Organic Farming
- Thread starter Lethos
- Start date
Well, using "Organic farming" couldn't feed the entire world's population. At all. It could at best feed a fraction. I can't remember the actual number of people that it could feed, but it's very small. So, look around at all the people you know and decide who you would like to starve to death.
Penn and Teller did an episode on Bull Shit debunking the idea that Organic farming was better for you in any way. Even debunked the idea that Organic food tastes better.
Also, Organic farmers tend to use far worse and more dangerous pesticides than their counterparts.
The idea that food is inorganic is rather dumb, anyway. Farmers have been cross breeding plants for generations to maximize their efficiency in growing their crops. The idea that there is some controversy now is just ridiculous.
Penn and Teller did an episode on Bull Shit debunking the idea that Organic farming was better for you in any way. Even debunked the idea that Organic food tastes better.
Also, Organic farmers tend to use far worse and more dangerous pesticides than their counterparts.
The idea that food is inorganic is rather dumb, anyway. Farmers have been cross breeding plants for generations to maximize their efficiency in growing their crops. The idea that there is some controversy now is just ridiculous.
well, this pretty much sums up my feelings on organic food...SimpleThunda said:
personally i don't care enough about it, i don't hate it, but won't target it. price is still my biggest deciding factor when i buy my food. for some reason organic beef mince is considerably cheaper at my local supermarket, so i buy it rather than non-organic
Actually the hatred is more a concern about how it's inefficient in terms of yields and how organic farming makes it impossible to feed the entire world because we won't have enough produce.Eeeee0000 said:
It's actually quite silly though since at this point starvation is more about economy than lack of food. We produce too much, stores throw out perfectly fine food because of the expiry dates, we (generalizing, not all of us do this I don't) buy more than we can consume and throw out things that may or may not have gone bad (again expiry dates).
OT: Personally I don't have a problem with organic farming, but I don't buy organic products because I am a poor bastard. I can't afford a healthy meal every day and I have to go with cheap solutions 3 times a week or more to survive. If my healthy meals were organic I would probably need to eat healthy once or twice a week which means an organic lifestyle would be bad for my health.
Some people prefer to eat organic because they think it tastes better, some because they think it's healthier. So far there's no proven difference in nutrients so that can be regarded as bullshit, but I'm not sure how much we know about the effects of pesticides since trace amounts that may be found may sometimes cause effects over time despite concentrations being so low it's hard to find it at all. Still, there's a lot of marketing behind this and I am not sure how much I trust it. I would need to read up on this, but I don't have the time to look deeply enough to find something worth referencing.
To conclude, I don't feel any antagonism towards organic farming nor do I feel any enthusiasm towards it. I think it's good that we have the option and I think we should support it as long as there's no shortage of food that isn't rooted in the economy.
2: The antagonism issue was kinda explained in my response to the quote above, but people are sooo altruistic that they care about all the 9 billion people we will have on this planet in 35 years, not altruistic enough to share some of the excess resources some of us have, but enough to lash out against anyone who supports organic farms on the internet.
3: Why is is worse in America than in Europe? I can't vouch for all of this being correct (poor research), but speaking as a European I have these observations. American corporations are really aggressive about anyone stepping on their turf and badmouth their products. Tobacco leading to cancer was a known risk in large parts of the world, but in USA the danger was played down until the mid 90s when they tobacco industry took some heavy blows due to several successful lawsuits. It was then revealed they had information of this spanning back decades. Global warming is another hot issue with researchers supporting the phenomenon receiving death threats if they wouldn't moderate or withdraw their comments on it. Companies have also spent a lot of resources to prevent free healthcare because it cuts into their profits. Just the same way the agriculture industry makes sure we all have the statistics of how many people we have to kill in order to stay sustainable with organic farming. In Europe companies don't have that much power and ill health effects are often revealed and even overstated. This leads to a different view on these things.
It's also quite possible that the observations you made on Europeans and Americans were caused by the time the post went up since Europeans live in a different time zone and may have been asleep or at work in that time lapse. I think you could make a similar observation if you were to look at the first few posts on a hot topic Critical Miss strip since that comes around late work/workf inished/pre-dinner time, while it comes out in the morning in USA.
