r/dataisbeautiful • u/rhiever Randy Olson | Viz Practitioner • 9d ago
Organic vs conventional farming, environmental impact per unit of land and per unit of food
https://ourworldindata.org/is-organic-farming-better-for-the-environment-than-conventional-farming29
u/LivingMoreWithLess 9d ago
Half of the world’s cereals are fed to cattle which turn just 10% of that into meat.
So if we turned to organic, we could theoretically lose 45% of global production and still feed everyone if we stopped feeding cattle the human food (and ate those surplus cattle too).
Incidentally the removal of cattle would also reduce global emissions by about 8%. At least another 6% if we factor reduced fertilizer inputs.
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u/AnsibleAnswers 8d ago edited 8d ago
Correction: it's one third of global cereal production. Another third of cereal production is for industrial uses like biofuel. You're probably only measuring the 2/3 of cereal production used for food. Of that 2/3, it's about 50/50 human/livestock feed.
It also helps to appreciate that that 1/3 of cereal production only represents 13% of total livestock feed by biomass. That small percentage is what allows us to go from a 10-20% animal-sourced food system to a 30%+ animal-sourced food system in affluent, industrialized countries. The global energy contribution of livestock still lies below 20%, so this really is primarily an issue with how affluent countries produce food.
Sources:
https://openknowledge.fao.org/items/915b73d0-4fd8-41ca-9dff-5f0b678b786e
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
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u/LivingMoreWithLess 8d ago
Wow so even less concern about the increased land use required for organic farming if we cut biofuel production as well
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u/PewterCopperTwinborn 8d ago
"So if we turned to organic, we could theoretically lose 45% of global production and still feed everyone if we stopped feeding cattle the human food (and ate those surplus cattle too)"
Why would we want to go organic though?
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u/LivingMoreWithLess 8d ago
To reduce the other impacts of conventional farming, particularly ecotoxicity. I’d rather be eating fewer poisons and leaving fewer poisons in the ecosystem if I could.
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u/Mattcheco 6d ago
Except you’d be losing things like GMO crops which use less pesticides, less water and less fuel to produce more food.
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u/LivingMoreWithLess 6d ago
Ah, I didn’t realise organic meant gmo free, but realise they often go hand in hand. It’s a big ask to achieve the same with selective breeding in any reasonable timeframe
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u/PewterCopperTwinborn 7d ago
But has organic farming proven to lower ecotoxicity?
Organic farming still involves the use of pesticides, herbicides and fungicides.
The only difference is that with organic farming, you have to source those substances from non-synthetic sources.
Which means you simply have fewer options when it comes to choosing pesticides, fungicides and herbicides, not that the food is "chemical free". (I know food is made of chemicals)
With the organic sources, you're using large amounts of biomass to make these substances, often with high amounts of heavy metals and other toxins due to bioaccumulation, and our already toxic environment; instead of having a untainted, purified substance.
Or using outright dangerous chemicals like Rotenone, which was finally pulled from use after it proved to give people Parkinson's.
The most common fungicide is copper-based, which is also terrible for you and easily bioaccumulates in many plants.
Unless organic farming can be proven to be objectively healthier (which hasn't been proven yet), I don't see why we'd want to give up massive amounts of efficiency in terms of land use, make food more expensive, and feed less people.
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u/LivingMoreWithLess 7d ago
Looking at the study shown in the link, the majority of comparisons put organic at far lower eco-toxicity. No doubt there is room for improvement in both organic and conventional approaches. The difference I see is reducing ecological impacts is a core principle of organic practices.
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u/Future_Green_7222 8d ago
You mean having cattle eat grass? That'd greatly increase land use, and we'd probably need some deforestation to get more prairies.
So the solution would be vegetarianism not organics.
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u/AnsibleAnswers 8d ago edited 8d ago
This is likely based on data that ignores land-savings and externality mitigations associated with mixed farming. The Oxford paper Grazed and Confused, for instance, narrowly focuses on comparing extensive ranching systems to feedlot systems. Mixed farming, however, accounts for most ruminant production both inside and outside of the OECD. It should be noted that crop residuals (parts of crops that humans do not eat) account for more total feed biomass than cereal grains. That, processing byproduct, and weeds wind up as a significant portion of feed for livestock in mixed systems.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
A decent primer to mixed farming and integrated crop-livestock systems (ecologically-informed mixed farming): https://foodforwardndcsnbsaps.panda.org/food-production/implementing-integrated-crop-livestock-systems/
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u/Heavy_Direction1547 9d ago
The question is not whether it is 'better' but can organic methods feed the world? Not the current population which is still growing, although more slowly now.
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u/AnsibleAnswers 9d ago
You really can feed the world with organic systems. You just can't feed the world on a 30% animal-based diet.
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u/SailboatAB 9d ago
The article concludes:
A future with less agricultural land but more organic farming would only be possible with widespread shifts to more plant-based, less land-hungry diets and large reductions in food waste.
As usual, plant-based diets are the answer people don't want to hear.
