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There was a derail (initiated in part by yours truly) in the Startups thread about agriculture, starting on this page and continuing for a page or two. Please continue it here. I have quoted the major posts in the derail here for reading convenience. I hope this thread can be fertile for productive discussion, and that we won't need to apply pesticides to this to keep the diseases and insects away! OwlFancier posted:Well my answer is obviously going to be nationalize agriculture and enforce sustainable practices, also possibly migrate away from low labour high sprawl farming back to higher labour lower sprawl farming to some degree. Get everyone growing stuff in their gardens and that. Liquid Communism posted:Most of this is factually inaccurate. Factory farmed food is fine, so long as sufficient health and safety laws are present and enforced. The issues are generally ethical regarding the treatment of food animals and workers, and environmental regarding the impact of the techniques used to get modern yields as regards erosion and especially fertilizer runoff, both of which are still a problem with small farms. Small farms also have less resources to act on these problems in the first place, and are more likely to be hurt by the burdens of compliance with regulations or the losses of a bad season. Brannock posted:"sufficient laws" is rather nebulous wouldn't you say? Of course with sufficient and enforced laws then anything is perfectly safe and healthy and fine. computer parts posted:It's objective fact that industrial farming uses fewer resources than organic methods, especially on a national scale. Like literally "economies of scale" science. You may as well be an anti-vaxxer if you deny this. OwlFancier posted:Fewer human resources. It uses, sort of by definition, more raw materials than just sticking crap in the dirt and letting it grow. twodot posted:I think we can reasonably accept dollars as a proxy for resources, and observe the cost of production of industrial farms per unit is lower than other farms, and conclude they use fewer resources in general. Maybe you care about a specific resource (oil), but distinguishing on human is weird unless you think it's good to have a bunch of people maintaining farms. Arsenic Lupin posted:Even organic farmers don't "stick crap in the dirt". You have to do a lot of work getting organic fertilizer into the soil, Otherwise, you wind up with the sort of soil exhaustion that is rampant in cotton and tobacco country. You use gasoline (in all but the tiniest of farms) just the same as a non-organic farm, possibly more because of the requirement to do more weeding than with broadleaf herbicides. Tuxedo Gin posted:How the gently caress do you get this? My family has a small organic farm with an orchard (~120 fruit trees) and a field of assorted veg. We use significantly less water, fertilizer, and zero pesticides and chemicals per plant/unit grown than a commercial operation. We don't use large gas operated vehicles for harvest or maintenance, either. We have a variety of crops that allows healthy use of the land without overstressing the soil (which is how we can get supermarket quality fruits and veg without dumping hundreds of tons of fertilizer on our plants). The only resource we have more of is people - we have 5 adults and 2 kids living and working our farm. An industrial operation using more natural and chemical resources could handle a much larger farm with one guy and his machines. ReidRansom posted:I'm sorry, but your personal anecdote here flies in the face of hundreds of years of agricultural science. Yes, industrial farming is not without problems, and yes, organic farming has its benefits, but in terms of yield/acre and total input cost per unit produced, etc., you cannot come close to matching a modern industrial farm. I went to and work at a leading agricultural school (although I am myself a geoscientist) and this place is lousy with phDs specializing in every aspect of making sure poo poo grows just so. Also, farmers, even large scale ones (especially large scale ones, really) are a loving miserly lot and waste far fewer resources than you might imagine. Tuxedo Gin posted:My argument is that input cost per unit is skewed on a national scale by subsidies and failure to factor in the environmental impact, and the benefits of yield/acre are irrelevant when we throw so much food away. We don't loving need those kinds of yields if we're wasting a massive amount of the produce either because it wasn't pretty enough or it didn't sell. Farmers count that as a unit sold, as do your statistics, but within the entire earth to belly agriculture system, those are wasted units and wasted resources. OwlFancier posted:If the argument is that industrial farming requires too many raw materials in the form of fertilizer and pesticides to keep the soil functional then this is arguably, primarily a function of mechanized farming which exists to keep labor costs down. cheese posted:1) I completely agree that using a simple dollar valuation is flawed. But that is what is currently being used. Liquid Communism posted:Ag labor is, in great part, lovely dangerous work that doesn't pay all that well. I live out in the middle of flyover country, just corn and soybeans far as the eye can see, and every farmer I know is constantly bitching about how much debt they have to take on just to stay in business, and that's with relying on family labor for everything humanly possible. It's why the family farm is a thing of the past, they just can't compete with the yields that the big operators get driving down food prices. Stinky_Pete posted:Using the dollar as a metric helps us understand motivations of the businesses responsible for the bulk of agriculture. We all know sustainable agriculture is better, but the question is how to make it more accessible to everyone, and a preferable option to large scale operations. Brannock posted:Industrial organic farming, especially thanks to the efforts of industrial farmers, is better than actual industrial farming... but not by such a large margin. It is good that they're avoiding a lot of the worst excesses and techniques of standard industrial farming, but they follow a similar paradigm, and many large-scale organic farmers follow the requirements and regulations for organic certification (which is often not as stringent as it could be) to the letter and none beyond that. Nationwide and, often, international shipping also undoes a lot of the non-nutritionally-focused good that organic farming ostensibly accomplishes. How much better is it for the planet if, even if your carrots are grown without pesticides or petroleum-based fertilizer, the carrots end up being shipped a couple thousands miles away using fossil fuels? Ready, set, grow!
