[andrewmutz]

The worst part of organic produce is that it is worse on two things that matter a lot: climate change and biodiversity.

Most of the negative impact of agriculture on the climate and on biodiversity happens when we convert an acre of land from its natural state to agricultural use. This is much worse for the environment than the presence of pesticides.

Organic produce consistently takes about 20% more land to produce the same amount of food. As a result, choosing organic over traditional means choosing worse outcomes for the climate and worse for biodiversity.

[nlfire]

The vast majority of agricultural land is used for meat production. I hear you if you are on an carnivore organic keto diet. Myself, I eat vegan most of the time, but I'm not strict by any measure. The extra land use from my organic purchases is more than offset by eating lower on the food chain.

[npunt]

This argument at its logical extreme would be that we should grow slop in vats because that takes less land to feed people.

Agree that climate and biodiversity are two very important factors, but there's others. Health effects (e.g. quality-adjusted life years) being one, soil health & resilience another. Monocropping pesticide-laden foods is not some ideal state.

[jraph]

Nonsense. The intensive agriculture that conventional pesticides enable destroys biodiversity and kills land fertility. Organic monoculture is still monoculture but conventional monoculture is still worse.

[dqv]

I've noticed a naming issue that keeps cropping (heh) up. No-till. Organic. Free range. The confusion is caused by information asymmetry (or word fuzziness). I think organic means one thing, farmer thinks it means another (or, as is frequently the case in capitalism, maybe they know what I think it means, but that I won't be checking closely, so they can get away with it being "technically organic").

The thing I'm noticing too is that people on HN are way worse at systems thinking than their confidence makes them seem. People on HN are always looking at food systems in isolation. It's weird because they're observing the systemic effects of these systems.

As an example, you don't have to use farmland to make up for that "productivity loss" (very narrow to look at these systems as just their food output in the first place). In the US, we have 40 million acres of grass lawns. The most useless thing to grow ever because the vast majority is non-native grass (some NPC will say "erm it gives us oxygen", which like... yeah so does literally anything else and nature isn't here just for breathing). For cropland, we have 328 million acres.[0]

40/328 ≈ 12%

And like sure, we can't use 100% of the lawns to grow food, but the idea that the reduced yield + needing 20% more makes organic "bad for the environment" because obviously that means taking the existing natural land and turning that into farmland is so unimaginative and lazy. We have a lot of ways we can make up for that 20% "loss". [1] Of course, there are always master mental gymnasts who will say weird things like "growing food on the streets? it'll get polluted!" (I regret to inform them that many farms are right up next to highways, so they should be upset at ICE cars) and "eww it's going to make a mess and there will be bugs" (ok, go live in a hospital and eat IV nutrition if you want to live a sterile life, we need bugs to survive, sorry). Although a question for me remains how much land is actually necessary to provide food for the US without imports.

But there is still so much to be done to make organic farming better (beyond just doing the bare minimum for the certification). Incorporating intercropping, trapcropping, agroforestry, covercropping, crop rotation, no-till and so on. I'll even let a few "weeds" like goosefoot pop up. I guess really, one must qualify organic farming by prefixing "regenerative". The first thing I thought of when I started thinking about how I would farm in an ideal world is how the majority of land would be dedicated to nature - prairie and forest must be 2/3 of it. (Oh no it's unproductive! Not! Tons of stuff to eat out of a well-managed prairie and forest.)

Yes this stuff becomes more labor intensive, but isn't the promise of AI that it will write all the "it's this, not that"s while I do the work that matters - feeding people?

[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/111436 [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1720760115