It's the same school of thought that says that one should lower taxes and invest less in road fixing and schools. Instead, cars wear out faster/need more repairs and wealthier parent pay for tutors to make up the difference.
40+ years of externalizing costs has taken its toll.
IMO the issue is ideologies vs actuaries/statisticians ... It's shocking how both the "left"/"right" agree on many values, but also so disagree on how to achieve them.
Eg: Both sides care about children, productive economy, value of education
Using education as an example, I think great harm has come as a result of making it a government monopoly. Not sure how it is in the US but in Europe there's not really a free market with regards to how children are taught. So there's no room for a competitor to come in and say "we can do it better", because when this happens (and it does happen occasionally) they are just shut down by police.
The school I went to was a Dalton school (though basically only in name, as explained below), one of the pioneering futuristic school systems developed in the early 20th century which said that people would learn more if they are allowed to learn about what they actually care about. My school had a copy of the original book describing the Dalton school system in the library. Almost everything described in the Dalton school from 1905 would be illegal if it were done today.
My point is, I'm fairly left-leaning but I support a radical deregulation of education on all levels: this seems to be one area where we should let the free market take care of things. And of course, if it turns out that a different way of teaching works better, there's nothing (except inertia) stopping the public schools from adopting the same methodology, making it universally available.
Don't you think leaving education to the free market would make it harder for kids from poor backgrounds to go up in life? When everyone uses the same system, it's in everyone's best interest to fund it and make it as good as possible. You won't get the best results, but at least everyone gets a decent education.
Except we've seen that this doesn't really work in practice. Kids are not all getting a decent education. Poor kids are still at a huge disadvantage compared to wealthy kids. There isn't a one size fits all education. Different roles which are needed by society require different skills. Everyone doesn't need to go to college. The world still needs ditch diggers and it likely always will. Not everyone is equal when it comes to intellectual or physical capability. When you try to shove everyone through the same system, you get a lot of square pegs going through round holes. This prevents those with high intellectual capabilities from reaching their full potential by reducing education to the lowest common denominator.
I like this idea! In fact I have wondered what effect it would have on government if citizens could literally vote with their dollars, ie. democratically decide how government funds are allocated. So every year each citizen would be allocated ( yearly budget / total population ) dollars and could choose how their dollars are spent.
My expectation is that a free market of ideas would allow superior modes of education to rapidly emerge, which would then be slowly and poorly copied by the mainstream. If I'm understanding you right, you're saying that by allowing a parallel education system with freedom of choice, all the smart and rich people would abandon the old one to die. (It would be kept alive, of course by taxes, in body, if not in spirit!)
My personal belief is that the death of the old education system is over a century overdue.
We don't need to kill it, just stop making alternatives illegal and the problem will solve it itself.
Letting the people with wealth and power use an alternative system would be the same thing as killing the public system. No one with the ability to improve the system would have the incentive to. It's the reason public schools aren't improving. In a privatized system you'll get a divided population with some being very well educated and while some get no education at all.
There's nothing preventing a public system from being changed and improved. Take Finland as an example. Everyone goes to the same public schools there, rich or poor. The result is one of the best education systems in the world. New methods are regularly tested and teachers have a lot of freedom to choose the ones that suit them.
I live in Denmark, which is in Europe. I’m extremely courious as to where in Europe you are actually from, because if there’s is one thing that is the same across the entirety of Europe from my experience, it is that no-one from a European country would ever talk about “Europe” like it was a uniform thing when talking about laws or public institutions. School in France is extremely different from school in Finland etc. Also I am puzzled to think about which country in Europe doesn’t have private schooling available next to public schools.
So I’m curious because taken on it’s own your comment sounds a lot like a fiction a conservative American would author about what they think ‘Europe’ is like. But this might just be a result of your alternative schooling.
Also your schooling is described as being not available where you are yet still what you went through which seems a bit of a conundrum as well. Was it actually illegal, or do you think you might have been exposed to biased propaganda by the institution coloring your view on what the educational system in your country is actually like?
Not American, but your comment amused me because I just spent the last hour reading about how to migrate there :)
I'm half Croatian, half Australian, and speak with an American accent due to my childhood friends. I went to an international school (IB) followed by a Dutch high school (VWO). (Basically I'm an alien everywhere I go.)
My school called itself a Dalton school, but upon reading the book by the creator of the original Dalton school (Education on the Dalton Plan, Helen Parkhurst, 1905) I was absolutely blown away by how radical and futuristic this school sounded, and how short my own school (which supposedly was the same kind) fell of that mark. I investigated why my school did hardly any of the things Dalton schools are supposed to do, and found out that they were against Dutch law.
As you say, Europe is not (yet) a monolithic entity, and perhaps there is even a country here where letting kids do what they want isn't considered a crime. Hopefully I was wrong to generalize in this regard, I would certainly be happy to hear about it.
As for my bias, I admit freely that I absolutely hated school, consider it an abomination and a crime against the human spirit, and almost certainly would have left if it weren't illegal (they send the police after your parents). I say "almost" because I did rather enjoy the part where you get to see your friends every day—although at the time it wasn't clear to me that this would go away with graduation, or how much I would miss it.
To be clear I have no problem with people willingly submitting themselves to such a thing, it's the coercion part that I can't stand for.
> Not sure how it is in the US but in Europe there's not really a free market with regards to how children are taught.
