What is to be grown? (Agribusiness, Organic, Local Farming Discussion)

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > What is to be grown? (Agribusiness, Organic, Local Farming Discussion)

Brannock: Feb 9, 2006; by exmarx; Fallen Rib

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.

But the crux of your idea I think is the creation of a communications system that actually serves the public benefit which is basically what tindr/grindr is. Sure it makes money but it also actually does function as a communication platform to fill a use in society, without immediately being detrimental to public safety.

To which end, a lot of the actual startup apps would be fine if they weren't trying to build a business on the basis of breaking/avoiding the law. A smartphone app for registered taxis would be a good thing. A social app for people to arrange communal meals would be a good thing. The issue is always the desire to turn a profit off the actual service without a commensurate degree of protection for the consumer and the worker.

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.

Ethical issues are rampant in the industry, yes, and while erosion and fertilizer runoff are a (large) problem, I think you're glossing over the impact that pesticides and monoculture have on the health and fertility of the soil. Blasting the soil repeatedly has a nasty side effect of destroying its health and requiring more and more external interference to keep it fertile and able to grow crops. GMO crops are helping to alleviate the pesticide problem, though. I have trouble believing your implication that meat harvested from animals that subsist off corn, protein pastes, and a steady diet of antibiotics, is as healthy and nutritious as that harvested from animals that are allowed to eat and grow as they would "naturally" (here used 'as opposed to in a factory environment"). A varied and natural diet, in combination with plenty of exercise, movement, and sunshine is provably better and healthier for humans than chowing on Doritos while seated indoors 24/7 -- is it really that far-fetched to think that it's also the case for the animals we eat?

That's before we get into how much energy is required to operate a global-reaching network to exchange food and fertilizer and all the other things you need to operate a modern industrial farm. That problem is starting to go away as we replace fossil fuels with longer-term and less-polluting forms of energy, but, frankly, it's not going away fast enough (and may already be too late) and it'll still be a long while before we're able to find a suitable replacement for fossil fuels for transportation itself.

"Sufficient laws" would, if implemented and enforced, do a lot to address the problems both you and I bring up. Unfortunately, large corporations have a habit of following regulations to the barest possible extent, and there's significant amounts of pressure and pushback from agribusiness against improved regulation, studies on nutritional impact and health, and the like. While it's true that smaller farmers are hit harder by setbacks (either market or act-of-God) and regulations, it's not like the government doesn't already provide assistance for these scenarios.

In my experience (which I admit is biased, I interact mostly with local small farmers and these at the farmer's market) conscientious and educated local farmers are better at working their land properly and attending to its unique differences, compared to larger farms leveling and brute-forcing their land and animals with industrial methods. I readily admit that many, if not most, small farmers are (and were) not conscientious and educated. I think we can aim for better ideals with our food and our lives, however, than "Whatever, let the Morlocks out in, heh, flyover country force-feed nature through our industrial machines while the vast majority of us sit around all day in our cities and cubicles."

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.

HOWEVER, industrial farming doesn't count the costs of long-term degradation of the soil, extermination of wildlife, and pollution of aquifers and streams. Industrial farming is degrading common resources in the same way that uncapped smokestacks degraded common air.

Industrial farming produces more food *per acre*, not per person. That's the point. Humans are cheap, acreage is expensive. The supply of farmable land is far smaller than the supply of people. (I don't know how this applies to the slow abandonment of prairie farming in the Dakotas and so on; I think that the land is marginal enough that the returns aren't high, but I don't actually know.)

tl;dr: Farming is complicated, and what you were taught in school was bullshit.

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.

Industrial farming not only rapes the land it is on, but it requires massive amounts of imported products (fertilizers, pesticides, fuel for vehicles including aircraft for spraying) that has a significant impact on land outside the farm. Industrial farms also have favorable water contracts and have little incentive to use that resource efficiently.

Industrial farming is cheaper for the consumer, but I'd even question that with the amount of subsidies that industrial agriculture gets. It certainly is not less resource intensive than small organic family farms. The primary benefit of industrial agriculture is amount of food produced, which is a dumb argument since so much food is thrown away in the process - from farm to supermarket dumpster.

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.

