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Organics Can't Match Conventional Farm Yields
scibri writes "A comprehensive analysis published in Nature (abstract) suggests that organic farming could supply needs in some circumstances. But yields are lower than in conventional farming, so producing the bulk of the globe's diet will still require chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The meta-analysis reviewed 66 studies comparing the yields of 34 different crop species in organic and conventional farming systems. The researchers included only studies that assessed the total land area used, allowing them to compare crop yields per unit area. Many previous studies that have showed large yields for organic farming ignore the size of the area planted — which is often bigger than in conventional farming. Crop yields from organic farming are as much as 34% lower than those from comparable conventional farming practices, though in some cases, notably with strawberries and soybeans, the gap is as small as 3%."
No shit.
Why is it that most of the people that I encounter seem to have been shat from the Sphincter of Mediocrity?
Did they take into account the costs that go into production of fertilizers and pesticides? I imagine that they take up non-zero space and that transporting them costs resources as well. Though it's hard to say how much oil a bushel of wheat is worth...
I was under the assumption that organic farms yielded more crops, and that we use pesticides / non-organic grown methods because they are just more fun.
The yield is lower, but was energy input taken into account?
If fewer resources are required organic could still win out.
Although I suspect it will still be like the summary says: both will have their place. It's a small miracle we're feeding about seven billion people, and it was achieved through hard work and using all the tools available.
Add some more billions and we'll likely have organics, conventional agriculture and GM crops side by side, since we'll have no choice but to use all tools again.
Which will we run out of first, oil or dirt?
Why is increasing the crop yield necessarily a good thing? It stands to reason that any increase in food production will lead to an increase in the total human population, which directly recreates the problem in a worse way for the next generation. The fact that our population has tripled over the past 60 years is alarming enough, if another increase of comparable scale happens the lack of available foodstuffs will be the least of our problems.
Yes, it's sad that children in economically depressed regions are starving so please avoid predicating an argument from that premise alone.
All you organic farmers who claim organic farming produces higher yields than conventional farming, you can just... ...wait, what, nobody ever claimed that? Shit, nevermind. Carry on.
I find the rhetorical twist here interesting: "conventional farming" is now the artificially accelerated, yield raising variant of farming. The very things that those techniques were supposed to address were increased yields, pest resistance, etc. "Organic" farming as we know it now was previously largely known as "farming". Obviously the results are not at all surprising, but there is a very sinister underlying rhetoric here. Fill in the blank: Study sponsored by: ________
If I were king I'd start by banning suburbs built on arable land. I'd also suggest that certain groups stop producing so many offspring.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
I believe the point of organic farming is to minimize the negative externalities of "conventional" (I would say "industrial") farming, such as water pollution. If you have to plant 34% more acres to avoid poisoning a major river, I and many others would call that a win.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
We could stop throwing away over 1/3 of our food, grow less beef cattle, and reduce our use of non-food agriculture like tobacco and ethanol (as a side note, we could stop using so much high fructose corn syrup too) and then maybe we'd actually be able to produce a decent amount of healthy organic food for the world. Personal and community gardens could lighten the load, as well as urban farming. It seems to me that its not the yield that we should worry about, rather the efficiency of use.
This is the most questionable aspect. The globe's diet is largely shaped by industrial agriculture (at least in non-poverty/sustainance living societies). Organic consumers tend to consume differently. Making the assumption that the global diet would remain the same and forcing the organic crop production into this model sorta sets the organic farmer up for failure from the gecko.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Proving once again that organics will be outclassed by synthetics? What, wrong game?
(The label "organics" always amused me.)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
The title of the linked article is "Organic farming is rarely enough". But it is difficult to back up that "producing the bulk of the globe's diet will still require chemical fertilizers and pesticides", and so they simply skip that.
Reference again, http://www.nature.com/news/organic-farming-is-rarely-enough-1.10519
S
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
In particular, yield per acre != merit of farming practice.
Did this study take into account the nutritional value of the crops grown? Even if organic crops yield less, there is a greater value to them if they are more nutritional than chemically produced crops. A quick look on Google points to many studies that claim the nutritional value of crops are better when grown organically. If the studies don't take this into account they really are not valid.
