Is the Current Food System Efficient?
Food miles (https://www.carbonbrief.org/food-miles-have-larger-climate-impact-than-thought-study-suggests/)
Diversity of species = efficiency, functional diversity. Pic from Brady and Weil page 486 Griffiths, 2000 data. Modern systems simplify, reducing jobs done and efficiency.
Earthworms and dung beetles intro led to more vegetation and increased carrying capacity (brady and weil page 493)
(Danger of increased sedimentation of freshwater. Money it takes to dredge waterways. Most erosion happens in concentrated days of heavy rainfall, which goes to show just how important it is to infiltrate that rain. Mississippi river basin statistic and soil erosion in Wisconsin in the spring research.)
Modern U.S. agriculture has been described as “the most efficient in the world, at least in terms of the dollar and cent costs of production.”1 The public health and ecological costs of industrialization, however, are not reflected in the prices of food.” (https://foodsystemprimer.org/production/industrialization-of-agriculture : reference- Ikerd JE. Sustaining the profitability of agriculture. In: Economist’s Role in the Agricultural Sustainability Paradigm. San Antonio, TX: University of Missouri; 1996.) Wendell Berry’s quote about food system not caring about health and health system not caring about food.
Maize production in the United States has been profitable (without government payments) only ∼7 of the last 26 yr (USDA Economic Research Service, 2018), 5 of these being the biofuel boom years of 2008 through 2012, resulting in billions of dollars in government payments to farmers (Imhoff & Badaracco, 2019).
Risks from specializing, monocropping, using fewer varieties: “Citrus greening, otherwise known as huanglongbing (HLB), has wreaked havoc in Florida, says Bill Dawson, a molecular virologist and longtime HLB researcher at the University of Florida. Because of the nutrition management programs and other mitigation strategies they must now use on their trees, growers in the Sunshine State spend three times the money to produce half as much fruit, Dawson says. And in some cases, the fruit still doesn’t taste as good as it used to.” (https://cen.acs.org/biological-chemistry/biochemistry/Citrus-greening-killing-worlds-orange/97/i23)
- As farms get larger, crop diversity declines and post-harvest loss increases. (Ricciardi et al., 2018)
Every Farm a Factory pg 5: Fixating on “efficiency” which was an idea from assembly line industries, so farms were pushed to become factories. Case IH promotion even said to make every farm a factory. But the trouble is that farming is inherently biological. Biology is complex, we don’t understand all the rules, it’s messy, it’s unpredictable. It’s understandable why we want to tame nature and provide a reliable food, feed and biofuel supply, but nature always wins. Treating a biological system in an industrial manner won’t turn out well. Pg 8: a more rational and businesslike farming system. Nature is often irrational and not businesslike.
Every farm a factory pg 90, 118
Wendell Berry in the Butz debate: “Butz claims that one farmer can feed more people today. That’s misleading because it took the oil companies, their workers, road builders, chemical companies, fertilizer companies, seed companies, processors, etc to get the product to the consumer.”
Compare the output per acre of a market gardener vs an acre of commodity corn or soy. How many calories are produced. How many nutrients. How many meals.
How efficient is ethanol and biodiesel? What would happen if we grew food locally and didn’t need to ship and process it? Then the need for biofuels decreases in the first place.
Economic price of modern ag:
“Nitrogen loading in the Gulf that is attributable to agricultural losses upstream caused between $552 million and $2.4 billion (2018 dollars) in damage to Gulf fisheries and marine habitat annually from 1980 to 2017.” (UCS, 2020)
We know from a large ecological literature that the fertilization of natural ecosystems, perhaps first noted in the eutrophication of lakes, is likely to result in a loss of species diversity…Any addition of a resource to [a natural community where that resource is scarce] will lead to the dominance of the species that can use that resource most efficiently. Rather than having a net positive effect, inadvertent fertilization alters ecosystem composition and diminishes ecosystem function. (Soclow, 1999)
Once upon a time, phrases like “right as rain” and “as pure as the driven snow” were commonly used, but today they don’t hold the same value they once did, at least in societies that have adopted industrial agricultural methodologies. (Rain on all places on Earth, even Antarctica, have been found to have contaminants.)