It's not a good idea to ban chemical fertilizers when your whole food production depends on them.
Ecologism may sound like a beautiful thing but it can't be implemented overnight and at scale. It's just ignoring decades of human progress without a proper alternative.
6 months later and the results are already here. Sadly, a lot of people will die from poverty and starvation thanks to this measure. I hope Sri Lankans stand up against this (even if they have to smuggle proper fertilizers into their country).
Usage of fertilizers and pesticides also underlies an ideology: Massively importing chemicals to boost agricultural production at the cost of soil depletion, bio accumulation and health risks. At some point, regaining control of land usage becomes a matter of sovereignty.
No shit. The biggest problem with organic is that it’s unsustainable for our population. It’s only useful for rich people to brag about amongst themselves.
It’s not even sustainable for the US to switch to organic for its own citizens, even setting aside the food it exports.
> The biggest problem with organic is that it’s unsustainable for our population.
It's likely this is also true for the "dump millions of tons of pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and fertilizers on the Great Plains" approach in the long run.
If it reduced yield by 20%, that doesn't mean it's unsustainable, it means it's somewhat more expensive. The difference between "rich people" and poor people isn't 20%.
If we only produce 105% of the food required to feed humanity, a 20% drop is a huge fucking deal. Food isn’t something people can just go without when there is a shortage.
The gist of the article is at the bottom regarding the externalities to a push to complete organic farming overnight:
Threat to food security?
According to experts, three scientifically rigorous meta-analyses of organic-conventional crop yield comparisons indicate that across all crops, the mean yield reduction in organic agriculture in Sri Lanka is around 19-25 per cent. This shows that an overnight shift to organic cultivation presents a clear and imminent threat to the country’s food security.
Eminent researchers have also noted that organic farming increases farmland due to its low yields. This results in deforestation, leading to large scale extinction of species and a rise in greenhouse emissions.
According to the Annual Review of Resource Economics, organic agriculture generates more air pollutants and environmental emissions in the crop production process for a unit of food than chemical farming.
Moreover, organic farming has exponentially higher monetary input costs due to a lack of usage of pest and pathogen-resistant chemicals, which increases manual labour, according to experts. The additional processing and marketing costs of organic produce is also significantly higher, analysts said.
>> According to experts, three scientifically rigorous meta-analyses of organic-conventional crop yield comparisons indicate that across all crops, the mean yield reduction in organic agriculture in Sri Lanka is around 19-25 per cent.
For a country that is a "net food importer" it seems obvious that would cause some kind of shock. The other stuff:
>> Eminent researchers have also noted that organic farming increases farmland due to its low yields. This results in deforestation, leading to large scale extinction of species and a rise in greenhouse emissions.
Longer term. Not relevant to this situation. There is also research showing the opposite, but again that's not the immediate isse.
>> organic agriculture generates more air pollutants and environmental emissions in the crop production process for a unit of food than chemical farming.
Not relevant. Notice the exclusion of pollutants in the chemical (fertilizer) production process. But again, not relevant to the current situation.
>> organic farming has exponentially higher monetary input costs due to a lack of usage of pest and pathogen-resistant chemicals, which increases manual labour, according to experts
"exponentially" is an exaggeration. The formerly mentioned increase in area means increase in labor.
>> The additional processing and marketing costs of organic produce is also significantly higher, analysts said.
You don't really need to do ANY marketing when the government mandated that everyone do it.
There's a lot here that's basically anti-organic, but the real problem is that it's simply more expensive, requiring a more land and labor and they didn't account for any of that in the rapid transition.
"Exponentially" is worse than an exaggeration, it just makes no sense. The word describes curves (where the input, usually the horizontal axis, is an input or time), not pairs of points such as (organic, price) and (conventional, price).
I would argue that I need to eat less high-quality food, which has greatly affected my weight, health and energy levels. I can't say organic is always more high-quality (in regards to nutrient my body needs), but I can say I have experienced a difference in quality of life after adopting many organic foods.
And so have many, many other people that are now so sick that their bodies simply won't tolerate (allergic reactions) non-organic food.
I think it's just fine to have 20% less output if you get more out of the food.
I also generally opt for organic (at least marketed as such). I don't know much on how much better it really is though apart from my feelings. But feelings and perceptions could lead to beneficial placebo effects.
It is another thing to mandate it for all agriculture overnight in a poor developing country.
Most sources say 8 billion. Anyway, he said that some people are so sick that they can't eat non-organic food. Not food with a specific pesticide. His claim is very different from yours, and IMO his is indefensible.
But to the consumer it's not clear what is causing the issue. They might just see that they can eat only organic vegetables.
For example, my mom has told me she can't eat bell peppers from Spain because she get diarrhea from them.
Now, I don't think that bell peppers grow different in Spain than they do in Portugal or in Italy, it's probably some pesticide or some fertilizer or something. It's probably not all spanish peppers, but we just don't know enough about the produce at the supermarket. All they tell us is the country of origin, so the only thing she can do is avoid spanish peppers.
You're probably right there. That could be what is alluded to when they mention that the organic technologies "generates more air pollutants and environmental emissions". Basically they burn more stuff.
You can't hord if you don't have money. The local Rupee was depreciated a lot, and the food prices have gone up 20-30% to a point that it is simply too expensive to hord things.
There are some loosely imposed rules that one cannot buy more than 5kg of rice per turn, etc. But I don't see people actively hording things. The long lines are likely because a shop is only allowed to bring in 2-3 customers at once.
If your money is worth less tomorrow you will spend it today.
If CPI inflation is really high, that means people will try to empty the shelves before prices have adjusted.
This is why moderate inflation around 2% is good because it stops hoarding of money and why inflation above 10% is destructive because people start hoarding goods.
Sri Lankans can probably answer this but Sri Lanka is in a vicious cycle - Covid-19 devastated tourism, which reduced the foreign currency reserves, which weakened the Sri Lankan Rupee, which made imports costly for an island that depends on imports for many basic necessities. This combined with harebrained policies of the President have put Sri Lanka, one of the richest countries (by per capita GDP) in the Indian subcontinent onto a path of economic devastation.
The vicious cycle is true (source: Sri Lankan, but not actively living there).
The current president isn't the only one to blame, though. For the past 15 or so years, the government relied more and more on China to basically keep its wheels moving at the comfort of endless projects funded by China. Sri Lanka used to manufacture a lot of things such as tyre, sugar, paper, etc. The over reliance on imported goods didn't play out well, and things such as tyre, sugar, and paper are now at a shortage because the government simply didn't bother to improve the local manufacturing of said goods.
Without intending to start a debate: we see something similar occurring in Venezuela due to a choice to focus on oil production a few years (decade?) back instead balancing food and oil production.
There may well be something to institutional economics and the notion of a holon.
A "revolution" which imposed from above is generally trash, for many of the same reasons that big-bang replacement projects fail. Incremental change is the responsible way forward; it will show you the costs of your decision, and give you time to understand the best practices which will mitigate these costs as you perform a gradual roll-out.
Even the successful American Revolution was an incremental change: an effort to preserve a tradition which feted the traditional rights and liberties of Englishmen going back to the Magna Carta. The shift in philosophical underpinnings may have been radical, but the political culture barely changed at all.
The EU wants to push the same dangerous idea with the green deal. Switch 25 % of farms to organic in ten years.
Edit:
People seem to misunderstand. I don't mean overnight, I mean pushing the same idea = organic farming.
It's doesn't work at scale. Doesn't matter if you have ten years or one day.
The EU is already dependent on other regions because without imported synthetic fertilizers and other chemicals, they won't be able to produce the same yields anyway. Most countries there already have 10% or more farmland dedicated to organic practices.[1] They have more tooling and expertise available outside the chemical monocropping approach, which is what doomed the change in Sri Lanka.
US Organic and EU organic are two different things. In EU organic "bio", copper pesticides are allowed, and even compounds synthesized by humans in some borderline cases. Differences for wines are even more profound.
Yeah we're all about material contents to our laws.
Do you feel copper pesticides are something that reduces/dilutes the organic quality?
Do you feel it's realistic to farm only in cleanrooms? I'm not really kidding here. Pests are a serious issue, without something to fight them, crops don't survive (at all... pretty much..)
Phasing changes in over time with proper education, training, and building out of supporting industry is not nearly the same as announcing a flag day when your farmers don't have warning, training, or access to the replacement goods.
I would assume a shock to the system as happened until the farmers adapt to something different.
To call it more primitive doesn't seem honest. Modern farming practices destroy the soil quality while using shortcuts to get higher yield in spite of that. From what I've read I think the jury is still out on which is better. Obviously organic farming is bad for the fertilizer and pesticide business.
I use "more primitive" based on the assumption that less focused development has gone into the technology for organic farming than chemical farming but if the word provides a negative connotation then, well, that's not what I mean.
One of the things I wanted to chime in with, somewhere in the discussion, was that this is the sort of policy which pushes people to develop technologies and that perhaps if deployed more slowly it might have driven innovation in organic farming.
Something like a pilot scheme + opt in + subsidies.
Unlike primitive farming, modern farming is aware of the soil. Primitive farming is what works to a minimal extent, but in general isn't very good for soil health. Modern farming looks to science to figure out what really make soil healthy.
The government is trying very hard to preserve its USD reserves. Importing vehicles is downright banned for 16 months now, and there are many rules imposed to control the USD outflow and improve the inflow.
I don't think this is anything new amidst a global pandemic, in a country that depended on tourism.
Saying that chemical fertilizer ban caused a food shortage isn't any fair or accurate, because the sugar crisis (a can of worms by itself) happened before the fertilizer ban, and the government imposing lockdowns caused the food supply issues. That said, there are many companies increasing their organic fertilizer production, and even smaller scale individual investors who are planning to produce organic fertilizers too.
Many of us see this as a net positive, but there must be a ramp, as opposed to an overnight switch.
The current president was elected in 2019, and I believe it was one of his "visions" to change chemical fertilizers to organic.
In the northern parts of the country, where the majority of rice farms are, a considerable percentage of people have kidney diseases that attribute to the use of chemical fertilizer.
There is a surplus of rice production in the country, so I don't think the reduced crop will make a big difference.
However, the state of tea farming is not the same. Price of Sri Lankan tea (Ceylon tea as it's commonly called) at auctions was slowly going down for the past few years, and tea estates expect the government to make an exception for them.
Since this ban was announced, the finance minister was changed to the brother of the current president (another can of worms), who might make necessary changes, exceptions, or probably just delay it to make sure the tea industry isn't disrupted.
I don't think saying someone is more dependent on tourism makes it the case that Sri Lanka isn't dependent on tourism. An overnight drop of 12% is huge.
I don’t think Munich is a good example. From what I know things were working reasonably well but Microsoft muscled their way back in with a lot of money and lobbying. If anything Munich is a warning that businesses will do whatever they can to obstruct progress if it doesn’t make money for them.
If there was a broad movement towards organic farming I would expect a similar thing: corporations will put out a lot of propaganda and buy off politicians to stop this.
All posts I'm seeing here are highly critical of organic farming.
