[lofo List] various items: critique of local organic... leading to... food waste

[Daryl Hepting <dhh@cs.uregina.ca>]

Hi;

My google alert for "local food" brought this item to my attention  
(I've included
it below).  It is a critique of this article:
(http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/02/spoiled-organic-and-local-so-2008 
) .
It also points out an article on food waste;
(http://www.culinate.com/articles/features/wasted_food)
and a blog on the same topic
(http://www.wastedfood.com/  -- and from that blog, here's a story about
elementary students reducing waste in cafeterias:
http://www.spotlightnews.net/news/story.php? 
story_id=123618733548666900);
and a UN Report on the Environmental Food Crisis.
(http://dev.grida.no/foodcrisis/)

From my perspective, a local food day program would include some of  
this discussion.
The RCE group is "Farming and Local Food Production, Consumption, and  
Waste Minimization",
so this all fits.  I appreciate your comments and feedback on this.

Best regards,
Daryl
--
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2009/3/6/92920/83480
Spoiled indeedPaul Roberts' MoJo article on farming gets big idea  
right and details wrong
Posted by Tom Laskawy (Guest Contributor) at 8:44 AM on 07 Mar 2009

Read more about: food | agriculture | Big Ag | sustainable agriculture
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I like Paul Roberts. I liked his book The End of Food. But I must  
admit that I was a bit underwhelmed by his recent article on  
sustainable farming in Mother Jones, "Spoiled: Organic and Local Is So  
2008." That's not to say there's nothing to recommend it. His central  
premise -- that we way we're farming today isn't sustainable and that  
no large-scale model of what sustainable agriculture would look like  
currently exists -- is valid and important (as anyone who hangs out  
around here is well aware).

And any article that gets its money quote from sustainable ag guru  
Fred Kirschenmann is certainly on the right track. Said Kirschenmann,  
"We've come to see sustainability as some kind of fixed prescription  
-- if you just do these 10 things, you will be sustainable, and you  
won't need to worry about it anymore." Which isn't true, of course.

But that title! Shouldn't it be "conventional agriculture" that's so  
2008? Meanwhile, there were far too many straw men in the article for  
my tastes (ever eaten a straw man? Blech!) Take, for example, the  
thought experiment supplied by environmental scientist Vaclav Smil on  
the effect of totally eliminating the use of synthetic fertilizer:

Such an expansion, Smil notes, "would require complete elimination of  
all tropical rainforests, conversion of a large part of tropical and  
subtropical grasslands to cropland, and the return of a substantial  
share of the labor force to field farming -- making this clearly only  
a theoretical notion."
That's probably accurate as far as it goes. But it's unclear how he  
modeled this version of organic agriculture - at a minimum it appears  
to be a vast oversimplification. And his conclusion then becomes the  
basis upon which to reject the whole organic concept. Meanwhile, look  
at one of Smil's central assumptions -- that "dietary habits remain  
constant," i.e. in his experiment we're all eating as much meat, high- 
fructose corn syrup, and processed foods as we are now. Well, to take  
one example, you don't have to look far to find folks who will tell  
you that current meat consumption, especially red meat consumption, is  
the sine qua non of unsustainability -- Roberts himself held forth at  
length on that very point in his book. By holding that constant,  
you've just pre-determined the outcome of your thought experiment. And  
look at a crucial element in Smil's calculation -- that he's trying to  
determine "the extra land we'd need for cover crops or forage (to feed  
the animals to make the manure)." Now I don't know for sure if he  
presumes the forage will be pasture or cereal (aka corn), but either  
way that's a pretty high bar he's set.

Neither Smil nor Roberts takes account of improving what the United  
Nation Environmental Programme report, "The Environmental Food  
Crisis," refers to as "food energy efficiency." I'm willing to give  
Roberts a pass and assume that his article lead-time precluded the  
inclusion of any of the following information (Note to magazine  
editors of all stripes: Folks, it's the 21st century. The Age of  
Twitter will not allow months-long lead-times for feature articles  
anymore. Get used to it).

As this report details, any movement toward sustainable agriculture  
will require that we first attack the problem of wasted food (and  
water) in the agricultural system (and here's a great article on food  
waste, not to mention a great blog). Whether it's the fact that as  
much as 50 percent of fruit and vegetable harvests are lost to waste  
at some point in the production and consumption chain or that 30  
million tons of fish are discarded at sea every year, it's clear  
reforms that presume "business as usual" in this area will fail. As  
for Smil's point about forage, if we did need to vastly increase our  
manure production, we should look first to efficiency gains as a feed  
solution (as perspective, that 30 million tons of lost fish equals the  
total amount of aquaculture feed used annually). Even better, the UNEP  
report observes that all the research into cellulosic ethanol may  
allow us to develop ways to feed livestock on wood glucose rather than  
cereal grains -- but that's for another post.

