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Yes, organic farming will kill us all

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Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#141

Post by loup-vaillant »

randomdata wrote: post #123
loup-vaillant wrote: post #38

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.

Farmer here. > It's because they're optimised to withstand heavy pesticide use. Pesticides are bad. The use of roundup on crops predates the roundup ready gene by a couple of decades. What certain GMO traits allows is reducing the pesticides down to pretty much only roundup, instead of the cocktail – including roundup – that ends up on the non-GMO crops. Other GMO traits help eliminate the need for certain pesticides…

> The law dissuades of from replanting patented seeds, if that is what you had in mind?

That works too, though I also thought of F1 hybrids (made so second generation crops are crap), an idea GMO can copy. Here in France, there's a law forbidding to grow any food outside a pre-approved list of crops —most of which seems to be F1 hybrids. Fortunately it doesn't appear to be enforced right now, so some farmers grow old local species anyway.

> Why single out Monsanto?

They're a symbol, often recognised as "most evil". I'm sure others have similar practices, I'm just not aware of them.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#142

Post by loup-vaillant »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #48
loup-vaillant wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I have seen a number of documentaries, but they're all in French. "Solutions locales pour un désordre global" and "Alerte à Babylone" come to mind.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#143

Post by roel_v »

KaiserPro wrote: post #90
roel_v wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Now, this is where my thoughts get controversial:" This is not controversial. It's widely recognized (even by conventional farming bodies) that soil degradation is a major environmental threat. At the EU level, while the Soil Directive proposal was withdrawn a few years ago, much other environmental work and legislation is about mitigation and monitoring of soil degradation / threats. There are different schools of…

oh, I'm not suggesting subsitance farming, that just sucks balls. Have you ever tried to plough furrows with horses? that shits hard. we need to be dumping literal mountains of shit on the fields again. we also need to stop killing the soil ecosystem, so that fungus, worms and all manner of other things can grown and break the soil up

Actually the reason we're in the soil predicament we're in (in Europe, at least) is that we've been dumping literal mountains of shit on the fields for years, leading to massive nitrate pollution. To the point that one of the limiting factors for keeping cows is the amount of land you have (or can rent) to spread the manure they produce over.

But that's just nitpicking of me - I take it that what you meant is that we need less annual crops, more polyculture food growing, less tilling, and other such methods that increase soil organic matter and soil life. The problem is though that all alternatives, right now, are only a little bit less labor intensive than subsistence farming; especially if we add in the extra constraint of 'minimizing food kilometers'. Whereas the high-tech route (vertical hydroponics-style) doesn't need soil at all...

I'm not sure where I'm going with this; all my replies in this thread have been pretty negative I'm afraid. The thing is that we don't have a good way forward; right now there is no 'sustainable agriculture' that is also scalable and cheap enough to feed everybody. If everybody who claimed 'their method' as the answer would start by admitting that, we could at least start from a position of mutual vulnerability, instead of the ideological entrenchment we see now.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#144

Post by byroot »

krzyk wrote: post #116
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.

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 mu…

> 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.

It's the exact same thing in France. It's not uncommon for farmers to dump the milk they overproduced to not get fined.

French farmer aren't any less productive than other european farmers, they simply target another quality for the most part.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#145

Post by riprowan »

latch wrote: post #133
riprowan wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you overgeneralize industrial meat production to all forms of ranching. There are huge areas of the USA that are not amenable to farming but which can be ranched. Raising cattle on these lands does not necessarily consume any water, food, or arable land that would be productively used otherwise. This form of ranching serves many purposes, one of which is to simulate the effect of millions of grazing animals r…

I think you've missed my main point: reduced consumption is an increase in sustainability [1]. And it's not clear to me that grass-fed beef is sustainable [2] (especially not at the current scale of consumption [3]) Farmers are critical, underpaid, and deal with a lot of risk. There must be some insurance. But consumers should pay the real price for their goods at the counter. 1 - https://www.theguardian.com/environm…

I agree with you on most of your points including that grass-fed beef is not sustainable at the current rate of consumption, but that does not mean that it isn't sustainable at a lower rate of consumption / higher price.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#146

Post by TeMPOraL »

kristopolous wrote: post #136
TeMPOraL wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My answer was to your "SPoF is an advantage" comment as a general question. Maybe unnecessarily pedantic of me (I need my morning coffee ;)). In context of sustainable ecosystems, I agree with your detailed explanation. Controlling and maintaining a complex system of feedback loops (that we still don't completely understand) is a very difficult task though, so I'm not surprised that currently the most crude methods (…

Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology is what you're looking for.

Thanks! Will add to my "reading/random" sublist :).

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#147

Post by joakleaf »

... but will unsustainable farming not kill us all by definition too?

I realize sustainable and organic are not the same. I am actually, not sure if organic is sustainable or indeed what is required across the world for a farm to be deemed organic.

However, I have always been under the impression, that conventional (non organic) farming is unsustainable in the long term due to the environmental impact, which we'll have to pay for at a later time.

