Some blowback about last weeks announcement that Stanford researchers find little difference between organically farmed food and commercially grown food leave a bit to be desired in the logic department. From the Times of India:
“More significantly, organic could help save the world from global warming. It saves 40 per cent of water used in conventional farming and uses non-conventional energy sources,” says Patel, claiming that he did not have to use water pump for as long as 25 days when it did not rain at all this monsoon. “In summers, I don’t need to irrigate my farms for almost 30-35 days. Head of the department of civil engineering in MSU A S Patel says if every village of average 100 acre size could shift to organic, the water saved would take care of the village’s domestic needs for the next 20 years!
The entire article is here.
Next there will be claims that low flow toilets will save the world from global warming because they use half the water of regular toilets.
“Next there will be claims that low flow toilets will save the world from global warming because they use half the water of regular toilets.”
This won’t work because low flow toilets have to be flushed twice to be effective in their primary function.
Good to see the Indians have identified that water is strongest factor in global warming not CO2. Just waiting for the all the other scientists to catch up.
Anyone who thinks Organic Faming does not use quantities of pesticides is sadly misinformed.
Organic produce is Expensive. So you pay more for similar vitamin levels as non organic produce. Big question is how do you know you actually have Organic produce? I know farmers that are the countryside equivalent of second hand car shysters. Grow your own tastes better because it is really fresh and barely oxidised.
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~lhom/organictext.html
How it solves the myth that is AGW escapes me.
Apparently they have a real problem in Germany too. This too joins the long list of unintended consequences for “virtuous actions”. From that normally Green oriented publication Der Spiegel
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Part 3: Water
Showerhead technology has undergone rapid development in recent years. Less water, more air, says the European Union’s environmental design guideline. Gone are the days when it was enough for a showerhead to simply distribute water. Today an aerosol is generated through a complicated process in the interior of the showerhead. The moisture content in the resulting air-water mixture is so low and the air content so high that taking a shower feels more like getting blow-dried.
The government is even teaching our smallest citizens how important it is to treat precious water responsibly. The Environment Ministry’s children’s website admonishes them to “Think about how you can save water! Taking a shower is better for the environment than taking a bath. Turn off the water when you’re soaping yourself. Never let the water run when you’re not using it. And maybe you can spend less time in the shower, too.”
This is all very well and good, but there’s only one problem: It stinks. Our street is filled with the stench of decay. It’s especially bad in the summer, when half of Berlin is under a cloud of gas.
A “Competency Center” established by the Berlin Water Authority recently published a list of the neighborhoods where the problem is especially egregious. Ironically, the upscale Gendarmenmarkt square tops the list. Pariser Platz, at the Brandenburg Gate, smells like a diaper pail. It isn’t just a problem in Berlin. Entire neighborhoods are also affected in Hamburg, the northeastern city of Rostock and the western Ruhr region.
Our consumption has declined so much that there is not enough water going through the pipes to wash away fecal matter, urine and food waste, causing blockages. The inert brown sludge sloshes back and forth in the pipes, which are now much too big, releasing its full aroma.
The water authorities are trying to offset the stench with odor filters and perfumed gels that come in lavender, citrus and spruce scents. But toxic heavy metals like copper, nickel and lead are also accumulating in the sewage system. Sulfuric acid is corroding the pipes, causing steel to rust and concrete to crumble. It’s a problem that no amount of deodorant can solve.
The waterworks must now periodically flush their pipes and conduits. The water we save with our low-flow toilets is simply being pumped directly through hoses into the sewage system below. On some days, an additional half a million cubic meters of tap water is run through the Berlin drainage system to ensure what officials call the “necessary flow rate.”
Germany has a lot of water. It has many rivers and lakes. The amount of rain that falls from the skies over Germany is five times as much as the entire water requirements of the entire population and industry. Less than 3 percent of the country’s water reserves would be enough to supply all households.
The obvious solution to our pipeline problems would be to use more water again. But that’s not how the Germans work. People who have been urged for so long to use as little water as possible when taking a shower don’t just toss their habits overboard. The conservation appeals have created deep imprints in our psyche.
