblito 5y ago
    > Important note: not all GMO is done to vendor lock farmers, most of it is actually beneficial to food quality and availability I am a farmer, that is absolutely not true. All GMO crops are made to be more profitable to the farmer, with the goals of increased bulk yields, longer shelf stability and decreased water usage. Something like 95% of all corn grown in America isn’t even for human consumption, they’re certainly not selecting for food quality and availability.
    - eurasiantiger 5y ago
      But are they vendor locking you like Monsanto is?
      - bluGill 5y ago
        Farmers can switch vendors if they want to. Even if they have a contract, it isn't for more than a few years. Monsanto is used because those farmers have done the math and they get the most profit working with Monsanto. Last I checked Monsanto was about a third of the seed market, the competitors total to more market share. (since I last checked Monsanto was bought out, and no longer exists)
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Can you define "more" here? Manure weighs more than than an equivalent bag of fertilizer, sure. Is that bad, though?
  - pcmaffey 5y ago
    Also, how far did that manure travel vs fertilizer? etc etc
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    Given any scenario for this type of environmental discussion, someone will find a problem with it. How far was the manure transported? How much CO2 did the cow burp? How much corn was trucked in to feed the cow? There’s also the matter of organic fertilizers working differently in some scenarios. Blood meal releases nitrogen more slowly than ammonium nitrate, for example. When you cross pseudo-religious beliefs you get in trouble as well — many of the organic fertilizers are animal byproducts (blood, feathers, eggshells, urine). So what wins for a vegan? Vegetables made with chemical fertilizers, or vegetables made with burnt eggshells and feathers?
- noasaservice 5y ago
  Citation please?
eurasiantiger 5y ago
Organic farming also uses less energy. That is incentive enough. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/renewable-agriculture-and-food-systems/article/abs/energy-efficiency-of-organic-agriculture-a-review/5524361BC7627B5771041FC656667D5B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/renewable-agricultur...
- enriquto 5y ago
  > organic farming performs better than conventional for nearly all crop types when energy use is expressed on a unit of area basis Well, of course. But that's a useless measurement. The whole point of hi-tech farming is to increase the density. Organic farming is less efficient for unit of food produced.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    My new HyperOrganic™ farming wins - only one seed allowed per acre, and minimal energy usage per unit of area.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    "Organic farming is less efficient for unit of food produced." Do you have data on that?
    - guerby 5y ago
      Ironically one of the source wrongly cited in the article says the contrary (ie organic is more efficient on energy per unit of food), see my comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28444679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28444679
    - enriquto 5y ago
      That's the next sentence on the article that I quoted (in the abstract).
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
etempleton 5y ago
But what individual can afford to think 50-80 years in the future? People have to do what is best for them in their life time. To be able to think 50-80 years in the future is just an incredible luxury most do not have, particularly most small farmers, and particularly, I would think, most small farmers in a developing country.
- mikewarot 5y ago
  >But what individual can afford to think 50-80 years in the future? Parents think that far into the future, as do thoughtful members of a productive society. MBA driven obsession with the next quarterly earnings report isn't a universal infection, yet, thank goodness.
  - tpoacher 5y ago
    In defense of the parent poster, they're making an altogether different point. Their point, as I take it, is that investing in future welfare at the risk of current welfare rarely makes sense to people's minds, and in fact often jeopardizes future welfare as well as current, due to the fact that any harm it causes now may in fact carry over into the future. What you're talking about, on the other hand, is about corporate greed and indifference. Very different scenario. E.g. A struggling parent buying cheap bread for their kids today rather than starving them for a month to save money and feed them more nutritious food later, is not the kind of decision one would attribute to MBA driven obsessions. Nor is this parent a worse parent than a more affluent one who can afford such an investment without starving their children.
    - pawelmurias 5y ago
      They are a worse parent than an identical but more affluent parent.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    > Parents think that far into the future, as do thoughtful members of a productive society. Ironically, thinking that far into the future results in many choosing not to become parents.
metalliqaz 5y ago
A good read on this topic is "Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal". It's a sobering and surprising book.
jjoonathan 5y ago
> Chem-based clearly gives higher yields for a period of 50-80 years, but what happens after that? You will have to keep moving the goalposts at a rate of 1 year per year, because it turns out that we understand which nutrients plants need and how to give them those nutrients.
- refurb 5y ago
  Exactly. What happens after 50-80 years? We continue to fertilize. The alternative is massively expanding farmland so that it can lay fallow for 25% of the time and also to account for lower yields.
  - tastyfreeze 5y ago
    We have enough successful regenerative farms now to prove that it is an effective way to produce food without destroying the environment. Human understanding of what is happening biologically in the soil has rapidly expanded in the last 20 years. We do not need to fertilize. It takes about 3 years for yields of a farm converted from traditional to regenerative to meet pre-conversion yields. The quantity of land used doesn't change. It is just managed a different way. Aside: organic and regenerative are not at all the same
NikolaNovak 5y ago