Homeschooling is the closest to that free market in the US. Your comment prompted me to look up the homeschooling statistics [1] and I was surprised by the results for Europe. The US outstrips the rest of the world by number of children in homeschooling by a large margin.
US homeschooling outcomes are so far promising [2], so one could say it is a pretty competitive alternative market.
But the values themselves are different. Caring about the children looks entirely different for one side vs the other given one side believes in a social safetynet and the other believes the opposite. The definition of a productive economy is different; for some it might mean everyone has a good paying job but for others it means their select investments return a lot of money in a year and they don't much care about these other sectors they aren't heavily leveraged in. What they identify as the value of education is different as well. For one side it might be to establish critical thinking skills and to hear a wide variety of thoughts on a topic, and for the other side it's just the opposite where they want only one groupthink and no deviation from that, and their leaders would prefer their base didn't critically think about the issues they support.
> ... where they want only one groupthink and no deviation from that, and their leaders would prefer their base didn't critically think about the issues they support.
Yeah, that's why they're adamant about the dangers of freedom of speech.
Functioning roads and schools supported by taxes is supported by 99.9% of people. People only object to paying high taxes for wasteful, inefficient bureaucracies and corrupt deals to pay well-connected insiders or campaign donors excessively for providing services.
Everyone wants roads and schools. Conservatives complain when they realize they're paying taxes for a campaign donor to rebuild the same road every year. Liberals complain when they realize the owner of the construction company is now a billionaire. Both want the road, neither want corruption and injustice, they just focus on slightly different aspects of the same dysfunction.
Everything is a tradeoff. It's very easy to label things as waste in isolation.
The reality is pesticides and other crop technologies substantially increase efficiency of the land we're using. This means per capita: we're using less land (more back to nature), losing less crop (less fuel/maintenance wasted), and requiring an increasingly smaller percentage of the population to tend to crops.
So don't ever eat out or make anything nice? Do you only eat rice and beans?
> or going to a casino are a total waste of resources
I broadly bucket expenses like that as "entertainment", which I guess isn't directly productive, but at the same time is arguably appreciated by the people who enjoy it. Hacker news arguably falls under this, mind you. There's a non-negligible amount of resources (server costs, paid moderator(s), and opportunity costs of all the participants) that's spent on it. So if you really want to put your money where your mouth is, you'd get off hn ;)
If developing-world nations like Bangladesh start seeing wet bulb temperatures incompatible with life - and we're getting close in spots; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature#Wet-bulb_... - having to supply AC to tens of millions of people in areas without the electrical infrastructure to reliably run them is... a problem.
So here in the PNW, we typically only heat during the winter. Most people here have never had AC in the summer time. So typically, power usage in the summer here is really low. Most of us just turn off the furnace for a number of months. We know it's fall when we finally turn on the heat.
Now that more and more people are getting heat pumps, I suspect that the energy saved during the winter is going to be offset quite a bit by people running their AC in the summer. I don't know how much that will be, but I know I'll be running my new AC unit this summer. Hopefully I won't need it more than a couple of weeks. But it's been hotter the last few summers, and if the trend continues, we'll be running the AC a lot more.
It's a side effect of building the wrong structure for the environment. If you ever go to the south take note of the architecture in the old homes and even rowhomes where working class people lived. The cielings will be very high, and there will be second window above the doorway perhaps. The windows will have awnings. There will be porches with large overhangs shading living rooms and dining rooms inside the dwelling. All of these features help with cooling a home in a hot climate and making it livable in a world before air conditioning, taking no energy to do so beyond that initial energy investment to build the building itself.
Meanwhile, look at what is built in the south today. The same sort of buildings you might see from alaska to phoenix to orlando to upstate new york. Only they might have installed central air for that floorplan in phoenix or orlando. They aren't building structures fit for the particular environment, they are building structures that are cheap to build in the market and don't really fit too well anywhere, and shoehorning it into whatever environment it sits with AC.
Building with classic Southern US techniques doesn't negate or even significantly reduce the need for air conditioning. Without AC, these types of structures still become incredibly hot during the summer; they suffer from mold and material damage from humidity; they required workarounds like sleeping on a screened-in porch during the summer instead of inside the house, because the house itself was too sweltering to tolerate, even at night. If you were lucky enough not to be laboring outside in the South during the summer, you spent a large part of your day sitting around being miserable. It was a major contributor to the south's lag in economic development, and a strong contributor to historically poor public health and life expectancy.
They're also not particularly efficient in terms of space utilization, making them unfeasible for sustainable, 'walkable' neighborhood development.
At least now adays modern structures are starting to incorporate these sorts of built in cooling solutions (e.g. sun shades) but I think there is a good middle ground to be struck between the 1850s and building structures that require less energy to cool in the first place. A lot of this stuff is just simple physics at work; hot air moves up etc.
Recently in CA in my neighborhood, someone decided to paint their spanish style home dark brown. I can't help but think going from ivory white to dark brown is going to increase their AC bill in the summer. Just using basic physics with consideration to the environment can go a long way.
The only thing unsustainable is an indefinitely growing population, but fortunately it's projected to level off. If so it renders the arbitrary objections a moot point.
The rich aren't numerous enough in number for it to matter, but more importantly, the linked highlights global disparity. Everyone in the West has a higher carbon footprint than poor countries just by living here. The resources consumed by the rich aren't ridiculously greater than the middle class.