Organic farming is defined as not using any pesticides so pesticides is not the reason they got sick. It may be some kind of micro organism that pesticide kills or something like that or merely a coincidence. It may be that those people went on an organic diet because they frequently felt ill and both decided to switch to a strict organic diet because someone told them that might help.likalaruku said:
I do apologize for making a large wall of text here and I might be wrong in several things here so do not take these as more than my personal musings on the subject.
Except that the use of pesticides and other management techniques reduces the presence of fungi and bacteria which can cause people to get sick. Not even just increasing yields; the use of pesticides has actually decreased the amount of toxins present in food (I've seen studies which back this up). And you're still conveniently ignoring that organic farmers also use a ton of pesticides, many of which are more dangerous than synthetic pesticides.SimpleThunda said:
This is also false. It's true, all other things held constant, organic farming would produce less food. But there are many organic farms that see very similar yields (within an order of magnitude) as that of conventional farms. Add in the fact that the world is currently doing fine in terms of food production (it's more of a distribution issue), and that there's about an order of magnitude of food production increases that can come out of less developed countries, it's not nearly as much of a problem as some would like to make you think. The problem I have is that strictly organic food is expensive, and that by using better management techniques, we could use even less land in the process (and allow for ecological restoration).Saltyk said:
Thats just factually incorrect. Farming in the UK between 1939-1945 did not produce enough food to feed the country using organic methods, modern industrial farming means that the UK is a net exporter of food. If organic farming was capable of producing the same amount food was the UK down to 2 weeks of food left in 1942? If organic yields were as high you claim why was rationing introduced? Yield per acre from organic farming is lower, the real world has shown it to be so.Blue_vision said:
Overcrowding isn't really an issue apart from in very small European countries, even then it's more an issue of designing settlements well. And in developed countries the birth rate is stabilising due to education & access to birth-control, which is all made indirectly possible by a stable food supply. You simply can't feed all people currently on earth if you use pre-Green revolution technology, so we need to be as efficient as possible, or at least encourage people to buy efficient crops. Trying to avoid the use of GM crops & pesticide will lead to more ecosystem destruction as you need a greater amount of farmland for the same yield.Flames66 said:
Take note of what I said. I said that everything else held constant, organic farming will produce an appreciable decrease in yields. But in reality, that difference can be quite small. In general, we have enough food to feed ourselves on earth as it is (in fact, enough to turn a bunch of it into meat and fuel), and we can easily make up the difference of food consumption through efficiency gains in other places. Many places in Africa, Eastern Europe, and India are producing under 20% (in some cases 10%) of what modern farms are able to produce. Raising the efficiency of that land will net considerable increases, and improving distribution can also have a huge impact on these countries.albino boo said:
And in your argument, do you not see any other possible explanations for why food production might drop? Perhaps because a significant percentage of the workforce became unproductive (enlisted as soldiers or worked in factories), or because investment in farm equipment was diverted to the war effort? Or because they had to support higher calorie requirements for soldiers, or because large amounts of food were turned into fuel for the military? Yeah, one example is totally a perfect explanation for how the world works /sarcasm.
And if you read what I posted, you'd see I'm against organic farming on principle! The reality is that we could get extremely similar yields with more directed use of fertilizers and pesticides, and good GM crops, compared to the huge wastes that occur now. Organic farming is stupid by completely banning the use of these tools. Conventional farming is stupid because it doesn't take into account any of the negatives such as eutrophication from fertilizer use or the huge cost in greenhouse gasses that is still not accounted for in the cost of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
I'm less concered by plants than I am animals, to be more specific growth hormones. With it being a more recent invention there is less info of how it affects humans growth. With how many prostitots there are it makes me wonder if it's related to early puberty. Ignoring fashion, girls should not have boobs and peroids in the 5th grade.
As for why people hate organic, I'd say it also has a lot of classism or pretentiousness in it rather than just debating the health risks/benefits.
As for why people hate organic, I'd say it also has a lot of classism or pretentiousness in it rather than just debating the health risks/benefits.