Yeah, my story is anecdotal, but it also reflects the experience of the small time family farms that surround ours. The impact of industrialized agriculture to the land absolutely requires more fertilizers, chemicals, and usually a lot more water per unit grown (and absolutely per unit consumed) than smaller operations. It also apparently requires leading schools that are lousy with scientists to support their methods. If industrial agriculture is so loving cost and resource efficient, why do they need so many subsidies?

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.

As I had cause to point out in UKMT the other day, it's quite possible to massively, massively increase yield per acre over conventional farming methods by greatly increasing labor use and forgoing the use of traditional harvesting machinery.

Yes current industrial farming methods do increase yield over pre-industrial methods but that is not really the point of them, the point of them, as with all industry, is to reduce labor costs because actually just owning land is cheaper than having to pay workers. There is no reason for the market to favor increasing crop yield per acre when you can just sprawl farmland over 90% of the country. If, however, you think doing that is ecologically damaging or unsustainable in the long term due to soil damage or whatnot, then the farming method you're looking for is quite different from what is commonly used now.

As has been pointed out above, we have a surplus of labor and it seems probably that that will only increase over time. So mechanized farming, while certainly profitable, does not really serve that much of a need in terms of productivity per-acre unless you have something better to use your labor surplus for.

cheese posted:

1) I completely agree that using a simple dollar valuation is flawed. But that is what is currently being used.
2) The idea of making food more expensive to somehow help poor people is asinine. Cheap food is what is keeping poor people alive, and that includes being able to go to McDonalds and feed a family of four for 10 bucks. The food is poo poo, no doubt, but stomachs have to be filled.

This is a result of the increasing irrationally of pairing a persons job and societal value as expressed through monetary wages, not as a sign that we should supplement our steadily falling wages with a labor intensive vegetable garden. When you eliminate eliminate countless jobs every year through increased productivity and technological advancements (including automation), but still demand that everyone prove they deserve to live by having a job, you are setting yourself up for failure and eventual revolution. I don't think the solution to that is taking the unemployed and making them harvest lettuce.

I think you are also ignoring the massive numbers of urban poor for whom a plot of farmable land is a pipe dream (because they live in a lovely apartment in an ocean of asphalt).

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.

Which is, I note, good for pretty much everyone else in society.

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.

If we want to talk about increasing food efficiency and making sustainable agriculture the easier option for every large-scale op, I think the obvious answer is that we have to drastically reduce our consumption of land animals. I don't know how, though. I started cooking shrimp as my meat staple instead of chicken, but I'm single and exceed the median household income in America so I can afford it. I mean, my local Food 4 Less has some pretty cheap frozen shrimp, but the chicken is still cheaper. It is not clear to me how to make it easy to rely on less meat, as it hits on cultural identity for a lot of people. And the other thing is that if everyone switches to shrimp overnight, there'd be a huge strain on those populations, so a veg-heavy diet is going to be key. I don't know.

You just said that poor people can't afford food at current prices. How much waste can they cut? I mean, we definitely need this going on in the States, but there's a lot more that's needed besides for full-organic to be a standard option for poor and even moderate-income families.

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?

The discussion should be about minimizing reliant on the international system as much as possible in favor of localized and specialized farming, but lol if you think most people are going to see that as a good thing instead of something that makes them less rich because they have that much fewer things to extract value out of.

I can see that this is a hot topic (as food-related topics tend to be). Should I or someone else make a thread for discussion?

There's this cultural idea that agricultural work is necessarily and inherently lovely so we've been pushing more and more people into cities. Who exactly is this benefiting? It's certainly not the poor who end up destitute and without work. Living in the country is not really any less lovely or less cultured than having access to the latest One Direction concert or nanobrewery -- especially nowadays with ubiquitous Internet access and international shipping. Do people need to be surrounded by millions of other people and to work in cubicle farms for their lives to be culturally fulfilling?

Good in what way? Why is cheaper better? Why sprint as fast as possible towards the bottom? For a century we went for As Cheap and As Many As Possible and it got us a planet of over seven billion people and a looming civilization-destroying ecological crisis. Why not As Quality As Possible?

Your farmers are bitching about not being able to keep up with the factory farms because, unless you left out some details, they're growing the exact same things as the factory farms using similar methods and practices. Of course they can't compete with the mega-operators who have huge resources at their fingertips to force compliance from the land and to soak short-term turbulence. It's a losing proposition either way. The more they grow the cheaper their food they get, so the more they have to grow to just be able to keep up, and they get mired further and further in debt. Government subsidies help with this but it doesn't prevent the problem from growing and ensnaring these people.

