Local and organic is a romantic myth
aeon.co
aeon.co
Are our yields as high as what we might get if robotic pickers and chemical fertilizers were used? No, but nobody is dying or being abused or getting cancer to make sure that a disgusting, mealy, colorless tomato can be on your cheeseburger.
If so, you have completely negated all energy savings.
That said, it's a culture of food production that's really where the efficiency lies. That's people saving and trading seeds, helping each other farm and harvest, and bottling and canning for winter.
That's not only tremendously efficient if it's done locally, it's also fun.
But I believe the parent comment was discussing the cost in fuel emissions for local farmers producing for ~50 families in his area vs. a mega-farm outputting tons of food for cities across state lines.
And, on top of all that, local food sources are extremely valuable to a large scale sustainable food system. They're a buffer, and a cultural benefit, as agrarian pursuit is a truly healthy way for society to form its social engagement - it's called deep ecology and it's a human need to be engaged and invested with the cycles of life. It's much better than sequestering behind walls in front of TV's as we do now. So, true that it can't provide all our food, but it can provide a damn good buffer, and a lot more value aside from just calories. Don't buy the myth that farm life is slavery - that's an invention of the last century. Generally farm life, when it is done right, is extremely fulfilling. They even had a word for it: bucolic!
The science is clear, and people in the field don't even question it: high-intensity farming (and living) are the true 'green' way of organizing our society. Low-density, 'farmer's market supported', everything-local is a luxury product, affordable for an elite only, and the popular conception just needs to catch up to that reality.
There's nothing at all wrong with that! Just don't then make the leap to claim that this is a model for feeding the world.
Think carefully before you decide what is cheaper.
You're also assuming that local, small-scale farming has no impact. In fact to produce the same amount of calories requires vastly more land and more energy and the total impact is larger. Organic farmers also use pesticides and fertilizers; they just use different ones. It's not at all clear they result in less environmental damage. Is spraying a vast amount of nicitinoids over a larger area better than a smaller amount of organophosphates? Not at all clear.
My produce doesn't beat Walmart prices but then, we don't have the luxury of govt subsidies, scale, and undocumented underpaid labor. Once you start paying people what they deserve, and charging people what it actually costs, the prices are more truthful.
This type of food only seems like a luxury product because the scales are tipped so unfairly towards cheap/bad food.
Maybe ... but there's a big difference between a store bought tomato that was stored in a fridge for months and a fresh tomato that comes out of the garden of my parents.
One is like eating cardboard with a strange texture, the other is actually an enjoyable experience even for someone that is not big on vegetables (OK fruits if you musts insist).
"(T)aste is more dependent on the variety of tomato than on the way it is grown."
The grocery store tomato is not the same varietal as the heirloom tomato grown in small scale gardens.
You're saying exactly the same that the article. It is not the way that it is grown, it tastes differently because they are picked before maturity. Take an organic tomato before it completely maturates and you will have the same insipid tomato.
There, I'll visit with the farmers I know by name and buy produce that was grown on farms a half-an-hour away.
The tomatoes I'll pick up will be one of may varieties available and so ripe that I'll need to eat them in the next couple days. That's OK because I can get more at the Saturday market. They'll also taste amazing and better than what I can get at the grocery store at any time. They'll also be very close to the same price.
I'm extremely thankful that I live in a place where this is possible and fully intend to continue doing so for multiple reasons - eating tastier food, supporting the local economy, experiencing exotic varieties, and participating in my local community.
But it's important to recognize that this isn't an environmentally friendly or especially sustainable pattern of consumption. Indeed these modes of production are less efficient and likely to be more damaging to the environment.
Local and/or organic is a luxury consumption option. Much like buying a choice cut of meat or premium food brands. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that it's also more "green."
Truly organic local food has been produced sustainably for millennia, so to call that a luxury while wallowing in cheap oil subsidized corn food is totally backwards.
You might also say: access to clean air and unpolluted drinking water is a luxury which is not particularly environmentally friendly or sustainable. Keep in mind when you are breathing and drinking clean air and water, that it's gonna be that way forever, and you're gonna be drinking mud and breathing soot in the long term because you're living in a "green" fantasy.
That'd be kinda setting the status quo for everyone based on your own low standards I think.
A solution for the environment cannot involve starving the world, or needing to allocate even more huge swaths of it for agriculture.
sorry, that's the claim that is not substantiated by evidence and it isn't close to being accurate. Conventional farming is a toxic mess, and it's heavily subsidized by unsustainable resources and practices at every level. It may be the case that the cost of doing farming right is high (and that is not necessarily meeting the "organic" standards which are themselves heavily biased by conventional interests, but by farming using truly organic methods) but that's because it tends to include costs to the planet, or not include cost savings that are causing extinction level changes to the planetary chemistry. There are people who will tell you that sustaining our population is not possible and that we are headed for an extinction event, however other people say that it is possible to live within our means, if we start factoring in the real cost of things like conventional farming, and therefore change our practice.
