Hacker News Reader

Comment by ndespres | Hacker News Reader

As a farmer I'm biased, but there's a lot to be said for eating fresh, in-season foods produced by people in your community. The human and environmental costs of making sure tomatoes can reach you from 1000 miles away is sickening. We run a 50-member CSA. Produce is picked fresh weekly or bi-weekly from the garden and available for pickup by 50 local families.

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.

View on HN

The environmental cost tends to be lower with the 1000 mile food. Transportation efficiencies of freight trains and tractor trailers dwarf those of the pickups and small container trucks you see with local produce. The overall emissions per pound of produce transported end up lower with the distant food.

Then there are locational issues. For example, it takes more (human-generated) energy to grow tomatoes in NZ than it takes to grow and can tomatoes in Italy then transport them to NZ. It sounds crazy, until you remember that tomatoes in Italy grow on hills and tomatoes in NZ require greenhouses and attendant infrastructure.

That's one metric. How about all the others?

Which ones?

Heated greenhouses so that e.g. tomatoes can be grown out of season.

uh, what's the cost in fuel emissions when I get a veg from my front yard grown in mulch generated from my own tree?

Depends. Did you even once drive to the nursery or hardware store to pick up seeds, pots or fertilizer to grow it?

If so, you have completely negated all energy savings.

not quite, since that one trip produced many pounds of fresh healthy food over many weeks, whereas a comparable amount of fresh produce from the grocery store takes many trips.

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.

How many tomatoes, or other vegetables, do you grow there? What about the environmental cost of living in a place that allows you to have a garden big enough to grow vegetables at all? You are using more fuel to get to and from your place; you waste more energy heating/cooling it, you require subsidies to get power, water and sewage infrastructure to your house (subsidized by the commons, btw). How much kettle or poultry do you grow? How do you contain their pollution? What about scaling - how does your proposed lifestyle scale?

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.

Probably negligible even if you have a higher-than-average methane output. :p

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.

yeah, well I think the mega-farm outputting tons of food for cities across state lines has it's place, however I think, and a lot of research as well as the direction of industry backs me up, that the conventional farming techniques on mega-farms need an upgrade. That is, fewer toxic chemicals, more organic practices, less monocropping, more automation, more high technology, more holistic, integrated, organic solutions to pests, etc.

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!

This is a perfectly valid decision! But you recognize that your local, fresh, in-season food is more expensive to produce and more expensive to consume, but quite possibly with higher quality. This is a luxury consumer good.

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.

I don't know whether small, local, organic farms are a model for feeding the planet but the premise of the article is flawed in the opposite direction.

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.

Do the prices of industrial farm produce include the cost of cleaning up industrial farm pollution such as nitrate fertilizers, organophosphate biocide, and airborne products of fossil fuel combustion? What about the inefficiency caused by the entire massive pyramid of the attendant industries: transportation, chemical manufacture, distribution, marketing? And the cherry on top: the health care burden due to epidemic diabetes and obesity?

Think carefully before you decide what is cheaper.

You're presenting a false dichotomy. It's entirely possible to believe that large-scale farming should be made more sustainable without believing that local, small-scale farming is an improvement.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com