Sri Lanka’s overnight flip to organic farming has led to an economic disaster
theprint.in
theprint.in
In summary, Sri Lanka has been facing an economic crisis and is struggling to pay for imports with rising exchange rates. One of the effects of this has been a push to reduce dependence on foreign imports across many sectors — including fertilizer.
http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2021/07/sri-lanka-manufactur...
So was this economic boom purely internal demand as a result of the borrowing?
Yes, correct. The two consequent previous governments borrowed like crazy to pull "economic development" like a rabbit out of a hat.
Not like you can "just do it and be a bigger economy / sell stuff" but you gotta get some sort of economic output that results in exports or ... something there if you're going to borrow, otherwise the result is inevitable.
You can borrow and spend money to diversify. Lots of successful countries have done it.
I was following it as well, but still got dragged into off-topic.
The root cause was the current Marxist government committing a complete fiscal suicide, and then trying ham-fistedly to ban people from spending their Dollars under every silly pretext.
Sri Lanka is a DEEEPLY DEEEPLY indebted nation after two previous governments, the current opposition's one, and previous incumbent's government maxed out country's credit card to buy votes, and draw fictional economic growth from debt.
P.S. And ironically, the complete economically inane political leadership will now smash Lanka's FX account even more by destroying the few of country's export items.
I don't think this is anything new amidst a global pandemic, in a country that depended on tourism.
Saying that chemical fertilizer ban caused a food shortage isn't any fair or accurate, because the sugar crisis (a can of worms by itself) happened before the fertilizer ban, and the government imposing lockdowns caused the food supply issues. That said, there are many companies increasing their organic fertilizer production, and even smaller scale individual investors who are planning to produce organic fertilizers too.
Many of us see this as a net positive, but there must be a ramp, as opposed to an overnight switch.
Yes, absolutely. The move has to be done gradually to allow farming to adapt. An overnight cutoff would surely cause yields to drop.
What isn't clear to me is how much warning was given for the ban. Was it announced ahead of time?
In the northern parts of the country, where the majority of rice farms are, a considerable percentage of people have kidney diseases that attribute to the use of chemical fertilizer.
There is a surplus of rice production in the country, so I don't think the reduced crop will make a big difference.
However, the state of tea farming is not the same. Price of Sri Lankan tea (Ceylon tea as it's commonly called) at auctions was slowly going down for the past few years, and tea estates expect the government to make an exception for them.
Since this ban was announced, the finance minister was changed to the brother of the current president (another can of worms), who might make necessary changes, exceptions, or probably just delay it to make sure the tea industry isn't disrupted.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210901-sri-lanka-org...
Rajapaksa came to power in 2019 promising subsidised foreign fertiliser but did a U-turn arguing that agro chemicals were poisoning people.
"The result: (...) kerosene oil and cooking gas prices are surging"
Hmm what the relation from cooking gas prices to organic farming?
"According to the Annual Review of Resource Economics, organic agriculture generates more air pollutants and environmental emissions in the crop production process for a unit of food than chemical farming."
Reading the paper : https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-resource-1...
"The evidence suggests that organic agriculture uses less energy per unit of land, and to a lesser extent, also per unit of output than conventional agriculture "
No mention of other air pollution I could find.
Nice to point to a paper that says the exact opposite of what the press article says.
I didn't check the rest, I'm assuming pesticide and chemical fertilizer producer saw a nice opportunity (fall of income due to COVID impact on tourism) to avoid organic contagion to other countries through cheap to corrupt journalists.
Organic practices -> Lost productivity per acre + increased costs per acre -> Loss of export profits -> Currency devaluation relative to international currencies (USD, EUR) -> Increasing prices of imports
All of that process is plainly stated in the article.
And honestly that's a very very weird argument. You are saying that a real life result has to be discounted because of a... Research paper? Especially one that obviously doesn't take into account the particularities of Sri Lanka? Actually scratch that, the study you linked doesn't say what you are saying at all. It's much more nuanced and frankly it makes the "it's big agro corrupt journalists" narrative even more ridiculous.
> These results should not be extrapolated, as unbiased evidence about organic yield effects under real-world conditions is limited (Kravchenko et al. 2017, Leifeld 2016). In any case, given the higher knowledge requirements for successful organic farming, it is likely that the average yield gaps would rise if an increasing number of farmers would adopt organic practices.
>However, where modern inputs are available and more commonly used, organic farmers typically have lower yields than conventional farmers. Yield gaps tend to increase during the process of economic development (Valkila 2009).The yield gaps imply that more land would be required to produce the same quantity of output with organic methods
>The conclusion that organic farming is not the global blueprint for sustainable agriculture does not mean that organic methods cannot be useful in specific situations. Under certain conditions, organic farming can be clearly positive for the environment, even when the effects are measured per unit of output.
