Organic Food no better than rest

Chemistry, it seems, is chemistry. Reuters reports:

Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said consumers were paying higher prices for organic food because of its perceived health benefits, creating a global organic market worth an estimated $48 billion in 2007.

A systematic review of 162 scientific papers published in the scientific literature over the last 50 years, however, found there was no significant difference. See the rest of the brief news blurb here.

And the abstract of the actual report can be found here.

The universal unconscious that lays behind modern farming

That would be oil.

And here is a link to Jeremy Grantham's latest missive on the markets. His comment on farming is, as usual, trenchant:

Modern agriculture has been described as a way of turning hydrocarbons into food. Without cheap energy – a single gallon of gas is the energy equivalent of 100 hours of old-fashioned labor – the world would certainly have trouble producing half of the current food supply, and that fraction could be substantially less. Hydrocarbons are not only critical to farm equipment and food distribution over very large distances, but also play a dominant role in fertilizer production. With sparse hydrocarbon usage, American agriculture would have to be totally and painfully restructured away from very large scale monoculture. Hydrocarbons are very efficient in the use of manpower but surprisingly inefficient with everything else, including output per acre and output per unit of energy.

Can anyone tell me what the last sentence meant? In what way, for example, are hydrocarbons 'inefficient with respect to output per acre?'

Trogolodytes heart antibiotics

Lest readers think this blog is intended to aid and abet the trogolodytes amongst us, here is a reminder from those farmers at the New York Times about the problem we face with respect to the use of antibiotics far in excess of the common good.

They begin, "The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that 70 percent of the antibiotics used in this country are fed to farm animals. These animals do not receive these drugs the way humans do — as discrete short-term doses. Agricultural antibiotics are a regular feed supplement intended to increase growth and lessen the chance of infection in crowded, industrial farms."

And they end, "the current practice is dangerously self-defeating: treating more and more animals with less and less effective drugs and in turn creating resistant strains of disease that persist in the soil and water. Congress should stop this now before an entire class of drugs becomes useless."

They are correct. Nature has proven its relentless ability to overcome our efforts to completely control it, and, left unchecked by sensible regulation, the industrial application of antibiotics to farm animals is doomed to failure.

More seriously, and less crudely

Well, that was not nice, I admit, and I sincerely apologize for the, er, earthy language. Won't happen again.

Crudeness and apologies aside, this blog is focused on a serious issue that will become more and more serious as time goes by. That is, how are we going to feed ourselves? Organic farming is attractive for many reasons, many of romantic perhaps, but all important in one way or another. There is no denying that. But our world supports more than 6 billion people now, and it looks like teenagers of the 2000s decade can expect to live in a world with 9 billion or more people. Can organic farming feed everyone? Can organic farmers live satisfying lives? Do organic farmers alive today have any idea just how tough farming was before what was called, ironically enough, the green revolution?

We know what paves the road(s) to hell. And we know that unintended consequences are inevitable, so all we can do is try to the very best of our ability to think clearly, a lot, about the consequences of what we think, say, and may do about farming. Like everything else humans do, we think and say a manure-load more than almost any of us actually do about farming, but that is no different than politics, sex, religion, and wall street --- the four horsemen of modern social conflict and dismay. And what we think and say influences what people feel they should or can do, including the laws and administrative pressures that make certain businesses more likely to succeed or fail.

In a word, the growing 'lazy consensus' in favor of organic farming deserves serious inspection, now. If it withstands scrutiny, that is great. If not, let's start talking honestly about the trade-offs involved before good intentions starve more people than circumstances of our own devising already do.

The goal of this blog is to shed a little useful light on the realities of farming, eating, and living moderately well in contemporary America, and the world. It is not a goal to use vile language.

So, let's start with a cautionary tale. When yours truly was young and indubitably an ineffectual world-saving romantic, E. F. Schumacher's, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, was swiftly handed around amongst many college students. The basic lesson back in 1973 was that large-scale farming and infrastructure investment was bad in undeveloped countries, and that small-scale farming and enterprise was good. Decidedly third-world India and Bangladesh was the background landscape for a significant part of Mr. Schumacher's analysis.

Schumacher pointed out the huge waste (not to speak of the corruption and theft) involved in World Bank scale infrastructure investments, particularly in the mega-dams and irrigation projects that were the style of the time. Schumacher was right about much of what he criticized. This was the time when Robert McNamara, the failed architect of the US/Viet Nam war, was running the World Bank and handing out big checks to big projects in the effort to make life better for poor people in the Third World.

Schumacher proposed, as the title of his book suggested, small-scale projects instead, like digging inexpensive tube-wells in each farming village to provide liberating local access to hitherto hard to obtain water. Life gets a whole lot better if you don't have to walk three miles each day with a jug of water balanced on your head. And now rural people could avoid drinking the contaminated ground waters that led to so much debilitating gastro-intestinal illness, including fatal diarrheas for many babies. Schumacher influenced the next generation of aid and development professionals, and thousands upon thousands of inexpensive wells were dug in villages all over the Indian sub-continent. All good --- good ideas, good intentions, good works, good and fast results.

Sadly, arsenic started coming up in many of these wells, heretofore unforeseen health problems sky-rocketed, and the newly empowered beauty of small-scale (i.e., peasant) farm enterprise, at least in Bangladesh and parts of India, was less certain. It turns out that much of Bangladesh's available underground water table is loaded with dangerous levels of arsenic salts. So rural folks there can, or must, literally pick their poison. As Professor D B ALASUBRAMANIAN wrote, arsenic is a silent killer. It causes skin lesions, affects the stomach, liver, lung, kidney and blood, disabling the body over time. It combines with proteins and enzymes, inactivating them and thus causing slow metabolic disorders. At the extreme, it causes cancer.

Is there a lesson here? Please, you tell me. The only ones I can think of are, in order of importance: be humble and always be prepared to acknowledge error (the quicker the better), beware of unintended consequences, and be especially cautious about claims wrapped in good intentions, if only because most of us are indeed decent people and therefore most of us quite understandably want to believe such claims. Good people are delighted when good news conforms to our good intentions.

Contrary to our natural tendency to rejoice and relax when presented with what appear to be good news, we must examine such claims as carefully as we are learning to examine anything.

If Americans can be grateful for anything that the obscenely mega-rich folks on Wall Street have done for us in the past twenty years, we can be grateful for the brutally expensive education they administered to us on the value of skepticism. Thank you sir, may I have another!

Gratitude aside, our skepticism should not exclude quasi-religious claims about the net value of organic farming. Let's see what happens.

Fuck Organic-Farming Trust Fund Kids

Yep, that's really the title of this first post on the Farmcurmudgeon blog.

Why? Well, some well-informed fellows, who shall remain nameless, told me so.

If we surrender farming to the ill-informed would-be world-savers then more people will go hungry, and worse, than already do.