"Organic" farming is not good in and of itself. It's better at preventing the consumption of toxic chemicals, it's more environmentally sound, and it's also more economically just (because "organic" foods are not copyrighted).
Since we can't feed the planet on organics, but we want all the benefits of organics, we need to change the way do make, use, and "protect" conventional crops. That means federal funding to develop non-copyrighted crops and promote biodiversity regardless of within organic and modified foods.
The lesson: instead of replacing modern modified foods with organics, bring modified foods up to the ethical and environmental standards of organic foods.
So what exactly is the story here? People are surprised that they can't get the same farm yields when not using chemicals that were specifically introduced to produce such higher farm yields?
In other news, I'm surprised I can't light a darkened room without actually using a light source.
Liberty in your lifetime
The chemical companies say the pesticides are safe. Didn't they make DDT? The chemical companies say the fertilizers are safe. Why do fertilizers end up polluting our waterways? Since most fertilizers are produced from fossil fuels what happens when we run out of them? I guess they will have to learn how to grow organically.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
I don't understand why we call inorganic farming "conventional". We've been using organic farming a lot longer than what is now considered conventional. Until recently there was no one used the term "organic farming" because all farming was organic.
Ok so one type of product maxed out at 34%, another had 3%. But what is the typical benefit? Surely if it is right in the middle most manipulation only result in about 15-20%.
Another factor not accounted for is actual nutrient value of the two. If the crop i.e. simply hold more water without nutrients the yield might be higher but without real effect.
While this is no surprise, I still think that we'll eventually have to transition to large-scale organic farming anyway. Present forms of industrial farming destroy topsoil and rely on fossil fuels which will get too expensive to be used for fertilizer. It might work for now, but hopefully we'll still be alive when present methods hit a wall. To stay alive, we'll simply have to transition to organic methods. What we need to do is to engineer crops that produce high yields even when they're farmed organically, which is to say, they should resist pests, fix lots of nitrogen from the atmosphere and yield products with a higher nutritional content. Organic farming is a method that makes sense to combine with a genetically engineered product, something I would much prefer to whatever it is that I'm buying in grocery stores now.
The Rodale Institute did a 30 year side-by-side study. They found that,
- initially, organic farms created less, as fertilizers and pesticide initially gave a conventional farms a boost. This disappeared over time, as conventional farming damages and degrades the soil, reducing yeilds.
- organic outperforms conventional in years of drought.
- organic farming systems build rather than deplete soil organic matter, making it a more sustainable system.
- organic farming uses 45% less energy and is more efficient.
- conventional systems produce 40% more greenhouse gases.
- organic farming systems are more profitable than conventional.
I am not sure where that last one came from (I haven't read the final report)
I've lived my entire life in the Upper Great Plains of the US. My family is cattle-ranchers. In Iowa, where I live now, our towns and cities are covered with endless square miles of corn -- all of which is grown conventionally.
I really dislike it when those who've never even seen a farm comment "authoritatively" about farming. It's like listening to Alex Jones talk about IT: he's obviously ignorant. In fact, he's so ignorant that one doesn't even know where to start correcting him.
Bottom-line for the ignorami: shut up. You have no idea what you're talking about, and it's painfully obvious to those of us who do.
Bottom-line for the long-haired hippie freaks who want us to convert to "organic" (i.e. pre-scientific advancement farming):
It'd serve you right if we did. You'd starve. The world is fed by my neighbors. If you want them to scrape by on subsistence-level farming, fine: we'll just eat what we grow while you idiots starve.
Large scale aquaponics could be better than both of them multiplied, globally.
Yes, larger initial cost, but once that is done, it is solid.
Insect farming, likewise, could provide an easily farmable supply of a lot of nutrients which can be molded to various requirements very easily. (be it powder, liquid, paste, patties, sausages and so on)
Then we add in large-scale recycling of edible materials rather than carting it off to land-fills to be used as nutrient supplies for these systems.
