Spoiled: Organic and Local Is So 2008
Our industrial food system is rotten to the core. Heirloom arugula won't save us. Here's what will.
UPDATE: Join us for an expert-led reader forum April 13-17 on MotherJones.com around the question: Is organic and local so 2008?
a couple years back, in a wheat field outside the town of Reardan, Washington, Fred Fleming spent an afternoon showing me just how hard it's gotten to save the world. After decades as an unrepentant industrial farmer, the tall 59-year-old realized that his standard practices were promoting erosion so severe that it was robbing him of several tons of soil per acre per year—his most important asset. So in 2000, he began to experiment with a gentler planting method known as no-till. While traditional farmers plow their fields after each harvest, exposing the soil for easy replanting, Fleming leaves his soil and crop residue intact and uses a special machine to poke the seeds through the residue and into the soil.
The results aren't pretty: In winter, when his neighbors' fields are neat brown squares, Fleming's looks like a bedraggled lawn. But by leaving the stalks and chaff on the field, Fleming has dramatically reduced erosion without hurting his wheat yields. He has, in other words, figured out how to cut one of the more egregious external costs of farming while maintaining the high output necessary to feed a growing world—thus providing a glimpse of what a new, more sustainable food system might look like.
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But there's a catch. Because Fleming doesn't till his soil, his fields are gradually invaded by weeds, which he controls with "judicious" amounts of Roundup, the Monsanto herbicide that has become an icon of unsustainable agribusiness. Fleming defends his approach: Because his herbicide dosages are small, and because he controls erosion, the total volume of "farm chemistry," as he calls it, that leaches from his fields each year is far less than that from a conventional wheat operation. Nonetheless, even judicious chemical use means Fleming can't charge the organic price premium or appeal to many of the conscientious shoppers who are supposed to be leading the food revolution. At a recent conference on alternative farming, Fleming says, the organic farmers he met were "polite—but they definitely gave me the cold shoulder."
That a recovering industrial farmer can't get respect from the alternative food crowd may seem trivial, but Fleming's experience cuts to the very heart of the debate over how to fix our food system. Nearly everyone agrees that we need new methods that produce more higher-quality calories using fewer resources, such as water or energy, and accruing fewer "externals," such as pollution or unfair labor practices. Where the consensus fails is over what should replace the bad old industrial system. It's not that we lack enthusiasm—activist foodies represent one of the most potent market forces on the planet. Unfortunately, a lot of that conscientious buying power is directed toward conceptions of sustainable food that may be out of date.
Think about it. When most of us imagine what a sustainable food economy might look like, chances are we picture a variation on something that already exists—such as organic farming, or a network of local farms and farmers markets, or urban pea patches—only on a much larger scale. The future of food, in other words, will be built from ideas and models that are familiar, relatively simple, and easily distilled into a buying decision: Look for the right label, and you're done.
But that's not the reality. Many of the familiar models don't work well on the scale required to feed billions of people. Or they focus too narrowly on one issue (salad greens that are organic but picked by exploited workers). Or they work only in limited circumstances. (A $4 heirloom tomato is hardly going to save the world.)
Such problems aren't exactly news. Organizations such as the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (which despite its namesake is a real leader in food reform) have long insisted that truly sustainable food must be not just ecologically benign, but also nutritious, produced without injustice, and affordable. And yet, because concepts like local or organic dominate the alternative food sector, there is little room left for alternative models, such as Fred Fleming's, that might begin to bridge the gap between where our food system is today and where it needs to be.
And how big is that gap? Using the definition of sustainability above, about 2 percent of the food purchased in the United States qualifies. Put another way, we're going to need not only new methods for producing food, but a whole new set of assumptions about what sustainability really means.
food is not simple. To make it, you have to balance myriad variables—soil, water, and nutrients, of course, but also various social, political, and economic realities. But because our consumer culture favors fixes that are fast and easy, our approaches toward food advocacy have been built around one or two dimensions of production, such as reducing energy use or eliminating pesticides, while overlooking factors that are harder to define (and ditto to market), such as worker safety.
Consider our love affair with food miles. In theory, locally grown foods have traveled shorter distances and thus represent less fuel use and lower carbon emissions—their resource footprint is smaller. And yet, for all the benefits of a local diet, eating locally doesn't always translate into more sustainability. Because the typical farmers market is supplied by dozens of different farms, each transporting its crops in a separate van or truck, a 20-pound shopping basket of locally grown produce might actually represent a larger carbon footprint than the same volume of produce purchased at a chain retailer, which gets its produce en masse, via large trucks.
And for all our focus on the cost of moving food, transportation accounts for barely one-tenth of a food product's greenhouse gas emissions. Far more significant is how the food was produced—its so-called resource intensity. Certain foods, like meat and cheese, suck up so many resources regardless of where they're produced (a pound of conventional grain-fed beef requires nearly a gallon of fuel and 5,169 gallons of water) that you can shrink your footprint far more by changing what you eat, rather than where the food came from. According to a 2008 report from Carnegie Mellon University, going meat- and dairyless one day a week is more environmentally beneficial than eating locally every single day.
Certainly, we can broaden concepts like food miles into more practical, ecologically honest terms. To that end, the British retail chain Tesco is testing a new labeling system that discloses a product's life-cycle carbon emissions in a per-serving figure. But even that focuses too much on a specific outcome, says Fred Kirschenmann, former director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. Real sustainability, he argues, is defined not by a food system's capacity to ensure happy workers or organic lima beans, but by whether the food system can sustain itself—that is, keep going, indefinitely, in a world of finite resources. A truly sustainable food system is inherently resilient—more capable of self-correction and self-revitalization than its industrial rival. Unfortunately, in the real world of farming, ideas like "resilience" must compete with realities like "costs" and "profits," and producers and consumers alike gravitate toward simpler standards—even if those standards don't represent truly sustainable practices. Worries Kirschenmann, "We've come to see sustainability as some kind of fixed prescription—if you just do these 10 things, you will be sustainable, and you won't need to worry about it anymore."
This tendency to replace complexity with checklists is the hallmark of the alternative food sector. Today's federal requirements for organic food, for example, only hint at the richness of the original concept, which encouraged farmers to not only forgo chemical fertilizers but also replenish soils on-site, using livestock manure or crop rotations. The problem is that replenishing on-site is costly and time consuming. As demand for organic has grown and farmers have been pushed to gain the same überefficiencies as their industrial rivals, more of them (particularly those selling to chain groceries) simply import manure from feedlots, sometimes hundreds of miles away. Technically, these farms are still organic—they don't use chemical fertilizers. But is something really sustainable if the natural fertilizer must travel such distances or come from feedlots, the apotheosis of unsafe, unsustainable production? Forget about food miles. What about poop miles?
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corn, rice, strawberries and
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corn, rice, strawberries and lettuce. I think this article hits a lot of important points but something enormous is being left out. Part of our rethinking food has to do with what we consider food in the first place. There are tens of thousands of edible species of plants in the world. As culture has become mass produced we humans have simply forgotten about 99% of those plants.