>>Organic/permaculture Hmm; I've never seen "Organic" and "Permaculture" seen used as synonyms; I am ignorant of the field, but my understanding of "Organic" was that it was more focused on what chemicals are and aren't used, largely due to their perceived benefit to ingesting humans / some level of "naturalness". I also haven't seen "Organic" as stopping monopolies and oligopolies either. Even if I accept that "Organic" doesn't simply mean "Carbon based", nothing in its modern usage seems to preclude new monopolies emerging. - As an end-user, what I found is that same companies that offer "regular" food tend to offer "organic" under spun labels, preserving status quo (but at higher price and therefore profit) - I assume that "Certified organic chemicals" for farmers' usage up the supply chain will similarly have to come from some company or another, and I don't immediately see what makes it harder for those to homogenize and eventually form a monopoly. [If it's an allusion to Monsanto etc, again, to me that's more of a matter of IP laws, and I don't see what prevents such occurrence in Organic field (I also see GMO and Organic as orthogonal and not necessarily incompatible, but definition of Organic is loose enough and changing enough with times/regions/individuals that I won't stake a big claim there).] I am genuinely willing to be educated!
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
  A lot of the problem is the definitions are broken and mean different things to different people. Plus there's a lot of nonscientific or pseudoscientific woo mixed in there too!
yosito 5y ago
I haven't seen a defense of organic farming based on data rather than on "natural" being good and "unnatural" being bad.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Yeah, and I've seen a lot of bad substitutions. It gets visceral when I volunteer for sorting at the food bank. The organic crates roll in, the traditional crates roll in -- and it turns out that, say, all the zucchini in the organic crates has turned to mush because they don't believe in spraying with wax. Crate after crate of rotting, wasted produce. Awful. Natural, yes, but nature is so often awful, and it's such a shame when we know how to be less wasteful and intentionally forego this knowledge in order to indulge shoppers' nature fetish. Is this even what they really want? Would they continue to insist on the organic label if they saw these crates of rotting zucchini mush?
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    Organic farming doesn't forbid waxing produce.
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      Maybe zucchinis need wax and preservatives? It looked like there was wax on the traditional produce and not on the organic produce, but I don't really know the process, I just see the crates of rotting produce at the food bank every fall. Those crates are overwhelmingly likely to have "organic" on the label whereas their picture-perfect counterparts are much less likely to have "organic" on the label.
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        > I don't know the process, I just see the crates of rotting produce every fall. Well, you don't typically spray preservatives on zucchini. Consider the possibility that there are factors outside your view here. Perhaps the organic farm you're getting the zucchini from is further away, or more successful commercially at selling their best product. Who knows? Without more information, you might just be the anecdotal victim of confirmation bias.
dathinab 5y ago
The problem IMHO is that the discussion is poisoned: > And most are based on a very short-term picture, which ignores the long-term costs of chemical-based farming: the incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion. But there are enough organic farming methods which also lead to "incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion" similar there are non-organic "chemical" methods which do not lead to such effects. So we should focus on long-term sustainable farming. And sure for most farms the first steps to sustainable farming are the same or at least very similar as the first steps to organic farming, but the "mid" and "end-game" can differ massively.
- baybal2 5y ago
  > So we should focus on long-term sustainable farming. You cannot farm soil for longer than 8-10 years without major nitrogen, and phosphorus replenishment. Actually lived in the sticks, and did farm labour in my childhood. Controllable soils which are good at intaking, and retaining fertilizers are sustainable. Bad soils with unusual soil chemistries can get depleted no matter how much fertiliser is dumped. That's true.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    What farmers did when I was growing up was they divide their lot into 4. Farm on three - put compost on other and rotate yearly.
    - chii 5y ago
      but that cuts your yield by 25%. Wouldn't a competing farm be more profitable to add fertilizers to the soil to replenish the loss nutrients, which means they can price out the crop rotation farm?
      - reedciccio 5y ago
        In most of western world agriculture is subsidized: that 25% of farm land that's on a break will be paid by the government. The gov mandates and pays also for crop rotation.
mumblemumble 5y ago
My complaint about "organic" is that it's a case of jumping to conclusions, and I fear that this is far too complex an issue for that to be a successful long-term strategy. Organic is typically understood to mean avoiding the use of things that aren't considered "natural." Which, in turn, tends to mean avoiding the use of both chemical and genetic engineering. To me, the idea that the most environmentally friendly agents for use in large scale agriculture just happen to already be sitting around in nature seems quite extraordinary. To take the case of pesticides and herbicides, I'm certainly no biologist, but the general pattern I see is that that nature provides broad-spectrum, non-specific poisons that kill relatively indiscriminately. And the only reason that these agents don't tend to cause a lot of damage to ecosystems is that they tend to be used in the way nature intended - that is to say, on a very small, non-industrial scale. Think "poisonous animals only using it for personal protection," or, "clove oil mostly only being found inside of a clove plant." I can't see any reason to see why we should just assume that taking these sorts of toxic agents that evolved for very limited use cases, and applying them over countless hectares of cropland, is actually a good thing. I also worry about just accepting organic agriculture's lower yield. Less yield per unit of cropland translates into more cropland being needed to feed the