5 ms·

I think modern agriculture is miraculous, don't get me wrong. But we ignore the negative externalities – the cost to our health, and to ecosystems, and to the s

by gdubs 3y ago

I think modern agriculture is miraculous, don't get me wrong. But we ignore the negative externalities – the cost to our health, and to ecosystems, and to the sustainability of civilization long-term. Even conventionally-minded farmers know that things like soil loss are a huge looming problem. And the labor issue is also complex – while big corn fields may be farmable via GPS-enabled, air-conditioned tractors, there's still a ton of migrant labor without which the system would cease to function. The idea behind a lot of the regenerative methods is to work with nature to reduce the need for inputs. I am a pragmatist and will tell you that, it's really hard! On this I agree. But a lot of the ideas from more fringe communities like permaculturists are becoming more and more integrated into the mainstream. I just think we need to accelerate that, and put a lot more research into alternative methods like agroforestry – because I think we all rely on a food system that's way more brittle and tenuous than people realize. One with a lot of negative externalities that we can't paper over forever.

ch4s3 3y ago
> the cost to our health This seems highly debatable. Sure cheap calories and cheap corn based sugars make it easy to develop so called lifestyle diseases, but on the other hand we've essentially eliminated famine and in most parts of the world malnutrition. In terms of ecosystem loss, it seems to me that concentrating most calorie production onto the smallest amount of land makes sense. > And the labor issue is also complex You're right of course, but I don't see how the manually intense process of regenerative and/or organic ag makes this better. Every small farm like this that I'm aware of makes heavy use of children, unpaid interns, and extremely low wage workers. It's not exactly comparable to migrant workers picking strawberries en-masse, but that's more of an issue of sacle and where these boutique farms find their labor IMO. I say this as someone whose parents and grandparents were all farmers, and my sister-in-law worked for a few years on a regenerative/organic farm. > But a lot of the ideas from more fringe communities like permaculturists are becoming more and more integrated into the mainstream This is the part that's actually really interesting to me. Finding ways to scale up and integrate ideas about soil health, water use, etc into mechanized, large scale agriculture is really great. People seem to be doing cool things with no-till and drip irrigation right now. > alternative methods like agroforestry My concern with this is that it definitely require LOADS of labor, and isn't likely to produce that much food. It also may put pressure on forest land may not be sustainable long term. On a small scale on you your own farm, it's probably great. But I have trouble imagining how it could ever make up a significant portion of overall fruit and nut consumption.
- petsfed 3y ago
  >Sure cheap calories and cheap corn based sugars make it easy to develop so called lifestyle diseases, but on the other hand we've essentially eliminated famine and in most parts of the world malnutrition. I think this is letting the good be the enemy of the perfect (a rare construction, to be sure). Yes, we've solved a very bad 1st order problem. That frees us up to work on 2nd order problems that we've never had to deal with before. This is a thalidomide-style problem in that the side-effects of the "cure" are a disease in their own right. I'd rather have diabetes than be dead, certainly, but wouldn't it better to not risk diabetes just to stay alive? I'm substantially in agreement with you though. The less land we use on food production, the better. The less labor we can expend growing and harvesting that food, the better. All of that said, the parameter space of agriculture has a complicated shape, so optimizing for any one parameter will be at the expense of other parameters.
  - ch4s3 3y ago
    > I think this is letting the good be the enemy of the perfect (a rare construction, to be sure). Yes, we've solved a very bad 1st order problem. That frees us up to work on 2nd order problems that we've never had to deal with before. This is a thalidomide-style problem in that the side-effects of the "cure" are a disease in their own right. I actually agree with you. > I'd rather have diabetes than be dead, certainly, but wouldn't it better to not risk diabetes just to stay alive? Again I agree, but I also think there's a huge cultural component to food/eating that is often missed in these discussions.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > wouldn't it better to not risk diabetes just to stay alive? This is a mischaracterisation. If you have any choice in what you eat, you risk diabetes just to stay alive. There is so much food that far fewer people are dying of malnutrition than in the past. As part of there being lots of food available, it's also possible to eat yourself into heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Great availability requires some responsibility.
  - ddorian43 3y ago
    Type 2 diabetes is solved with low carb and you can use the cheap food. See virtahealth.com if you want professional help.
myshpa 3y ago
> But we ignore the negative externalities – the cost to our health, and to ecosystems, and to the sustainability of civilization long-term Agriculture production as a major driver of the Earth system exceeding planetary boundaries https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agriculture_production_as_a_major_driver_of_the_Earth_system_exceeding_planetary_boundaries https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agricultu... Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-global-food-system-primary-driver-biodiversity-loss https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob... Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/ Humans are driving one million species to extinction - United Nations-backed report finds that agriculture is one of the biggest threats to Earth’s ecosystems https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01448-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01448-4
- ch4s3 3y ago
  You could boil all of this down to the fact that our current best effort at feeding 9 billion people has a lot of unfortunate externalities. If your proposal is to revert back to high land and labor input methods, then maybe it would make a difference insofar as a few billion people would probably starve. For my part, I'd prefer we try innovating our way through it.
  - Loic 3y ago
    No. Just reduce your meat consumption to about 1kg per month or less. You can still enjoy a really good steak from times to times and you reduce your load on the ecosystem massively. This is orthogonal to the way you produce food.
    - ch4s3 3y ago
      That's quite the presumption about MY consumption. Moreover the word "just" is doing a lot of work here. I'm responding primarily to the overall land use picture here. Agriculture even as efficiently as we're doing it now takes a lot of space, even removing most meat from the equation.