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 17:33 |
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# ? May 30, 2024 13:21 |
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Organic is a buzzword and you're buying into pseudoscience and marketing gimmicks. And organic is incredibly destructive and encourages excessive land use for decreased yield, and utilizes substances that are more toxic than Round Up for herbicides and Insecticides that are more toxic. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Jun 10, 2016 |
# ? Jun 10, 2016 17:36 |
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Grow some seed corn and soybeans, rotate as needed. Hope this helps.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 17:40 |
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I grew up on a small apple farm in Arizona. We only had a couple hundred trees and it wasn't our primary income, mainly we would sell them at farmer's markets and swap meets. After organic started to become the hotness in the 90s we piggybacked onto that for a while only because we already fit the technical definition of organic. It's all bullshit though and our yields were MUCH less than non-organic farms. Since we didn't rely on the income as much we could get away with it though.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 17:42 |
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CommieGIR posted:Organic is a buzzword and you're buying into pseudoscience and marketing gimmicks. Only sometimes. My goto example on this is milk. Milk is some very chemically complex stuff, loads and loads of poo poo in there, and while it's trivial these days to make a cow make more milk, you can't necessarily make the cow make more of all of the things that go into that milk. Organic milk therefore is typically higher in these micronutrients and can indeed provide greater health benefits to the consumer should they not be getting those nutrients elsewhere. But that isn't to say that non-organic milk is bad. Organic is expensive, and I'd rather people have milk that isn't necessarily the best it can be than no milk at all.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 17:47 |
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ReidRansom posted:Only sometimes. Now are you talking about Pasteurized milk or Milk without growth hormones? Because no, Raw milk is bullshit. quote:The raw milk movement is a crank movement linked to the raw food movement. Its adherents, drawing on New age medicine, argue that pasteurization and homogenization damage the nutritional value of milk, and believe that milk which is unpasteurized and non-homogenized is healthier than the milk which is typically sold in grocery stores.[1] It should be distinguished from the movement among foodies to permit the regulated sale of raw milk and the use of raw milk for the production of other dairy products, which makes no health claims and merely reflects a preference for the flavor of raw milk and raw milk products; of course, one often leads to the other, so the line is rather thin.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 17:49 |
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CommieGIR posted:Now are you talking about Pasteurized milk or Milk without growth hormones? Pasteurized milk from grass-fed cows not given hormones. I'm not a raw milk person.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 17:51 |
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ReidRansom posted:Pasteurized milk from grass-fed cows not given hormones. Cool, we're golden. I just posted that in case someone did come by.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 17:52 |
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CommieGIR posted:Organic is a buzzword and you're buying into pseudoscience and marketing gimmicks. Who are you replying to? If it's me I'm not really favorable towards our (American) current definition of organic and I think we can do a hell of a lot better. I think it's interesting that you cite decreased yield in the same breath that you condemn toxic substances. Properly managed multi-layer farming produces high yields while requiring very little external substance input. It's not widely used because it's much simpler to brute force your land and grow only a few varieties of crops or a couple types of animals.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 18:04 |
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The major problem with this argument is that there is no holistic metric by which to measure how effective and efficient a use of land is. Industrial ag (including organic industrial ag) mostly only cares about $/acre or $ earned/$ spent. That's the business metric. It doesn't consider ecological damage due to monocultural practices or damage caused by the production, transportation, or usage of fertilizers, chemicals, and machinery. All they care about is $/$. They don't care that a huge volume of what they sell is thrown away by the markets and consumers, representing wasted resources. They factor in government subsidies that keep them earning huge profits (so why are we subsidizing them?). Even in drought stricken California, where big and small farms have been hit hard by water shortages, you can drive up and down the central valley and see climate inappropriate crops being grown using inefficient watering methods that result in massive amounts of water waste by evaporation. The problem is much more complex than just land use and $ in/$ out. It's more complex than environmental impact and crop yields. You have to consider that a lot of poor people can't afford fresh food, even though tons of it is thrown away every day by producers for being too ugly, by markets for not being sold (even at super low industrial prices!), and by consumers for being purchases but not eaten in time. There is no reason we should be subsidizing industrial ag, throwing away tons of food, and having millions of kids going to school without breakfast. The entire way we look at food and food production needs to change in order to really address the issues at stake. Consumers are too far removed from the food production process and it allows large industrial producers to abuse animals, abuse workers, claim massive government subsidies, and toss out foods with spots because markets only want flawless waxy apples and bell peppers.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 18:07 |