With this great wealth of potential nutrition (like for example some of those weeds that our hero no till farmer is spraying with "agent orange" producer Monsanto's Round Up!) we foolishly spend over 70% of food production calories on the four most prevalent industrial farm crops. The fact that this point was missing from the article leaves me wondering what else was left out.
On the whole, however, I am extremely happy with the journalist's important and thorough work as well as with the emphasis mojo has placed on this subject over the years.
This article gives me a headache in my eye
The lack of creative synthesis is depressing. No-till farmers are set up as opponents or competitors of industrial organic farmers, and while some lip service is paid to actual ground-breaking agriculturalists, like Takao Furuno (where's Joe Salatin?) the writer goes on to say that poor Takao "must carefully monitor the performance of each crop and apply any new insights the following season."
Oh, the horror! Monitoring crop performance and learning from your experiences! Do you realize you're implying that most farmers are dumb? You also leave out the most important facet of highly productive polyculture farms--utilizing the wisdom of life (both plant and animal) to take care of important roles on the farm. Yes, it's insane for an industrial organic farm to truck in manure from a feedlot, but that doesn't mean that we throw up our hands and say we couldn't possibly stop using chemical fertilizers. Polyculture means that the producers of material and the consumers are all living together, creating a vibrant and growing ecosystem.
Oh, and then you go on to state that really hard things like monitoring performance and learning from experience will "add considerably to a farmer's labor hours. Matt Liebman, a polyculture expert at Iowa State University, says a reintegrated model can require almost twice the labor hours of a conventional agribusiness one." Oh gosh'n'golly, doubling the labor hours! Are you implying this is a bad thing? Are you suggesting there aren't people in this world who would rather live in the country? You even note later in your article that if farmers had guaranteed health care, they'd be able to give up their "off-farm" jobs and devote more time to, you know, things like monitoring their crop performance and adapting to that information.
Look, no-till farming is great. It's not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination. It requires an investment in new equipment and an education in new ways of doing things, but you end up with greater profits from decreased expenditures on fertilizers. Previous farm bills have encouraged no-till agriculture, but certainly more can be done. You still have the perennial problems of mono-cropping--increased susceptibility to pestilence and disease, and a reliance on massive equipment that is going to become more and more expensive to run.
And for sheer migraine induction, there's this: "If we wanted to rid the world of synthetic fertilizer use—and assuming dietary habits remain constant—the extra land we'd need for cover crops or forage (to feed the animals to make the manure) would more than double, possibly triple, the current area of farmland, according to Vaclav Smil"
Yeah, if we assume that we are simply trying to convert current industrial farming practices by trucking in manure and leaving fields "fallow" with cover crops, then that stat might be accurate. Joel Salatin harvests 30,000 dozen eggs, 10,000 to 12,000 broilers, 100 head of cattle, 250 hogs, 800 turkeys and 600 rabbits a year (probably more now, that's from a 2005 NYT article) on his Polyface farm in Virginia. In the winter, the cattle are fed silage in open-sided barns, and straw keeps getting layered in with their waste. Some corn is sprinkled in there as well. In spring, the cattle go outside to graze and "pig-erators" are allowed into the giant compost pile, where they dig mightily for that corn, mixing up the compost. The cattle are grazed intensively, meaning that they spend no more than one day on a given piece of pasture. Four days later, chickens are put into the paddock, and they attack the cow piles to get at the maggots within, thus breaking them up for the benefit of the plants and feeding themselves. Why four days? Because in another day or so the maggots will pupate into flies, and that potential protein source instead becomes an annoyance and a source of possible disease.
It's not just Takao and Joel: Eliot Coleman is producing vegetables in great quantities, for local markets in *Maine*, through the cold northern winter by utilizing unheated hoop houses and modern cultivation techniques. These guys are exceptionally bright, but they can be imitated. How about we reverse the last sixty years of depopulating the countryside and improve the quality of life of farmers and their customers by looking more seriously at polyculture? Why set up this false choice between no-till and "organic" (where organic is defined as giant scale industrial organic). We need to think beyond the 30 foot combine.
When small dairy farmers (and yes, there are still some small conventional dairy farmers in Wisconsin, at least) switch from conventional practices (keep the cows in giant sheds, grow corn and feed it to the cows) to intensive grazing (move the herd to a new piece of pasture after every milking) they report that their hours of labor haven't decreased, but the new tasks (monitoring electric fencing, moving the herd, managing pasture) are far more engaging and enjoyable than endless field work (planting, spraying, harvesting) in the combine. They also notice the cows are happier doing what cows are meant to do, and I think that also contributes to their better quality of life.
What bothers me about this article is that in trying to be "provocative," the author makes massive oversimplifications, and ignores current examples of successful production of large quantities of food on relatively small pieces of land. The invocation of "heirloom arugula" sounds more like the McCain campaign attacking Obama than of any constructive dialog.
Yes, I agree very much with
Yes, I agree very much with your comments. Polyface sets the standard of how we should be producing food in this country. Waste is not an issue, it not only heats his pigs in the winter, it fertilizes his fields in the spring. The man is a genius in my opinion, but you are right, it is not magic, it is a model that can be followed by others. I know he takes interns, but he should probably start a school as well.
HERE HERE DR FOOD!!
HERE HERE DR FOOD!!
Here Here Dr Food? What did
Here Here Dr Food? What did you mean by that mate? Mike at regcure serial and
pc booster review guide.
HERE HERE DR FOOD!!
HERE HERE DR FOOD!!
Poorly, shallowly researched and full of unsupported assumptions
Mr. Roberts' article is full of false assumptions, including the assumption that large-scale animal agriculture is a necessary component of organic agriculture. It is not. Animal manure is not necessary for organic agriculture, and large-scale industrial animal agriculture -- whether "organic" or not -- is unsustainable, period.
I notice that the words "vegan" and "vegetarian" do not even appear in Mr. Roberts' article. Nor, for that matter, does the word "animal" -- except for the single use in his false assumption that vast quantities of animal manure are necessary for organic agriculture. Nor does he mention the recent UN study on the enormous, negative global impacts of animal agriculture.
Nor does he mention recent studies showing that small, diversified farms are far more productive, while simultaneously using drastically less energy and other inputs, than "industrial" large scale monocrop agriculture (whether organic or not).
Nor does he mention the Rodale Institute's decades of research which have demonstrated the superior productivity, resilience and sustainability of small-scale diversified food production.
Mr. Roberts' article appears to be poorly, shallowly researched and aimed -- as is too often the case with such articles -- at creating a sensation by making broad unsupported claims that "everything the greenies are telling you is wrong".
Yes, small and diversified farms are both our past & our future
Thank you for reinforcing that idea. Of course there will always be trade in food--I love a box of clementines in the cold northern winter, and apples don't grow well in Florida--but individual farms need to be more diverse in order to minimize the threat of pestilence and the need for massive inputs of nutrients.
