Save the Honeybee, Sterilize the Earth
psmag.com
psmag.com
When we can find ways to produce a given quantity of food with less land, water, fertilizer and fossil fuel, this, as far as it goes, is an un-alloyed good.
But less labor is not as clearly so. Of course for a time it was necessary: we needed to move on from the situation where agriculture required ninety percent of the workforce. But nowadays we are finding the economy provides too few jobs, and in particular too few jobs that don't require specialized skills or markers of political status. Maybe there is some optimum of labor efficiency in agriculture, and we've overshot that optimum?
However, that ignores the long term costs, which may be what you are alluding to. Farms don't operate at huge profit margins, so they cannot compete with each other if they started hiring significantly more labor. One primary feature of governance is passing on long-term expected costs (e.g. ecological collapse and unemployment) to citizens/businesses optimizing for short-term profitability.
In this case, you would want the government to somehow identify each farm's contribution to the ecological cost, and figure out how to pass that cost along. One possibility would be a pollution style tax.
If herbicides all of a sudden cost significantly more due to taxes, then other solutions (like labor) will become more common.
Our society also benefits from an increase in the number of jobs, which may have also been what you meant by "optimum". Creating meaningless jobs (e.g. picking/weeding when you could use a machine for less) does not add any long term economic value itself, though it does increase stability. It would be more efficient to just tax the economic base, though, and use the money for something economically more productive than weeding.
What happens to the people displaced, I dunno. Malthusians and Luddites have been telling us we're all going to die in a mass of unemployment and poverty for a quarter of a millenium, and they've been consistently wrong, mostly because they lack the imagination (as we all do) to see how humans will cleverly adapt to the new reality.
In the medium term, agricultural robots may displace a lot of pesticide use as well, because if you have a solar-powered 24/7 robot weeding, you don't need chemicals. This also should be viewed as a good thing.
But a world where robots can do everything, including writing this post for me, creates an interesting problem. Most people--especially men--are not well-suited to not having work. How we fulfill people's need to work in a world where there is no work that needs to be done is an interesting problem to have. But remember that there was a Roman emperor who killed off an early attempt at industrialization and rudimentary assembly lines because he feared what the newly-unemployed would do, and worried that surplus slaves would revolt. It's hard to argue, knowing what we know now, that he made the right decision. Our inability to see our own future shouldn't stop us from embracing it.
I imagine it will allow people to work on what they want to work on, instead of what they have to work on. I, for one, would stop spending ~40 hours a week building software for others and build myself an airplane instead. Next? Maybe a sailboat. Sure, the robots could do it better and more efficiently, but I enjoy doing that sort of "work".
But what do I know, maybe not everyone is like me. Maybe it'll turn into Wall-E, or everyone just ends up sitting around watching Friends reruns, or most people would form street gangs and battle it out out of boredom.
As a child, I dreamed that I would grow up to a world where genetically modified organisms were the key to sustainable agriculture. We could have plants that eliminated the need for oil based fertilizers by enriching the soil like clover does and that are resistant to disease and insects. Instead I somehow ended up in this Bizarro World, where Dr. Evil runs Monsanto. Where they’ve turned large tracks of fertile land into a barren, sterile wasteland that can only grow their GMO crops.
We fight nature. If instead we worked with it, we could make our ecosystem healthier. For example switching to organic no-till farming could sequester an estimated 78 billion metric tonnes of carbon.[1] Not to mention the heath benefit of that the organic food would provide and impacted of reduced fertilizer runs off. It's a shame we as a society don't have the desire to work with mother nature.
>“Bees aren’t a canary, they’re a mirror, telling us our agricultural system is out of whack.”
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming#Environmental
I don't precisely think that's a correct characterization (as someone who is employed by a subsidiary of MON). Let's rephrase that:
- Large tracts of land have been planted with high density crops without weeds and highly resistant to pests.
This year I believe the record corn harvest was over 300 bu/ac. That's a vast improvement compared to 100 years ago.
I was taken to a research area earlier this year and took two photos of corn at a demonstration plot - one circa late 1800 farming practice, one circa 2014 farming practice.
