The author of this unsourced hit piece explains where the skew comes from: Bjørn Lomborg has engaged in poor science at best, if not whole cloth scientific misconduct[1], suppressed dissent about his works as head of a government institution[2], and works for the right-wing Hoover Institute which has published such... high-quality works as "The Pseudoscience of Global Warming"[3].
Clearly, the author of this op-ed is more than willing to bend their scientific thought to suit their political goals.
Isn't organic at this point just substituting synthetic chemicals for ones that happen to be more naturally sourced (and possibly less suitable/targeted and/or more toxic)? It's industrial organic and basically the opposite of the original intent. I know my son who is all in on sustainable farming get super set off when I asked if their farm was organic, saying the organic chemicals used are worse, and complaining of the cartel like barrier to entry in the certification process and the associated certification fees.
That said, I'm glad we don't use human waste on our fields. OMG did that smell bad in when I was in China.
Yes. Organic is meant to sacrifice some production for much less environmental impact.
Another interpretation of the situation is that if we aren't growing enough food to allow for a single missed harvest in one conflict zone, then we aren't planning well, particulars aside.
A perfectly reasonable response to that problem is to expand farming to more areas but to use organic practices to ensure the expansion has minimal impact. That would be in line with TFA and still include organic farms.
Much like the comment about a rapid switch to solar, TFA intentionally misses the point to take an opportunity to swipe at a broad class of people rather than practices.
Quantify some. TFA claims a reduction of 29-44% and a doubling of food prices. And looking at what happened in Sri Lanka, I have no trouble believing it.
> much less environmental impact.
Quantify less and define environmental impact.
> expand farming to more areas
So, does increasing the amount of land used for agriculture count as having less or more environmental impact?
What happened in Sri Lanka was that the government ran out of foreign exchange and was desperate for something to cut.
So they basically pissed in the air and told everyone it was raining ("great news: you're all organic farmers now"). It was a desperate move, backed by magical thinking - a failed attempt at reality distortion.
This is not really the way any sane government would organise a transition to organic farming practices. You'd do studies, start small, give people time to adapt. Not announce out of the blue that you've banned all chemical fertiliser and pesticide imports.
Seem to be a lot of pundits out there trying to make what happened in Sri Lanka a story about organic farming - eh maybe, maybe not. It seems more like a story about poor governance and predatory international lending.
The government of Sri Lanka banned the import of fertilizer and pesticides to deal with a deepening current account deficit. This was because the government listened to people like Vandana Shiva and decided that a switch to organic agriculture will work out.
The result is out there for everyone to see. Rice, the staple food crop and tea the primary cash crop have seen yields plummet and deepened the crisis.
Plenty of countries around the world that have had worse governance than Sri Lanka. Plenty of countries have a higher debt burden. What makes Sri Lanka's government unique is that they decided to listen to the nonsense peddled by the organic activists.
Sri Lanka just didn't have any kind of fertilizer, neither organic nor inorganic. Of course that doesn't work, especially not on farm land that had been heavily fertilized in the past. The ground is dead for years because chemical imbalances can only be corrected in the short term with additional fertilizer. Yearly crops don't root deep so after a harvest the next rain will just remove any remaining nutrition, which at that point is heavily one-sided anyway. You have to practice long term crop rotation and you cannot use the field every year.
That will obviously use more land. Plants do grow better if you shower them with nitrogen but there still are ways for agricultural growth without regularly poisoning the soil. But yes, that will inevitably mean more expensive food.
They just accelerated their plans "slightly" because there was no money for fertilizer, inorganic or not.
Ukraine is one missed harvest. The article opened up with that as a motivating example, for some reason.
increasing the amount of land used for farming does not have an impact on its own unless you're deforesting, I guess. but dumping significant amounts of water and fertilizer and pesticide will have an ecological impact, esp on downstream water or maybe drying up the aquafors. So, organic seeks to reduce that impact by zeroing those contributing factors (except water!) This is not unclear, you're trying to slam dunk, I think.
Less environmental impact = not as much, say, nitrate runoff, algae toxicity downstream, collateral insect kill off, and so on. On a per-extra-food-unit compared to current baseline (remember we're measuring only new hectares in my example)
loss can be 50% and still world food production goes up b/c we're adding hectares. And if organic holds to its claims, we're doing so with less net impact on a per hectacre basis.
