I'm pretty much right down the middle on this stuff, but I tend to regard the latter as a bigger problem simply because the amount of money and lobbying involved. Think of the amount of money to be made by increasing grain yields by 1%, can we really expect industry to determine objectively that a higher yield grain is nutritionally equivalent?

Of course with the commercialization of public institutions and the insane pressure to publish, one can not trust scientific publications as well as before. What is it 60% of life science publications can't be reproduced?

There is a real need for change in system, so we can trust research more. I think the capitalistic thinking has ruined science. One looks at science as some production process which needs to increase yield. Thus one ends up focusing on quantity rather than quality.

I'd rather see a lot fewer publications and stuff of actual quality which can be reproduced than what is going on now.

https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~lhom/organictext.html

I don't see how you can say that for the later case - most of the requirements mentioned here (for example) http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/organic/index_en for Organic food seem like they would be better for the environment.

In take of less potent and lower quantities of non-food chemicals used as pesticides, herbicides and reduced presence of antibiotics seem like things that would lead to better human health (either directly or indirectly) too.

Can you explain how focus on a local supply chain, say, as one element of Organic farming practice is detrimental to either of those things, [human] health or environment?

Oh, you don't even have to accept global warming to see how using diesel to till the soil can cause harm. Particulate matter in the air is really harmful. (both the diesel exhaust and the soil getting churned up into the air) Disturbed soil runs off into streams, leading to dead zones. Competition for crude oil seems to support war, which has lots of bad effects on the environment.

So... eat GMO to save the environment.

> A recent study compared the effectiveness of a rotenone-pyrethrin mixture versus a synthetic pesticide, imidan. Rotenone and pyrethrin are two common organic pesticides; imidan is considered a "soft" synthetic pesticide (i.e., designed to have a brief lifetime after application, and other traits that minimize unwanted effects). It was found that up to 7 applications of the rotenone- pyrethrin mixture were required to obtain the level of protection provided by 2 applications of imidan.

> It seems unlikely that 7 applications of rotenone and pyrethrin are really better for the environment than 2 applications of imidan, especially when rotenone is extremely toxic to fish and other aquatic life.

I know it is anecdotal evidence, but organic farmers would not care if the fertilizer/pesticide made from mined minerals are better/worse for the environment or not as long as it passes the "organic" criteria. A rather more useful criteria IMO would be "relatively harmless to the environment"

http://freakonomics.com/2011/11/14/the-inefficiency-of-local...

"Forsaking comparative advantage in agriculture by localizing means it will take more inputs to grow a given quantity of food, including more land and more chemicals—all of which come at a cost of carbon emissions."

The two seem to be polar opposites to me. In the case of vaccines, you have thousands of years of history that demonstrates the danger of diseases and recent history showing how effective vaccines are. Those arguing against vaccines need to show serious harm caused before it would cancel out the benefits.

In the case of GMO foods, history argues against the technology. We know that non-GMO food is healthy. We have thousands of years of evidence to support that fact. The problems GMO are solving are on the producer's side, not the consumer's.

You can argue that the problem being solved is providing enough food to feed everyone and that history also shows the devastating effects of famine and starvation, but there are other ways to solve that problem that have none of the risks of GMO foods (less reliance on meats, for example, would make much more efficient use of our agricultural resources). Show me an alternative way of dealing with measles, flu, tetanus, hep and all the other illnesses we vaccinate that's even half as effective as vaccines and I'll concede that the two debates are similar.

If you don't believe in the safety of "unnatural" foods, you'll need to stop eating corn, bananas, beef, pork, and any other domesticated plant or animal. Recent history has shown that GMOs are much more precise and effective at domesticating plants for our purposes.

1: http://www.arcticapples.com/how-did-we-make-nonbrowning-appl...

I achieve the same thing by slicing apples with ceramic instead of metal. Think of how much I saved on R&D!

Part of my biggest issue is that a company can patent the gene modifications they make and then say, "You're eating our proprietary cucumber now." I understand their business model, but I think if anything should be "open source", it should be our food.

Also the results of non-GMO breeding can be, and have been patented.

