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I'd love to see a citation on this -- my impression (grew up in farm country) was that organic farming was significantly less yield, higher expense, and totally impossible to actually run a profitable farm on without raising prices immensely. People do it, but the market for food that costs 3x is relatively small -- most moderate to lower income simply can't afford it.

Maybe things have changed, but I suspect if they have everybody would have switched already. Obviously getting rid of poisons is a great target, but I've never heard from anyone in the business that it's even a possibility.

Organic products are often more expensive, but not necessarily 3x more expensive, or anywhere near it

Carrots for sale in Ireland in one of the most popular supermarkets - https://www.tesco.ie/groceries/product/search/default.aspx?s... ... organic ones are more or less the same price as non-organic

I was thinking of the most common organic thing we buy, which are eggs -- usually about .69usd/dozen for the regular ones and 2.99-3.99usd/dozen for the organic ones.

I'm sure there are many other things one could look at, but in general at the stores where I shop it's around that.

ETA: Logically, the comment doesn't make sense anyway -- farmers like money, they're not ideologically hanging on to spraying their crops with unnecessary poisons because they want to.

Many years since I had relatives in agriculture and horticulture, so I may be embarrasingly outdated.

Monoculture tends to encourage everything we don't want. Needing fertilisers or rotation, pesticides, disease has many acres to spread easily through etc.

There's good organic and bad, and efficient and inefficient., but look into polyculture[1]. An old mixed farm would mix crops and sometimes livestock in the same space. The yields were lower, but there were often more yields across the farm to compensate. Thus the yield difference is often not as advertised. Sympathetic planting could actively reduce likelihood of disease and pests. Not everything scales to large farms.

It's also expensive because it's expensive. People expect and treat organic as a premium product. Supermarkets charge accordingly, in no small part because they can. If less industrial approaches to agriculture became widespread, prices would fall. Though unlikely to remove the difference completely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyculture (Doesn't consider organic polyculture)

I agree that it is a more sustainable method of farming to mix crops across growing seasons. However, that is "dealt with" in modern farming by using fertilizers and such -- and as you say, it doesn't scale well.

Organic is certainly a premium product, and where there are consumers that can afford it, it will thrive. Unfortunately it seems to me that right now the cost to produce it is simply too high for it to come out of that premium category and be the norm.

Polyculture also mixes during the season. A field of onions and carrots as they discourage each other's pests. Or interspersing some height for a harvestable canopy. Or an orchard where chickens are under the trees, picking up grubs and fertilising. (Don't know if that works in practice, take as a for instance). Some of these were just the standard old way of doing farming. Not so amenable to the largest scale, but if less scale is what's required to keep a working planet...

You're probably right about organic right now, but before the recession, all the UK supermarkets were going crazy over organic throughout the 00s. Organic versions of most things became available and prices fell to a point where some were only 10% or 20% more. The trend was clear enough, but stopped dead by 2008.

There's the classic variety which uses per-industrial practices to farm. This is indeed cute but hopelessly ineffective. And there's the modern variety which uses data and science driven approaches to farm while minimizing resources. E.g. watering and fertilizing based on drone observed growth patterns and other readings means you can use a lot less. Managing the soil in sane way that preserves it rather than destroys it gives you better yields and also improves water retention. Fighting parasites and pests is a lot easier if you understand the dynamics of their ecosystems and e.g. use predatory insects to counter that. Teaching small farmers some basics about how stuff works might help them improve their yields and put a stop to really destructive practices like burning forests to create land that is briefly usable for farming before it turns into desert.

Things are definitely changing. 'Modern' mono-cultures are based on the state of the art fifty years ago when it was acceptable to just blindly plow, fertilize, and spray many acres of land without even bothering to measure the impact. It works, for a while, but it is not long term sustainable and there is a lot of farm land turning into barren desert world wide due to decades of mismanagement, abuse, and exploitation. The notion that you need to spend a lot on fertilizers, misc. poisons, genetically modified seeds and machines to plow (aka. destroy the soil) your land in order to farm is maybe a bit outdated.