Are we already seeing some of the impact from both European and US farms (pollution of oceans and e.g. Colorado river drying up)?

To me it seems like we are in trouble either way, if we wish to continue with our current consumption of meat.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#148

Post by bad_user »

latch wrote: post #133
riprowan wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you overgeneralize industrial meat production to all forms of ranching. There are huge areas of the USA that are not amenable to farming but which can be ranched. Raising cattle on these lands does not necessarily consume any water, food, or arable land that would be productively used otherwise. This form of ranching serves many purposes, one of which is to simulate the effect of millions of grazing animals r…

I think you've missed my main point: reduced consumption is an increase in sustainability [1]. And it's not clear to me that grass-fed beef is sustainable [2] (especially not at the current scale of consumption [3]) Farmers are critical, underpaid, and deal with a lot of risk. There must be some insurance. But consumers should pay the real price for their goods at the counter. 1 - https://www.theguardian.com/environm…

On one hand I agree with what you're saying, biggest problem is that the price isn't fair, as it is subsidized, either by the government directly (corn subsidies, etc.) or by the damage to the environment and our health that we keep ignoring.

However you cannot introduce a tax on all produce, when clearly some practices are more sustainable than others. At the current rate of consumption, grass fed cattle might not be enough to satisfy the demand, but if a farm doesn't pollute the environment, then it does not deserve a tax.

In nature there's symbiosis in the food chain, there's symbiosis between predator, cattle and grass, with grass being evolved for grazing, which in turn helps to offset the CO2 emissions of the cattle consuming it, with predators playing an important role in trimming the herd, which would otherwise go out of control. This obviously doesn't have to be a zero-sum game and by the looks of it nature has been way more effective at converting sun's energy into organic matter than we have.

Surely meat is too cheap compared to what it actually costs to produce, but I fear that many people identify meat consumption as this big evil, but without identifying the source of the problem. The problem is with all industrial farming, because we've accelerated farming by burning fossil fuels, turning forests into corn fields and polluting everything in the process. Without cheap fossil fuels or government subsidies, industrial farming practices wouldn't be possible. And it's not sustainable because there is no symbiosis in anything we are doing.

And the other problem is over-population, with capitalism and poverty encouraging continuous growth. You now hear on the news that the population in Europe is aging, which should actually be a great piece of news, except that our current economic climate doesn't cope well with a diminished fertility rate, capitalism relies on constant growth, hence we actually rely on other nations remaining poor and producing imigrants ;-)

And we should be ending the global poverty, which I'm fairly certain that we can, which should flatten that growth curve, but we should also impose a maximum fertility rate of 2 and stop doing commerce with the countries that don't do that. Because we wouldn't need industrial-scale farming, if we wouldn't have 7 billion mouths to feed and Earth is limited.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#149

Post by randomdata »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #141
randomdata wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farmer here. > It's because they're optimised to withstand heavy pesticide use. Pesticides are bad. The use of roundup on crops predates the roundup ready gene by a couple of decades. What certain GMO traits allows is reducing the pesticides down to pretty much only roundup, instead of the cocktail – including roundup – that ends up on the non-GMO crops. Other GMO traits help eliminate the need for certain pesticides…

> The law dissuades of from replanting patented seeds, if that is what you had in mind? That works too, though I also thought of F1 hybrids (made so second generation crops are crap), an idea GMO can copy. Here in France, there's a law forbidding to grow any food outside a pre-approved list of crops —most of which seems to be F1 hybrids. Fortunately it doesn't appear to be enforced right now, so some farmers grow old…

> made so second generation crops are crap

To be clear, they're not specifically made so that second generation crops are crap. That's just the natural process of nature.

If you selected the two most ideal humans to breed, by the time their children have children, it's easy to see that there is no guarantee that the original traits in the parents that were selected for are carried down the line. The best traits are soon lost. It's much the same story here.

> I'm just not aware of them.

That surprises me. Bayer, BASF, DOW? I would have figured these are household names, and in some cases are much larger businesses than Monsanto.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#150

Post by KaiserPro »

roel_v wrote: post #143
KaiserPro wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh, I'm not suggesting subsitance farming, that just sucks balls. Have you ever tried to plough furrows with horses? that shits hard. we need to be dumping literal mountains of shit on the fields again. we also need to stop killing the soil ecosystem, so that fungus, worms and all manner of other things can grown and break the soil up

Actually the reason we're in the soil predicament we're in (in Europe, at least) is that we've been dumping literal mountains of shit on the fields for years, leading to massive nitrate pollution. To the point that one of the limiting factors for keeping cows is the amount of land you have (or can rent) to spread the manure they produce over. But that's just nitpicking of me - I take it that what you meant is that we…

Ahh, slurry. yes, that lovely problem. I should have been more specific, instead of litrally spraying raw shit everywhere, we need to create proper compost/soil products.

The aztecs managed it, I'm sure we can re-do Terra preta at scale

I agree, what we really need is the application of science, and some imagination to try many different things.

There is no one size fits all here.

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