Agriculture and the Environment

[unspeakablehorror]

One problem with conventional farming  is that it uses so many harmful pesticides.  This is unhealthy for the environment, and unhealthy for humans as well.

Organic crops reduce this issue, but tend to introduce a different issue.  Because it seems these crops generally require considerably more land and water to produce the same amount of product.

It's the same issue for animals that aren't given antibiotics (giving animals antibiotics is one vector for introducing extremely terrible antibiotic-resistant bacteria into the world) and grass fed livestock etc.  These again produce lower yields per acre and unit of time.

I don't think this issue has any easy answers, but I think it's something that needs to be thought about if we want our food supply to truly be more environmentally friendly.  I also think that people often don't think about their crops and livestock as being the invasive plants and animals that they often are.

Comments

[tobermoriansass]

So the thing is while organic farming does produce lower yields our current agricultural system is...horribly inefficient. There's huge amounts of food being dumped because it can't go to first world markets because its cosmetically wrong - it doesn't get distributed, unfortunately, because that would drive prices down, so a lot of these dumped crops go to animals or just get used as compost, when there's actually scope for distribution on local markets.

So ideally there also needs to be a restructuring of the agricultural market as is along with taking a long, hard look at distribution and supply chains. I know that over here, at least, some nearly 40% of our produce goes waste because we lack good storage and transport systems - a lot of grain is bought by the govt and goes into storage to keep prices from plummeting wildly, but unfortunately this grain isn't stored that great.

If we could defragment and re-shape a lot of the agricultural supply/delivery systems we might find that we're actually producing enough food - without say, looking at alternate production systems like urban farms, vertical farms or aeroponic/hydroponic farm systems.

[unspeakablehorror]

Yes, that's certainly an important issue to address! There is so, so much waste in the current system, and looking into the various causes of that and ways to mitigate those issue is important.

There's some amount of food waste that's unavoidable of course, but there's a lot of wasted food that could much more easily be avoided by restructuring the supply and delivery systems, as you've said.

I wonder how much food could be gained in that way (ie. how much of that inefficiency could be ironed out), and what changes would have to be made to accomplish that?