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Yes, organic farming will kill us all

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Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#41

Post by dagw »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #28
dagw wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's healthier (no poisonous pesticide in my apple!) That is simply not true. Organic farming uses pesticides just as conventional farming, and I'm not aware of any studies that find that organic pesticides are consistently better for your health than non-organic. Rotanone for example is popular with many organic farmers, and has been linked to causing Parkinson's disease. PS: This is not an argument against organic…

Depends on how we define "organic". If it can include pesticides, that's a bit depressing. There's a way to avoid pesticides altogether: grow local apples that thrive in the local environment. Some will get eaten by worms, some will rot… Select them out. You don't always need those pesticides.

I'm not aware of any definition of organic farming that excludes the use of pesticides. There is also Biodynamic farming, which does avoids pesticides and artificial fertilizer.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#42

Post by manmal »

avar wrote: post #20
kuschku wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there is a huge unspoken problem yet. In many areas of northern Germany, even with the extremely strict limits on fertilizer and pesticides that Germany has, the drinking water, rivers and oceans are getting so massively polluted that we’re seeing massive algae blooms and drinking water slowly becoming undrinkable. It’s a massive problem, and there’s no way to solve these without massively reducing fertilizer and…

Start by picking GMOs instead of the woo-woo that is organic farming. See e.g. a German-funded meta-analysis[1] that found that: "[...] the adoption of herbicide-tolerant (HT) soybean, maize, and cotton, and insect-resistant (IR) maize and cotton has resulted in a 22% increase in average yields, a 37% overall decrease in pesticide use, and a 68% increase in farmer profits.". 1. http://www.theskepticsguide.org/gm-impa…

It is a meta study, but in this field I would take a hard look at the selected studies before I trust those results (I did not take a hard look, so I can't say). A 37% decrease of something that ruins drinking water is surely better than nothing, but only an incremental improvement. It can easily be offset by agriculture growth within the next decades.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#43

Post by throwaway1892 »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #5

The thing with conventional farming is that a lot of the costs (in terms of environmental damage which needs to be repaired) are currently externalized, i.e. payed for by the society, which indeed makes industrial farming more cost-effective than organic farming, at least for the farmer (though in many countries you can charge a good premium for organic food, which will often outweigh your additional cost). The same…

> Farming lobby in Europe

For my perspective in France, here the farming lobby is inexistant/inefficient, since farmers had to big pretty big actions all over France just to raise the price of milk. So I think it's not the farming lobby, but the fertilizers and pesticides lobby.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#44

Post by [deleted] »

avar wrote: post #20
kuschku wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there is a huge unspoken problem yet. In many areas of northern Germany, even with the extremely strict limits on fertilizer and pesticides that Germany has, the drinking water, rivers and oceans are getting so massively polluted that we’re seeing massive algae blooms and drinking water slowly becoming undrinkable. It’s a massive problem, and there’s no way to solve these without massively reducing fertilizer and…

Start by picking GMOs instead of the woo-woo that is organic farming. See e.g. a German-funded meta-analysis[1] that found that: "[...] the adoption of herbicide-tolerant (HT) soybean, maize, and cotton, and insect-resistant (IR) maize and cotton has resulted in a 22% increase in average yields, a 37% overall decrease in pesticide use, and a 68% increase in farmer profits.". 1. http://www.theskepticsguide.org/gm-impa…

[deleted]

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#45

Post by TeMPOraL »

Swizec wrote: post #25
justin_vanw wrote: post #12

I think this is just an example of 'elitism' on the part of the author. It is ludicrous to think that there is a chance that the 'local/organic' movement will ever capture more than 1%-2% of food production. Most people don't care, and some fraction of people that do care are intelligent enough to decide that additional cost for no increase in quality is not worth it. So this is 'elitism' because people think that a…

And yet in the US there is at least one supermarket chain running entirely on the premise that people do care. Whole Foods. Afaik they're pretty successful too. The worst part is that unlike in Europe, I can actually taste the difference in the US.

> The worst part is that unlike in Europe, I can actually taste the difference in the US.

Yeah, I've heard about the taste thing from friends who visited US. And it makes me wonder - given that a sizeable part of the food we eat[0] is made by the same megacorps (Nestle, Unilever, etc.), where exactly does this difference come from? Is this about local ingredients? Slightly different manufacturing methods? Differences in legal landscape causing those?

--

[0] - the tastier part; doesn't necessarily mean the healthier part

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#46

Post by KaiserPro »

I spent most of my early childhood (0-7) on an "allotment" it measured 90 rods by 10 feet, or some other useless unit of measurement.

Next to the allotment is a standard farmers field. It was earmarked for housing about 10 years ago, and it was abandoned as an crop growing device there and then.

There are two obvious features of this field:

1) its much lower than the allotment 2) it only grows algae.

The soil in the field is now basically sand. Most of the organic matter having dried out and blow away.

There are no worms, because there is nothing for them to eat. Even if there were, they would have been killed by the pesticides long ago.

Basically modern farming techniques sacrifice soil quality for current yield.

Decent soil is needed to retain moisture. Decent soil requires much less in organic fertilisers, which greatly reduces phosphate run-offs.

Now, this is where my thoughts get controversial:

modern farming requires empty soils. Empty, poor quality soil does not retain water. This leads to run off, flooding and droughts. I would also suggest that it contributes directly to global warming, as bare soil retains its heat much better than dense vegetation.

For the water retention, thats easy to prove, for temperatures, much harder

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#47

Post by kuschku »

avar wrote: post #20
kuschku wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there is a huge unspoken problem yet. In many areas of northern Germany, even with the extremely strict limits on fertilizer and pesticides that Germany has, the drinking water, rivers and oceans are getting so massively polluted that we’re seeing massive algae blooms and drinking water slowly becoming undrinkable. It’s a massive problem, and there’s no way to solve these without massively reducing fertilizer and…

Start by picking GMOs instead of the woo-woo that is organic farming. See e.g. a German-funded meta-analysis[1] that found that: "[...] the adoption of herbicide-tolerant (HT) soybean, maize, and cotton, and insect-resistant (IR) maize and cotton has resulted in a 22% increase in average yields, a 37% overall decrease in pesticide use, and a 68% increase in farmer profits.". 1. http://www.theskepticsguide.org/gm-impa…

That’s a nice meta study, but not a single one of those crops is grown in Germany.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#48

Post by TeMPOraL »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #31
SeanDav wrote: post #13

There is a lot of discussion in generalities in this article and precious few hard facts. I would love to see a less chemical approach to farming but articles like this are not going to convince very many people that organic is a viable method of feeding the masses.

It's not a simple issue. A proper argument would require a few hours.

I for one would happily read it. Do you know of any?

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#49

Post by leecarraher »

so what would this rube goldbergian harvester machine look like that could be capable of efficiently farming such a dynamic landscape as a multistory(already sounding like we got some marketing terms in the works here) farm... my guess is about 5'10", over worked and from some economically depressed country. yay organic

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#50

Post by thinkloop »

> we should be TERRIFIED that fewer than 1 in 100 Americans actually knows how to grow enough food to feed a family or more

Am I the only one that found this to be high, and comforting?

I looked up how many software engineers there are in the US, it's also around 1% (3.6m) [1]

About 0.5% of us are lawyers [2]

Double-checking the farmers stat, it seems there are 2.1m farms [3], each must be manned by at least several people that know stuff. This does not count casual horticulturists. I'd guess that at least over 10% of the population would know how to grow food to feed a family.

1. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2483690/it-careers/indi...

2. https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/05/09/the-lawyer-bu...

3. https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Preliminary_...

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