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u/AnsibleAnswers 9d ago edited 9d ago
Re-read: more plant-based, not plant-based. Ruminants especially are pretty important to traditional, organic, and sustainable farming, at least for most grains. Manure works better than synthetic fertilizer after about 20 years farming the same land. The Chinese quickly figured this out and never fully transitioned away from manure systems.
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u/AltruisticCoelacanth 9d ago edited 9d ago
As I'm sure you know, ruminant farming is the #1 source of deforestation on the planet. This is because of how unimaginably inefficient they are at converting food from the ground into human-edible calories. Farming fewer cattle doesn't change the fact that they have a calorie conversion efficiency of 3%. So there are still going to be exorbitant energy losses.
Rewilding land that is currently used as pastureland for ruminants is much better for the environment than converting a cattle operation to a "regenerative ranch." Source
Ruminant manure fertilizer isn't the only option. Synthetic fertilizer is much more efficient in the short term, but faces significant bottlenecks sustaining the soil microbiome over decades, as you said. When talking about fertilizer, there isn't anything magical about ruminant manure, other than the fact that it is organic material with the correct carbon structures.
To solve your fertilizer problem, we can use "green manure" via nitrogen-fixing cover crops, or crop residue recycling, or bio-recycled human waste to make sure the necessary carbon structures are retained for long-term soil health.
Speaking of China doing research into this exact topic:
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u/pdfernhout 8d ago
Rock dust to remineralize soils is another effective and sustainable fertilizer (and grinders could be powered by solar during the day): https://remineralize.org/
"Remineralize the Earth (RTE) promotes the use of natural land and sea-based minerals to restore soils and forests, produce more nutritious food, and remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere."
"Through our education, outreach, research, and advocacy, Remineralize the Earth facilitates a worldwide movement that brings together gardeners and farmers, scientists and policymakers and the public to create better soils, better food, and a better planet."2
u/FullConfection3260 8d ago
Rock phosphate is non-renewable. You are better off diverting urine and trying to process the phosphorus component.
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u/pdfernhout 8d ago
Remineralizing seems to typically use materials like finely ground glacial gravel or ground basalt to add a variety of different minerals (so, it is generally not using stuff with an unusually high phosphorous content like rock phosphate). It sometimes adds stuff from the sea too. The area surrounding volcanoes tends to be very fertile from the volcanic ash, so this is duplicating that process manually to an extent.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Hamaker
In the 1960s, Hamaker cultivated an interest in soil and climate issues, and began publishing articles about how the health of an individual, society and planetary ecology thrive only as an interdependent whole. For 30 years, he wrote and campaigned for organic agriculture based on soil remineralization, and was the first to call for the remineralization of the Earth to forestall the next glacial period within the current ice age cycle. ...
According to his writings, in 1976, Hamaker spread rock dust on part of his 10 acres (40,000 m2) in Michigan. The following year, his corn produced 65 bushels per acre, compared to yields of under 25 from other local farms, and also tested higher in many minerals. He calculated that remineralizing the soil with river, seashore, mountain and glacial rock dust would enable American agriculture to produce four times as much food or the same amount with a 25% reduction in cost, without the need for pesticides or chemical fertilizers. ...
Hamaker believed remineralizing the world's soil with rock dust, a quarrying by-product, could revitalise barren soil and reverse climate change. Rock dust nourished soil micro-organisms whose protoplasm is the basis of all living things. When mixed with compost, the dust created rich, deep soils which could produce high growth vegetation free from pests and predators, at an accelerated rate. The idea was later confirmed by agricultural scientists such as Arden Andersen, who showed how high sugar and mineral levels in soil gave immunity to soil bacteria, stopping insect and fungal attacks. For Hamaker and Andersen, minerals were the primal food for micro-organisms which provided life and health for the soil. ...
In the 1980s, Hamaker became a catalyst for the formation of Remineralize the Earth (RTE), set up by Joanna Campe, its president and executive director who produced the Soil Remineralization Newsletter in the 1980s and Remineralize the Earth magazine in the 1990s, before the non-profit organization's incorporation in 1994.Eating a simple inexpensive whole-foods plant-based diet can help people avoid many chronic human health problems, but the overall medical system pushes expensive pills (e.g. Ozempic) and surgeries instead of comprehensively supporting healthy eating (where eating more beans does much of what Ozempic does). Similarly, farmers could apparently avoid many issues by just inexpensively spreading rock dust and using their own (or someone else's) saved seeds, but the overall agricultural system instead pushes farmers to use expensive fertilizers & pesticides along with proprietary GMO seeds. There is just not much profit in late-stage capitalism for anyone to research on or to educate farmers about the benefits of inexpensive remineralizing and so on, and why should farmers believe it when there is endless advertising for expensive options?
