> And most are based on a very short-term picture, which ignores the long-term costs of chemical-based farming: the incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion.
But there are enough organic farming methods which also lead to "incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion" similar there are non-organic "chemical" methods which do not lead to such effects.
So we should focus on long-term sustainable farming.
And sure for most farms the first steps to sustainable farming are the same or at least very similar as the first steps to organic farming, but the "mid" and "end-game" can differ massively.
You cannot farm soil for longer than 8-10 years without major nitrogen, and phosphorus replenishment. Actually lived in the sticks, and did farm labour in my childhood.
Controllable soils which are good at intaking, and retaining fertilizers are sustainable.
Bad soils with unusual soil chemistries can get depleted no matter how much fertiliser is dumped. That's true.
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/76hmbge/soil-...
They focus on two farmers, one a small-scale farmer in NY who started with the vision of a sustainable farm, and a commodity farmer in Minnesota who was looking for ways to improve yield. The Minnesota couple are, like your example, not at all "tree-huggers;" they're just people who want to survive. And what they found is that they can get more crops, for less money, while also limiting their exposure to potentially harmful fertilizers and pesticides.
They see a lot of resistance from their neighbors, because conventional farm knowledge is so ingrained in their culture. Running a farm is tricky, and experimenting can be the difference between profit and losing your shirt. There's just not much will to risk losing the land that's been in a family for generations on a quest to find a better way.
Feel like I'm missing something. State universities all over the nation have agricultural programs. Are they teaching stuff like cover crops? In other words, does this guy align with the conventional experts, or is he fringe, or does the industry have a schism?
Ag extensions mostly recommend the high input farming methods. What Gabe Brown practices is more than just cover crops.
Source: grew up in the sticks and worked on the family farm as a kid.
Natural nitrogen replenishment rate is microscopic. And it will do absolutely nothing about phosphate depletion.
Phosphate replenishment can be done by spreading manure or using fertilizers. It's a harder problem, but you have to work the problem.
Yes, and and the rate of replenishment, even if you dump many times more soy straw on the fields than you will harvest, will still be microscopic.
It plainly doesn't work for anybody, but people who only farm for themselves. It's a grandly inefficient use of a scarce resource — land.
Even if the soil will be squirming with nitrogen fixing organisms, and nothing else for many years, it's nitrogen intake will be like a single nitrate application, or less.
> Phosphate replenishment can be done by spreading manure
And catch god knows how much food borne diseases in the process. That's disgusting, and absurd in the 21st century.
Wouldn't a competing farm be more profitable to add fertilizers to the soil to replenish the loss nutrients, which means they can price out the crop rotation farm?
This is why regulations (and to combat their evasion by other countries, anti-dumping tariffs) are needed.
Can you buy good soil or is it part of the land and just too deep/not worth buying?
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/what-are-s...
Good soil needs lots of dead plant stuff. Bad soil is clay or rocks.
What I don't get is why the focus on fertilizers? There may be some wisdom on not spraying random poisons on the stuff you are going to eat¹, but the worst you can get with fertilizers is soil salinization, and this is perfectly avoidable on any place that isn't a desert already, and there are ways to avoid it on deserts too, just a bit more expensive.
1 - So there's a reason for a poison by poison discussion, the overall label of "organic" just poisons the discussion.
How do the crops you mention “gather phosphorous”? From where?
If you learn about the soil food web you will learn that most things we dump on farmland are made available to plants by bacteria and fungi. Unfortunately, those are the things that we kill by farming the way we do.
Hmm; I've never seen "Organic" and "Permaculture" seen used as synonyms; I am ignorant of the field, but my understanding of "Organic" was that it was more focused on what chemicals are and aren't used, largely due to their perceived benefit to ingesting humans / some level of "naturalness".
I also haven't seen "Organic" as stopping monopolies and oligopolies either. Even if I accept that "Organic" doesn't simply mean "Carbon based", nothing in its modern usage seems to preclude new monopolies emerging.