So that's exactly what it is saying : organic farming can be good, probably can't replace conventional methods, and if you want the yields to even start comparing somewhat favorably with conventional agriculture you need to build a lot of institutional knowledge, provide resources to farmers and time. It's better than traditional, very small scale agriculture, but if the inputs for "chemical" farming are there you should probably use them. That's a lot of caveats and they mostly don't apply to this situation.
"The evidence suggests that organic agriculture uses less energy per unit of land, and to a lesser extent, also per unit of output than conventional agriculture (Table 3). This difference is mainly attributable to the nonuse of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides in organic systems. Fuel use for agricultural operations is similar across systems. However, for certain crops (especially vegetables) more fuel is sometimes required in organic production, when repeated mechanical or thermal weed control becomes necessary (Lynch et al. 2011, Scialabba & Müller-Lindenlauf 2010, Smith et al. 2015). This may also lead to higher overall energy use in organic systems in certain situations (Lee et al. 2015).
"Concerning GHG emissions, most studies conclude that organic farming has lower impacts when expressed per unit of land but not when expressed per unit of output (Table 3). Generally, organic systems are characterized by lower nitrogen inputs, and thus lower N2O emission potential. However, balancing nutrient supply and plant demand is typically more challenging in organic systems; oversupply of nitrogen from organic fertilizer may also lead to significant N2O emissions, while undersupply leads to lower yields (Clark & Tilman 2017, Lynch et al. 2011, Skinner et al. 2014). In crop production, soil carbon stocks and sequestration rates were found to be significantly higher in organic than in conventional systems (Gattinger et al. 2012, Lori et al. 2017). In livestock production, less intensive organic husbandry systems lead to larger quantities of manure per unit of meat, and thus higher methane and N2O emissions (Treu et al. 2017). Overall, the evidence does not support the widely held notion that organic agriculture is more climate friendly than conventional agriculture (WBA 2016)."
Unfortunately that last citation is some 500 page document in German which I'm unable to read.
Per output organic vs conventional:
Energy use 15–21% lower a,b
Nitrous oxide emissions 8% higher a
GHG emissions 0–10% lower a,b,c
GHG emissions of organic diet equal to conventional diet d
For reference Nitrous oxide is around 7% of all GHG in the USA, so the +8% by 70% by 7% doesn't amount to much vs 0-10% when you add up, source: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
I am prepared to be wrong about that, of course. It isn't completely beyond the realm of possibility that there are legitimate "dilution is the solution to pollution" effects at play. I just... have doubts.
> Organic farming is less polluting than conventional farming when measured per unit of land but not when measured per unit of output. Organic farming, which currently accounts for only 1% of global agricultural land, is lower yielding on average. Due to higher knowledge requirements, observed yield gaps might further increase if a larger number of farmers would switch to organic practices.
In other words, forcing a ton of farmers to switch to organic farming over night would almost certainly lead to them being much less efficient than average organic farmers.
The post most likely has a political agenda so outsiders commenting walk into a landmine but anyways, here my two cents worth of observations, more as generally commentary
Doing nothing is not an option: Controlling the water consumption, chemical effluent, deforestation, biodiversity impact etc of ever growing agricultural activity is a no-brainer. Yet:
* any misstep in the so-called "transition" or adaptation will be ruthlessly exploited by those who basically do not care what comes down a few generations. Even well-meaning politicians will be reluctant to be proactive or first movers if they face crucifixion.
* more specifically: the food scarcity scare will be used cunningly to protect existing agribusiness interests from lost profits. NB: Tea is a export oriented cash crop. This does not mean its not important (if those exports finance food imports, or even just because a whole bunch of people make their living though this) but conflating unrelated interests is not how an honest society solves problems
I just hope that the people of this beautiful and remote island (Arthur C. Clarke lived there BTW I wonder what he would have thought) find a way to transition and thrive in a sustainable future...
- we have to make this transition
- if there is any pushback or stumbles during the transition it’s not because the transition is wrong, but because of nefarious forces?
but what is your take? that somebody sitting pretty at the top of the food chain will simply roll over and absorb the losses because it turns out a whole range of practices is unsustainable?
I've got a few stranded assets to sell to you
I’m poorly traveled and ignorant of Sri Lanka but I believe it’s a very poor country where $200 is a lot to ask for let alone luxuries like pest pathogens, ag netting, soil testing etc etc… And if you don’t have all that, then going organic is going to absolutely destroy yields and you cannot have a modern society if everyone is farming
Those of us who have managed projects and built stuff can recognize the flaw. It is the difference between "what we'd like to be true" and having a solid plan for getting there.
Probably having all organic farming is a great goal but probably could have been predicted to backfire if done overnight.
Specifically: don't kill your inorganic farming before your organic farming produces enough for you to eat.
This pattern of failure can be seen everywhere. Don't give up your strategic base in Afghanistan until all your people are evacuated. Don't shut down your nuclear power plants until your renewables have actually proven to produce enough.
Idealism is great for visualizing the future. But unchecked idealism will kill you. I am not sure about the politics of Sri Lanka but I see in the US people rally around which politician can paint the rosiest picture of the future rather than the tempered pragmatic who can make iterative progress towards a better place.