Might have my terms confused here, 'organic' isn't a term usually used in the Netherlands. We use 'biological' to describe things that have been produced like that (just as bullshit as a term as organic...), and this applies to crops without pesticided and stuff but also to free-range meat from animals that don't get antibiotics and such. For example, you can buy 'scharreleieren' (battery eggs are prohibited, these are from chickens that live with about 9 of them per square meter), 'free range eggs' (9 chickens per square metre inside, but also 4 square metres per chicken of outside space) and biological eggs, which are free range but also can't get their beaks cut of and stuff like that. That's what I meant.Eamar said:
(going to read the rest now)
I'm sorry but you don't seem to understand that the UK hasn't increased in land area and has in fact reduced the area under cultivation and yet is now a net exporter of food despite having 20 million more people living in the country. Industrial farming must be producing far higher yields per acre than previous organic methods, what other explanation is there. I also suggest that you look land girls, women that were sent to work on farms to replace missing labour. It would also be instructive to read about the dig for victory campaign. Last point the UK hadn't been self sufficient in food from the 1840s onwards. The yields per acre from the UK farmland by organic methods cant support more than about 10-15 million people and there is a century of food imports to prove it.Blue_vision said:
Between 1939 and 1945 isn't a good example to compare with other periods, that was during the bloody war! Nobody had any food. Lots of people starved to death in the winter of 1945 in my country, and that wasn't because of organic farming, there was a war going on.
Organic food is bullshit, see the embedded video above (conveniently from P&T's Bullshit). It's inefficient, more expensive, not better for the environment and most people can't tell the difference in a blind taste taste. If someone wants to spend more on their food that's fine, but they shouldn't push it on other people and they shouldn't preach about how much better it is for the world when it isn't.
There was a decrease in other inputs. A smaller workforce more dedicated to industrial production meant there was less labour to go into agriculture. Combine this with a decrease in resources to improve and maintain agricultural machines such as tractors, and you're obviously going to see a decrease in output. In addition, British agriculture was extremely inefficient during the early 1900s, as it was more cost-effective for Britain to be importing grain. In general, it's silly to try to make the comparison between British agriculture (or really any agriculture) in World War 2 with modern agriculture.albino boo said:
The recorded yielded per acre in from 1700 to today remains the same using organic farming. Large agricultural estates that use organic farming now used the organic farming in the past and there centuries of records on file. The manpower requirement has fallen because of greater mechanisation but the yields have not increased. The UK were the world leaders in farming mechanization from the 1850s onwards. Steam powered threshing machines came into use in the 1830s and the steam plough came into use in the 1850s. Where do you think the people moving to cities to work in factories came from?Blue_vision said:
Don't see the point of it.
I see it like the difference between Medicine and Natural Medicine. The former being actually scientifically tested and the latter being the leftovers we used to think worked but know better now. The same for Food and Organic Food.
That's not to say Food is perfect as it is, especially in the animal welfare department there's a lot of room for improvement. But those improvement I think should happen from inside with stricter regulations and better research in how to keep animals in ways that are both good for us and them.
I see it like the difference between Medicine and Natural Medicine. The former being actually scientifically tested and the latter being the leftovers we used to think worked but know better now. The same for Food and Organic Food.
That's not to say Food is perfect as it is, especially in the animal welfare department there's a lot of room for improvement. But those improvement I think should happen from inside with stricter regulations and better research in how to keep animals in ways that are both good for us and them.
The main problem with organic food is that the standards by which something is called organic are kind of all over the place at the moment, proven by the people in this thread seeming to have a variety of ideas about what constitutes organic food, it's not the people's fault, standards mean you can slap the organic label on just about anything in some places.
Organic does have certain benefits depending upon how you go about getting it. A lot of it comes from more local farms, especially in the U.S. and Europe, so it's much easier to track where the food is coming from if you have a particular inclination to support local growers, or want to avoid the exploitation involved in many products grown in third world countries that rely on things like child labor, or environmentally unsustainable slash and burn tactics.
People who have moral objections to pen or factory style farming may also be willing to bite the price increase to get meat that hasn't kept in a small cage its whole life and injected with hormones to make it grotesquely large. Organic also allows you to get meat cheaper if you live near such a ranch and get the meat directly, you can get prime cuts right off the butcher, you can't really do that with factory farming.
