[FreekNortier]

I do garlic at commercial scale with fertilizers but my own food is grown 100% organic. There is a big difference in taste. What we should keep in mind though is that organic is difficult/expensive to scale. I doubt that it will be possible to feed the entire global population with 100% organic food. So that tasteless tomato that you buy at the store might not be the best but it does feed you.

[carapace]

Check out "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown" et. al.

He's a commercial farmer that's been doing regenerative agriculture for a while now, he's got "the gift of gab" and his stuff is all scientifically grounded and verified in the real world on his working farm in N. Dakota.

Rather than being difficult or expensive the methods he's using save money, increase the quality and quantity of his topsoil year-on-year, and he actually makes more profit per acre than his neighbors.

https://youtu.be/uUmIdq0D6-A

[Melting_Harps]

> I do garlic at commercial scale with fertilizers but my own food is grown 100% organic. There is a big difference in taste. What we should keep in mind though is that organic is difficult/expensive to scale. I doubt that it will be possible to feed the entire global population with 100% organic food. So that tasteless tomato that you buy at the store might not be the best but it does feed you.

The argument that it doesn't scale negates the majority of Agriculture's 10K+ year history. This modern system of chemically driven commodification of food is rather new (post WWII). Granted the World's population is larger than what it was back then, which introduces challenges, but the truth is we are facing disease due to the over-consumption of the 'abundance' more than anything else in the West, and the East is following as well.

While I agree the current monetary incentives are not aligned for its success, and the business model that had proven profitable for small scale, local and often organic farms working for the past ~15 years has been essentially curtailed due to COVID, as so many restaurants are limited in capacity or shut down altogether, it is not beyond the realm of possibility to transition how we view Agriculture and Food as a whole. I think this re-calibration is necessary for the challneges we face as Species on Earth moving forward and sincerely believe COVID may be the the disruption we needed to question the 'business as usual' model.

There is a great deal of efficacy to the theory/practice that soil remediation to be an effective deterrent in reducing atmospheric CO2 levels; at its core the way Biodynamics has operated since its inception when it was introduced to the nobility in Austria since WWI is nothing more than a distillation of viable practices that follow sound microbiology methods. It may be attached to a great deal esoteric 'woo' but once you see past what is essentially Marketing what you have is the collective synthesis of 10,000+ of trial and error in Man's relationship and the Stewardship we've had with the Nature. That much cannot be disputed.

People not entirely obsessed with this topic forget that a food supply not dependent on inputs like artificial fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides aren't that old and that some countries never adopted it due to the costs associated.

Explaining the significance of this topic without a great deal of context is entirely daunting but, large concentrated populations in former Empires didn't suffer because their wasn't enough BT corn to feed its cattle, and we would be remiss to forget that much.

Detroit's story with urban farming and the culture it brought back with it is a really amazing story that proves that something deemed not 'commercially viable' is not as important as the resilience of a community and a People if the will exists.

> So that tasteless tomato that you buy at the store might not be the best but it does feed you.

'Feed' is questionable, but what it clearly does is introduces a myriad of chemicals into your body that can and has cause(d) other health issues, all while still disappointing your palate.

[kickout]

> large concentrated populations in former Empires didn't suffer because their wasn't enough BT corn to feed its cattle, and we would be remiss to forget that much.

Um, food riots were an absolute MAJOR thing in antiquity and right up until only very recently (<50 years). Urban farming doesn't work at scale. Not sure people realize how much scale modern agriculture has.

https://thinkingagriculture.io/innovation-efficiency-chemica...

[Melting_Harps]

> Not sure people realize how much scale modern agriculture has.

I do, I've admitted to be obsessed with the topic and have spent a large part of my life dedicated towards it. Look at my posts to see what I've done.

> Um, food riots were an absolute MAJOR thing in antiquity and right up until only very recently (<50 years).

This is very disingenuous and deflecting comment. What is being argued here isn't that food scarcity didn't take place, for that one really should look towards currency debasement, peasant uprisings, and the clashes in slavery and indentured servitude as well caste systems and feudalism as the likely culprits. Disease and blight both Human as well as crop (like the potato famine) also play a significant part in this story.

But what is being argued is that the advent of CURRENT Ag practices, those reliant on those inputs, aren't commonplace as you are making it out to be in the total History of Agriculture as a whole.

But it must be said that scale means nothing when the most obvious byproduct is disease (heart disease and diabetes kills more than thing else in the West and obesity has been endemic for some time) and destruction of the environment along with it. And that's where we are.

> Urban farming doesn't work at scale.

Urban farming, logistically speaking, is pretty much how most of Europe was built. The wars changed a lot of the landscape of many Capitals and metropolitan areas and displaced many farms outwardly as distributions and supply chains expanded, but in my experience with 15+ European countries I lived/worked in most of the country-side is built in such a way where the cities surround the farms/orchards/vineyards outwardly. They served as a sort of nucleus, which makes sense if you were going design a system to serve a growing population and it's civilization.

The exception being coastal areas that seem to have a more spontaneous pattern about them, likely due to port city trade/imports.

[carapace]

> food supply not dependent on inputs like artificial fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides aren't that old and that some countries never adopted it due to the costs associated.

I was reading a thing the other day (I'll link to it if I can find it) that was pointing out that something like 70% of the people in the world are still fed today by old school farming. Chemical/industrial agriculture only supplies food for about 30% of the world.

[Melting_Harps]

> Chemical/industrial agriculture only supplies food for about 30% of the world.

While that is possible, if solely measured by direct to consumer purchases/ I think that may be an understatement as the majority of it is used in the ancillary food system as fodder for livestock (GMO and subsidized corn for the most part).

The numbers are are really hard to get accurately, as the Food Industry as a whole cannot be correctly quantified by its Nature--they span from massive Mega Corp farms and it's food processors to under the radar subsistence local farms and markets that operate on a SystemD model.

I wish it were true, to be honest as it would indicate my revolution/cause has succeeded, my most ambitious target was to get involved and help break into the 50% threshold in my Lifetime: when I started and began this endeavor in my mid teens (the early 2000s) it was nearly ~85% percentage bias towards chemical based conventional Ag.