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Brannock posted:Who are you replying to? If it's me I'm not really favorable towards our (American) current definition of organic and I think we can do a hell of a lot better. Anything currently qualified for 'Organic' crops is more toxic than anything currently used on GMO crops and used in larger quantities and lower dilution. And no, any definition of 'Organic' is bullshit, because it assumes some sort of flaw with Genetically Modified Crops that exists, or some risks with them. Cite your sources for 'Properly managed multi-layer farming'
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 18:09 |
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One other thing I'd mention in regard to organic meat and produce is taste and variety. Yes, some of that is entirely subjective and may have nothing to do with the fact that it is organically grown, but modern industrial agriculture is really only concerned with maximum yield and therefore maximum profit. If you want heirloom varieties of produce or breeds of meat animal, you're probably looking at organic because it's either not as profitable at an industrial scale, or in some other way unsuitable for that level of production.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 18:23 |
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CommieGIR posted:And no, any definition of 'Organic' is bullshit, because it assumes some sort of flaw with Genetically Modified Crops that exists, or some risks with them. This is unnecessarily aggressive. I'm not against GMO grops. I think the current practices of organic farming fail to live up to the ideals in many many ways. For the most part I try to buy local when I can, from farmers who are open about their practices. CommieGIR posted:Cite your sources for 'Properly managed multi-layer farming' Unfortunately I suspect any sources I could provide, from my limited knowledge (I am not a farmer), would be dismissed out of hand for being biased since they're from people and groups who practice and advocate organic/small-scale/local/low-external-input/what-have-you farming. Similarly, large corporations are very unlikely to permit studies casting their own practices and production in a negative light. Instead, I ask you to perform a simple thought experiment. Can any given plot of land support one type of crop or animal? Obviously, yes. Can it support more than one? Very likely. Will supporting more than one type of product reduce yield, that is to say, is it zero-sum? If you grow chickens (X) and vegetables (Y) on the same space of land, will the output (O) remain constant? Can you add goats, pigs, fruit, cows, herbs, flowers? I think it'd take a lot before you started running into diminishing returns, certainly more than a monoculture farm. But, of course, handling a farm with several dozen different growing products is a lot more complex and more complicated for a mechanized system to handle than fencerow-to-fencerow monoculture. I also want to suggest that things being more expensive is not inherently or necessarily bad. Higher food prices are only a problem when people cannot afford them, which is a problem stemming in large part from our system that actively attempts to keep the poor poor. There is an enormous amount of waste in the system, as well as an enormous amount of government subsidization for farming and agriculture. Paying hypothetically $2.50 for your pound of green beans instead of $2.00 is not going to break the bank. Producing 20% fewer green beans, especially when we're already wasting a colossal amount of food, is not going to destroy the system. We might even be better off for it, if these green beans are coming from people we know and interact with, coming from farms that aren't a quarter of the planet away, and are grown in-season when the weather and the soil is appropriate for it. If we can pay slightly more for food, especially the sort of food that employs more people, is grown more conscientiously, is (arguably) of higher quality and (unarguably) of greater variety, then that seems better all around, right? It's a similar (but not identical) principle of having a $15 minimum wage. I should point out that low food prices has, in the past, completely destroyed the market for food and caused shortages. This is why we have heavy government subsidies today. I think the subsidies do a good thing and are certainly done in good spirit, but they do mask the true cost of food, and they do incentivize extreme productions of corn in particular which ends up making its way into our food even if we aren't actually buying corn itself. I enjoy strawberries in winter as much as anyone, but I'm well aware that it's a very luxury good that requires a lot of consumption to deliver these strawberries to my kitchen island, and that very likely the sticker price I paid for my sugar-dipped strawberries isn't anywhere close to the actual price.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 18:31 |
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CommieGIR posted:Organic is a buzzword and you're buying into pseudoscience and marketing gimmicks. my favorite thing about the organic label was that the FDA had studied the idea of implementing it years ago and found that consumers would tend to attribute all kinds of wildly false things to food with the label, particularly additional/superior nutrition and positive health impacts, so they disallowed it for a long time until marketing finally won out (under bush the elder)
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 18:39 |