humans. Which, in turn, means more habitat destruction due to human activity. Versus, if you allow engineering into the equation, you can start to try and engineer things to be less harmful when used at an industrial scale. A pesticide that is engineered to be as specific as possible to only the pest in question. Or, let's dream big, some sort of precision agriculture fertilization system that can dynamically reformulate the fertilizer being applied to meet the soil needs of that particular corner of the field. None of this is to say that mainstream agriculture is automatically better than organic. More that. . . well, at least in the USA, the organic program is organized under the United States Department of Agriculture's marketing division. Which is very good at marketing. They've done an excellent job of convincing American consumers of a false dichotomy that the organic program is the sole standard bearer of environmentally friendly agriculture. And that's a shame, because some foregone conclusions about what it means to be organic have therefore trapped people who want to be environmentalist into a local minimum that probably isn't nearly as environmentally friendly as they could be if their options hadn't been artificially constrained by a paragon of crony capitalism.
baybal2 5y ago
> And most are based on a very short-term picture, which ignores the long-term costs of chemical-based farming: the incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion. Soil depletion...? How in the world you deplete soil by adding nutrients through fertiliser?
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > How in the world you deplete soil by adding nutrients through fertiliser? "Chemical-based farming" is a lot more than just adding fertilizer. Clear-cutting and deforestation to make farmland. Increased crop yields extracts more from the ground. Increased extraction of groundwater. Erosion due to killing of weeds, heavy tilling, and destruction of forests and native plants. Phosphate mining makes a giant mess.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    > Phosphate mining makes a giant mess. No, in comparison to many other mining activities, it's a much smaller size of a mess.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      Any interest in engaging in the overall point? Soil depletion via intensive agriculture is a pretty well established thing.
      - baybal2 5y ago
        Any agriculture depletes soil. That's the law of preservation of energy. If there is no nitrates, and phosphates in the soil, they can't magically appear out of nowhere.
        ceejayoz 5y ago
        There's a spectrum between "natural meadow that replenishes the soil via normal activity" and "intensive industrial agriculture sustained by phosphate mines". Organic farming aims to fall in the middle somewhere.
luc4sdreyer 5y ago
Organic crops are much worse for the environment in the long term. The biggest environment problem right now is habitat loss. In 100 years it might be climate change (of course we should definitely try to prevent climate change), but for the foreseeable future it's habitat loss. The current extinction event is mostly driven by habitat loss. Most habitat loss is due to the conversion from natural land to farmland[1]. We're losing between 24 and 150 species _per day_.[2] Organic crops are much less land efficient[3][4][5], so they drive habitat loss. It also releases more greenhouse gasses, but given the scale of environmental destruction that a worldwide increase in organic farming could cause, there isn't even a point in talking about it. Organic farming is a marketing ploy where food suppliers realised they can sell fake ethical superiority to consumers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_destruction [2] https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_do_estimates_vary_so_wildly https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_d... [3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorganic-farming-is-actually-worse-for-climate-change/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorga... [4] https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2019/11/organic-farming-uses-more-land-than-conventional https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2019/11/organic-farmin... [5] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/10/22/organic-food-better-environment/ https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/10/22/organic-food-be...
- dbingham 5y ago
  You're going to need a citation for the statement that organic farming releases more greenhouse gasses. That would be a deeply un-intuitive finding, and even with that citation I would want to scrutinize it carefully. Organic farming builds soil, where chemical farming strips it away. Organic farming has no dependencies on fossil fuels, but fossil fuels are used to create the fertilizers that chemical farming depends on. Any analysis of the comparitive greenhouse gas emissions needs to include a full lifecycle analysis of the fertilizers and pesticides used in conventional industrial farming. And I really, seriously doubt that will find lower greenhouse gas emissions in chemical farming. As for habitat loss - organic farming done right provides ecosystem services. Not as well as fully wild habitat, it's true, but it's not totally dead space and does support the ecosystem. Where as conventional, industrial farming is worse than dead space - it creates a death zone where anything that goes there dies. So even if organic farming is a little bit less space efficient, on total it is better for the ecosystem because it provides positive habitat, as opposed to the negative habitat of conventional farming. I would also challenge your assertion that its less space efficient, since there have been other studies that have found it can be equivalent when done right and given the right conditions: "Under certain conditions—that is, with good management practices, particular crop types and growing conditions—organic systems can thus nearly match conventional yields, whereas under others it at present cannot." [1] We've also spent a lot less time optimizing organic farming on a large scale than we have conventional industrial farming. So there are likely substantial efficiency gains yet to be found. I don't think you stand on firm ground declaring that organic farming is worse, environmentally, in the long term. The harms of industrial farming are extensive and extensively documented. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11069 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11069

