As a farmer I'm biased, but there's a lot to be said for eating fresh, in-season foods produced by people in your community. The human and environmental costs of making sure tomatoes can reach you from 1000 miles away is sickening. We run a 50-member CSA. Produce is picked fresh weekly or bi-weekly from the garden and available for pickup by 50 local families.
Are our yields as high as what we might get if robotic pickers and chemical fertilizers were used? No, but nobody is dying or being abused or getting cancer to make sure that a disgusting, mealy, colorless tomato can be on your cheeseburger.
The environmental cost tends to be lower with the 1000 mile food. Transportation efficiencies of freight trains and tractor trailers dwarf those of the pickups and small container trucks you see with local produce. The overall emissions per pound of produce transported end up lower with the distant food.
Then there are locational issues. For example, it takes more (human-generated) energy to grow tomatoes in NZ than it takes to grow and can tomatoes in Italy then transport them to NZ. It sounds crazy, until you remember that tomatoes in Italy grow on hills and tomatoes in NZ require greenhouses and attendant infrastructure.
not quite, since that one trip produced many pounds of fresh healthy food over many weeks, whereas a comparable amount of fresh produce from the grocery store takes many trips.
That said, it's a culture of food production that's really where the efficiency lies. That's people saving and trading seeds, helping each other farm and harvest, and bottling and canning for winter.
That's not only tremendously efficient if it's done locally, it's also fun.
How many tomatoes, or other vegetables, do you grow there? What about the environmental cost of living in a place that allows you to have a garden big enough to grow vegetables at all? You are using more fuel to get to and from your place; you waste more energy heating/cooling it, you require subsidies to get power, water and sewage infrastructure to your house (subsidized by the commons, btw). How much kettle or poultry do you grow? How do you contain their pollution? What about scaling - how does your proposed lifestyle scale?
The science is clear, and people in the field don't even question it: high-intensity farming (and living) are the true 'green' way of organizing our society. Low-density, 'farmer's market supported', everything-local is a luxury product, affordable for an elite only, and the popular conception just needs to catch up to that reality.
Probably negligible even if you have a higher-than-average methane output. :p
But I believe the parent comment was discussing the cost in fuel emissions for local farmers producing for ~50 families in his area vs. a mega-farm outputting tons of food for cities across state lines.
yeah, well I think the mega-farm outputting tons of food for cities across state lines has it's place, however I think, and a lot of research as well as the direction of industry backs me up, that the conventional farming techniques on mega-farms need an upgrade. That is, fewer toxic chemicals, more organic practices, less monocropping, more automation, more high technology, more holistic, integrated, organic solutions to pests, etc.
And, on top of all that, local food sources are extremely valuable to a large scale sustainable food system. They're a buffer, and a cultural benefit, as agrarian pursuit is a truly healthy way for society to form its social engagement - it's called deep ecology and it's a human need to be engaged and invested with the cycles of life. It's much better than sequestering behind walls in front of TV's as we do now. So, true that it can't provide all our food, but it can provide a damn good buffer, and a lot more value aside from just calories. Don't buy the myth that farm life is slavery - that's an invention of the last century. Generally farm life, when it is done right, is extremely fulfilling. They even had a word for it: bucolic!
This is a perfectly valid decision! But you recognize that your local, fresh, in-season food is more expensive to produce and more expensive to consume, but quite possibly with higher quality. This is a luxury consumer good.
There's nothing at all wrong with that! Just don't then make the leap to claim that this is a model for feeding the world.
I don't know whether small, local, organic farms are a model for feeding the planet but the premise of the article is flawed in the opposite direction.
My produce doesn't beat Walmart prices but then, we don't have the luxury of govt subsidies, scale, and undocumented underpaid labor. Once you start paying people what they deserve, and charging people what it actually costs, the prices are more truthful.
This type of food only seems like a luxury product because the scales are tipped so unfairly towards cheap/bad food.
Do the prices of industrial farm produce include the cost of cleaning up industrial farm pollution such as nitrate fertilizers, organophosphate biocide, and airborne products of fossil fuel combustion? What about the inefficiency caused by the entire massive pyramid of the attendant industries: transportation, chemical manufacture, distribution, marketing? And the cherry on top: the health care burden due to epidemic diabetes and obesity?
Think carefully before you decide what is cheaper.
You're presenting a false dichotomy. It's entirely possible to believe that large-scale farming should be made more sustainable without believing that local, small-scale farming is an improvement.