Time and again we see this top-down police push that don't consult key stake holders (farmers, merchants, consumers etc.,) or fail to consider their feedback ending in a disaster.
To top it off they rolled it out 100% (No A/B experiment, so to speak). These big changes have higher order effects that manifest post launch and can't easily be predicted. They denied themselves a chance to adopt to those higher order effects by launching it overnight. The result is not too surprising.
They "predict" that they will lose 50% of the harvest. Let's not call it a failure just yet and see how this turns out after a few years.
Sure, sudden change is disruptive, but humans are adaptable and can accomplish amazing things in a crisis. If they don't revert it and stay organic only, maybe they'll have an amazing reputation and a huge competitive edge in a decade.
They won't have an edge. The green revolution is what allowed population to boom.
Now some people are like "yeah, let's go back to before"?
Sounds a lot like the people who shun vaccines and medication.
Yes, the population can adapt downwards as people starve or migrate somewhere else. After a decade or so, the people who are left will be in an excellent position to sell organic tea to middle-class Americans.
Similar arguments were made in defence of collectivization in the 1920s. The complacency is astounding.
The only workable answer is for lots of distributed planners to make lots of real-time decisions based on pertinent information. Most of them will make bad decisions, but a few will make correct ones, and hence win.
Centralization and a bureaucracy applying a decision upon a large territory is a good recipe for disaster if the decision is a bad one.
Any "overnight flip to" anything is often a bad decision.
Moreover the real cause is an economic crisis centered on a foreign exchange deficit: http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2021/07/sri-lanka-manufactur...
I assume everyone would expect lower yields from more primitive growing and processing technologies.
To call it more primitive doesn't seem honest. Modern farming practices destroy the soil quality while using shortcuts to get higher yield in spite of that. From what I've read I think the jury is still out on which is better. Obviously organic farming is bad for the fertilizer and pesticide business.
One of the things I wanted to chime in with, somewhere in the discussion, was that this is the sort of policy which pushes people to develop technologies and that perhaps if deployed more slowly it might have driven innovation in organic farming.
Something like a pilot scheme + opt in + subsidies.
What matters is substainable farming.
And what is often labeled as BIO/organic is often not the most substainable farming method. It's to much focused on categorizing thinks by their origin instead of categorizing them by their effect specific to their usage.
(And over night switches to anything tend to not be a good idea.)
Zimbabwe tried that and failed (no organic farming needed there). And now Sri Lanka is trying it and failing.
A more sensible approach would be to phase it in with the right incentives for organic farming and adding the cost of externalizes to the price of non organic farm produce in a phased in manner.
Recent history of Zimbabwe (<http://imgur.com/a/VdQdD>)
The reason why capitalism works so well for poor countries is that they have decades of growth ahead of them and capitalism forces growth at the cost of exploitation.
Even the successful American Revolution was an incremental change: an effort to preserve a tradition which feted the traditional rights and liberties of Englishmen going back to the Magna Carta. The shift in philosophical underpinnings may have been radical, but the political culture barely changed at all.
> “The ban has drawn the tea industry into complete disarray… If we go completely organic, we will lose 50 per cent of the crop, (but) we are not going to get 50 per cent higher prices”
Thinking simplistically like that (the entirety of the cost is not in production, ofc), you need 100 per cent higher prices (double) to cover for losing 50 per cent (half) of the crop — this "tea conglomerate expert" has not thought this through :)
Percentages are so ingrained in our culture, but with them being a relative measure, they are so easy to confuse.
Why not speak in simpler terms to help yourselves? "Losing half the crop, we'll need to double the prices (to break even)."
So many leaders, when their anti-market policies fail, double down. This will further reduce supply, by demotivating farmers. It will help only the lucky few consumers who are first in line, before the shelves are empty.
According to an estimate, tea is Sri Lanka’s single biggest export, bringing in over $1.25 billion/year, which is nearly 10 per cent of the country’s export income.
…
An island-wide survey of farmers found out that 90 per cent use chemicals for farming and 85 per cent expected sizable reductions in their harvest if disallowed to use fertilisers. Moreover, the survey said that only 20 per cent farmers had the knowledge to transition to completely organic production.
…
The survey also revealed that many key crops in Sri Lanka depend on heavy use of chemical input for cultivation, with the highest dependency in paddy at 94 per cent, followed by tea and rubber at 89 per cent each.
…
According to experts, three scientifically rigorous meta-analyses of organic-conventional crop yield comparisons indicate that across all crops, the mean yield reduction in organic agriculture in Sri Lanka is around 19-25 per cent.
…
The article also states 2-3 million tons is estimated to be produced locally per year, and paddy cultivation requires 4 million tons per year and tea cultivation requires 3 million tons per year. So they are short there.
To break even, you need to double prices (i.e. 100% higher), not 50% higher. Very strange expert.
