Organic Farming Not So Sustainable?

If you're in an urban megatropolis, you can find anything including organic and actual farmers selling their wares. If you are in rural middle of nowhere, then you can do the same. When you are in po-dunk towns of a few thousand people to less than a million, you usually don't have that choice. There is 1 farmers market within an hours drive of me, and the produce is crap most of the time. If I drive an hour in any direction away from the mountains, I hit farm land. There is a disconnect somewhere.

When I go to NYC I can find farmers markets everywhere, and even the local grocery stores carry more local produce than imported even though there is no farm land in sight.

 

I think it depends where you live. There are at least 5 or 6 farmers markets with 15 miles of my podunk town of 30,000. Only 2 or 3 are open all year though and the pickings get slim in the winter. There are a also a bunch more roadside stands selling crops during growing season, mostly orchard and berry crops.

 

You can go to the Union Sq. Greenmarket and get local strawberries, in season.

But there's the rub. The strawberry season is only a couple weeks long, and oftentimes people want strawberries outside of that time period.

 

Reality bites

 

i have LONG since questioned "Organic" as a buzz word.

i have eaten only grass fed beef and pork for more than 7 years now and the key thing is its not delivered. we go get it. its about 19 miles from my front door. so its a drive but i "Leaf" it so it costs me a quarter in fuel to pick it up

Colvin Ranch

i eat fast food (like everyone else. well, not everyone. 90% of us eat it, but only 50% will admit to it) so we do Burgerville 2-5 times a month. they use ONLY regionally produced food so the carbon footprint is greatly reduced and they do have some awesome seasonal milkshakes...some to die for!

[ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgerville]Burgerville - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

also have several local organic co-ops. one is Left Foot Organics. they are expensive but also local (about 15 miles away) and besides being green, they do a lot of good work for the community so definitely a great place to support.

Left Foot Organics: Homepage

i rather do locally produced and am lucky enough to live in an area where it can be had. but lately the prices have really jumped in the past year along with everything else in my life. will be about 3 months from making a decision on Beef. prices are up more than $2 a pound from the last purchase and it makes it tougher and tougher for most people to continue to support the local farmer

 

Organic does take more land and more water, to the point where there's not enough farmland on earth to feed all of us organically. There's a reason farmers stopped being "organic" in the first place.

 

for every pound of food the US eats, it throws away 4 lbs. maybe we just need to eat what we put on the plate then we would buy less, the demand would be less and we could go back to "less economical" ways of producing the food

Dive! The Film - Living Off America's Waste

problem is; we produce so much of it, we can "afford" to waste it...or can we?

 

Yes, we should be more efficient with our food, but there's still not enough farmland on earth to feed 7 billion people with organic methods. If we switched back tomorrow, 2-3 billion people would starve to death.

 

i think we need to re evaluate our land use processes, period. a big reason why we have such limited resources to produce food has nothing to do with the # of people we have to feed.

it has to do with piss poor decisions in land management, and "resource management" that really becomes the ultimate definition of an oxymoron when concerning, water, soil nutrients, etc.

its a cascading joke from top to bottom

 

I wonder about Monty's claim, given just how much agriculture is wasted in processing the core product into processed shit and meat.

 

Well it is only numbers but it its estimated that the food thrown away in the US alone could feed 2 billion people. That is a hard number too swallow. But the other half of the equation is that food production its the 4th or 5th leading cause of GHG. The throwing of food away in landfills is also a leading cause of GHG

 

4 times that eaten being thrown away is a rather remarkable number. So is enough food thrown away in the US to feed 2 billion people a remarkable number. Do you have a reliable source for that information that you can cite?

FWIW, I agree with you that there is a problem.

 

No

 

Seems a bit off based on the numbers here, which indicate 27% waste and that it could feed 80 million people.

One caveat is that it only looked a "food available for consumption". So presumably waste in production isn't included. The 2nd link references a study that produced a figure of 50%.

One Country

Waste Land: Does the Large Amount of Food Discarded in the U.S. Take a Toll on the Environment?: Scientific American

 

We waste very little food at home. Usually because of a miscalculation that results in something spoiling, but that's unusual.

My wife and I do eat out a lot so contribute to the restaurant industry which is very wasteful. We frequently split a meal and get an extra salad or side of veggies to go with it so we minimize our direct contribution to restaurant waste. Meal splitting has gotten so common that many restaurants put a splitting fee on the menu.

 

the movie referenced above does not address what consumers waste. only what grocery stores waste.

as far as "reliable information" in this information age, i no longer have even the slightest clue as to what "reliable" information is because what i see is propaganda and opinion with a scattering of figures so, there you go.

anyway the movie looked at several different grocers and their food policy. one was Trader Joes (for being a "green" company, they waste more than any other retailer) it was Dec 24th and the store would not be open again until Dec 26th. Trader Joes apparently has a habit of throwing away food a day or two before the "use by" date but since they were not open, they were throwing away food that had several days to go before expiring.

the producer of the movie started life as a dumpster diver but then realized that the amount of food was waay more than he or his friends could eat, so he started investigating the store's various donation policies which was a very brief investigation because there was nothing to investigate.

it was only after a lot of harassment by the diver, that TJ's agreed to allow any food to be picked up. most other stores declined and lock their dumpsters so you cannot retrieve it.


now, remember (see above) its all just numbers, but its estimated that the City of LA alone throws away enough food to feed the entire state of Cali. now, i saw this several months ago so all the numbers are faded impressions of an experience that has now been obscured by several layers of life.

so watch the movie

 

Nope. The highest food production per land area system ever developed was the Paris system from the end of the anti-penultimate century.

The reason we don't use it now is labor costs.

 

Normally yes, but Texas has been ravaging its water table for decades. So much in fact that shore property in some places has sunk into the sea (long before rising oceans where the scare du jour.) So I am not so sure if it was the local organic farmers, or just a convenient non-conformist scapegoat.

As I like to say, though, why not try "Organic Food", or as our grandparents called it, "Food."