These massive yields of corn and soybeans, by the way I should point out, are a huge reason why American food sucks and a huge contributor to the extreme obesity crisis we're facing. I shudder to think of what it's doing to the soil, especially with the huge amounts of external input necessary to keep the soil fertile. We urgently need better variety in our agriculture.

Ready, set, grow!

# ¿ Jun 10, 2016 17:33

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Brannock: Feb 9, 2006; by exmarx; Fallen Rib

CommieGIR posted:

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.

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.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2016 18:04

Brannock: Feb 9, 2006; by exmarx; Fallen Rib

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.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2016 18:31

Brannock: Feb 9, 2006; by exmarx; Fallen Rib

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.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2016 19:35

Brannock: Feb 9, 2006; by exmarx; Fallen Rib

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.

Also, promoting the idea that their is a conspiracy against Organics by mainstream groups is just that, a conspiracy theory.

Cite your sources.

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

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

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.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2016 19:52

Brannock: Feb 9, 2006; by exmarx; Fallen Rib

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

The industrial production of animal products is nasty business. From mad cow, E. coli and salmonella to soil erosion, manure runoff and pink slime, factory farming is the epitome of a broken food system.

There have been various responses to these horrors, including some recent attempts to improve the industrial system, like the announcement this week that farmers will have to seek prescriptions for sick animals instead of regularly feeding antibiotics to all stock. My personal reaction has been to avoid animal products completely. But most people upset by factory farming have turned instead to meat, dairy and eggs from nonindustrial sources. Indeed, the last decade has seen an exciting surge in grass-fed, free-range, cage-free and pastured options. These alternatives typically come from small organic farms, which practice more humane methods of production. They appeal to consumers not only because they reject the industrial model, but because they appear to be more in tune with natural processes.

For all the strengths of these alternatives, however, they�re ultimately a poor substitute for industrial production. Although these smaller systems appear to be environmentally sustainable, considerable evidence suggests otherwise.

Grass-grazing cows emit considerably more methane than grain-fed cows. Pastured organic chickens have a 20 percent greater impact on global warming. It requires 2 to 20 acres to raise a cow on grass. If we raised all the cows in the United States on grass (all 100 million of them), cattle would require (using the figure of 10 acres per cow) almost half the country�s land (and this figure excludes space needed for pastured chicken and pigs). A tract of land just larger than France has been carved out of the Brazilian rain forest and turned over to grazing cattle. Nothing about this is sustainable.

Advocates of small-scale, nonindustrial alternatives say their choice is at least more natural. Again, this is a dubious claim. Many farmers who raise chickens on pasture use industrial breeds that have been bred to do one thing well: fatten quickly in confinement. As a result, they can suffer painful leg injuries after several weeks of living a �natural� life pecking around a large pasture. Free-range pigs are routinely affixed with nose rings to prevent them from rooting, which is one of their most basic instincts. In essence, what we see as natural doesn�t necessarily conform to what is natural from the animals� perspectives.

The economics of alternative animal systems are similarly problematic. Subsidies notwithstanding, the unfortunate reality of commodifying animals is that confinement pays. If the production of meat and dairy was somehow decentralized into small free-range operations, common economic sense suggests that it wouldn�t last. These businesses � no matter how virtuous in intention � would gradually seek a larger market share, cutting corners, increasing stocking density and aiming to fatten animals faster than competitors could. Barring the strictest regulations, it wouldn�t take long for production systems to scale back up to where they started. (Brannock Note: Capitalism and the profit drive! Is inherently unstable!)

All this said, committed advocates of alternative systems make one undeniably important point about the practice called �rotational grazing� or �holistic farming�: the soil absorbs the nutrients from the animals� manure, allowing grass and other crops to grow without the addition of synthetic fertilizer. As Michael Pollan writes, �It is doubtful you can build a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients.� In other words, raising animals is not only sustainable, but required.

But rotational grazing works better in theory than in practice. Consider Joel Salatin, the guru of nutrient cycling, who employs chickens to enrich his cows� grazing lands with nutrients. His plan appears to be impressively eco-correct, until we learn that he feeds his chickens with tens of thousands of pounds a year of imported corn and soy feed. This common practice is an economic necessity. Still, if a farmer isn�t growing his own feed, the nutrients going into the soil have been purloined from another, most likely industrial, farm, thereby undermining the benefits of nutrient cycling.