Enjoy your 20~+billion cap for food. Power, though, that'll still be a problem.
A well designed aquaponics farm can be run very cost efficiently compared to tractor fuels, automatic watering and pesticide deployment, since a considerable amount of it is controlled with gravity.
Even with UV lights, probably, for those longer / infinity days. (don't quote me on the last part though)
Why the hell aren't we doing this?
These 3 things could feed the world several times over.
All it needs is a little investment and it will pay for itself pretty damn quickly.
Oh, I see why. Nobody wants to spend any of that virtual money.
Yeah that's really funny yet time and time again, I've been downmodded for saying that pesticides actually do increase output and people who have never farmed a day in their life are modded up for saying that "There has been a growing of evidence showing that the overuse of pesticides has led to a *decline* in crop yields, not an increase."
Slashdot is a bastion of technological know-how. Not farming, however.
My work here is dung.
Bah hell. "Redundant" was not what I was looking to mod you as.
Carry on!
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
"as much as 34% lower" is meaningless -- what's the weighted average based on a healthy diet.
And while we're on the topic of healthy diet, if everyone gave up 90% of their meat consumption, we'd be vastly better off (both as individuals and globally) than using chemicals. If the advantage is only 34% I'd be unimpressed. This is strong argument for a (near) vegetarian diet, not for conventional agriculture.
Yes, it's sad that children in economically depressed regions are starving so please avoid predicating an argument from that premise alone.
That isn't enough?
No, it isn't. And it's the wrong solution to the problem.
There's plenty of food in the World. Half the food in the US is thrown out, btw.
What the real problem is, is getting the food to people who need it. One of the major reasons is that most starving people live in failed states - states that have no problem feeding their soldiers.
Or here it is another way: you can produce all the food you think you need to stop starvation and it wouldn't even put a dent in it.
Organic farming can't match "conventional" farm yields in terms of water pollution due to run-off either.
"Crop yields from organic farming are as much as 34% lower than those from comparable conventional farming practices"
"organic farming could supply needs in some circumstances. But yields are lower than in conventional farming, so producing the bulk of the globe's diet will still require chemical fertilizers and pesticides."
Which obviously jumps out as obviously false. Just using the number of 34% as the amount less that every crop would grow would mean that obviously Organic can feed the world because we know that far far more then that is "wasted" from western agriculture.
It has got to be something like 20% of food grown in the USA that is actually eaten by humans.
After you take out huge chunks that are thrown away, ~40%, even more that is inefficiently converted to human food through meat, and other argi land that is used to grow bio diesel or sweeteners. In fact it is probably far far less then 20%.
And of course Organics would yield less in these circumstances. Correctly done you do not grow organic produce in a monoculture field like environment that these studies are studying.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Are they talking about food? Or profits?
Organic doesn't mean no pesticides, it means no artificial pesticides. However, artificial pesticides are used because they're more efficient, and more easily meet safety standards.
Also, "chemical" fertilizer is nonsensical jargon. Everything is a "chemical", and ALL fertilizer has the same 3 chemicals - potassium, phosphorous, and nitrogen.
If you look at yield over time (like more than 50 years) you get a different picture. If you care about the human race in 50-100 years, sustainability not organics/conventional is the issue.
Conventional farming can only maintain a high yield for a fixed period of time depending on the depth of the topsoil, typically less than 50 years. The main reason for this is soil erosion, the topsoil is literally blown away during the parts of the year when the soil is bare. Of course this can occur with organic farming too if done in an unsustainable way.
Organics is usually a good start towards sustainability. But it is not the full solution to global food security. The key problem is that nutrient cycles have been destroyed with the mass shipping of food we now have. Really we need to compost all the food scraps from the cities and send them back to the farms to feed the soil and grow more food. Tons of organic matter in cities are a waste problem, at an organic farm they are fertiliser.
Or maybe it would make more sense to grow the food closer to where is was used.
So just plant 34% more. With all the fields the government pays to leave fallow it'd finally start using more of the land again.
-
I'll just stick with cannibalism. After all it's vegan.