You're also assuming that local, small-scale farming has no impact. In fact to produce the same amount of calories requires vastly more land and more energy and the total impact is larger. Organic farmers also use pesticides and fertilizers; they just use different ones. It's not at all clear they result in less environmental damage. Is spraying a vast amount of nicitinoids over a larger area better than a smaller amount of organophosphates? Not at all clear.
> But surely, you’ll object, tomatoes grown in small-scale gardens taste better. Not so! Double-blind tasting panels have been unable to pick out the greenhouse tomatoes as lacking in flavour, or tomatoes grown without fertiliser as more tasteful.
Maybe ... but there's a big difference between a store bought tomato that was stored in a fridge for months and a fresh tomato that comes out of the garden of my parents.
One is like eating cardboard with a strange texture, the other is actually an enjoyable experience even for someone that is not big on vegetables (OK fruits if you musts insist).
Yup, this is one case where the "double-blind" takes out the actual variance in the experiment. I don't care about the carefully-controlled studies. The practical effect of including all aspects of the supply chain is that my personal supermarket's tomatoes are bland and mealy; the ones from my local farmers' market aren't.
> but there's a big difference between a store bought tomato that was stored in a fridge for months and a fresh tomato that comes out of the garden of my parents.
You're saying exactly the same that the article. It is not the way that it is grown, it tastes differently because they are picked before maturity. Take an organic tomato before it completely maturates and you will have the same insipid tomato.
In about 15 minutes, I'm going to get up from my desk, go outside and walk two blocks. There I'll arrive at one of the 8 weekly farmers markets in my area. It takes up two city blocks of the main street, every Tuesday evening year-round.
There, I'll visit with the farmers I know by name and buy produce that was grown on farms a half-an-hour away.
The tomatoes I'll pick up will be one of may varieties available and so ripe that I'll need to eat them in the next couple days. That's OK because I can get more at the Saturday market. They'll also taste amazing and better than what I can get at the grocery store at any time. They'll also be very close to the same price.
I'm extremely thankful that I live in a place where this is possible and fully intend to continue doing so for multiple reasons - eating tastier food, supporting the local economy, experiencing exotic varieties, and participating in my local community.
Many enjoy locally produced food and desire the freshness or access to heirloom varieties.
But it's important to recognize that this isn't an environmentally friendly or especially sustainable pattern of consumption. Indeed these modes of production are less efficient and likely to be more damaging to the environment.
Local and/or organic is a luxury consumption option. Much like buying a choice cut of meat or premium food brands. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that it's also more "green."
You might also say: access to clean air and unpolluted drinking water is a luxury which is not particularly environmentally friendly or sustainable. Keep in mind when you are breathing and drinking clean air and water, that it's gonna be that way forever, and you're gonna be drinking mud and breathing soot in the long term because you're living in a "green" fantasy.
That'd be kinda setting the status quo for everyone based on your own low standards I think.
This makes no sense. The whole point is to find a model for feeding 7 billion people that preserves the environment. Local and organic do _more_ damage to the environment than producing the same equivalent amount of food industrially. They use more land and more energy.
A solution for the environment cannot involve starving the world, or needing to allocate even more huge swaths of it for agriculture.
sorry, that's the claim that is not substantiated by evidence and it isn't close to being accurate. Conventional farming is a toxic mess, and it's heavily subsidized by unsustainable resources and practices at every level. It may be the case that the cost of doing farming right is high (and that is not necessarily meeting the "organic" standards which are themselves heavily biased by conventional interests, but by farming using truly organic methods) but that's because it tends to include costs to the planet, or not include cost savings that are causing extinction level changes to the planetary chemistry. There are people who will tell you that sustaining our population is not possible and that we are headed for an extinction event, however other people say that it is possible to live within our means, if we start factoring in the real cost of things like conventional farming, and therefore change our practice.
And technology is definitely a factor in that transition, so if you buy the phony trolling argument going on here that greenhouses, and automation is incompatible with sustainable, organic, local farming practice, then you are being sold a bill o' goods!
local, organic, small-scale farming is certainly practical, and it's also imperative for a sustainable model to support our immense population. So is automation, and greenhouses, and transporting food from far away places. What is incompatible with a sustainable future is conventional, factory farming, where the fields are awash in toxic chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and supplemented with bare fertilizers manufactured using toxic processes out of fossil fuels or harvested from unsustainable sources. That can't go on. Fortunately organic holistic farming methods produce higher yield and healthier foods, and are compatible with the best and highest tech in automation, greenhouses, and etc, and increasingly the old and new tech is coming together on the small scale, local farm.
To produce the same amount of food will require more total resources, including land area, energy, and environmental damage. Your small-scale organic farm-produced product is a luxury good, with luxury inputs.
