Narrator: Julie Borlaug, granddaughter of Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, suggests revisiting the local food movement after hunger issues are managed.
Julie Borlaug: While I appreciate this movement and their mission and what they are doing, I'm a little more concerned with the child who's dying in Africa right now, and I would like to hope that more people would put their energy and time into saving a child and then we can get back to these movements when we have the ability to save the rest of the world. But I think there's more dire need out there right now and, you know, the investment in that could go a lot further.
Mike Adams: The local eating, uh, phenomenon, the locavore movement, if you will, has really gotten a lot of attention and, um, gained a lot of popularity and we've seen the popularity and increase in business for local farmers' markets and things like this, people wanting to buy local, and that is very good and people really enjoy that, and there's a lot to be said for it. But part of the thinking behind that for some has been, well, if you're buying it local, that must be good for the environment. You're not transporting, you don't have big, huge agriculture, people like the thoughts of a smaller operation and, you know, right there close by, and I want to look at that. Is there really an environmental benefit with this locavore movement? We're gonna talk about that with our next guest, author Stephen Budiansky, joins us. Stephen, thanks for being with us on AgriTalk.
Stephen Budiansky: Howdy.
MA: Certainly there's a lot of popularity with this local food movement. Nothing wrong with that - I mean, it's good. People enjoy it. We like the fresh produce, especially in the summer time, the farmers' markets and things. But just from the environmental standpoint as far as what are called "food miles" and how much better off we are by eating local, you've done some interesting research into that and it might - might surprise people what you've found.
SB: Well, I mean, that's right. And I should preface this by saying I mean of course there's some perfectly good reasons for wanting to buy locally. Freshness and flavor and varieties, and certainly around here in Virginia where I am it's produced an economic value to land other than just, you know, plopping more 6000 square foot houses on them to be able to have this local, rural economy. So that's all fine. As a, you know, individual consumer choice, you know, who can fault this?
My skepticism is about the whole sort of moral imperative that goes with this. And this 'Oh you have to buy local to save the planet' practically we're being told. And, you know, the first thing that I - that caused a question mark to, uh, you know, appear in my mind is this claim about how much, um, energy cost is involved in transporting food long distances. Because it seems to me, well, tractor trailers are pretty efficient at moving a lot of food a lot of - excuse me, well bulk. Everything else in our economy is transported long distances. We don't buy local cars and local books and local clothes, um, and it turns out that transportation is one of the smallest energy components of our whole food system.
I think what's important here is when you're buying local food, you're often buying food that was produced in a more environmentally friendly way than the same foods purchased from across the country. The stuff you get from your farmer can't be had from a similar farmer 3 states away. That farmer is selling at his or her own local farmers' market, to his or her own local customers. The energy savings is not in transportation, as Budiansky correctly points out, but he fails to see that there is a positive environmental impact in buying from a more sustainable farm. If it were possible to buy the same food from far away - AND VERIFY that it was produced in an environmentally friendly way and then transport it in a way that is equally efficient to the way produce from large farms is shipped - then perhaps locavores would find that acceptable. In fact, speaking for myself, that is more or less what happens for the Fair Trade organic chocolate and coffee I buy.
Budiansky continues:
But, you know, I think the bigger issue is that in some ways it's actually the worst thing you could do for the environment to be doctrinaire about this and say, you know, "Everything we eat has to come within..." well, I've seen people say 100 miles. And you know, the reason for that is, that when you grow stuff where it grows most efficiently with the most modern technology, you're using a heckuva lot less inputs. You're using less water, you're using less land, certainly, you're using less energy, you're using less chemicals per pound of food produced. And so, to do that, will often more than offset the very small amount that you have to spend, in terms of energy, to then transport it, you know, even halfway or all the way across the country.
See, here's where he misses it. When you talk about less water, this should refer to less irrigation because no one controls rainfall. And there is a very scientifically sound basis to say that healthy, living soil (which results from sustainable agriculture) uses water better than dead soil. As for the less land claim, the difference has been proven as minor. One study by Catherine Badgley found that in developed countries, a switch from chemical to organic ag will result in an 8 percent decrease in yield. I can only imagine that that figure is over the long term, as farmers do experience a yield decrease when they first go organic, but then their yield increases again. As for the idea of fewer chemical inputs, well... there is no factual basis for that at all. I've seen no statistics whatsoever. But if you are comparing local organic ag with non-local large scale chemical ag, then you've got your answer right there. Organic ag does not use chemical inputs, and I don't think that anyone would argue that we need to reduce the amount of organic inputs like manure used in agriculture.