As a farmer and someone who knows quite allot about all levels of food production and consumption I find this post ridiculously ironic.
Your neighbours are, of course, creating billions of tons of sweeteners and bio-fuels not food. Sure a small percentage will go to cattle who will convert it very inefficiently to food that will be eaten by humans, but that number (even without taking out the 40% that will be thrown out at the end) will be a tiny percentage of that.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
"But yields are lower than in conventional farming, so producing the bulk of the globe's diet will still require chemical fertilizers and pesticides."
This whole thing _starts_ with an assumption. I remember when /. used to be mostly Sys Admins. For the rest of you, the _first_ thing you do is Root Cause Analysis. Instead of taking the amount of crap people are eating, and _then_ comparing methods of producing that ridiculous quantity, you need to go back to basics and first figure out how much of which foods people _should_ be eating. The food pyramid (and its replacement) attempted to do that, but fell short. No one knows because no one has done _that_ study, which is obvious when you look at the obesity problem.
Until you start there, anything else you "study" is meaningless.
in pure quantity but not in - all other factors aside - taste.
Compare any non-organic product, meat, vegetables or grains in substance, oomp and taste to pure gain optimized stuff you have a looser on the non-organic side.
This is only a starting number. If we were somehow left without conventional farming as an option, we would find a way to raise yields through artificial selection of crops and other means.
of cost reduction are what are required to meet a population growing at a geometric rate, in theory.
if you want to argue that somehow the 'resources required' to grow organics wont meet population growth, you have to prove that somehow conventional produce can meet the geometric rate increase while organics cant.
but if you go into the store, organics are not 'orders of magnitude' more expensive than conventional produce. they are usually 1 to 3 times more in cost. thats not an order of magnitude. its a pretty simple scalar multiple.
and alot of the difference in cost is because of subsidies for various industries, like the oil industry where the petroleum precursor of most fertilizers and insecticides comes from.
now, go into any supermarket, and look on the shelves. you see a huge amount of processed food, repackaged, precooked, pre-stuffed, etc etc etc. all of that 'added value' is, well, basically its waste. nobody "needs" frozen apple turnovers with chocolate icing in the pattern of a heart shape, but you can go buy it if you want. the idea that somehow organic food would be 'wasted productivity' in the food system is absolutely ridiculous when you look at all the crap in the various 'value added' isles of the supermarket. all of those are, essentially, lowering the efficiency of transporting the calories from the farm to the belly. you could simply sell 5 pound bags of flour for 2 dollars each, and get rid of the entire cereal and cracker aisle, and the people would get the same nutritional value approximately, but they would save a huge amount of money. money = resources. those resources saved could then be put back into growing 'extra food' and meeting the 'growing population'.
but that argument is fucking stupid because the 2-3 times price markup for a bag of crackers vs a bag of raw flour (which you could use to make your own goddamn crackers) is not going to cause mass starvation simply because its less efficient. all it does is make people smile because crackers taste good, and make food companies and retailers money because they can 'value add' to the raw flour and build a profit into the increased price.
now if you see organics, instead of some hippy 'impediment to growth and optimization of food supply', and, instead simply view it as another way to deliver calories or raw food products, then the arguments against them from an efficiency standpoint are just as stupid.
you cant say that organic flour is going to cause mass starvation because it costs 5 bucks a pound instead of 3 bucks a pound, when you have just repackaged that conventional flour into cheerios on the next aisle and are selling it for 6 bucks a pound.
these people are fucking idiots and should be embarassed to call themselves thinkers.
Maybe we should work on reducing demand instead of pumping our food supply full of unnatural garbage to meet the needs of an unsustainable global population.
It's funny that when scientific studies don't confirm the left-wing environmentalist agenda, suddenly all the comments are negative. Whatever happened to listening to experts and peer reviewed journal articles, you know, what people say about global warming? Being a rational person means updating your priors when you get more information, not assuming all information contrary to your assumptions is produced by evil megacorps and their dupes. I haven't read one fair criticism of the actual content of the article yet...
...according to the Society of Chemical Industries.