This is all a moot point in the face of stagnant population growth. It would be no less sustainable for the West to consume more by virtue that the demand isn't infinite and technological innovation increases efficiency all the time.
Maybe a stupid question but this removes surface pesticide residue, is there any evidence of how much that is percentage wise versus 'absorbed' pesticide inside the fruit?
For most of agricultural history people didn't eat raw vegetables at all, and only some raw fruits. Before the advent of modern agriculture night dirt was a common fertilizer and a serious vector for disease. It's still unsafe to ear raw fruits and vegetables in parts of the world with bad sanitization. I know a few people who have gotten seriously ill consuming fresh pressed fruit juice in North Africa.
It's a nice anecdote, but I've lived and travelled in various African countries and never been sick from consuming fruit, vegetables or pressed juice. I'd be much more worried about eating poorly butchered and stored meat. The idea people throughout history didn't eat raw fruits and vegetables is also quite wrong.
Again, after living in rural communities, they largely eat what they can get - which includes a lot of raw fruits and vegetables. Of course meat is important, but no more important than nuts, berries, tubers etc.
Here's a 2017 study from Egypt about the frequency of parasite cysts on fresh produce[1]. Here's another about salmonella generally in North Africa[2]. Both irrigation and washing of produce use water that may not be safe to drink. This isn't some anecdotal issue I'm bringing up.
> It's a nice anecdote, but I've lived and travelled in various African countries and never been sick from consuming fruit, vegetables or pressed juice.
That's all and good, but how do you even know that? One can live with parasites for quite a while before noticing any symptoms.
I come from a 'third world' country. We really wash our fruits and specially our vegetables. Even though they might come from large farming operations, you can still have people without proper sanitization handling them after taking a dump.
Heck, there are still places where you cannot enter a body of water without worms piercing your skin and having a party in your intestines. Our elementary school curriculum was pretty extensive on diseases and specially parasites.
> The idea people throughout history didn't eat raw fruits and vegetables is also quite wrong.
They did. People also died a lot. Although a berry growing somewhere in the wilderness will probably have less of a chance of carrying diseases or parasites that infect humans (on the account of not having encountered other humans). After farming? All bets are off.
> Although a berry growing somewhere in the wilderness will probably have less of a chance of carrying diseases or parasites that infect humans (on the account of not having encountered other humans).
> Without them then fruit would be inaccessible to many people.
This is just a lucky side effect, I'm 100% sure that main goal is for the pesticides industry just take their cut on the producers margin. By growing those margins, sure, but it's not something that should be forgotten.
No, the main goal of the pesticides industry is to supply chemicals that kill of various pests (insects, fungi etc) that would otherwise destroy a significant proportion of the harvest.
Without these pesticides food would be significantly more expensive and less accessible to many people.
I agree that we should talk about moving away from chemical dependent farming but we need to be aware of the full picture in order to avoid glib solutions.
I realize I should have been more nuanced, but you should too. The increase of production is undeniable, I'm not challenging that, and introduction of pesticides in the second half the the 20th century lowered drastically the cost of living of many.
But the pesticide industry has become predatory, and their concerns have not been public welfare for a very long time.
That's the point of the analogy. Use of pesticides in some part allows us to have stable and cheap access to food. There are similar ethical arguments to be had about restricting pesticides.
Where I live, fruit and vegetable farmers are routinely required to discard significant portions of the harvest per USDA mandates… maybe we could find some middle ground between poisoning people for obscene harvests and allowing pests to decimate crops?
because most consumers won't be able to tell the difference while they incur cost of extra process. They have pre-washed salads in NA too, but I doubt those are washed using ultrasonic devices.
My experience so far is: don't go for the €100/$100 one.
I bought one because my relative wanted to have this particular model in his 3D printing... cave (for lack of a better word) and it broke down after a few weeks.
Here is what I saw for an ultrasonic jewelry cleaner:
>As a general rule of thumb, you will require between 50watts to 100 watts per gallon for your ultrasonic jewelry cleaner to achieve efficient cleaning.
The cohorts are huge (120,000+ people) and they controlled for a number of other factors in the analysis, so I don't think sample error is here to blame for why they observed high-pesticide fruits/veggies having less health benefits than low-pesticide fruits/veggies.
The p values are small enough that the correlation seems likely to be real, even after lots of dredging through that dataset. I'm less sure about the causality, though. It's also possible they've just discovered that richer people (a) live longer, and (b) like organic produce. They controlled for various factors (note 1 on table 2), but none that seem like usefully strong proxies for income or wealth.
Surely this relationship is noteworthy only to the extent it's potentially a causality? The authors are careful not to make explicit claims, but most discussion here is about that possibility. The title of this HN submission is too ("could negate"), though the title of the paper itself is more cautious.
After more carefully reading the paper, I think the premise of my original comment was completely wrong though. The study apparently had no information on whether the participants were eating conventional or organic produce. Rather, they categorized by type of fruit or vegetable, converting the average results of tests for residues to a score from 0 (best) to 6 (worst) with a somewhat arbitrary heuristic. For example, grapefruit scored 0, and spinach scored 6.
That eliminates the spurious correlation I speculated about, though others may exist; it would be interesting to know which specific fruits and vegetables accounted for most of the effect. That heuristic also increases the risk of data dredging; I wonder how many versions they tried before they got their result. As to the residues, it seems they considered all pesticides equally, even though some are strongly suspected to be much more dangerous than others. It would be interesting to repeat the analysis considering only residues of those suspected to be most (or least) dangerous, to see if their effect gets bigger (or smaller).