And most are based on a very short-term picture, which ignores the long-term costs of chemical-based farming: the incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion.
Chem-based clearly gives higher yields for a period of 50-80 years, but what happens after that?
Organic/permaculture is sustainable and possible even for our large populations. It presents challenges to some other assumptions of our highly industrialized food supply chain, but that doesn't mean it can't feed the globe.
It just makes it harder for one or two companies to monopolize everything.
These results may be skewed by use of non-GMO/GMO crops, which tend to correlate with organic/non-organic farming. Organic farming methods can be used with GMO crops, however.
Important note: not all GMO is done to vendor lock farmers, most of it is actually beneficial to food quality and availability
I think studies in the EU, which bans GMOs but does plenty of non-organic farming, should address this. However, I don't know of any to cite, or what the results may be.
> Important note: not all GMO is done to vendor lock farmers, most of it is actually beneficial to food quality and availability
I am a farmer, that is absolutely not true. All GMO crops are made to be more profitable to the farmer, with the goals of increased bulk yields, longer shelf stability and decreased water usage. Something like 95% of all corn grown in America isn’t even for human consumption, they’re certainly not selecting for food quality and availability.
Farmers can switch vendors if they want to. Even if they have a contract, it isn't for more than a few years. Monsanto is used because those farmers have done the math and they get the most profit working with Monsanto. Last I checked Monsanto was about a third of the seed market, the competitors total to more market share. (since I last checked Monsanto was bought out, and no longer exists)
Given any scenario for this type of environmental discussion, someone will find a problem with it.
How far was the manure transported? How much CO2 did the cow burp? How much corn was trucked in to feed the cow?
There’s also the matter of organic fertilizers working differently in some scenarios. Blood meal releases nitrogen more slowly than ammonium nitrate, for example.
When you cross pseudo-religious beliefs you get in trouble as well — many of the organic fertilizers are animal byproducts (blood, feathers, eggshells, urine). So what wins for a vegan? Vegetables made with chemical fertilizers, or vegetables made with burnt eggshells and feathers?
> organic farming performs better than conventional for nearly all crop types when energy use is expressed on a unit of area basis
Well, of course. But that's a useless measurement. The whole point of hi-tech farming is to increase the density. Organic farming is less efficient for unit of food produced.
Ironically one of the source wrongly cited in the article says the contrary (ie organic is more efficient on energy per unit of food), see my comment below:
I don't see it saying that. It says the results are more variable on a per unit basis. This article says organic is still more energy efficient on a per unit basis.
But what individual can afford to think 50-80 years in the future? People have to do what is best for them in their life time.
To be able to think 50-80 years in the future is just an incredible luxury most do not have, particularly most small farmers, and particularly, I would think, most small farmers in a developing country.
In defense of the parent poster, they're making an altogether different point.
Their point, as I take it, is that investing in future welfare at the risk of current welfare rarely makes sense to people's minds, and in fact often jeopardizes future welfare as well as current, due to the fact that any harm it causes now may in fact carry over into the future.
What you're talking about, on the other hand, is about corporate greed and indifference. Very different scenario.
E.g. A struggling parent buying cheap bread for their kids today rather than starving them for a month to save money and feed them more nutritious food later, is not the kind of decision one would attribute to MBA driven obsessions. Nor is this parent a worse parent than a more affluent one who can afford such an investment without starving their children.
Point taken, but by “what person” is what average person in the world that is living day-to-day and is just trying to feed their kids tomorrow. I imagine most of the farmers in Sri Lanka are just trying to make it day-to-day.
> People have to do what is best for them in their life time.
Kim Stanley Robinson's recent novel "Ministry for the Future" had an interesting take on this; that our future descendants may need legal standing in the court system, and lawyers tasked with defending their needs there.
> Chem-based clearly gives higher yields for a period of 50-80 years, but what happens after that?
You will have to keep moving the goalposts at a rate of 1 year per year, because it turns out that we understand which nutrients plants need and how to give them those nutrients.
We have enough successful regenerative farms now to prove that it is an effective way to produce food without destroying the environment. Human understanding of what is happening biologically in the soil has rapidly expanded in the last 20 years.
We do not need to fertilize. It takes about 3 years for yields of a farm converted from traditional to regenerative to meet pre-conversion yields. The quantity of land used doesn't change. It is just managed a different way.
Aside: organic and regenerative are not at all the same
Hmm; I've never seen "Organic" and "Permaculture" seen used as synonyms; I am ignorant of the field, but my understanding of "Organic" was that it was more focused on what chemicals are and aren't used, largely due to their perceived benefit to ingesting humans / some level of "naturalness".
I also haven't seen "Organic" as stopping monopolies and oligopolies either. Even if I accept that "Organic" doesn't simply mean "Carbon based", nothing in its modern usage seems to preclude new monopolies emerging.
- As an end-user, what I found is that same companies that offer "regular" food tend to offer "organic" under spun labels, preserving status quo (but at higher price and therefore profit)
- I assume that "Certified organic chemicals" for farmers' usage up the supply chain will similarly have to come from some company or another, and I don't immediately see what makes it harder for those to homogenize and eventually form a monopoly.
[If it's an allusion to Monsanto etc, again, to me that's more of a matter of IP laws, and I don't see what prevents such occurrence in Organic field (I also see GMO and Organic as orthogonal and not necessarily incompatible, but definition of Organic is loose enough and changing enough with times/regions/individuals that I won't stake a big claim there).]
A lot of the problem is the definitions are broken and mean different things to different people. Plus there's a lot of nonscientific or pseudoscientific woo mixed in there too!
It gets visceral when I volunteer for sorting at the food bank. The organic crates roll in, the traditional crates roll in -- and it turns out that, say, all the zucchini in the organic crates has turned to mush because they don't believe in spraying with wax. Crate after crate of rotting, wasted produce. Awful. Natural, yes, but nature is so often awful, and it's such a shame when we know how to be less wasteful and intentionally forego this knowledge in order to indulge shoppers' nature fetish. Is this even what they really want? Would they continue to insist on the organic label if they saw these crates of rotting zucchini mush?
Maybe zucchinis need wax and preservatives? It looked like there was wax on the traditional produce and not on the organic produce, but I don't really know the process, I just see the crates of rotting produce at the food bank every fall. Those crates are overwhelmingly likely to have "organic" on the label whereas their picture-perfect counterparts are much less likely to have "organic" on the label.
> I don't know the process, I just see the crates of rotting produce every fall.
Well, you don't typically spray preservatives on zucchini.
Consider the possibility that there are factors outside your view here. Perhaps the organic farm you're getting the zucchini from is further away, or more successful commercially at selling their best product. Who knows?
Without more information, you might just be the anecdotal victim of confirmation bias.
Does the fridge energy usage plus the terrible global warming potential of the fridge's gases outweigh the non organic version's increased chemical use?
> Would they continue to insist on the organic label if they saw these crates of rotting zucchini mush?
Probably. They feed their kids “organic” because they believe it will give them a competitive edge. Not because if concern for people who can’t shop at Whole Foods.
Here's one: Organic food needs soil, sunlight, and water. Conventional food needs soil, sunlight, water, oil refineries, chemical plants, etc., plus all the heavy industry necessary to support those things.
Here's another: If I recall correctly, after WWII the US didn't know what to do with all its munitions factories. They realized that the basic ingredients of bombs were good at fixing nitrogen in the soil, so they made minor conversions to the factories and started producing chemical fertilizers. Fifty years later, Timothy McVeigh was able to buy a truckload of the stuff and bomb a federal building.
I hope Sri Lanka continues this experiment. Could it be that after so many years of conventional agriculture, the soil was too depleted of nutrients to be suitable for food crops? I imagine that things will improve as the land heals.
you didn't provide data, chemical based farming has been going on industrial scale for 100 years now... no barren land is accumulating.
if 100 years aren't enough to evaluate long term consequences what is?
> if 100 years aren't enough to evaluate long term consequences what is?
100 years isn't long when you're changing the global ecosystem.
The Industrial Revolution began in the late 1700s. We're only now beginning to agree on its long-term consequences, and quite a ways off from agreeing on mitigation steps.
What is data? In the comment I replied to, the words "rather than" indicate that the OP considered the defense "natural vs. unnatural" to be a defense based on data. I replied on that standard.
I will repeat that I hope Sri Lanka continues this experiment. Experiments like this are the only way we'll get the data we need.
I think you are (possibly deliberately) forgetting that there are pesticides which are allowed in organic farming, they are just not as effective as more modern alternatives and they end up polluting the water table in a very significant way.
> Here's another: If I recall correctly, after WWII the US didn't know what to do with all its munitions factories.
The War Department did construct 10 ammonia plants which made precursors for explosives, which could also make fertilizer precursors, and they absolutely switched them over after the war.
But ammonia production capacity doubled by 1950, and that wouldn't have happened without a demand side to the story as well. It also turned out that farmers realized nitrogen fertilizers work really, really well.
> Here's one: Organic food needs soil, sunlight, and water. Conventional food needs soil, sunlight, water, oil refineries, chemical plants, etc., plus all the heavy industry necessary to support those things.
It is absolutely ignorant to believe that organic is better for the environment than non-organic. Oil refineries and heavy industry are needed to support farming enough to feed the world, organic or not. And organic food is more expensive, in terms of resources consumed, not less.
I have mixed feelings about this request. On the one hand, fair enough. On the other hand, I'm reminded of the paper 'Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial'[1]. We don't always need data.
Take chlorpyrifos[2]. It's pretty nasty. It requires no additional data to determine that, all else being equal, we'll be better off not consuming its residues on our food. This is not simply an "unnatural = bad" argument: this is a specific chemical with known harmful effects, which you can avoid by buying organic.
Of course, the key question is: is all else equal? Organic farming does permit some other chemicals, and has a wide range of other impacts, including yields etc. So it's possible that organic farming is net negative for human welfare. But it's unfair to characterise a preference for organic farming as being quite as unscientific as you seem to claim.
I also think the article is telling us less about the innate merits of organic farming and more about the stupidity of making huge system changes overnight without training the people on the ground.
Wow. Ok, that's pretty convincing. I guess it's frustrating having organic vs regular as the option here. Seems like we need more terms to have a more reasonable discussion. Like, what is it called when we don't use dangerous pesticides but we do use man-made fertilizer? What is it called when we use crops optimized for flavor and nutrition vs shelf-life and bulk?
I live in the Netherlands and the produce here is pretty awful compared with France, Italy or Germany. I'd be happy with some kind of arbitrary point system to indicate holistic quality. Even though we might disagree on details, balancing price, health, nutrition, taste, environmental sustainability and labor ethics is really hard for a consumer. When you buy organic you kind of hope all those things are included, but it just seems so non-rationalized at the moment.
It’s true that some of this could be fixed by more transparency. For example, the pesticides used on crops ought to be listed/available on packaging/at the point of sale.
>Take chlorpyrifos[2]. It's pretty nasty. It requires no additional data to determine that, all else being equal, we'll be better off not consuming its residues on our food.
Can't you make the same argument with other organic but yucky stuff? eg.