COGlory 5y ago

Organic and permaculture are very different things. Studies have shown organic farms use more fertilizer than non-organic to produce the same yield.

eurasiantiger 5y ago
These results may be skewed by use of non-GMO/GMO crops, which tend to correlate with organic/non-organic farming. Organic farming methods can be used with GMO crops, however. Important note: not all GMO is done to vendor lock farmers, most of it is actually beneficial to food quality and availability
- simiones 5y ago
  I think studies in the EU, which bans GMOs but does plenty of non-organic farming, should address this. However, I don't know of any to cite, or what the results may be.
- pueblito 5y ago
  > Important note: not all GMO is done to vendor lock farmers, most of it is actually beneficial to food quality and availability I am a farmer, that is absolutely not true. All GMO crops are made to be more profitable to the farmer, with the goals of increased bulk yields, longer shelf stability and decreased water usage. Something like 95% of all corn grown in America isn’t even for human consumption, they’re certainly not selecting for food quality and availability.
  - eurasiantiger 5y ago
    But are they vendor locking you like Monsanto is?
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Farmers can switch vendors if they want to. Even if they have a contract, it isn't for more than a few years. Monsanto is used because those farmers have done the math and they get the most profit working with Monsanto. Last I checked Monsanto was about a third of the seed market, the competitors total to more market share. (since I last checked Monsanto was bought out, and no longer exists)
ceejayoz 5y ago
Can you define "more" here? Manure weighs more than than an equivalent bag of fertilizer, sure. Is that bad, though?
- pcmaffey 5y ago
  Also, how far did that manure travel vs fertilizer? etc etc
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Given any scenario for this type of environmental discussion, someone will find a problem with it. How far was the manure transported? How much CO2 did the cow burp? How much corn was trucked in to feed the cow? There’s also the matter of organic fertilizers working differently in some scenarios. Blood meal releases nitrogen more slowly than ammonium nitrate, for example. When you cross pseudo-religious beliefs you get in trouble as well — many of the organic fertilizers are animal byproducts (blood, feathers, eggshells, urine). So what wins for a vegan? Vegetables made with chemical fertilizers, or vegetables made with burnt eggshells and feathers?
noasaservice 5y ago
Citation please?

eurasiantiger 5y ago

Organic farming also uses less energy. That is incentive enough. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/renewable-agriculture-and-food-systems/article/abs/energy-efficiency-of-organic-agriculture-a-review/5524361BC7627B5771041FC656667D5B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/renewable-agricultur...