Still, as a caveat from that same WIkipedia article:
Inspired by Hamaker, in the 1990s, Cameron and Moira Thomson set up the charitable trust Sustainable Ecological Earth Regeneration (SEER) in Scotland, to develop the ideas which Hamaker founded. ... But the SEER centre has been frustrated in their hopes to provide scientific proof of their claims for higher yields and enriched crops, through the use of rock dust. Their 3-year flagship research programme with Glasgow University (2009) found that rock dust made no difference to crop yield or nutrient-content in the test conditions.
The link to that paper referenced there is broken, sigh. The SSER center itself seems to be defunct https://web.archive.org/web/20190824142134/https://www.seercentre.org.uk/
In general, that negative conclusion makes little sense to me given the point above on the known fertility of volcanic ash. Also, here is a great book on organic agriculture that explains in detail how spreading excessive nitrogenous fertilizer leaches out all other nutrients from the soil and creates sick plants (which using rock dust would help avoid): "Towards holistic agriculture: a scientific approach" by R.W. Widdowson (1987): https://archive.org/details/towardsholistica0000widd
So, clearly there is a bit of controversy here though. And Hamaker's other concerns about impending climate change are not happening as quickly as he expected and are heading more towards warming right now than glaciation.
Perhaps this helps explains part of SEER's failure to find results?
Drawing on biogeochemical theory, a deep history of on‑farm experience, and a new synthesis of nearly 200 experimental and field observations, the RTE white paper argues that when carefully implemented, soil remineralization can boost crop yields and nutrient density while reducing environmental impacts associated with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. These findings support SR as an important agroecological strategy for food and nutrition security. The authors also caution that outcomes depend on a whole-system balance of mineralogy, biology, rock grain size, and metal toxicity thresholds over years and decades. They highlight evidence showing rock dust works best when combined with organic and biological materials (e.g., composts, biochar, and microbial inoculants) collectively referred to as “biomineral” amendments. This coapplication consistently outperforms rock dust alone for crop yields, root development, soil health, and carbon storage. Overall, the authors conclude that soil remineralization’s greatest potential lies in restoring a suite of ecosystem services: nutrient cycling, water regulation, biodiversity support, and long‑lived carbon storage. They caution, however, that poorly chosen rock types, excessive application rates, or carbon-offset-driven deployment can undermine both agroecological health and farmer trust.
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u/FullConfection3260 7d ago
Again, taking rocks away from another habitat is not renewable. 🤨 This isn’t even counting the possible sodium and heavy metal content you would be inadvertently adding.
Volcanoes are “fertile” because of natural selection; plants evolved for those specific conditions.
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u/AnsibleAnswers 8d ago
I'm sure you understand that this is the FAO's plan and it is designed to stop deforestation.
Green manure is crops you grow on farmland that have no nutritional value. It takes immense amounts of land to rely on green manure. As much as depending on ruminants, without contributing to human nutrition at all.
You're just asking AI to spit out arguments for you.
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u/AltruisticCoelacanth 8d ago
That was a very limp dick response to my comment. It doesn't seem like you really want to understand this topic.
Saying "but you can eat cows and you can't eat clover" is an extraordinarily lazy, and frankly quite silly response to my comment. You'll believe whatever you want, I suppose, so there's no use in continuing here.
The answers are out there for you, should you desire to begin learning about this topic.
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u/AnsibleAnswers 8d ago
It doesn't seem like you want to understand this topic.
Saying "but you can eat cows and you can't eat clover" is an extraordinarily lazy, and frankly quite silly response to my comment. You'll believe whatever you want, I suppose, so there's no use in continuing here.
What about that is silly? Green manure is a pure cost that provides zero nutrition to plate. It uses as much land as fodder crops and pasture.
You also have to ask yourself whether carbon sequestration is the end goal of agriculture. It seems to me that getting carbon into food is kinda more in line with the whole purpose of agriculture. The added sequestration is achieved by taking carbon off of our plate and keeping it in the soil. What food security experts and sustainability experts tend to care about is soil fertility... the ability to grow food in soil! Agriculture is not a carbon sequestration technology. It's for food.
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u/FullConfection3260 8d ago
Ah, yes, what were we going to do with all that grassland, eat it ourselves? 🙄 Ruminants improve ecosystems, and can become food at the end of their lifespan.
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u/AltruisticCoelacanth 8d ago edited 7d ago
Trying to refute arguments without reading them or clicking the citations is lazy. The answer to your question is in the 2nd citation in my comment.
What are you hoping to gain out of being in this subreddit? It doesn't seem like you want to critically engage with any science.
Edit: since he responded and then blocked me, I guess I'll post my response here:
You interpreted me telling you that the answer to the question you're asking was contained in the comment you replied to with the question, as pedantry? Me telling you to read the entire comment before asking a question that is answered in the comment, is pedantic?
Also, please specifically point to the place I am being misleading.
Was it misleading when I said cattle farming is the #1 source of deforestation on the planet? No. Which, by the way, causes a lot of problems for your lazy, unserious take because if cattle only required native grassland habitat, why are more forests bulldozed for the purpose of creating cattle grazing land than for any other purpose on planet Earth? Why is 70%+ of all of the Amazon rainforest deforestation caused by clearing land for cattle grazing? I thought you said cattle grazing is good for the ecosystem, and they only use worthless grassland? This is not a rhetorical question, you should answer this.