>Take cow manure. It's pretty nasty. It requires no additional data to determine that, all else being equal, we'll be better off not consuming its residues on our food.
From the Wikipedia page on chlorpyrifos: “Organizations such as PANNA and the NRDC state that chlorpyrifos meets the four criteria (persistence, bioaccumulation, long-range transport, and toxicity) in Annex D of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants”.
I don’t think cow manure meets any of those four criteria.
>From the Wikipedia page on chlorpyrifos: “Organizations such as PANNA and the NRDC state that chlorpyrifos meets the four criteria (persistence, bioaccumulation, long-range transport, and toxicity) in Annex D of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants”.
But the parent poster explicitly mentioned that "it requires no additional data to determine that"? That sounds pretty closer to "chemicals are yucky", rather than "chemicals are bad and these studies show that" (what you're arguing for).
> Of course, the key question is: is all else equal? Organic farming does permit some other chemicals, and has a wide range of other impacts, including yields etc. So it's possible that organic farming is net negative for human welfare.
It is a given that organic is a net negative. Non-organic allows everything organic plus everything organic prohibits. We might need to reform non-organic in some cases, but those doesn't mean we need the arbitrary restrictions of organic.
Modern organic farming is in infancy still, plagued by a number of problems plaguing non-organic farming too (eg. transportation, picking unripe fruit and vegetables to let them ripen in the storage or on the store shelves and to avoid pests...).
The focus is currently on how use of "non-organic" methods (pesticide effects on humans and insect—particularly bee—population, soil depletion...) are harmful, and naturally, humans immediately explore the other extreme, without looking for a sweet spot in the middle (of course, humans are exploring it, it's just not publicized enough).
And the sweet spot is always in the middle.
Organic produce is popular because it gives you some reassurance (compared to almost none otherwise) and the living standards have increased in large (edit: small, but mostly participating on HN :) parts of the world to be able to afford it (with their living standard, I am sure Sri Lanka wanted to be the first exporter of exclusively organic produce, not for their internal use): we are still far away from finding the best way, but it's important to work from both ends to help us get there.
The problem IMHO is that the discussion is poisoned:
> And most are based on a very short-term picture, which ignores the long-term costs of chemical-based farming: the incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion.
But there are enough organic farming methods which also lead to "incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion" similar there are non-organic "chemical" methods which do not lead to such effects.
So we should focus on long-term sustainable farming.
And sure for most farms the first steps to sustainable farming are the same or at least very similar as the first steps to organic farming, but the "mid" and "end-game" can differ massively.
> So we should focus on long-term sustainable farming.
You cannot farm soil for longer than 8-10 years without major nitrogen, and phosphorus replenishment. Actually lived in the sticks, and did farm labour in my childhood.
Controllable soils which are good at intaking, and retaining fertilizers are sustainable.
Bad soils with unusual soil chemistries can get depleted no matter how much fertiliser is dumped. That's true.
Wouldn't a competing farm be more profitable to add fertilizers to the soil to replenish the loss nutrients, which means they can price out the crop rotation farm?
In most of western world agriculture is subsidized: that 25% of farm land that's on a break will be paid by the government. The gov mandates and pays also for crop rotation.
In the short term such a farm would indeed be more profitable, but in the long term? The "less profitable" farm would close shop and be replaced by a fertilizer farm... and then, as a net result, society is worse off.
This is why regulations (and to combat their evasion by other countries, anti-dumping tariffs) are needed.
You would see a 25% cut in revenue (yielded crops to market) but also would see a cut in your costs (you aren't tilling, planting seeds, harvesting, putting wear and tear on tools, transporting to market) that would offset it.
The economies of scale of industrializing farming means that cutting the planting and harvesting by 25% doesn't cut the cost by the same 25% (i.e., the same economies of scale works against you when you try to decrease your scale!).
I did not mean to imply that costs would drop by exactly 25%, just that you might not see the hit to your profit margin you would expect due to your costs also decreasing with decreasing revenue.
True, but presumably there exist (possibly not-yet-invented) high-yield farming practices which fix atmospheric nitrogen without the need for fertilizer. There’s just not been any economic pressure to use or invent such a practice, since presumably it would be less efficient than using fertilizer. Phosphorous you can’t get out of the atmosphere so we might not have an easy out there.
Yes, there is, you rotate your crop with legumes. There are also crops that gather stable phosphorous and activates it, but those tend to be long-lived and thus bad for rotation.
What I don't get is why the focus on fertilizers? There may be some wisdom on not spraying random poisons on the stuff you are going to eat¹, but the worst you can get with fertilizers is soil salinization, and this is perfectly avoidable on any place that isn't a desert already, and there are ways to avoid it on deserts too, just a bit more expensive.
1 - So there's a reason for a poison by poison discussion, the overall label of "organic" just poisons the discussion.
I assume the focus is on ensuring long-term crop viability even if we manage to deplete easily accessible mineral deposits used to provide phosphates or whatever. Personally I say we liberate everything we can from the ground, including carbon.
How do the crops you mention “gather phosphorous”? From where?
Phosphorous is released from minerals by fungus in healthy soil. Tilling and chemical amendments, NPK fertilizers and biocides, kill fungus first.
If you learn about the soil food web you will learn that most things we dump on farmland are made available to plants by bacteria and fungi. Unfortunately, those are the things that we kill by farming the way we do.
I don't know if you've come across this video on HN before, but I discovered it here and it was an eye-opener for me. It's a guy called Gabe Brown who transformed his farm into one that needed no fertilizer by using no-till and rotation. One of the most compelling things is that he's no tree-hugger (he even has an uncomplimentary comparison with the soil from an organic farm) - his focus is squarely on profit, which goes up when you're not forking out huge amounts of money on chemicals. I thought I'd give it five minutes, then 2.5 hours later I realised I'd watched the whole thing.
They focus on two farmers, one a small-scale farmer in NY who started with the vision of a sustainable farm, and a commodity farmer in Minnesota who was looking for ways to improve yield. The Minnesota couple are, like your example, not at all "tree-huggers;" they're just people who want to survive. And what they found is that they can get more crops, for less money, while also limiting their exposure to potentially harmful fertilizers and pesticides.
They see a lot of resistance from their neighbors, because conventional farm knowledge is so ingrained in their culture. Running a farm is tricky, and experimenting can be the difference between profit and losing your shirt. There's just not much will to risk losing the land that's been in a family for generations on a quest to find a better way.
Feel like I'm missing something. State universities all over the nation have agricultural programs. Are they teaching stuff like cover crops? In other words, does this guy align with the conventional experts, or is he fringe, or does the industry have a schism?
He started as fringe out of necessity. He and a few others are now the leaders of a paradigm shift. Gabe Brown has shown that it is immensely profitable to ditch costly chemical inputs and manage a farm as an ecosystem. He wasn't the first to return to farming this way. But, he has done a lot to spread it around.
Ag extensions mostly recommend the high input farming methods. What Gabe Brown practices is more than just cover crops.
It's absolutely true that you can't keep farming the same soil year in and year out and expect it to produce. This is why crop rotation is done and why fields are allowed to remain fallow from time to time. It seems to me that these concepts are bundled in the term "long-term sustainable farming."
Source: grew up in the sticks and worked on the family farm as a kid.
Crop rotation implies the selection and plating of nitrogen fixing crops. For example, because corn requires significant nitrogen, we would plan peas alongside corn. Peas are nitrogen fixing and the corn stalks provide a good structure for the vines. The next season, the corn field would be planted with something entirely different.
Phosphate replenishment can be done by spreading manure or using fertilizers. It's a harder problem, but you have to work the problem.
> Crop rotation implies the selection and plating of nitrogen fixing crops.
Yes, and and the rate of replenishment, even if you dump many times more soy straw on the fields than you will harvest, will still be microscopic.
It plainly doesn't work for anybody, but people who only farm for themselves. It's a grandly inefficient use of a scarce resource — land.
Even if the soil will be squirming with nitrogen fixing organisms, and nothing else for many years, it's nitrogen intake will be like a single nitrate application, or less.
> Phosphate replenishment can be done by spreading manure
And catch god knows how much food borne diseases in the process. That's disgusting, and absurd in the 21st century.
It is a combination of factors, but the primary determinants are the mineral composition and the organic and biological content. It's more cost effective, though time consuming, to make soil in place than it is to strip mine it and transport it.
My complaint about "organic" is that it's a case of jumping to conclusions, and I fear that this is far too complex an issue for that to be a successful long-term strategy.
Organic is typically understood to mean avoiding the use of things that aren't considered "natural." Which, in turn, tends to mean avoiding the use of both chemical and genetic engineering.
To me, the idea that the most environmentally friendly agents for use in large scale agriculture just happen to already be sitting around in nature seems quite extraordinary. To take the case of pesticides and herbicides, I'm certainly no biologist, but the general pattern I see is that that nature provides broad-spectrum, non-specific poisons that kill relatively indiscriminately. And the only reason that these agents don't tend to cause a lot of damage to ecosystems is that they tend to be used in the way nature intended - that is to say, on a very small, non-industrial scale. Think "poisonous animals only using it for personal protection," or, "clove oil mostly only being found inside of a clove plant." I can't see any reason to see why we should just assume that taking these sorts of toxic agents that evolved for very limited use cases, and applying them over countless hectares of cropland, is actually a good thing.
I also worry about just accepting organic agriculture's lower yield. Less yield per unit of cropland translates into more cropland being needed to feed the humans. Which, in turn, means more habitat destruction due to human activity.
Versus, if you allow engineering into the equation, you can start to try and engineer things to be less harmful when used at an industrial scale. A pesticide that is engineered to be as specific as possible to only the pest in question. Or, let's dream big, some sort of precision agriculture fertilization system that can dynamically reformulate the fertilizer being applied to meet the soil needs of that particular corner of the field.
None of this is to say that mainstream agriculture is automatically better than organic. More that. . . well, at least in the USA, the organic program is organized under the United States Department of Agriculture's marketing division. Which is very good at marketing. They've done an excellent job of convincing American consumers of a false dichotomy that the organic program is the sole standard bearer of environmentally friendly agriculture. And that's a shame, because some foregone conclusions about what it means to be organic have therefore trapped people who want to be environmentalist into a local minimum that probably isn't nearly as environmentally friendly as they could be if their options hadn't been artificially constrained by a paragon of crony capitalism.
> And most are based on a very short-term picture, which ignores the long-term costs of chemical-based farming: the incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion.
Soil depletion...? How in the world you deplete soil by adding nutrients through fertiliser?
> How in the world you deplete soil by adding nutrients through fertiliser?
"Chemical-based farming" is a lot more than just adding fertilizer.
Clear-cutting and deforestation to make farmland. Increased crop yields extracts more from the ground. Increased extraction of groundwater. Erosion due to killing of weeds, heavy tilling, and destruction of forests and native plants. Phosphate mining makes a giant mess.
There's a spectrum between "natural meadow that replenishes the soil via normal activity" and "intensive industrial agriculture sustained by phosphate mines".
Organic farming aims to fall in the middle somewhere.
