Eat organic? Not if it's going to destroy the climate 03 March 05

The food miles cost of out-of-season produce is the same whether the food is organic or not. The point is very simple – flying asparagus in from Peru is ridiculous and destructive – and there’s no need to dramatise it with conflicts or suggest that organic food is necessarily problematic. All we have to do is eat locally and therefore seasonally.

I realise that you’re also making a point about ecological tokenism, and I think that’s an excellent ranting ground, but it’s another separate issue that has nothing at all to do with food miles and little more with organic farming.

What I’d like is an analysis of whether and how obedience to European organic standards exacerbates the cash-crop problems of African growing countries. Last month Asda had organic green beans from Ethiopia, which seemed obscene (and yes, I know Ethiopia is a big and usually fertile country) . Perhaps you could dust off your old IMF-bashing hat and give us the benefit?

Its wonderful to think how we fly food from regions where poverty even famine occur, to regions where obesity and food mountains/lakes exist. The only time such activity is returned is when something dramatic enough (Tsunami/famine) grabs our attention.

All the while it is compounding the GW problem. Its almost as if we are trying to identify new and ever more ingenious ways of pumping GHGs into the atmosphere.

(Flying food around, except in emergencies, as far as I am concerned, should be a crime)

On the organic theme, it is highly dubious just how organic many of these products are. (There is even scepticsm about how “organic” food from some parts of the EU is). It would appear then that people are not only adding to the GW problem by buying organic from overseas, but also getting ripped off too, ah how unfair!

...good phrase Mark. Bullets allow continued low prices on fossil fool.

Country of origin labeling should be secured. I see in my grocery store that certain foods [brands?] don’t have the country of origin. Fortunately I know when things are in season, so I don’t purchase these products. My GF, however, is only starting to pay attention.

Our stating that we should only buy local is great in theory, but much of the planet has bought into global trade. Corporations exploit soil at economies of scale and plant monoculture crops with subsidized water and ship with subsidized fuel.

Countries secure loans thru the World Bank which tells them they need to trade, trade, trade. These countries often impart austerity programs to comply with loan agreements (although they are catching on), so their people – sadly – depend upon global trade for their livelihoods.

The point? Problems aren’t black and white. Buying locally may mean many crops aren’t available to us, because of corporatization of food. Certainly we should start eating locally. But we need to privilege family farms first – this creates jobs, and allows us local food – BUT also may allow for trade.

Until the structure of our society changes, we will have global trade. Creating viable family farms saves land for the time when trade will not be global.

D

Good linky Mark, thanks. This is a good article entitled ‘Eating Oil’, in Resurgence mag, Iss 216; a nice overview of the situation. I recommend checking out this magazine if you don’t know about it – it is rather out-of-the-box thinking, but it’s written at a high level.

Best,

D

Non-organic foods may use synthetic fertilizers, which I believe release NOx & contribute to global warming, acid rain, and stratospheric ozone depletion. People living near such farms or chemical fertilizer plants can suffer from blue baby syndrome & have dead babies on their hands. Soil from chemical farms more likely runs into rivers, harming them, and clogging hydropower stations, and reducing a precious resource, topsoil. Nearly half of the topsoil in the U.S. has been lost.

And I haven’t even started on pesticides and their harms . . .

Maybe we should put pressure on local farmers to go organic. Or, grow our own tomatoes & other veggies & can them. We used to do that, and I know my husband would like to get back into doing it.

You’ll have to do a lot of subsidizing, Lynn, to force farmers to go organic. Fossil fool fert is far cheaper to buy and apply than organic. The days of crop rotation with cattle grazing (free fert) are over, as land can’t be fallowed as it loses money, which is needed to pay off the huge loans it takes to be a farmer nowadays. If organic fert made it easier for the typical farmer, they’d use it.

Also, as a point of clarification, most ag byproducts that are ‘harmful’ are in the N2O-NH4 type – this gets deposited as excess N which is the problematic ‘dead zone’ issue you see, along with the excess N that is contributing to the N imbalance in the ecosphere. NOx from ag goes to the atmosphere, where it becomes smog (still a problem), but NOx output from ag is dwarfed by output from transportation.