Back to the interview:
MA: Yeah, I think it's interesting that, while we agree there's nothing wrong with, uh, touting the benefits and what people like about eating local, what bothers me is the implied negative towards, uh, you know production agriculture and the fact that something coming from one state halfway across the country is somehow bad for the environment, and that's implied if not actually stated by --
SB: Oh it's often explicitly stated by the local food movement and that's, again, that's where I start to say "Let's look at the facts." If it were not for modern agricultural technology, particularly nitrogen fertilizer, we would literally have cut down every acre of rainforest on the planet by this point to feed mankind. It is still, to me, an astonishing fact that we, today, grow - in the United States - grow three times - I mean, we feed three times as many people, we export 10 times as much as we did 100 years ago on, essentially, exactly the same acreage of farmland. So think if we did not have, you know, improved varieties, nitrogen fertilizer, mechanization, we would need three times as much land just to feed our growing population.
I LOVE this. I LOVE his invocation of the rainforest here. There are so many countless and varied ecosystems in the world, and he's picking the rainforest as the one we would chop down to plant crops on. I think it's safe to say that we probably would NOT do that, since the rainforest is often home to extremely crappy soil that is not suitable for forms of agriculture other than a slash and burn type system that allows the forest to recover during long fallow periods.
Obviously, of course, he chose rainforests because they are the baby of environmentalists - and often the baby of rather uneducated environmentalists in rich countries who have never been to the rainforest. I say that because, having just been there myself for the first and second times, when you're actually there - at least in Mexico and Bolivia - no one calls it the rainforest. They call it the jungle or the forest. And there are other types of tropical forests. When I've been traveling, often I'm not sure if I'm actually visiting a rainforest or not because no one calls it that. In one case, I'm quite sure I visited tropical dry forest. Elsewhere in Bolivia (not where I visited) you'll find "pampas," which is the word used there for savannah. And some of the richest biodiversity in the world is in Bolivia's Yungas.
A few other points here. First of all, as I noted before, we would see a very small decline in productivity if we switched from chemical ag to organic. The study that found that also checked to see if we would have a lack of nitrogen and found that we would not. Additionally, do you notice how he refers to chemical ag as "modern agricultural technology." The truth of the matter is that agroecology is scientific - arguably MORE scientific than chemical ag - and no less modern, even if many of its methods are ancient. Last, while it wasn't started explicitly here, there's an idea that small scale agriculture cannot produce the yield of large scale agriculture. That idea is actually quite backwards. Consider the Dervaes family, who grows 6000 pounds of produce per year on 1/10th of an acre in Pasadena, CA. Small farms are farmed much more intensively than large farms, and that's been proven quite well.
The other interesting thing is when you start looking at what can you actually grow, you know, locally everywhere. You know, everyone looks at fruits and vegetables, that's about five percent of the acreage that goes directly to feed human beings. I mean, we'll even leave animals out of it completely, leave the entire United States corn crop out of it completely, leave exported wheat out of it completely, and say, let's pretend, for the sake of argument, we're all vegans, you know, what - how much land is required to feed us our basic food. Well, maybe five percent of that land that goes for direct human consumption is fruits and vegetables that are suitable for local agriculture. Three-quarters or so are, you know, wheat and small grains, oilseeds... You cannot grow those in small, quote-unquote, local agriculture. I mean, it's just not possible.
He's going off into crazy-land here. He's right when he estimates that about 5 percent of U.S. cropland is fruits and vegetables. Some 90 percent is corn, soy, wheat, and hay. Of that, much of the corn goes to animals, and most of the rest goes to ethanol and export. A small percent goes to high fructose corn syrup. The wheat is eaten and exported. The soy is crushed, with humans eating the oil and animals eating the meal. The hay goes to animals. So when he starts estimating how much food humans eat and what percent of that fruits and veg constitute once animals and exports are out of the picture, he's completely off. At that point, fruits and veg are much more than 5 percent. Additionally, grains and legumes can be grown locally, and certainly can be grown on a relatively small scale (compared to the size of the average farm that produces them now), although at the moment this is usually not the case.
MA: Yeah, I often point out, I love produce from a garden. Love it. Look forward to it. But I just don't see how anyone could say we're gonna realistically feed the world by everybody having a garden.
SB: Yeah, and especially this point I just made about how much land is required for the basic staples that feed the world: rice, wheat, um, you know, dried legumes, oilseeds, and you know, look at what's happened in India since the Green Revolution of the 1960's where farmers started having access to nitrogen fertilizers, started to have access to improved varieties. They have spared literally hundreds of millions of acres of land that otherwise would have had to be found, somewhere, and brought into production, because they have tripled their yield per acre of these staples. And, you know, we're not talking about little changes on the margin, when you're talking about tripling, in a few decades, and you know, this is land that is being spared for parks, and wildlife, and nature reserves, and rainforest.
I haven't seen facts to support anything he says here, but I doubt what he claims about India is true - given his lack of correct facts about America. India today has some incredibly wealthy people, but it also has a large segment of the population going hungry. Even AFTER the Green Revolution. Not to mention the farmer suicide epidemic of the last decade. And I think he's got an incredible "rich country" bias about what is being saved, in terms of "parks, and wildlife, and nature reserves, and rainforest." What I've seen in other countries is that they don't always have uninhabited virgin forests like we do here. Often those areas are quite inhabited and have been for a long time, but the people who live there have found ways to support themselves without wrecking the environment around them. |