How is your factory farmed tomato that depends on buried costs of fossil fuel, and inorganic fertilizers, and unsustainable resources not a luxury good? The luxury is the cheap price, which is not sustainable.
Truly organic local food has been produced sustainably for millennia, so to call that a luxury while wallowing in cheap oil subsidized corn food is totally backwards.
Greenhouses produce energy, with solar panels on their roof, even when amortizing all production costs. Inorganic fertilizers are much more efficient than other methods; greenhouses need no pesticides because the environment can be controlled, and use friendly insects that eat the few bad ones there are. Did you even read the article?
who is arguing against greenhouses? the article sets up a false dichotomy between local organic produce, which is more efficient by any measure that includes the cost of doing business, and greenhouses, which are not at all incompatible.
> But urban land is in short supply, expensive, often polluted, and unsuitable for horticulture.
We should stop focusing on the plants and focus more on the soil. Better soil = better water retention = less work with irrigation = healthy plants = healthy planet.
> The belief that only small-scale, non-mechanised agriculture without the use of chemicals respects biodiversity, and that tradition is key to the future, is illusory. In reality, small-scale unfertilised farming of annual crops or unregulated grazing in the tropics are major causes of destruction of soils and forests.
The only problem here is the "annual crops or unregulated grazing" because on a diverse agroforestry the trend is the opposite, the soil gets better and better as years goes on. More organic matter falling on the soil = better soil, as long as you don't remove the organic matter you're good to go! The main problem lives here, a lot of people clean the grass and burn it, the soil should never be uncovered, you can cut the grass no problem but leave it there to compost and improve your soil, just like happens in a forest.
> Chemical use is still, for the most part, equated with environmental destruction. This is a false image, one that leads people to turn away from science and technology. We cannot go back to the ill-designed agricultural systems of past centuries with their famines and harvest failures.
Sure, this so called "science and technology" is what made the land "often polluted, and unsuitable for horticulture" in the first place.
Grow food forests, build forest soil! The forest never needs any chemical added by humans, it doesn't have pest problems, why? It's diverse. Diversification guarantees your surviving, when you have only one source of food (or money, or anything) and it dries out you starve, but if you have multiple sources you can not only survive but have more colorful plate too.
Sure it's more laboring to do forest, but we can change our machines to work with forests instead of mono-cultures, that's the way to go, the more mature a forest gets the less human intervention it needs. Here in Brasil I'm seeing a few people starting to develop machines to work with agroforestry, that's the future of food IMHO: forests!
Well, maybe I'm biased, since I found out permaculture and agroforestry I'm in love, couldn't be happier :)
What is the yield from your agriforest? Will your forests feed 7 billion people?
Of course not. It's perfectly fine to desire luxury goods like local or heirloom varieties when you buy your food. But you are trying to propose a model for feeding the world, and using this approach the world would starve.
I'm just a beginner here, my agroforest yields nothing, I started just a few months ago. Anyway, from what I hear from people more experienced than me is quite the opposite, it yields much more, sure you would get less tomatos per hectare but you would get a lot of other products too. I'm very curious where can I find evidences agroforests couldn't feed the world? Or evidences it yields less then current farming methods?
Edit: a good view on the agroforests they're doing here https://vimeo.com/136423275 it is subtitled, this one is a good example of how a agroforest can recover destructed lands.
The point of food forests is to create solid reserves of food at local level, not to replace industrial agriculture - it's a buffer to have food growing near you, and it makes everyone safer.
The point of local food production is it is resilient. If you add local composting, greenhouses, local gardens, community gardens, local farms etc, to sustainable practice in industrial ag, then you have a model that can feed everyone with launching us off a cliff when for example the cost of oil begins to rise as supply falls or war hits in some region or other.
I didn't make it beyond a few paragraphs, and I don't really have even 'semi-strong' views either way - but this reads like the author has never set foot in the country, nevermind lived there.
The "there's still potential for spoils in transport" argument is laughable, insignificant, and I imagine less than that occurring in transport to a mass-packing facility!
I'm all for technology, but this is just poorly written pro-agribusiness propaganda. It doesn't even address any of the most common criticisms of big agriculture, and instead is just attacking farmers markets for whatever reason.
A lot of people don't realize that shipping is incredibly cheap now, in both money and energy. It takes less fuel to ship a car from London to New York by container ship than it does to drive that car fifty miles.
OK, then BY ALL MEANS please create a supply chain to supply me with delicious heirloom tomatoes that stretches a few thousand miles. I suspect if it were possible places like Whole Foods and the like would already be doing it and selling those tomatoes at $5-$10/lb year round.