- https://plus.google.com/116106755607615316501/posts/hvUBLxsj... - https://plus.google.com/116106755607615316501/posts/H76wXT2U...
Quick, guess which one has the best yield/acre - and which one has the best environment for honeybees. I'm not a beekeeper or an agronomist, but I strongly suspect that the focus on anti-weed, anti-pest farms is aggressively hostile to non-food production. I'm inclined to believe permaculture is the sustainable way forward, but I have no idea how to feed the planet with permaculture without a massive human die-off.
You don't even have to go back that far. At the local elevator there is a highest corn yield award from the 70s hanging on the wall. The winning yield was 120 bu/ac. Though we don't quite get to 300 bu/ac in this area (yet), but 250 bu/ac isn't unheard of.
The record for 2014 harvest is 504 bu/ac for Corn.
http://farmfutures.com/story-ncga-announces-2014-corn-yield-...
Collapse of pollinators carries a risk of human die-off.
We have to relocalize agricultural production, so that we're not dependent on transporting crops grown in high density areas. We have to totally change the distribution of housing and farm land. We have to get rid of lawns and make it so that basically every speck of land not devoted to structures is growing food in some way. And we have to change our society so that people have the free time to harvest and store food. We have to accept that feeding everyone is going to require their time again and walk back a bit from our current extreme specialization.
That's the part that is really, really hard to achieve. We're up against a ticking clock here, and I have no idea how to achieve it in time.
The thing is we're going to get the massive human die off if we don't change. So we really have nothing to lose in trying. The only question is "How long do we have to try experiments in gradual change before we run out of time?"
As for Monsanto, while I'm sure there's no Dr. Evil chewing on his pinkie at the top of its corporate hierarchy, it has done many things that are hard to call anything but evil. Even for a moral relativist like myself.
> crops highly resistant to pests.
Farmers using Monsanto's GMO crops need to use MORE pesticide than no GM crops.[1]
Our continued survival as a species depends on clean water,fresh air, fertile soil. Millions of tons of soil are lost from land degradation. It may require more effort, but we could feed 7 billion people with sustainable agriculture. And if you really cared about the future of our civilization, you would acknowledge the damage your employer is causing.
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/02/us-usa-study-pesti...
I don't believe I was creating a straw man or negating the reality of our ecosystem change - I want to make plain: high density crops with no pests or weeds is a profound alteration from the way things are in a natural environment. It allows a high level of density (more food), but cuts hard against other things. The natural plant life is swarming with pests and "Weeds" are a human classification.
WRT your link. We're forcing evolution to occur faster. That's pretty much unarguable, yea?
I'm a software engineer, not an agronomist, so I can't speak to real practical sustainable architecture of food systems. I simply don't have the science needed to be intelligent about it. I don't feel long-term ecosystem alteration is a good thing to our system (see pictures I linked for an example of the variance - which picture is more natural?). I'd like to experiment with urban permaculture, but I don't think that could even feed my family (all 2 of us).
Food is incredibly important - I would love to have a cunning idea to reduce food waste globally, but I don't have that domain expertise at present to produce a cunning and marketable startup there.
The health benefits of 'organic' are also pretty nebulous. I guess they tend to grow varieties that have been bred with more focus on taste though.
The very notion of agriculture itself "fights nature". Saying we should "work with mother nature" sounds nice, but it doesn't mean much.
"For thousands of years we carried bees by raft and barge, by wagon and train, across oceans and continents, so they could make us honey and wax. Now we’ll try to carry them through the Anthropocene so they can pollinate our crops. The old mutualism, where we make homes for bees so bees can make us honey, is turning into fraught co-dependence. We need bees on an industrial scale to fertilize our food, and the bees need us to keep them alive in an increasingly hostile industrial landscape."
Articles like this really hit home for me and speak to those somewhat behind-the-scenes large-scale transformations of the natural world that you don't always see until you're a part of.
I grew up in IL and attended undergrad at UIUC. I wasn't in CS or engineering, but this[1] program where perhaps my strongest focus was ecology. It is difficult to convey just how incredibly altered the ecology of the IA-IL-IN corn belt is. A giant swathe of land that was denuded, drained, tiled, and channelized. A few random things that stand out as a part of this from undergrad.