enriquto 5y ago
> organic farming performs better than conventional for nearly all crop types when energy use is expressed on a unit of area basis Well, of course. But that's a useless measurement. The whole point of hi-tech farming is to increase the density. Organic farming is less efficient for unit of food produced.
- bombcar 5y ago
  My new HyperOrganic™ farming wins - only one seed allowed per acre, and minimal energy usage per unit of area.
- giantg2 5y ago
  "Organic farming is less efficient for unit of food produced." Do you have data on that?
  - guerby 5y ago
    Ironically one of the source wrongly cited in the article says the contrary (ie organic is more efficient on energy per unit of food), see my comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28444679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28444679
  - enriquto 5y ago
    That's the next sentence on the article that I quoted (in the abstract).
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]

etempleton 5y ago

But what individual can afford to think 50-80 years in the future? People have to do what is best for them in their life time. To be able to think 50-80 years in the future is just an incredible luxury most do not have, particularly most small farmers, and particularly, I would think, most small farmers in a developing country.

mikewarot 5y ago
>But what individual can afford to think 50-80 years in the future? Parents think that far into the future, as do thoughtful members of a productive society. MBA driven obsession with the next quarterly earnings report isn't a universal infection, yet, thank goodness.
- tpoacher 5y ago
  In defense of the parent poster, they're making an altogether different point. Their point, as I take it, is that investing in future welfare at the risk of current welfare rarely makes sense to people's minds, and in fact often jeopardizes future welfare as well as current, due to the fact that any harm it causes now may in fact carry over into the future. What you're talking about, on the other hand, is about corporate greed and indifference. Very different scenario. E.g. A struggling parent buying cheap bread for their kids today rather than starving them for a month to save money and feed them more nutritious food later, is not the kind of decision one would attribute to MBA driven obsessions. Nor is this parent a worse parent than a more affluent one who can afford such an investment without starving their children.
  - pawelmurias 5y ago
    They are a worse parent than an identical but more affluent parent.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > Parents think that far into the future, as do thoughtful members of a productive society. Ironically, thinking that far into the future results in many choosing not to become parents.

metalliqaz 5y ago

A good read on this topic is "Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal". It's a sobering and surprising book.

jjoonathan 5y ago

> Chem-based clearly gives higher yields for a period of 50-80 years, but what happens after that? You will have to keep moving the goalposts at a rate of 1 year per year, because it turns out that we understand which nutrients plants need and how to give them those nutrients.

refurb 5y ago
Exactly. What happens after 50-80 years? We continue to fertilize. The alternative is massively expanding farmland so that it can lay fallow for 25% of the time and also to account for lower yields.
- tastyfreeze 5y ago
  We have enough successful regenerative farms now to prove that it is an effective way to produce food without destroying the environment. Human understanding of what is happening biologically in the soil has rapidly expanded in the last 20 years. We do not need to fertilize. It takes about 3 years for yields of a farm converted from traditional to regenerative to meet pre-conversion yields. The quantity of land used doesn't change. It is just managed a different way. Aside: organic and regenerative are not at all the same

NikolaNovak 5y ago

>>Organic/permaculture Hmm; I've never seen "Organic" and "Permaculture" seen used as synonyms; I am ignorant of the field, but my understanding of "Organic" was that it was more focused on what chemicals are and aren't used, largely due to their perceived benefit to ingesting humans / some level of "naturalness". I also haven't seen "Organic" as stopping monopolies and oligopolies either. Even if I accept that "Organic" doesn't simply mean "Carbon based", nothing in its modern usage seems to preclude new monopolies emerging. - As an end-user, what I found is that same companies that offer "regular" food tend to offer "organic" under spun labels, preserving status quo (but at higher price and therefore profit) - I assume that "Certified organic chemicals" for farmers' usage up the supply chain will similarly have to come from some company or another, and I don't immediately see what makes it harder for those to homogenize and eventually form a monopoly. [If it's an allusion to Monsanto etc, again, to me that's more of a matter of IP laws, and I don't see what prevents such occurrence in Organic field (I also see GMO and Organic as orthogonal and not necessarily incompatible, but definition of Organic is loose enough and changing enough with times/regions/individuals that I won't stake a big claim there).] I am genuinely willing to be educated!

NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
A lot of the problem is the definitions are broken and mean different things to different people. Plus there's a lot of nonscientific or pseudoscientific woo mixed in there too!

yosito 5y ago

I haven't seen a defense of organic farming based on data rather than on "natural" being good and "unnatural" being bad.

jjoonathan 5y ago
Yeah, and I've seen a lot of bad substitutions. It gets visceral when I volunteer for sorting at the food bank. The organic crates roll in, the traditional crates roll in -- and it turns out that, say, all the zucchini in the organic crates has turned to mush because they don't believe in spraying with wax. Crate after crate of rotting, wasted produce. Awful. Natural, yes, but nature is so often awful, and it's such a shame when we know how to be less wasteful and intentionally forego this knowledge in order to indulge shoppers' nature fetish. Is this even what they really want? Would they continue to insist on the organic label if they saw these crates of rotting zucchini mush?
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Organic farming doesn't forbid waxing produce.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Maybe zucchinis need wax and preservatives? It looked like there was wax on the traditional produce and not on the organic produce, but I don't really know the process, I just see the crates of rotting produce at the food bank every fall. Those crates are overwhelmingly likely to have "organic" on the label whereas their picture-perfect counterparts are much less likely to have "organic" on the label.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      > I don't know the process, I just see the crates of rotting produce every fall. Well, you don't typically spray preservatives on zucchini. Consider the possibility that there are factors outside your view here. Perhaps the organic farm you're getting the zucchini from is further away, or more successful commercially at selling their best product. Who knows? Without more information, you might just be the anecdotal victim of confirmation bias.

dathinab 5y ago

The problem IMHO is that the discussion is poisoned: > And most are based on a very short-term picture, which ignores the long-term costs of chemical-based farming: the incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion. But there are enough organic farming methods which also lead to "incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion" similar there are non-organic "chemical" methods which do not lead to such effects. So we should focus on long-term sustainable farming. And sure for most farms the first steps to sustainable farming are the same or at least very similar as the first steps to organic farming, but the "mid" and "end-game" can differ massively.

baybal2 5y ago
> So we should focus on long-term sustainable farming. You cannot farm soil for longer than 8-10 years without major nitrogen, and phosphorus replenishment. Actually lived in the sticks, and did farm labour in my childhood. Controllable soils which are good at intaking, and retaining fertilizers are sustainable. Bad soils with unusual soil chemistries can get depleted no matter how much fertiliser is dumped. That's true.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  What farmers did when I was growing up was they divide their lot into 4. Farm on three - put compost on other and rotate yearly.
  - chii 5y ago
    but that cuts your yield by 25%. Wouldn't a competing farm be more profitable to add fertilizers to the soil to replenish the loss nutrients, which means they can price out the crop rotation farm?
    - reedciccio 5y ago
      In most of western world agriculture is subsidized: that 25% of farm land that's on a break will be paid by the government. The gov mandates and pays also for crop rotation.

mumblemumble 5y ago

My complaint about "organic" is that it's a case of jumping to conclusions, and I fear that this is far too complex an issue for that to be a successful long-term strategy. Organic is typically understood to mean avoiding the use of things that aren't considered "natural." Which, in turn, tends to mean avoiding the use of both chemical and genetic engineering. To me, the idea that the most environmentally friendly agents for use in large scale agriculture just happen to already be sitting around in nature seems quite extraordinary. To take the case of pesticides and herbicides, I'm certainly no biologist, but the general pattern I see is that that nature provides broad-spectrum, non-specific poisons that kill relatively indiscriminately. And the only reason that these agents don't tend to cause a lot of damage to ecosystems is that they tend to be used in the way nature intended - that is to say, on a very small, non-industrial scale. Think "poisonous animals only using it for personal protection," or, "clove oil mostly only being found inside of a clove plant." I can't see any reason to see why we should just assume that taking these sorts of toxic agents that evolved for very limited use cases, and applying them over countless hectares of cropland, is actually a good thing. I also worry about just accepting organic agriculture's lower yield. Less yield per unit of cropland translates into more cropland being needed to feed the humans. Which, in turn, means more habitat destruction due to human activity. Versus, if you allow engineering into the equation, you can start to try and engineer things to be less harmful when used at an industrial scale. A pesticide that is engineered to be as specific as possible to only the pest in question. Or, let's dream big, some sort of precision agriculture fertilization system that can dynamically reformulate the fertilizer being applied to meet the soil needs of that particular corner of the field. None of this is to say that mainstream agriculture is automatically better than organic. More that. . . well, at least in the USA, the organic program is organized under the United States Department of Agriculture's marketing division. Which is very good at marketing. They've done an excellent job of convincing American consumers of a false dichotomy that the organic program is the sole standard bearer of environmentally friendly agriculture. And that's a shame, because some foregone conclusions about what it means to be organic have therefore trapped people who want to be environmentalist into a local minimum that probably isn't nearly as environmentally friendly as they could be if their options hadn't been artificially constrained by a paragon of crony capitalism.