Finally, there is no avoiding the fact that the nutrient cycle is interrupted every time a farmer steps in and slaughters a perfectly healthy manure-generating animal, something that is done before animals live a quarter of their natural lives. When consumers break the nutrient cycle to eat animals, nutrients leave the system of rotationally grazed plots of land (though of course this happens with plant-based systems as well). They land in sewer systems and septic tanks (in the form of human waste) and in landfills and rendering plants (in the form of animal carcasses).

Farmers could avoid this waste by exploiting animals only for their manure, allowing them to live out the entirety of their lives on the farm, all the while doing their own breeding and growing of feed. But they�d better have a trust fund.

Opponents of industrialized agriculture have been declaring for over a decade that how humans produce animal products is one of the most important environmental questions we face. We need a bolder declaration. After all, it�s not how we produce animal products that ultimately matters. It�s whether we produce them at all.

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.

Let�s go point by point. First, that grass-grazing cows emit more methane than grain-fed ones. This is factually false. Actually, the amount of methane emitted by fermentation is the same whether it occurs in the cow or outside. Whether the feed is eaten by an herbivore or left to rot on its own, the methane generated is identical. Wetlands emit some 95 percent of all methane in the world; herbivores are insignificant enough to not even merit consideration. Anyone who really wants to stop methane needs to start draining wetlands. Quick, or we�ll all perish. I assume he�s figuring that since it takes longer to grow a beef on grass than on grain, the difference in time adds days to the emissions. But grain production carries a host of maladies far worse than methane. This is simply cherry-picking one negative out of many positives to smear the foundation of how soil builds: herbivore pruning, perennial disturbance-rest cycles, solar-grown biomass, and decomposition. This is like demonizing marriage because a good one will include some arguments.

As for his notion that it takes too much land to grass-finish, his figures of 10 acres per animal are assuming the current normal mismanagement of pastures. At Polyface, we call it neanderthal management, because most livestock farmers have not yet joined the 20th century with electric fencing, ponds, piped water, and modern scientific aerobic composting (only as old as chemical fertilization). Hence, while his figures comparing the relative production of grain to grass may sound compelling, they are like comparing the learning opportunities under a terrible teacher versus a magnificent teacher. Many farmers, in many different climates, are now using space-age technology, biomimicry, and close management to get exponential increases in forage production. The rainforest, by the way, is not being cut to graze cattle. It�s being cut to grow transgenic corn and soybeans. North America had twice as many herbivores 500 years ago than it does today due to the pulsing of the predator-prey-pruning cycle on perennial prairie polycultures. And that was without any corn or soybeans at all.

Apparently if you lie often and big enough, some people will believe it: Pastured chicken has a 20 percent greater impact on global warming? Says who? The truth is that those industrial chicken houses are not stand-alone structures. They require square miles of grain to be carted into them, and square miles of land to handle the manure. Of course, many times that land is not enough. To industrial farmers� relief, more often than not a hurricane comes along just in time to flush the toilet, kill the fish, and send pathogens into the ocean. That�s a nice way to reduce the alleged footprint, but it�s devilish sleight of hand with the data to assume that ecological toxicity compensates for the true land base needed to sustain a factory farm.

While it�s true that at Polyface our omnivores (poultry and pigs) do eat local GMO (genetically modified organism)-free grain in addition to the forage, the land base required to feed and metabolize the manure is no different than that needed to sustain the same animals in a confinement setting. Even if they ate zero pasturage, the land is the same. The only difference is our animals get sunshine, exercise, fresh pasture salad bars, fresh air, and a respectful life. Chickens walking on pasture certainly do not have any more leg sprains than those walking in a confinement facility. To suggest otherwise, as McWilliams does, is sheer nonsense. Walking is walking � and it�s generally considered to be a healthy practice, unless you�re a tyrant.

Interestingly, in a lone concession to compassion, McWilliams decries ranging hogs with rings in their noses to keep them from rooting, lamenting that this is �one of their most basic instincts.� Notice that he does not reconcile this moral imperative with his love affair with confinement hog factories. Nothing much to use their noses for in there. For the record, Polyface never rings hog noses, and in the few cases where we�ve purchased hogs with rings, we take them out. We want them to fully express their pigness. By moving them frequently using modern electric fencing, polyethylene water piping, high-tech float valves, and scientifically designed feed dispensers, we do not create nor suffer the problems encountered by earlier large-scale outdoor hog operations 100 years ago. McWilliams has apparently never had the privilege of visiting a first-rate, modern, highly managed, pastured hog operation. He thinks we�re all stuck in the early 1900s, and that�s a shame because he�d discover the answers to his concerns are already here. I wonder where his paycheck comes from?

