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Yes, organic farming will kill us all

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Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#91

Post by XorNot »

lolive wrote: post #63
7sigma wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

What happens when you eat this BT corn?

The extremely acidic and enzyme rich system in your stomach demolishes the chemical structure, DNA, and proteins into constituant amino acids.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#92

Post by TeMPOraL »

kristopolous wrote: post #70
TeMPOraL wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

That analogy isn't correct. You've made it 1 thing against 1 versus 1 against 3. 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, symb…

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 (genocidal chemical warfare) are also the cheapest / most efficient.

I wonder if this isn't a good field to benefit from computational models though - from tools to design, predict and manage natural feedback loops in agriculture. I don't know, maybe it's already a thing in the industry?

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#93

Post by charlesdm »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #66
charlesdm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? 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 syst…

1. Given I buy a lot of locally sourced stuff, I know for a fact that no pesticides are being used.

Yes, it’s more expensive. No, your industrial GMO food won’t be healthier, because they’ll still be using pesticides. But it will be healthier than the alternative (i.e. having to use a ton of pesticides).

2. I’m not against GMO food, but I am against heavy pesticide usage. If certain crops are modified to be resistant against certain insects, for example, and less pesticides have to be used because of that, that’s good.

An “organic” GMO vegetable (i.e. increased resistants against common diseases etc, no actual pesticide usage) could be an interesting avenue to explore. We just need to get pesticide usage down.

3. Maybe I have my tinfoil hat on here, but I do not believe for a second that Roundup isn’t massively unhealthy. Most of the positive research was funded, directly or indirectly, by Monsanto.

Even the most legitimate scientists can be bought and paid off. Don’t forget that.

In addition, do we really have to prove something is actually bad? In this case, I think there really should be conclusive evidence that something ISN’T bad.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#94

Post by grzm »

geon wrote: post #84
grzm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the point you're trying to make. Likely you understand the distinction your parent intends as well, and this is a commonly understood way to discuss the topic. Do you have a preferred alternative to suggest that conveys the same intent, preferably one that is also widely understood?

Use terms that convey the objection you have to it. Or object to the negative effects they have in the first place.

What specifically do you suggest? If you're being pedantic and snipey, you're not engaging in good faith. If you disagree with the general argument, be honest and say so. If you're looking to have a constructive discussion, help move the conversation forward, which includes showing you understand what they intend to say, even if you disagree or they're not expressing themselves as clearly as you'd prefer. Understandably you can't read their mind, but you can speculate charitably.

If you don't think they're discussing in good faith, you can choose to civilly explain why that's so, or choose not to comment at all if you don't think there's a constructive way forward. For controversial topics, it's even more important to do this as it's that much easier for discussion to devolve into a flamewar.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#95

Post by XorNot »

Applejinx wrote: post #67
geon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cadmium is a chemical (I just worked with some watercolors, that's why it comes to mind). Do you want that in your water table just because 'it's a chemical, like water'? How about lead?

Cadmium is also in tattoo ink and completely harmless because it's not bioavailable.

Your exact example proves the parents point: be specific about what you're talking about because it matters.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#96

Post by roel_v »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #9
grive wrote: post #2

The general gist is interesting in order to captive the intended audience of sceptics, and the clickbait title is effective in that way. Still, though, a clickbait title. Furthermore, the usual consensus I hear is that we will need to change our practices drastically, we cannot let the "conventional" farming on life support indefinitely and we cannot let it destroy our sustenance. Organic farming is however still far…

> Organic farming is however still far from being enough to make us live. What I have seen says otherwise. There's a thing about chemical agriculture: when you first implement it, you get incredible yields. Then the soil starts dying (no more acari, no more fungi, compressed soil…), and the yields slowly go back to roughly the previous levels, only this time you need all the chemicals to sustain it. If you suddenly s…

"With a good (or properly resuscitated) soil, it appears organic agriculture have higher yields per unit of surface than chemical agriculture. However, it requires more labour. It would seem the yield per man-month may actually be lower."

Even leaving aside what 'organic agriculture' means, there is no evidence that yield are higher than conventional farming. Yield could be enough to sustain enough people with the same area we use now for farming, yes; but super-yield claims are unsubstantiated.

But apart from that, what's swept under the rug here is that labour is a major component of food cost; so saying 'sure we need 50 people to harvest what would otherwise be done by one guy but the per-surface unit yield is enough!' is disingenuous. It's not realistic to expect people to go back to harvesting their own food; nor is it realistic to count on huge price rises to pay for 'organic' ag (labour and packaging make up about 60% of the cost of the food on your plate).

And there are no scalable techniques for growing food in mixed ecosystems, except maybe at the very basic silvopasture level. But those aren't the ones that are going to wean us off traditional agriculture.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#97

Post by riprowan »

latch wrote: post #80
bad_user wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current definition of what "organic farming" is has been obviously corrupted by the current farming industry. In the end it's just a label. 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.…

Reducing the consumption of meat seems like a step in the right direction. It's a huge drain on water, land, energy and calories. At the very least, people should be paying for the real cost. Taking it further, instead of subsidizing these industries, I wouldn't mind seeing a beef-tax.

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 roaming free over the prairies as they did for millennia until about 150 years ago. Another is to eliminate the need for antibiotics, which are not required when grazing animals are not confined and fed a corn diet, and when sick animals are much more easily culled.

There is such a thing as sustainable ranching, just as there is such a thing as sustainable farming. The trick is to incentivize the right kind of ranching. Unfortunately, your suggestion would probably produce more unsustainable ranching, as it would lower margins across the board such that only the industrialists could turn a profit.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#98

Post by roel_v »

rini17 wrote: post #85
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…

It's only your preconceptions that are ludicrous. In 1990s agriculture in Russia partially collapsed, so people turned to their small plots of land and "captured the food production". They were lucky they knew how - the communist government-managed centralized distribution was unreliable so the skill was handy. Of course, there's no hard data from this chaotic period, but being from eastern european country myself, i…

Those home food gardening systems aren't sustainable, if you're implying that. They very often use artificial fertilizers (and in wrong dosages ,too - hey if one gram is great, 2 grams must be better, right?) They are often based on tilling and/or small monocultures with maybe a basic crop rotation system, etc. Sure, they have beneficial aspects that traditional farms don't have, but home-scale subsistence farming is just bad in different ways from conventional industrial scale farming.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#99

Post by strken »

thinkloop wrote: post #50

> 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…

Maybe only a fraction of farm workers understand the entire process at their farm, i.e. some drive tractors, some stick milking machines to cow udders, some are itinerant workers following crop harvests, some fly crop dusters, and none of these groups would be able to run the entire farm on their own.

Even so, it seems a strange thing to worry about.

Re: Yes, organic farming will kill us all

#100

Post by richthegeek »

jankotek wrote: post #64
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…

When joining EU, Czech Republic had to raise 5x nitrate limits in drinking water. Mainly for pollution in germany. Now water for toddlers is not safe for some aquarium fish.

Many aquarium fish are delicate little creatures, far more so than pretty much any human.
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