Yes, organic farming will kill us all

Seed would not be the limiting factor. Land would.

I feel fortunate to live on a bit more than one acre of suburban land that would be relatively appropriate for farming. But if you plow up the entire lawn, cut down the trees, and discount the drain field, house, and driveway, and don't purchase feed for livestock, that's just not enough area to feed my family.

And most people in my area don't have an acre. Sure, some local farmers have hundreds or thousands of acres - but there are a lot more people who only have a second-story apartment or a small city lot.

It's a simple problem of economies of scale. If you have a tractor, it's much, much easier to go from 10 acres to 100 acres than it is to go from 0 acres to 1 acre.

So now you give some qualifications to your earlier statement.

Do note that modern pesticides are not in widespread use all over the world (cost). Modern pesticides applied by a well educated professional can have a relatively low impact on the environment. But there are a lot of poorly educated farmers out there (most of them, really), and that doesn't begin to address the abuse of pesticides by lawn care companies and homeowners.

1. If we stop eating so much beef, we really, really don't need to grow so much corn. Cattle feed accounts for an astronomical percentage of the need to grow so much acreage. Dropping the ethanol boondoggle (it is not a real solution to our problems with oil, it is not scalable or efficient) would make a lesser but still significant impact in freeing up existing farm acreage for edible crops.

2. These people tend to compare farms that are making no real attempts at maximizing for profitability against industrial farms that are totally maximized for profitability (in both cases here profitability can be considered a synonym for efficiency.) Making money is of course on the list of priorities for local farms, but it's not their primary goal. Most of the people I know who are running local farms in my area either inherited the farm from their family or left lucrative careers in other areas to become farmers. Money is not the primary driver of their actions as it is with an industrial farm. So of course they don't compete on that level. They are not trying to.

3. I don't buy local because I believe it is "more nutritious". I buy local for a few reasons. First, the food tastes better. Garlic is a great example. Store garlic that often comes from Mexico is very dry and the individual cloves are usually very small. They grow varietals that are maximized for number of cloves. My local garlic has larger bulbs and it is fresher because it hasn't taken a long voyage from Mexico. Because it has fewer individual bulbs, the volume of the head is more usable garlic and less paper. This applies to most produce I get from local sources. Tomatoes are another prime example. Mass produced tomatoes are picked before they are ripe and gassed to give them their color. Local tomatoes are red all the way through and taste way, way better.

4. Animal welfare isn't even mentioned in the article that I saw. But it is a big reason I try to buy my meat and dairy locally. I've seen what happens at industrial farms, and I've visited my local farms. It's night and day. I am comfortable with how the animals are cared for and live their lives at my local farms. I think anyone with a heart has a hard time watching footage of industrial farms and knowing we contribute to that horror.

5. Lastly it presupposes an all or nothing world. This is the biggest piece of bullshit that the "We have to pursue industrial farming at all costs!" folks push. Their argument imagines only a world where we are 100% local organic farms that care nothing for efficiency or only 100% industrial farms that are super efficient (but care nothing for animal welfare and quality of the end produce.) This of course is ridiculous. It's never going to be all or nothing. The future will be some version of what we have now; a mixture.

Referring to pesticides: "Organic standards-setting bodies are responsive to new data on toxicity of natural substances and precautionary measured are applied while alternatives are being sought."

"most natural pesticides have a very small persistence in the environment and are, therefore, unlikely to be leave residues in food. Rotenone, for instance, breaks down when exposed to sunlight and has a short lifespan (a week or less) in the environment."

"Research is being undertaken to find alternatives to copper and, meanwhile, organic standards include restrictions on the quantity of copper salt applied to fields."