- As an end-user, what I found is that same companies that offer "regular" food tend to offer "organic" under spun labels, preserving status quo (but at higher price and therefore profit)
- I assume that "Certified organic chemicals" for farmers' usage up the supply chain will similarly have to come from some company or another, and I don't immediately see what makes it harder for those to homogenize and eventually form a monopoly.
[If it's an allusion to Monsanto etc, again, to me that's more of a matter of IP laws, and I don't see what prevents such occurrence in Organic field (I also see GMO and Organic as orthogonal and not necessarily incompatible, but definition of Organic is loose enough and changing enough with times/regions/individuals that I won't stake a big claim there).]
I am genuinely willing to be educated!
The biggest environment problem right now is habitat loss. In 100 years it might be climate change (of course we should definitely try to prevent climate change), but for the foreseeable future it's habitat loss. The current extinction event is mostly driven by habitat loss. Most habitat loss is due to the conversion from natural land to farmland[1]. We're losing between 24 and 150 species _per day_.[2]
Organic crops are much less land efficient[3][4][5], so they drive habitat loss. It also releases more greenhouse gasses, but given the scale of environmental destruction that a worldwide increase in organic farming could cause, there isn't even a point in talking about it.
Organic farming is a marketing ploy where food suppliers realised they can sell fake ethical superiority to consumers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_destruction
[2] https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_d...
[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorga...
[4] https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2019/11/organic-farmin...
[5] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/10/22/organic-food-be...
Organic farming builds soil, where chemical farming strips it away. Organic farming has no dependencies on fossil fuels, but fossil fuels are used to create the fertilizers that chemical farming depends on. Any analysis of the comparitive greenhouse gas emissions needs to include a full lifecycle analysis of the fertilizers and pesticides used in conventional industrial farming. And I really, seriously doubt that will find lower greenhouse gas emissions in chemical farming.
As for habitat loss - organic farming done right provides ecosystem services. Not as well as fully wild habitat, it's true, but it's not totally dead space and does support the ecosystem. Where as conventional, industrial farming is worse than dead space - it creates a death zone where anything that goes there dies.
So even if organic farming is a little bit less space efficient, on total it is better for the ecosystem because it provides positive habitat, as opposed to the negative habitat of conventional farming.
I would also challenge your assertion that its less space efficient, since there have been other studies that have found it can be equivalent when done right and given the right conditions: "Under certain conditions—that is, with good management practices, particular crop types and growing conditions—organic systems can thus nearly match conventional yields, whereas under others it at present cannot." [1]
We've also spent a lot less time optimizing organic farming on a large scale than we have conventional industrial farming. So there are likely substantial efficiency gains yet to be found. I don't think you stand on firm ground declaring that organic farming is worse, environmentally, in the long term. The harms of industrial farming are extensive and extensively documented.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorga...
The "natural" pesticides used by organic farming can also bioaccumilate, that doesn't sound like good soil management to me. [1]
As for the rest of it: it doesn't really matter what's possible in theory. Research is awesome and should continue. But like I said, we're losing dozens of species per day. We have to choose whatever is most cost and land-efficient today (else people will starve).
It's true that some organic crops are sometimes environmentally better. But the only question is how much better or worse it is today, on average. Unless you have a cheap and effective way that will guarantee that certain standards are maintained on 90% of the organic farms on the planet. I don't know of such a mechanism. Costs will be minimized and rules that decrease yield will be skirted.
A global carbon tax and some sort of land use tax (I don't know how else natural land could be protected) would solve most of these problems but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
[1] https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2020/07/23/organic-fungic...
What do you mean? Climate change is happening now, not in 100 Years. And it's just getting worse in the next 10-20 Years.
He's saying that habitat loss is right now the direct cause of more extinction events on the daily than climate change is right now causing.
Manure weighs more than than an equivalent bag of fertilizer, sure. Is that bad, though?