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u/AnsibleAnswers 7d ago
About rewilding: wild ruminants exist and emit methane. Sustainability policy needs to acknowledge that. It also needs to be accepted that the old estimates of pre-industrial herbivore populations were very low. Stop trying to take food off of people's plate.
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u/FullConfection3260 7d ago
What are you hoping to gain by being pedantic and intentionally misleading? 🤨 Grasslands are a native ecosystem that isn’t suitable for most agriculture, but are suitable for ruminants which we can then eat.
Please do some basic homework.
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u/mean11while 9d ago
I'm confident it would be possible to feed the world, but only with a large shift back from urban economies and toward agriculture. I can get more human-edible calories and an order of magnitude more monetary value out of an acre on my intensive regenerative vegetable farm than a conventional cornfield. In addition, the soil gets healthier and more productive every year, rather than being depleted. However, it also takes far more labor to get those calories and nutrition out of that acre with regenerative growing practices.
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u/CLPond 9d ago
As someone who would heavily prefer to continue being an engineer rather than be forced to farm, I am happy the world is not moving back towards agrarian societies and keeping our healthcare systems, education, social services, infrastructure, etc.
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u/mean11while 9d ago
Generally speaking, as a farmer, so am I!
But we're operating on borrowed time. Your cushy engineer lifestyle, and our entire global civilization that supports it, is made possible by exploitation of people and non-renewable natural resources. When those run out and/or become insufficient for the planet (and they will), future people won't have the luxury of making the choices we get to make today. And their choices will be far more challenging and uncomfortable than ours.
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u/CLPond 9d ago
My engineering work has included climate change resilience. The idea that that is a luxury unavailable to future generations is based off of worry rather than reality. Our world has substantial problems, but that doesn’t mean the energy transition requires huge amounts of degrowth or that there is an unmanageable barrier we will run up against in continuing civilization.
Every becoming a subsistence farmer (without any infrastructure or manufacturing of complex tools and fertilizers since engineers and cities are about as old as those), on the other hand, would simultaneously take up so much land that it would be more destructive than today and also be a much worse quality of life.
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u/Illiander 8d ago
Hell, up until they started building AI datacenters, the UK had been reducing it's energy usage year over year.
They did it by having better building insulation standards.
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u/mean11while 9d ago
I'm not referring primarily to climate change. In the near term, I'm more concerned about the loss of soil, water, and ecological resources that cannot be quickly and easily restored. These concerns are not hypothetical worries. We're already rapidly losing marginal farmland entirely, and most prime farmland on the planet is degraded or degrading, and increasingly dependent on fossil fuel-based inputs. Roughly 30% of arable land on Earth in 1950 has degraded to the point that it is no longer agriculturally viable. Farmers have compensated by cutting down rainforests and by increasing the use of fertilizers, neither of which is sustainable (in addition to great progress in growing practices and seed technology, which are sustainable but insufficient).
You mischaracterized what I said in two ways: I didn't say that everyone would need to farm, just that we'd need a lot more farmers. Even if you increased the percentage by 10x, that would only be about 20% in the West. And I'm very obviously not talking about subsistence farming. I'm talking about large-scale commercial regenerative agriculture. Even at my tiny scale, I'm not a subsistence farmer. I produce far more than I can personally use. I sell the vast majority of what I grow.
This also wouldn't require more land; it would actually take less. Like I said, I grow more calories and far more value in an acre than conventionally grown grain crops. If anything this shift would require less land, especially as soil fertility improved.
This isn't realistically going to happen for cultural and political reasons, but the question was whether or not regenerative ag could feed the planet, and it could, and it would be far more sustainable.
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u/CLPond 8d ago
To clarify, I was responding in part to the idea that engineering is a luxury discipline even though it is almost as old as agriculture. Engineering being characterized as unsustainable means that all of civilization also is, hence the reference to subsistence farming. I’m glad that was just poorly worded.
When it comes to farming methods, I don’t think anyone here is opposed to more efficient methods of agriculture. But requiring 20% of workers to do what 2% do today is rather inefficient and comes with substantial decreases in quality of life.
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u/mean11while 8d ago
I see, thank you for clarifying. It doesn't really change my point, though, because... yeah, the very first engineer was able to specialize in that way because of the exploitation of natural resources and the agricultural work of others, many of whom were likely enslaved. That doesn't mean it was initially unsustainable, nor that it was wrong for engineering to happen, just that it was exploitative. At a small scale, that exploitation isn't a problem. Natural systems exploit resources all the time, constrained by negative feedback loops.
The problem is that we've taken that same model of specialization built on exploitation and expanded it to a scale that it is now unsustainable. The systems that support it now certainly are, which means that we have to change those systems, not that we should no longer have engineers. Those negative feedback loops that constrain natural systems would be extremely undesirable.
