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Yes, organic farming will kill us all

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Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#111

Post by SpeakMouthWords »

throwaway1892 wrote: post #43
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.

> For my perspective in France, here the farming lobby is inexistant/inefficient

Tell that to the EU's Common Agricultural Policy. The kickbacks France gets compared to other countries is insane. Your lobbyists have been most effective!

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#112

Post by tomp »

roel_v wrote: post #60
throwaway1892 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's a lot more complicated than that. There isn't one single 'farming lobby'. France, to take your example, has a highly inefficient agricultural system, heavily dependent on CAP subsidies. There has been massive pressure the last two decades to reduce that, but it hasn't happened yet and probably won't for years to come. This is a form of 'lobbying' (those farmers get benefits from those subsidies), even if those f…

> sure you can say that that's because extra-EU farmers don't have to internalize environmental costs to the same degree the EU ones have to, but then it's a matter of setting import restrictions

A great argument against the current version of globalisation. Free trade is good, dumping isn't!

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#113

Post by JulianMorrison »

D_Alex wrote: post #101
JulianMorrison wrote: post #75

You want organic and efficient? How about hermetically sealed "vertical" robot-operated farms in skyscrapers? No pests, so no pesticides.

You would not believe how hard the "no pests" thing is in real life. It only takes a few insect eggs to start an infestation. It is hard enough to do that on a "sack of grain" scale, let alone on industrial farm scale. Only way AFAIK that pest infestation are successfully forestalled in large food storages are through refrigeration or inert or even toxic atmospheres. Both of these will not work if you are actually tr…

Well, the atmosphere only has to be non-toxic to plants, if you are actually using robots to sow, tend, and harvest. CO2/Nitrogen mix perhaps?

Compartmentalization and lack of toing-and-froing by humans would help too.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#114

Post by roel_v »

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.

Look, pesticides are a cost. If there was a way that was as easy as you make it out to be, farmers would already do it, because the market would force them to. This whole discussion is about the fact that it isn't as simple as saying 'just grow local'. People do that already and those apples cost 2-3 times what they cost in the supermarket (apart from a few weeks in september when they are 1/2 of supermarket prices because there's a glut of apples that will otherwise spoil). The question is now: how do we scale this up, so that we can feed everybody this way, including those people who can't afford such price premiums?

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#115

Post by tomp »

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…

> 37% overall decrease in pesticide use

What's "pesticide use"? If I use 1L of super-strong broad-spectrum pesticide instead of 10L of super-weak narrow-spectrum pesticide, is that really an improvement?

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#116

Post by krzyk »

throwaway1892 wrote: post #43
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.

French farmers are the biggest group of farmers that is subsidized by EU. For me it is the source of everything what's wrong with farming in EU.

Because of subsidies they produce crops that are not developed in efficient way (because they will receive subsidy either way).

Because of them e.g. Polish farmers are forced to produce less milk than they have ability to - milk producers are given fines if they create to much milk, which is ridiculous.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#117

Post by bryanlarsen »

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…

The criticisms of conventional farming are valid, but that doesn't mean that organic farming is any better.

I believe that organic farming is much more likely to cause soil degradation and environmental harm than conventional farming for several different reasons:

- organic farming's main tool to combat weeds and regrowth is tillage, which causes immense amounts of damage to the soil directly and allowing the soil to blow away or wash away. Conventional farmers know how damaging tillage is and are increasingly moving away from it as pesticide alternatives become available. It was tillage that turned the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia into the deserts of Iraq.

- Organic farmers still use pesticides and herbicides, but they are limited to those that are certified organic. Organic pesticides and herbicides aren't necessarily any safer for human consumption or for the environment, they're just "organic". For example, some organic farmers literally salt their soil. When the only thing you have in your toolbox is a hammer, that's what you use, even when the situation calls for a scalpel.

- Conventional farmers care far more about the value of their land than organic farmers do. Farmers don't have retirement funds, they've just got land on which they've spent the last 40 years paying off the mortgage. A conventional farmer with healthy soil can sell his land for a lot more than one with unhealthy soil. An farmer with land that's "certified organic" doesn't care, it's that "certified organic" stamp that he's getting paid for.

- Organic herbicides and pesticides are much less efficient than conventional ones. So they have to use much larger quantities. Which means more runoff. For instance, they sometimes spread massive amounts of manure on their fields, cause massive algal blooms in the waterways and destroying them.