As the current US presidential election has shown, when money and lobbying collides with emotions and FUD, the latter wins every time, and thus I consider the latter a bigger problem.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/12/peter-wo...

I can imagine you have more sympathy for animals than plants since they are more like us, but I suspect bias if you use that as a basis for morality.

This makes absolutely no sense. "free-range" is a question about chicken health, not egg safety.

Is this comparing with organic products, or also non-organic? What is a "prosumer" in the food/grocery sense? I'm not familiar with the term in that context.

The community is sharing their money or work to keep the agriculture running. They are actively engaged in their food production and therefore prosumers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community-supported_agricultur...

Sounds like price comparison is an open question, unless there are more definitive/rigorous comparisons out there. At the very least, it sounds like there's a tradeoff between quality and selection (when you walk into a supermarket you can choose to buy whatever you want, whereas a CSA is limited to what's currently being harvested at a particular farm).

I'd certainly be open to making this tradeoff for some of my food, though when I've had CSA deliveries redirected to me by neighbors on vacation, I found that much of the food (even oranges, which I think of as moderately durable) went bad within just a few days.

That turned out to be an big advantage of the CSA for me. It is very satisfactory to be in natures rhythm, be engaged in the growing of things I eat and therefore in the growing of myself. I learned a lot of new products and recipes I even did not know exists.

See http://www.localharvest.org/csa/ for an in-depth explanation of the concept.

See this article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-organic-m...

[1] https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~lhom/organictext.html

What is the most sustainable and ecologically friendly way to get food then? Local farms, farmers markets, or growing your own food seems like the best but I don't think that's sustainable for the whole population.

Citation? I can't imagine they would use little or none unless they were farming something specific, like rice, which can grow under water or if it's grown indoors.

> What is the most sustainable and ecologically friendly way to get food then? Local farms, farmers markets, or growing your own food seems like the best but I don't think that's sustainable for the whole population.

So I'm having trouble finding the study I read a few years back but it essentially found that large, centralized farms are the most efficient because our transportation has gotten so good and many plants grow better in specific climates versus growing everything locally. So if you have enough scale then centralized, huge farms seems to be the way to go.

However that's using today's farming. I've seen many write-ups calling for entire buildings with hundreds of floors for farming. If we can get those energy efficient then we should be able to create the perfect climate for each plant and we'll be taking up vertical space so it'll be better land usage too.

Though that would suck if power died from, say, a solar flare and all of our food was in these towers...heh

Basically, french state's scientific body reviewed this organic permaculture farm for 4 years. They do not use pesticides, do not use thermic engines, and are so productive that it allows farmers to earn the median french salary while doing 35h/week on average.

How? No tilling of the soils. Worms do it for you. No weeds, since the soil is always cultivated, leaving no room for them. No need for a lot of fertilisers : the organic soil is actually growing from the constant adjunction of carbon, and beans are fixing the nitrogen in the soil. No need for excessive watering : the soil retains humidity. Etc...

Science, guys.

I don't really have a source for that more than anecdotal evidence. I've been involved with local farms that don't use any pesticides, however they were on the scale of ~5-15 acres. On a commercial scale it's probably not really possible. And organic food you'd buy in a supermarket is definitely not grown in this way.

The link you provided also only mentions two types of organic pesticides when there are thousands of USDA approved organic pesticides. I'm sure there are some USDA Organic pesticides that are just as harmful if not more so than some conventional pesticides but that's really just an argument for better USDA regulations.

>So I'm having trouble finding the study I read a few years back but it essentially found that large, centralized farms are the most efficient because our transportation has gotten so good and many plants grow better in specific climates versus growing everything locally. So if you have enough scale then centralized, huge farms seems to be the way to go.

I'm sure that large, centralized farms are most efficient in the short term. But long term effects on food production and soil could offset that. If in 50 years the soil is nutritionally drained and farms have to continue to pump more nutrients in then the cost and effeciency is going to drop. [1][2]

I think near-term, some combination is required because the level of food production needed is so high. Long-term, incorporating more sustainable practices into commercial scale farms or moving production into greenhouses like you mentioned is a better idea.