I worked with a professor briefly who practically begged farmers to let him install small riparian buffer strips to greatly reduce the hypoxia-inducing agricultural runoff. But no matter how small the width of the strips proposed, it's a hard bargain to just hand over a strip of your potentially producing land.
I saw a series of farms where channelization of streams on their property had led to large erosion problems, and were working to restore a kind of anchored natural meander. The idea being that you would be able to avoid the wholesale erosion, but also control the extent of the bend.
UIUC itself was an utter joke in terms of institutional ecological initiative. We have the Morrow plots, the oldest experimental agricultural field in the united states, but no restored prairie, nothing to hint at what we replaced. You can find some if you go off of campus though, in Urbana.
It's just kind of weird to think back to being in the middle of this giant living machine. Watching it flush its effluent down to the Gulf, and seeing everything else shrivel and die around it.
I went Monarch tagging a few months ago[2], and that is a sad endeavor (but also incredibly fun, everyone should run through a meadow catching butterflies at some point in their life). Everyone involved knows their habitat has decreased dramatically.
EDIT: And just one more thing. This might sound kind of cheesy, but I have always loved bumblebees, our rotund, fuzzy, endemic workers. They remind me strongly of hot, lazy, Midwestern summers from my childhood. I sort of vaguely knew that they weren't doing well[3], but this article reminded me of that, and I'll be sad to see them go.
[1] https://www.earth.illinois.edu/ [2] https://vimeo.com/108187852 [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumblebee#Endangered_status
I've got notes scribbled down on a better dietary framework, on creating incentive systems for farmers, on improving distribution to consumers. There are so many different areas of the problem to tackle that its a little overwhelming to know where to start or how best to get involved.
I'm genuinely saddened to know how far removed I am from the food I eat and the fact that helping seems so far-fetched just makes me all the more distraught.
It is a fallacy to assume that the machine was ever working properly.
I don't think anyone would argue that in the long run we humans would be better off managing our ecosystem a bit more rationally than our current haphazard approach.
What I have seen though is that the startup process we learn in IT projects. Build something iteratively, with a lean startup approach goes a very long way in many business areas. You have skills that few in business posess. Use them and do something good. I did. You can too.
I've noticed a trend among practical/engineering minded people to dismiss organic foods as wa-wa nonsense, but buying them over slightly cheaper, industrially farmed alternatives is actually one of the best things you can do as a consumer to help the situation. "Organic" as a term is USDA certified and includes things like not using pesticides/antibiotics, including buffer zones around farms to prevent runoff, etc.
The ongoing shift is driven by market forces; people want more food, cheaper, and so industrial agriculture adapts to the market, producing huge volumes of monocultured crops with all the tenuous methods described in the article. The only way to reverse the trend is to change the market - by a conscious decision on the part of consumers to spend more than the absolute minimum possible, for food that is better on every level - environmentally, nutritionally, and subjectively (seriously, pasture raised eggs are delicious).
For those of us fortunate enough to be able to afford to spend a bit more on food, I think its a wonderful means of helping move the needle in the right direction.
For me personally, its just nowhere near enough. I've gone so far as offering to invest in farm land for friends who were interested in trying out sustainable farming practices (they ended up not finding land convenient enough and moved on to other endeavors) .
That's not true. Organic foods are prohibited from being grown with synthetic pesticides, but non-synthetics are allowable.
There is a vast knowledge barrier to overcome. I've been farming for about eight years now and still feel like a newbie, and feel even more clueless outside of my specific niche of grains. I sometimes can feel disconnected, and I'm right there in the middle of it.
I imagine trying to approach the topic of where your food comes from is like a non-technical person trying to be part of where their Google search results come from. Even to technically-minded people there can be a certain level of 'voodoo' going on there.
So, I guess the question in my mind from this is: How can we make the topic of food more approachable? It is not for lack of trying. There are many organizations and individual farmers who have made it their mission to get the information out there. Thoughts from your side of the table?