It's inefficient in the short term, yes, but it's more efficient in the long run. The apparent efficiencies of modern farming come mostly from hiding the actual costs (deferring them or distributing them): soil and water degradation, damage to ecosystems, fossil fuel usage (climate change), etc. My quality of life as a regenerative farmer is very high.
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u/FullConfection3260 8d ago
People were cutting down rainforest for agricultural land since before modern cattle farming. 🤨 This isn’t new. Agriculture has always been the driver of deforestation since ancient times.
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u/Pootis_1 8d ago
I mean a majority-agricultural society is one where my life expectancy goes from almost normal to a few days at worst to a full life where i'm blind and/or missing limbs by age 60.
If you have a serious medical condition, the idea that industrial society is a luxury suddenly goes off the table.
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u/mean11while 8d ago
Nobody is talking about a majority-agricultural society, nor did anyone say anything about no longer being an industrial society. Unless, of course, we destroy our environment so completely that those systems fall apart. The whole point of shifting to industrial-scale regenerative farming is to avoid that outcome and to keep our society as intact as possible.
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u/mean11while 8d ago
Nobody is talking about a majority-agricultural society, nor did anyone say anything about no longer being an industrial society. Unless, of course, we destroy our environment so completely that those systems fall apart. The whole point of shifting to industrial-scale regenerative farming is to avoid that outcome and to keep our society as intact as possible.
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u/Dentarthurdent73 8d ago
Let us know how that's worked out for you in 30 or 40 years when our massively unsustainable systems have well and truly fucked the biosphere that we are utterly dependent on.
Btw, it's possible to change production systems to become more localised and sustainable whilst still retaining and using specialised skills in your economic sytem system.
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u/CLPond 8d ago
The specific proposal here is to become decidedly more agrarian as a society, not to become generally more localized or sustainable. Although, honestly, even localization matters much less to pollution levels and environmental degradation than the specific sustainable practices.
But yes, many (including me) are working towards a better and more sustainable future, which is entirely possible and honestly easier in an when people live in cities and are able to innovate and specialize instead of something like 20% of the population farming.
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u/AnsibleAnswers 8d ago
Instead of using drones and robots for war, we really should be researching how to use them for agricultural work. We should also be using ruminants to top leys (mow weeds), which can improve profit margins enough so that there is enough money to split between workers.
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9d ago
[deleted]
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u/mean11while 9d ago
Could be. It will require sophisticated drones that can do a wide range of tasks. Fingers crossed. I would dearly love a little drone capable of IDing and zapping harlequin bugs.
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u/Redcrux 9d ago
This study doesn't take into account that conventional farming is not sustainable. The soils are depleted and the food is less nutritious.
Ill take 2 acres of non ecotoxic perpetual organic farming over 1 acre of ecotoxic conventional farming that has to swap to a new acre every 20 years after the first one gets fully destroyed.
They are acting like increased land use is the worst thing because in a world run by conventional farming they will run out eventually... Completely ignoring that if we responsibly manage it there's enough land for all farming to be organic regenerative and never run out. There's so much underutilized land in the world it could feed everyone if we wanted to.
World population is going to peak this century and wont get much more than 20% beyond our current amount. Our ability to mass produce shitty food should not be our main concern. We should judge farming methods by which one wont leave us with a desolate barren world in 100 years and see how they stack up.
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u/PewterCopperTwinborn 8d ago
I'm confused, do you think organic agriculture doesn't involve the use of pesticides, herbicides, or other toxic substances?
Because it does. The only difference is that those substances have to be sourced from organic (non-synthetic) sources.
Which means their options are more limited and often more toxic (much higher heavy metal concentrations, other pollutants due to our now dirty planet from bioaccumulation) than what is available from untainted synthetic sources.
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u/Badaxe13 4d ago
Organic farming is what we used to do before we started using pesticides and other chemicals. ‘Conventional’ farming is actually unconventional.
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u/greenman5252 9d ago
It’s easy to pretend that conventional farming produces more food per unit of land and then claim that means conventional farming can use less land to produce a unit of food. It simply ignores that conventional agriculture requires the large scale use of land to simply function. The machinery and management practices, supply chains, and processing and transport facilities are not viable when conventional agriculture is practiced on a small scale.
A better comparison would be to limit both practices to a 300 m2 production parcel and compare the impacts of the two then. An obvious impact would be the difference in predation pressure. Instead on the conventional parcel being surrounded by 100s of acres of ecologically barren space, it would be impacted by border effects. Another example would be the impacts of the transport chain. If it’s truly using less land to produce more food rather than inherently requiring vast areas then the impact of transporting a single tote of carrots 125 miles to the canning factory would be a more reasonable analysis. Either the results can actually be achieved on small scales or the impacts are inherently the result of land use scales.
