Comment by relax88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by relax88 | Hacker News Reader

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It seems to be that in order to support sustainable farming one must decidedly be OK with supporting a less efficient and more expensive system.

Would it be better for the environment if this guy just went out of business and the goods were produced as efficiently as possible on as little land as possible in order to satisfy the demand?

Im curious if anyone has ever studied or modelled what the environmental impact of agriculture would look like if it wasn’t highly mechanized intensive farming and was instead decentralized and sustainable. Would we even be able to feed everyone? Would the land use for agriculture increase?

I could be wrong on this but I remember reading somewhere that the total amount of land used for food production in Europe and North America has actually decreased as things have become more efficient. This seems like a good thing vs using more land less efficiently?

Yes, and studies of agricultural efficiency and environmental impact consistently point to one thing that has the most positive effect: eat less meat.

The impact of local production, or reducing "food miles" as it's sometimes branded, is typically small, and in many cases the locally grown food is more energy intensive to transport to consumers than food grown at great distances:

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2012/09/04/how-green-is-lo...

I would argue the greatest benefit of locally produced food is not necessarily reduced transportation expenses, but instead the consumer's visibility into the supply chain. It has been my experience that people are better stewards when they can see directly what impacts their behaviors have on the environment around them.

This is a really good point. Maybe naively, I want to believe a lot of people would eat healthier and waste less if they saw first hand what it takes to feed us, particularly the impact of food production on the workers that bring that food to market, and the impact on the animals we use for food.

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