- Conventional farmers are constrained by economics. They're selling a commodity, where price == marginal cost. So the only way to make a profit is to have lower costs per unit of output than your competitors. Their major costs are diesel, herbicides & pesticides -- minimizing those is both good for the farmer's pocketbook and the environment. An organic farmer's price is not set at the marginal cost, so it's often better for them to increase inputs to increase yields, even when it's not as efficient.

P.S. I gave 5 arguments. They are not equal. The first one (tillage) is orders of magnitude more significant than the other 4. Tillage destroys the soil, and is far more "unnatural" than any sort of herbicide or pesticide organic or conventional.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#118

Post by angry_octet »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #45
Swizec wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The food in big supermarkets in the US/Canada often used varieties selected for their storage longevity, prettiness, and yield. Then they are often picked early and cold stored. It's miraculous that we can have year round supplies of cheap fresh fruit and vegetables, but we sacrifice taste and variety to get there.

I'd like to think this is the reason Whole Foods is successful - hierloom tomatoes that taste great etc, not did from the woo woo anti-aircraft lobby.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#119

Post by legulere »

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…

> insect-resistant (IR) [...] decrease in pesticide use

So the pesticides do not count if you let the plants produce them themselves?

Also I find it kind of hard to believe that making plants herbicide resistant and spraying them with herbicides reduces the amount of pesticides used.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#120

Post by vanderZwan »

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…

> The real problem is properly accounting for all costs incurred by a given farming technique, which is difficult as the farming lobby seems to be one of the most effective ones in the world (at least judging from a European perspective).

I think this a good moment to side-track a bit into agricultural history. While I'm generally not a fan of Great Man history, Sicco Mansholt seems to be a very interesting focal point in this case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicco_Mansholt

Mansholt, a former farmer himself, and politically so left he would be labelled a communist had he been in the US, was one of the founding fathers of the EU, specifically it's commissioner of agriculture. He created the Common Agricultural Policy in 1962. In 1972, near the end of his political career, he had an affair with Petra Kelly while she was still a member of the Social Democrats. He greatly influenced her line of thinking surrounding sustainability. Kelly left the SPD in 1979 to found the German Green Party, which was the first major green party in Europe.

Here's a documentary about him, but it's only in Dutch without subtitles, sadly, so I'll summarise it below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AniIokCHtk

After WWII, a big worry was creating a stable food supply to feed everyone. One major problem was that farmers were not paid enough to sustain themselves. It was clear this wouldn't change, because the only way to fix it was to raise food prices, which would have all kinds of negative consequences. The solution seemed to be a mix of subsidies, and having less farmers take care of larger areas of land. The idea was that the same amount of money would go to agriculture, but since it would be divided among fewer farmers they would be able to eke out a decent living.

Mansholt was originally a farmer himself, and also had a personal stake in this: after the famines in the war he wanted to prevent this from ever happening again, and he was aware about population growth. And he also did not want to have ten million farmers living in abject poverty - better to have half of them switch professions in that case.

Just some context: his policies suggested that farms should be at least 100 hectares. Back then it was very common for farms to be one, two hectares.

So Mansholt was one of the main architects of this Common European Agricultural Policy within the European Commission (the precursor to the EU). There obviously were lots of protests by farmers, Mansholt was threatened, etc, but in the end he got his policies through. In 1962 the CAP was first implemented[0]. Ever heard of "get big or get out"? That was a phrase used by Earl Butz, US Secretary of Agriculture from 1971 to 1976. A decade later.

Funny enough, Butz did this thing around the same time the Club of Rome came out with "The Limits To Growth", in 1972. Mansholt was one of the early converts, going against his own earlier policies. The huge problems he saw with unexpected surpluses of food (in the Netherlands we even have words like "boterbergen" and "melkplassen" (buttermountains and milklakes) to describe this), grown unsustainably, were probably also a part of this.

He saw the error of his ways and started lobbying for sustainable practices. Which, btw, did not align with the typical organic farming practices this article rails against. To make things even more complicated, he fell in love with a 39 years younger German politician, Petra Kelly[2], who was then a member of the German Social Democrats. They had a two year affair, and in all likelihood they greatly influenced each other's thinking. In 1979 Kelly left the SPD and become one of the founding members of Die Grünen.

I find it very interesting to see how drastically agricultural practices have changed in the last century. While we talk about farming lobbies, it's easy to forget how big of a hand governments themselves had in creating these big farms. The story of Mansholt shows how hard it is to reverse the trend too: even the former chief architect of the policies that stimulated modernisation did not have enough political clout to get people to become more sustainable.

Having said all of that, I really hope the type of organic farming described in this article will take off. We'll need to find a way around the existing power structures though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra_Kelly

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