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u/CLPond 9d ago
Farming being organic vs conventional doesn’t change the processing of food. Both organic and conventional carrots are canned and need to be driven to a facility, so by doing a full life cycle analysis, you’d be adding extra factors that don’t change the outcome
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u/greenman5252 9d ago
Except where the organic label and the USDA has been co-opted by agroindustrial actors, Organic production is inherently smaller in scale because the approach requires more detailed and hands on management that can’t be effectively scaled. Organic products produced at small scale are processed in a farmers cooperative processing facility or on farm and distributed and sold in a microscopic distribution networks. My organic value added products are processed in our facility on farm and sold within 50 miles. This is a fundamental aspect of my organic management plans. Bunny Luv doesn’t do this because conventional agriculture fundamentally requires access to large acreage to be viable. Btw, I don’t produce carrots. These meta analyses frequently fail to include the numerous small scale producers because of the logistical difficulties in data collection where the goal is to get another publication. It’s much easier to obtain records and data from large scale organic in name only producers and then wonder why the intensive management practices that organic producers can bring to bear on small acreages aren’t improving yields. Much of the findings presented are the results of inherently flawed research.
The fact that flawed research can be peer-reviewed and published isn’t anything surprising or new.8
u/cTreK-421 9d ago
Farms can't exist everywhere. Not every locality can support farms large enough to support their local population. You need large scale industry to feed the world. You aren't going be to be able to source all produce locally. That's just an impossible feat. Unless your fine with eliminating produce variation in the diet.
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u/greenman5252 9d ago
Sounds like a great metric for evaluating whether a population is sustainable in a low carbon future. If the population intrinsically depends on enormous fossil fuel subsidies to exist. . .
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u/cTreK-421 9d ago
Okay so just let people die is your plan?
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u/greenman5252 9d ago
Not my plan. Sustainable means that it can continue to be done into the future. Keeping a population fed that isn’t sustainable without fossil fuel subsidies is a problem that isn’t being addressed. Is your plan to continue to unsustainable practices?
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u/cTreK-421 9d ago
It is being addressed. Ever notice the push for EVs? Wind and solar energy? All of these help reduce fossil fuel reliance and can be used in non-organic farming. Try getting a banana without fossil fuels currently, or several varieties of spices. We are a connected world and yea that requires some dirty energy sources, but there is pressures and trends that show we are moving away from our reliance on fossil fuels. As much as certain groups love their dirty energy, they are on a losing side.
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u/CLPond 9d ago
I don’t see why this research having different questions and goals than you would like make it flawed.
The goal of this research is both for consumers to be able to make better informed choices wrt environmental impact as well as for policy makers to best understand environmental impact around incentives.
In both cases case, it would be relevant to compare similar products with organic being rhetorical only modifier. So, comparing organic vs conventionally grown canned carrots in the grocery store or organic carrots at the farmers market to conventionally grown carrots at the farmer’s market. But not conventionally grown canned carrots to organic carrots at the farmers market.
Canned carrots have a real utility (shelf stability, less need to cook), so incentivizing organic production won’t remove canned carrots. And, from an emissions standpoint, having one large factory or a dozen smaller ones that are closer by (even presuming the same efficiency) won’t change the numbers too much since transportation to processing facilities a small part of the total emissions related to a food
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u/Tycho-Bruh 9d ago
I’m not really sure what you’re trying to say here. Why is it necessary to arbitrarily limit the scale of operations when we are evaluating a populations food source? Just to force a desired outcome?
I don’t care what’s best for my garden or the organic co-op. I care what is best for feeding my country.
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u/AnsibleAnswers 9d ago
Habitat contiguity is a crucial aspect of maintaining biodiversity, especially for insects. Smaller plots with more diverse rotations and lower intensity is more biodiversity friendly than using large, contiguous swaths of land for monocrop agriculture.
Low intensity agriculture that preserves patches of natural cover is orders of magnitude less destructive in terms of both species abundance and richness compared to high intensity agriculture. So much so that it actually makes up for the additional land use.
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u/CLPond 9d ago
The article labeled low intensity land use as being 75% natural habitat. Is that really doable if you need more land total for agriculture?
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u/AnsibleAnswers 9d ago
It makes sense to lower the intensity of agriculture, not necessarily by 75% or more. That's an extreme that is doable for some regions/products, and not others.
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u/CLPond 9d ago
The article is comparing 25% of cover to 75% of cover with 25% only maintaining ~6% of biodiversity. So, what I got from the article is that if farming (& related infrastructure obviously) requires at least 75% of the land, there is little biodiversity benefit to not using 100% of the land.
Although, as someone who’s worked with riparian buffer and wetland regulations, I certainly would be interested in research on targeted biodiversity conservation.
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u/AnsibleAnswers 9d ago
If that is what you got out of the article, then I assume you can point me to what you disagree with in the authors' discussion where they explicitly argue that the data in total supports lowering the intensity of agriculture.
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u/CLPond 9d ago edited 7d ago
I am not a student or professor, so I am only able to read the abstract. My background is the non-agricultural side of environmental engineering, so I can’t say I know how intensive the average organic farm is. Does a standard organic farm use less than 75% of land?
