I've got a call here for Thomas Malthus ...

[fivemack]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2115773,00.html

has the content-free (given that it's from the Observer) title "Organic food under threat".

As far as I can see, they've just discovered that food grows on farms, that there are only finitely many farms, that each farm has only finite yield, and that the reason that farmers moved away from organic food in the first place is that a given amount of land produces a whole lot more food when sown with aggressively-bred grain, fertilised with carefully-bound phosphorus, and freed of pests with targeted insecticides. The demand for organic food in England has just reached equality with the supply, at which point it has to grow at a rate in which new farms can be brought into production, rather than at the rate by which a consumer whim can inflame.

England can't feed England even with the utmost available refinements of agricultural technology. England hasn't been able to feed England with the greatest available refinements of agricultural technology since about 1900 - ask any U-Boat commander. So I'm surprised that people are now surprised to find that England can't feed England if its inhabitants request it to do so with one fertiliser factory tied behind its back.

Comments

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

Well put. You should write to The Observer to this effect.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

What a good thing there are other countries, and even ones with farms in them, and some of those farms even organic, or potentially organic!

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Those countries probably also have people who like to eat food in them too though, also producing intensively. Pinch a load of the land for organic farming and a load for biofuels and the global food price goes up. Bad news for Africa.

[angoel.livejournal.com]

Good news for Africa surely - they can sell at a higher price than before.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

They will either become as accustomed to wealth as an Englishman, and so demand much higher prices for food than we currently enjoy (a demand that I expect to provoke the rich countries into even more savage bombings, invasions, and occupations than they currently inflict on countries that demand too much for their oil); or abandon their farms in turn as the price of food continues to be insufficient to support an English farmer; or forever stay much poorer than the English.

A fourth alternative is that the English themselves will become poor enough again that growing food once again looks like an attractive use of our labour.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

My inner socialist does not expect the current wealth differential of the world to remain constant, and does not expect there to be enough resource on the planet to bring everyone to current English levels, so on the scale of centuries expects to end up at about current Polish levels. I don't think that peasant agriculture is an attractive use of labour at that point.

However, the Gini coefficient of the world seems to be moving upwards if it's moving at all, so the world may end up oversupplied with poor peasants (and, given that the Gini coefficient for land ownership has always been enormous) poor landless peasants.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Well, broadly good news for those parts of Africa which are more than self-sufficient in food, and bad news for those which are not.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

What a good thing some of us are growing our own. I don't grow as much as I'd like to but it's a start.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I attempt to grow my own food, but for the spiritual effects of contemplating greenery and the exercise effects of vigorous weeding rather than out of any particular desire for food.

Ignoring the gastropods and the aphids, though it is clearly the height of folly to ignore either the gastropods or the aphids, I've a couple of weeks of broccoli, maybe as much as a month of potatoes, maybe as much as a week of broad beans, maybe a week of carrots or maybe much less - I think I need some kind of widget to plant carrot-seed uniformly, it's too fine to pour out of the packet at a controlled rate of one seed per five centimetres along a furrow, so I suspect I'll have a conglobulated orgy of intertwined carrots by the time things have grown - a couple of weeks of apples from the neighbour's tree, and a couple of crumbles of blackberries.

I'm not being efficient - masses of garden space left for grass, the crops are not fertilised or pesticided, and I remove the weeds between thumb and forefinger rather than with N-(phosphonomethyl) glycine. I'm not vegetarian, so I know I can't remotely hope to feed myself from the garden, and so scarcely bother to try.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Perennials are the way to go. Also, foraging. I'll be happy when I've got a solar dehydrator sorted out though.

And yeah, I wouldn't be bothering if it were only because food is expensive, although if it got expensive enough I suppose I would. I do get better value for money out of my organic strawberry patch than I ever would from supermarket organic strawberries, though.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Indeed, whenever I eat a biscuit or thicken a gravy I feel I ought to give thanks to the wheat-farmers from roughly Edmonton across to roughly Winnepeg and down to roughly St Louis, whose vast unpopulated expanses produce flour enough for all practical and very many impractical purposes.

Actually, looking up various bits of statistics, it is more likely to the French that I should give thanks; they produce forty million tons of wheat a year, 90% as high yield as the UK and on 2.5 times the area.

But the issue is that people are demanding produce grown organically in England, for food-miles reasons, and don't seem to be very clear on the fact that England's not actually big enough (one fifth the size of Saskatchewan, and much less exclusively planted with wheat) for this to be possible.