How far was the manure transported? How much CO2 did the cow burp? How much corn was trucked in to feed the cow?
There’s also the matter of organic fertilizers working differently in some scenarios. Blood meal releases nitrogen more slowly than ammonium nitrate, for example.
When you cross pseudo-religious beliefs you get in trouble as well — many of the organic fertilizers are animal byproducts (blood, feathers, eggshells, urine). So what wins for a vegan? Vegetables made with chemical fertilizers, or vegetables made with burnt eggshells and feathers?
Important note: not all GMO is done to vendor lock farmers, most of it is actually beneficial to food quality and availability
I am a farmer, that is absolutely not true. All GMO crops are made to be more profitable to the farmer, with the goals of increased bulk yields, longer shelf stability and decreased water usage. Something like 95% of all corn grown in America isn’t even for human consumption, they’re certainly not selecting for food quality and availability.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/renewable-agricultur...
Well, of course. But that's a useless measurement. The whole point of hi-tech farming is to increase the density. Organic farming is less efficient for unit of food produced.
Do you have data on that?
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-resource-1...
Take chlorpyrifos[2]. It's pretty nasty. It requires no additional data to determine that, all else being equal, we'll be better off not consuming its residues on our food. This is not simply an "unnatural = bad" argument: this is a specific chemical with known harmful effects, which you can avoid by buying organic.
Of course, the key question is: is all else equal? Organic farming does permit some other chemicals, and has a wide range of other impacts, including yields etc. So it's possible that organic farming is net negative for human welfare. But it's unfair to characterise a preference for organic farming as being quite as unscientific as you seem to claim.
I also think the article is telling us less about the innate merits of organic farming and more about the stupidity of making huge system changes overnight without training the people on the ground.
It is a given that organic is a net negative. Non-organic allows everything organic plus everything organic prohibits. We might need to reform non-organic in some cases, but those doesn't mean we need the arbitrary restrictions of organic.
Can't you make the same argument with other organic but yucky stuff? eg.
>Take cow manure. It's pretty nasty. It requires no additional data to determine that, all else being equal, we'll be better off not consuming its residues on our food.
I don’t think cow manure meets any of those four criteria.
But the parent poster explicitly mentioned that "it requires no additional data to determine that"? That sounds pretty closer to "chemicals are yucky", rather than "chemicals are bad and these studies show that" (what you're arguing for).
I live in the Netherlands and the produce here is pretty awful compared with France, Italy or Germany. I'd be happy with some kind of arbitrary point system to indicate holistic quality. Even though we might disagree on details, balancing price, health, nutrition, taste, environmental sustainability and labor ethics is really hard for a consumer. When you buy organic you kind of hope all those things are included, but it just seems so non-rationalized at the moment.
It gets visceral when I volunteer for sorting at the food bank. The organic crates roll in, the traditional crates roll in -- and it turns out that, say, all the zucchini in the organic crates has turned to mush because they don't believe in spraying with wax. Crate after crate of rotting, wasted produce. Awful. Natural, yes, but nature is so often awful, and it's such a shame when we know how to be less wasteful and intentionally forego this knowledge in order to indulge shoppers' nature fetish. Is this even what they really want? Would they continue to insist on the organic label if they saw these crates of rotting zucchini mush?
Probably. They feed their kids “organic” because they believe it will give them a competitive edge. Not because if concern for people who can’t shop at Whole Foods.
Would the fridge die sooner if it was used more?
Well, you don't typically spray preservatives on zucchini.
Consider the possibility that there are factors outside your view here. Perhaps the organic farm you're getting the zucchini from is further away, or more successful commercially at selling their best product. Who knows?
Without more information, you might just be the anecdotal victim of confirmation bias.
Yeah, it's possible that there's another explanation, but it's also possible that foregoing preservative techniques causes food to go bad earlier.