There is a law of preservation of energy. Elements don't transmute into each other, and don't appear out of nowhere.
The mass of biologically available nitrogen, and phosphorus in the harvest is equal to the mass of nitrogen, and phosphorus removed from soil.
No way around this. When there will be no nitrogen, and no phosphorus, there will be no crops. There will be no material for plants to use to make its cells from!
The "Organic agriculture" crowd sound to me very much like antivaxers, except fighting the agriculture industry.
> The mass of biologically available nitrogen, and phosphorus in the harvest is equal to the mass of nitrogen, and phosphorus removed from soil.
This is simplistic to a fault. Legumes, for example, fix nitrogen; we've known for thousands of years about crop rotation.
Runoff and erosion - processes that tend to be sped up by industrial farming techniques - cause phosphorous depletion in a way not due to the harvest itself, as well.
There are a lot of factors in soil depletion. Some are under our control, via different farming techniques, changes in density, etc.
Soil is an ecosystem of insects and arthropods and fungi and bacteria. Soil that has been subjected to intensive agriculture is a dead ecosystem, little more than a substrate to hold NPK.
There are already good references in previous threads (e.g. look up anything by Gabe Brown).
But in a nutshell - plants are in a symbiosis with the microorganisms and fungi that live in the ground. Plants feed them sugars and they feed the plants nutrients in return.
When you add large amounts of artificial fertilizers, plants don't need to feed these organisms anymore and this soil fauna dies. But the soil fauna also normally excretes materials that improve soil quality (e.g. fungi excrete glomalin, which binds the soil particles together). So if you use artificial fertilizers for a long time, your soil becomes dead. And such soil is easily depleted by wind and rain erosion.
Organic crops are much worse for the environment in the long term.
The biggest environment problem right now is habitat loss. In 100 years it might be climate change (of course we should definitely try to prevent climate change), but for the foreseeable future it's habitat loss. The current extinction event is mostly driven by habitat loss. Most habitat loss is due to the conversion from natural land to farmland[1]. We're losing between 24 and 150 species _per day_.[2]
Organic crops are much less land efficient[3][4][5], so they drive habitat loss. It also releases more greenhouse gasses, but given the scale of environmental destruction that a worldwide increase in organic farming could cause, there isn't even a point in talking about it.
Organic farming is a marketing ploy where food suppliers realised they can sell fake ethical superiority to consumers.
You're going to need a citation for the statement that organic farming releases more greenhouse gasses. That would be a deeply un-intuitive finding, and even with that citation I would want to scrutinize it carefully.
Organic farming builds soil, where chemical farming strips it away. Organic farming has no dependencies on fossil fuels, but fossil fuels are used to create the fertilizers that chemical farming depends on. Any analysis of the comparitive greenhouse gas emissions needs to include a full lifecycle analysis of the fertilizers and pesticides used in conventional industrial farming. And I really, seriously doubt that will find lower greenhouse gas emissions in chemical farming.
As for habitat loss - organic farming done right provides ecosystem services. Not as well as fully wild habitat, it's true, but it's not totally dead space and does support the ecosystem. Where as conventional, industrial farming is worse than dead space - it creates a death zone where anything that goes there dies.
So even if organic farming is a little bit less space efficient, on total it is better for the ecosystem because it provides positive habitat, as opposed to the negative habitat of conventional farming.
I would also challenge your assertion that its less space efficient, since there have been other studies that have found it can be equivalent when done right and given the right conditions: "Under certain conditions—that is, with good management practices, particular crop types and growing conditions—organic systems can thus nearly match conventional yields, whereas under others it at present cannot." [1]
We've also spent a lot less time optimizing organic farming on a large scale than we have conventional industrial farming. So there are likely substantial efficiency gains yet to be found. I don't think you stand on firm ground declaring that organic farming is worse, environmentally, in the long term. The harms of industrial farming are extensive and extensively documented.
This tells us less about the viability of organic farming and more about the idea that one can change an entire nation's agriculture system overnight by fiat.
Zimbabwe tried that and failed (no organic farming needed there). And now Sri Lanka is trying it and failing.
A more sensible approach would be to phase it in with the right incentives for organic farming and adding the cost of externalizes to the price of non organic farm produce in a phased in manner.
Some parts of Marxism are incredibly strange. I advocate for land value taxes which is basically a big middle finger to land owners. Yet Marx will suggest people seize the "means of production" in this case the land. But there is a big reason why the evil white land owner had that land. He utilized it the most in the short term even if that means destroying it over the long term.
The reason why capitalism works so well for poor countries is that they have decades of growth ahead of them and capitalism forces growth at the cost of exploitation.
> At the root of this economic catastrophe is a bizarre overnight flip by Rajapaksa’s government on 29 April to ban the import of chemical fertilisers and any other agrochemicals to make the Indian Ocean nation the first in the world to practice organic-only agriculture.
Time and again we see this top-down police push that don't consult key stake holders (farmers, merchants, consumers etc.,) or fail to consider their feedback ending in a disaster.
To top it off they rolled it out 100% (No A/B experiment, so to speak). These big changes have higher order effects that manifest post launch and can't easily be predicted. They denied themselves a chance to adopt to those higher order effects by launching it overnight. The result is not too surprising.
The unsurprising result is that naysayers call the change a failure before the first harvest after the change.
They "predict" that they will lose 50% of the harvest. Let's not call it a failure just yet and see how this turns out after a few years.
Sure, sudden change is disruptive, but humans are adaptable and can accomplish amazing things in a crisis. If they don't revert it and stay organic only, maybe they'll have an amazing reputation and a huge competitive edge in a decade.
> Sure, sudden change is disruptive, but humans are adaptable
Yes, the population can adapt downwards as people starve or migrate somewhere else. After a decade or so, the people who are left will be in an excellent position to sell organic tea to middle-class Americans.
Similar arguments were made in defence of collectivization in the 1920s. The complacency is astounding.
This is the fundamental problem with technocracy: the technocrats cannot know everything about the current state, and they cannot predict everything about the future state. It is very easy after the fact to critique their decisions ('hey, why didn't you just increase taxes on chemical fertilisers by 10% annually over the course of a decade?'), but it is in the general case impossible for central planners to make informed decisions. The problem space is just too large.
The only workable answer is for lots of distributed planners to make lots of real-time decisions based on pertinent information. Most of them will make bad decisions, but a few will make correct ones, and hence win.
What matters is not organic farming, bio farming, no-chemistry farming or anything like that.
What matters is substainable farming.
And what is often labeled as BIO/organic is often not the most substainable farming method. It's to much focused on categorizing thinks by their origin instead of categorizing them by their effect specific to their usage.
(And over night switches to anything tend to not be a good idea.)
> Former central bank deputy governor W.A. Wijewardena reportedly termed the organic plan as a “dream with unimaginable social, political and economic costs”. He said Sri Lanka’s food security had been “compromised
Those of us who have managed projects and built stuff can recognize the flaw. It is the difference between "what we'd like to be true" and having a solid plan for getting there.
Probably having all organic farming is a great goal but probably could have been predicted to backfire if done overnight.
Specifically: don't kill your inorganic farming before your organic farming produces enough for you to eat.
This pattern of failure can be seen everywhere. Don't give up your strategic base in Afghanistan until all your people are evacuated. Don't shut down your nuclear power plants until your renewables have actually proven to produce enough.
Idealism is great for visualizing the future. But unchecked idealism will kill you. I am not sure about the politics of Sri Lanka but I see in the US people rally around which politician can paint the rosiest picture of the future rather than the tempered pragmatic who can make iterative progress towards a better place.
"The result: (...) kerosene oil and cooking gas prices are surging"
Hmm what the relation from cooking gas prices to organic farming?
"According to the Annual Review of Resource Economics, organic agriculture generates more air pollutants and environmental emissions in the crop production process for a unit of food than chemical farming."
"The evidence suggests that organic agriculture uses less energy per unit of land, and to a lesser extent, also per unit of output than conventional agriculture "
No mention of other air pollution I could find.
Nice to point to a paper that says the exact opposite of what the press article says.
I didn't check the rest, I'm assuming pesticide and chemical fertilizer producer saw a nice opportunity (fall of income due to COVID impact on tourism) to avoid organic contagion to other countries through cheap to corrupt journalists.
> Hmm what the relation from cooking gas prices to organic farming?
Organic practices -> Lost productivity per acre + increased costs per acre -> Loss of export profits -> Currency devaluation relative to international currencies (USD, EUR) -> Increasing prices of imports
All of that process is plainly stated in the article.
Probably because a bad harvest can have disastrous results that are felt across the economy? Shortages of foreign currency can usually mean shortages of goods inside a country, as governments either try to minimize forex outflows (and thus imports) or is just forced to after running out.
And honestly that's a very very weird argument. You are saying that a real life result has to be discounted because of a... Research paper? Especially one that obviously doesn't take into account the particularities of Sri Lanka? Actually scratch that, the study you linked doesn't say what you are saying at all. It's much more nuanced and frankly it makes the "it's big agro corrupt journalists" narrative even more ridiculous.
> These results should not be extrapolated, as unbiased evidence about organic yield effects under real-world conditions is limited (Kravchenko et al. 2017, Leifeld 2016). In any case, given the higher knowledge requirements for successful organic farming, it is likely that the average yield gaps would rise if an increasing number of farmers would adopt organic practices.
>However, where modern inputs are available and more commonly used, organic farmers typically have lower yields than conventional farmers. Yield gaps tend to increase during the process of economic development (Valkila 2009).The yield gaps imply that more land would be required to produce the same quantity of output with organic methods
>The conclusion that organic farming is not the global blueprint for sustainable agriculture does not mean that organic methods cannot be useful in specific situations. Under certain conditions, organic farming can be clearly positive for the environment, even when the effects are measured per unit of output.
So that's exactly what it is saying : organic farming can be good, probably can't replace conventional methods, and if you want the yields to even start comparing somewhat favorably with conventional agriculture you need to build a lot of institutional knowledge, provide resources to farmers and time. It's better than traditional, very small scale agriculture, but if the inputs for "chemical" farming are there you should probably use them. That's a lot of caveats and they mostly don't apply to this situation.
I find it hard to believe that you read the entire section on environmental impact, let alone the paper, if that single sentence in that section is all you could find. The quote from the press article does not disagree with what the paper says.
"The evidence suggests that organic agriculture uses less energy per unit of land, and to a lesser extent, also per unit of output than conventional agriculture (Table 3). This difference is mainly attributable to the nonuse of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides in organic systems. Fuel use for agricultural operations is similar across systems. However, for certain crops (especially vegetables) more fuel is sometimes required in organic production, when repeated mechanical or thermal weed control becomes necessary (Lynch et al. 2011, Scialabba & Müller-Lindenlauf 2010, Smith et al. 2015). This may also lead to higher overall energy use in organic systems in certain situations (Lee et al. 2015).