Then McWilliams moves on to the argument that economic realities would kick in if pastured livestock became normal, driving farmers to scale up and end up right where we are today. What a clever ploy: justify the horrible by eliminating the alternatives. At Polyface, we certainly do not discourage scaling up � we actually encourage it. We think more pasture-based farms should scale up. Between the current abysmal state of mismanagement, however, and efficient operations, is an astronomical opportunity to enjoy economic and ecological advantages. McWilliams is basing his data and assumptions on the poorest, the average or below. If you want to demonize something, always pick the lowest performers. But if you compare the best the industry has to offer with the best the pasture-based systems have to offer, the factory farms don�t have a prayer. Using portable infrastructure, tight management, and techno-glitzy tools, farmers running pastured hog operations practically eliminate capitalization costs and vet bills.

Finally, McWilliams moves to the knock-out punch in his discussion of nutrient cycling, charging specifically that Polyface is a charade because it depends on grain from industrial farms to maintain soil fertility. First of all, at Polyface we do not assume that all nutrient movement is anti-environmental. In fact, one of the biggest reasons for animals in nature is to move nutrients uphill, against the natural gravitational flow from high ground to low ground. This is why low lands and valleys are fertile and the uplands are less so. Animals are the only mechanism nature has to defy this natural downward flow. Fortunately, predators make the prey animals want to lounge on high ground (where they can see their enemies), which insures that manure will concentrate on high lookout spots rather than in the valleys. Perhaps this is why no ecosystem exists that is devoid of animals. The fact is that nutrient movement is inherently nature-healing.

But, it doesn�t move very far. And herein lies the difference between grain used at Polyface and that used by the industry: We care where ours comes from. It�s not just a commodity. It has an origin and an ending, start to finish, farmer to eater. The closer we can connect the carbon cycles, the more environmentally normal we will become.

Second, herbivores are the exception to the entire negative nutrient flow argument because by pruning back the forage to restart the rapid biomass accumulation photosynthetic engine, the net carbon flow compensates for anything lost through harvest. Herbivores do not require tillage or annuals, and that is why all historically deep soils have been created by them, not by omnivores. It�s fascinating that McWilliams wants to demonize pasture-based livestock for not closing all the nutrient loops, but has no problem, apparently, with the horrendous nutrient toxicity like dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey created by chemical fertilizer runoff to grow grain so that the life of a beef could be shortened. Unbelievable. In addition, this is one reason Polyface continues to fight for relaxing food safety regulations to allow on-farm slaughtering, precisely so we can indeed keep all these nutrients on the farm and not send them the rendering plants. If the greenies who don�t want historically normal farm activities like slaughter to occur on rural acreage could understand how devastating these government regulations actually are to the environmental economy, perhaps McWilliams wouldn�t have this bullet in his arsenal. And yes, human waste should be put back on the land as well, to help close the loop.

Third, at Polyface, we struggle upstream. Historically, omnivores were salvage operations. Hogs ate spoiled milk, whey, acorns, chestnuts, spoiled fruit, and a host of other farmstead products. Ditto for chickens, who dined on kitchen scraps and garden refuse. That today 50 percent of all the human edible food produced in the world goes into landfills or greenie-endorsed composting operations rather than through omnivores is both ecologically and morally reprehensible. At Polyface, we�ve tried for many, many years to get kitchen scraps back from restaurants to feed our poultry, but the logistics are a nightmare. The fact is that in America we have created a segregated food and farming system. In the perfect world, Polyface would not sell eggs. Instead, every kitchen, both domestic and commercial, would have enough chickens proximate to handle all the scraps. This would eliminate the entire egg industry and current heavy grain feeding paradigm. At Polyface, we only purport to be doing the best we can do as we struggle through a deviant, historically abnormal food and farming system. We didn�t create what is and we may not solve it perfectly. But we�re sure a lot farther toward real solutions than McWilliams can imagine. And if society would move where we want to go, and the government regulators would let us move where we need to go, and the industry would not try to criminalize us as we try to go there, we�ll all be a whole lot better off and the earthworms will dance.