In the US, stopping corn subsidies would do wonders. Most corn farmers would probably adapt to more profitable and less damaging crops. Less corn-syrup in the food chain would be a good thing. Outside the US this is not a common ingredient at all. Also, ethanol is a scam. Abusing farmland for fuel production is insane. Pull the subsidies on that and it that whole market will collapse.

If you are interested, a few interesting videos: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI, Allan Savory on planned grazing as a solution to desertification and a possible new way of cattle farming to feed the planet. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC_Y1ZTZXQ4, Regreening the planet - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV5LAXZ5HHw, Vertical Farming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18262496, The rise of the Robot Farmer

You can find much more of this stuff using your favorite search engine. Not all of it is tree-hugger propaganda; though some of it obviously is. What I like is that the application of science and out of the box thinking can be seriously disruptive in terms of getting really awesome results with modest means. Assuming the way we farm today is peak human capability is both fatalistic and depressing. We can do way better; and we should.

Planned grazing in particular is a bit of a mind fuck if you like eating meat. But in a good way. No need to feed cows corn when we could be using them to turn desert back into fertile grasslands while restoring the soil and capturing more C02 that way than is produced by the cattle or the corn farming. Basically the premise of this is that planned grazing fertilizes barren lands and prunes dead vegetation suffocating it thus allowing fresh growth and soil restoration. Healthy soil captures CO2 and retains water. Barren soil releases CO2 and has poor water retention. By doing this systematically, you can turn arid lands back into healthy soil with vegetation, carbon capture, and potential for actually growing some produce. It think of this as terraforming earth. No need to go to Mars for that; we have plenty of human created desert that we can fix before going there.

I agree absolutely that corn subsidies to create something that is a shit fuel that destroys engines is insane.

And yes, we can absolutely do better. I agree that we should.

I do believe that farmers today -- and even twenty years ago or more -- are a lot more data driven than you might believe.

>there are plenty of farms that have switched to being fully organic while increasing yields and profits.

But probably not corn or any of the other staple crops. It's going to be hard to get the same yields of those without using modern industrial monoculture techniques.

We don't actually know if profits in real farms rise as much as agricultural tech sellers say they do. Bayer and Monsanto could just have really good sales teams. (They obviously do).

Like with medicine, we'd expect the effects measured in lab of new pesticides on yields to be larger than their real impact in the wild. It just receives considerably less scrutiny than medicine, so really, it's hard to cut through all the bullshit.

Despite what anyone's feel good story may bring up in rebuttal, there really isn't that much talent going into the buy-side of agricultural technology.

So what if it turns out that industrial monoculture techniques are vastly oversold (they almost certainly are), and that the real math shows a slight benefit, but not one that outweighs environmental costs?

>So what if it turns out that industrial monoculture techniques are vastly oversold (they almost certainly are)

Maybe some of the more recent techniques of industrial monoculture are oversold, but the steady rise of yields since the 1940s [1] make me feel like you're talking up a much bigger game than is actually the case. Perhaps the cost of some of Monsantos latest GMOs and pesticides isn't worth it. But throwing out the entire industrial monoculture paradigm is absolutely not cost effective. If it was more farmers would have figured it out by now. They aren't that dumb.

[1] https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/Co...

Most of corn and other staple crops large yields have more to do with the excessive usage of fossil fuel derived fertilizer. There have been some gains in GMO to get slightly more efficient yields, but we already spent a few thousand years doing that by hand selection so any extra gains are pretty difficult. What we have largely been focusing on is making the plants resistant to pesticides so that the inevitable infection doesn't occur while you are dumping on crazy amounts of freely available energy as fertilizer. Basically we are turning natural gas into food, 60% of the worlds total crop yield in fact exists because of natural gas derived fertilizer, and when nature tries to take it's share of that free energy, we dump anything we can on it to prevent it from infecting our crops. Pump and dump the soil like that for 20 years until it is garbage, sell it off, buy out some poor struggling farmer that is doing sustainable practices, start over again with fresh 50-100 year maintained topsoil.

Herbicides for dessication seem like a terrible, terrible idea. If I wanted glyphosate to end up in food, that's what I'd do.