So, reducing overfertilization is necessary because it reduces excess N to the terrestrial biosphere. I don’t have the ref at hand, but since the agricultural revolution, we have fixed more N than in the entire geological history of the planet.

We are far in excess each year, and this is due to the industrial agricultural pracices we use.

D

Mark,

I am trying to do my own math on this aspect to further understand the concepts presented which is helping me refine my skills which may one day be put to better use than just sharing on this blog site. Hopefully others may benefit from the exercises as I openly share them.

In doing this so far I have learned much about conversion of energy units such as the difference between chemistry calories and food Calories. I read where a food Calorie must be capitalized to distinguish it from a chemistry calorie A food Calorie is equal to 1000 times a chemistry calorie.

Ever wonder how food Calories are determined? I just learned myself from the site below:

http://www.wikimirror.com/Calorie

It seems that greenhouses may be a solution to have more veggies off-season; however many times greenhouses are heated with natural gas to help the plants.

I have recently learned about seafood farming from a recent documentary on our public TV and it appears that seafood lower on the food chain such as shellfish and tilapia have a lower environmental impact.

Tilapia feed on plants while fish higher on the food chain like salmon must be fed on other fish. I have never eaten tilapia but may now try it. I love salmon and I hope I like tilapia. Tilapia aquaculture is more sustainable and may be a better source of protein with respect to GW/CC concerns. I found a website on this below:

http://ag.arizona.edu/azaqua/ata.html

Mark, thanks for posting all these informative sites. In the USA, much of our veggies do travel long distances especially with certain states specializing in various produce.

I have an interest in food calculations and I am doing a few calculations comparing beef to carrots based on your post and wonder about our total dietary aspects with regard to GW/CC in total emissions by food category with travel costs being a part of that total.

This would be relevant to this discussion but it seems so far that travel emissions predominate based on what you and others have posted.

Thanks to all my fellow bloggers on Mark’s site for giving so many insights and posts. I think we have a nice little group here engaged in real problem solving. I would like to see us continue to build on each other’s thoughts since this helps us develop further.

I will post more later but I have a question about Kyoto below:

Mark, I think that Kyoto made the fuel to transport products between nations or oceans exempt from carbon inventories and they are called bunker fuels. Do I have this right?

Best, Dan

I had a really good film with farmers telling how they actually saved money through organic farming, even though they lost somewhat more crops due to pests, and on top of that they earned more because of higher prices. The impression I had was that it takes more knowledge to go organic, and lots of farmers don’t know or don’t want to bother, even though they could make more money (at least that’s what some organic farmers said). I agree that there’s much more NOx from cars. However there is a pesticide, I think something like methyl bromide, that they put on strawberries, that affects the ozone layer.

I read in the Balch & Balch book, Prescriptions for Dietary Wellness, that organic foods contain more nutrients – organic kale, for instance, has double the vitamin A of chemical kale, pound for pound.

The has been a lot of recent hype about food miles. Does local food produce less carbon emissions than food from the other side of the world. You won’t know unless you do some calculations.

I live in Marlborough, New Zealand and we have calculated the carbon emissions from growing and producing a high quality bottle of wine and freighting it to the UK. It would cost us 1.5 new zealand cents to offset the carbon by restoring some native forest, or building a wind farm. In the same way it would cost us 4.5 cents to deliver a kg of farmed salmon to the UK.

We are keen to supply the UK with carbon neutral products. I would be interested if any local UK producers can do the same.

It seems silly to restrict yourself to locally produced food when it can be supplied from the other side of the world at a better quality, lower price and with less effect on the environment even when the emissions from freight are included.

Some very stimulating links from everyone: thank you. I am half-way through reading Natural Capitalism and can’t put it down! Thank you Lynn!