by gdubs 3y ago

ch4s3 3y ago

> the cost to our health This seems highly debatable. Sure cheap calories and cheap corn based sugars make it easy to develop so called lifestyle diseases, but on the other hand we've essentially eliminated famine and in most parts of the world malnutrition. In terms of ecosystem loss, it seems to me that concentrating most calorie production onto the smallest amount of land makes sense. > And the labor issue is also complex You're right of course, but I don't see how the manually intense process of regenerative and/or organic ag makes this better. Every small farm like this that I'm aware of makes heavy use of children, unpaid interns, and extremely low wage workers. It's not exactly comparable to migrant workers picking strawberries en-masse, but that's more of an issue of sacle and where these boutique farms find their labor IMO. I say this as someone whose parents and grandparents were all farmers, and my sister-in-law worked for a few years on a regenerative/organic farm. > But a lot of the ideas from more fringe communities like permaculturists are becoming more and more integrated into the mainstream This is the part that's actually really interesting to me. Finding ways to scale up and integrate ideas about soil health, water use, etc into mechanized, large scale agriculture is really great. People seem to be doing cool things with no-till and drip irrigation right now. > alternative methods like agroforestry My concern with this is that it definitely require LOADS of labor, and isn't likely to produce that much food. It also may put pressure on forest land may not be sustainable long term. On a small scale on you your own farm, it's probably great. But I have trouble imagining how it could ever make up a significant portion of overall fruit and nut consumption.

petsfed 3y ago
>Sure cheap calories and cheap corn based sugars make it easy to develop so called lifestyle diseases, but on the other hand we've essentially eliminated famine and in most parts of the world malnutrition. I think this is letting the good be the enemy of the perfect (a rare construction, to be sure). Yes, we've solved a very bad 1st order problem. That frees us up to work on 2nd order problems that we've never had to deal with before. This is a thalidomide-style problem in that the side-effects of the "cure" are a disease in their own right. I'd rather have diabetes than be dead, certainly, but wouldn't it better to not risk diabetes just to stay alive? I'm substantially in agreement with you though. The less land we use on food production, the better. The less labor we can expend growing and harvesting that food, the better. All of that said, the parameter space of agriculture has a complicated shape, so optimizing for any one parameter will be at the expense of other parameters.
- ch4s3 3y ago
  > I think this is letting the good be the enemy of the perfect (a rare construction, to be sure). Yes, we've solved a very bad 1st order problem. That frees us up to work on 2nd order problems that we've never had to deal with before. This is a thalidomide-style problem in that the side-effects of the "cure" are a disease in their own right. I actually agree with you. > I'd rather have diabetes than be dead, certainly, but wouldn't it better to not risk diabetes just to stay alive? Again I agree, but I also think there's a huge cultural component to food/eating that is often missed in these discussions.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > wouldn't it better to not risk diabetes just to stay alive? This is a mischaracterisation. If you have any choice in what you eat, you risk diabetes just to stay alive. There is so much food that far fewer people are dying of malnutrition than in the past. As part of there being lots of food available, it's also possible to eat yourself into heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Great availability requires some responsibility.
- ddorian43 3y ago
  Type 2 diabetes is solved with low carb and you can use the cheap food. See virtahealth.com if you want professional help.

myshpa 3y ago

> But we ignore the negative externalities – the cost to our health, and to ecosystems, and to the sustainability of civilization long-term Agriculture production as a major driver of the Earth system exceeding planetary boundaries https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agriculture_production_as_a_major_driver_of_the_Earth_system_exceeding_planetary_boundaries https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agricultu... Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-global-food-system-primary-driver-biodiversity-loss https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob... Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/ Humans are driving one million species to extinction - United Nations-backed report finds that agriculture is one of the biggest threats to Earth’s ecosystems https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01448-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01448-4

ch4s3 3y ago
You could boil all of this down to the fact that our current best effort at feeding 9 billion people has a lot of unfortunate externalities. If your proposal is to revert back to high land and labor input methods, then maybe it would make a difference insofar as a few billion people would probably starve. For my part, I'd prefer we try innovating our way through it.
- Loic 3y ago
  No. Just reduce your meat consumption to about 1kg per month or less. You can still enjoy a really good steak from times to times and you reduce your load on the ecosystem massively. This is orthogonal to the way you produce food.
  - ch4s3 3y ago
    That's quite the presumption about MY consumption. Moreover the word "just" is doing a lot of work here. I'm responding primarily to the overall land use picture here. Agriculture even as efficiently as we're doing it now takes a lot of space, even removing most meat from the equation.