Your linked source is specific to Europe which tends to have much stronger regulations on pesticides. While the parent didn't state it explicitly I believe their statement was about the US since - yea, in America the organic label doesn't change the volume of pesticides you can use but rules out some of them.
The best tactic you can follow in the US is to try and buy imported produce from countries with stricter pesticide laws.
In fairness organic is defined very differently in different countries. Wild fish are not organic in UK but farmed fish can be. Taken literally all food is organic apart from a few mineral supplements like iron tablets.
> Modern synthetic pesticides are far, far from great but they're still better than their natural counterparts.
Far too much generalisation there. There are thousands of synthetic pesticides, and dozens (hundreds?) of "natural" ones (ranging from gelatine to roteome).
It's not a pointless comparison when organic farmers used harmful rotenone so much that it had to become banned outright.
Needing to ban a 19th century pesticide in the 21st century is not a broad brush, but proof of the growing common misconception that naturally occurring means safer than synthetic - the entire basis of the Organic label.
Pesticide is a big category and a lot of pesticides are themselves organic and non-toxic. Presumably the troubling pesticides from the study are more along the lines of Roundup and less along the lines of horticultural vinegar, but they don't say so explicitly in the abstract. They do quote another study, "interventions switching individuals from conventional to organic diets result in a dramatic decline in urinary pesticide metabolites".
Pesticide use in conventional system can use synthetic chemistries whereas organic can only use 'natural' formulations. Thus, it is extremely difficult to compare apples to apples and most studies are flawed. Because the 'natural' formulation aren't as effective (usually), this needs to higher nominal rates.
Again, it's very dicey comparison. I'm not advocating convention > organic, but feel the need to pushback on people that think organic > conventional
This article (if read completely) highlights the extreme lack of data on this subject and mostly does a good job explaining how each metric is 'loaded' (toxicity, nominal application amounts, off-target movements, etc.)
This is a very grey subject and it should be debated as such.
I read a while ago about leek that was stolen while it was still toxic from the pesticides. Apparently the leeks needed some more weeks for the toxins to flush through. Haven't been able to find some other info about this process.
For leeks to have a white portion of the stem (usually the part that is eaten), you have to bury part of it underground or it turns green. Presumably they use something like a soil fumigant to prevent spoilage of this underground part. Pretty nasty stuff if it actually renders the plant toxic for 6 weeks.
Some solid and oily toxins are considered technically insoluble in water since so few milligrams will dissolve in a liter. Unlike familiar things that are obviously soluble in grams like salt or sugar.
Now the pesticides are developed to be highly toxic in milligram amounts, but the advantage is that there is likely only to be a few milligrams on the farm produce that needs to be washed off.
Solubility is a function of solvent temperature and volume, so the hotter and the greater number of liters or gallons, often astronomically more of an "insoluble" material can be taken up into a solvent compared to the very minuscule amount soluble when cold.
Naturally thorough flushing and/or repeated rinsing with fresh hot solvent will be more effective than a single bath, since the first bath sees the highest concentration of solute. Which can re-deposit upon evaporation.
I'm sure people have not thought it was that bad and have occasionally eaten something like an unwashed grape or strawberry, or even quite a number of them whether focusing much awareness on it or not.
Take fruit from that same batch and run it under good amounts of hot water and see if you can taste the difference too.
Carefully using an appropriate vegetable brush is a good idea as well.
I have food allergies and have a very strict diet.
Recently I had some issues with dry scalp, doctors weren’t helpful to diagnose the root cause, and I traced it to non organic carrots that removed or replaced by organic ones caused the symptoms to return.
I can’t buy cheap bulk carrots, but organic ones are fine.
This sounds insane but I’m starting to think the food supply isn’t as safe as we think.
This is part of the reason I really want to move out of the U.S. Other countries are much more strict with what they allow in their food. I understand that I can pay more for organic produce and meat, but for a supposedly first-world country, you'd think decent produce would be a given.
be careful: organic may still allow a ton of things that are bad for you, such as copper sulfate in the EU.
While the idea of organic produce is great, the implementation is deeply misleading: tell people petrol derivatives are legit in "bio" fruit and enjoy their confusion :)
why not shop at produce-prioritizing grocers like Sprouts (if it's available where you are)? they are VERY much aligned with your priorities, and, in their focus, are cost efficient.
So you'd rather everyone pay more for food based on your personal preferences? Even though there's a lot of evidence that these foods are entirely safe...
> So you'd rather everyone pay more for food based on your personal preferences?
The counterpoint here is "so you'd rather everyone pay more for health care decades from now to save a few bucks on groceries now?"
> Even though there's a lot of evidence that these foods are entirely safe...
The US requirement for a lot of chemicals is "generally recognized as safe", which, in practice, means "we don't know that it's not safe yet". When we find something's unsafe, industry frequently switches to something similar that's still GRAS (because no one's been using it) but likely has the same issues. Europe takes a stricter approach.
Example: BPA in plastics, which has now been replaced with BPS and BPF.
The only assumption is is that in low doses pesticides are not harmful, but there is no deep knowledge of years and years of low dose pesticide exposure. And those limits might differ based upon weight, gender, age, genetics and luck.