Will this take more people working to produce food? Yes! Will the food cost more? Yes! Is this really a bad thing? I don't think so.
Look, I'm a pediatrician and my poorest patients are my fattest patients. We no longer have a moral obligation to make food as cheap as possible. We have a moral obligation to make nutrient rich high quality food available to everyone.
I couldn't figure out what
I couldn't figure out what the point to this article was. I've also been wondering what exactly heirloom arugula is, seeing as arugula is a domesticated weed. Seed Savers offers 3 different varieties and doesn't refer to any of them as heirloom. given that ambiguity, tomatoes, peppers, or eggplant would've been better choices.
It seems as if this whole article boils down to "Organics won't feed the world," which is a very boring argument (I used to work for the Crop Sciences Department of my local land-grant university. Wonderful folks, but I heard this A LOT without much to back it up). It ignores the fact that research into organic methods has a lot to offer to non-organic farming, as well as all the variations on the organic-conventional continuum that farmers use. And there are many.
Lastly, I did a quick total of how far the food we buy at the farmer's market travels to get there. The grand total? 200 miles, if I buy peaches. Most of the time it's around 50.
"Lastly, I did a quick total
"Lastly, I did a quick total of how far the food we buy at the farmer's market travels to get there. The grand total? 200 miles, if I buy peaches. Most of the time it's around 50."
Think per capita. *Each* tomato, head of lettuce, etc. uses less fuel when it's being shipped with 10,000 of its friends even though the train/tractor trailer uses more fuel than the farmer's pickup uses going to market.
nerd alert?
wow, you guys are even nerdier than i thought mojo readers would be. why do you think farmers use high yield, chemical laden crops? because they have a LOWER yield? chemicals and biotech crops have been in use for decades and they aren't going anywhere.
Not going anywhere until cheap petroleum runs out, anyway
Thanks for pointing out the obvious. Our current system is built on cheap petroleum.
This is why it is unsustainable.
We can figure that out now, or we can wait until oil is back over $100 per barrel. Me, I'm learning to grow food and raise chickens because the food is better, mostly, but also because I'm not confident that our modern society is capable of turning this thing around in time to avoid a collapse.
Wes Jackson??
People interested in The Land Institute and Wes Jackson should be aware that for 30 years, he's been saying "30 years from now, we'll be doing..." whatever. And it's all still 30 years away. Donate now!
Of much greater interest is Woody Agriculture- these guys have farmers planting their crops, now. And outyielding soybeans; no plow, no spray.
www.badgersett.com
Somebody tell Fred, there's a better way.
I'm an avid chemical corporation activist, I was a certified pesticide applicator with MNDOA, and for many many reasons, I know Monsanto is not to be trusted. Phosphates are not necessary to kill the average weed. Dimethylamine salt of Dicantha is just as effective, though it doesn't immediately kill the weed, so if you want to watch the weeds shrivel up and die like the commercial... You're a sadist. Instead, it coats the leaves with a biodegradable salt, inhibits growth, as it convinces the weed that it is thirsty, and the weed slowly drowns itself. It's readily commercially available, and can be applied by tank or backpack sprayer, depending on the severity of the weeds.
Fred, and other industrial and organic farmers should take note: Many natural pesticides are not harmful to the environment, and are just as available as the commonly used (often highly toxic) commercial pesticides. When selecting a method of pest control, you should always look for a plant extract that can do the job. Every weed and insect has a natural weakness to certain plants, and their extracts are about as harmful as just growing that plant. Marigolds, for instance, ward off not only weeds, but also disincline rodents and vermin from grazing nearby.
Nowhere in nature will you see a field of corn growing all by itself, stretching out into the distance. On every acre of undeveloped land is a complex and dynamic combination of plants and animals, that forms it's own balanced microcosm.
By planting crops together that naturally complement each other, you can balance a plot's ph, stave off weeds, and avoid hungry insects and herbivores, all without the use of pesticide. Any rogue herbivores that come around to feed further encourage our survival by becoming food, and we thus aid natural selection by thinning the herd of it's slower moving mammals.
If you must go the pesticide route, no respectable farmer should be seen buying products from a company that spent millions to genetically engineer seeds for a crop that can't reproduce itself. They call it "the terminator seed." It's made them a lot of money in South America.
Somewhere there's a line between agribusiness polluters and evil batman villains, and Monsanto's on the wrong side of it.
Let's not lump every "Joe the farmer" in with them, just because they don't know better... For fuck's sake, tell them! Even simple farm folk would probably like to know they've been lied to, and are consequently poisoning their land. They're doing what they're told, so all we have to do is tell them different.
And remind them that Monsanto is eeeeeeeeeeviiiiil.
Dimethylamine salt of Dicantha?
In my garden I tend to pull or flame the weeds, but I was curious about what you said. Can you elaborate? When I googled "Dimethylamine salt of Dicantha" I got three hits and two of them were this page with your comment. The other referred to 2,4 D and if that's what Dimethylamine salt of Dicantha is, well I think the toxicity of 2,4, D is nothing I want in my yard.
Informative but
Informative but talky.
Ultimately there is no 'sustainable' closed-loop farming system even recycling human nutrients of all kinds including poo, tinkle, and bodies. Eventually nutrients wash off to the ocean and off-farm input are required. A healthy Salmonidae population is thus an imperative to return nutrients to the land under Fish-Power.
More vegans and urban farms please!
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I suppose people will interpret this article however they want. If they are technophiles, they'll see it as promoting biotech. If they are "greenies" they'll see it as dis/mis-information. For the most part, however, I think this article provides an excellent synopsis over the complexity of a sound and just food policies and systems.
What I take away from this article is the need for pluralistic approaches to producing the worlds food in an imperfect world. Two important steps seem to be 1) reducing and/or eliminating animal products (especially beef and dairy) from one's diet, and 2) moving toward more community-owned urban food. Treating food as a commodity to be privately traded disempowers communities to feed themselves and obstructs universal access to sufficient food. Perhaps this will be difficult to manage in densely populated cities in developing countries, but vertical and urban agriculture seem to be at the crest of he wave for a new and better future of food (one that is decentralized, de-privatized, local, and fairly distributed).
Until then, there may be a *need* for economies of scale (aka large farms) to produce the food needed to feed the world as well as more vegetarians and vegans. Sadly, some of the most fertile lands in the world located in the Heartland are being eroded by misinformed farming practices and covered in concrete by suburban sprawl. It seems that only when our society and politicians become committed to ecological justice and thinking and conscious of environmental racism, classism, and nationalism will there be a truly "sustainable" *and* just food system.
why are the comments all
why are the comments all all-caps. my eyes hurt
All-caps is an Internet Explorer glitch
No all-caps in Firefox on a Windows PC. No all-caps in Safari on a Mac.
Sorry. I tried to read through these comments on a hospital computer last weekend and yeah, it hurts.
To be honest, I cant see
To be honest, I cant see capitalized letters, is it fixed or what? Joe at pc booster 2009 guide.
