Comment by chicob | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chicob | Hacker News Reader

This article seems to conflate organic farming with sustainability.

Organic farming resorts only to non-synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. Unless these are provably bad, in which case some synthetic substances are allowed.

It feels awkward having to state, in the most technological age mankind has seen, that the divide between organic and synthetic is not the same as the one between sustainable and unsustainable, nor between safe and unsafe for human beings.

I suspect one of the Portuguese wineries mentioned in the article to be Esporão, that has recently converted to Organic Farming. This was not, coincidently, done in a inconspicuous way, but rather publicized by corporate PR in sustainable farming venues, rather disingenuously I should say.[1][2]

On one occasion, and for lack of time for QnA, I didn't get the opportunity to ask a very simple question:

- Once engaged in Organic Farming, a farmer is limited in the range of permissible practices, and synthetic pesticides are off limits. On the other hand, if engaged in Integrated Farming, a well known farming standard in the EU, a farmer can still proceed according to the precepts of Organic Farming if one so chooses. Why, then, is that company committed to Organic Farming?

I suspect the reason is the possibility of labelling their products as such.[3] Marketing - not love for the environment - is behind the move.

So regarding the headline question, soft PR avoids the accusation of greenwashing in a world of corporate virtue signalling.

[1] https://www.esporao.com/en/

[2] Search results for organic farming: https://www.esporao.com/en/?s=organic+farming

[3] Example of label: https://www.esporao.com/en/olive-oil/organic-olive-oil-2017/

The article is not conflating organic farming with sustainability.

It’s citing a specific example where a company switched to organic farming because it was more sustainable, specifically making the soil more sustainable.

"In the case of the Portuguese wineries, both already had good reputations for quality. All they wanted to do was to keep giving consumers great wine at a good price, without degrading their soil. They hadn’t increased the cost of making wine as they shifted to organic practice."

My interpretation comes from this kind of phrasing, were it is assumed that the shift towards organic farming was a move towards sustainability.

Yeah but it describes what that organic practice was. Which was changes to improve the sustainability of the soil.

It’s again referencing a specific organic practice which is sustainable.

It is conflating the two. For example, the paragraph starting with:

> This phenomenon is not limited to the clothing industry. The UK organic groceries market has been expanding steadily for the past eight years.

Without any explanation given of how this relates to sustainability, they imply that the relationship between organic and sustainable is obvious. That looks like conflation to me.

Except that isn’t doing that either.

The this here refers to “whereby innovations are silently enacted and kept from the rest of the industry” which is not sustainability. Further, it calls this practice “secret sustainability” and the article itself encloses it in quotes indicating it’s using this term out of convenience, and that it’s not actually a precise term.

The use of quotes around secret sustainability is the article explicitly pointing out that it does not consider this an accurate term, and is using it extremely loosely.

There is a huge overlap between organic farming and sustainable farming. Its starts from soil depletion. Then, oil-derived fertilizers. Next, aggressive pesticides that harm useful insects and bees. The list goes on.

Oil-derived fertilizers? What are they? Do you mean NATURAL GAS derived fertilizer? Would that be ok if the hydrogen to synthesize the ammonia were instead sourced from renewable energy? It would be the same ammonia!

Yes, I meant gas. And using renewables for farming is only a partial solution. Farming can be extremely energy intensive or less so depending on the methods used.

Animal farming is more than order of magnitude worse.

A lot of industrial farming developed that way due to access to cheap energy - but this is not sustainable.

| Farming can be extremely energy intensive or less so depending on the methods used.

In the US, we use less energy growing and harvesting food than we do cooking food. Total ag energy use is a tiny fraction of the total energy use in the economy.

Energy-intensive agriculture is perfectly sustainable. There's more than enough renewable energy available.

The one resource I would worry about is phosphorus, but this will be a problem for "organic" farming too. The solution there is to minimize erosion, recycle phosphorus-bearing wastes, build up sparingly soluble phosphate reserves in soils (and don't let erosion wash those away), and ultimately make up for losses by exploiting very low quality phosphate ores (crustal average is 0.1% P).

Does this account for the massive amount of energy we 'cheat' out of natural gas derived fertilizer? If we eliminate natural gas, the energy costs of fertilizer production go up near 10 times what it is now.

Yes, it includes the energy used in making fertilizer. It also includes all the fuel used on farms.

Here's a link for the numbers from 2014.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2017/januaryfebruary/en...

In that year, ag used 1.74% of US energy consumption. 29% of that was for fertilizer. As I said, the absolute amount of energy used in farming is really rather small, even for "energy intensive" agriculture. That's because the ag sector is such a small part of the US economy (< 1% of GDP).

> Energy-intensive agriculture is perfectly sustainable

citation needed.

Why wouldn't it be? I mean, why is being energy intensive inherently not sustainable? Surely particular inplementations could be unsustainable, but that's true of non-energy intensive agriculture as well.