But there are also other risks. For instance with Strawberries they might have limits of one pesticide, but they max out different ones, so you get a cocktail of chemicals that used together exceeds the allowed limits of one.
> The only assumption is is that in low doses pesticides are not harmful
In case you haven't noticed yet, the world mostly runs on assumptions people pretend/parrot as facts and even defend their assumptions as if they actually were facts.
Common sense dictates that less harmful dosages are still harmfull, but less so. Your body repairs the damage quicker than it can spread, which works fine until the internal repair rate starts slowing down and that's not even considering any potential long term side effects.
I find it very scary that this study even exists. This is just common sense in Austria. Pesticides are bad, period.
This is a pure strawman argument, the parent comment said none of those things. Regarding entirely safe, this is a comment thread on a study that says they're not entirely safe.
Yes, it's perfectly safe to spray poison, which is meant to kill living beings, onto food. Absolutely. Common sense is wrong, of course. Poison is safe. Any evidence suggesting otherwise is obviously just fabricated.
Gasmasks, used when applying insecticides manually, are just for show. Laws outside of the US, which prohibit certain use of chemicals, are just random.
This is a strawman. Nobody wants to eat pesticides.
"Common sense" was that you don't eat the poison. You remove it from the food first. You also remove any soil on the food, and if the food is sold in a box or can, you don't eat that, either.
The thing I want to learn, because I'm more interested in learning than I am in reveling in how right I am, is whether common agricultural poisons can be rinsed off with a bit of tap water, or if they're too sticky or too easily absorbed for that to be sufficient. Apparently they can't be washed off this easily, which is annoying, because I rather like buying my apples without worms in them.
Oh yeah. Well in Europe one reason the food tastes so good is there's running water there. In USA you only get brine unless you're on a farm, or collecting rainwater.
"High-pesticide-residue FV intake was unrelated whereas low-pesticide residue FV intake was inversely related to all-cause mortality"
high pesticide consumption was unrelated (so had no effect on mortality), while low pesticide intake had inverse relation to mortality (low pesticide = high mortality)?
The expectation is that FV consumption decreases all cause mortality.
This agrees with the observation that low-pesticide residue FV intake was inversely related to all-cause mortality.
If High-pesticide-residue FV intake was unrelated to all cause mortality it could mean that there is a detrimental effect in High-pesticide-residue FV that offsets the expected benefit of FV.
If you eat low-pesticide fruits and vegetables, you're less likely to die.
If you eat high-pesticide fruits and vegetables, your chances of dying are unaffected, which is surprising because you would expect that increased fruit and vegetable consumption would decrease your chances of dying.
So, it seems that the potential health benefits of eating fruits and vegetables is negated if they contain high levels of pesticide.
Combine this article with the other one about contamination of fruits and vegetables in Europe and we have a pretty bad picture of the situation:
European citizens have been exposed to a
dramatic rise in the frequency and intensity of
residues of the most toxic pesticides on fruits
and vegetables sold in the EU. This report
and its primary conclusion contradict official
claims that toxic pesticides use is declining
and that food residue levels are under
control. This report also exposes a complete
failure by Member States and the European
Commission to implement EU Regulation and
protect consumers.
I can't wait until vertical farming becomes cheap enough to overtake traditional farming methods. Pesticide use will be a thing of the past while all of our food is grown locally in controlled environments. Optimizing for food taste instead of pesticide or weather resistance.
Not to mention the reduced carbon footprint (due to transportation), significant decrease in water usage, and increased efficiency.
The excuse to legalize all these pesticides and genetic food was to feed the hungry in the 3rd world. What actually happened is we are eating it, the companies are making more money and kids are still starving in many parts of the world.
>I can't wait until vertical farming becomes cheap enough to overtake traditional farming methods
There was a recent post about "World’s largest vertical strawberry farm" that recently opened[1], and the price quoted for the product was "$20 for 8 strawberries". That still seems terribly expensive, at least compared to conventional produce. What technological breakthroughs are on the horizon that would reduce that price to levels that are comparable to conventional produce?
you think controlled environments don't use chemicals to control pests???
They do, and they use them a lot, because controlling pests and pathogens is physically hard no matter how hard you try.
Vertical farming is way, way more energy intensive than regular outdoor based farming for the simple reason is outdoor farming can use the sun. That sole fact basically kills vertical farming for all but the highest of margin food (spices, some vegetables). When we get cheap energy, vertical farming will take off. Not before.
Controlled environments, are, well, erm, controlled, so something like a hydroponic greenhouse normally wouldn't use pesticides at all - pests should not be getting in at all.
If the greenhouse uses normal soil then ofcourse it's not totally isolated, but still i'd expect them to use less
I've heard of facilities with short crop cycles (greens, herbs, etc.) running totally bug-free with zero pesticides, with air showers at the entrance and careful segregation so that one introduction doesn't ruin their whole crop, etc. I don't think that's common, though.
There's usually bugs. It's common to deliberately introduce predatory insects, which control the pests in the same way as in nature, with the additional benefit that they can't fly away if the pest population gets too low. Chemical pesticides are also widely used, both organic and non-organic.
Hydroponic crops are especially vulnerable to sucking pests (aphids, whiteflies, etc.), because of the large amounts of tender new growth. Without controls or natural predators, their population can just explode, much worse than anything you'd get outdoors.
Having spent alot of time in controlled environments, the name is misleading. These are chip making clean facilities. I'd guess >99% of CE facilities have to spray pesticides.