But since I can only get them in season, and rarely then, I suspect that there is something to the "local, organic" myth after all.
You never realized it's all about the price point being combined with a story? Someone figured out you can make people pay quite a bit more for higher quality tomatoes if you can claim with some credibility that they are grown locally.
How about the good quality tomatoes grown 1000 miles away, that could be economically shipped to you in a way that is less destructive to the environment than the first option, still taste as good and be cheaper? Not an option, because they don't conform to your arbitrarily chosen standard of being "local".
You are no better than the luddites.
There is nothing about mass production that lowers the quality. What lowers quality is the price point and the demand for the cheapest possible product. Shift it to some better balance between quality and price, and mass production would kill your cute little hobbyist farms in every single benchmark, including sustainability.
At the moment the "ecological"/"locally grown" meme is blocking this development.
> You never realized it's all about the price point being combined with a story?
Given that other people are indicating that THEIR Whole Foods has heirloom tomatoes year round and mine does not, and we're presumably all in the US (if we can go to Whole Foods) then that means I'm right! If Whole Foods could economically ship them to every store in the country, they'd do so! That means that there are some things which simply aren't economical to do at any scale other than local.
I don't have a local fetish where "local" == "better" for everything and in fact, you'll notice that I'm complaining about the lack of heirloom tomatoes, rather than bragging about it.
> You are no better than the luddites.
Way to jump to some conclusions and start in on the ad hominem! Congrats!
> Shift it to some better balance between quality and price, and mass production would kill your cute little hobbyist farms in every single benchmark, including sustainability.
Again, way to go on the attack for what reason exactly? What did stupid little hobby farms ever do to you? Why are you so hostile to the idea that a "luddite" could have a "small business" that they "own" alongside the industrial agriculture that you so desire? They're farming on a scale that'll never put major agribusiness in a bind so what does it matter?
The "local" fanatics might be annoying, but I'll grant them that at least they have a real beef with agribusiness buying up small farms and growing vast monocultures. That's a documented phenomena.
But what threat do small farmers pose for Monsanto? None, as far as I can tell. There's a revolving door between Monsanto and government, no such revolving door exists between any small farms and government.
It's just not physically possible to ship a tomato that's been fully vine ripened for a thousand miles. Once they're fully ripe, they're too fragile to ship an appreciable distance. So, the big producers pick them hard and unripe and ship them. Yes, they'll continue to ripen off the vine, but once they've been cut off from their source of nutrients and water they're not going to get any more. It's the trade off necessary to have produce outside of the local season. (Greenhouses in upstate with grow lights would be a better alternative way to get tomatoes in New York City in January though.)
> Once they're fully ripe, they're too fragile to ship an appreciable distance.
That is a mechanical problem. It can and probably has been solved, except it's likely a bit more expensive than just chucking them into a box. Again, the price point.
Whole foods does have heirloom tomatoes for most of the year where I am... Also this is an extremely nitpicked example. With many things, especially fruit, organic options keep more poorly and are less satisfying. I'd much prefer my industry grown, GMO plums to organic options that aren't as sweet or crisp.
Yes it's a nitpicked example, but it's also valid. There are some things that for various reasons have to be local and I think that's a valid counter-point to the article that argues "local is stupid" in a fairly unqualified fashion.
I'm not saying that local is an unqualified good either, it's clearly qualified. There are some things that local is better at full stop.
Now I feel really badly about buying the local organic produce at one of the many farmers markets near me. Even though the produce is fresh, delicious, and my $$$ stay in my local community, I now realize that I should have been paying for the tomato transported 1000 miles with a smart chip in the carton. Thanks for the wake up call!
I live in upstate ny and get all of my seasonal vegetables from farms about 45m away.
Sunday we got rutabagas about 5x the size of the supermarket versions for 1/2 the price. Bushel of broccoli for $10. Bushel of spaghetti squash for $20. (75% savings vs retail)
So cheaper and it almost always of higher quality.
I don't understand why this is not scalable. Even in the bay area, where there is high population density and the price of living is one of the highest in the world, there are tons of farmer's markets everywhere.
Technology which improves transportation aid local food production even more.
Probably the best evidence I have to support this "fallacy" is the couple hundred pounds of honey I harvest locally every year. So according to this article I should drop my beekeeping and just buy honey from Chinese suppliers who are operating at scale and using smarter ... technology? I dunno, but in the future I'd like my honey like my tomatoes: to continue to come from my neighborhood whenever possible.
I don't understand why the opposite to "local" has to be "halfway around the world". Why not do it in a scalable but sensible way? You know, like being able to address a market of millions instead of thousands, but perhaps not necessarily billions.