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Brannock posted:Unfortunately I suspect any sources I could provide, from my limited knowledge (I am not a farmer), would be dismissed out of hand for being biased since they're from people and groups who practice and advocate organic/small-scale/local/low-external-input/what-have-you farming. Similarly, large corporations are very unlikely to permit studies casting their own practices and production in a negative light. Just FYI: Please cite your sources. And if you are afraid they may be called out as biased, truth is, they may be biased. The fact that you are calling attention to that is actually an issue, because unfortunately for your argument, the Organic crowed is more guilty of bias than most. Also, promoting the idea that their is a conspiracy against Organics by mainstream groups is just that, a conspiracy theory. Cite your sources.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 18:41 |
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CommieGIR posted:Just FYI: Please cite your sources. And if you are afraid they may be called out as biased, truth is, they may be biased. The fact that you are calling attention to that is actually an issue, because unfortunately for your argument, the Organic crowed is more guilty of bias than most. Hey, cite yours, too. e: You keep sayings things are objectively true, making strong claims about your argument, then demanding sources from others, without citing anything yourself. Tuxedo Gin fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Jun 10, 2016 |
# ? Jun 10, 2016 18:43 |
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I think there is not a major defense of industrial organic farming being better than industrial non-organic farming in this thread. They are the same thing. The real argument here is industrial global ag vs. local community centered ag.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 18:52 |
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Tuxedo Gin posted:The real argument here is industrial global ag vs. local community centered ag. What exactly does that entail - is it less mechanized and what farm size qualifies as non-industrial? Brannock posted:I also want to suggest that things being more expensive is not inherently or necessarily bad. Higher food prices are only a problem when people cannot afford them, which is a problem stemming in large part from our system that actively attempts to keep the poor poor. There is an enormous amount of waste in the system, as well as an enormous amount of government subsidization for farming and agriculture. Paying hypothetically $2.50 for your pound of green beans instead of $2.00 is not going to break the bank. Producing 20% fewer green beans, especially when we're already wasting a colossal amount of food, is not going to destroy the system. We might even be better off for it, if these green beans are coming from people we know and interact with, coming from farms that aren't a quarter of the planet away, and are grown in-season when the weather and the soil is appropriate for it. If we can pay slightly more for food, especially the sort of food that employs more people, is grown more conscientiously, is (arguably) of higher quality and (unarguably) of greater variety, then that seems better all around, right? It's a similar (but not identical) principle of having a $15 minimum wage. The US exports a lot of food so higher food prices have effects beyond the borders of the US. Paying 50 cents more for a pound of beans may or may not be manageable for the poor in the US but more likely than not it won't be for the poor that rely on US exports. When biofuels became a thing in the 2000s food prices spiked across the world. In Europe and the US people managed but there were shortages and ultimately political instability in other places. As far as I can tell implementing reforms that reduce production by 20% will have the same effect.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 19:09 |
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Tuxedo Gin posted:Hey, cite yours, too. https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...150c_story.html http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/organic-farming-yields-and-feeding-the-world-under-climate-change/ http://freakonomics.com/2011/11/14/the-inefficiency-of-local-food/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/henrymiller/2014/11/19/why-organic-isnt-sustainable/#389337e837aa CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Jun 10, 2016 |
# ? Jun 10, 2016 19:26 |
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Anos posted:What exactly does that entail - is it less mechanized and what farm size qualifies as non-industrial? I don't think there would be any size restrictions. It's more about feeding your local market and not a global one. My family has a tiny farm in rural San Diego county. We sell within the county. Between sales at markets and trading with other small local farms (We have extra eggs, persimmons, and honey - we trade for things that are in season but we don't grow), we have very little food waste. What produce is wasted is composted and used to fertilize our fields and orchards. We make enough to support 5 adults and 2 kids with a very, very comfortable lifestyle. We do not even put 40 hours a week into it. Obviously that is anecdotal and our entire food production system would have to be completely broken down in order to accommodate a shift to local farming, but would that be a bad thing? People need to work. People are hungry. We have a lot of wasted land in the suburbs and exurbs that could be used far more effectively. Urbanization doesn't require industrial farming, but suburban sprawl does, and is a waste (and not sustainable). Anos posted:The US exports a lot of food so higher food prices have effects beyond the borders of the US. Paying 50 cents more for a pound of beans may or may not be manageable for the poor in the US but more likely than not it won't be for the poor that rely on US exports. When biofuels became a thing in the 2000s food prices spiked across the world. In Europe and the US people managed but there were shortages and ultimately political instability in other places. As far as I can tell implementing reforms that reduce production by 20% will have the same effect. You can make the argument that people in other countries will die from a 50 cent increase in green beans, but the whole point of the local farming argument is that we should be using land to feed our local community. Millions across America don't get enough food to eat. Lots of kids get one meal a day: school provided lunch. Industrial ag isn't working for anyone but big business and middle class - and it isn't even better for the middle class, it just works for them.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 19:31 |