While this chemical industry subsidized study is curiously well-publicized, other studies abound that argue the opposite.
http://www.ota.com/organic/benefits/nutrition.html
Slap an 'organic' label on some foodstuffs and its price rises beyond where the poor can afford it anyway. So they starve and the global demand for food goes down, making lower productivity a non issue.
Have gnu, will travel.
should say it all. Yet the man has proven organic can produce the same yield and or more than "conventional" farming.
... in the short term. 'Clean' athletes can't match steroid pumped athletes. Local workers can't match sweat shop labourers. Recycling can't match dumping rubbish in a hole. Walking can't match sprinting. Sleep can't match amphetamines. Now, make those comparisons again, but factor in Total Cost of Ownership and 'Externalities'.
Add it to your instant queue, and make an effort of watching it multiple times.
Production costs for so-called "conventional" farming have high negative externalities--costs that are simply not captured in a yield-per-acre formula, or even a yield-per-dollar forumula.
Which makes this metastudy not particularly useful or meaningful, because without some way of assessing those costs, we don't have enough information to know what is better.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Who funded this study?
What subsidies are in place that make non-organic farming cheaper?
Look at corn subsidies and many others that favour big agribusiness who purchasing favour from politicians in the form of new laws and subsidies.
What is the nutritional value of organic vs non-organic food?
How is nutrition measured and who does it favour?
The final question is, what is the TOTAL cost of organic vs non-organic farming? Organic farming has a lower environmental cost overall as it does not create environmental debt in the form of major damage to ecological systems that take years to repair.
It's actually a labor issue. I talked this over last month with an engineer who's studied the various methods.
For a given area of land (they got this right) and given a market viable labor cost the modern farming techniques are more profitable and can produce more food.
But, if the cost of labor is factored out, the organic techniques, using intensive agriculture methods, are actually the better producers. I'm changing to this method on our farm this year as our labor is supplied by the family.
It's hard to expand beyond the family farm because a legal farm hand's cost breaks the profitability (address cost of living problems in the US if you want more organic food). Now then, let's compare the cost of labor in the US to the cost of labor in some countries where people live on $1.30 a day. Then things start to get more interesting.
Part of the problem is the way we're mechanized. It's nobody's fault, but the 19th century machines have driven our methods. When we have AI-guided robots to pick vegetables in the US, the equation may swing back the other way.
The nitrogen cycle problems can be solved with the right kinds of natural fixers, but you have to calculate, plan, and rotate. Anybody who wants to try this should spend $11 on this book - the author has worked out all the tables and methods through trial-and-error and engineering approaches (it's a full-color/full-sized well-made book - I'd have expected this to go for $28 at a book store - I think the author just wants it out there).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Organic, manufactured, it's all "chemicals". Just different delivery systems.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
This is easy to explain , what we consider conventional is what has been done as a standard procedure for the last decade or two, maybe more. You do not consider people on poney express being the conventional method to bring mail to remote places, you do not consider anymore conventional transportation the buggeyman, and conventional home refrigeration is not anymore a cellar or ice cube delivered by men on a car drawn by horse.
The same way , conventional farming, aka the one which has been done for the last 50 years or since the haber revolution, *IS* for the better or worst farming with fertilizer. And organic farming, despite being a equated to a throw back to what I would call "antique farming" is not the conventional way.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
In the rural area of France and Germany (when I was a teenager). I can't think of the top of me of a situation where beef was "shoulder to shoulder" except during transportation, and sometimes in winter when the places was lacking.
Conventional records:
World record soybeans, 2010, 160.6 bu/acre * 60 lbs/bu = 9,636 lbs/acre
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/10/prweb4636574.htm
World record rice, 2011, 13.5 tons/hectare = 10,927 lbs/acre
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-09/20/content_13737437.htm
World record corn, 2002, 442 bu/acre * 70 lbs/bu = 30,940 lbs/acre (being generous, assuming ear corn)
burkstractor.com/eq_brochures/Case.../SeedNewsMar292006.pdf
(granted, not as good a source. find a better one)
World record wheat
World record wheat, 2010, 15.637 tons/hectare = 12,656 lbs/acre
http://www.meattradenewsdaily.co.uk/news/190310/nz___record_wheat_yield_.aspx
(lbs/bushel figures taken from http://extension.missouri.edu/publications/DisplayPub.aspx?P=G4020)
Now compare with the Dervaes family, doing permaculture in Pasadena on 1/10 of an acre. All years from 2003-2009 inclusive (newer data isn't posted) are between 4,000 lbs and 6,000 lbs on 1/10 of an acre. So 40K - 60K lbs/acre annually. That's better than world record yields on a regular basis.