There is another interesting side- benefit to returning to traditional farming techniques in hill farms and river catchment basins: the link between intensive agriculture and rain-water run-off. With increasing rainfall in the West of the UK, we have suffered several severe flooding events to the point where insurance companies are refusing to re-insure many properties, businesses in flood risk areas are closing and the cost of hard-engineering solutions to main rivers is going up steeply.

One of the projects we co-fund in Mid Wales is a group of ten small family farms who have gone back to traditional, sustainable, non-subsidised, non-organic but low input farming. They have planted more trees, & hedgerows, taken out field drainage and developed woodland shelters and cut their livestock numbers by about 30%. They market their meat & produce locally, use their own woodchip as livestock bedding which saves £60/ton on straw and is healthier for the animals resulting in lower vetinary bills. Of the many, many interesting & positive results coming out of this project, is the rapid increase in ground porosity. This indicates an increase in absorbtion of rainfall to the subsoil of between 10 and 25x. The land is becoming an eco-sponge, reducing flash-flooding and releasing water slowly over the summer. The cost benefits, if exptrapolated from the 1000 hectare trial site to the whole river Severn basin could be enormous. Of yes, and their locally butchered meat is delicious and sells at a premium price in local markets.

check out: http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/beyond/factsheets/changing4_prog5.shtml

Colin

A great thing that’s happening in our local area is the emergence of community organic farms. These are just brilliant. Often they are established in a joint partnership between a local school and the surrounding local residents. Both contribute time and energy to the project and in the end get the benefits of healthy organic produce (especially good when it’s introduced into school lunches etc), more friendships are established in the community and because it’s local and organic the GHG are considerably lower than they are for other forms of food production.

UK government new Sustainable Development plan launched today (7 March 05) together with SD framework for devolved regional governments.

At last there is some momentum building.

Link is: http://www.sustainable-development.gov.uk/delivery/latestnews.htm

comments from other UK readers?

kind regards

Colin

Colin, thanks for the link to the UK govt sustainable development policy info. I’ve had a very quick look and the chapter headings under “Securing the Future” look encouraging. Am I right in thinking there is an echo of the “Natural Capitalism” (Hawken et al) approach here? I’ve only just started exploring this and the rest of the work the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) are pursuing. See http://www.natcap.org. Also see http://resurgence.gn.apc.org/issues/lovins198.htm for an interview with Amory Lovins one of the authors of “Natural Capitalism”. See Harvard Business Review for an article summarising the Natural Capitalism argument. “A Road Map for Natural Capitalism”. Sorry can’t recall the link I used to download this free.

I’m grappling with their stuff and find it encouraging but have a nagging feeling that they are, in their enthusiasm, downplaying the difficulties in shifting to a fundamentally different way to make markets operate. They published late 90s and Mark’s book makes no reference to them. Neither does Meyer Hillman. Richard Heinberg in “The Party’s Over” refers to the RMI’s Hypercar and it’s ideal fuel, hydrogen, with some caution. He argues “Hydrogen is … not an energy source, but an energy carrier”. That is, you need energy input to create it. He chucks in the term “techno-utopianism” when referring to the advocates of the hydrogen economy. (page 146-7)

As a further check on the extent to which the RMI have impacted I’ve searched the New Economics Foundation site and can find no references. http://www.neweconomics.org

Overall some encouraging ideas are around but this govt will need an awful lot of careful monitoring to ensure ideas are put into practice extensively and quickly enough. More to follow.

Douglas Coker

Hello Douglas,

The full SD report is over 150 pages, so don’t print it all unless you have to!! The executive summary covers the 250 action points. I was at the Sustainable Development Commission’s Celtic Conference in Edinburgh yesterday where the framework doc for the regional governments was launched and we were given copies of the full UK report which was then discussed. Jonathan Porritt, chair of SDC opened the meeting and there was an impressive line-up of ministers and civil servants present to say their piece.