Proposed Solution
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Heavy mulching would eliminate the need for pesticides, control erosion, produce a superior crop, conserve water, enrich the soil and keep the weeds at bay.
biobabe
This article is well-meant
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This article is well-meant but it is also monumentally over-simplifying towards both conventional and especially organic agriculture.
This happens because its premise is extremely ambitious and could never be correctly informative even if it spanned a dozen thesis works- it justs sadly jumps to unfounded conclusions, one after the other.
It does, however start with a crutial and valid point: there is not a 100% fully sustainable, closed-system way of farming. Farming is about taking nutrients in the form of food and trying to return most of them and/or minimize their loss.The sooner this is accepted the quicker it will be to achieve a viable and responsible solution.
As for just a fraction of the serious questions this article suggested me:
1."(...) the reality is: this model can't do what we need it to do, that is, feed billions of people.(...)"
According to FAO it does feed billions of people- 95% percent of all farms in the world are below 2 hectares (in number, corresponding to 50-60% of food production average)and produce without herbicides and oil-based pesticides or instruments. In India, half of all grain is produced by small scale farming. Sadly it cannot compete with subsidized industrial farming that comes in the form of free foreign aid. We are paying companies for "aiding" these countries food needs, destroying local economy and local-specific agriculture. It is tragic that so many people still think good is being done with this.
2."Considering the transport only accounts for 10% of the emissions from food production"
Where? Which sort of food? For what types of production?? It could be 1% or 50%!
3."Growing food organically but underpaying workers"
There are badly and well paid workers in all kinds of farming but only one employs a vast majority of people all around the world because it is more accessible to all kinds of budgets and plot sizes- guess which?
4."going meat- and dairyless one day a week is more environmentally beneficial than eating locally every single day."
One of the correct claims in this article, and also one of the very few that refer to a study- coincidence?
5."This is costly and to cut costs, some farmers just truck in manure from feed lots."
The additional costs that come with organic farming by being more labor intensive are compensated by its lack of pesticides and herbicides and by the fact that it is sold as a premium product. It is a wrong assumption- the author says "some" but then appears to say that all organic farming goes on on animal manure-because many keep their small scale cattle cost effectively (horses f.e.) or use green manures like comfrey and others, vermicomposting, etc, etc.
6."If we were to convert all of the US industrial farms to organic, consider the resources we would need."
Let me put it this way: What if we converted all farmland into large scale industrial agriculture, that depends on monocropping (goodbye habitats and biodiversity) and oil based products (like pesticides, fuel and herbicides)? Consider the non renewable resources we would need, like oil and mined phosphate?
Is oil more abundant than manure??? More reliable?? Cheaper?? Forget the fact that the reason industrialized agriculture weighs 40% on total emissions is largely because it is so dependent on oil and mining... Never mind soil erosion and water scarcity, those are just details.
7."If we want to get rid of fertilizers and use cover crops and other alternative farming methods, we would need 2-3 times the amount of farmland currently available - which means knocking down more rainforests and taking over more land for farms."
This sentence just made me fall off my chair- it simply goes against everything that has been studied or is even empirically visible worlwide! Organic agriculture DEPENDS on crop diversity, consociation and rotation. The reason rainforest is taken down for agriculture is because the soil's nutrients drain away quickly (you know, because of monocropping) and is useless after 2-3 years. These bombastic claims should come with SOURCES! Seriously, I want to learn about these amazing discoveries!
8."Other alternative farming models will also be needed, like vertical farming (massive, glass-walled sky-scrapers capable of feeding thousands of people)."
A nice illustration of complete cluelessness. Urban farming is a great idea- building a structure in highly valued land for farming is just not very pragmatic, to put it gently. Nevermind all the technicalities that would require hydroponics on that scale. Making and maintaining a building is, believe it or not, very energy intensive.
9."Money for offesetting the costs of food - one reason organic has yet to really take off is that it's expensive and with the rising costs of food"
Organic food is not more expensive. Industrialized, large scale farming is heavily subsidized (in the western world it only exists because of subsidies- for buying all the diesel it uses for example) and thus falsely cheap. This is empirically verifiable when the cost of oil rises, so does most food- not because of transport but because of how it's produced. If governments stopped paying people to pollute while making lower quality food that employs small numbers of people in cheap labour countries maybe we would be going somewhere. Subsidizing organic farming is not the solution either, especially if you consider that it is already the dominant type of agriculture even without any government intervention, I would go so far as to say, even despite of it.
The author closes with an interesting thought, though - it's just a shame what came before it. It just makes it seem as though the solution the author proposes is to compromise even further into a form of food production that is more pollutant, dependent on oil, lower quality and socially unfair in order to sustain the unsustainable...
Not a very nice thought for a Treehugger.
Nom de Guerre: You make some
Nom de Guerre: You make some good points, but I also think you miss the point.
Yes, most farming worldwide is still small-scale, but so what? Many of these "small farms" are sustenance operations in the extreme—they exist because their occupants have NO other options for feeding themselves—and in many cases, they are BARELY feeding themselves. No, these small farms can’t compete with subsidized industrial ag, but that’s harldy their only problem—in many cases, these small farms lack the basic tools (water, good seeds, good soils; health care); they are brutally inefficient and highly labor intensive—these aren't reformed industrialists looking for a better way; these are poor people who have no other choice—and hardly the army on which to build a new food system. Should they be replaced with some mega agribusiness? NO. Should they be led to dependence on petroleum-based (and therefore finite) inputs? hell no. But there has to be some allowance for the possibility that this sector could benefit from SOME consolidation and SOME industrialization. Anyone who points to small farms in the developing as “proof” that small farms can feed the world hasn’t spent much time outside of the wealthy west.
2."Considering the transport only accounts for 10% of the emissions from food production" – this figure refers to farming and processing (with processing and packaging being the most energy intensive/
3. “There are badly and well paid workers in all kinds of farming but only one employs a vast majority of people all around the world because it is more accessible to all kinds of budgets and plot sizes- guess which?” Again, I think you need to distinguish between sustenance and small-scale.
5."This is costly and to cut costs, some farmers just truck in manure from feed lots."
“The additional costs that come with organic farming by being more labor intensive are compensated by its lack of pesticides and herbicides and by the fact that it is sold as a premium product. It is a wrong assumption- the author says "some" but then appears to say that all organic farming goes on on animal manure-because many keep their small scale cattle cost effectively (horses f.e.) or use green manures like comfrey and others, vermicomposting, etc, etc.”
Dude: I have NO problem with farmers, organic or otherwise, creating systems that recycle nutrients—as the original organic model intended—and an integrated livestock/cover crop model can indeed be hugely productive: my concern is that many of today’s organic operations, in their effort to keep costs down and broaden their market share, have adopted the industrial model of outside, off-site inputs. So my question was, and STILL is, how do we take the strengths of the integrated livestock/cover crop model and scale it up to feed all the people who are alive today and will be alive (we hope) tomorrow?
Paul Roberts: You reply to Nom de Guerre, but not to me!
