Tinfoil hat time. Agricultural concerns get a lot less attention than energy concerns because the agricultural system is: A) Fragile B) Running over capacity C) Subject to more visible disruptions D) Refined to favor multinationals. You can throw rocks at BP. BP can take it. You throw rocks at agribusiness and the whole thing unravels. Point by point: USDA enforcement is ragged edge at the best of times. The enforcement tools are utterly inappropriate to the task at hand. Unsafe workplace? That'll be $120k in fines. Selling unpasteurized milk? That's a swat team: 30 people dead from a Listeria outbreak? 6 months home confinement. Re-jigger that. We've got SWAT teams insisting that milk be made in OSHA factories so that an FDA-inspected farm can kill 30 people. It pretty much demonstrates that our current food safety guidelines don't really scale to anything smaller than a Tyson plant. Meanwhile, we've created a system where one cantaloupe farm caused 146 cases of listeria poisoning in 28 states. I stopped eating ground meat when I read in The End of Food that the average hamburger patty is made up from 55 cows, sometimes over a thousand. I was in England during their last big TSE scare; it doesn't take much. Meanwhile, I see raids in the news of bathtub cheese all the time, but who actually causes a food safety scare? Resers. Because we live in the land of the 3000-mile Caesar salad. I remember the tylenol killer. that shit gripped the nation for weeks and it was just some psycho fucking with pill bottles (that's why you've got seven safety seals on your ketchup). You can not drive for a while but everybody's gotta eat. And nobody grows their own food. So you fuck with food one little bit and the whole country is sideways. We were on the ragged edge of rice riots in 2008. We didn't see worse because we effectively control the world's food supply. But, as mentioned above, that control is tenuous. And profitable, but only if you process the fuck out of your food. I made chicken en mole yesterday. For that you need thighs. Straight-up chicken thighs? 99 cents a pound. Boneless, skinless thighs? $7.99 a pound. Dry kidney beans? 99 cents a pound. Kidney bean chili? $1.79 for a sixteenth of a cup of beans. People think ramen is cheap. Know how much ramen costs to make? I knew a guy who ran a pizza joint for a while. Sold his pizzas for $9, they cost him about $3.50 in ingredients. The rest of it was overhead. Domino's? Domino's spends less than a dollar a pizza and they're buying everything from Sysco or the equivalent. I can buy industrial chicken, retail, any day of the week for a dollar a pound. If I go to the farmer's market and buy a free-range organic chicken direct from the farmer it'll run me $6.99 a pound. Ever paid $28 for a chicken? I have. Once. Bill McKibben describes trying to interest the farmers around him in making artisan, free-range bacon. Nobody will do it because their cost to produce it was over $12 a pound. We've tipped the scales heavily in favor of giant industry because it's all we can regulate and because it's the only thing that makes money. If you want to make things better, you suck the profit out of it and you get smaller and that fucks everything up. And we're past the point where there's much that can be done. Wanna see a scary graph? Here's the average age of the american farmer: Wanna see another? here's the average size of the american farm: Keep in mind that that average includes anyone who declares any farm income on anything over an acre... and that I have friends that grow hay on their back lots and sell it to each other just so they can maintain those bitchin' ag loans. The system is deeply fucked. Deeply, deeply fucked. And the reason Obama hasn't done shit about it is that unfucking it is going to require some seriously heinous Upton Sinclair-grade drama. A lot of people are going to have to die, a lot of people are going to have to starve, and a whole bunch of bad shit is going to happen in order for anything to change and that bad shit is going to be blamed on whoever pulled the Jenga tile.
Wow, I had forgotten all about the rice thing. Great post, especially those graphs. Always worth remembering. I have to have to have to read the End of Food. Does it offer solutions? Are there any solutions? Industrial complexes are historically hard to bring down ... crap like this makes me feel trapped and powerless and very, very annoyed.
End Of Food mostly emphasizes that we didn't end up with this massive towering monstrosity of industrial food production out of malice, but because it's the most efficient way to feed a lot of people. That's the real problem - without intensive agriculture, the planet supports a lot fewer people than it has. So if you want to switch wholesale from intensive agriculture, you'd best look long'n'hard at population control. That's the thing about permaculture. It's pretty awesome assuming you're one of the privileged folk with twenty times your allotment of land. If not, Soylent Green, baby.
Yes, industrial agriculture is the lazy, unsustainable way of feeding large amounts of people in the short run. But the side effects of fertility depletion and top soil erosion are the obvious alarm bells that industrial mono-cultures cannot be the way of feeding everyone in the future. Decentralizing the production of food and encouraging more local, sustainable land management and agriculture is the way to feed a growing population, as a UN study has found. As for the diet of the future, UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet.