Source for Dervaes family: http://urbanhomestead.org/urban-homestead
In other news, pure weight training can't match the results of weight training coupled with anabolic steroids. What I find interesting about this study is that it seems to conclude we've already passed the point of being able to sustain our population using sustainably agricultural practices.
Rearing livestock - including growing the food to feed them - takes up so much more space AND uses up much more water AND produces less actual food than just using that land for growing crops and eating those instead...
Just sayin'
* by eating 30% less meat the difference here would be gone, and western people would have a healthier life too * by eating only vegetarian food, there would be more than enough organic produce for twice the current world population * by using permacultural and forest gardening principles the global soil, water and biodiversity will be sustained, while providing an amble crop for a low meat, vegetarian or vegan society
Yes, fertilizer increase the yield. However, you need limited resources to produce them. To make a real estimate, you have to compare the total resource consumption of both methods to come to a correct conclusion.
Organic yes.
Certified organic - as long as that shit didnt come from a waste water treament plant.
Careful what u put in your mouth - it might have come from your neighbor's toilet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sludge
Ever wonder why the rate of scientific fraud is so high?
I believe that politics is heavily invested in science in US to help lift stock prices.
Very sad times indeed.
Its rampent in the waste water industry - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sludge
This crack reminds me of the argument about time spent on Linux being based on the assumption of your time not being worth anything. Self-Disclosure: Linux user.
anything other than organic is not traditional, GMO, Factory farms are only profit hog farming and have nothing to do with traditions
Much of our produce is grown where water does not fall from the sky. The American Southwest including Southern California divert several rivers including much of the colorado to water your lettuce. Unfortunately the reservoirs and snow caps feeding those rivers are seriously depleted. This is why seasonal, local eating is the new organic. You don't need strawberries in February at the cost of tons of water, and chemicals just wait till May (Mid Atlantic States) and enjoy a proper sweeter, chemical free strawberry. (Yes my organic Pennsylvania grown strawberries have a higher concentration of fructose than Georgia or Arizona grown strawberries.)
I didn't RTFA (not a subscriber,) however it seems that this study is comparing monocropping to organic monocropping, I would be more interested in a study that compares relative yields (in calories or some other measurement) per acre of a mono-cropped farm vs a well managed permaculture farm.
If you consider the total cost/net income of any agricultural practice, "conventional" industrial agriculture will lose, and badly. I believe permaculture-based practices will come out on top. If nothing else, based on the real-life examples of one man (and several others who have followed along a similar path).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepp_Holzer
Sepp Holzer is The Man, when it comes to agriculture. I'm willing to bet he produces more diversity, quality and quantity per acre on his 45 hectare farm in the Austian Alps ( at 1100 to 1500 meters above sea level!) than any other plot on earth, on what used to be a sterile and acidic pine forest. All ON HIS OWN, without any government subsidies. On the contrary, he has spent his adult life fighting for his way against ignorant civil servants and self-serving "Large Ag" lobbyists who are determined to maintain the status quo. His farm has brought him wealth, fetching the highest prices for the quality and rarity of his product and livestock, but he's more in demand these days as a lecturer and to help with international projects to undo the devastation caused by modern industrial agricultural practices.
I would have imagined that organic farming is much closer to "conventional" than all the special treatment agribusiness carries out to fatten their yields. Silly me!
I've always had the assumption that organic produce is luxury items, just like up to date comprehensive healthcare. I can afford to eat and drink organics therefore I do.