And technology is definitely a factor in that transition, so if you buy the phony trolling argument going on here that greenhouses, and automation is incompatible with sustainable, organic, local farming practice, then you are being sold a bill o' goods!
Just go to google scholar and start reading the literature on this topic for the last 10 years. It's not even a debate any more.
We should stop focusing on the plants and focus more on the soil. Better soil = better water retention = less work with irrigation = healthy plants = healthy planet.
> The belief that only small-scale, non-mechanised agriculture without the use of chemicals respects biodiversity, and that tradition is key to the future, is illusory. In reality, small-scale unfertilised farming of annual crops or unregulated grazing in the tropics are major causes of destruction of soils and forests.
The only problem here is the "annual crops or unregulated grazing" because on a diverse agroforestry the trend is the opposite, the soil gets better and better as years goes on. More organic matter falling on the soil = better soil, as long as you don't remove the organic matter you're good to go! The main problem lives here, a lot of people clean the grass and burn it, the soil should never be uncovered, you can cut the grass no problem but leave it there to compost and improve your soil, just like happens in a forest.
> Chemical use is still, for the most part, equated with environmental destruction. This is a false image, one that leads people to turn away from science and technology. We cannot go back to the ill-designed agricultural systems of past centuries with their famines and harvest failures.
Sure, this so called "science and technology" is what made the land "often polluted, and unsuitable for horticulture" in the first place.
Grow food forests, build forest soil! The forest never needs any chemical added by humans, it doesn't have pest problems, why? It's diverse. Diversification guarantees your surviving, when you have only one source of food (or money, or anything) and it dries out you starve, but if you have multiple sources you can not only survive but have more colorful plate too.
Sure it's more laboring to do forest, but we can change our machines to work with forests instead of mono-cultures, that's the way to go, the more mature a forest gets the less human intervention it needs. Here in Brasil I'm seeing a few people starting to develop machines to work with agroforestry, that's the future of food IMHO: forests!
Well, maybe I'm biased, since I found out permaculture and agroforestry I'm in love, couldn't be happier :)
Of course not. It's perfectly fine to desire luxury goods like local or heirloom varieties when you buy your food. But you are trying to propose a model for feeding the world, and using this approach the world would starve.
The point of local food production is it is resilient. If you add local composting, greenhouses, local gardens, community gardens, local farms etc, to sustainable practice in industrial ag, then you have a model that can feed everyone with launching us off a cliff when for example the cost of oil begins to rise as supply falls or war hits in some region or other.
Edit: a good view on the agroforests they're doing here https://vimeo.com/136423275 it is subtitled, this one is a good example of how a agroforest can recover destructed lands.
The "there's still potential for spoils in transport" argument is laughable, insignificant, and I imagine less than that occurring in transport to a mass-packing facility!
But since I can only get them in season, and rarely then, I suspect that there is something to the "local, organic" myth after all.
How about the good quality tomatoes grown 1000 miles away, that could be economically shipped to you in a way that is less destructive to the environment than the first option, still taste as good and be cheaper? Not an option, because they don't conform to your arbitrarily chosen standard of being "local".
You are no better than the luddites.
There is nothing about mass production that lowers the quality. What lowers quality is the price point and the demand for the cheapest possible product. Shift it to some better balance between quality and price, and mass production would kill your cute little hobbyist farms in every single benchmark, including sustainability.
At the moment the "ecological"/"locally grown" meme is blocking this development.
That is a mechanical problem. It can and probably has been solved, except it's likely a bit more expensive than just chucking them into a box. Again, the price point.
Given that other people are indicating that THEIR Whole Foods has heirloom tomatoes year round and mine does not, and we're presumably all in the US (if we can go to Whole Foods) then that means I'm right! If Whole Foods could economically ship them to every store in the country, they'd do so! That means that there are some things which simply aren't economical to do at any scale other than local.
I don't have a local fetish where "local" == "better" for everything and in fact, you'll notice that I'm complaining about the lack of heirloom tomatoes, rather than bragging about it.
> You are no better than the luddites.
Way to jump to some conclusions and start in on the ad hominem! Congrats!
> Shift it to some better balance between quality and price, and mass production would kill your cute little hobbyist farms in every single benchmark, including sustainability.
