Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment

[vtsnowedin]

If discussion could solve global problems this world would have become a paradise by now.

Americans have been debating abortion and gun control for decades.

What solution has come out of it???

So your discussion here is a waste of time? Well if you insist.

[vtsnowedin]

Your conflating two quite different issues; generating profit and growing food. Large industrial farms generate more profit, that's how they are able to grow larger. It doesn't follow that they produce more food though. Small farms are not as profitable, but do produce more food.

The hole in your logic is as wide as the grand canyon. If it is not clear for you to see on it's face I expect no explanation will be understood.

[clv101]

If I've got this backwards, I'd really would appreciate an explanation.

[emordnilap]

Nice rant Yaday.
So you would have us stop all industrial activity and mechanized agriculture? I suppose that would save the environment but for whom would you save it? Most if the seven billion now alive would starve without the use of technology. Is it not better to recycle a piece of metal then to go back to the mine and dig yet another hole in the ground to extract enough ore to feed the smelter or blast furnace?

So you didn't see this report, vt? http://www.grain.org/article/entries/4929

Very good, very thorough. It tells us what some of us felt but had no figures to back it up. Industrial agriculture has little to do with food.

[emordnilap]

I find I can't warm up to the prospect of living on a diet of oatmeal and tofu.

vt, you're a very intelligent, knowledgeable person and I concede you're allowed to say something particularly idiotic once in a while.

[vtsnowedin]

If I've got this backwards, I'd really would appreciate an explanation.

A large farm can only make more profit by producing food at a lower unit cost.
The fact that the total food produced by small farms exceeds that of large ones is a function of how many small farms there are in the wold total not the profitability or unit cost of production on each farm. You might find this interesting .
http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/c ... /a1-20.pdf
Now calculate the cost of growing 165 bushels of corn on a small farm for comparison.

[biffvernon]

One of the complicating factors when doing the accounting is that rather a lot of food is grown for, er, eating, rather than for profit. One then has the difficulty of comparing apples with pairs (to use an unfortunate analogy).

Nobody counts any of the food that I grow - it does not feature in anybody's statistics (neither the apples not the pairs).

[clv101]

If I've got this backwards, I'd really would appreciate an explanation.

A large farm can only make more profit by producing food at a lower unit cost.

No, that's no the case. The large farm makes profit by its income (from selling produce and significant subsidies) being greater than its costs. It's quite possible for the unit production costs to be higher - if it can also sell at a higher price or receive significant subsidies. The small farms tend to be involved in less profitable food production for direct local markets whereas large industrial farms tend to produce highly profitable commodity crops for industrial processing such as soybean, oil palm, rapeseed and sugar cane. More people are fed by the small farms - but the large farms make more profit.

The fact that the total food produced by small farms exceeds that of large ones is a function of how many small farms there are in the wold total not the profitability or unit cost of production on each farm.

It's not about the number of farms. One of the key points of this study is that the small farms produce more food from less land than the large industrial farms. The small farms aren't very profitable, they aren't making folk rich or generating shareholder value - but they are feeding most people on the planet.

You might find this interesting .
http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/c ... /a1-20.pdf
Now calculate the cost of growing 165 bushels of corn on a small farm for comparison.

It isn't about the cost of growing on a small farm - it's about the productivity of the small farms.

I encourage you to read the report, there's no need for me to paraphrase it here!

For some, the idea that small farms are more
productive than big farms might seem
counterintuitive. After all, we have been told
for decades that industrial farming is more
efficient and more productive. It's actually the
other way around. The inverse relationship
between farm size and productivity has been
long established and is dubbed the "productivity
paradox"

http://www.grain.org/article/entries/49 ... rmland.pdf

[vtsnowedin]

There are three kinds of lies. 1. lies 2. Dame lies and 3. statistics!

[the_lyniezian]

It seems a fair number of these large farms are in fact either not producing food or not producing much of substance. Palm oil plantations, biofuels, animal feed, and tree plantations for wood products are all mentioned.

[kenneal - lagger]

Large farms are more productive per person employed i.e they are most efficient at turning oil into food, hence cheaper. Small farms and gardens are more productive per acre than a large farm but more labour intensive, hence more expensive. Large farms produce mainly commodity crops such as grains and others mentioned above while small farms are better at producing vegetables. The old fashioned mixed farms were more productive and are more sustainable because they rely less on oil and gas based inputs.

The UN produced a report recently, referred to elsewhere on this site, which said that the future of food production in the world was small scale, organic agriculture. It provides food and work in one go.

[Little John]

So, the essence of this report, then, is that small scale farms produce more food per acre due to more intensive farming, not less. Well, no shit. The only difference being that the greater intensification is achieved via human work as opposed to the work of non-human machines. Okay, all well and good, assuming it is correct in its assumption.

However, this then begs the obvious question of how much human labour is required to achieve this? Does, for example, the amount of human labour required match the amount of food produced in terms of what those humans need to eat a full diet? If it doesn't, then it's a pyrrhic victory. Secondly, even assuming the numbers still, if only in principle, stack up, how many people, in practice, are then diverted away from the rest of the industrial economy and, in being so diverted, to what extent is the manufacture and maintenance of the infrastructure of that economy undermined, in turn removing much of the infrastructural support mechanisms that will still be required by those farm labourers?

In other words, if it's as simple an equation as that report and some on here would have, then perhaps they might care to explain how, in the centuries leading up to the industrial revolution, with a population a mere fraction of what it is now, and where most labour was expended on the land in the production of food, mass starvation was a far more likely prospect for the average citizen than it has ever been since the advent of that revolution. None of which is to suggest that this industrial civilisation is anything other than utterly unsustainable in the longer run. What I'm questioning, however, is pie-in-the-sky, pipe-dreams about how we can somehow return to some kind of pre-1750 rural idyll that never actually existed in the first place. But, even to the extent that it did, it did so only in support of a population a tiny fraction of its current level.

[biffvernon]

I don't see it as a 'return'. We know a lot more now. And I don't think it's a one-dimensional problem. I'm pretty impressed with the high-tech horticulture that goes on in Lincolnshire greenhouses. Fantastic productivity per unit land, and oer unit energy, what with anaerobic digesters to provide methane for use in electric generators and waste heat capture. It's no panacea but will be part of the mix for a future sustainable agriculture.

[emordnilap]

Steve, Biff's answered for me - and I'm just reading a book which helps confirm it.

The Market Gardener has been written by a Canadian and shows how small-scale intensive farming can not only provide a substantial income (the turnover/profit figures are impressive) from a relatively small area but the food is nutritionally dense, GMO-free and organic. And of course, it feeds the growers as well its customers in the industrial economy.

It provides several full-time, satisfyingly labour-intensive jobs. It's 'mid-tech', way ahead of what they knew in the 1750s, but uses minimal fossil fuels.

He's about the same latitude as the south of England but I'm not sure if he has the benefit of a gulf stream effect. Still, it isn't exactly the perfect climate for food growing. An inspirational manual, for that is its purpose.

[Little John]

All you merely doing is suggesting that all will be well with BAU with modifications.

From where I'm standing, you really don't get.

These conversations are pointless, for both parties involved. Time will tell.

Time to go outside and get on with life I think