Here's another: If I recall correctly, after WWII the US didn't know what to do with all its munitions factories. They realized that the basic ingredients of bombs were good at fixing nitrogen in the soil, so they made minor conversions to the factories and started producing chemical fertilizers. Fifty years later, Timothy McVeigh was able to buy a truckload of the stuff and bomb a federal building.
I hope Sri Lanka continues this experiment. Could it be that after so many years of conventional agriculture, the soil was too depleted of nutrients to be suitable for food crops? I imagine that things will improve as the land heals.
I think you would be hard pressed to feed a nation with organic farms without oil refineries right now.
The War Department did construct 10 ammonia plants which made precursors for explosives, which could also make fertilizer precursors, and they absolutely switched them over after the war.
But ammonia production capacity doubled by 1950, and that wouldn't have happened without a demand side to the story as well. It also turned out that farmers realized nitrogen fertilizers work really, really well.
100 years isn't long when you're changing the global ecosystem.
The Industrial Revolution began in the late 1700s. We're only now beginning to agree on its long-term consequences, and quite a ways off from agreeing on mitigation steps.
I will repeat that I hope Sri Lanka continues this experiment. Experiments like this are the only way we'll get the data we need.
It is absolutely ignorant to believe that organic is better for the environment than non-organic. Oil refineries and heavy industry are needed to support farming enough to feed the world, organic or not. And organic food is more expensive, in terms of resources consumed, not less.
The focus is currently on how use of "non-organic" methods (pesticide effects on humans and insect—particularly bee—population, soil depletion...) are harmful, and naturally, humans immediately explore the other extreme, without looking for a sweet spot in the middle (of course, humans are exploring it, it's just not publicized enough).
And the sweet spot is always in the middle.
Organic produce is popular because it gives you some reassurance (compared to almost none otherwise) and the living standards have increased in large (edit: small, but mostly participating on HN :) parts of the world to be able to afford it (with their living standard, I am sure Sri Lanka wanted to be the first exporter of exclusively organic produce, not for their internal use): we are still far away from finding the best way, but it's important to work from both ends to help us get there.
To be able to think 50-80 years in the future is just an incredible luxury most do not have, particularly most small farmers, and particularly, I would think, most small farmers in a developing country.
Parents think that far into the future, as do thoughtful members of a productive society.
MBA driven obsession with the next quarterly earnings report isn't a universal infection, yet, thank goodness.
Their point, as I take it, is that investing in future welfare at the risk of current welfare rarely makes sense to people's minds, and in fact often jeopardizes future welfare as well as current, due to the fact that any harm it causes now may in fact carry over into the future.
What you're talking about, on the other hand, is about corporate greed and indifference. Very different scenario.
E.g. A struggling parent buying cheap bread for their kids today rather than starving them for a month to save money and feed them more nutritious food later, is not the kind of decision one would attribute to MBA driven obsessions. Nor is this parent a worse parent than a more affluent one who can afford such an investment without starving their children.
Ironically, thinking that far into the future results in many choosing not to become parents.
Kim Stanley Robinson's recent novel "Ministry for the Future" had an interesting take on this; that our future descendants may need legal standing in the court system, and lawyers tasked with defending their needs there.
You will have to keep moving the goalposts at a rate of 1 year per year, because it turns out that we understand which nutrients plants need and how to give them those nutrients.
The alternative is massively expanding farmland so that it can lay fallow for 25% of the time and also to account for lower yields.
We do not need to fertilize. It takes about 3 years for yields of a farm converted from traditional to regenerative to meet pre-conversion yields. The quantity of land used doesn't change. It is just managed a different way.
Aside: organic and regenerative are not at all the same
Organic is typically understood to mean avoiding the use of things that aren't considered "natural." Which, in turn, tends to mean avoiding the use of both chemical and genetic engineering.