You are of course welcome to pay extra for some sort of weird pleasure of having things made very close to where you live, but I think the taxation systems should punish you for the extra strain that makes you put onto the environment.
well i agree with you, and I wouldn't knock food transport and scale provided it is done in a sustainable and non toxic way.
but i definitely take issue with the "weird pleasure" comment, as there is nothing weird about the pleasure of farming in the city and growing your own food. It's about one of the most engaging cultural practices in existence, and it's as old as people. But it takes learning and practice, and awareness of that value, which is clearly missing in modern culture which views farming as some sort of weird thing. A weird peasure indeed!
> But urban land is in short supply, expensive, often polluted, and unsuitable for horticulture.
Nonsense. This is an argument for expanding access and cleaning up after ourselves - land that is too polluted to grow in is too polluted to live on.
> So does the industrial washing of packed and cut vegetables, which also saves water, compared with household‑level processing.
Also bullshit. People spend more water cleaning vegetables that have already been cleaned from industrial sources than from their yard. Growing vegetables close to home is a resource saver across the board, especially if it were smartly integrated with urban composting projects.
>While ‘handpicked’ sounds attractive to the urban consumer or occasional gardener, this type of manual labour is backbreaking if done all day long.
It is attractive to the urban consumer because if you are picking for yourself and family, the work isn't backbreaking and all day long. I fully believe in automated, roboticized food production as a replacement of slave labor, however it seems fairly sensible to me that, as labor becomes less of an imperative of class, that the quality of a person's labor will become more refined holistic and less machine-like, ie: farming and gardening for exercise instead of going to the gym.
> To top it all, the yield from organic farming is low.
Bullshit!! I don't have numbers handy, but I've been on farm tours, (granted organic is a misleading label these days) and the net yield from farms that depend on renewable, organic resources is higher than industrialized factory farmed produce, and the quality is higher. Only in the narrow calculus of unit per price is the yield higher, but we already know the dirty secret there: factory farmed, mass produced food is subsidized by oil and unsustainable resources, where the true cost is buried in diminishing returns over generational time spans.
> ketchup
haha! the great ketchup argument. Now we know this was ghost written by Ronald Raygunz ghost!
> Double-blind tasting panels have been unable to pick out the greenhouse tomatoes as lacking in flavour, or tomatoes grown without fertiliser as more tasteful.
Manure. Who does the testing? I can't think of an easier study to game. Plus "tomatoes grown without fertiliser" is a tell: not "fertilizer" as organic compost made from cow manure is "fertilizer", but inorganic fertilizer made from petroleum? - yeah, give me the manure tomatoes please.
And here's the last straw in this troll article:
>In complete contrast to the mantra of organic farming, modern greenhouses are now in the vanguard of sustainability.
Because organic farmers have used greenhouses for decades and beyond, and there's nothing incompatible with the organic, sustainable, small-scale, local movements and the greenhouse. So this article can't maintain a consistent argument with respect to its own premise. No one is arguing that sustainability in farming shouldn't utilize the best tech possible, but attacking the best progressive pillars of the movement which are small scale, individual efforts on shoddy grounds to promote the benevolent promise of mass scale industrial agriculture - it's not good work.
I will say that to the extend that these kinds of articles are meant to raise hackles and cause discussion among hipster urban farm types, then well done!
>> To top it all, the yield from organic farming is low.
> Bullshit!! I don't have numbers handy, but I've been on farm tours, (granted organic is a misleading label these days) and the net yield from farms that depend on renewable, organic resources is higher than industrialized factory farmed produce, and the quality is higher. Only in the narrow calculus of unit per price is the yield higher, but we already know the dirty secret there: factory farmed, mass produced food is subsidized by oil and unsustainable resources, where the true cost is buried in diminishing returns over generational time spans.
Note that you have to include the environmental footprint of the inefficient humans that manage "organic" farms and compare that to more automated variants.
yeah but that's the problem exactly with the article, which is that there is no incompatibility with automated, greenhoused, hi-tech, and sustainable, local, organic farming. They are compatible. Given that, local and organic (not the label, but the true meaning, which is things grown in living and decaying matter, not awash in chemicals and subsidized by non-renewable, fossil fuel based supplements) The argument is that conventional mass production farming is superior to local, hands-on, organic farming. I don't think this is true, but I know a lot of pretty deeply invested corporations that would like it to be true.
Are our yields as high as what we might get if robotic pickers and chemical fertilizers were used? No, but nobody is dying or being abused or getting cancer to make sure that a disgusting, mealy, colorless tomato can be on your cheeseburger.