The point is that Smil's thought experiment was destined to fail.  
Meanwhile, Robert's uses it to undercut the whole concept of the mass  
application of organic farming. Nowhere does he mention the United  
Nations study that organic farming practices are perfectly suited for  
Africa or even the research that indicates that organic farming at  
scale in the developing world can exceed conventional yields by 80  
percent.

Another oversight came in this anecdote about Fred Fleming, a farmer  
who has moved to a conventional no-till system as a way to save his  
soil. This has put him in purgatory, apparently. Neither conventional  
farmers nor organic farmers accept him as one of their own:

Because Fleming doesn't till his soil, his fields are gradually  
invaded by weeds, which he controls with "judicious" amounts of  
Roundup, the Monsanto herbicide that has become an icon of  
unsustainable agribusiness. Fleming defends his approach: Because his  
herbicide dosages are small, and because he controls erosion, the  
total volume of "farm chemistry," as he calls it, that leaches from  
his fields each year is far less than that from a conventional wheat  
operation. Nonetheless, even judicious chemical use means Fleming  
can't charge the organic price premium or appeal to many of the  
conscientious shoppers who are supposed to be leading the food  
revolution. At a recent conference on alternative farming, Fleming  
says, the organic farmers he met were "polite--but they definitely  
gave me the cold shoulder."
The anecdote itself dates from Roberts' book and the author admits it  
comes from "a couple years back." But since then, we've learned that  
conventional no-till is deeply problematic. Meanwhile, agriculture  
researchers like those at theRodale Institute have developed a form of  
organic no-till with yields that exceed conventional ag without the  
problems that Fleming faces and that doesn't rely on hand-weeding.

Straw men indeed.

Roberts' worst offense, however, is the virtual absence of climate  
change and resource limits in his discussion of sustainability. Though  
he clearly identifies current practices as unsustainable, he glosses  
over the underlying reasons. Where do the pressures on resources and  
yields exerted by climate change fit in to Roberts' analysis? For  
example, conventional farming requires lots of water. What affect will  
recurring droughts have? Roberts doesn't address it. Meanwhile, as  
water becomes scarce in places like California, farmers are  
spontaneously adopting organic practices because they limit soil loss  
and use less water.

There are, however, several development that Roberts is right to  
emphasize. No, not robots. I'm referring to things like limited use of  
synthetic fertilizers and pesticides (such as with Integrated Pest  
Management). It may be that such low-use systems -- let's call it  
conventional-ag lite -- which reduce synthetic use by 80 percent will  
be a necessary part of the equation. But it won't be because the  
conventional lion will have sat down with the organic lamb (Mmmm.  
Organic lamb...) but rather because synthetics will have become  
prohibitively expensive.

And he has a good analysis of the potential future for urban  
agriculture, so-called vertical farming. But for some reason, he ties  
it to a hit on local foods. He sets up local food as a quixotic quest  
that will never scale while proponents of local food are portrayed as  
unwilling even to consider the idea of bringing food in from farther- 
flung rural areas. It seems that any "reasonable" account of  
sustainable farming must now put itself at a comfortable arm's length  
from "foodies." We've been seeing a lot of that lately. And it's true  
that our current food systems can't support a large-scale move to  
local. But if it's so unreasonable, why was New York City able to come  
up with a set of recommendations that, if enacted, could vastly  
increase the amount of food produced by its local foodshed without a  
significant increase in carbon emissions (its current Achilles Heel).

For all my criticisms of Roberts' piece, I do think it has a strong  
finish and ends up hitting all the right points -- that the dominance  
of monocultures and the classic "efficiencies of scale" concept in  
agriculture and the food industry is a major part of the problem, that  
farm subsidies (as long as they subsidize the right things) will  
remain a crucial part of the solution, that the federal government  
could transform agriculture overnight by simply changing what kind of  
food it buys and that the future of farming will likely look nothing  
like today's. And buried at the end is a compelling (and ominous)  
observation that we aren't necessarily headed for a happy ending.  
Americans (supported by many of our representatives) may simply not  
accept what needs to be done. Instead, they will demand that we drive  
our tractors over the cliff. I just wish I didn't have to pick so much  
straw out of my teeth to learn it.
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