There are some loosely imposed rules that one cannot buy more than 5kg of rice per turn, etc. But I don't see people actively hording things. The long lines are likely because a shop is only allowed to bring in 2-3 customers at once.
This is why moderate inflation around 2% is good because it stops hoarding of money and why inflation above 10% is destructive because people start hoarding goods.
The current president isn't the only one to blame, though. For the past 15 or so years, the government relied more and more on China to basically keep its wheels moving at the comfort of endless projects funded by China. Sri Lanka used to manufacture a lot of things such as tyre, sugar, paper, etc. The over reliance on imported goods didn't play out well, and things such as tyre, sugar, and paper are now at a shortage because the government simply didn't bother to improve the local manufacturing of said goods.
There may well be something to institutional economics and the notion of a holon.
It’s a history of the step changes in ag yield due to (generally “non-organic”) optimizations, and two scientists’ competing visions of what things we should be optimizing for (feeding hungry people now, food security, “naturalness”, long-term soil health, use of chemicals, energy efficiency, aesthetics, crop diversity, etc).
A better strategy towards the shift to organic (regardless of how you feel about the move itself) would have been to impose an ever increasing tax to understand the long-term impacts of moving away from something their economy heavily relied on.
Unsustainable agriculture, decorously defended as "economic" with its innumerable deferred and eternalized costs neatly ignored in polite company, is a civilizational dead end.
The dollar reserves went from $8bn to $3bn.
The country regulated imports including fertilizers.
Threat to food security? According to experts, three scientifically rigorous meta-analyses of organic-conventional crop yield comparisons indicate that across all crops, the mean yield reduction in organic agriculture in Sri Lanka is around 19-25 per cent. This shows that an overnight shift to organic cultivation presents a clear and imminent threat to the country’s food security.
Eminent researchers have also noted that organic farming increases farmland due to its low yields. This results in deforestation, leading to large scale extinction of species and a rise in greenhouse emissions.
According to the Annual Review of Resource Economics, organic agriculture generates more air pollutants and environmental emissions in the crop production process for a unit of food than chemical farming.
Moreover, organic farming has exponentially higher monetary input costs due to a lack of usage of pest and pathogen-resistant chemicals, which increases manual labour, according to experts. The additional processing and marketing costs of organic produce is also significantly higher, analysts said.
For a country that is a "net food importer" it seems obvious that would cause some kind of shock. The other stuff:
>> Eminent researchers have also noted that organic farming increases farmland due to its low yields. This results in deforestation, leading to large scale extinction of species and a rise in greenhouse emissions.
Longer term. Not relevant to this situation. There is also research showing the opposite, but again that's not the immediate isse.
>> organic agriculture generates more air pollutants and environmental emissions in the crop production process for a unit of food than chemical farming.
Not relevant. Notice the exclusion of pollutants in the chemical (fertilizer) production process. But again, not relevant to the current situation.
>> organic farming has exponentially higher monetary input costs due to a lack of usage of pest and pathogen-resistant chemicals, which increases manual labour, according to experts
"exponentially" is an exaggeration. The formerly mentioned increase in area means increase in labor.
>> The additional processing and marketing costs of organic produce is also significantly higher, analysts said.
You don't really need to do ANY marketing when the government mandated that everyone do it.
There's a lot here that's basically anti-organic, but the real problem is that it's simply more expensive, requiring a more land and labor and they didn't account for any of that in the rapid transition.
And so have many, many other people that are now so sick that their bodies simply won't tolerate (allergic reactions) non-organic food.
I think it's just fine to have 20% less output if you get more out of the food.
It is another thing to mandate it for all agriculture overnight in a poor developing country.
There is no evidence of this ever happening to anyone anywhere. The fact that you think this is even possible means you drank the Kool-Aid.
For example, my mom has told me she can't eat bell peppers from Spain because she get diarrhea from them.
Now, I don't think that bell peppers grow different in Spain than they do in Portugal or in Italy, it's probably some pesticide or some fertilizer or something. It's probably not all spanish peppers, but we just don't know enough about the produce at the supermarket. All they tell us is the country of origin, so the only thing she can do is avoid spanish peppers.
And most are based on a very short-term picture, which ignores the long-term costs of chemical-based farming: the incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion.
Chem-based clearly gives higher yields for a period of 50-80 years, but what happens after that?
Organic/permaculture is sustainable and possible even for our large populations. It presents challenges to some other assumptions of our highly industrialized food supply chain, but that doesn't mean it can't feed the globe.
It just makes it harder for one or two companies to monopolize everything.
Important note: not all GMO is done to vendor lock farmers, most of it is actually beneficial to food quality and availability
I am a farmer, that is absolutely not true. All GMO crops are made to be more profitable to the farmer, with the goals of increased bulk yields, longer shelf stability and decreased water usage. Something like 95% of all corn grown in America isn’t even for human consumption, they’re certainly not selecting for food quality and availability.
Manure weighs more than than an equivalent bag of fertilizer, sure. Is that bad, though?