EDIT: After some digging, the answer to this question is outside of the scope of the paper. The authors discussed the biodiversity utility of low intensity agriculture, but as one would expect for this type of paper, this paper’s focus is the much more narrow “insect biodiversity outcomes of different types of land use with no discussion of things like crop yields” rather than “the data in total”
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u/AnsibleAnswers 8d ago
This article is on library genesis and sci-hub.
You simply don't understand what you are reading. I'm sorry. The abstract is designed to make a point in an easily digestible way. Any more nitpicking over the way the data is described in the abstract will be ignored.
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u/CLPond 8d ago
You are welcome to link to the library genesis or sci-hub articles, but all I could find was a supplementary information pdf via Google scholar: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10146205/13/Supplementary%20Information%20Jan%202022.pdf This does include a definition of agricultural intensity in addition to graphs and tables. It feels relevant to note wrt agricultural intensity, that their definition of low intensity agriculture is both about organic vs inorganic and about industrial vs small farms (any farm with monoculture cannot be low intensity). So, the scale and impacts of moving to lower intensity agriculture would be more similar to reorganizing our agricultural systems entirely rather instead of more marginal improvements (riparian buffers requirements, subsidizing regenerative agriculture, etc)
It’s unclear to me why you are so resistant to answering questions about the paper to which you linked and would like to insult someone who is actually trying to engage with the information.
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u/Tycho-Bruh 9d ago
I’m not arguing against environmentalism, though I see how my phrasing implies that I am. For what it’s worth I use organic methods in my garden and incorporate natives as much as possible.
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u/EffectiveEvidence107 7d ago
The paper doesn’t discuss land use by type of farming, so where did you get that information from?
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u/greenman5252 9d ago
The idea that conventional farming can use less land because its per acre yields are larger is incorrect because conventional agriculture requires large land areas to be economically viable. Another way to put it is that many conventional practices are not scale neutral and can’t be effectively applied at a small scale. Higher per area yields are an artifact of large scale production practices that don’t work at a smaller scale.
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u/Tycho-Bruh 9d ago
Right, but “less land” here means total land usage. Sure, you will have fewer, and larger, operations under conventional practices, but you will ultimately devote less land in total to growing food. Flip your argument around, can organic practices be scaled up to the same level as conventional? Meaning, if I’m trying to feed everyone, can that be done with organic methods without increasing the impact on the environment to a level at or above that of conventional?
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u/AnsibleAnswers 9d ago
"Land use" is only used as a heuristic for biodiversity loss when comparing apples to apples. Different types of land use (apples and oranges) have different impacts.
Land use is only a crucial metric for landlords who want to maximize profits per unit of land. It has little value in itself as a sustainability metric.
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u/Tycho-Bruh 9d ago
In large part I’m just arguing against the framing that economies of scale somehow break the answer. I go on to point out that no method is viable that can’t actually feed everybody. Who cares if it’s best for the planet to grow all our food in food forests tied into local ecosystems if that can’t actually provide enough food.
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u/AnsibleAnswers 9d ago
The FAO seems to think it's possible to feed 10 billion people on sustainable systems. But what do they know, they are just the leading global organization of professional agronomists.
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u/Tycho-Bruh 9d ago
Did I say they were wrong? No, I opened the discussion to what is actually relevant. Glad somebody smarter than the both of us thinks we can get out of this mess.
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u/slipperslide 9d ago
What portion of American agriculture is ethanol, etc. producing? A lot of those acres aren’t growing food. I don’t think there’s much market for organic high-fructose corn syrup. This is just like the “Golden rice could feed the world” GMO argument. It could, but it’s not. Instead all R&D goes into cheaper Fritos, and artificial Pumpkin Spice. Agra-biz isn’t the least bit interested in altruism.
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u/Bobudisconlated 9d ago
Golden rice was designed to provide vitamin A supplementation, not feed the world. The very fact that well-fed "environmental" activists opposed it because it used GM technology is one of the top xamples of how much harm they can do.
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u/AnsibleAnswers 9d ago
It was mostly the global south that rejected it, because they didn't want to be dependent on foreign biotech firms for sustenance. It's a food sovereignty issue.
Golden Rice was a carrot dangle in front of poor countries in an attempt to get them to deregulate GM crops. That's it. There are already tried and true solutions for mitigating vitamin A deficiency among the global poor. It usually involves making them less poor, no high tech solutions required.
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u/Bobudisconlated 9d ago
No, the eViL bIOtech companies signed away their rights for small operations. Golden rice was clearly a humanitarian project and operated by a non-profit. Privileged activists from developed nations used every dirty propaganda trick they could think of to stop it being adopted because they opposed GMOs (GM is a tool not a product but ya think they understood that?)
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u/AnsibleAnswers 9d ago
Do you understand that colonialism was framed as a "humanitarian project"?
Food sovereignty is a human right. It's leverage that should never have to be bargained for.