Again, way to go on the attack for what reason exactly? What did stupid little hobby farms ever do to you? Why are you so hostile to the idea that a "luddite" could have a "small business" that they "own" alongside the industrial agriculture that you so desire? They're farming on a scale that'll never put major agribusiness in a bind so what does it matter?
The "local" fanatics might be annoying, but I'll grant them that at least they have a real beef with agribusiness buying up small farms and growing vast monocultures. That's a documented phenomena.
But what threat do small farmers pose for Monsanto? None, as far as I can tell. There's a revolving door between Monsanto and government, no such revolving door exists between any small farms and government.
I'm not saying that local is an unqualified good either, it's clearly qualified. There are some things that local is better at full stop.
Sunday we got rutabagas about 5x the size of the supermarket versions for 1/2 the price. Bushel of broccoli for $10. Bushel of spaghetti squash for $20. (75% savings vs retail)
So cheaper and it almost always of higher quality.
Technology which improves transportation aid local food production even more.
You are of course welcome to pay extra for some sort of weird pleasure of having things made very close to where you live, but I think the taxation systems should punish you for the extra strain that makes you put onto the environment.
but i definitely take issue with the "weird pleasure" comment, as there is nothing weird about the pleasure of farming in the city and growing your own food. It's about one of the most engaging cultural practices in existence, and it's as old as people. But it takes learning and practice, and awareness of that value, which is clearly missing in modern culture which views farming as some sort of weird thing. A weird peasure indeed!
Nonsense. This is an argument for expanding access and cleaning up after ourselves - land that is too polluted to grow in is too polluted to live on.
> So does the industrial washing of packed and cut vegetables, which also saves water, compared with household‑level processing.
Also bullshit. People spend more water cleaning vegetables that have already been cleaned from industrial sources than from their yard. Growing vegetables close to home is a resource saver across the board, especially if it were smartly integrated with urban composting projects.
>While ‘handpicked’ sounds attractive to the urban consumer or occasional gardener, this type of manual labour is backbreaking if done all day long.
It is attractive to the urban consumer because if you are picking for yourself and family, the work isn't backbreaking and all day long. I fully believe in automated, roboticized food production as a replacement of slave labor, however it seems fairly sensible to me that, as labor becomes less of an imperative of class, that the quality of a person's labor will become more refined holistic and less machine-like, ie: farming and gardening for exercise instead of going to the gym.
> To top it all, the yield from organic farming is low.
Bullshit!! I don't have numbers handy, but I've been on farm tours, (granted organic is a misleading label these days) and the net yield from farms that depend on renewable, organic resources is higher than industrialized factory farmed produce, and the quality is higher. Only in the narrow calculus of unit per price is the yield higher, but we already know the dirty secret there: factory farmed, mass produced food is subsidized by oil and unsustainable resources, where the true cost is buried in diminishing returns over generational time spans.
> ketchup haha! the great ketchup argument. Now we know this was ghost written by Ronald Raygunz ghost!
> Double-blind tasting panels have been unable to pick out the greenhouse tomatoes as lacking in flavour, or tomatoes grown without fertiliser as more tasteful.
Manure. Who does the testing? I can't think of an easier study to game. Plus "tomatoes grown without fertiliser" is a tell: not "fertilizer" as organic compost made from cow manure is "fertilizer", but inorganic fertilizer made from petroleum? - yeah, give me the manure tomatoes please.
And here's the last straw in this troll article:
>In complete contrast to the mantra of organic farming, modern greenhouses are now in the vanguard of sustainability.
Because organic farmers have used greenhouses for decades and beyond, and there's nothing incompatible with the organic, sustainable, small-scale, local movements and the greenhouse. So this article can't maintain a consistent argument with respect to its own premise. No one is arguing that sustainability in farming shouldn't utilize the best tech possible, but attacking the best progressive pillars of the movement which are small scale, individual efforts on shoddy grounds to promote the benevolent promise of mass scale industrial agriculture - it's not good work.
I will say that to the extend that these kinds of articles are meant to raise hackles and cause discussion among hipster urban farm types, then well done!
> Bullshit!! I don't have numbers handy, but I've been on farm tours, (granted organic is a misleading label these days) and the net yield from farms that depend on renewable, organic resources is higher than industrialized factory farmed produce, and the quality is higher. Only in the narrow calculus of unit per price is the yield higher, but we already know the dirty secret there: factory farmed, mass produced food is subsidized by oil and unsustainable resources, where the true cost is buried in diminishing returns over generational time spans.
Note that you have to include the environmental footprint of the inefficient humans that manage "organic" farms and compare that to more automated variants.