How far was the manure transported? How much CO2 did the cow burp? How much corn was trucked in to feed the cow?
There’s also the matter of organic fertilizers working differently in some scenarios. Blood meal releases nitrogen more slowly than ammonium nitrate, for example.
When you cross pseudo-religious beliefs you get in trouble as well — many of the organic fertilizers are animal byproducts (blood, feathers, eggshells, urine). So what wins for a vegan? Vegetables made with chemical fertilizers, or vegetables made with burnt eggshells and feathers?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/renewable-agricultur...
Well, of course. But that's a useless measurement. The whole point of hi-tech farming is to increase the density. Organic farming is less efficient for unit of food produced.
Do you have data on that?
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-resource-1...
To be able to think 50-80 years in the future is just an incredible luxury most do not have, particularly most small farmers, and particularly, I would think, most small farmers in a developing country.
Parents think that far into the future, as do thoughtful members of a productive society.
MBA driven obsession with the next quarterly earnings report isn't a universal infection, yet, thank goodness.
Their point, as I take it, is that investing in future welfare at the risk of current welfare rarely makes sense to people's minds, and in fact often jeopardizes future welfare as well as current, due to the fact that any harm it causes now may in fact carry over into the future.
What you're talking about, on the other hand, is about corporate greed and indifference. Very different scenario.
E.g. A struggling parent buying cheap bread for their kids today rather than starving them for a month to save money and feed them more nutritious food later, is not the kind of decision one would attribute to MBA driven obsessions. Nor is this parent a worse parent than a more affluent one who can afford such an investment without starving their children.
Ironically, thinking that far into the future results in many choosing not to become parents.
Kim Stanley Robinson's recent novel "Ministry for the Future" had an interesting take on this; that our future descendants may need legal standing in the court system, and lawyers tasked with defending their needs there.
You will have to keep moving the goalposts at a rate of 1 year per year, because it turns out that we understand which nutrients plants need and how to give them those nutrients.
The alternative is massively expanding farmland so that it can lay fallow for 25% of the time and also to account for lower yields.
We do not need to fertilize. It takes about 3 years for yields of a farm converted from traditional to regenerative to meet pre-conversion yields. The quantity of land used doesn't change. It is just managed a different way.
Aside: organic and regenerative are not at all the same
Hmm; I've never seen "Organic" and "Permaculture" seen used as synonyms; I am ignorant of the field, but my understanding of "Organic" was that it was more focused on what chemicals are and aren't used, largely due to their perceived benefit to ingesting humans / some level of "naturalness".
I also haven't seen "Organic" as stopping monopolies and oligopolies either. Even if I accept that "Organic" doesn't simply mean "Carbon based", nothing in its modern usage seems to preclude new monopolies emerging.
- As an end-user, what I found is that same companies that offer "regular" food tend to offer "organic" under spun labels, preserving status quo (but at higher price and therefore profit)
- I assume that "Certified organic chemicals" for farmers' usage up the supply chain will similarly have to come from some company or another, and I don't immediately see what makes it harder for those to homogenize and eventually form a monopoly.
[If it's an allusion to Monsanto etc, again, to me that's more of a matter of IP laws, and I don't see what prevents such occurrence in Organic field (I also see GMO and Organic as orthogonal and not necessarily incompatible, but definition of Organic is loose enough and changing enough with times/regions/individuals that I won't stake a big claim there).]
I am genuinely willing to be educated!
It gets visceral when I volunteer for sorting at the food bank. The organic crates roll in, the traditional crates roll in -- and it turns out that, say, all the zucchini in the organic crates has turned to mush because they don't believe in spraying with wax. Crate after crate of rotting, wasted produce. Awful. Natural, yes, but nature is so often awful, and it's such a shame when we know how to be less wasteful and intentionally forego this knowledge in order to indulge shoppers' nature fetish. Is this even what they really want? Would they continue to insist on the organic label if they saw these crates of rotting zucchini mush?
Well, you don't typically spray preservatives on zucchini.
Consider the possibility that there are factors outside your view here. Perhaps the organic farm you're getting the zucchini from is further away, or more successful commercially at selling their best product. Who knows?
Without more information, you might just be the anecdotal victim of confirmation bias.
Yeah, it's possible that there's another explanation, but it's also possible that foregoing preservative techniques causes food to go bad earlier.
Would the fridge die sooner if it was used more?
Probably. They feed their kids “organic” because they believe it will give them a competitive edge. Not because if concern for people who can’t shop at Whole Foods.
Here's another: If I recall correctly, after WWII the US didn't know what to do with all its munitions factories. They realized that the basic ingredients of bombs were good at fixing nitrogen in the soil, so they made minor conversions to the factories and started producing chemical fertilizers. Fifty years later, Timothy McVeigh was able to buy a truckload of the stuff and bomb a federal building.
I hope Sri Lanka continues this experiment. Could it be that after so many years of conventional agriculture, the soil was too depleted of nutrients to be suitable for food crops? I imagine that things will improve as the land heals.