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Harumph! I feel so slighted! ;-)
I'm glad to hear that your question was and still is "How do we take the strengths of the integrated livestock/cover crop model and scale it up to feed all the people.." because that wasn't the message I took away from your article. You mentioned one farmer who is successful, but then immediately implied that his model was not reproduceable because he has to do all that hard work of carefully monitoring his crop performance and such.
If that is the question, how about we talk about the folks who are successfully managing integrated polyculture?
Yes, there are gigantic certified organic farms who have adopted the industrial model. This is because our current food system has externalized a lot of the costs of industrial food production and requires mass production to fit in with centralized processing and distribution models. That's not sustainable either, but that's not the future of food, that's tinkering around with the current doomed system.
How about we talk about the future of food, after oil prices rise again? I don't think anybody ever proposed that heirloom arugula was going to save anyone. If we are to be saved, it will be by returning thousands of people, smart and knowledgeable people, to the areas outside our cities (and in some cases inside our cities), to grow our food in complex polycultural farms with both plants and animals working together.
Not too far from Madison Wisconsin is Vermont Valley farm. The owners there bought an old farm on marginal land (with a swamp/wetland in the middle) and over the past many years have transformed it into a highly productive CSA farm that feeds hundreds, actually more like thousands of people. This is happening all over the country. Let's talk about what works.
Forward thinking city managers/governments in diverse places with dropping populations are encouraging the remaining residents to cluster together and are actually taking out unused roads and buildings to return the land to a more natural state. How about we discuss the potential for land reclamation for food production?
The story of Cuba's sudden forced conversion to local and organic food production (after being cut off from the largess of the Soviet Union, and from trade with the United States) is also a very interesting case study. Can we talk about that?
To my eyes, this article is
To my eyes, this article is pure FUD. Pure F.ear U.Certainty and D.oubt. Like all good FUD, this article fails to convey any truth or substance.
Since so many others have pointed out so many other excellent points...My only statement-question is:
Before the invention of salt-based fertilizers (often mistakenly called "chemical" fertilizers), how in the world did farmers feed the people of the planet utilizing the unsustainable organic & local farming methods available to them?
I second the question, is the author of this article paid by Monsanto and/or the WHO?
To my eyes....
No, I don't work for Monsanto. And just because I'm skeptical of some current alternative ag practices doesn't automatically make me a supporter of industrial Seems to me that before the invention of 'salt based" fertilizers, there were a lot fewer people to feed.
This appears to be mostly an
This appears to be mostly an expression of the long standing suspicion of organics movement on the part of some elements of the political left. Is it possible that all those individual trucks taking goods to a farmers market use more enerby than the industrial distribution system? Sure. That is a perfectly acceptable hypothesis. But where has it every been tested? We aren't told. All the available analysis seems to show the opposite. The transportation footprint of a head of lettuce from California that is sold in the midwest is enormous.
But one ought not start to believe that local and/or organic food alone will eliminate corporate agriculture or restore a secure food system that produces safe, healthy food. The key issue is reducing the ability of the corporate food system to externalize costs. Corporate produced peanut butter just got a lot more expensive with the recent food disaster. But those costs largely won't be found in the cost of peanut butter. And periodic widespread contamination of food products is just one of the costs of industrial agriculture that gets externalized.
Finally, the question seems to be whether people should pay a premium for food products that are produced exclusively using limited tillage farming practices. I doubt they should. There are plenty of good reasons to use "no-till" farming, but its not at all clear that the finished food products are significantly different from traditional tillage.
The Troll speaks
The world is sadly screwed, unless two events occur:
1. Animal agraculture is given up. This would provide a temporal boost in efficiency and buy us another decade or two.
2. During that bonus round, we had better replace carbon energy with clean and renewable.
Otherwise, while we wait around for the end to arrive, successive 4th, then 3rd, and later 2nd world peoples will hit rock-bottom. After that, the Bentleys will be used for tomato planters and following generations (if there are any) won't even be sure what the rusted machines formerly did.
Go Veggie. Then go Vegan. Quit debating the atomic weight of cobalt. The solution is within ourselves.
Respectfully submitted~
"Animal agraculture is given
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"Animal agraculture is given up."
What do we do with all existing domestic animals? Turn them loose to forage on their own?
Domestic animals have co-evolved with humans, and our paths are inextricably interwoven.
That's not to say that the gross levels of meat production need be continued, but without animals on the land, farming cannot continue.
I'm a vegetarian who occasionally shares a last meal with an old friend as a remembrance and sacrament when a free-range egg hen or paddock-rotated milk goat nears the end of its natural life. That's something die-hard vegans just cannot understand.
:::: Jan Steinman, Communication Steward, EcoReality Co-op ::::
Don't confuse the Industrial norm w/ the Permaculture exception
Bytesmiths,
I think you confused the comment about the need to eliminate industrial meat production with a solution that involves having a few animals on a small-decentralized-sustainable farm. The former is currently the U.S. norm and the latter is the exception.
"What do we do with all existing domestic animals? Turn them loose to forage on their own?"
This is really not a concern. Assuming you mean animals like chickens and cows and not dogs and cats... (1) These animals are so genetically messed-up that they would probably only live a few more months if we didn't kill them; and (2) there are farm sanctuaries like Peaceful Prairies that could help these animals live a happy life until they died a natural death. But yes, we should free these animals from their concentration camps.
"Domestic animals have co-evolved with humans, and our paths are inextricably interwoven."
I agree with you for small scale permaculture models of sustainability, but this is the exception. Our current food system is, in the words of Michael Pollan, a "black box". I'm confused how you see human lives interwoven with the animals that we eat? They are in concrete buildings, separate from ourselves or anything natural, fed massive amounts of antibiotics and hormones. These Animals are confined to tiny cages, stalls, pens, and corrals never allowed to exhibit natural behavior. I do not think we co-evolved for this situation!!!
The ten thousand years we’ve been herding and commodifying animals and the 20-26 thousand years we’ve been hunting large animals are very short compared to the 300,00 years homo sapiens has been here and the 7-10 million yeras that hominids have been here.
"...without animals on the land, farming cannot continue."
Again, you're confusing the exception of permaculture with the norm of concentrated-centralized-industrial systems. The reality is that our environment is collapsing because of our current system and if animals on the land (and eating from the land), civilization cannot continue.
The UNFAO reports that cattle (if it included pigs, chickens and fish, it would be MUCH worse!!!) cause 18% total greenhouse gas emissions. (vs. all transport: 13%, the 2nd largest contributor), generates 65% nitrous oxide, which has 269 times the global warming potential of CO2 (from manure), accounts for 37% methane (72 times more potent than CO2), a major driver of deforestation...70% Amazon turned over to grazing...etc, etc, etc.
"I'm a vegetarian"
I hope you realize you are still buying into the meat industry if you consume milk, cheese, leather, wool, silk, etc. Dairy cows end up as hamburgers and are obviously part of the problem. No offense, but if vegetarians chose their diet for ethical reasons, it is hypocritical. It's inherently impossible to respect animals while mass-producing their 'products' -- they are sacrificed to the gods of profit and efficiency.