To help you along, I'll bring up the part that's most problematic, IMO: the production of nitrous oxide from nitrogen fertilizer. But N fertilizer is pretty much required to get yields sufficient to feed the world, so that's a problem that's going to have to be solved.

Let’s be clear, aquifer depletion for example is unsustainable not because of water but because that source is going to run out. Similarly, anything depending on Natural Gas unsuitable as long we are going to run out of natural gas.

The issue is using this stuff inherently means a future spike in prices.

> The issue is using this stuff inherently means a future spike in prices.

The alternative then being a present spike in prices? I don't see how that's better.

Not always, let’s say you have two options A and B that have similar lifetime costs including both capital costs and maintenance costs. A is unsustainable, but you have already paid the capital costs.

Now switching to B means paying those capital costs. However, equipment has a finite lifespan so if you time the transition to the point when you need to replace A anyway it’s essentially free.

At the consumer level electric cars are a reasonable approximation of this. For many people, TCO is about the same, but switching early is a poor choice. Similarly, for electric companies wind and solar are unlikely to outcompete existing coal power plants, but it can cheaply replace yet to be constructed coal power plants.

That's an unfair and unrealistic assumption. Industrial farming doesn't use synthetic fertilizer - the 'unsustainable' - because they lack basic accounting knowledge, they do so because they can make more food for less money (or some variation thereof) over reasonable accounting lifetimes. At the risk of invoking the rational market hypothesis, if using 'sustainable' methods were cheaper over the lifetime of the non-sustainable we wouldn't be having this conversation because the sustainable methods would already be in use.

edit: nor is there meaningful capital inertia behind synthetic vs. other fertilization.

To not use synthetic fertilizer, today, would increase food costs today. To run out of synthetic fertilizer e.g. 150 years from now would increase food costs an equal or lesser amount. Potentially lesser as a result of increased time to develop better sustainable methods. Integrating cost over the next e.g. 250 years, it will always be cheaper (better) to use the non-sustainable resources at the time sustainable methods are most expensive (today). Externalities, like global warming aside, as they aren't relevant to the example of fertilizer I was replying to.

It’s not quite that simple, sustainability is more than simply a binary choice between 100% synthetic vs other fertilizers. There is also a huge amount of inertia around crop types.

For example subsidies play such a huge role in agriculture we are far from the economic optimal usage just a local optima under current tax law. Consider what happens if we stop ethanol subsidies while paying some farmers to keep some fields fallow. ~40 percent less corn * 96,000,000 acres is quite a bit less fertilizer.

That’s not a recommendation, just a demonstration that the solution space is huge. Different subsidies and taxes can make a huge difference.

Sure a full treatment would require a few hundred pages, at least but I believe my point that 'not using any synthetic fertilizer because we will eventually run out of natural gas is probably inane' stands despite the relative simplicity. Subsidies or no, a farmer with x acres will still try and maximize yield (and $$$) from those acres.

While I generally agree with the thrust of your argument. Farmers maximize profit not yields, as those are rarely the same thing.

For each crop, to maximize yield is to maximize profit. In fact, those are usually the same thing. Unless some requirement must be met, like moisture, protein or sugar content (i.e. corn or barley), in which case a given yield can mean different profits.

Farmers have poor leverage on produce retail prices, and depending on the soil and climate they have, the local markets and distributors, a limited range of crops is available. Once chosen, they simply maximize yield.

As for permanent crops, farmers simply maximize yield.

Several methods like hydroponics are generally not cost effective even though they increase yields.

More realistic examples are Center Pivot Irrigation Systems which don’t utilize all available land. https://extension.uga.edu/publications/detail.html?number=B8...

Sure, but that doesn't mean increasing yield is not increasing profit for regular agricultural practice. Fringe agriculture like hydroponics becomes cost effective when having no other means of production rises produce prices just enough.

And central pivot irrigation increases total production, and average yields as well, when the alternative is rainfall.

Many central pivots near me have permanent crops in most of the corners, usually with drip irrigation. Also worthy of notice is not all land lots are neat squares, and some corners end up being quite small.

That’s something of a ‘no true Scotsman’ argument.

In areas with high average rainfall central pivot are often not supplemented by other irrigation systems or different crops. Sure, drip could increase yields slightly, but it’s not considered to be worth both the expense and hassle.

In other words, standard agricultural practice varies by location to maximize profit by increasing yield, when it’s cost effective to do so.

PS: Posting that feels like a really nitpicking argument as I think we both agree with what’s going on. But, I get annoyed when people talk about maximizing yield as a shorthand for maximizing profit. It’s something of a social convention where you can’t say you’re trying to make more money even when talking about how you make more money.

It would be the same ammonia, but it wouldn't be releasing all that carbon in the atmosphere that natural gas brings when pulled to the surface.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com