Thrips, white flies, and other insects are _very_ common.
ETA: to add info for you. CE usually implies the control is from inputs (water, nutrients, light) not physical access.
What you are looking is called a greenhouse, they are what enable Netherlands to be the world's 2nd largest exporter of food and much of UK vegetables come from there.
Vertical greenhouses trade space efficiency for energy efficiency, you have to provide lights because they can't make full use of natural sunlight.
This only makes sence for some low-calorie foods, like berries and salads - you have to provide too much light to grow something calorious like -potato
> This only makes sence for some low-calorie foods, like berries and salads - you have to provide too much light to grow something calorious like -potato
Seems to me that collecting solar energy and then using to power LEDs close to the leaves of said plants could be doable up to a certain size (or number of floors). Our panels are inefficient but plant leaves are much worse.
Can anyone provide a hopeful development update as to what efforts if any are underway in the farming industry to genuinely move past herbicides and pesticides of this kind?
Consumers can move past herbicides and pesticides by paying more (sometimes much more) for their food, and cooking more from scratch.
Of course this is easy for wealthy first-world dwellers. Less so for low income families in places with less diverse supply chains.
Organic farming has lower yields (those pests otherwise killed off by the pesticides end up eating a lot of the produce) and is more labour intensive - which explains the higher cost.
Additionally there is more to the picture than farmers and consumers.
In most first-world countries the large retailers (Walmart is famously the most ruthless here) mercilessly squeeze suppliers (distributors and large farmers) to supply the most produce at the lowest price. This pushes farms into consolidation and industrial production - i.e. very large scale mono-culture farming heavily dependent on chemicals.
The very low cost food that we see in our supermarkets has the effect of making orgainic produce look overpriced by comparison - often consumers these days view organic as a luxury item.
Governments too have grant-aided and subsidized farms in a way that often incentivizes "high-tech" farming.
Organic especially in the US, but also in the EU, doesn't mean no herbicides and pesticides[1][2]. Some of the non-synthetic insecticides are FAR more dangerous for people[3]. A popular organic pesticide from the recent past worked by destroying cell mitochondria in a vast swath of eukaryotic cells, nasty stuff.
I should have been more clear, that one was allowed in the US, but some of the things that are allowable in the EU aren't necessarily super safe. Generally speaking really effective natural pesticides were dangerous for humans.
Sure, whatever. Organic farming isn't perfect and isn't a panacea, and I've zero interest in defending it, or in attacking high-chemical factory farming for that matter.
We need to gain a better understanding of our food production systems, the full chain, precursors (seed, fertiliser and chemical suppliers), farms, processors, distributors, retailers.
We need to stop thinking in terms of pure cost. We need to stop thinking in terms of good and evil (good organic farmers vs evil corporations or whatever). We need, as a society, to gain a proper understanding of the complexity of the food chain, of the trade-offs involved in various methods. Of the advantages and disadvantages...
It's appalling that there are chemical residues in our food, possibly to an extent that it has health implications visible in a study such as the one cited.
It's amazing that in most countries food is now much much more accessible for the vast majority of the population than it was, say, a century ago.
To a large extent these are two sides of the same coin.
> To a large extent these are two sides of the same coin.
Yeah, I think that's the interesting thing here. People don't routinely starve in droves anymore and malnutrition is increasingly rare. On the other hand there's creeping fragility in the food system(s), unknown knock on effects of chemicals applied to lots of staple crops, and land/water use issues.
It seems to me like a lot of smart people are actually working on these things but progress is as always uneven and happening in fits and starts.
It's a very complex system with complex trade offs. But, and this is crucial, not so complicated that the issues cannot be understood by an adult with high school education.
As it is, there is very poor understanding among adults in the rich world of where their food comes from, how it is grown or reared, what food/fertiliser it is given, what chemicals it is treated with and how much, how it is processed, how it is packaged, the margins along the way, and the power dynamics along the chain
Even educated adults can be shockingly uninformed, witness Gweneth Paltrow style fantasies about imagined health benefits of organic food, or on the flip side, total ignorance about the quantity of chemicals that go into the production of conventional food.
The increased frailty of our food chains and environment means that collectively we need to get educated, realise the high environmental and health cost of chemically intensive farming and start exploring alternatives.
And not with this dumb "organic good, chemical bad" mentality but properly evaluating the trade-offs in each system
It's hard to envisage a world where we feed 8, 10, 12 billion people without some chemical input, but it's certainly a good idea to try at least move in that direction
> It's hard to envisage a world where we feed 8, 10, 12 billion people without some chemical input, but it's certainly a good idea to try at least move in that direction
It seems like with current projections global population might peak around 9.4 billion in the 2600s and then fall back down to around ~8.8 by the end of the century. If we can manage river water carefully, I think it's going to be fine in the medium to long run.
Looks like I misremembered the projected peak population.
And yes, long to medium run it's going to be fine if we can carefully manage river water carefully. And if we don't exhaust soils in key agriculture heartlands, and if we don't cause too much icecap collapse, and if we don't trigger desertification of vulnerable areas (southwest USA, various parts of sub-Saharan Africa etc) and...
I do, I didn't notice the typo until the edit window expired.
> And if we don't exhaust soils in key agriculture heartlands
I think that's probably solvable if it doesn't happen at exactly the wrong time.