--I'm a vegan who's tired of lame arguments that try to justify ecocide. I understand your frustration with "die-hard" vegans, because I don't think it's a universal truth to be vegan. Our diets must vary based on context, time, and place. Right now, in the U.S., we have the option to not buy into the destruction -- to try to restore balance to a system that is so out of balance it is threatening our survival.
Tired old Vegan argument
Plubius said:
"I'm a vegan who's tired of lame arguments that try to justify ecocide."
Well I'm a farmer who's tired of the lame vegan arguments. You apparently don't get out into rural areas much. Yes, it's true that modern CAFO's are horrible places and should be done away with. But the choice is not CAFO versus vegan. Around here, there are a lot of cows but no feedlots. So eating locally raised meat and dairy exclusively would be better than eating commodity meat and dairy just six days a week.
You dismiss small-scale diversified sustainable production of livestock as "the exception and not the rule" - which may be true. But it seems like a much more realistic alternative than convincing everyone to give up meat entirely. Reduce consumption, sure, but widespread veganism is not the solution.
The article, and several responders, pulled out the familiar arguments against meat and dairy production - the vast resources needed. These arguments are almost always assuming modern production methods: monoculture grain fields feeding feedlots. Grass is pretty simple to grow, without using much resources. Not only that, it can be grown on a lot of marginal land not suited to grain production. That significantly increases the available land for agriculture. My farm is mostly unsuited to crop farming. The alternative to livestock for me would be trees (yes, a permaculture forest culture would be possible, but not practical) or houses and lawns. Our livestock generate fertility that allows us to grow crops on part of the farm. Our cattle and sheep take fewer resources to raise than our vegetable and grain crops.
What gets me riled up is that there are a lot of producers out there who are doing things the right way. If folks spent more energy on finding and supporting them rather than advocating veganism for the masses, then there would be even more, and it could become the norm rather than the exception. The problem with trying to solve the big problems on a big scale is that, by definition, small solutions don't work. But the reality is that a lot of small solutions add up. And farming works better at the smaller end of the scale spectrum - more production per acre with fewer resources imported and less polution and other environmental harm.
Yes, supporting local farmers is something we can all try to do!
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Thanks for commenting. It's true that avoiding industrial meat is the right thing to do, but at that point there are more options than just going vegan. I'm lucky enough to have the means and the room to buy an extra freezer, the kind that doesn't have a defrost cycle.
We buy whole lambs and half hogs and steers and then butcher them ourselves. These animals were raised locally (the steer within 10 miles) on grass, and the cost isn't too bad because we bought in bulk. We're learning old skills, like making broth from bones and rendering lard (which isn't nearly as bad for you as you've heard, as long as it hasn't been indrustrially processed!)
I've heard about meat coops, or meat CSA's developing, where people can pool their resources to acquire high quality meat from a local farmer. Dear readers, if you want to make a difference but you're not ready to go vegan, do a little research: find out what's available in your area. Support a local farmer.
More Vegan BS
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Publius, you're spreading more lies. You say that "These animals are so genetically messed-up that they would probably only live a few more months if we didn't kill them". That is false. You obviously have no real knowledge on this issue. The rest of your arguments are similarly fraught with errors. Veganism is unsustainable. It is merely a moral equivalent of sticking your head in the sand. Eat Meat.
A real, practical solution
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A real, practical solution exists for sustainably fertilizing all farmlands. It just needs to be developed on a commercial scale. It is a renewable resource and, while no one has attempted to harvest it commercially on the scale required to fertilize our nation, I am confident that it could be done in an environmentally low impact and sustainable way. I am talking about seaweed, plankton or kelp. Not only would you get the big three--nitrogen, phosphate and potassium--but you would also be restoring all of the trace minerals that are depleted from our nation's soils. This would also solve another problem: our national health crisis. Research and literature abound with regards to the root cause of 90+% of our diseases and conditions; we are dying and suffering from mineral deficiencies; vitamins can not be utilized by our bodies without the presence of many different trace minerals and calcium in particular plays a huge role in maintaining our body's pH level. This role of calcium's is so important that our body will rob its own bones to maintain a healthy pH level in our blood stream, thus, cavities, gingivitis, osteoporosis occur. If we were to fertilize our soils with a truly complete fertilizer, then we would reap the benefits with restored good health as the vegetables and fruits of our diet would now convey a broad spectrum of trace minerals AS GOD ORIGINALLY INTENDED!! Isn't it interesting how most of our problems can be traced to the incredible presumption that we can improve upon or do a better job of things than God! Another benefit of horticulture with seaweed is at the same time we would be reducing and hopefully completely eliminating the strip mining for phosphates along the spine of Florida which is highly unsustainable and ecologically destructive.
The environmental damage caused by our greed and presumption is catastrophic: the watershed is being permanently altered, the lost forests cannot be replaced (like the rainforests--the complexity thereof precludes human efforts to restore what took mother nature hundreds of years to achieve), the water flows of the Peace and Myakka river systems is being altered, the estuaries that depend upon those river flows are being adversely impacted, the local economy (tourism: fishing, kayaking, unspoilt beaches, etc. are being negatively impacted) yes the beaches--the red tide that destroys beach-going tourism is a direct result of the fertilizer chemicals that are presently used by our farmers leaching from the soil into the rivers and back into the ocean causing the algae-bloom known as red tide!
But that's not the end of the list! The local communities of the west coast of Florida are finding out that water is a precious commodity--they are running out, so water supply (both quantity and quality), contamination of the land, air (from dust off the land) and water with toxic waste and RADIOACTIVE ISOTOPES, and, last but not least, heavy metals that are the leavings when the strip mining is done. Corporate indifference has led to several major spills from containment silos of this deadly mix devastating the environment with pollution, fish die-offs, etc.
So three birds with one stone! Let's use seaweed for our health, our environment and our children (we'd be doing the rest of the world a big favor as well!!!) It will solve our agricultural fertilizer problem, our runaway healthcare costs problem/our own health problems, and convert a highly unsustainable industry over to a highly sustainable one. Cultivating and harvesting seaweed commercially would help to filter out the toxins we've been dumping into our oceans. It would help to create more and thus replace the oxygen levels in our atmosphere (yes oxygen depletion is a real concern for our race also). It would reverse the red tide phenomenon. It would help to restore the pH balance of the oceans saving coral reefs and fish populations. It would provide green jobs for our society. It would be infinitely renewable and sustainable--a true gift to our great-great grandchildren. It would remove carbon from the environment storing it in plant tissue as C6H12O6 (a natural sugar energy source) and thereby, help in the battle to reverse the climate change crisis that threatens to destroy us. It would remove any future dependence on other countries as our natural resources dried up. It would have many as yet unknown positive effects simply because we are restoring the balance of nature and renewing our harmonious relationship to it. Just like ripples in a pond!