Anyway, that's one hope of organic farming - its part of a responsible portfolio of cleaner food management that doesn't have unilateral decrees about practices (like TFA does).
I'm more in tune with Precision Agriculture, which is a saner, 80/20 solution that has yet to prove itself on a worldwide scale.
> Another interpretation of the situation is that if we aren't growing enough food to allow for a single missed harvest in one conflict zone, then we aren't planning well, particulars aside.
The last 20 years of my life and all of my activism has been summed up in a succinct manner, yet almost no one including people in tech will ever do much about that until they burnout enough times and have enough money to get a hobby farm that is.
You'd think this would be an immense task and a call to arms that is only for the elitist-technorati around here to solve, but 'hey... it's not my fault FAANG just pays us to sit on our asses.'
With that said, Ukraine is and has been the breadbasket of Europe and a massive exporter of wheat in the region and to Africa, even after Chernobyl: we saw something similar happen during the Maidan Revolution in 13-14, and the first multi-nationals in there were mainly Big Ag corps and Petro corps: John Deere, New Holland, CAT, Eni etc...
This is no coincidence, and it's no surprise no one took this into account until this happened in February '22: Russia was standing at the border of Ukraine in the Spring of '21 [0] but unless you're involved you weren't aware of this fact. I was there in the Fall-Winter of '21, when Belarus and Poland had their proxy war, and it was clear that invasion was going to occur. Even the PM of Poland said the same thing but did little to prepare his nation for the influx of refugees: all the work is still being done mainly by volunteers. They have been the most receptive to Ukrainians, but it's still a mainly grassroots initiative is what I'm saying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_and_agriculture_in_Nazi_G... the next stage of that ideology is to realize you need more area "Lebensraum" and realizing there is not enough of this, to declare those living in it conquerable and "nutzlose Esser" that need to be disposed off. WorldWar2 eastern europes nightmare had a ideologic base and that was the reliance on medieval farming techniques instead of fertilizer. Yes, i know it sounds nature romantic, but the end of the line of this sort of ideology were literally mass graves.
I couldn't get past the paywall, but it seems like a broad dismissal of "them damn hippies".
I'm going to guess that they ignore the externalized cost of over-ferritization that goes downstream and destroys those habitats. Also ignoring the cost of supporting the petro-economy to deliver that cheap fertilizer.
It also probably ignores the cost of loss of topsoil and other environmental factors as well...
Wall Street Journal is the journal of record for the ruling economic elite who make money in industrial farming.
If less meat was consumed, organic farming could feed everyone. That said, I believe in a hopefully (mostly) fair market, and people should choose with their wallets and perhaps their meat addictions, what they want to buy.
Also, subsidizing things like virtually free water for meat production is arguably bad for society. I like to eat meat several times a month, and I along with everyone else should pay the externalities costs like harm to the environment, much greater energy and water use, etc.
Personal freedom, while curtailing government welfare payouts to corporations.
If less meat was eaten, i would prefer for areas to go back to wilderness, while the rest is used with traditional fertilizer && robots to whack weeds. I dont want to use the same area, i want to reduce the footprint to give the wilderness space.
Clearly, the author of this op-ed is more than willing to bend their scientific thought to suit their political goals.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150316130136/http://www.cprm.g...
[2]: http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/lomborgstory15.htm
[3]: https://www.hoover.org/research/pseudoscience-global-warming
Up here in my part of British Columbia, we do. Post-digester, but yah, black water becomes grey water becomes ranch land and golf course water.
Another interpretation of the situation is that if we aren't growing enough food to allow for a single missed harvest in one conflict zone, then we aren't planning well, particulars aside.
A perfectly reasonable response to that problem is to expand farming to more areas but to use organic practices to ensure the expansion has minimal impact. That would be in line with TFA and still include organic farms.
Much like the comment about a rapid switch to solar, TFA intentionally misses the point to take an opportunity to swipe at a broad class of people rather than practices.
Quantify some. TFA claims a reduction of 29-44% and a doubling of food prices. And looking at what happened in Sri Lanka, I have no trouble believing it.
> much less environmental impact.
