Comment by azanar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by azanar | Hacker News Reader

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I would much rather buy locally-grown, non-organic produce than organic produce grown in an industrial operation a thousand miles away.

Why? Outside of the arguments of freshness, which could be dealt with by a more efficient distribution mechanism, I don't see any net benefit.

I'll admit that the argument toward supporting local farmers carries little weight with me. Outside of the freshness argument, it strikes me as little more than small-town sentimentalism. There are a number of other industries where we did far better when we dispatched that argument; I'm not yet convinced that food production is any different. I can imagine all sorts of economies of scale that could be exploited, but we have to let the economy scale first.

The trouble is that food production is more organism than industry. And most of our obesity problems in this country, and a great deal of greenhouse gas effects, derive from ignorance of that fact.

The American industrial food chain consumes more oil than American automobiles. The industrial food chain enforces a farm mono culture where a plot of land sees only one crop, year on year, for decades. Or maybe two: Maybe soybeans get thrown in the mix. Local polyculture farms raise animals and a number of different crops in a little dance that mimics the natural cycle of life. Cows eat grass, and they and horses are the only animals that can. Birds clean up after the cows. What's left when the birds are done grows more grass. Goto 1.

The industrial farm leaves over-tilled dead soil in desperate need of artificial fertility, and ridding these farms of animals leaves them all on gigantic feed lots with manure ponds.

If you don't see the problems with this, you've buried your head in the sand. And that doesn't even touch the surface of the massive amount of fossil fuel we use to truck produce and meat 2000+ miles to a supermarket that itself is filled with thousands up thousands of food-like substances.

Huge agribusiness has proven you can indeed industrialize food. And to anybody that's ever looked closely at it, it's also proven that you shouldn't.

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