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see
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/germany-s-environmental-protection-policies-fail-to-achieve-goals-a-821396-4.html
They are very unclear on the concept. Organic crop yields are about 25% lower, on average, than conventional. That means that to feed the same people, you need 25% more land, plus 25% more fuel to seed, plow and harvest.
Using the Hollywood recommended single square of recycled toilet paper per day will save the rainforests ! ! !
and give the unwashed masses an “Earthy”….organic….aroma…..
Truthseeker says:
September 10, 2012 at 3:38 am
“Next there will be claims that low flow toilets will save the world from global warming because they use half the water of regular toilets.”
This won’t work because low flow toilets have to be flushed twice to be effective in their primary function.
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Ah, but if cisterns returned to near the ceiling as they used to be they could just work as well as low suite toilets on full flow.
As I am on tank water (and now alone in the house) it could be an experiment I can do at home !
“Organic” also means less production. Modern, western agriculture is perfectly feasible and “sustainable”. It’s working, it’s been working for decades.
This Patel fellow’s approach is exactly not that. It’s not working, it’s not feasible, it’s not “sustainable. Yes, village could do that. And? What about cities? Vienna here has 1.5 million inhabitants. How are we going to feed them with “organic” only? We can’t, simple as that.
“Everyone agrees that organic food tastes much better”
Reminds me of one of the experiments conducted in the TV show “Penn & Teller’s Bullshit!”. They cut a banana in half, claimed one half was organically grown and conducted a blind test. Quite a few said the “organically grown banana” was much tastier.
Still… Being able to grow crops without pesticides is a good thing. Hopefully the bugs that eat the pests make a comeback too.
So, I’m to understand that if I take a flat of tomatoes and grow half of them organically and half in(?)organically, the plants in the organic half of the flat will require less water. My well-mulched and well-composted garden soil may retain more moisture, but I’d guess the plant moisture requirements are essentially the same per unit tomato yield. The fallacy of believing that you can easily expand garden plot growing methods to feed very large populations seems prevalent here.
I am an organic chemist and have never gotten accustomed to the term “organic” as applied to food. One has chemical compounds mainly consisting of C, H and O and the other doesn’t?
Unfortunately, you get enough people living in cities who have no idea how farming works, reading the above crap, and they will approve legislation to reduce water on farms and then have no food.
@edmh “The inert brown sludge”
hardly inert !! something must be reacting to release all the aromatics. 😉
They may be using less water, but if dryland farming in India is anything like dryland farming here on the Great Plains, they’re also getting far lower yields. However, it just may be different over there, considering the things [snip . . yup, over the line . . kbmod]) tell us about the way Himalayan Glaciers work.
There is nothing wrong with recycling water via treatment plants as wee do in the UK. They say that Londoners drink water that has been recycle 4-5 times on its journey down old father Thames! As for Organic farming as opposed to Modern Farming, as Numberwatch states accurately in its Vocabulary section, the former is farming with impure chemicals whereas the latter is farming with pure chemicals!!! The OF food taste no better, & what they put on it as pesticides one dare not contemplate, & it has been demonstrated that there is much carcinogenic potential in each process, not that I am worried about a 1 in 10,000th chance or even less of such an event!
Can’t think of anything other then salt and water that I consume that aren’t organic.
‘Organic food could help save the world from global warming’
Of course it will, because it would reduce the world’s population by a third.
Organic food often takes more inputs and passes over the field (burning fossil fuel) because the chemicals and transgenes work better to control weeds and insects.
Well if we look here:
http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0426-hance_organicvsindustrial.html
which references :
Verena Seufert, Navin Ramankutt, and Jonathan A. Foley. Comparing the yields of organic and conventional agriculture. Nature. 2012. doi:10.1038/nature11069.
we get :
“After weeding out problematic research on organic versus conventional agricultural, researchers with the University of Minnesota and McGill University looked at 66 studies on 34 different crops. They found that conventional farming currently beats organic agriculture in yields by 25 percent. However, that simple statistic does not capture the full picture: yields varied widely between types of crops and growing methods.
“For some crops, like many fruits and some legumes (e.g., chickpeas or beans), organic farms nearly match the yield performance of their conventional counterparts, co-author Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment, explained to mongabay.com. For example, when looking at rain-fed legumes, the study found that organic yields were only 5 percent behind conventional, and organic fruits were just 3 percent behind.