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.)

# ¿ Jun 10, 2016 20:14

Brannock: Feb 9, 2006; by exmarx; Fallen Rib

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.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2016 20:47

Brannock: Feb 9, 2006; by exmarx; Fallen Rib

CommieGIR posted:

That's the problem though: These people are arguing that their method of farming should be the only viable and acceptable version. So, yes, it is an issue.

This is outright false. What they're arguing isn't that all industrial production should cease immediately, they're saying that industrial production has significant negative externalities that aren't being fully accounted for, and that there isn't sufficient alternative sources of food for people. On top of that, they're also advocating a shift back (to be clear, a shift, not a complete and instant transformation of the entire industry) to cities sourcing their food from nearby areas instead of halfway across Earth. Some of the more zealous will go on all-encompassing rants talking about the deleterious effects of the industry, but the overall consensus is that it's impossible to feed 7+ billion without mass industrial farming.

The real question is: how did it get to be this way? Why is it this way? Is it the best way we can arrange the system? (No) Is it good and healthy for our people, or for our culture, or for our mental state, satisfaction and happiness?

CommieGIR posted:

Oh Salatin.

The guy who thinks the Wetlands produces more Methane that bovine agriculture.

Got it

No, I'm gonna say Salatin isn't a very good source for farming tips and helping solve the ecological impact of farming.

The guy is just a farmer. That's it. No studies. No actual evidence. Just lots of first hand experience and anecdotes.

"Don't worry guys, I have it in faith that my system can replace industrial agriculture!"

His system is insane. Nor is this a sustainable system. By his logic, we should all have to drive out to the farm to get all our poultry and meats. This would result in farms of massive scale surrounding cities and towns. A bunch of farmers with their own homespun wisdom on farming is not a viable solution to sustainable agriculture and farming.

Okay dude when you quote an external source citing a quote from the same article that I provided full text of, to rebut a part of that article that in the very post that you quoted I actually point out his mistake about methane and wetlands, when you do that it makes it laughably clear that you aren't actually bothering to take time to read and comprehend, and that you aren't approaching this with anything resembling conductiveness to a discussion. I think I'm done with you.

icantfindaname posted:

Perfectly efficient food production is eating Soylent and ground cricket flour, not organic local produce. Local organic production is massively less efficient than even the system we have now, and setting up the entire world's agriculture like that means billions of people die of starvation

This is a cute rhetorical flourish serving to paint a frightening picture, but without much real substance to it. Yes of course if we go back to 1875 CE farms everywhere it won't be able to keep up with the ravenous hunger of seven billion locusts, but that's not remotely what anyone except the disingenuous are arguing.

For the people who are heavily advocating mass centralized industrial farming, it would be useful to remember that these sort of setups are much more vulnerable to sudden failure, than a system with a healthy amount of diffused and distributed smaller farms that can at least resist shocks localized to one part of the country. Don't put all your eggs in one basket and such. The Soviet peasants reverted to small local farms near the end of the Soviet Union. If they'd had these farms all along, in addition to the large centralized industrial farming, I suspect there would have been much fewer starvation deaths.

icantfindaname posted:

No actually we do need to feed billions of people, that's exactly the problem. And as for people living in unsustainable places, there are hundreds of millions of poor brown people living in just such places today, and those places will become increasingly unsustainable in the future thanks to climate change. The major stress on world food production isn't Las Vegas and California suburbs, it's third world countries under water stress, and while eliminating waste and inefficiency in Las Vegas will help a little its effect on a country like Yemen or Bangladesh will be negligible. The solution to developing countries' problems looks nothing like small, local farms, it looks like industrial agriculture with huge inputs of capital and technology

Building upon what I wrote above, don't you think these places should have local farms along with the huge industrial agriculture? One can cover for the other, and vice versa. They'd also be much more resilient to economic and financial shocks. If it was exclusively big-business agriculture, what happens when the suits decide it's no longer profitable, or try to find other methods of extracting profit and utility from its Third World customers and consumers?

# ¿ Jun 10, 2016 22:29

Brannock: Feb 9, 2006; by exmarx; Fallen Rib

CommieGIR posted:

You honest to god made the argument that we should not support the population we have. Unless you were being sarcastic, I think the burden is on you to demonstrate why people should have to perish to support your goals.