> and if we don't cause too much icecap collapse
This seems like a thing we could adapt to, even if it's highly undesirable. Building out a bunch of artificial reefs, locks, dykes, and flood plains seems very doable. We might end up with some 22nd century Venices, and a few less islands but not the end of civilization.
> if we don't trigger desertification of vulnerable areas
This seems harder to adapt to without moving a lot of people.
I dont think it follows either, but at least when you cook from scratch you have control over how much stuff is washed before you use it. That's not the case for more processed food.
I'm not suggesting processed food necessarily uses poorly washed vegetables, just that its out of one's control - it certainly strikes me as possible that industrial scale processes might do a better job at removing chemical residues than a typical home cook giving store bought produce a quick rinse.
As Sri Lanka recently found, it is difficult to feed all of your people by switching to organic. As much as I appreciate the benefits of organic and do try to buy it when reasonable, I recognize that organic farming takes more land, water, and labor to produce the same volume of food as non-organic. It works for a low volume, premium price model for some people but not for everyone.
I feel like our best bet to reduce the need for pesticides would be using GMO techniques to make our crops resistant to pests but the same people pushing for organics tend to dismiss GMOs out of hand.
That’s because GMO means roundup resistant in a whole huge section of its use case, and farmers are just making it rain roundup on the food. I read an article about (American) farmers using roundup to get wheat to dry and open after harvest. Basically coating the wheat right before sale.
>As Sri Lanka recently found, it is difficult to feed all of your people by switching to organic.
Oh come now. I don't really think we can use a country who had to suddenly switch from using inputs to making due without them as a good test case for organic farming. Those are absolutely less than ideal conditions.
Everything I've read on organic farming and permaculture nearly always yields higher per acre output (maybe at a higher labor cost, I dunno).
Some of our cereal crops aren't good candidates for going organic but it absolutely makes sense for a lot of of fruits and vegetables, especially the soft skinned varieties that are more apt to absorb pesticides.
Again, it certainly wouldn't replace the cereal crops, but for fruits and vegetables that are perishable and prone to absorbing pesticides, I could easily see small scale local agg replacing our current system if the price of carbon were accurately reflected (i.e. carbon tax)
I'm not defending a thesis here. You asked for a source for the assertion that one could have high yields under organic farming and I provided one. I understand organic farming yields are lower when comparing against most conventional agriculture, but your original assertion (I hate we don't have thread context in reply windows) was implying that we couldn't properly feed everyone fruits / veg using organic agriculture. I highly doubt that. Maybe organic would require more labor or different automation than simply dousing everything with roundup and pesticides, but we could do it. We simply have to decide to prioritize health and environmental impacts over cost.
> Everything I've read on organic farming and permaculture _nearly always_ yields higher per acre output
_nearly always_
Your second assertion is accurate:
> organic farming yields are lower when comparing against most conventional agriculture
I didn't at any stage say "we couldn't properly feed everyone fruits / veg using organic agriculture" - maybe you're mixing me up with some other commenter. What I do think is that currently we are not in a position where we could feed the world's population only with organic (not just fruit and vegetable - grains, meat etc also).
Parts of Africa are facing grain shortages due to disruptions in the supply in Ukraine. This shows how tight supplies are.
Those chemicals ( and I'm no fan) do enable a massive increase in yields. There's no "simply" - I agree with you that a move away is desirable, but it is far from simple or easy.
Lot of comments here mention pesticide use in organic FV as well, just not synthetic pesticides. Are there any distinctions within organic and conventional of fruits and vegetables that have low pesticide use regardless of organic or not?
I've seen fruit marked as "IPM" in my local grocery store. That refers to integrated pest management, a general philosophy of controlling pests through understanding of their physiology, behavior, and interaction with the artificially-managed ecosystem, sometimes using synthetic chemical pesticides but in the smallest quantities that achieve the desired effect.
Unless the farmer is a moron, IPM is how most farmers try to use pesticides. Pesticides and chemical applications can be very expensive. Farmers try to use the least possible amount they can for purely economic reasons. My wife's grandfather was using IPM back in the 70s. Farming is competitive. If your costs are too high, you eventually go bankrupt during bad years. For the most part IPM is the rule, not the exception. Purely limited by the farmer's ability to understand pest cycles.
A matter of degree, maybe. Certainly there's a degree of understanding that's cheaper than just blind heavy spraying, and that any grower would thus be foolish not to obtain. I've often seen "IPM" used to refer to systems that went beyond that though, incurring higher cost for lower ecological impact. For example, the guidelines linked below note explicitly that
> Practices contained in this protocol are considerably more expensive than conventional programs that rely on highly toxic pesticides.
I think my supermarket apples were just plain "IPM" though, not a specific set of guidelines like that. Those guidelines seem like a tough sell overall, hard to succinctly explain the benefits to the average consumer.
Conventional IPM programs use more toxic, but muuuch less volume of pesticides.
Organic programs user "better" pesticides, but much much more.
Which is better? We'll, it depends on how fast those pesticides break down and what those degraded molecules are. It depends on how much volume is applied to the produce. It depends on if it accumulates in the flesh of the produce.
What if a pesticide outrageously lethal to humans, but breaks down in 2 days and you only apply it in the first 25% of the produce growing window?
Which is worse? 400 lbs of feathers accumulating on your chest at 100 lbs/week for 4 weeks or 400 lbs of steel on your chest applied once.
Silly metaphor, but the answer to incredibly difficult system problems is really "it depends". Conventional vs organic is not clear cut.