To me, the idea that the most environmentally friendly agents for use in large scale agriculture just happen to already be sitting around in nature seems quite extraordinary. To take the case of pesticides and herbicides, I'm certainly no biologist, but the general pattern I see is that that nature provides broad-spectrum, non-specific poisons that kill relatively indiscriminately. And the only reason that these agents don't tend to cause a lot of damage to ecosystems is that they tend to be used in the way nature intended - that is to say, on a very small, non-industrial scale. Think "poisonous animals only using it for personal protection," or, "clove oil mostly only being found inside of a clove plant." I can't see any reason to see why we should just assume that taking these sorts of toxic agents that evolved for very limited use cases, and applying them over countless hectares of cropland, is actually a good thing.
I also worry about just accepting organic agriculture's lower yield. Less yield per unit of cropland translates into more cropland being needed to feed the humans. Which, in turn, means more habitat destruction due to human activity.
Versus, if you allow engineering into the equation, you can start to try and engineer things to be less harmful when used at an industrial scale. A pesticide that is engineered to be as specific as possible to only the pest in question. Or, let's dream big, some sort of precision agriculture fertilization system that can dynamically reformulate the fertilizer being applied to meet the soil needs of that particular corner of the field.
None of this is to say that mainstream agriculture is automatically better than organic. More that. . . well, at least in the USA, the organic program is organized under the United States Department of Agriculture's marketing division. Which is very good at marketing. They've done an excellent job of convincing American consumers of a false dichotomy that the organic program is the sole standard bearer of environmentally friendly agriculture. And that's a shame, because some foregone conclusions about what it means to be organic have therefore trapped people who want to be environmentalist into a local minimum that probably isn't nearly as environmentally friendly as they could be if their options hadn't been artificially constrained by a paragon of crony capitalism.
Soil depletion...? How in the world you deplete soil by adding nutrients through fertiliser?
"Chemical-based farming" is a lot more than just adding fertilizer.
Clear-cutting and deforestation to make farmland. Increased crop yields extracts more from the ground. Increased extraction of groundwater. Erosion due to killing of weeds, heavy tilling, and destruction of forests and native plants. Phosphate mining makes a giant mess.
No, in comparison to many other mining activities, it's a much smaller size of a mess.
Soil depletion via intensive agriculture is a pretty well established thing.
If there is no nitrates, and phosphates in the soil, they can't magically appear out of nowhere.
Organic farming aims to fall in the middle somewhere.
There is a law of preservation of energy. Elements don't transmute into each other, and don't appear out of nowhere.
The mass of biologically available nitrogen, and phosphorus in the harvest is equal to the mass of nitrogen, and phosphorus removed from soil.
No way around this. When there will be no nitrogen, and no phosphorus, there will be no crops. There will be no material for plants to use to make its cells from!
The "Organic agriculture" crowd sound to me very much like antivaxers, except fighting the agriculture industry.
This is simplistic to a fault. Legumes, for example, fix nitrogen; we've known for thousands of years about crop rotation.
Runoff and erosion - processes that tend to be sped up by industrial farming techniques - cause phosphorous depletion in a way not due to the harvest itself, as well.
There are a lot of factors in soil depletion. Some are under our control, via different farming techniques, changes in density, etc.
But in a nutshell - plants are in a symbiosis with the microorganisms and fungi that live in the ground. Plants feed them sugars and they feed the plants nutrients in return.
When you add large amounts of artificial fertilizers, plants don't need to feed these organisms anymore and this soil fauna dies. But the soil fauna also normally excretes materials that improve soil quality (e.g. fungi excrete glomalin, which binds the soil particles together). So if you use artificial fertilizers for a long time, your soil becomes dead. And such soil is easily depleted by wind and rain erosion.
And most are based on a very short-term picture, which ignores the long-term costs of chemical-based farming: the incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion.
Chem-based clearly gives higher yields for a period of 50-80 years, but what happens after that?
Organic/permaculture is sustainable and possible even for our large populations. It presents challenges to some other assumptions of our highly industrialized food supply chain, but that doesn't mean it can't feed the globe.
It just makes it harder for one or two companies to monopolize everything.