Limiting pesticide use can also help with people with certain allergies, I personally am allergic to something that is sprayed on many fruits and vegetables, it's not life threatening, but it does ruin a meal if an apple or green beans cause my mouth to itch badly for a good thirty minutes or so after eating. My only options here have been to either cook the vegetables before eating, to buy organic equivalents that don't use that particular brand of pesticide, or to grow my own. I am willing to pay a higher price to ensure that I can freely eat apples again.
The argument that organic farming somehow wastes food and land is an inherently silly one, the lack of food is not why people starve around the world, it is a lack of distribution and financial incentive that drives starvation in today's world. The U.S. alone allows about 20% of all the food it produces to rot, either by being thrown out as leftovers, or rotting before consumption. The U.S. government also pays subsidies to farmers to not grow or slaughter food, in order to regulate food prices and prevent them from dropping too low to be economically viable to grow by a private business. Even more of our food and farm land goes to feed energy inefficient luxury goods like cattle or ducks. We've got a long way to go before organic farms actually start to have any sort of appreciable effect on the world food supply, private business and economics do far more to limit the distribution and efficient consumption of food.
That said, organic is a wide open term, and it often gets wrapped up in the overblown fears against GM foods. Organic isn't some superfood that will cure illnesses and stick it to big corporations, many of the foods touted as organic are grown by the same large companies that grow the other stuff as well. Most of the benefits surrounding organic food are intangible, so it's impossible to quantify how much the benefit of it is actually worth. In the end, it's like any gourmet item you have to decide whether the cost is worth it to you, not all organic food is the same, and you can slap an organic label on almost anything in some places, so what you're buying as organic may just be the same thing you get normally.
Organic does have certain benefits depending upon how you go about getting it. A lot of it comes from more local farms, especially in the U.S. and Europe, so it's much easier to track where the food is coming from if you have a particular inclination to support local growers, or want to avoid the exploitation involved in many products grown in third world countries that rely on things like child labor, or environmentally unsustainable slash and burn tactics.
People who have moral objections to pen or factory style farming may also be willing to bite the price increase to get meat that hasn't kept in a small cage its whole life and injected with hormones to make it grotesquely large. Organic also allows you to get meat cheaper if you live near such a ranch and get the meat directly, you can get prime cuts right off the butcher, you can't really do that with factory farming.
Limiting pesticide use can also help with people with certain allergies, I personally am allergic to something that is sprayed on many fruits and vegetables, it's not life threatening, but it does ruin a meal if an apple or green beans cause my mouth to itch badly for a good thirty minutes or so after eating. My only options here have been to either cook the vegetables before eating, to buy organic equivalents that don't use that particular brand of pesticide, or to grow my own. I am willing to pay a higher price to ensure that I can freely eat apples again.
The argument that organic farming somehow wastes food and land is an inherently silly one, the lack of food is not why people starve around the world, it is a lack of distribution and financial incentive that drives starvation in today's world. The U.S. alone allows about 20% of all the food it produces to rot, either by being thrown out as leftovers, or rotting before consumption. The U.S. government also pays subsidies to farmers to not grow or slaughter food, in order to regulate food prices and prevent them from dropping too low to be economically viable to grow by a private business. Even more of our food and farm land goes to feed energy inefficient luxury goods like cattle or ducks. We've got a long way to go before organic farms actually start to have any sort of appreciable effect on the world food supply, private business and economics do far more to limit the distribution and efficient consumption of food.
That said, organic is a wide open term, and it often gets wrapped up in the overblown fears against GM foods. Organic isn't some superfood that will cure illnesses and stick it to big corporations, many of the foods touted as organic are grown by the same large companies that grow the other stuff as well. Most of the benefits surrounding organic food are intangible, so it's impossible to quantify how much the benefit of it is actually worth. In the end, it's like any gourmet item you have to decide whether the cost is worth it to you, not all organic food is the same, and you can slap an organic label on almost anything in some places, so what you're buying as organic may just be the same thing you get normally.