I'll add that after doing more research today, the label "Organic" doesn't mean better for the environment. That much is now clear to me. However, sustainable farming practices that can usually be found a small-local farms and backyard gardens are more environmentally friendly. Though scaling that for worldwide production is a difficult problem.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4552827/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160305010056/https://nature.be...

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. Just like the right-wing has their anti-government extremists, the left-wing has their anti-corporate extremists. However, the latter group is interesting in the sense that they actually think science is on their side.

sorry to anyone who was confused by my edit.

From what I've observed, people buying organic may be wrong about organic food specifically, but they pretty obviously have something else figured out. They cook fresh food every day, they eat together as a family (often with friends), none of them are overweight. For them, cooking and eating are a social activity and O can't escape the observation that they're happier than those families eating a 20pc chicken nuggets box in front of the TV.

I live in Europe though and we don't seem to suffer yet from the hostility of anti-organic people.

It is difficult to farm at scale and sell produce year round across a continent; time to consumption is a luxury beaten out of it at that scale and food often suffers under it. Only the varieties of tomatoes, etc. that can withstand changing temperatures and conditions, make it to market weeks later, and still look good enough to sell will be used, and these are often not as flavorful both initially and after several weeks.

Why is it "strange and unearned"? In many states / countries there are specific regulations that qualify what can be labelled "organic" or not (having to do largely with whether certain classes of pesticides or fertilizer were used in their production or not, for example).

Are you saying that pesticides in the food chain are complete red herring, and that any concern about them is "strange and unearned"? I'm not sure I quite follow you, actually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Germany_E._coli_O104:H4_o...

Using epidemiological methods the outbreaks in 2011 were traced to a shipment of seeds from Egypt that arrived in Germany in December 2009.

Citing as a source:

http://phys.org/news/2012-02-insight-whole-genome-sequencing...

I imagine this is most of America.

Ultimately it comes down to an ignorance in how the farming process works and an ignorance in how genetics work when modifying plants either in a laboratory or though breading.

I've also never met a person who supports organic who also knew about the practice of using radioactivity to cause random mutations in organic farming.

If you're engaging someone who doesn't agree with you on an issue, purely throwing facts at them is very unlikely to convince them of your point, and is going to end up frustrating both sides. Human psychology just doesn't work that way. We're not purely rational, evidence-based beings.

How much time have you taken to understand their positions and the reasons they hold them? Are they just irrational? Ignorant? Obstinate? Willfully uneducated? If you think this is the case, how can you convince them anyway? After all, they're irrational, ignorant, obstinate, and willfully uneducated :)

If you can understand (that's not necessarily the same as agree with) where they're coming from, that goes a long way towards understanding how you can reach some kind of shared understanding and agreement where none existed before. That might seem like it's a slower process, and takes too much time. But if it actually works, and the other method (throwing facts) doesn't, it's actually accomplished something.

There's a lot of contentious issues right now that are very important for us to reconcile. Working on skills like this, figuring out how to come to agreements and compromises, working solutions, is vital.

So I _try_ to figure out where they're coming from and relate to it. But I can never do it. I've never figured out a way to argue with someone in a productive way.

In fact if you know of any good reads on the topic I'd love to check them out. I've been told I'm not empathetic enough though I try to be and I'm not entirely sure how to fix it.

- Crocker's Rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881288

- Principle of Charity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12774600

- Rapaport's Rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12774692

I also found Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind"[0] really worthwhile. I mean to read it again in the next week or so. What I find particularly impressive with his work is that he found that his research actually changed his own thinking.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt

And you know, re-reading your response "I've never had facts change anyone's mind", I think even if you don't change someone's mind at the time, finding some common ground, something you agree on is a worthwhile accomplishment. Sometimes it seems the gulf between us is so large. Recognizing that it might not be is reassuring.

I hope you find these useful!

In other words, nutters think GMOs are Spiderman when they're actually just Batman.

While perhaps a bit of a hyperbole, this video lines up pretty well with me real-world experience (unfortunately): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzEr23XJwFY