baybal2 5y ago

> And most are based on a very short-term picture, which ignores the long-term costs of chemical-based farming: the incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion. Soil depletion...? How in the world you deplete soil by adding nutrients through fertiliser?

ceejayoz 5y ago
> How in the world you deplete soil by adding nutrients through fertiliser? "Chemical-based farming" is a lot more than just adding fertilizer. Clear-cutting and deforestation to make farmland. Increased crop yields extracts more from the ground. Increased extraction of groundwater. Erosion due to killing of weeds, heavy tilling, and destruction of forests and native plants. Phosphate mining makes a giant mess.
- baybal2 5y ago
  > Phosphate mining makes a giant mess. No, in comparison to many other mining activities, it's a much smaller size of a mess.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    Any interest in engaging in the overall point? Soil depletion via intensive agriculture is a pretty well established thing.
    - baybal2 5y ago
      Any agriculture depletes soil. That's the law of preservation of energy. If there is no nitrates, and phosphates in the soil, they can't magically appear out of nowhere.
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        There's a spectrum between "natural meadow that replenishes the soil via normal activity" and "intensive industrial agriculture sustained by phosphate mines". Organic farming aims to fall in the middle somewhere.

luc4sdreyer 5y ago

Organic crops are much worse for the environment in the long term. The biggest environment problem right now is habitat loss. In 100 years it might be climate change (of course we should definitely try to prevent climate change), but for the foreseeable future it's habitat loss. The current extinction event is mostly driven by habitat loss. Most habitat loss is due to the conversion from natural land to farmland[1]. We're losing between 24 and 150 species _per day_.[2] Organic crops are much less land efficient[3][4][5], so they drive habitat loss. It also releases more greenhouse gasses, but given the scale of environmental destruction that a worldwide increase in organic farming could cause, there isn't even a point in talking about it. Organic farming is a marketing ploy where food suppliers realised they can sell fake ethical superiority to consumers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_destruction [2] https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_do_estimates_vary_so_wildly https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_d... [3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorganic-farming-is-actually-worse-for-climate-change/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorga... [4] https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2019/11/organic-farming-uses-more-land-than-conventional https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2019/11/organic-farmin... [5] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/10/22/organic-food-better-environment/ https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/10/22/organic-food-be...

dbingham 5y ago
You're going to need a citation for the statement that organic farming releases more greenhouse gasses. That would be a deeply un-intuitive finding, and even with that citation I would want to scrutinize it carefully. Organic farming builds soil, where chemical farming strips it away. Organic farming has no dependencies on fossil fuels, but fossil fuels are used to create the fertilizers that chemical farming depends on. Any analysis of the comparitive greenhouse gas emissions needs to include a full lifecycle analysis of the fertilizers and pesticides used in conventional industrial farming. And I really, seriously doubt that will find lower greenhouse gas emissions in chemical farming. As for habitat loss - organic farming done right provides ecosystem services. Not as well as fully wild habitat, it's true, but it's not totally dead space and does support the ecosystem. Where as conventional, industrial farming is worse than dead space - it creates a death zone where anything that goes there dies. So even if organic farming is a little bit less space efficient, on total it is better for the ecosystem because it provides positive habitat, as opposed to the negative habitat of conventional farming. I would also challenge your assertion that its less space efficient, since there have been other studies that have found it can be equivalent when done right and given the right conditions: "Under certain conditions—that is, with good management practices, particular crop types and growing conditions—organic systems can thus nearly match conventional yields, whereas under others it at present cannot." [1] We've also spent a lot less time optimizing organic farming on a large scale than we have conventional industrial farming. So there are likely substantial efficiency gains yet to be found. I don't think you stand on firm ground declaring that organic farming is worse, environmentally, in the long term. The harms of industrial farming are extensive and extensively documented. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11069 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11069