Note: although an unrelated discussion, some of the context for this thread is in “Should Aboriginals be made to shop at Carrefour?”, where it all started. Gman raised the question of whether sustainable agriculture (whatever that means) really is “better” than the industrial farming we’ve used for the last 50 years or so.
That’s a fair point: words like ‘sustainable’ and ‘organic’ are used with an Alice-in-Wonderland carelessness - “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
‘Sustainable’ means a method of farming that improves rather than degrades the soil fertility. There are different technologies (mostly climate-specific) for achieving that result, and some of the techniques branded ‘organic’ are really just industrial agriculture without the chemicals. Undoubtedly, those methods aren’t very effective, and I suspect that’s why most people have the idea that organic farming is never going to work out.
When I talk about sustainable farming, I’m specifically thinking of a farm with the following characteristics:
- Any exported mass is returned, in some form or other, to the land, and any unused mass (straw, roots, inedible leaves etc) is added back to the soil, possibly after being first used as animal feed. Practically, that means organic wastes (yes, including human manure) must be collected from consumers.
- A rich and complex ecosystem is established and allowed to evolve with minimal human intervention. Typically that means a lot more perennial plants compared to annuals, including shrubs and trees. The function of this ecosystem is to provide a living mulch layer and a matrix of roots for soil stability. Nutrients for commercial crops are provided by the decomposing mulch layer; originally, these nutrients would have been “mined” by deep tree roots and/or by microbial symbiosis.
- Animals are an integrated part of the farm, providing manure, performing manual labour (e.g., insect predation and soil management), and “recycling” agricultural waste. They may also provide meat, eggs, dairy, wool, etc.
Mostly because they’re complex and difficult to manage. The main advantage of chemical-fed agriculture is that any idiot can do it. Just follow the numbers in the textbook and you’ll get a yield. Setting up an integrated farm with many different interconnected systems takes years to establish and fine-tune. You will receive not one single penny of government subsidy while you struggle to get it right. You may even get council officials coming around harassing you. There are very few people with the financial wherewithal (and the balls) to cope with that. Then there’s the negative pressure from vested interests. You’ll often hear people reciting received wisdom (such as the “fact” that only industrial agriculture will feed the world) as if it were proven truth, when it’s really just something they read in a Monsanto commercial featuring smiling brown faces and windmills.
Depends what you mean by “yield”. In any other industry, people talk about ($in)/($out). In a farming context, people talk about tonnes/hectare, which is as meaningless as talking about the output of a fashion store in terms of weight. That measure is used because it’s guaranteed to make chemical-fed monoculture farming look good. Spray enough chemicals on 5 hectares and use expensive machines to manage it, and you’ll get 200 tonnes of onions or potatoes. Nobody ever mentions how much those chemicals and machines cost, where the fuel comes from, where the waste is disposed of, who pays for cleaning up the river pollution. Nobody mentions that 200 tonnes of onions represents a ridiculous market mismatch, especially if the farmer lives in some Indian village in the middle of nowhere. All things considered, he’ll make US$50/tonne bottom-line profit, if he’s lucky. That’s why nobody has 5-hectare farms any more.
A properly-managed 5-hectare organic farm might deliver 10 tonnes of much higher-quality onions into local supply chains; there will also be 100-150 tonnes of all sorts of other things, including value-added products like cheese, prepared vegetables, preserves, etc. The organic farm will make 3-6 times more money than the other type because their costs are lower and their output is more accurately matched to the target market. Why is that a good thing? It means that farms don’t need to be large monocultures; they can be dispersed dog-ends of land, and they’ll still make money, even without subsidy.
Isn’t it patently obvious that industrial agriculture, as currently practiced, has spectacularly failed to feed the world? We turned our backs on flint arrows, gas mantles and thermionic valves because something better came along. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Chemical-fed agriculture most especially doesn’t work in the tropics for very specific reasons:
- In poor countries, there is not the expertise, money, or transport infrastructure required to supply machines, energy and chemical inputs to farms, nor to get large tonnages quickly and reliably to market.
- Wind, monsoon rains, and sun can devastate unprotected soil (and crops). It has to be seen to be believed. It is not physically possible to farm western-style monocultures in that environment. The soil just washes away and turns to desert.
- In most of Africa (for example) the soils are naturally infertile, with little in them that typical food plants can access. Local species are of course well adapted to this situation, as can be observed in untouched forests. Modern sustainable technologies attempt to emulate what happens in a natural forest.
Yes, potassium is abundant and we could manufacture ammonia using solar power, but the main issue is phosphorus. There is going to be no technological solution to rock phosphate runout, which most governments agree will happen in our lifetimes. Note also that the retail price difference between sustainably-managed farms and chemical-fed ones is mainly a marketing issue. The ‘organic’ stuff is usually cheaper to produce, and 60-90% of the shelf cost is transportation, storage, and business overhead anyway. A lot of the food you eat is, ultimately, derived from oil.
Here’s the point: why are we deploying all this technology when it isn’t even necessary? How did farmers - and rainforests - get by before the Haber-Bosch process? Why, for example, do we need to synthesize ammonia and then use machines to apply it, when we can simply plant leguminous crops, innoculate with the appropriate bacteria, and let nature take care of it? Also, it’s not just about NPK. Trying to micromanage all the required nutrients is painful. What we’re doing with agriculture is a bit like a thirsty guy extracting hydrogen and oxygen from the air and synthesizing some water, instead of just dipping a cup in the river.
Yes - a lot of “old” farmland has been ruined and will no longer produce without chemical inputs. In the US especially there is actually a long tradition of using cover crops to regenerate the soil. It’s really only since 1950 that the problems started.
By not applying chemicals in the first place - so there is nothing to run off. Current research suggests that artificial chemicals are applied in concentrations about 50x higher than they need to be, simply because so much is lost. Heavy mulches (deposited by dense vegetation, not by human activity) perform double duty, acting as a slow-release nutrient source, and protecting the soil to keep topsoil loss to an absolute minimum. That’s why it’s called “sustainable”.