One of the main concensus points to emerge early was that local and regional politicians and officers are still making bad, short term investment and procurement decisions because they are not getting the right information to base the decisions on. An example was a county school meals service praised for its local fresh and organic food buying policy, its training of staff, success rate with pupils, reduction in poor behaviour, better nutrition etc. and then being criticised for its unit cost of £1.35 per head. The same Audit commission report recommending tendering of the service to private contractors to reduce costs!. At the same time, the local NHS Trust were adding their voice to the clamour about the growing costs of childhood obesity, headteachers were commenting how better behaviour in class (no additives in the food) improved learning and reduced teacher’s stress, and the council’s economic development department was saying just how much the local economy had been boosted by increasing demand from local producers who were otherwise likely to get out of agriculture.

Any commercial business that wants to survive has a cashflow statement, a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet to work from. Improvements in one part of the business that produce benefits elsewhere still show up as a net gain to the bottom line. Our present economic management system is ridiculous: it expects whole-picture judgements to be made by those who are only given two or three pieces of the jigsaw to look at!

Your comments about Natural Capitalism are valid. I will not criticise the authors for their assumption that progress will happen at the rate they assume just because it would be stupid not to do this. The book provides illustrations of the wealth of options open to us by thinking laterally and working more effectively. Mankind is bedevilled by greed, stupidity, self-interest and ignorance and (as Merlin the wizard observes in the film Excalibur) “it is the doom of men that they forget”. NC is an exhortation and an exhilaratingly optimistic vision: it is not a crystal ball. We can still yet completely screw it all up and become extinct. What it does do is point out the paths that we can choose to take, and the UK SD plan is at last a recognition that a different path is now open to us here and that perhaps it might be a good idea if we encouraged our friends, colleagues and neighbours to start hurrying down it.

Many thanks for the response

kind regards

Colin

Thanks for the warning. I have been downloading rather a lot recently and my wee printer is groaning as a result of the subsequent printing load. See my post above on the need to explore NC and SD systematically.

Cheers

Douglas Coker

after an engineer/architect friend who’s into solar homes and electric vehicles told me things against it. For one thing, the fossil fuel industries are not against it, because (1) it will take several decades or more to become a reality on a mass scale, and (2) it will still need energy (read “fossil fuels”) to convert water or hydrocarbons into hydrogen. Either way, no real problem for them.

I also read there might be some negative side effects from so much steam/water coming out on an extremely massive scale, since there is no plan to reduce driving & energy use. I can’t remember what those side effects are, but maybe we should really look into them before we buy into hydrogen whole sale (like we should have done with everything else).

However, I am a believer in most of Lovins’s ideas, because my husband and I did reduce our own household consumption of energy & water by 1/3 to 1/2 cost-effectively, then went onto wind power – not cost-effective, as it costs us a whopping $1 more per month. Although, I do think with rising fossil fuel prices, wind might start saving us money in a couple of years, especially if they ever halt subsidies & tax breaks to fossil fuels and factor in oil-related military costs (we do all pay the price April 15th).

I still have hope for electric vehicles (though there is the battery problem – cost, pollution). I know EVs are much cheaper to run & maintain than I.C.E.s (the motor is like a sewing machine motor, or so some EV people told me), and even if the recharging power comes from fossil fuels, it reduces GHGs by about 1/3 over I.C.E. cars. Now with my wind energy & a rechargeable hybrid coming out soon (I just heard that yesterday), I could run such a car almost entirely on wind power, since we very rarely drive far enough that the gasoline engine would have to kick in.

The basic thing is H is a carrier, not an energy source, Lynn. You have to crack something to make that work.

So, the basic issue is that fossil fool is a cheap energy source. When it runs out, we can’t depend upon cheap energy any more.

D

Michael John Cambridge,

While you think that it seems silly to restrict yourself to locally grown foods when there are benefits (that you listed) to buying from foreign countries (and the fact that New Zealand is pretty far away from the rest of the world) you are not considering the effect that transporting food has on the world. While everyone says that we shouldn’t use as many cars and find a different fuel to use, taht is exactly the same as transporting food. You are helping to destroy the environment when you get these foods shipped from all over the world. We do not realise how privelaged we are to be able to get food shipped from us from wherever we want, but we are abusing this power A LOT. So think about the environment and the effect that you dinner will have on it.