![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I've got a call here for Thomas Malthus ...
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.
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject