Can anyone provide a hopeful development update as to what efforts if any are underway in the farming industry to genuinely move past herbicides and pesticides of this kind?
Consumers can move past herbicides and pesticides by paying more (sometimes much more) for their food, and cooking more from scratch.
Of course this is easy for wealthy first-world dwellers. Less so for low income families in places with less diverse supply chains.
Organic farming has lower yields (those pests otherwise killed off by the pesticides end up eating a lot of the produce) and is more labour intensive - which explains the higher cost.
Additionally there is more to the picture than farmers and consumers.
In most first-world countries the large retailers (Walmart is famously the most ruthless here) mercilessly squeeze suppliers (distributors and large farmers) to supply the most produce at the lowest price. This pushes farms into consolidation and industrial production - i.e. very large scale mono-culture farming heavily dependent on chemicals.
The very low cost food that we see in our supermarkets has the effect of making orgainic produce look overpriced by comparison - often consumers these days view organic as a luxury item.
Governments too have grant-aided and subsidized farms in a way that often incentivizes "high-tech" farming.
I could go on...
Organic especially in the US, but also in the EU, doesn't mean no herbicides and pesticides[1][2]. Some of the non-synthetic insecticides are FAR more dangerous for people[3]. A popular organic pesticide from the recent past worked by destroying cell mitochondria in a vast swath of eukaryotic cells, nasty stuff.
[1] https://www.global-organics.com/post.php?s=2018-02-02-are-pe....
[2] https://www.pan-uk.org/site/wp-content/uploads/List-of-activ...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20220513165751/https://blogs.sci...
We need to gain a better understanding of our food production systems, the full chain, precursors (seed, fertiliser and chemical suppliers), farms, processors, distributors, retailers.
We need to stop thinking in terms of pure cost. We need to stop thinking in terms of good and evil (good organic farmers vs evil corporations or whatever). We need, as a society, to gain a proper understanding of the complexity of the food chain, of the trade-offs involved in various methods. Of the advantages and disadvantages...
It's appalling that there are chemical residues in our food, possibly to an extent that it has health implications visible in a study such as the one cited.
It's amazing that in most countries food is now much much more accessible for the vast majority of the population than it was, say, a century ago.
To a large extent these are two sides of the same coin.
Yeah, I think that's the interesting thing here. People don't routinely starve in droves anymore and malnutrition is increasingly rare. On the other hand there's creeping fragility in the food system(s), unknown knock on effects of chemicals applied to lots of staple crops, and land/water use issues.
It seems to me like a lot of smart people are actually working on these things but progress is as always uneven and happening in fits and starts.
It's a very complex system with complex trade offs. But, and this is crucial, not so complicated that the issues cannot be understood by an adult with high school education.
As it is, there is very poor understanding among adults in the rich world of where their food comes from, how it is grown or reared, what food/fertiliser it is given, what chemicals it is treated with and how much, how it is processed, how it is packaged, the margins along the way, and the power dynamics along the chain
Even educated adults can be shockingly uninformed, witness Gweneth Paltrow style fantasies about imagined health benefits of organic food, or on the flip side, total ignorance about the quantity of chemicals that go into the production of conventional food.
The increased frailty of our food chains and environment means that collectively we need to get educated, realise the high environmental and health cost of chemically intensive farming and start exploring alternatives. And not with this dumb "organic good, chemical bad" mentality but properly evaluating the trade-offs in each system
It's hard to envisage a world where we feed 8, 10, 12 billion people without some chemical input, but it's certainly a good idea to try at least move in that direction
It seems like with current projections global population might peak around 9.4 billion in the 2600s and then fall back down to around ~8.8 by the end of the century. If we can manage river water carefully, I think it's going to be fine in the medium to long run.
Looks like I misremembered the projected peak population.
And yes, long to medium run it's going to be fine if we can carefully manage river water carefully. And if we don't exhaust soils in key agriculture heartlands, and if we don't cause too much icecap collapse, and if we don't trigger desertification of vulnerable areas (southwest USA, various parts of sub-Saharan Africa etc) and...
> And if we don't exhaust soils in key agriculture heartlands
I think that's probably solvable if it doesn't happen at exactly the wrong time.
> and if we don't cause too much icecap collapse
This seems like a thing we could adapt to, even if it's highly undesirable. Building out a bunch of artificial reefs, locks, dykes, and flood plains seems very doable. We might end up with some 22nd century Venices, and a few less islands but not the end of civilization.
> if we don't trigger desertification of vulnerable areas
This seems harder to adapt to without moving a lot of people.
How is this even relevant?
I'm not suggesting processed food necessarily uses poorly washed vegetables, just that its out of one's control - it certainly strikes me as possible that industrial scale processes might do a better job at removing chemical residues than a typical home cook giving store bought produce a quick rinse.
I feel like our best bet to reduce the need for pesticides would be using GMO techniques to make our crops resistant to pests but the same people pushing for organics tend to dismiss GMOs out of hand.
Oh come now. I don't really think we can use a country who had to suddenly switch from using inputs to making due without them as a good test case for organic farming. Those are absolutely less than ideal conditions.
Everything I've read on organic farming and permaculture nearly always yields higher per acre output (maybe at a higher labor cost, I dunno).
Some of our cereal crops aren't good candidates for going organic but it absolutely makes sense for a lot of of fruits and vegetables, especially the soft skinned varieties that are more apt to absorb pesticides.
You'd really need to cite some sources on that
Again, it certainly wouldn't replace the cereal crops, but for fruits and vegetables that are perishable and prone to absorbing pesticides, I could easily see small scale local agg replacing our current system if the price of carbon were accurately reflected (i.e. carbon tax)
It's about cultivating vegetables in a specific, labour intestine, urban environment, and is partly speculative.
It's not about organic farming yields in general which are generally significantly lower that those of conventional farming.
> Everything I've read on organic farming and permaculture _nearly always_ yields higher per acre output
_nearly always_
Your second assertion is accurate:
> organic farming yields are lower when comparing against most conventional agriculture
I didn't at any stage say "we couldn't properly feed everyone fruits / veg using organic agriculture" - maybe you're mixing me up with some other commenter. What I do think is that currently we are not in a position where we could feed the world's population only with organic (not just fruit and vegetable - grains, meat etc also).
Parts of Africa are facing grain shortages due to disruptions in the supply in Ukraine. This shows how tight supplies are.
Those chemicals ( and I'm no fan) do enable a massive increase in yields. There's no "simply" - I agree with you that a move away is desirable, but it is far from simple or easy.