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Anos posted:The US exports a lot of food so higher food prices have effects beyond the borders of the US. Paying 50 cents more for a pound of beans may or may not be manageable for the poor in the US but more likely than not it won't be for the poor that rely on US exports. When biofuels became a thing in the 2000s food prices spiked across the world. In Europe and the US people managed but there were shortages and ultimately political instability in other places. As far as I can tell implementing reforms that reduce production by 20% will have the same effect. Exporting food is on its face a good thing, but ends up stifling agricultural and economic growth in other countries. Here's another, and one more. Regions should be nutritionally self-sufficient. When artificial political and economic barriers interfere, we get serious market imbalances, unnecessary food shortages, and that are enormously wasteful like most of the American desert regions that inexplicably have large populations and siphon off loads of water and resources. There's also the energy consumption problem. Abstract money aside, it costs far far more in real resources to ship green beans across oceans. The future of our human civilization should be concerned with the consumption of real resources. We're far too focused on money which is subject to manipulation, abuses, and market failures.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 19:35 |
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ReidRansom posted:My goto example on this is milk. Milk is some very chemically complex stuff, loads and loads of poo poo in there, and while it's trivial these days to make a cow make more milk, you can't necessarily make the cow make more of all of the things that go into that milk. Organic milk therefore is typically higher in these micronutrients and can indeed provide greater health benefits to the consumer should they not be getting those nutrients elsewhere. But that isn't to say that non-organic milk is bad. Organic is expensive, and I'd rather people have milk that isn't necessarily the best it can be than no milk at all.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 19:36 |
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twodot posted:What's an example of a micronutrient found in milk which your average American able to afford organic milk is unlikely to find elsewhere? Like iodized salt is good because even if people are unlikely to need it, it has basically no impact on production or price. If we're asserting organic milk is healthy because it complements the nutrition profile of Soylent drinkers, that seems pretty suspect. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/02/18/467136329/is-organic-more-nutritious-new-study-adds-to-the-evidence It's just better levels. Is it a huge difference? No, not really. It is the lack of hormones and antibiotics that make the massive difference and cost justification. Hormones and antibiotics from meat and dairy are having substantial impacts on general health in this country.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 19:49 |
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If you actually want to do this, make your farm into one of those community groups and then trick all the community folks as well as local schools to come out and 'farm' and 'learn to live on the land' and all that crap and get a bunch of free labor.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 19:51 |
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CommieGIR posted:Just FYI: Please cite your sources. And if you are afraid they may be called out as biased, truth is, they may be biased. The fact that you are calling attention to that is actually an issue, because unfortunately for your argument, the Organic crowed is more guilty of bias than most. I put effort in my response to you and I'm disappointed you found it unnecessary to engage with any of what I wrote. Partly because of that, I am not particularly inclined to go to the trouble of digging up studies and sources for you. Your unconditional resistance to what we're discussing I think justifies my concern that anything I provide will be dismissed out of hand. Further, you keep assuming that I'm an Organic Farming advocate despite my saying otherwise multiple times, which is a strong indicator that you didn't take the time to read what I and others have been writing. Claiming that the suggestion that the enormous industrial agribusiness industry will actively work to push and publicize its own interests and minimize competition is a conspiracy theory is laughable because that's exactly what they do. It's what businesses do, it's in their interest! If they didn't do it, they wouldn't be good businesses in our capitalistic system! It's what businesses and corporations do in all other industries, why should agribusiness be an exception? Do I need to cite the Milk advertising movement or the food pyramid or corn growers pushing for more and more support for their crop, to name a few of the most well-known examples? When the original organic farming movement became too large to be ignored, agribusiness interests bought out a lot of these, branded, and folded them into their own operations. This is part of why industrial-organic agribusinesses operate so very similarly to industrial agriculture. Further, let's assume you're correct and small farms have a lower yield-per-acre than large farms (ignoring other variables, like multiple crops and livestock instead of a monoculture, etc, etc). So what? Productivity itself is not an inherent good. If we can squeeze 99% productivity out of our farms with colossal megaindustrial practices and we're able to feed