100 years isn't long when you're changing the global ecosystem.
The Industrial Revolution began in the late 1700s. We're only now beginning to agree on its long-term consequences, and quite a ways off from agreeing on mitigation steps.
I will repeat that I hope Sri Lanka continues this experiment. Experiments like this are the only way we'll get the data we need.
I think you would be hard pressed to feed a nation with organic farms without oil refineries right now.
The War Department did construct 10 ammonia plants which made precursors for explosives, which could also make fertilizer precursors, and they absolutely switched them over after the war.
But ammonia production capacity doubled by 1950, and that wouldn't have happened without a demand side to the story as well. It also turned out that farmers realized nitrogen fertilizers work really, really well.
It is absolutely ignorant to believe that organic is better for the environment than non-organic. Oil refineries and heavy industry are needed to support farming enough to feed the world, organic or not. And organic food is more expensive, in terms of resources consumed, not less.
Take chlorpyrifos[2]. It's pretty nasty. It requires no additional data to determine that, all else being equal, we'll be better off not consuming its residues on our food. This is not simply an "unnatural = bad" argument: this is a specific chemical with known harmful effects, which you can avoid by buying organic.
Of course, the key question is: is all else equal? Organic farming does permit some other chemicals, and has a wide range of other impacts, including yields etc. So it's possible that organic farming is net negative for human welfare. But it's unfair to characterise a preference for organic farming as being quite as unscientific as you seem to claim.
I also think the article is telling us less about the innate merits of organic farming and more about the stupidity of making huge system changes overnight without training the people on the ground.
I live in the Netherlands and the produce here is pretty awful compared with France, Italy or Germany. I'd be happy with some kind of arbitrary point system to indicate holistic quality. Even though we might disagree on details, balancing price, health, nutrition, taste, environmental sustainability and labor ethics is really hard for a consumer. When you buy organic you kind of hope all those things are included, but it just seems so non-rationalized at the moment.
Can't you make the same argument with other organic but yucky stuff? eg.
>Take cow manure. It's pretty nasty. It requires no additional data to determine that, all else being equal, we'll be better off not consuming its residues on our food.
I don’t think cow manure meets any of those four criteria.
But the parent poster explicitly mentioned that "it requires no additional data to determine that"? That sounds pretty closer to "chemicals are yucky", rather than "chemicals are bad and these studies show that" (what you're arguing for).
It is a given that organic is a net negative. Non-organic allows everything organic plus everything organic prohibits. We might need to reform non-organic in some cases, but those doesn't mean we need the arbitrary restrictions of organic.
The focus is currently on how use of "non-organic" methods (pesticide effects on humans and insect—particularly bee—population, soil depletion...) are harmful, and naturally, humans immediately explore the other extreme, without looking for a sweet spot in the middle (of course, humans are exploring it, it's just not publicized enough).
And the sweet spot is always in the middle.
Organic produce is popular because it gives you some reassurance (compared to almost none otherwise) and the living standards have increased in large (edit: small, but mostly participating on HN :) parts of the world to be able to afford it (with their living standard, I am sure Sri Lanka wanted to be the first exporter of exclusively organic produce, not for their internal use): we are still far away from finding the best way, but it's important to work from both ends to help us get there.
> And most are based on a very short-term picture, which ignores the long-term costs of chemical-based farming: the incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion.
But there are enough organic farming methods which also lead to "incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion" similar there are non-organic "chemical" methods which do not lead to such effects.
So we should focus on long-term sustainable farming.
And sure for most farms the first steps to sustainable farming are the same or at least very similar as the first steps to organic farming, but the "mid" and "end-game" can differ massively.
You cannot farm soil for longer than 8-10 years without major nitrogen, and phosphorus replenishment. Actually lived in the sticks, and did farm labour in my childhood.
Controllable soils which are good at intaking, and retaining fertilizers are sustainable.
Bad soils with unusual soil chemistries can get depleted no matter how much fertiliser is dumped. That's true.
Wouldn't a competing farm be more profitable to add fertilizers to the soil to replenish the loss nutrients, which means they can price out the crop rotation farm?
This is why regulations (and to combat their evasion by other countries, anti-dumping tariffs) are needed.
What I don't get is why the focus on fertilizers? There may be some wisdom on not spraying random poisons on the stuff you are going to eat¹, but the worst you can get with fertilizers is soil salinization, and this is perfectly avoidable on any place that isn't a desert already, and there are ways to avoid it on deserts too, just a bit more expensive.
1 - So there's a reason for a poison by poison discussion, the overall label of "organic" just poisons the discussion.
How do the crops you mention “gather phosphorous”? From where?
If you learn about the soil food web you will learn that most things we dump on farmland are made available to plants by bacteria and fungi. Unfortunately, those are the things that we kill by farming the way we do.
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/76hmbge/soil-...