How does no till solve the problem of mono-culture depletion of soil fertility?
It doesn't, but then neither does rotation. Rotation diminishes the problem but considering modern agriculture of any appropriately-scaled quantity is heavily dependent on intensive practices and petroleum-based enrichment, supplementation is a given.
Who mentioned rotation? Did you read the UN report? Exactly, scale is part of the issue. More farmers and people growing more in their own back/front yard is part of the solution. Until we figure out a way of creating a closed loop of nutrients, supplementation will always be an issue. Some even argue that we've broken the nutrient look by flushing human waste down the toilet. But that's a whole different discussion that brings up its own issues.
Me, more than 4 months ago: "it's not that simple." You, yesterday: Me, yesterday: "it's not that simple." You, yesterday: "how does your simple solution address this complex problem I bring up?" Me, yesterday: "it's not that simple." You, today: "did you read this study I linked in response to your dead comment from four months ago?" Dude - It's not that simple. And you know what? I'm not your audience. And you know what else? It's impolite to pick a fight with 4 month old comments so you can bludgeon me into reading a UN report. You can now officially fuck off.Decentralizing the production of food and encouraging more local, sustainable land management and agriculture is the way to feed a growing population
Haha, that has obviously hit a nerve. My audience?! You seemed to be so self-assured and knowledgeable in the subject of food production that's why I engaged with your conversation. I'm not sure what the age of the thread has to do with anything. It sounds like a cop-out to avoid the discussion. I'm sorry to hear that you confused a grown up discussion of facts with "picking a fight".
As for your last comment, it says all I need to know about you. Take care.
Could you say that due to population growth rates coming to a halt (as already happens over here) a better system could be devised that is based on constant food supply instead of endless growth? Or is that a completely different scale / problem / cause and effect?
I think NAFTA, the World Bank, the WTO and all the rest of the multinational apparatus wouldn't exist if open-eyed capitalists didn't recognize there were more financial opportunities among emerging markets and developing economies than there were among stable democracies. The Iraq War was very good for a large group of businesses. So are the water wars of South America. I think things will stabilize in a much better place but it's gonna be decades and decades.
Yeah, but no. See, I can eat one cow, or I can eat five acres of grass.
Reading the End of Food will demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt just how much oil you consume, son. Check this link out. The whole fucking show is awesome (the whole fucking series is awesome) but this was one of the demonstrations that impressed me the most in my young life. Start at 2:32 if the link is fucked: And that, dear flagamuffin, is why the world doesn't run on sunlight. That energy goes into fertilizer, too.
I don't know which part you were talking about specifically, maybe the eye-opening bit with the teaspoons of gunpowder and petrol -- wow -- but I'm sure glad I accidentally watched the whole thing because at the end a well-meaning penciled British family drowns when their car isn't energy-efficient and they trigger instant global warming.
I've been vegetarian for going on two years now, and portion-to-portion and I eat about the same volume as my carnivore friends. Cows may have their place on the farm (In the traditional sense of the word), but in the convoluted world we live in today, it's definitely more efficient to buy a pound of tofu and beans over a pound of steak at the supermarket.
It's a system. The interconnections are deep. A 3000 mile caesar salad benefits international shipping companies, foreign landholders, distribution centers, the tax districts through which it passes and the shareholders therein. A caesar salad grown up the valley with dressing from eggs down the street benefits your friends and neighbors. That's pretty much the lesson of the local movement - buy local, eat local, benefit local. Local is a lot less efficient, though. In many cases it increases fuel use, etc. Means it's going to be more expensive, and the externalities are going to be in your back yard. The fundamental shift has been in what we spend on food. Check this shit out: I can't profess that spending three times as much on food as we do now will solve anything, but let's take it as a goal post. Suppose some magic fix would end up with us spending three times as much on food as we do now. what would we have to get out of that to make it worthwhile? It ends up being the same problem as gas tax. Those are always harder to pass than sin taxes because most people need to drive somewhere. And the more essential something is, the more regressive the charges are to low-income families. Food is about as essential as it comes. So if you're poor in 2014 you're paying less than a third as much for food as you would if you were poor a hundred years ago. Your money goes elsewhere, though: ...it's almost like we've been running out of time: You wanna know where hipsters come from? Graphs like this. the more you look at the system, the more you recognize that it offers you less and less. Know what magazine has been growing the fastest for the past ten years?