He made the argument that, ideally, we shouldn't be supporting huge populations in places like Saudi Arabia and the American Southwest desert. That we still got huge populations there is an example of wildly inefficient market capitalism that allowed its purchasing power to be distorted to the extent that it's actually "profitable" to ship resources there to be pissed into the sand.

These places should not have happened. He is not advocating that we march out and guillotine every citizen living in these places. Perhaps, and here I venture into speculation, he is advocating a slow over-time reduction in population there with encouragement for its citizens to move to other areas less resource-expensive and more habitable to human life.

Similarly, a global population of seven billion should never have happened in the first place, especially not an increase of five billion in sixty years. This explosive increase has forced our hand, agriculturally, into practices and methods that we perhaps would never have used otherwise, simply to feed these people. Chicken and egg, though, without these drastic shifts in agricultural methods, we probably would not have had 7+ billion in the first place. Either way we're facing an ecological disaster thanks to global overconsumption. In the (sadly increasingly unlikely) case that our civilization survives it mostly-intact, it would be more than prudent to have a better way of handling this to prevent any future disasters.

There is nuance here, CommieGIR. I challenge you to examine it.

CommieGIR posted:

We'll have bigger emissions hits by switching off coal and gas than we will switching off industrial agriculture that currently does feed our planet.

And yes, people will die for your plan. And what are suggesting is a major step backwards for agricultural capacity, and no, local farms are not going to make up the difference, as your own linked studies said. Your system basically sets us up, waiting for a single bad year to basically leave us dying from hunger that WON'T BE HANDLED BY THE LOCAL FARMS.

I'm glad you like purchasing from the local farmers market. Its not going to make ends meet.

Okay, I regret going back on my resolution to not address you anymore. Local farms are supplementary, not a total replacement. Local farms are incredibly useful because they can help absorb ecological and economic shocks to the industrial system. You are responding to him as if he's advocating for an extreme position that exists mostly in your mind.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2016 23:03

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 12:01

Brannock: Feb 9, 2006; by exmarx; Fallen Rib

Anos posted:

Why do you think local production will result in less food waste from producers and retailers?

Less food lost in transportation, to name one thing. As for other reasons, when customers buy directly (or near-directly) from farms they are more likely to forgive superficial flaws thanks to an assurance of quality from the farmer and a knowledge that the farmer is responsible for it. When you buy something from a faceless corporation in a supermarket, and it's discolored and deformed, you have no idea whether this is just something that occasionally happens and is normal, or if it represents a severe or dangerous defect in the manufacturing process. Maybe some pesticide leaked into the food? Maybe some industrial mixer screwed up the alchemical balance of the pureed corn that goes into your Dorito? Who knows? Better safe than sorry and spewing from two ends at once, and you reach for something else instead. But the lumpy potato you buy from Farmer Myles? "Oh, that one had to grow around a rock. Just slice off that eye there and you're good to go!"

Anything that's left over? Compost and fed to the pigs. Or, you know, we could keep on putting it in the dumpsters.

Anos posted:

Why do you want to go back?

Partly because the consequences of an increase of five billion people in sixty years is destroying the planet. If we manage to survive that I'd rather not repeat the same mistake.

There's that rhetorical trick, again. "You want to go back to being mud-encrusted and starving?!" It's {current year}, we've learned a shitload about farming techniques and technologies that we can apply to local and smaller farms. There has been significant improvement and education. It's not a "going back", it's "fixing and improving what we're doing."

The system does work, yes. Precariously. It is not a stable system. Running out of fossil fuels will shatter this system. A potential collapse of globalism will utterly devastate this system. Climate change and especially the ensuing political chaos will completely mutilate the remnants of this system. If population centers at least have a network of nearby farms (of large and small size) that they can fall back on, instead of being utterly and completely reliant on shipping food across the Pacific from California, then any potential loss of human life will be mitigated to significant amounts.

Stability aside for now. We have only a vague idea what all these antibiotics being poured into our meat is doing to us (and to our water supply). We do know that antibiotic resistance is increasing at scary amounts, though! We're experiencing the aftermath of injecting corn into every part of our food process, and the aftermath is an overlarge, fleshy, and wheezing population. China began importing Western food and Western practices; an obesity crisis is growing in China. These antibiotics and all the parts of the corn kernel are specifically because of our factory farming practices.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2016 00:22

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