As you decrease the area for the sample size, you kind of select for better yields. Higher ratio of things like rows to aisles, for instance, and less natural variation in land. At an extreme example, you could select a single plant as a sample size...but since that doesn't scale outward to an acre, the results are pretty meaningless. A few bushes in your yard are not a reasonable comparison to farms spanning hundreds of acres.
Support more choices in goverment-Vote 3rd party.
Just out... athletes on steroids outperform athletes that don't use steriods.
Good luck looking up the underwriters and funders of this fucking propaganda.
I feel like John Ringo should be on this thread busting heads.
Of course "conventional" farming is more efficient. Takes a lot of farm-hands to uproot the weeds when you're not using Roundup. See: The Amish.
It's a far cry from a few bushes in your yard. Permaculture calls for using several layers: large trees, smaller trees, bushes, herbs, climbers growing up your trees, ground cover. You do most of it as perennials so it takes little energy to maintain once established. It's a model of agriculture that works well for a household, using the time and resources available to a household. They grow enough for themselves and a restaurant besides, with so much variety that they have little need for a grocery store. If this sort of model were predominant, we wouldn't need conventional ag. The ultimate goal is having enough food and land for everyone, right?
-epte
permaculture.
For those who hardly see beyond their screens:
* industrial farming requires 10x - 100x the energy of the food it yields (incl.transport, chemicals, cooling)
* organic does a lot better, but still farming is done 'on rows', monoculture.
* permaculture is chaotic, works with plants (and other elements) in guilds, who cooperate and support each other. Permaculture can outperform conventional farming, counting tons of yield per hectare. So says taco, our permaculture guru. He's far more reliable than a bunch of sold out scientists, paid by whoever it may be.
http://www.unl.edu/nac/forestfarming.htm
Apart from the composition of the stuff it self (by using modern chemistry, you could also manufacture compounds which are not found in manure - whereas humans and nature will be able to cope with these new compounds is a separate question), the main reasons for going organic or manufactured is the consequence of the delivery system it self:
- when shitting, a bull produce different kind of by-product as an industrial plant when manufacturing similar ferilizer.
- fungicides, pesticides and antibiotics could even by based on compounds occuring naturally (penicilline was designed after a molecule release by actual mold), but using them on an industrial scale has very negative ecological results (resistance).
- stacking chickens in small over crowded cages has much worse epidemiological risks than free roaming chickens in the backyard.
At the end, the steak landing in your plate might be the same (just gone through a different delivery method), but it's impact on nature might be radically different depending on which method was chosen.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"outperforms" organic/sustainable farming. (sarcasm)
In general food security is not a problem with insufficient yield so much as issues with poverty and distribution. We don't need to produce more, we need to make sure the food we do produce gets to the people that need it.
Gad, what happened to the high school science curriculum?
The fact that we did not hit the global starvation point as predicted by Malthus by 1918 was directly attributable to Bayer's method of artificial nitrogen fixing, ammonia production, that made so much of 20th century gains in agriculture yields possible.
It is a no brainer if one looks at the crop yields before manufactured fertilizer and mechanical irrigation to what was done before. We physically don't have enough arable land to feed the number of people we have today with "organic" methods of farming.
And look at the health problems we get with imported foods that are organically fertilized... e-coli outbreaks from improperly washed veggies from Mexico that show they were fertilized with manure.. from humans as well.
The huge divergence between the crop yields when using ammoniated fertilizers as opposed to manure have been documented since the first half of the 20th century. Organic may meet some esthetic ideal but it doesn't produce enough to feed the population.
NRRPT/RCT
Three major problems here:
One: more edible food is wasted by industrial agriculture, restaurants, and at home than is needed to feed all the starving people; the problem is waste and distribution, not quantity.
Two - Organic doesn't just mean swapping petrofertilizers for manure. The nutrient yield per square foot on moderate-sized, integrated farms is higher than conventionally grown row crops. The nutrient yield per square foot using organic nutrients but an industrial model is lower.
Three - over one year, or over five years, "conventional" may offer a better yield in large area row-crops...but that land is being constantly degraded and its ability to support healthy life is decreasing with chemical fertilizers and -icides. With proper organic farming, the soil is richer and healthier every year.