I think one of the trickier parts is that people, in general, don't consume much in the way of real information, everyone is overloaded with headlines and pop culture. I'm amazed at how few people I know who actually read and the list shrinks considerably when its narrowed to non-fiction.
I think food shows like Mind of a Chef are probably the best current medium for informing people. I could see podcasts working well. Whatever the approach, it unfortunately has to be easily digestible and relatively light-hearted.
My angst is more that I want to be an active participant rather than just an informed consumer. I see the trend happening but I also know how easily the trend can be perverted (i.e. the whole foods effect of ruining otherwise amazing farming practices in order to reach scale) which reinforces my want to really push the envelope.
Please reach out to me (email in profile) if you'd like to discuss this more in depth. I love speaking to people involved in the Ag scene and if I ever do jump in I'll need people I can vet ideas with.
https://gs1.wac.edgecastcdn.net/8019B6/data.tumblr.com/c67fb...
Up to this point we've been shopping in the great store that is the Earth's biosphere. As of about now, we've bought the store. We have the power to change or destroy almost any piece of inventory. We could wipe out the bees in a few years if we wanted to. Or, if we want them to survive, we'll need to consciously protect them. The point is, either way it takes a choice now. The great forces of nature can no longer overpower us.
We're used to the world being a certain way: certain species, ecosystems, weather and climate patterns, etc. But from this point forward, those will only persist if we consciously choose them to.
I have some ideas how I would correctly manage this store if I were in charge because I don't care about turning a profit. I just want to ensure that I and my family can go shopping there 5, 15, or 100 years later. However, I have no idea how I would manage a store when you have 7 billion other store managers. Some of which are seeking to turn a profit, some of which are looking to sell, some of which hate various sociopolitical groups and want them to disappear (and aren't afraid to break a few eggs to get their way), some of which just want to see it burn down for the laughs, some that just want to take the goods without paying, etc. Yes, obviously it's a training issue, but holy shit the sheer enormity of it all.
Burning coal (or burning a building) is quite many orders of magnitude easier than doing the reverse.
It's just entropy.
If you will cast your gaze at [1], you'll see a satellite view covering much of the Texas panhandle, part of north west Texas, and on my laptop, sections of New Mexico and Oklahoma. Driving from north to south on that map would take two or three hours. The view is covered with small green patches; if you look towards the bottom left, south of Dimmitt, there are a bunch of them.
Each of those green patches is a (typically circular) irrigated field. Some of them are roughly a mile in diameter[2]. If you zoom in a couple of times, you'll find that essentially the entire area south of I-40 is a patchwork of rectangles---each rectangle is a agricultural field, mostly irrigated as well.
That part of the country was once known as the "Great American Desert"; technically, it is semi-arid grassland. Later, it was the Dust Bowl, although improved agricultural techniques seem to have reduced the number of dust storms from when I was a kid.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@34.6467676,-101.5723564,240948m...
[2] The irrigation system: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.43037,-102.2239981,118m/data...
[3] For your enjoyment, here's a street view looking east towards the Rita Blanca National Grasslands: https://www.google.com/maps/@36.4142581,-102.5405722,3a,75y,...
This is also interesting: http://www.takepart.com/feature/2014/06/20/what-is-killing-b...
and I heard this a while back: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/12/wally_thurman_o.htm...
After reading about these and other related articles I had assumed CCD was mostly a non-issue. Maybe I'm wrong?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee#Solitary_and_communal_bees
maybe i'm understating it a bit, but my guess is that if honey bees died off, efficiency drop in agriculture would be temporary, except for honey industry.
Long story short, the humans were WAY better at it than the bees (I forget the % increase, but it was significant), but it was so tedious that the labor costs still drove the end-user cost of the apples above what the market was willing to pay.
The impact would be to the variety and tastiness of the food we have available, but I doubt it would significantly impact our ability to feed the population, or the health of that population. Oh, I'm sure that good access to fruits and nuts does make us healthier than we'd be without it, but it's a matter of small degrees, not life or death.
I suspect that hives are the only way to get sufficient population density for efficient agricultural use, and the drop in agricultural output would be permanent.