"Concerning GHG emissions, most studies conclude that organic farming has lower impacts when expressed per unit of land but not when expressed per unit of output (Table 3). Generally, organic systems are characterized by lower nitrogen inputs, and thus lower N2O emission potential. However, balancing nutrient supply and plant demand is typically more challenging in organic systems; oversupply of nitrogen from organic fertilizer may also lead to significant N2O emissions, while undersupply leads to lower yields (Clark & Tilman 2017, Lynch et al. 2011, Skinner et al. 2014). In crop production, soil carbon stocks and sequestration rates were found to be significantly higher in organic than in conventional systems (Gattinger et al. 2012, Lori et al. 2017). In livestock production, less intensive organic husbandry systems lead to larger quantities of manure per unit of meat, and thus higher methane and N2O emissions (Treu et al. 2017). Overall, the evidence does not support the widely held notion that organic agriculture is more climate friendly than conventional agriculture (WBA 2016)."
Unfortunately that last citation is some 500 page document in German which I'm unable to read.
Energy use 15–21% lower a,b
Nitrous oxide emissions 8% higher a
GHG emissions 0–10% lower a,b,c
GHG emissions of organic diet equal to conventional diet d
One 2012 paper (I did not track it) says nitrous oxide higher 8% but GHG less up to 10% or identical, so less air pollution overall.
What is the rationale for calculating relative impacts per acre instead of per unit output? This appears like a hustle to make organic agriculture look better than it is.
I am prepared to be wrong about that, of course. It isn't completely beyond the realm of possibility that there are legitimate "dilution is the solution to pollution" effects at play. I just... have doubts.
The other comments point out that you skipped or ignored the relevant sections of the paper, but you also missed this in the abstract:
> Organic farming is less polluting than conventional farming when measured per unit of land but not when measured per unit of output. Organic farming, which currently accounts for only 1% of global agricultural land, is lower yielding on average. Due to higher knowledge requirements, observed yield gaps might further increase if a larger number of farmers would switch to organic practices.
In other words, forcing a ton of farmers to switch to organic farming over night would almost certainly lead to them being much less efficient than average organic farmers.
> “The ban has drawn the tea industry into complete disarray… If we go completely organic, we will lose 50 per cent of the crop, (but) we are not going to get 50 per cent higher prices,” he reportedly said.
To break even, you need to double prices (i.e. 100% higher), not 50% higher. Very strange expert.
This feels like a perfect summary of the struggle (political, economic, social) that lies ahead for the entire planet.
The post most likely has a political agenda so outsiders commenting walk into a landmine but anyways, here my two cents worth of observations, more as generally commentary
Doing nothing is not an option: Controlling the water consumption, chemical effluent, deforestation, biodiversity impact etc of ever growing agricultural activity is a no-brainer. Yet:
* any misstep in the so-called "transition" or adaptation will be ruthlessly exploited by those who basically do not care what comes down a few generations. Even well-meaning politicians will be reluctant to be proactive or first movers if they face crucifixion.
* more specifically: the food scarcity scare will be used cunningly to protect existing agribusiness interests from lost profits. NB: Tea is a export oriented cash crop. This does not mean its not important (if those exports finance food imports, or even just because a whole bunch of people make their living though this) but conflating unrelated interests is not how an honest society solves problems
I just hope that the people of this beautiful and remote island (Arthur C. Clarke lived there BTW I wonder what he would have thought) find a way to transition and thrive in a sustainable future...
my take is pretty clear and it is not what you describe.
but what is your take? that somebody sitting pretty at the top of the food chain will simply roll over and absorb the losses because it turns out a whole range of practices is unsustainable?
I think it's more like, there will be people sabotaging the transition at every step, using any misstep as an argument to not do make transition at all.
> "a former army general has been appointed as ‘commissioner general of essential services’ to raid and seize food stocks. The officer has been tasked to ensure sale of products at government-named prices or on custom import costs."
So many leaders, when their anti-market policies fail, double down. This will further reduce supply, by demotivating farmers. It will help only the lucky few consumers who are first in line, before the shelves are empty.
I am a commercial organic farmer. I have trouble sourcing something every year and I live in the United States and have resources available to me to afford exotic things like potash from Alaska or pathogens to kill grasshoppers. If it’s a wet spring and I need more pest mitigation I can have a hundred guinea hens mailed express for $200.
I’m poorly traveled and ignorant of Sri Lanka but I believe it’s a very poor country where $200 is a lot to ask for let alone luxuries like pest pathogens, ag netting, soil testing etc etc… And if you don’t have all that, then going organic is going to absolutely destroy yields and you cannot have a modern society if everyone is farming
I frequently buy organic produce and it is consistently more expensive. I am willing and able to pay for it but even in rich Western countries organic farming is a tiny niche.
Here’s an example. The guinea hens eat the bugs and aggressively chase rattlesnakes out, and then coyotes and hawks eat the hens. Like most things it’s a mixed blessing because the snakes keep the rodent and rabbits population in check.
The fun with percentages: people get it wrong even when it hugely affects their bottom line.
> “The ban has drawn the tea industry into complete disarray… If we go completely organic, we will lose 50 per cent of the crop, (but) we are not going to get 50 per cent higher prices”
Thinking simplistically like that (the entirety of the cost is not in production, ofc), you need 100 per cent higher prices (double) to cover for losing 50 per cent (half) of the crop — this "tea conglomerate expert" has not thought this through :)
Percentages are so ingrained in our culture, but with them being a relative measure, they are so easy to confuse.
Why not speak in simpler terms to help yourselves? "Losing half the crop, we'll need to double the prices (to break even)."
It’s a history of the step changes in ag yield due to (generally “non-organic”) optimizations, and two scientists’ competing visions of what things we should be optimizing for (feeding hungry people now, food security, “naturalness”, long-term soil health, use of chemicals, energy efficiency, aesthetics, crop diversity, etc).
In summary, Sri Lanka has been facing an economic crisis and is struggling to pay for imports with rising exchange rates. One of the effects of this has been a push to reduce dependence on foreign imports across many sectors — including fertilizer.
>As the country saw an economic boom in the post-LTTE years, it increasingly turned to foreign borrowings through the issue of sovereign bonds. But outside of tourism and certain exports, the country hardly managed to ensure it was attracting enough FDIs and foreign funds to meet its rising debt obligations.
So was this economic boom purely internal demand as a result of the borrowing?
Not like you can "just do it and be a bigger economy / sell stuff" but you gotta get some sort of economic output that results in exports or ... something there if you're going to borrow, otherwise the result is inevitable.
The problem isn't spending because governments are a macroeconomic and microeconomic entity bundled together. Everyone wants to present it as a moral failure but it is quite simple. When your country consists of one industry and that industry is gone, so is your country.
You can borrow and spend money to diversify. Lots of successful countries have done it.
> In summary, Sri Lanka has been facing an economic crisis and is struggling to pay for imports with rising exchange rates. One of the effects of this has been a push to reduce dependence on foreign imports across many sectors — including fertilizer.
I was following it as well, but still got dragged into off-topic.
The root cause was the current Marxist government committing a complete fiscal suicide, and then trying ham-fistedly to ban people from spending their Dollars under every silly pretext.
Sri Lanka is a DEEEPLY DEEEPLY indebted nation after two previous governments, the current opposition's one, and previous incumbent's government maxed out country's credit card to buy votes, and draw fictional economic growth from debt.
P.S. And ironically, the complete economically inane political leadership will now smash Lanka's FX account even more by destroying the few of country's export items.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 491 ms ] threadEcologism may sound like a beautiful thing but it can't be implemented overnight and at scale. It's just ignoring decades of human progress without a proper alternative.
6 months later and the results are already here. Sadly, a lot of people will die from poverty and starvation thanks to this measure. I hope Sri Lankans stand up against this (even if they have to smuggle proper fertilizers into their country).
It’s not even sustainable for the US to switch to organic for its own citizens, even setting aside the food it exports.
Wtf was the Sri Lankan govt thinking..
It's likely this is also true for the "dump millions of tons of pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and fertilizers on the Great Plains" approach in the long run.
Do you have a source on this? I've read things that are mostly good when undertaken in a thoughtful way at a reasonable pace.
It is thinking whatever any other co with Marxist streak does.
They want to look cool, and "revolutionary". A lot of stage moves.
Threat to food security? According to experts, three scientifically rigorous meta-analyses of organic-conventional crop yield comparisons indicate that across all crops, the mean yield reduction in organic agriculture in Sri Lanka is around 19-25 per cent. This shows that an overnight shift to organic cultivation presents a clear and imminent threat to the country’s food security.
Eminent researchers have also noted that organic farming increases farmland due to its low yields. This results in deforestation, leading to large scale extinction of species and a rise in greenhouse emissions.
According to the Annual Review of Resource Economics, organic agriculture generates more air pollutants and environmental emissions in the crop production process for a unit of food than chemical farming.
Moreover, organic farming has exponentially higher monetary input costs due to a lack of usage of pest and pathogen-resistant chemicals, which increases manual labour, according to experts. The additional processing and marketing costs of organic produce is also significantly higher, analysts said.
For a country that is a "net food importer" it seems obvious that would cause some kind of shock. The other stuff:
>> Eminent researchers have also noted that organic farming increases farmland due to its low yields. This results in deforestation, leading to large scale extinction of species and a rise in greenhouse emissions.
Longer term. Not relevant to this situation. There is also research showing the opposite, but again that's not the immediate isse.
>> organic agriculture generates more air pollutants and environmental emissions in the crop production process for a unit of food than chemical farming.
Not relevant. Notice the exclusion of pollutants in the chemical (fertilizer) production process. But again, not relevant to the current situation.
>> organic farming has exponentially higher monetary input costs due to a lack of usage of pest and pathogen-resistant chemicals, which increases manual labour, according to experts
"exponentially" is an exaggeration. The formerly mentioned increase in area means increase in labor.
>> The additional processing and marketing costs of organic produce is also significantly higher, analysts said.
You don't really need to do ANY marketing when the government mandated that everyone do it.
There's a lot here that's basically anti-organic, but the real problem is that it's simply more expensive, requiring a more land and labor and they didn't account for any of that in the rapid transition.
And so have many, many other people that are now so sick that their bodies simply won't tolerate (allergic reactions) non-organic food.
I think it's just fine to have 20% less output if you get more out of the food.
It is another thing to mandate it for all agriculture overnight in a poor developing country.
There is no evidence of this ever happening to anyone anywhere. The fact that you think this is even possible means you drank the Kool-Aid.
For example, my mom has told me she can't eat bell peppers from Spain because she get diarrhea from them.
Now, I don't think that bell peppers grow different in Spain than they do in Portugal or in Italy, it's probably some pesticide or some fertilizer or something. It's probably not all spanish peppers, but we just don't know enough about the produce at the supermarket. All they tell us is the country of origin, so the only thing she can do is avoid spanish peppers.
There are some loosely imposed rules that one cannot buy more than 5kg of rice per turn, etc. But I don't see people actively hording things. The long lines are likely because a shop is only allowed to bring in 2-3 customers at once.
This is why moderate inflation around 2% is good because it stops hoarding of money and why inflation above 10% is destructive because people start hoarding goods.
