Mr. Leonard,

I don't know if you are familiar with permaculture and no step, no till agriculture.

But I can tell you that I produce about 60% of my family's food on my own land, without use of a tractor or chemicals. The only fossil fuel I used was in bringing large amounts of horse manure and bagged leaves to the farm.

I can't imagine that driving tractors over the ground, soaking the dirt in chemical baths, and then reaping with these massive machines (or with farmworkers exposed to high levels of poisons) is more "sustainable" than what I do.

There's a lot of unemployed people out there, and many others in meaningless jobs that they hate. If we employed a LOT more human labor doing Permaculture, and fired the tractors and the chemical pesticide/fertilizer industries, that would have to be more sustainable.

I find this particular blog entry hard to believe, and I'd like to see the evidence.

You know, there's the old ditty about the British Empire losing it's hold on the world for lack of butter to be spread on a piece of toast in the hands of an old woman in Cornwall, and the story traces back the unravelling from that point via a series of seemingly connected consequences.

And so this study defines the problem of organic sustainability by the consumption of energy used to yield a final product- but based on how far back the authors will go back the trail leading to their very own 'old woman buttering her toast'.

What's left out of that calculation is the amortization of that very same energy used to create the greenhouse, for example. In other words, yes, there was energy consumed to make the aluminum and glass structuture, but what's the net cost per year considering the lifetime of that structure?

Assuming a 50 year life (which is not optimisitic considering that our greenhouse is nearly that age and shows no signs of collapse), the energy cost is miniscule compared to the huge burden of transporting food cross country and even cross-continent.

The more accurate truth to the matter is that the most energy is used at the consumer level which includes the cost of packaging, getting those items to one's home, then storing and preparing them in appliances that consume energy-refrigerators, micorwaves, ovens and stoves. There's where the main consumption of energy occurs, and is where most conservation should occur.

I will try to post the link to the article in Scientific American that has the analysis I'm referring to.

david.sf

I get crabby when I read false comparisons: driving to the grocery store versus buying local food. There is no doubt that the single best thing one can do to make their own behavior more sustainable is to get out of their car. So obviously, biking and walking is better than driving. And driving a short distance to get food is better than driving a long distance. And if you have to choose between driving less and buying more sustainable food, driving less clearly has a greater impact. But decisions about driving are generally separate from the issue of locally grown versus transported food. So saying you can save more by not doing X that you can by doing Y presents something as a choice, when it is more than possible for most of us to do both.

I buy local because it supports my local economy, supports diverse food products, reduces the use of pesticides and (I believe, cost of building greenhouses aside) reduces carbon emissions. I also try to bike or walk whenever I can. I don't think it's very complicated. I am afraid that throwing in these unnecessary complications and false choices can lead to cynacism and inaction.

Those "massive machines" and "chemical soaked dirt" don't just feed your local area or even just the U.S., THEY FEED THE WORLD! Ask some starving child in Sudan eating his bowl of U.S. grown wheat what he thinks about permaculture vs factory farming. I seriously doubt he gives a rat's ass how that food was grown.

"Some conclusions seem obvious, upon reflection. Locally grown isn't always the best answer. Tomatoes grown organically in a greenhouse next door to you may consume more fossil fuel energy than tomatoes shipped from hundreds of miles of away, if you take into account the energy used to produce the aluminum and glass that the greenhouse is built from."

This would seem to only make sense if you build a new greenhouse every time you grow a new batch of tomatoes... A greenhouse that stands 20 years takes more energy to fab & build than a diesel tractor-trailer driving hundreds of miles every week? I don't think so...

As Bill states: Those "massive machines" and "chemical soaked dirt" don't just feed your local area or even just the U.S., THEY FEED THE WORLD! Ask some starving child in Sudan eating his bowl of U.S. grown wheat what he thinks about permaculture vs factory farming. I seriously doubt he gives a rat's ass how that food was grown.

The hallmark of most simple, angry arguments is the reduction of issues into black and white.

No one here is arguing against the scale of US agriculture (although some clearly don't like it for various reasons) as much as they're arguing against the point of view of the author, who seems to point out flaws in the organic food movement based on what appear to be poorly defined assumptions.

True, the US agricultural economy has done much to feed the world, as you state, but this opens the miserable can of worms regarding aggressive Third world 'dumping' of over-subsidized grains, both from the US and Europe, which have been clearly documented by UNESCO as being partially responsible for much of the devastation of agriculture in the poorest nations of Africa and South America.

Truly, to some degree, the road of good intentions, etc...

But that's for another discussion.

The real issue is getting a more accurate picture of the complex interplay of our economy as regarding food supply, and more importantly, keeping the discussion organized along COGENT lines so some people can move FORWARD in the discussion with ideas that maybe can be incorporated into their own lives should be the minimun requirement here....

So what can we do as Americans? Conserve, recycle, eat out less, eat raw foods only, ignore the whole thing? The fact that there are many possibilities reflects the wide variety of our culture, don't you think?

If anything comes out of this thread I would hope it would at least be the awareness of the issue and perhaps even some realization that we all need to participate, whatever our capacity.

david.sf