another 8 billion people because of that and our population grows accordingly, is that actually a good thing? What have we gained? Are you and I better off for it? Is our society better off for it? Is our home, our planet, better off for it? Shouldn't we be thinking about what we decide to do as a society, about our food practices, our work, and our societal rites, in terms of what benefits us best, instead of what creates the most clutter and enables the most consumption? Why the endless pursuit of more, more, more? Do we really need more people? There's seven billion people on our planet. Do we really need more food? The entire Northern Hemisphere (and Australia) is experiencing an obesity crisis that's starting to spread into South America and Africa as well. CommieGIR posted:https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...150c_story.html These sources look amusingly like the top results on Google for "organic farming inefficiency studies". The first one is a personal article by a small-scale farmer and is decidedly neutral on which is better, but tends to favor the small farms. The second has a familiar-sounding quote (by that, if it's not clear, I mean it resembles a sentence you challenged me on earlier in this thread): quote:"But, this yield difference varies across different conditions. When farmers apply best management practices, organic systems, for example, perform relatively better." and is mostly supportive of small-scale farming while conceding that industrial farming DOES have higher yield. I don't believe yield is necessarily the end-all be-all as I wrote above. The third misses the point rather largely by complaining about lower productivity, and assumes that local farming requires more "chemicals". It goes on to assume that we need to, and should, continue our policy of massive corn and soybean production even though we're struggling to find ways to use all these corn and soybeans and it ends up being filtered into our entire food system either through being fed to our animals, used as fertilizer, or processed into manufactured food. The fourth is interesting because it fixates on sustainability. Why is sustainability the goal, rather than stability? Miller argues that sustainability isn't sufficient to feed a "growing population" (there's that conceit again). Why should our society be in a state of constant growth, especially when it threatens to damage and overwhelm the systems that enable its functioning? The quote on the final part (page 3) of the article provides a definition for sustainability that I would characterize as better fitting for "stability". Miller is also explicitly arguing against the American definition of Organic Farming, something I've already distanced myself from in this thread, and criticizes many of the same ideas and practices that I have been. Using large amounts of metals, insecticides, fungicides, is, I suggest, missing the point of trying to work more in harmony with nature to grow food. Soil-maintenance practices that create increased erosion and runoff is neither sustainable nor stable and does not live up to the ideals of "organic farming". I also agree that the knee-jerk opposition to GMO is silly and unhelpful.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 19:52 |
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twodot posted:What's an example of a micronutrient found in milk which your average American able to afford organic milk is unlikely to find elsewhere? Like iodized salt is good because even if people are unlikely to need it, it has basically no impact on production or price. If we're asserting organic milk is healthy because it complements the nutrition profile of Soylent drinkers, that seems pretty suspect. CLA in both milk and meat. Also found in some mushrooms. Now, as wikipedia there says, the evidence for any benefit CLA in particular may have in humans is still a bit up in the air, but it has shown evidence of anti-cancer properties and weight reduction and some role in preventing early-onset puberty, all likely related to its anti-aromatase activity. And it is something the content of which has decreased in our foods with modern production.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 20:02 |
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In the interests of promoting discussion (and to demonstrate that I'm not a crusader for any particular side): http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/13/opinion/the-myth-of-sustainable-meat.html quote:The Myth of Sustainable Meat Joel Salatin (he of Polyface Farm/Omnivore's Dilemma fame) responds quote:The recent editorial by James McWilliams, titled “The Myth of Sustainable Meat,” contains enough factual errors and skewed assumptions to fill a book, and normally I would dismiss this out of hand as too much nonsense to merit a response. But since it specifically mentioned Polyface, a rebuttal is appropriate. For a more comprehensive rebuttal, read the book Folks, This Ain’t Normal. I don't think either McWilliams or Salatin are entirely correct (for instance, Salatin's numbers about wetlands and methane are off the mark) but, frankly, that's true for all sides in this discussion. I do think there's a hell of a lot of room for improvement, and I do agree with Salatin that individual households are ripe for improvement and better engagement with the food system (as well as providing their own contributions). One thing Salatin didn't bring up, and one thing McWilliams didn't mention, is that we eat entirely too much meat. Any future that has improved agricultural and improved food practices will involve a lot less meat than we currently eat. That is not to say that we should eliminate animals entirely from our diet. Animals are a very useful vehicle for converting inedible biomass into human-digestible nutrients, and in particular animals are excellent at turning land that are otherwise unsuitable for growing crops into productive food environments. (There is a reason, for instance, that Scottish Highland Cattle exist. The highlands are nearly impossible to grow food in, but the cattle can transform the weeds and grasses there into food for us.)