The current president isn't the only one to blame, though. For the past 15 or so years, the government relied more and more on China to basically keep its wheels moving at the comfort of endless projects funded by China. Sri Lanka used to manufacture a lot of things such as tyre, sugar, paper, etc. The over reliance on imported goods didn't play out well, and things such as tyre, sugar, and paper are now at a shortage because the government simply didn't bother to improve the local manufacturing of said goods.
There may well be something to institutional economics and the notion of a holon.
Even the successful American Revolution was an incremental change: an effort to preserve a tradition which feted the traditional rights and liberties of Englishmen going back to the Magna Carta. The shift in philosophical underpinnings may have been radical, but the political culture barely changed at all.
Edit: People seem to misunderstand. I don't mean overnight, I mean pushing the same idea = organic farming. It's doesn't work at scale. Doesn't matter if you have ten years or one day.
Edit: and 17% of milk production.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/657572/organic-farmland-...
Do you feel copper pesticides are something that reduces/dilutes the organic quality?
Do you feel it's realistic to farm only in cleanrooms? I'm not really kidding here. Pests are a serious issue, without something to fight them, crops don't survive (at all... pretty much..)
I assume everyone would expect lower yields from more primitive growing and processing technologies.
To call it more primitive doesn't seem honest. Modern farming practices destroy the soil quality while using shortcuts to get higher yield in spite of that. From what I've read I think the jury is still out on which is better. Obviously organic farming is bad for the fertilizer and pesticide business.
One of the things I wanted to chime in with, somewhere in the discussion, was that this is the sort of policy which pushes people to develop technologies and that perhaps if deployed more slowly it might have driven innovation in organic farming.
Something like a pilot scheme + opt in + subsidies.
I don't think this is anything new amidst a global pandemic, in a country that depended on tourism.
Saying that chemical fertilizer ban caused a food shortage isn't any fair or accurate, because the sugar crisis (a can of worms by itself) happened before the fertilizer ban, and the government imposing lockdowns caused the food supply issues. That said, there are many companies increasing their organic fertilizer production, and even smaller scale individual investors who are planning to produce organic fertilizers too.
Many of us see this as a net positive, but there must be a ramp, as opposed to an overnight switch.
Yes, absolutely. The move has to be done gradually to allow farming to adapt. An overnight cutoff would surely cause yields to drop.
What isn't clear to me is how much warning was given for the ban. Was it announced ahead of time?
In the northern parts of the country, where the majority of rice farms are, a considerable percentage of people have kidney diseases that attribute to the use of chemical fertilizer.
There is a surplus of rice production in the country, so I don't think the reduced crop will make a big difference.
However, the state of tea farming is not the same. Price of Sri Lankan tea (Ceylon tea as it's commonly called) at auctions was slowly going down for the past few years, and tea estates expect the government to make an exception for them.
Since this ban was announced, the finance minister was changed to the brother of the current president (another can of worms), who might make necessary changes, exceptions, or probably just delay it to make sure the tea industry isn't disrupted.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210901-sri-lanka-org...
Rajapaksa came to power in 2019 promising subsidised foreign fertiliser but did a U-turn arguing that agro chemicals were poisoning people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
If there was a broad movement towards organic farming I would expect a similar thing: corporations will put out a lot of propaganda and buy off politicians to stop this.
And most are based on a very short-term picture, which ignores the long-term costs of chemical-based farming: the incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion.
Chem-based clearly gives higher yields for a period of 50-80 years, but what happens after that?
Organic/permaculture is sustainable and possible even for our large populations. It presents challenges to some other assumptions of our highly industrialized food supply chain, but that doesn't mean it can't feed the globe.
It just makes it harder for one or two companies to monopolize everything.
Important note: not all GMO is done to vendor lock farmers, most of it is actually beneficial to food quality and availability
I am a farmer, that is absolutely not true. All GMO crops are made to be more profitable to the farmer, with the goals of increased bulk yields, longer shelf stability and decreased water usage. Something like 95% of all corn grown in America isn’t even for human consumption, they’re certainly not selecting for food quality and availability.
Manure weighs more than than an equivalent bag of fertilizer, sure. Is that bad, though?
How far was the manure transported? How much CO2 did the cow burp? How much corn was trucked in to feed the cow?
There’s also the matter of organic fertilizers working differently in some scenarios. Blood meal releases nitrogen more slowly than ammonium nitrate, for example.
When you cross pseudo-religious beliefs you get in trouble as well — many of the organic fertilizers are animal byproducts (blood, feathers, eggshells, urine). So what wins for a vegan? Vegetables made with chemical fertilizers, or vegetables made with burnt eggshells and feathers?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/renewable-agricultur...
Well, of course. But that's a useless measurement. The whole point of hi-tech farming is to increase the density. Organic farming is less efficient for unit of food produced.
Do you have data on that?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28444679
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-resource-1...
To be able to think 50-80 years in the future is just an incredible luxury most do not have, particularly most small farmers, and particularly, I would think, most small farmers in a developing country.
Parents think that far into the future, as do thoughtful members of a productive society.
MBA driven obsession with the next quarterly earnings report isn't a universal infection, yet, thank goodness.
Their point, as I take it, is that investing in future welfare at the risk of current welfare rarely makes sense to people's minds, and in fact often jeopardizes future welfare as well as current, due to the fact that any harm it causes now may in fact carry over into the future.
What you're talking about, on the other hand, is about corporate greed and indifference. Very different scenario.
E.g. A struggling parent buying cheap bread for their kids today rather than starving them for a month to save money and feed them more nutritious food later, is not the kind of decision one would attribute to MBA driven obsessions. Nor is this parent a worse parent than a more affluent one who can afford such an investment without starving their children.
Ironically, thinking that far into the future results in many choosing not to become parents.
Kim Stanley Robinson's recent novel "Ministry for the Future" had an interesting take on this; that our future descendants may need legal standing in the court system, and lawyers tasked with defending their needs there.
You will have to keep moving the goalposts at a rate of 1 year per year, because it turns out that we understand which nutrients plants need and how to give them those nutrients.
The alternative is massively expanding farmland so that it can lay fallow for 25% of the time and also to account for lower yields.
We do not need to fertilize. It takes about 3 years for yields of a farm converted from traditional to regenerative to meet pre-conversion yields. The quantity of land used doesn't change. It is just managed a different way.
Aside: organic and regenerative are not at all the same
Hmm; I've never seen "Organic" and "Permaculture" seen used as synonyms; I am ignorant of the field, but my understanding of "Organic" was that it was more focused on what chemicals are and aren't used, largely due to their perceived benefit to ingesting humans / some level of "naturalness".
I also haven't seen "Organic" as stopping monopolies and oligopolies either. Even if I accept that "Organic" doesn't simply mean "Carbon based", nothing in its modern usage seems to preclude new monopolies emerging.
- As an end-user, what I found is that same companies that offer "regular" food tend to offer "organic" under spun labels, preserving status quo (but at higher price and therefore profit)
- I assume that "Certified organic chemicals" for farmers' usage up the supply chain will similarly have to come from some company or another, and I don't immediately see what makes it harder for those to homogenize and eventually form a monopoly.
[If it's an allusion to Monsanto etc, again, to me that's more of a matter of IP laws, and I don't see what prevents such occurrence in Organic field (I also see GMO and Organic as orthogonal and not necessarily incompatible, but definition of Organic is loose enough and changing enough with times/regions/individuals that I won't stake a big claim there).]
I am genuinely willing to be educated!
It gets visceral when I volunteer for sorting at the food bank. The organic crates roll in, the traditional crates roll in -- and it turns out that, say, all the zucchini in the organic crates has turned to mush because they don't believe in spraying with wax. Crate after crate of rotting, wasted produce. Awful. Natural, yes, but nature is so often awful, and it's such a shame when we know how to be less wasteful and intentionally forego this knowledge in order to indulge shoppers' nature fetish. Is this even what they really want? Would they continue to insist on the organic label if they saw these crates of rotting zucchini mush?
Well, you don't typically spray preservatives on zucchini.
Consider the possibility that there are factors outside your view here. Perhaps the organic farm you're getting the zucchini from is further away, or more successful commercially at selling their best product. Who knows?
Without more information, you might just be the anecdotal victim of confirmation bias.
Yeah, it's possible that there's another explanation, but it's also possible that foregoing preservative techniques causes food to go bad earlier.
Would the fridge die sooner if it was used more?
Probably. They feed their kids “organic” because they believe it will give them a competitive edge. Not because if concern for people who can’t shop at Whole Foods.
Here's another: If I recall correctly, after WWII the US didn't know what to do with all its munitions factories. They realized that the basic ingredients of bombs were good at fixing nitrogen in the soil, so they made minor conversions to the factories and started producing chemical fertilizers. Fifty years later, Timothy McVeigh was able to buy a truckload of the stuff and bomb a federal building.
I hope Sri Lanka continues this experiment. Could it be that after so many years of conventional agriculture, the soil was too depleted of nutrients to be suitable for food crops? I imagine that things will improve as the land heals.
100 years isn't long when you're changing the global ecosystem.
The Industrial Revolution began in the late 1700s. We're only now beginning to agree on its long-term consequences, and quite a ways off from agreeing on mitigation steps.
I will repeat that I hope Sri Lanka continues this experiment. Experiments like this are the only way we'll get the data we need.
I think you would be hard pressed to feed a nation with organic farms without oil refineries right now.
The War Department did construct 10 ammonia plants which made precursors for explosives, which could also make fertilizer precursors, and they absolutely switched them over after the war.
But ammonia production capacity doubled by 1950, and that wouldn't have happened without a demand side to the story as well. It also turned out that farmers realized nitrogen fertilizers work really, really well.
It is absolutely ignorant to believe that organic is better for the environment than non-organic. Oil refineries and heavy industry are needed to support farming enough to feed the world, organic or not. And organic food is more expensive, in terms of resources consumed, not less.
Take chlorpyrifos[2]. It's pretty nasty. It requires no additional data to determine that, all else being equal, we'll be better off not consuming its residues on our food. This is not simply an "unnatural = bad" argument: this is a specific chemical with known harmful effects, which you can avoid by buying organic.
Of course, the key question is: is all else equal? Organic farming does permit some other chemicals, and has a wide range of other impacts, including yields etc. So it's possible that organic farming is net negative for human welfare. But it's unfair to characterise a preference for organic farming as being quite as unscientific as you seem to claim.
I also think the article is telling us less about the innate merits of organic farming and more about the stupidity of making huge system changes overnight without training the people on the ground.
[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorpyrifos
I live in the Netherlands and the produce here is pretty awful compared with France, Italy or Germany. I'd be happy with some kind of arbitrary point system to indicate holistic quality. Even though we might disagree on details, balancing price, health, nutrition, taste, environmental sustainability and labor ethics is really hard for a consumer. When you buy organic you kind of hope all those things are included, but it just seems so non-rationalized at the moment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_S
Can't you make the same argument with other organic but yucky stuff? eg.
>Take cow manure. It's pretty nasty. It requires no additional data to determine that, all else being equal, we'll be better off not consuming its residues on our food.
I don’t think cow manure meets any of those four criteria.