They focus on two farmers, one a small-scale farmer in NY who started with the vision of a sustainable farm, and a commodity farmer in Minnesota who was looking for ways to improve yield. The Minnesota couple are, like your example, not at all "tree-huggers;" they're just people who want to survive. And what they found is that they can get more crops, for less money, while also limiting their exposure to potentially harmful fertilizers and pesticides.
They see a lot of resistance from their neighbors, because conventional farm knowledge is so ingrained in their culture. Running a farm is tricky, and experimenting can be the difference between profit and losing your shirt. There's just not much will to risk losing the land that's been in a family for generations on a quest to find a better way.
Feel like I'm missing something. State universities all over the nation have agricultural programs. Are they teaching stuff like cover crops? In other words, does this guy align with the conventional experts, or is he fringe, or does the industry have a schism?
Ag extensions mostly recommend the high input farming methods. What Gabe Brown practices is more than just cover crops.
Source: grew up in the sticks and worked on the family farm as a kid.
Natural nitrogen replenishment rate is microscopic. And it will do absolutely nothing about phosphate depletion.
Phosphate replenishment can be done by spreading manure or using fertilizers. It's a harder problem, but you have to work the problem.
Yes, and and the rate of replenishment, even if you dump many times more soy straw on the fields than you will harvest, will still be microscopic.
It plainly doesn't work for anybody, but people who only farm for themselves. It's a grandly inefficient use of a scarce resource — land.
Even if the soil will be squirming with nitrogen fixing organisms, and nothing else for many years, it's nitrogen intake will be like a single nitrate application, or less.
> Phosphate replenishment can be done by spreading manure
And catch god knows how much food borne diseases in the process. That's disgusting, and absurd in the 21st century.
Can you buy good soil or is it part of the land and just too deep/not worth buying?
Good soil needs lots of dead plant stuff. Bad soil is clay or rocks.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/what-are-s...
Organic is typically understood to mean avoiding the use of things that aren't considered "natural." Which, in turn, tends to mean avoiding the use of both chemical and genetic engineering.
To me, the idea that the most environmentally friendly agents for use in large scale agriculture just happen to already be sitting around in nature seems quite extraordinary. To take the case of pesticides and herbicides, I'm certainly no biologist, but the general pattern I see is that that nature provides broad-spectrum, non-specific poisons that kill relatively indiscriminately. And the only reason that these agents don't tend to cause a lot of damage to ecosystems is that they tend to be used in the way nature intended - that is to say, on a very small, non-industrial scale. Think "poisonous animals only using it for personal protection," or, "clove oil mostly only being found inside of a clove plant." I can't see any reason to see why we should just assume that taking these sorts of toxic agents that evolved for very limited use cases, and applying them over countless hectares of cropland, is actually a good thing.
I also worry about just accepting organic agriculture's lower yield. Less yield per unit of cropland translates into more cropland being needed to feed the humans. Which, in turn, means more habitat destruction due to human activity.
Versus, if you allow engineering into the equation, you can start to try and engineer things to be less harmful when used at an industrial scale. A pesticide that is engineered to be as specific as possible to only the pest in question. Or, let's dream big, some sort of precision agriculture fertilization system that can dynamically reformulate the fertilizer being applied to meet the soil needs of that particular corner of the field.
None of this is to say that mainstream agriculture is automatically better than organic. More that. . . well, at least in the USA, the organic program is organized under the United States Department of Agriculture's marketing division. Which is very good at marketing. They've done an excellent job of convincing American consumers of a false dichotomy that the organic program is the sole standard bearer of environmentally friendly agriculture. And that's a shame, because some foregone conclusions about what it means to be organic have therefore trapped people who want to be environmentalist into a local minimum that probably isn't nearly as environmentally friendly as they could be if their options hadn't been artificially constrained by a paragon of crony capitalism.
Soil depletion...? How in the world you deplete soil by adding nutrients through fertiliser?
"Chemical-based farming" is a lot more than just adding fertilizer.
Clear-cutting and deforestation to make farmland. Increased crop yields extracts more from the ground. Increased extraction of groundwater. Erosion due to killing of weeds, heavy tilling, and destruction of forests and native plants. Phosphate mining makes a giant mess.
No, in comparison to many other mining activities, it's a much smaller size of a mess.
Soil depletion via intensive agriculture is a pretty well established thing.
If there is no nitrates, and phosphates in the soil, they can't magically appear out of nowhere.
Organic farming aims to fall in the middle somewhere.
There is a law of preservation of energy. Elements don't transmute into each other, and don't appear out of nowhere.
The mass of biologically available nitrogen, and phosphorus in the harvest is equal to the mass of nitrogen, and phosphorus removed from soil.
No way around this. When there will be no nitrogen, and no phosphorus, there will be no crops. There will be no material for plants to use to make its cells from!
The "Organic agriculture" crowd sound to me very much like antivaxers, except fighting the agriculture industry.
This is simplistic to a fault. Legumes, for example, fix nitrogen; we've known for thousands of years about crop rotation.
Runoff and erosion - processes that tend to be sped up by industrial farming techniques - cause phosphorous depletion in a way not due to the harvest itself, as well.
There are a lot of factors in soil depletion. Some are under our control, via different farming techniques, changes in density, etc.
But in a nutshell - plants are in a symbiosis with the microorganisms and fungi that live in the ground. Plants feed them sugars and they feed the plants nutrients in return.
When you add large amounts of artificial fertilizers, plants don't need to feed these organisms anymore and this soil fauna dies. But the soil fauna also normally excretes materials that improve soil quality (e.g. fungi excrete glomalin, which binds the soil particles together). So if you use artificial fertilizers for a long time, your soil becomes dead. And such soil is easily depleted by wind and rain erosion.
The biggest environment problem right now is habitat loss. In 100 years it might be climate change (of course we should definitely try to prevent climate change), but for the foreseeable future it's habitat loss. The current extinction event is mostly driven by habitat loss. Most habitat loss is due to the conversion from natural land to farmland[1]. We're losing between 24 and 150 species _per day_.[2]
Organic crops are much less land efficient[3][4][5], so they drive habitat loss. It also releases more greenhouse gasses, but given the scale of environmental destruction that a worldwide increase in organic farming could cause, there isn't even a point in talking about it.
Organic farming is a marketing ploy where food suppliers realised they can sell fake ethical superiority to consumers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_destruction
[2] https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_d...
[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorga...
[4] https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2019/11/organic-farmin...
[5] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/10/22/organic-food-be...
Organic farming builds soil, where chemical farming strips it away. Organic farming has no dependencies on fossil fuels, but fossil fuels are used to create the fertilizers that chemical farming depends on. Any analysis of the comparitive greenhouse gas emissions needs to include a full lifecycle analysis of the fertilizers and pesticides used in conventional industrial farming. And I really, seriously doubt that will find lower greenhouse gas emissions in chemical farming.
As for habitat loss - organic farming done right provides ecosystem services. Not as well as fully wild habitat, it's true, but it's not totally dead space and does support the ecosystem. Where as conventional, industrial farming is worse than dead space - it creates a death zone where anything that goes there dies.
So even if organic farming is a little bit less space efficient, on total it is better for the ecosystem because it provides positive habitat, as opposed to the negative habitat of conventional farming.
I would also challenge your assertion that its less space efficient, since there have been other studies that have found it can be equivalent when done right and given the right conditions: "Under certain conditions—that is, with good management practices, particular crop types and growing conditions—organic systems can thus nearly match conventional yields, whereas under others it at present cannot." [1]
We've also spent a lot less time optimizing organic farming on a large scale than we have conventional industrial farming. So there are likely substantial efficiency gains yet to be found. I don't think you stand on firm ground declaring that organic farming is worse, environmentally, in the long term. The harms of industrial farming are extensive and extensively documented.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorga...
The "natural" pesticides used by organic farming can also bioaccumilate, that doesn't sound like good soil management to me. [1]
As for the rest of it: it doesn't really matter what's possible in theory. Research is awesome and should continue. But like I said, we're losing dozens of species per day. We have to choose whatever is most cost and land-efficient today (else people will starve).
It's true that some organic crops are sometimes environmentally better. But the only question is how much better or worse it is today, on average. Unless you have a cheap and effective way that will guarantee that certain standards are maintained on 90% of the organic farms on the planet. I don't know of such a mechanism. Costs will be minimized and rules that decrease yield will be skirted.
A global carbon tax and some sort of land use tax (I don't know how else natural land could be protected) would solve most of these problems but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
[1] https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2020/07/23/organic-fungic...
What do you mean? Climate change is happening now, not in 100 Years. And it's just getting worse in the next 10-20 Years.
He's saying that habitat loss is right now the direct cause of more extinction events on the daily than climate change is right now causing.
Ecologism may sound like a beautiful thing but it can't be implemented overnight and at scale. It's just ignoring decades of human progress without a proper alternative.
6 months later and the results are already here. Sadly, a lot of people will die from poverty and starvation thanks to this measure. I hope Sri Lankans stand up against this (even if they have to smuggle proper fertilizers into their country).
If there was a broad movement towards organic farming I would expect a similar thing: corporations will put out a lot of propaganda and buy off politicians to stop this.
It’s not even sustainable for the US to switch to organic for its own citizens, even setting aside the food it exports.
Wtf was the Sri Lankan govt thinking..
It's likely this is also true for the "dump millions of tons of pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and fertilizers on the Great Plains" approach in the long run.
Do you have a source on this? I've read things that are mostly good when undertaken in a thoughtful way at a reasonable pace.
It is thinking whatever any other co with Marxist streak does.
They want to look cool, and "revolutionary". A lot of stage moves.
Edit: People seem to misunderstand. I don't mean overnight, I mean pushing the same idea = organic farming. It's doesn't work at scale. Doesn't matter if you have ten years or one day.
Edit: and 17% of milk production.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/657572/organic-farmland-...