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 20:14 |
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ReidRansom posted:CLA in both milk and meat. Also found in some mushrooms.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 20:18 |
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twodot posted:You haven't addressed my question, because there isn't established maximum beneficial amount of CLA (even assuming it is beneficial whatsoever, which seems in dispute), and whether an ordinary meat or mushroom eater would hit that limit anyways. You said "can indeed provide greater health benefits", but what you appear to mean is "For people who have a specific deficiency, which hasn't actually been proven to exist, drinking organic milk can be good". Given modern diets, I think someone saying "Using iodized salt can provide greater health benefits" to be very disingenuous. That it is beneficial isn't in dispute. It's more the specific mechanism by which it acts and how that interacts with all the other complex biological processes in an animal (human or other) that are still not well understood. It is not for a specific deficiency as you cannot produce your own CLA. You can only get it from foods. Recommended intake is ~3g/day, which you can get from non-organic meat or milk, but you'll need to consume about 5x as much to do so. e: and like I said before, it is definitely better that people get something, even if it's not ideal, rather than nothing because they can't afford it. This was meant as an example of something where a more traditional method yields a product with a measurable difference in something that can impact health ReidRansom fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Jun 10, 2016 |
# ? Jun 10, 2016 20:28 |
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Also, using non-iodized salt doesn't pump you full of biological function altering hormones and superbug contributing antibiotics. GMO hysteria is dumb, but hormones and antibiotics in meat and dairy are loving awful.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 20:33 |
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Brannock posted:Exporting food is on its face a good thing, but ends up stifling agricultural and economic growth in other countries. Here's another, and one more. Regions should be nutritionally self-sufficient. When artificial political and economic barriers interfere, we get serious market imbalances, unnecessary food shortages, and that are enormously wasteful like most of the American desert regions that inexplicably have large populations and siphon off loads of water and resources. Not all regions can be self-sufficient. Should they ideally be? Sure. But they aren't and they can't be. We can take Saudi Arabia as the worst example. I guess they could theoretically desalinate enough water to grow enough food but it's not obvious that it would require less energy than importing it. Moreover, climate change will shift which areas are more productive, potentially making populous and currently self-sufficient countries rely on imports in the future. We need a global food network to deal with the fact that people do not naturally distribute themselves according to agricultural output and short or long term changes thereof. Tuxedo Gin posted:I don't think there would be any size restrictions. It's more about feeding your local market and not a global one. My family has a tiny farm in rural San Diego county. We sell within the county. Between sales at markets and trading with other small local farms (We have extra eggs, persimmons, and honey - we trade for things that are in season but we don't grow), we have very little food waste. What produce is wasted is composted and used to fertilize our fields and orchards. Ok, but what do you do if your crop fails? As in, all communities are now self-sufficient and there's very little food waste but this year floods destroyed a whole lotta farmland. You can't just say you'll import it from somewhere else because that system doesn't exist anymore and besides they have to feed their own local communities. Without over-production or a food network you have no hedge against it. There's a reason developed countries rarely experience famines today and it's not self-sufficiency. The people who live in the suburbs and the people who struggle to afford food are very often two different groups. Suburbanites don't grow food because they can afford not to and those that can't afford food also can't afford the land to grow it on. Tuxedo Gin posted:You can make the argument that people in other countries will die from a 50 cent increase in green beans, but the whole point of the local farming argument is that we should be using land to feed our local community. Millions across America don't get enough food to eat. Lots of kids get one meal a day: school provided lunch. Industrial ag isn't working for anyone but big business and middle class - and it isn't even better for the middle class, it just works for them. But it does kinda work - there's enough food and it's here reliably without the famines of the past. People may struggle to afford it but that's a systemic, political problem unrelated to farming practices and it won't be solved by changing how we grow food and making food more expensive. If you solve poverty then I guess we could grow food in a different way but surely we should first ensure that people can afford it before we make those changes.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 20:41 |
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ReidRansom posted:That it is beneficial isn't in dispute. ReidRansom posted:the evidence for any benefit CLA in particular may have in humans is still a bit up in the air quote:Recommended intake is ~3d/day, which you can get from non-organic meat or milk, but you'll need to consume about 5x as much to do so. twodot fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Jun 10, 2016 |