Looking up Canadian wheat-growing gets me

http://www.esquesinghistoricalsociety.ca/DL1853-1.html

which would be startlingly useful were it 1916; I suspect Toronto township is no longer 50% better than the average place in Canada to grow wheat. Agricultural statistics seem unusually hard to google ( http://www.fao.org/ag/AGP/AGPC/doc/field/Wheat/europe/europe.htm is the best I managed), it may be that what I need is a farmer's almanac.

[aldabra]

You can get some agricultural statistics here: http://www.defra.gov.uk/esg/work_htm/publications/cs/farmstats_web/2_SURVEY_DATA_SEARCH/survey_data_search_overview.htm
if what you're interested in is hectares of turnips per ward.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

See also this article in the Indiependent (http://independent.co.uk/incoming/article2697804.ece).

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I was under the impression that you can grow more food per acre with a hand-on, organic approach. You can grow much more food per farmer with mechanized industrial farming. I don't know if this is just organic food propaganda, but it doesn't sound crazy to me.

In any case, there may not be grounds for panic. If the price of organic food goes up, then there's an incentive to convert non-organic farms to organic, though I believe the process takes some years.

Also, if Britain is like the US, conventional farming leads to tremendous amounts of wasted food. More people and thought involved in the process would presumably lead to less waste.

It may be that people will need to be somewhat less picky about organic and distance travelled for their food, but could still have plenty of fairly organic, relatively local food, perhaps at a moderately higher price.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

. . . you can grow more food per acre with a hand-on, organic approach.

If I may, this is possible; but in the end one faces different challenges that obviate the improvements. "Hand-on" is more farmers, right? "Mechanized industrial" means using tractors, combines and the like, right?

Mechanization uses fuel (diesel, gas, LNG, CNG -- anything but biodiesel), usually fuel other than what we people eat. Farmers, being people, do not. Transfering the heavy lifting to tractors and other mechanicals reduces the amount of the harvest needed to feed the harvesters, thus improving the saleable yield. I'm not approaching this yield from a revenue perspective, but from a "how much food gets to market?" angle. Even with improvements in waste reduction, this market yield reduction is really what everyone, including Thomas Malthus, is referring.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Yes, "hand-on" (a typo for "hands-on") is farmers.

One caveat in all this is that presently, there are a lot of people who'd like to farm who don't have a chance to.

In a mostly organic small farm situation, there might be a lot of people who don't like farming who are stuck with it.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I think there are a lot of people who like the open-air and the spiritual aspects of the allotment, who like to garden and think they'd therefore like to farm; the impression I get is that people who like the idea of farming and get to do it often end up quite quickly disillusioned.

The one I know best had financial backing (it is difficult, on a small organic farm, to make losses which your husband the full-partner in a London solicitor's firm cannot make good) so did not end up both disillusioned and saddled with a backbreaking mortgage.

Every report on factory conditions in Shenzhen points out that the workers vocally prefer twelve-hour shifts on electronics assembly lines to being the disposable daughter on a peasant farm in the western provinces, though that may be a worst-case kind of farm work.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I was under the impression that you can grow more food per acre with a hand-on, organic approach

I've found some stats (see my next post), and that doesn't seem to be true for wheat; somewhere like Belgium, which I suspect is very mechanised, manages seven tons per hectare, whilst somewhere like India, which I'd suspect would be more on the hands-on side, manages three.

The scary thing is that the US, noted for its amber waves of grain, is 20% less efficient per hectare than India. This is probably a matter of lack of need - sixty megatons of wheat is enough to satisfy US domestic consumption and to spare, ramping up to the efficiency of Norway and providing another sixty megatons for export would crash the market entirely.

I think it may be true that you can grow more food in an intercropping process which (at the present level of investment in agricultural robotics, which is tiny since marginal return on capital is much greater if you use the capital to hire more desperate Moldovans, and since there are obvious humanitarian problems to rendering 90% of the farmers of Bulgaria redundant on a two-year timescale) has to be harvested by hand, provided you're in a tropical climate where sweetcorn, squash and beans all grow more than one crop a year.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

If the US, by being as efficient as Norway, could grow twice as much wheat and feed the whole of Africa for essentially nothing, then all the Africans could get busy growing organic strawberries to be eaten in Britain, and hand-cranking their economies. Once they'd made some money doing this, they could start supporting wheat prices by paying for the wheat and it would all work out -- by using the spare capacity in the US system to raise the floor until they had the money to be proper consumers.

there are a lot of people who'd like to farm who don't have a chance to.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Somewhat related.