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

[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.