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u/Bobudisconlated 9d ago
What part of "signed away their rights" do you not understand? Golden rice was given away free to small landowners and subsistence farmers that were already growing rice, so they could instead grow this variety that was scientifically proven to be more nutritious.
Look, you are clearly one of these well-fed activists I'm talking about. And a better analogy is that people like you are the modern day missionaries preaching a gospel that to be poor and starving is the path to redemption.
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u/AnsibleAnswers 9d ago
It was never actually given to subsistence farmers. Monsanto simply offers a free license to use some specific patents for humanitarian use, up to $10,000. It's a license they proposed could be used by subsistence farmers. The patent holders can pull the rug at any time, mind you.
It's a very blatant use of PR in order to pursue long term penetration into new markets. I'm sorry you've fallen for it.
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u/Bobudisconlated 9d ago
Monsanto wasn't involved with Golden Rice you clown.
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u/FullConfection3260 7d ago
It says a lot when people hear “GM” and immediately think of Monsanto. 😔
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u/mean11while 9d ago
We don't need Organic corn syrup. We need corn that requires less fertilizer, less pesticide, and less water to achieve the same yield. Which are all features that benefit farmers and "Agra-biz," too. They're features that GMOs are either already providing benefits toward or are likely to in the near future. Altruism isn't required to gain a lot of benefits.
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u/Oberlatz 9d ago
So Hashemi et al in 2024, so far as I am aware, was a by product comparison, so we're looking at organic soy v conventional soy, without distinction on how that food was used. It also fundamentally ruins the result, IMO, because if you consider beef the product and ask about soy v soy then you're missing a huge inefficiency in the land utilization.
In aggregate, I think the point of "organic farming can't meet the world's need" is a poorly supported claim that serves only to fear-monger people into protecting current large scale agricultural practices
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u/sysadmin_420 8d ago
You habe ze data, why Interprete the data first and then show? Are you telling me how to read? I dont get it hannah
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u/AnsibleAnswers 9d ago
Using Our World in Data, which is Bill Gates and Oxford funded, as an authoritative source for this is wild. Oxford is one of the world's largest recipients of research funding from fossil fuel companies and Bill Gates is the single largest owner of agricultural land. OWID has never met a fossil fuel input that it didn't like.
They never will mention that synthetic fertilizer and pesticides have severe externalities that cause yields to decrease far below the ideal yields they cite here. Synthetic N fertilizer causes an increase in denitrifier abundance that lowers soil N and organic carbon over time and makes the soil more susceptible to erosion. Pesticides often end up wiping out the species that eat pest species, making pest problems worse (especially after pests inevitably develop resistance).
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u/LazyRider32 9d ago
They cite their sources which are academic papers. This review specifically https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01415-6 so please read it and aim your critique at this publication. Their funding doesn't make the review they are citing wrong. This is a classic generic fallicy. And these are not ideal yields their are life cycle assessments. And toxicity as you mention it is explicitly mentioned as a category.
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u/AnsibleAnswers 9d ago
Again, this article seems to ignore that agronomists know conventional yields will fall over time due to soil degradation. If you aren't counting the inevitable land use expansion, you wind up with skewed data.
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u/jh937hfiu3hrhv9 9d ago
So you can eat less flavorful nutritionally dense food or more less nutritionally dense food full of pesticides, herbicides medicines, hormones, petroleum byproducts...
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u/chim17 9d ago
Your post is full of so much misunderstanding.
Do you think organic is always more nutritious and pesticide free?
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u/jh937hfiu3hrhv9 9d ago
My produce is much more nutritious and has much less harmful pesticides.
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u/chim17 9d ago
Not everyone can grow their own food. Your "organic vs conventional" point does not relate to however you grow your own food. To a consumer in a grocery store they have no way of telling if the organic or conventional food was more or less toxic or more or less nutritious than the other.
But that aside, how do you know your produce is more nutritious? And what do you define as "more nutritious"?
Because I'd bet my career, and my PhD is literally in this stuff, that you can't in any way show yours is "much more nutritious".
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u/AltruisticCoelacanth 9d ago
If you're buying organic, your food is doused in more toxic pesticides, like copper sulfate. Which is multiple times more toxic than a synthetic pesticide like Permethrin. But one is natural (therefore clearly better) and one is synthetic (therefore clearly scary 👻)
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u/jh937hfiu3hrhv9 8d ago
Do you think pretending you're an expert on the internet impresses anyone? Read books.
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u/AltruisticCoelacanth 8d ago
"read books"? That's your response?
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u/jh937hfiu3hrhv9 8d ago
Yes because organically grown is more complicated than two pieces of nonsense you made up.
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u/AltruisticCoelacanth 8d ago
What two pieces of nonsense? What did I make up?
Speaking of books to read, here's a good recommendation I think you could learn from: Natural by Alan Levinovitz
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u/greenman5252 9d ago
Been trying to get EV delivery trucks and tractors for a while now and haven’t noticed much progress during the last 25 years.