Quantify less and define environmental impact.
> expand farming to more areas
So, does increasing the amount of land used for agriculture count as having less or more environmental impact?
> a single missed harvest in one conflict zone
Which part of TFA talks about a missed harvest?
So they basically pissed in the air and told everyone it was raining ("great news: you're all organic farmers now"). It was a desperate move, backed by magical thinking - a failed attempt at reality distortion.
This is not really the way any sane government would organise a transition to organic farming practices. You'd do studies, start small, give people time to adapt. Not announce out of the blue that you've banned all chemical fertiliser and pesticide imports.
Seem to be a lot of pundits out there trying to make what happened in Sri Lanka a story about organic farming - eh maybe, maybe not. It seems more like a story about poor governance and predatory international lending.
The result is out there for everyone to see. Rice, the staple food crop and tea the primary cash crop have seen yields plummet and deepened the crisis.
Plenty of countries around the world that have had worse governance than Sri Lanka. Plenty of countries have a higher debt burden. What makes Sri Lanka's government unique is that they decided to listen to the nonsense peddled by the organic activists.
That will obviously use more land. Plants do grow better if you shower them with nitrogen but there still are ways for agricultural growth without regularly poisoning the soil. But yes, that will inevitably mean more expensive food.
They just accelerated their plans "slightly" because there was no money for fertilizer, inorganic or not.
increasing the amount of land used for farming does not have an impact on its own unless you're deforesting, I guess. but dumping significant amounts of water and fertilizer and pesticide will have an ecological impact, esp on downstream water or maybe drying up the aquafors. So, organic seeks to reduce that impact by zeroing those contributing factors (except water!) This is not unclear, you're trying to slam dunk, I think.
Less environmental impact = not as much, say, nitrate runoff, algae toxicity downstream, collateral insect kill off, and so on. On a per-extra-food-unit compared to current baseline (remember we're measuring only new hectares in my example)
loss can be 50% and still world food production goes up b/c we're adding hectares. And if organic holds to its claims, we're doing so with less net impact on a per hectacre basis.
Anyway, that's one hope of organic farming - its part of a responsible portfolio of cleaner food management that doesn't have unilateral decrees about practices (like TFA does).
I'm more in tune with Precision Agriculture, which is a saner, 80/20 solution that has yet to prove itself on a worldwide scale.
The last 20 years of my life and all of my activism has been summed up in a succinct manner, yet almost no one including people in tech will ever do much about that until they burnout enough times and have enough money to get a hobby farm that is.
You'd think this would be an immense task and a call to arms that is only for the elitist-technorati around here to solve, but 'hey... it's not my fault FAANG just pays us to sit on our asses.'
With that said, Ukraine is and has been the breadbasket of Europe and a massive exporter of wheat in the region and to Africa, even after Chernobyl: we saw something similar happen during the Maidan Revolution in 13-14, and the first multi-nationals in there were mainly Big Ag corps and Petro corps: John Deere, New Holland, CAT, Eni etc...
This is no coincidence, and it's no surprise no one took this into account until this happened in February '22: Russia was standing at the border of Ukraine in the Spring of '21 [0] but unless you're involved you weren't aware of this fact. I was there in the Fall-Winter of '21, when Belarus and Poland had their proxy war, and it was clear that invasion was going to occur. Even the PM of Poland said the same thing but did little to prepare his nation for the influx of refugees: all the work is still being done mainly by volunteers. They have been the most receptive to Ukrainians, but it's still a mainly grassroots initiative is what I'm saying.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/politics/biden-putin-r...
I'm going to guess that they ignore the externalized cost of over-ferritization that goes downstream and destroys those habitats. Also ignoring the cost of supporting the petro-economy to deliver that cheap fertilizer.
It also probably ignores the cost of loss of topsoil and other environmental factors as well...
If less meat was consumed, organic farming could feed everyone. That said, I believe in a hopefully (mostly) fair market, and people should choose with their wallets and perhaps their meat addictions, what they want to buy.
Also, subsidizing things like virtually free water for meat production is arguably bad for society. I like to eat meat several times a month, and I along with everyone else should pay the externalities costs like harm to the environment, much greater energy and water use, etc.
Personal freedom, while curtailing government welfare payouts to corporations.