this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
292 points (98.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43971 readers
939 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
meh. nutritional value is about the same, yeah, but that's not the point of organic food. people who claim that eating an all organic diet makes you better are yahoos.
The point of organic farming is that it is just all-around better for the planet, the soil, the organisms therein and less polluting.
The only real issue I see with organic food is that it excludes GMOs
GMOs are an issue for nations' food sovereignty, but organic food modt importantly means no phytosanitary products (such as the infamous roundup), which persist in the plants and cause all sorts of cancers
There is not conclusive evidence that organic food is better for the environment. Obviously there are facets of the environment impact that will be better than conventional agriculture, but there is a ~19% reduction in yield, and lower soil carbon in organic agriculture. A reduction in yield means more land must be cleared for agriculture, so the other facets of organic ag would need a to be substantially better than conventional to make up for it.
I disagree. Just following your source to its conclusion, I think it's safe to say OA (organic agriculture) is better all around:
Your conclusion that we'd have to clear more land for agriculture use if we all switched to OA seems flawed; e.g. here in Germany we use about 60% of agricultural land to raise livestock feed like corn etc (https://www.landwirtschaft.de/tier-und-pflanze/pflanze/was-waechst-auf-deutschlands-feldern). Seems to me like eating less meat and growing idk lentils or beans would not immediately lead to food insecurity.
This is also what the FAO says: yes, OA leads to yield reduction when compared to conventional methods, but not to food scarcity and instead to healthier ecosystems (https://www.fao.org/organicag/oa-faq/oa-faq6/en/).
(sry gotta go, more.later)
Yeah, I definitely agree we'd be better off cutting land used for livestock. I guess it's a slightly different story in Germany because any land you're using for livestock (or livestock feed) is presumably land that could be used for human food. In America, much of the land used for cattle is ranch land not suitable for agriculture. We do still have massive amounts of land cultivating crops like corn and hay for cattle that is suitable for agriculture, though.
Just going down that pro and con list, though, it really does seem unclear to me. OA releases less CO2, but it also stores less CO2 in the soil. Lower energy use/higher efficiency per land area is great, but what we really want is lowest energy use per X amount of food. The "enhanced soil and water quality" part is also debatable. this study shows a higher eutrophication potential from OA, so worse for water. It does seem to be dependent on the crop, and the impacts of beef are so insanely higher than plants, that it almost seems irrelevant how you farm crops.
It's somewhat like saying that a suburban block is better for the environment than a city block. It's true, but only if you consider just that plot of land. A city block is way more efficient in terms of per person effect on the environment.
I think the crux of the problem is that the original tenets of organic agriculture were set by some scientists a hundred years ago, but also people like Rudolph steiner who was an occultist. There's still a mix of actual science and hippy pseudoscience mixed in to this day. For example, the focus on only "natural" pesticides means using compounds that have higher runoff, persistence in the soil, and broader impacts to insect life. I wish that there was more flexibility for OA standards to change to the best evidence that we have.