This whole f'n argument sounds like "clearcuts are better because they enable us to cut own all the trees faster"
..or .. here's a novel idea ... maybe, just maybe people could EAT LESS! but of good quality food. Maybe it's not necessary to stuff our belies to the point of bursting 3 times a day with less nutrient rich burgers / fries / whatever else preservative full, genetically warped, crap food. And eat to 60% full of nutrient rich great food. Maybe people can even stop wasting there yards with grass and oversized bushes and plan some of there own vegetables. If something like this was adopted as general thought on a large scale it would have far greater impact that needed to further the path of freak food.
So the difference is insignificant. The 'conventional' farming is destroying the land and wasting fossil fuel. I can raise livestock on pasture far more efficiently than a factory farm. I use virtually zero electricity, propane, gasoline or diesel. I guy no grain. The animals are out on pasture. Conventional hog farmers are losing money many years and in the best years only make about five to ten bucks a pig. I make 25 to 50 times more profit per pig than they do. At the end of the year, conventional farms only exist because they're subsidized by the tax payer. I get no subsidies yet I'm profitable and sustainable.
By the way, check out our on-farm butcher shop project.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sugarmtnfarm/building-a-butcher-shop-on-sugarmountainfarm
Cheers,
-Walter Jeffries
Sugar Mountain Farm
Pastured Pigs, Sheep & Kids
in the mountains of Vermont
Read about our on-farm butcher shop project:
http://sugarmtnfarm.com/butchershop
You are ignoring the mass quantity of the greenhouse gas methane produced all your crappy bulls.
There's a small difference between green house gasses released by animals and green house gasses produced by chemistry of refined petrol derivative:
The green house gasses that bulls are farting come from the food they are eating (grass) which in turn fixated carbon from the atmosphere. Yes, at this step, the carbon is in green house gasses. But it's always the same carbon going round and round and round. No net increase of carbon in the atmosphere over the century. Just lots of shifting around.
On the other hand: factory by products, burning fuel, plastics and the like release carbon, which came from compounds which where refined from oil, which was extracted from underground and was never actually in the atmosphere during the current geological era. Keep doing so over a century (like we're doing) and not only are you depleting oil resources, but you're also increasing the amount of carbon running around. Ultimately bringing it back to levels it had during some completely different past era if you keep going the same.
Until we manage to only use 100% recycled products as raw material for factories and no more refined oil products, bulls are still going to be a lesser problem on the long term than chemical factories, no matter how much they fart.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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This past week, most of the United Kingdom newspapers have been awash with Mr Peel story, conversations on tubes and buses and in offices have been ignited once again with the story of Nigerians and their financial invention the 419 scam. But this is not all that Nigerians are good at; unfortunately it is the only one that Michael Peel chose to tell the world Cheap Dr Dre Beats
There are many different ways to grow "organic" foods, and using a statistical comparison rather than a functional comparison over long periods of time is a poor excuse for pro-business farming methods (as opposed to pro-soil or pro-environment). Conventional agriculture is an extractive process, whereas fully organic and biodynamic farming methods are husbandry methods that add fertility to the soil over time. Another aspect is that conventional food production has created a system dependent on foods that people DON'T EAT, wasting much of the food they grow so efficiently just to increase profits through high meat diets with low nutritional content. The health care costs should be included in the results of conventional farming in order to determine if what they are calling food actually IS such. Since the USDA numbers comparing pre-WWII foods to todays foods show a big drop in Vitamin A, etc., then it is important to evaluate the end products for their usefulness to people, not just filling bellies with calories. In addition, there is the loss of work-at-home physical labor through the population, and its associated health and transportation overhead costs, which are only supportable with cheap energy right now. We have spent the last 100 years replacing people on farms with petroleum-based pesticides and machines. Unless we find viable alternatives, organic farming will be the future of food, whether we choose it or not.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1082559/The-GM-genocide-Thousands-Indian-farmers-committing-suicide-using-genetically-modified-crops.html