But the parent poster explicitly mentioned that "it requires no additional data to determine that"? That sounds pretty closer to "chemicals are yucky", rather than "chemicals are bad and these studies show that" (what you're arguing for).
It is a given that organic is a net negative. Non-organic allows everything organic plus everything organic prohibits. We might need to reform non-organic in some cases, but those doesn't mean we need the arbitrary restrictions of organic.
https://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/sar
The focus is currently on how use of "non-organic" methods (pesticide effects on humans and insect—particularly bee—population, soil depletion...) are harmful, and naturally, humans immediately explore the other extreme, without looking for a sweet spot in the middle (of course, humans are exploring it, it's just not publicized enough).
And the sweet spot is always in the middle.
Organic produce is popular because it gives you some reassurance (compared to almost none otherwise) and the living standards have increased in large (edit: small, but mostly participating on HN :) parts of the world to be able to afford it (with their living standard, I am sure Sri Lanka wanted to be the first exporter of exclusively organic produce, not for their internal use): we are still far away from finding the best way, but it's important to work from both ends to help us get there.
> And most are based on a very short-term picture, which ignores the long-term costs of chemical-based farming: the incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion.
But there are enough organic farming methods which also lead to "incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion" similar there are non-organic "chemical" methods which do not lead to such effects.
So we should focus on long-term sustainable farming.
And sure for most farms the first steps to sustainable farming are the same or at least very similar as the first steps to organic farming, but the "mid" and "end-game" can differ massively.
You cannot farm soil for longer than 8-10 years without major nitrogen, and phosphorus replenishment. Actually lived in the sticks, and did farm labour in my childhood.
Controllable soils which are good at intaking, and retaining fertilizers are sustainable.
Bad soils with unusual soil chemistries can get depleted no matter how much fertiliser is dumped. That's true.
Wouldn't a competing farm be more profitable to add fertilizers to the soil to replenish the loss nutrients, which means they can price out the crop rotation farm?
This is why regulations (and to combat their evasion by other countries, anti-dumping tariffs) are needed.
What I don't get is why the focus on fertilizers? There may be some wisdom on not spraying random poisons on the stuff you are going to eat¹, but the worst you can get with fertilizers is soil salinization, and this is perfectly avoidable on any place that isn't a desert already, and there are ways to avoid it on deserts too, just a bit more expensive.
1 - So there's a reason for a poison by poison discussion, the overall label of "organic" just poisons the discussion.
How do the crops you mention “gather phosphorous”? From where?
If you learn about the soil food web you will learn that most things we dump on farmland are made available to plants by bacteria and fungi. Unfortunately, those are the things that we kill by farming the way we do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/76hmbge/soil-...
They focus on two farmers, one a small-scale farmer in NY who started with the vision of a sustainable farm, and a commodity farmer in Minnesota who was looking for ways to improve yield. The Minnesota couple are, like your example, not at all "tree-huggers;" they're just people who want to survive. And what they found is that they can get more crops, for less money, while also limiting their exposure to potentially harmful fertilizers and pesticides.
They see a lot of resistance from their neighbors, because conventional farm knowledge is so ingrained in their culture. Running a farm is tricky, and experimenting can be the difference between profit and losing your shirt. There's just not much will to risk losing the land that's been in a family for generations on a quest to find a better way.
Feel like I'm missing something. State universities all over the nation have agricultural programs. Are they teaching stuff like cover crops? In other words, does this guy align with the conventional experts, or is he fringe, or does the industry have a schism?
Ag extensions mostly recommend the high input farming methods. What Gabe Brown practices is more than just cover crops.
Source: grew up in the sticks and worked on the family farm as a kid.
Natural nitrogen replenishment rate is microscopic. And it will do absolutely nothing about phosphate depletion.
Phosphate replenishment can be done by spreading manure or using fertilizers. It's a harder problem, but you have to work the problem.
Yes, and and the rate of replenishment, even if you dump many times more soy straw on the fields than you will harvest, will still be microscopic.
It plainly doesn't work for anybody, but people who only farm for themselves. It's a grandly inefficient use of a scarce resource — land.
Even if the soil will be squirming with nitrogen fixing organisms, and nothing else for many years, it's nitrogen intake will be like a single nitrate application, or less.
> Phosphate replenishment can be done by spreading manure
And catch god knows how much food borne diseases in the process. That's disgusting, and absurd in the 21st century.
Can you buy good soil or is it part of the land and just too deep/not worth buying?
Good soil needs lots of dead plant stuff. Bad soil is clay or rocks.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/what-are-s...
Organic is typically understood to mean avoiding the use of things that aren't considered "natural." Which, in turn, tends to mean avoiding the use of both chemical and genetic engineering.
To me, the idea that the most environmentally friendly agents for use in large scale agriculture just happen to already be sitting around in nature seems quite extraordinary. To take the case of pesticides and herbicides, I'm certainly no biologist, but the general pattern I see is that that nature provides broad-spectrum, non-specific poisons that kill relatively indiscriminately. And the only reason that these agents don't tend to cause a lot of damage to ecosystems is that they tend to be used in the way nature intended - that is to say, on a very small, non-industrial scale. Think "poisonous animals only using it for personal protection," or, "clove oil mostly only being found inside of a clove plant." I can't see any reason to see why we should just assume that taking these sorts of toxic agents that evolved for very limited use cases, and applying them over countless hectares of cropland, is actually a good thing.
I also worry about just accepting organic agriculture's lower yield. Less yield per unit of cropland translates into more cropland being needed to feed the humans. Which, in turn, means more habitat destruction due to human activity.
Versus, if you allow engineering into the equation, you can start to try and engineer things to be less harmful when used at an industrial scale. A pesticide that is engineered to be as specific as possible to only the pest in question. Or, let's dream big, some sort of precision agriculture fertilization system that can dynamically reformulate the fertilizer being applied to meet the soil needs of that particular corner of the field.
None of this is to say that mainstream agriculture is automatically better than organic. More that. . . well, at least in the USA, the organic program is organized under the United States Department of Agriculture's marketing division. Which is very good at marketing. They've done an excellent job of convincing American consumers of a false dichotomy that the organic program is the sole standard bearer of environmentally friendly agriculture. And that's a shame, because some foregone conclusions about what it means to be organic have therefore trapped people who want to be environmentalist into a local minimum that probably isn't nearly as environmentally friendly as they could be if their options hadn't been artificially constrained by a paragon of crony capitalism.
Soil depletion...? How in the world you deplete soil by adding nutrients through fertiliser?
"Chemical-based farming" is a lot more than just adding fertilizer.
Clear-cutting and deforestation to make farmland. Increased crop yields extracts more from the ground. Increased extraction of groundwater. Erosion due to killing of weeds, heavy tilling, and destruction of forests and native plants. Phosphate mining makes a giant mess.
No, in comparison to many other mining activities, it's a much smaller size of a mess.
Soil depletion via intensive agriculture is a pretty well established thing.
If there is no nitrates, and phosphates in the soil, they can't magically appear out of nowhere.
Organic farming aims to fall in the middle somewhere.
There is a law of preservation of energy. Elements don't transmute into each other, and don't appear out of nowhere.
The mass of biologically available nitrogen, and phosphorus in the harvest is equal to the mass of nitrogen, and phosphorus removed from soil.
No way around this. When there will be no nitrogen, and no phosphorus, there will be no crops. There will be no material for plants to use to make its cells from!
The "Organic agriculture" crowd sound to me very much like antivaxers, except fighting the agriculture industry.
This is simplistic to a fault. Legumes, for example, fix nitrogen; we've known for thousands of years about crop rotation.
Runoff and erosion - processes that tend to be sped up by industrial farming techniques - cause phosphorous depletion in a way not due to the harvest itself, as well.
There are a lot of factors in soil depletion. Some are under our control, via different farming techniques, changes in density, etc.
But in a nutshell - plants are in a symbiosis with the microorganisms and fungi that live in the ground. Plants feed them sugars and they feed the plants nutrients in return.
When you add large amounts of artificial fertilizers, plants don't need to feed these organisms anymore and this soil fauna dies. But the soil fauna also normally excretes materials that improve soil quality (e.g. fungi excrete glomalin, which binds the soil particles together). So if you use artificial fertilizers for a long time, your soil becomes dead. And such soil is easily depleted by wind and rain erosion.
The biggest environment problem right now is habitat loss. In 100 years it might be climate change (of course we should definitely try to prevent climate change), but for the foreseeable future it's habitat loss. The current extinction event is mostly driven by habitat loss. Most habitat loss is due to the conversion from natural land to farmland[1]. We're losing between 24 and 150 species _per day_.[2]
Organic crops are much less land efficient[3][4][5], so they drive habitat loss. It also releases more greenhouse gasses, but given the scale of environmental destruction that a worldwide increase in organic farming could cause, there isn't even a point in talking about it.
Organic farming is a marketing ploy where food suppliers realised they can sell fake ethical superiority to consumers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_destruction
[2] https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_d...
[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorga...
[4] https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2019/11/organic-farmin...
[5] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/10/22/organic-food-be...
Organic farming builds soil, where chemical farming strips it away. Organic farming has no dependencies on fossil fuels, but fossil fuels are used to create the fertilizers that chemical farming depends on. Any analysis of the comparitive greenhouse gas emissions needs to include a full lifecycle analysis of the fertilizers and pesticides used in conventional industrial farming. And I really, seriously doubt that will find lower greenhouse gas emissions in chemical farming.
As for habitat loss - organic farming done right provides ecosystem services. Not as well as fully wild habitat, it's true, but it's not totally dead space and does support the ecosystem. Where as conventional, industrial farming is worse than dead space - it creates a death zone where anything that goes there dies.
So even if organic farming is a little bit less space efficient, on total it is better for the ecosystem because it provides positive habitat, as opposed to the negative habitat of conventional farming.
I would also challenge your assertion that its less space efficient, since there have been other studies that have found it can be equivalent when done right and given the right conditions: "Under certain conditions—that is, with good management practices, particular crop types and growing conditions—organic systems can thus nearly match conventional yields, whereas under others it at present cannot." [1]
We've also spent a lot less time optimizing organic farming on a large scale than we have conventional industrial farming. So there are likely substantial efficiency gains yet to be found. I don't think you stand on firm ground declaring that organic farming is worse, environmentally, in the long term. The harms of industrial farming are extensive and extensively documented.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11069
What do you mean? Climate change is happening now, not in 100 Years. And it's just getting worse in the next 10-20 Years.
He's saying that habitat loss is right now the direct cause of more extinction events on the daily than climate change is right now causing.
Zimbabwe tried that and failed (no organic farming needed there). And now Sri Lanka is trying it and failing.
A more sensible approach would be to phase it in with the right incentives for organic farming and adding the cost of externalizes to the price of non organic farm produce in a phased in manner.
Recent history of Zimbabwe (<http://imgur.com/a/VdQdD>)
The reason why capitalism works so well for poor countries is that they have decades of growth ahead of them and capitalism forces growth at the cost of exploitation.
Time and again we see this top-down police push that don't consult key stake holders (farmers, merchants, consumers etc.,) or fail to consider their feedback ending in a disaster.