# ? Jun 10, 2016 20:42 |
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Anos posted:Not all regions can be self-sufficient. Should they ideally be? Sure. But they aren't and they can't be. We can take Saudi Arabia as the worst example. I guess they could theoretically desalinate enough water to grow enough food but it's not obvious that it would require less energy than importing it. Moreover, climate change will shift which areas are more productive, potentially making populous and currently self-sufficient countries rely on imports in the future. We need a global food network to deal with the fact that people do not naturally distribute themselves according to agricultural output and short or long term changes thereof. I suggest that places like Saudi Arabia, Phoenix, Dubai, and Las Vegas should not be inhabited by humans to the extent that they are, nor should we try to make them habitable when it comes at the cost of siphoning massive amounts of resources from elsewhere. The reason that they even exist the way they do today is thanks to the abstraction of money and an international financial system, not because of any actual legitimate accounting of the consumption of real-resources and a serious cost-benefit analysis of such. Climate change is unlikely to transform these places into cornucopias. In fact, it is more likely to further drat these places.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 20:47 |
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twodot posted:I don't understand how to reconcile this with this: Sorry, i edited that to 3g/d. And the hard evidence is mostly in animals, is what I mean. In humans it isn't conclusively proven, but there is ample evidence showing that some animal models do apply. And yes, by all means, supplement if you're not getting enough. It's good for you. But you could also get enough of it in your diet if you choose what you eat carefully. This is all I'm saying. ee: and once again, this was only meant as an example of how organic sometimes isn't total bullshit. It is not meant to say you cannot get the same benefit from some other source. ReidRansom fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Jun 10, 2016 |
# ? Jun 10, 2016 20:50 |
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The problem with this topic is that the way we are doing things right now, works for the world right now. We are raping our agriculturally productive land. We are wasting space with useless suburban sprawl. We have massive populations in places that simply cannot support those populations. Yes, for local community farming to be ideal we would need make some progress on problems like poverty, overpopulation, and unsustainable business and lifestyle practices. But we need to address those things anyway. Yeah, right now things work pretty loving well, for the most part. In 100+ years that probably won't be the case. Passing the buck and saying "technology will sort it out" is setting your grandkids and great grandkids for a really, really bad time. The problems with agriculture are intertwined with economic issues and ecological issues. It is cheaper and easier to stay the course, but it isn't better. Nobody is calling for an immediate end to major industrial agriculture, but rather a shift to making local choices when you can, even if it is a little more expensive or requires you to go to a farmer's market on Sunday morning.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 20:55 |
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ReidRansom posted:But you could also get enough of it in your diet if you choose what you eat carefully. This is all I'm saying. edit: ReidRansom posted:ee: and once again, this was only meant as an example of how organic sometimes isn't total bullshit. It is not meant to say you cannot get the same benefit from some other source. twodot fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Jun 10, 2016 |
# ? Jun 10, 2016 20:58 |
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twodot posted:I don't think you've provided any evidence this is true, even presuming it's good. Like grass fed cows produce more CLA in their milk than other cows, that doesn't seem to be in dispute, but whether that amount matters seems very much in dispute, especially considering an inability to reproduce, in humans, benefits found in animals. Are you being intentionally dense? The other source would mean supplements. And why supplement if you can get it in your diet? And the inability to reproduce in humans what we see in animals is because we don't split humans into groups, feed them different diets until puberty, and then kill and dissect them to weigh their ovaries or any poo poo like that. There just aren't as many trials in humans because they're expensive and take years and years and years, but here is a study showing benefit in humans.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 21:27 |
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ReidRansom posted:One other thing I'd mention in regard to organic meat and produce is taste and variety. Yes, some of that is entirely subjective and may have nothing to do with the fact that it is organically grown, but modern industrial agriculture is really only concerned with maximum yield and therefore maximum profit. If you want heirloom varieties of produce or breeds of meat animal, you're probably looking at organic because it's either not as profitable at an industrial scale, or in some other way unsuitable for that level of production. It's also even less sustainable than industrial agriculture. Sustainable isn't heirloom roosters raised in a specific terroir and fed organic corn it's synthetic chicken breasts grown in a vat
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 21:29 |
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Tuxedo Gin posted:I think there is not a major defense of industrial organic farming being better than industrial non-organic farming in this thread. There is this thing called 'economy of scale' which is why we don't produce things by using artisans in cottages like the 1700s anymore
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 21:31 |
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# ? May 30, 2024 13:21 |
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icantfindaname posted:It's also even less sustainable than industrial agriculture. Sustainable isn't heirloom roosters raised in a specific terroir and fed organic corn it's synthetic chicken breasts grown in a vat It's all such small scale it's usually pretty low impact though.
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# ? Jun 10, 2016 21:32 |