“But for other crops, like our major cereals and grains, the conventional farms currently have a big yield advantage,” Foley continues, “and that’s a big problem, since grains are a fundamental building block of the human diet.”
This didn’t meant there wasn’t room for improvement in many organic food systems. For example, the authors write that when nitrogen was added to organic fields, yields rose significantly. They note that depending on manure and compost for nitrogen in organic farming simply proved too “slow” for some crops. A lack of phosphorous in certain soils may also hamper organic production in some cases.
“More work is needed, and fortunately, I think it might be possible to make big gains in yield with organic-style approaches,” says Foley, who emphasizes that none of the study’s three authors are “anti-organic,” but all are “big fans of organic food in our households.”
Still, Foley says as a scientist they have a duty to follow the data, and “the science shows us that organic has much work to do to compete with the yields of conventional grains.”
Read more: http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0426-hance_organicvsindustrial.html#ixzz264DNa0Dt”
So the Soil Association isn’t going to save the planet just yet…..
Truthseeker says:
September 10, 2012 at 3:38 am
“This won’t work because low flow toilets have to be flushed twice to be effective in their primary function.”
In addition, for those having a septic system, it is not advisable to use a low flow toilet at the farthest point from the septic tank. Lack of flushing power may not push all the waste into the tank and could leave enough in the pipe lines to eventually cause a problem.
US corn yield prior to WWII (ie- “organic”) 30 bu/ac; current US yield 155 bu/ac.
Return the land used for biofuel production to food production and that would help considerably. I wouldn’t bother with ‘organic food’ as it costs more and crops less. As so called AGW is a faith and not a fact it has no relevance in the real world. Only to money grabbing politico-scientists and their sycophants.
I have no idea what you people put in those low flow toilets, but I have two of them, live on a septic system and in over 7 years have only had them clog less than half a dozen times. I do not flush them twice each time and they get plenty of use. It seems a complaint that people just repeat without thinking about it or I have some magical method of making them work?
Be careful what you predict here! It will show up in a week in some global publication. You can probably never suggest anything too crazy that someone will not latch onto it.
Yet another solution to a non-problem…
(PS – so why are organic foods twice as expensive in the stores versus non-organic if they take less water to grow?)
“In 2008, the National Agricultural Statistics Service of USDA conducted a detailed survey of Organic agriculture in the US. Participation rates were high with Organic growers, so the data is quite reliable. What it showed was probably surprising to many. After at least three decades of “rapid growth,” Organic now accounts for 0.52% of harvested US cropland.”
http://www.biofortified.org/2011/02/todays-organic-yesterdays-yields/
As noted in the link, organic soybean yields are 34% less than the national conventional-agriculture average typically. Those for corn are 29% less.
“Organic wheat production is equivalent to that [of conventional agriculture] from even earlier eras – [like] 57 years [ago] for Winter Wheat and 58 years for Spring Wheat on a national basis.”
Whether organic or conventional, individual farm yields vary by a large percentage dependent on many factors, so there is a bunch of intentionally misleading articles published comparing such as a record top organic farm to the average conventional farm (or other tricks) rather than comparing averages to averages like the figures noted above.
Fundamentally, going backwards in advancement like no longer using modern synthetic fertilizers (limiting nitrogen fixation to that from “natural” sources like manure and bacteria alone) results in lesser yields, in more land area required per unit of food production.
Presently organic farming is a minuscule fraction of total food production in industrialized countries due to its extra cost and inefficiency (i.e. the 0.52% of U.S. cropland figure). However, if the world went backwards in agricultural yields by switching to organic farming everywhere, vastly less land could be spared for nature — amounting to an enormous environmental catastrophe dwarfing imaginary global warming harm. As usual, many activists are more fundamentally anti-industrial than they are really are anything else.
If anything, those yield differences may be a practical understatement considering the enormous cost difference seen retail between regular and organic foods. (For instance, if I recall correctly, when I’ve seen organic potatoes in supermarkets, they cost multiple times as much as regular ones).
Re: Les Johnson
You are making a common mistake with your calculation.
If your target is 100 units and you are only producing 75 units (25% less) then you need to increase 75 by 25 which means the percentage is: 100*25/75 = 33%
So you need 33% more land and fuel.