Quick review: what have we got to make a splash with? Three huge rocks (our soils, our health and our future) bushel baskets of rocks and pebbles representing benefits both known and unknown. All from one simple change! With any kind of luck this will be one snowball that turns into a huge avalanche of positive effects.
Peace,
Dave
The author mentions Austria
The author mentions Austria (5.3 % organic, i believe) as the "super green" country. .. but what about Cuba? for entirely different reasons, 80% of Cuba's produce is organic. When the Soviet Union crumbled and with it Cuba's access to chemical fertilizers, fuel, etc. they had to figure out a new way to feed their people. An excellent film chronicles this transformation The Power of Community: How Cuba survived Peak Oil.
Some missing things...
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I'm amazed and disappointed that there has been no mention of Permaculture. That's as close to infinitely sustainable as anyone has gotten. It stresses the harmless, natural integration of humans and domestic animals into the landscape in an integrated system of small- to medium-scale food production.
Also largely missing (although there were a few mentions in the comments) is the importance of returning borrowed nutrients to the soil via humanure.
One thing is without doubt: humans have proved to be incredibly capable of turning ancient sunlight into human biomass. As fossil fuels go into steep decline, all the rules will change. While I agree that industrial-sized organic farming is still industrial farming, this article misses the essential point that industrial farming will go into decline in lock-step with the decline of fossil fuels, which has already begun.
:::: Jan Steinman, Communication Steward, EcoReality Co-op ::::
It was a decent intro to a sprawling subject
A short article just can't cover all the issues in improving agriculture.
I live in the Indian River citrus district of Florida. which for the moment exports grapefruit and juice products internationally. In a few years, the entire industry may be gone, thanks to citrus greening, a devastating disease. Avocados may be the next crop lost to disease.
Florida's agriculture has never been terribly stable, partly because of its dependence on specialty crops that are sold far away, partly because of hurricanes and freezes, and occasionally due to new diseases.
The hurricane threat, by itself, assures that Miami will never have condo-like structures housing crops, even if some "condo mangoes" are sufficiently compact to grow happily on balconies.
Our infertile sand soils assure that Florida will have to import food (although Everglades rice, grown on muck, can occasionally be found in supermarkets. Oddly enough, Puerto Rican rice is everywhere). Trace mineral deficiencies also make it difficult to do without some degree of fertilization.
In Florida, sustainability may need to be defined largely in terms of effects on runoff and groundwater, plus soil contamination. Copper contamination of soils of citrus groves from use of fungicides is a serious problem on lands proposed for use as stormwater treatment sites in the vicinity of the Everglades. Sustainability in terms of creating stable communities and stable agricultural output may simply not be possible.
Sustaibale food
Using small amounts of fertiliser and minimum cultivations falls down on two counts: 1) the energy needed to produce the fertilizer and 2) the use of oil. In the near future cost will prohibit both and in the long term severe shortages will exclude both. Then there is the predicted shortage of phosphates. By 2040 that could be a real problem which nobody seems to be addressing. Add in the effecys of climate change, peak oil and water shortages and anybody with any sense will see that this demands more than slight adjustments to current farming systems.
We have to get the message that there is a HUGE food supply problem on the horizon. Just tinkering with farming methods is not enough we need radical solutions. Small scale growing does have a very big part to play but that means dismantling the food supply infrastructure and maybe that's another problem - too many vested interests. The constant drive for large profits are preventing some of even thinking about the changes that are needed and needed now! The word 'sustainable' has been hijacked to mean maintaining profits; that will soon become impossible. That's a hard pill to swallow but it is a reality that we have to face. The end result of all this is that we either take action now to radically change the way food is produced and distributed or we wait until there are food riots!
a decentralized model
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We have been trying to find someone interested in putting our model into reality - but so far no luck. We propose to produce the input ( organic soybean halves) regionally and the end product (tempeh) locally in small production coops. Perhaps the whole operation tied together as a type of franchise. While there seems to be all this talk about local food and food production - it seems to be mostly on the demand side (in our experience)
More info: http://www.maketempeh.org
The most valuable part of
The most valuable part of this article was the comments it has elicited. The article has mentioned some interesting questions that deserve to be thought about, but it hasn't given any useful answers. It also seems to be hyping an excuse for abolishing the "organic" standards to the benefit of chem/petro input manufacturers and sales forces. For example, it presents Smil's claim about vast new farmland required for organic manure inputs without presenting any counterclaim. That is the
same as endorsing Smil's claim. Since Smil's claim very disingenously seeks to divert attention away from legume and non-legume plant sources for nitrogen fixation; as well as carefully covering-up-by-omitting-mention-of seaweed as a source of nitrogen and other plant nutrients; I would dismiss the author's endorsement of Smil's claim as being just as dishonest as Smil's claim itself.
But as mentioned before, the article's chief benefit lies in all the good information it elicited: seaweed, Joel Salatin, Elliot Coleman, Badgersett Farm, permaculture, etc. To which one might add work going on in biochar, glomalagenic mycorrhyzae, etc. I personally might add that edible animals grazed on land too steep and/or dry to grow crops is a plus and not a minus. The elicitation of all this information in the comments section shows that even an article intended to sow pro-Corporate F.U.D. can have beneficial after-effects despite its bad intentions.
Great summation of a lot of
Great summation of a lot of problems with the current paradigm of organic/sustainable food, but one big, looming question:
Where do GMOs fit into this, if at all? What role can/should they play in either a long term solution, or, as claimed about simply reducing pesticide use, as a temporary stage in the transition to a truly sustainable model?
So called "Domestic" animals (Bytesmiths )
I had suggested that each person rationally and logically conclude that the only sustainable method of continued (global) existence involves the personal evolution beyond animal farming. From this, Bytesmiths extrapolated that all of a sudden, Elsie the cow and co, would be set loose to eat people's flower-gardens and impede traffic on hwy 95. Such a conclusion is merritless and attempts to draw a gross caricature out of what is very simple, neat and effective. Namely, if-and-when people stop consuming the animal products, the producers will stop producing them. There need not be a national ban on Hamburgers. Merely a widespread awareness of the adverse consequences of not doing so. Right now the status quo is quite to the contrary. Right now, animal farming is one of the largest recipients of public subsidies. It is possibly the single largest creator of pollution and spreader of diseases. It also wastes enough resources to literally feed every starving person in the entire world.
So I ask you Bytesmiths, suppose that large numbers of people began to have such a personal epiphany? What would you (the oh-so conscientious vegetarian) tell them? Don’t go veggie/vegan? We have no homes for the bacon? Ridiculous.
Besides, “domestic” [read: farm] animals were not produced by nature. We created them. If people decided not to pay for them, these herds and flocks would slowly dwindle (not over-run Chicago—even though its probably what Chicago deserves).