Certainly agreed. Note that the guidelines I linked above do permit certain synthetic pesticides, despite their somewhat confusing use of the word "conventional" in the text that I quoted. For example, cyflumetofen is synthetic, and it's in their lowest-risk category. Copper hydroxide products are permitted under OMRI organic guidelines, but forbidden or restricted here.
I generally like the idea of more restrictive voluntary guidelines based only on safety to the ecosystem and consumer, and not on naturalness like for "organic". I haven't seen much commercial uptake, though.
The purpose of pesticides is to negate the health effects of famine. Everyone has lost perspective. There are billions of people that need to eat every day.
US citizens may eat much foods made in US everyday, but outside US citizens may not. I'll care this if I live US, but I don't much care as a non-US resident, because consumption is low. Amount is important factor.
The title of this is plain ridiculous.
The primary "health benefit" of eating food is that you dont die of hunger.
Are all american vegitairians dead ;)
Or do people live of meat and petrolchemicals?
I'm no fan of communism, but one thing I think communism did better is that allotment gardens and and small cottage gardens where much more attainable under communism for poor people. So even poor people could grow their own food.
I live in Ontario where the price of real estate is bonkers. If you own land, you can't even build a shed without there being a main building. And you can't build anything under 800 sqft. The high property taxes and real estate prices make it basically unaffordable for most people.
I planted a few fruit trees in my backyard, but so far only squirrels benefit.
Stalin allowed for the household plot, because.... everyone was starving due to communism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_plot During the Holodomor and in "the breadbasket" of Ukraine, people were arrested for not yielding _all_ of their produce to the state.
Now the effect of terrorizing people with scarcity of food may have caused them to try to grow more of their own food, but I'm not sure that's the best tactic.
Europe and Russia has a history of peasants growing their own food. Subsequently farmland was divided into small lots. With lots of small farmers. This did not sit well with ideological goals of communism and also the soviets were in a military race with the west. Stalin wanted the state to be productively competitive with the high output large farms in America. So centrally controlled economy, and taking away land from the former peasants was one way he thought he would achieve that. But it failed in famine and the country side still to this day has many smaller farms. The land is just divided differently there. Locally grown organic food is how people still feed themselves through many parts of the world. But with globalization the price of food is low enough that local small farms can't compete on price. But still offer higher quality food in many regards. They're just squeezed out by mega farms. Also twice as many people in the world now, so need more food cheap to feed them. Globalization has made same things better and some things worse at the same time.
It makes it an interesting idea that poor people own more land in poor countries and are more self sufficient. The current form of capitalism in Canada and America is creating an underclass of people that are totally reliant on the state through debt schemes or direct welfare programs. Their labour has so little value, their salaries don't even cover rent and food. Inflation will make this more apparent than ever before.
I'm not sure the forced collectivization failed in the metrics that mattered to Stalin. The collectivization did really massively increase agricultural productivity enabling huge numbers of workers to be moved into factory work in the cities. Many people, including in the West, were in awe of the supposed communist productivity miracle.
Now, in retrospect we can say it was just the process of industrialization played out in a super-compressed timeline, and not due to the inherent economic superiority of communism. But it wasn't clear at the time, it was really an open question whether communism was a economically superior system. Which made the capitalist class really afraid, and caused various forms of communist repression in the West like McCarthyism.
As an aside, it wasn't like industrialization as a process was all roses in the West either. Enclosure of the commons drove masses of subsistence farmers into brutal factory work in the cities.
The only part of your first post I object to is the attribution to communism. Literally, growing all the food and then sending it to the collection point of the commune. That didn't work at all and home plots were _allowed_ as a violation of pure communist idealogy. They existed before, they were opposed by communism, but then allowed to return because they actually work.
I don't disagree with that. I just wanted to advocate for something more like it here. Allowing more poor to be self reliant and sufficient through more equitable land ownership.
That's fair. Traditionally land jubilee's and debt jubilee's helped this happen. In ancient Israel of the Old Testament there was a complete unwinding of ALL debts every 6 years. Any that extended into the 7th year were... cancelled. Also, land wasn't sold, according to the law. It was apportioned by family and you could only _lease_ it for 50 years -- after that, it reverted to the family. Thus preventing land accumulation in a few hands.
In the US we had victory gardens during times of war rationing. I personally grow one still today, but not everyone has the space, time and inclination to learn how to grow plants and preserve a harvest.
Many American cities have "community gardens" equivalent to the European allotments. Mine will provide a few hundred square feet to any resident for a nominal fee, for the exclusive use of that resident with some basic restrictions (noncommercial, grow mostly edible plants, etc.).
I saw some documentary on the TV about the common food people ate in various decades in the UK, and there they said that some time after WWII when rationing was ended people were so dead tired of their victory gardens that most of them were replaced with lawns or flowers in just a few short years.
Just curious, what method do you use to protect against squirrels? They're kind of crazy here, will eat everything. I had one chew through a plastic bird feeder to get at the seeds.
I have a fence, and dogs are often in the backyard. Squirrels don't really bother most of what I grow anyway since they're mostly started indoors and transplanted.
One thing that is almost undebatable about communism is that it is NOT better for farming. Russian collectivism and the Chinese great leap forward are about the only data points needed.
The comment above me about community gardens is correct though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-JZkiGigDw&t=261s
research citation https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4688301/