61–70 of 260 posts
> global soil deterioration I learned something new and important today. For some reason, I thought this was a solved problem since Haber–Bosch process was invented. Apparently it isn't so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem (here in France) is that the number of farmers is going down hard (with suicides every day). They are currently crushed by regulations, labor costs, undercuts by products from other countries with different labor costs and regulations and the supermarkets that make big margin on their back. So your solution is good, but it is not currently applicable here in France.
> but it is not currently applicable here in France. You point out a serious policy problem. Couldn't we apply that solution if we changed that policy?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason why GMO is bad is probably not because of the "Modified" part. It's because they're optimised to withstand heavy pesticide use. Pesticides are bad. Also, that freedom thing: GMO are generally sterile, so you have to buy seeds every year from Monsanto. Great business model for Monsanto, not so much for the farmer.
"It's because they're optimised to withstand heavy pesticide use" Actually, GMOs need less pesticides than non GMO crop. Some of them produce their own pesticide (BT corn and BT cotton). "Pesticides are bad." Thats kind of the point, they are bad to pests that try to eat the crop "GMO are generally sterile" You are confusing GMO with hybrids and no they are not sterile, the just lose vigour after a few generations, s…
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…
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…
Organic isn't the answer, it's trying to address some legitimate concerns, but it's a movement full of scientific woo-woo that's been legislated. For instance, organic farming thinks GMO's are bad, but is just fine with irradiating large fields full of plants to accomplish random mutations through radiation breeding. This article is one example of this, the author decries traditional corn fields, and as a counterexam…
But the question remains: how can we do sustainable farming, without polluting the soil and the water and without poisoning humans?
If we can't find a way to make that work, then we are all heading towards an apocalypse, because what we are doing currently isn't sustainable.
And no, GMOs are not an answer because efficiency is not our current problem. Pesticides are only needed because of mono-cultures, a problem that is only relevant in the context of current industrial farming practices. Even more aggravating is that we live in the information age, we can now build the proper tools to do industrial-scale farming without making use of mono-cultures or pesticides. We can have robots to do all the hard work, we can use AI for rotating crops in order to keep the soil healthy, etc. And GMOs would not help much, because you're not addressing the problem of raising mono-cultures and for example it will not lead to much healthier soils and would do nothing to help the bees.
Sadly, even though mother nature is proving how extremely dumb and primitive we are, we are still not learning ;-)
Organic isn't the answer, it's trying to address some legitimate concerns, but it's a movement full of scientific woo-woo that's been legislated. For instance, organic farming thinks GMO's are bad, but is just fine with irradiating large fields full of plants to accomplish random mutations through radiation breeding. This article is one example of this, the author decries traditional corn fields, and as a counterexam…
For mass producing food, GMOs can be good. They increase yield. Then again, at the same time, look at all the food we throw away in the western world. Do we actually need to increase crop yield in the developed world? You may call it a luxury product, but I will personally pick true organic food any day of the week. Pesticides are bad and unhealthy. Organic food is even already somewhat being exposed to pesticides th…
This is equivalent to asking if we actually need for food to be cheap / cheaper. I'd say "yes". Unfortunately, food waste is simply a side effect of it being easily and cheaply available. You can't eliminate food waste - you can't create a perfectly efficient system in a real world - but if you want a shot at reducing it, ban catering companies.
(More generally, if you want people to stop doing stupid things with product X, the market solution would be to increase the price of product X to such a level that almost no one would dare waste it; in case of necessities like food or water, I'd really prefer the regulatory solution of taxing/fining the stupid thing itself.)
> You may call it a luxury product, but I will personally pick true organic food any day of the week. Pesticides are bad and unhealthy. Organic food is even already somewhat being exposed to pesticides through historical pollution. I only have one life.
For the very same reason I'll pick industrial, preferably GMO food, any day of the week. As you wrote, pesticides are bad and unhealthy. They're also - from what I hear - happily used by organic farming industry as a replacement for the 'bad', 'unnatural' methods of conventional agriculture. So this way, organic food gets exposed to poisons more.
> Just look at the whole Monsanto / glyphosate / roundup discussion.
Oh yeah, I remember it turning out to be mostly harmless and a much better alternative to what your typical organic farm would use. Saying "it's bad" is easy, but what's often missing is the "compared to what?" part.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to assume organic food is much more expensive to produce than chemical food. You'll need to justify that assumption, especially in the face of hidden costs: scorched soils (that require chemicals to grow anything ), light but pervasive food poisoning (pesticides), growing resistances to our pesticides and antibiotics, heavy dependence on fossil fuels, as well as quite a bit of oil for chemicals. As a not so…
Please don't use the word "chemical" like it is something unnatural or harmful. Water is a chemical. The active ingredients of natural fertilizer are chemicals.
Organic isn't the answer, it's trying to address some legitimate concerns, but it's a movement full of scientific woo-woo that's been legislated. For instance, organic farming thinks GMO's are bad, but is just fine with irradiating large fields full of plants to accomplish random mutations through radiation breeding. This article is one example of this, the author decries traditional corn fields, and as a counterexam…
> For instance, organic farming thinks GMO's are bad
No, I think modern GMOs are going in the wrong direction. Modern wheat varieties have shrunk from being ~1.2 meters to not very high, through the use of selection, as has herbicide/pesticide tolerance. GMOs just make it faster.
All of this means that you don't have to look after the soil. Which is great, but then you have to irrigate it. but then that become expensive. Then you have to fertilise it, and that become increasingly expensive.
> some hilly permaculture farm in Austria
I can't see a combine getting up there, can you?
> impoverishing a large part of the population by doing manual labor on farms.
Thats what subsistence farming does. They can't afford mechanisation, so have to manually plough and weed.
Ofcourse weeding is greatly simplified if you grow your seeds in rows. We've known that since jethro tull's days.
GMOs are basically a sticky plaster. Yes, they can be more drought resistant, but why are there droughts? perhaps, just perhaps removing the spongy organic layer of soil that trapped the water might be the answer. increasing drainage so that floods dont happen, might also be a cause.
Farming is fucking complex, I'd suggest you go and work on a permaculture and "modern" farm, to see just what's required.
Now the question is:
* should we learn how to do this now, at a comfortable pace while we still have oil-based food as a backup, where wealthy individuals can opt to support this essential research by buying organic food,
* or should we wait until the oil's all but gone and there's a Malthusian event looming?
To me the choice is easy. At worst I'm paying more than "needed" to eat, at best we're able to phase out another reliance on oil in an orderly manner.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A single point of failure is an advantage?
Yes? As a king, what would you prefer - to defend against one big kingdom that wants all of your land, or to defend against three big kingdoms that each want a third of your land? When number of points of failure trade off against your attack surface, you can't just say "more PoFs is better".
If we were to use that analogy, a more accurate metric would be either having 1 large centralized kingdom or 100 small, autonomous, independent kingdoms that each have fundamentally different weaknesses. If one fails, you still have 99.
But even that fails to understand the dynamic of biological systems. There's mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationships between crops and many creatures (bees, worms, etc).
Presenting it as always in conflict is inaccurate.
The fundamentally different approach is to not look at pest solutions through a genocidal chemical warfare lens but instead to figure out how to maintain a sustainable relationship and have all of nature working for you instead of setting most of it as against you.