To top it off they rolled it out 100% (No A/B experiment, so to speak). These big changes have higher order effects that manifest post launch and can't easily be predicted. They denied themselves a chance to adopt to those higher order effects by launching it overnight. The result is not too surprising.
They "predict" that they will lose 50% of the harvest. Let's not call it a failure just yet and see how this turns out after a few years.
Sure, sudden change is disruptive, but humans are adaptable and can accomplish amazing things in a crisis. If they don't revert it and stay organic only, maybe they'll have an amazing reputation and a huge competitive edge in a decade.
They won't have an edge. The green revolution is what allowed population to boom.
Now some people are like "yeah, let's go back to before"?
Sounds a lot like the people who shun vaccines and medication.
Yes, the population can adapt downwards as people starve or migrate somewhere else. After a decade or so, the people who are left will be in an excellent position to sell organic tea to middle-class Americans.
Similar arguments were made in defence of collectivization in the 1920s. The complacency is astounding.
The only workable answer is for lots of distributed planners to make lots of real-time decisions based on pertinent information. Most of them will make bad decisions, but a few will make correct ones, and hence win.
Centralization and a bureaucracy applying a decision upon a large territory is a good recipe for disaster if the decision is a bad one.
Any "overnight flip to" anything is often a bad decision.
Moreover the real cause is an economic crisis centered on a foreign exchange deficit: http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2021/07/sri-lanka-manufactur...
What matters is substainable farming.
And what is often labeled as BIO/organic is often not the most substainable farming method. It's to much focused on categorizing thinks by their origin instead of categorizing them by their effect specific to their usage.
(And over night switches to anything tend to not be a good idea.)
Those of us who have managed projects and built stuff can recognize the flaw. It is the difference between "what we'd like to be true" and having a solid plan for getting there.
Probably having all organic farming is a great goal but probably could have been predicted to backfire if done overnight.
Specifically: don't kill your inorganic farming before your organic farming produces enough for you to eat.
This pattern of failure can be seen everywhere. Don't give up your strategic base in Afghanistan until all your people are evacuated. Don't shut down your nuclear power plants until your renewables have actually proven to produce enough.
Idealism is great for visualizing the future. But unchecked idealism will kill you. I am not sure about the politics of Sri Lanka but I see in the US people rally around which politician can paint the rosiest picture of the future rather than the tempered pragmatic who can make iterative progress towards a better place.
"The result: (...) kerosene oil and cooking gas prices are surging"
Hmm what the relation from cooking gas prices to organic farming?
"According to the Annual Review of Resource Economics, organic agriculture generates more air pollutants and environmental emissions in the crop production process for a unit of food than chemical farming."
Reading the paper : https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-resource-1...
"The evidence suggests that organic agriculture uses less energy per unit of land, and to a lesser extent, also per unit of output than conventional agriculture "
No mention of other air pollution I could find.
Nice to point to a paper that says the exact opposite of what the press article says.
I didn't check the rest, I'm assuming pesticide and chemical fertilizer producer saw a nice opportunity (fall of income due to COVID impact on tourism) to avoid organic contagion to other countries through cheap to corrupt journalists.
Organic practices -> Lost productivity per acre + increased costs per acre -> Loss of export profits -> Currency devaluation relative to international currencies (USD, EUR) -> Increasing prices of imports
All of that process is plainly stated in the article.
And honestly that's a very very weird argument. You are saying that a real life result has to be discounted because of a... Research paper? Especially one that obviously doesn't take into account the particularities of Sri Lanka? Actually scratch that, the study you linked doesn't say what you are saying at all. It's much more nuanced and frankly it makes the "it's big agro corrupt journalists" narrative even more ridiculous.
> These results should not be extrapolated, as unbiased evidence about organic yield effects under real-world conditions is limited (Kravchenko et al. 2017, Leifeld 2016). In any case, given the higher knowledge requirements for successful organic farming, it is likely that the average yield gaps would rise if an increasing number of farmers would adopt organic practices.
>However, where modern inputs are available and more commonly used, organic farmers typically have lower yields than conventional farmers. Yield gaps tend to increase during the process of economic development (Valkila 2009).The yield gaps imply that more land would be required to produce the same quantity of output with organic methods
>The conclusion that organic farming is not the global blueprint for sustainable agriculture does not mean that organic methods cannot be useful in specific situations. Under certain conditions, organic farming can be clearly positive for the environment, even when the effects are measured per unit of output.
So that's exactly what it is saying : organic farming can be good, probably can't replace conventional methods, and if you want the yields to even start comparing somewhat favorably with conventional agriculture you need to build a lot of institutional knowledge, provide resources to farmers and time. It's better than traditional, very small scale agriculture, but if the inputs for "chemical" farming are there you should probably use them. That's a lot of caveats and they mostly don't apply to this situation.
"The evidence suggests that organic agriculture uses less energy per unit of land, and to a lesser extent, also per unit of output than conventional agriculture (Table 3). This difference is mainly attributable to the nonuse of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides in organic systems. Fuel use for agricultural operations is similar across systems. However, for certain crops (especially vegetables) more fuel is sometimes required in organic production, when repeated mechanical or thermal weed control becomes necessary (Lynch et al. 2011, Scialabba & Müller-Lindenlauf 2010, Smith et al. 2015). This may also lead to higher overall energy use in organic systems in certain situations (Lee et al. 2015).
"Concerning GHG emissions, most studies conclude that organic farming has lower impacts when expressed per unit of land but not when expressed per unit of output (Table 3). Generally, organic systems are characterized by lower nitrogen inputs, and thus lower N2O emission potential. However, balancing nutrient supply and plant demand is typically more challenging in organic systems; oversupply of nitrogen from organic fertilizer may also lead to significant N2O emissions, while undersupply leads to lower yields (Clark & Tilman 2017, Lynch et al. 2011, Skinner et al. 2014). In crop production, soil carbon stocks and sequestration rates were found to be significantly higher in organic than in conventional systems (Gattinger et al. 2012, Lori et al. 2017). In livestock production, less intensive organic husbandry systems lead to larger quantities of manure per unit of meat, and thus higher methane and N2O emissions (Treu et al. 2017). Overall, the evidence does not support the widely held notion that organic agriculture is more climate friendly than conventional agriculture (WBA 2016)."
Unfortunately that last citation is some 500 page document in German which I'm unable to read.
Per output organic vs conventional:
One 2012 paper (I did not track it) says nitrous oxide higher 8% but GHG less up to 10% or identical, so less air pollution overall.For reference Nitrous oxide is around 7% of all GHG in the USA, so the +8% by 70% by 7% doesn't amount to much vs 0-10% when you add up, source: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
I am prepared to be wrong about that, of course. It isn't completely beyond the realm of possibility that there are legitimate "dilution is the solution to pollution" effects at play. I just... have doubts.
> Organic farming is less polluting than conventional farming when measured per unit of land but not when measured per unit of output. Organic farming, which currently accounts for only 1% of global agricultural land, is lower yielding on average. Due to higher knowledge requirements, observed yield gaps might further increase if a larger number of farmers would switch to organic practices.
In other words, forcing a ton of farmers to switch to organic farming over night would almost certainly lead to them being much less efficient than average organic farmers.
To break even, you need to double prices (i.e. 100% higher), not 50% higher. Very strange expert.
The post most likely has a political agenda so outsiders commenting walk into a landmine but anyways, here my two cents worth of observations, more as generally commentary
Doing nothing is not an option: Controlling the water consumption, chemical effluent, deforestation, biodiversity impact etc of ever growing agricultural activity is a no-brainer. Yet:
* any misstep in the so-called "transition" or adaptation will be ruthlessly exploited by those who basically do not care what comes down a few generations. Even well-meaning politicians will be reluctant to be proactive or first movers if they face crucifixion.
* more specifically: the food scarcity scare will be used cunningly to protect existing agribusiness interests from lost profits. NB: Tea is a export oriented cash crop. This does not mean its not important (if those exports finance food imports, or even just because a whole bunch of people make their living though this) but conflating unrelated interests is not how an honest society solves problems
I just hope that the people of this beautiful and remote island (Arthur C. Clarke lived there BTW I wonder what he would have thought) find a way to transition and thrive in a sustainable future...
- we have to make this transition
- if there is any pushback or stumbles during the transition it’s not because the transition is wrong, but because of nefarious forces?
but what is your take? that somebody sitting pretty at the top of the food chain will simply roll over and absorb the losses because it turns out a whole range of practices is unsustainable?
I've got a few stranded assets to sell to you
So many leaders, when their anti-market policies fail, double down. This will further reduce supply, by demotivating farmers. It will help only the lucky few consumers who are first in line, before the shelves are empty.
I’m poorly traveled and ignorant of Sri Lanka but I believe it’s a very poor country where $200 is a lot to ask for let alone luxuries like pest pathogens, ag netting, soil testing etc etc… And if you don’t have all that, then going organic is going to absolutely destroy yields and you cannot have a modern society if everyone is farming
https://www.metzerfarms.com/GuineaFowl.cfm
> “The ban has drawn the tea industry into complete disarray… If we go completely organic, we will lose 50 per cent of the crop, (but) we are not going to get 50 per cent higher prices”
Thinking simplistically like that (the entirety of the cost is not in production, ofc), you need 100 per cent higher prices (double) to cover for losing 50 per cent (half) of the crop — this "tea conglomerate expert" has not thought this through :)
Percentages are so ingrained in our culture, but with them being a relative measure, they are so easy to confuse.
Why not speak in simpler terms to help yourselves? "Losing half the crop, we'll need to double the prices (to break even)."
It’s a history of the step changes in ag yield due to (generally “non-organic”) optimizations, and two scientists’ competing visions of what things we should be optimizing for (feeding hungry people now, food security, “naturalness”, long-term soil health, use of chemicals, energy efficiency, aesthetics, crop diversity, etc).
In summary, Sri Lanka has been facing an economic crisis and is struggling to pay for imports with rising exchange rates. One of the effects of this has been a push to reduce dependence on foreign imports across many sectors — including fertilizer.
http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2021/07/sri-lanka-manufactur...
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58390292
So was this economic boom purely internal demand as a result of the borrowing?
Yes, correct. The two consequent previous governments borrowed like crazy to pull "economic development" like a rabbit out of a hat.
Not like you can "just do it and be a bigger economy / sell stuff" but you gotta get some sort of economic output that results in exports or ... something there if you're going to borrow, otherwise the result is inevitable.
You can borrow and spend money to diversify. Lots of successful countries have done it.
I was following it as well, but still got dragged into off-topic.
The root cause was the current Marxist government committing a complete fiscal suicide, and then trying ham-fistedly to ban people from spending their Dollars under every silly pretext.
Sri Lanka is a DEEEPLY DEEEPLY indebted nation after two previous governments, the current opposition's one, and previous incumbent's government maxed out country's credit card to buy votes, and draw fictional economic growth from debt.
P.S. And ironically, the complete economically inane political leadership will now smash Lanka's FX account even more by destroying the few of country's export items.