Respectfully submitted~
thrilled to see this article
I was thrilled to see this article. Some of my friends and I talk about how this local-tarianism and organic momentum is bathed in, at the least, smugness, and at the extreme, in post-colonial ideology. We are all progressives, but extremely disturbed by the ideology connected to these so called liberal movements. We see these movements as a response to globalization from "liberals" in the West/Global North. After promoting global capital and food production isn't is convenient that western/global north liberals are pushing for these protectionist and elite policies?! Also, organic/local ag lovers should check out an article in Gourmet magazine about involuntary servitude in winter tomato picking. There is a great deal of good for small US farmers in these movements, but also much about which to be concerned and question.
Misconceptions about all those smug elitist liberals
In an environment where the proper left is so marginalized as to be nonexistant in the mainstream press (excepting wildly inaccurate character assassination), I can totally understand your confusion on these issues.
A few points--
The permaculture, local organic food movement is inherently anti-globalization, as are all proper 'liberals'. The problem with globalization is not in the idea of using free trade to generate economic development, but in eliminating the protections for workers and the environment in a directed attack on labor with the goal of redistributing the wealth of the entire world into the hands of the richest 1%. In other words, globalization as it has been practiced is a corrupt practice of the power elite. It is quite literally fascism, made possible only through the overwhelming corruption of the popular media. There is a vast amount of academically rigorous, well-researched information available on this subject, which I highly recommend you dig into.
So while globalization advocates may have a reputation for being 'liberals', the truth is that the policy makers who put into place these destructive policies (Clinton, etc) are agents of the corporate machine, and not liberals at all. There is no hypocrisy on the part of liberals seeking sustainable, local agriculture, only on the part of politicians who claim to seek economic opportunity for everyone while promoting policies that directly encourage abusive labor practices and environmental destruction, and on the part of businesses who profit by exploitation while claiming that they are organic and therefore morally sound. Nor is it elitist to want food to be produced in a way that is consistent with basic human dignity and ecological conservation. Elitism suggests exclusivity, which can hardly be attributed to a movement that aspires to global application. It suggests a position of power or at least privilege, when the majority of its adherents are in fact no better off than anyone else economically, and its most vocal opponents are the forces of industry, a proper ruling elite with no sense of obligation to its fellow man, one that lies to itself and to the world in the interest of continuing that which cannot be continued without ending life on earth. If liberals seem smug to you, I suggest that you are simply misinterpreting the confidence that comes with being objectively right, that comes with being well informed and committed to making the world a better place. You say that you are progressives. As progressives, perhaps you could try to better educate yourselves on these topics. I think you will rapidly find common ground with the liberals you malign here today, and you will find a community that is far more welcoming than you would have previously imagined. We're waiting for your help.
Best of luck to you.
@John GMO's weren't needed
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@John
GMO's weren't needed before and aren't needed now. They are a good product to sell to lazy farmers who couldn't care less about the quality of their GMO crops that go unsupervised to mostly feed low quality cattle or make frying oil anyway. It presents a lot of benefits to irresponsible farmers- because they are the ones who buy the seeds and the herbicides, you know - and zero advantages to the consumer who actually has to eat the stuff (unknowingly).
Just label the foods that have GMO's (to allow choice) and let's be done with this nonsense already.
It just gives Biotechnology a bad name...
@Trollstein:
No animals is radical, as is eating them daily (which is a lot worse-yes) like most people do- a balance is possible where animals integrate sustainable farming practices and are eaten on occasion, as is required by a complete diet. Like you say, this can never be mandatory but should come naturally as an healthy and conscious choice to most people. I hate impositions by the nanny state almost as much as I hate stupidity.
@mjf32 in DC
Good food isn't "Liberal" or "Conservative". You might think there is such a thing as a marxist broccoli where most people just see produce and for that I praise your rich imagination.
This isn't about politics- it's about eating well and in balance with nature, you know, minimum common sense, not hippie stuff- naturally, you can always have your "freedom fries".
Both our choices regarding our diets should not be judged and determined by labels such as smug or ignorant but instead by viewed as something natural in a Democracy, a right of choice that I hope does not upset you or your unsmug friends further.
Ps. You seem to imply industrial agriculture only employs fair labour and doesn't benefit at all from government subsidies, since reality contradicts you on both points perhaps you can explain yourself better. The reality is organic, or not, there are jerks in business everywhere and the important thing is not to oversimplify things.
Cheers!
Building community
My oldest son teaches Environmental Ecology at Eckerd College in St. Pete, FL. His experience growing up on our organic farm has inspired him to launch a pilot project in an area elementary school that uses space within the schoolyard to grow food on raised beds. Students rotate visiting the production area and become acquainted with the biology of food production from seed to harvest. At the end of the school year the community-at-large will join to share the success (and presumed failures) of the project.
The impact on the school community has been immediate. If this project succeeds other elementary schools may be invited to join. You may visit the project site at http://theedibleschoolyard.blogspot.com/
The article here has promoted some good posts. It is possible the solutions to food production may be locally decided based on the myriad factors communities face. I would think that informed participation by young minds would make for informed decisions when it is their turn to solve a community problem: what's for lunch? Resources, energy, outreach, sharing, aspiring and achieving have a fresh face in community organized projects. Find one near you and support it.
PS>
PS: (to everyone)
A variety of pro-veggie and similar groups have, throughout the years estimated what a McDonald’s hamburger would cost if all the governmental (corporate) welfare were removed from the equation. This estimate varies but the more conservative estimates suggest that it would more then double the cost. These subsidies are in a variety of types, mainly free grazing and water, but also involve some nestled subsidies, such as vinyl products being tarried at higher percentages then leather, thereby making leather production artificially more profitable. A very good first step would be to remove these corporate subsidies. As it now stands, we taxpayers are paying for this political power base twice. Once through the corporate welfare and a second time through the shared cost of the health consequences of the cheep flesh.
But to really understand what is going on here, one needs to totally quit eating animal protein and fats for two weeks. About 1-week in, it becomes clear that one is withdrawing from a toxic addiction, not unlike nicotine or cocaine. It is not merely a matter of changing one’s customs. How these customs started is a long story going back to the fact that in pre-history, calories were hard to come by. But even if the reader is a proud carnivore, which I once was, a two week test run is not unreasonable to suggest, just for fuss-sake. After the two weeks, if you are still proud, then I for one would have significantly more respect for you. Without the trial, what we are mainly dealing with is people who are defending (rationalizing) their addiction, while vigorously denying that it is even an addiction.
Respectfully submitted~
I vote for seaweed!
Just an aside: I was recentlly on a Scottish farm, near the seashore. The farmer had a storage building full of petro fertilizer, while the beach nearby was covered with tons of rotting seaweed. I was sad.
I suppose there is the question of carbon footprint of trucking seaweed to interior states. Then again, there is no excuse for California farmers not to jump on this. That would be huge, since we feed a goodly chunk of the US all by ourselves.
The food production problem is related to that of energy production--the solution lies in regionally-appropriate best practices. The article is useful in opening up discussion, but I agree with many of the posters about its serious omissions, particularly for not mentioning Cuba's organic farming success.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a farmer, although my potted thyme and parsley plants have been doing well.
