ORGANIC FOLLOW-UP

Organic as religion is silly; organic because it costs less is common sense.

Organic doesn't cost less. It costs more. When you do "green accounting" that considers costs often ignored as externalities it costs very much more to produce a basket of goods using organic methods.

When costs are the focus, you might be tempted to pursue techniques that reduce inputs: use cheap land, don't irrigate, don't fertilize, don't fight weeds and pests, and use cheap seed. Use low paid manual labor rather than machines and fuel.

The problem with this is that yields are low, or even non-existent in some years, and the quality of life for all involved is primitive. This is the nasty, short and brutish existence of subsistence agriculture that dominated in most places for most of human history and is still the issue today in large parts of the developing world. Famines are the norm.

There are exceptions, a few blessed places such as the Nile Delta that yield well with such practices. Annual floods bringing fertile sediments from the interior of the continent do wonders for exhausted land.

Keeping inputs low isn't useful. Keeping costs low per unit of production is useful. Spending money to make money works up to a point, the limits of the system. It may even be smart to push beyond that point into the region of diminishing returns if production is sorely needed. If the price for produce is very high due to shortage then the inputs it makes sense to use to increase yield can rise.

There is confusion when all costs are not measured. For example, the misuse of cheap fertilizer to excess can pollute ground and surface waters. When those costs are not reflected back to those who cause them it isn't possible to make useful economic decisions. Subsidies and tariffs do something similar to failure to account for external costs. Both muffle the market signals needed for good decision making.

Many agronomic methods are used by both organic and non-organic producers. Most of these are traditional agronomic methods used for eons and still sensible. They aren't organic methods, they are common methods. Smart farmers with the freedom to make decisions without doctrinal inhibition use such methods when they are effective, and use methods that are taboo for fetishists in other cases.

"I wouldn't mind seeing some independent numbers on crop yields. All the time, I read that "yields are down" from scaremongers hoping I'll jump this way or that on the news, yet how are these things figured? They never say, and it makes me concerned that some fingers are finding their ways onto the scales."

Too true. See Fat Year for some recent US figures. 2004 was the fattest year on record for the US due to good weather. Yields vary greatly. They always have and always will do so. Industrialization doesn't repeal nature, turn farming into a lab activity with reliable and predictable results. That's why there are futures markets and crop insurance. That's why some go broke while others grow fat. The oldest successful farmer story is about the fellow who can smell a wreck coming and keep his seed in the sack during bad years. While others squander their resources he sits tight, and buys them out when they go broke. Nature and markets aren't pretty, though some argue insightfully that they are all the more beautiful as a result. Beauty has blemishes rather than the symmetric perfection of prettiness.

Yields are not rising at the rate they did during the green revolution. The methods promulgated at that time - improved cultivars, chemical soil amendment and pest control, better machinery etc. - have given us a one-off increase in production. These methods have spread widely but are far from universal. Much of the developing world has not yet had a green revolution. They need different, locally adapted high yield cultivars rather than those well suited to developed world locations. The needed cultivars aren't only versions of the same crops but also different crops that are valued in different places. Only a few crop plants have been intensively improved so far. They also need property rights, rule of law, access to capital and market economies. They need education, civil rights, health care, etc. etc. etc. They need development to bootstrap development.

Continuing evolution of agronomic methods give increased yields, but it's evolution not revolution at this point. The use of precision methods reduce inputs a bit and increase yields a bit. GMOs allow interesting techniques such as no-till which reduce yields but reduce costs even more as well as reducing erosion and GHG emissions. There are trade offs in ag as in anything else.

The green revolution was a result of industrialization. It was an application of the whole panoply of techniques made possible by industrialization. Everything from the obvious use of machines to industrial chemistry was involved. Even the breeding of high yield cultivars that used much more energy (fertilizer) and put that energy into seed rather than leaves and stems was enabled by industrialization.

Where do we go from here? It's speculative of course, no one knows what lies beyond a singularity like the green revolution, but we have some hints.

Fertilizer is expensive and getting more expensive because it depends on methane, natural gas, which has increased in cost greatly. The Claude-Haber process uses methane as both the main feedstock and main energy source. A lot of energy is needed to raise reaction vessel temperatures to 900 degrees F and pressures to 1,000 atmospheres so that the methane feedstock will react with nitrogen from the atmosphere yielding Ammonium nitrate. A post industrial revolution that greatly reduced the cost of energy would be a big help. Nuclear, solar etc. etc. Biogenesis of methane from coal fields, for example, that greatly increased methane reserves, reducing prices, would be a big help. Genetic modification to allow plants to "breathe" nitrogen from the atmosphere might help a little, but it's an expensive thing for plants to do. They'd need better leaves and roots to be able to produce as they do now while also being able to do more metabolic work to make plant available nitrogen compounds. There's no free lunch, even for plants.

Careful thinkers imagine synthetic opportunities, unexpected combinations of technologies and insights such as the marriage of gene sequencing to computational methods that resulted in the huge increase in our ability to sequence genomes. In general, though we can't say what will happen to continue advancement of agriculture it is more reasonable to expect continued advancement than decline. In the meantime, the doom and gloom chorus will prance and shout, as they always have and always will. They are like, social-herpes, always with us though sometimes in remission.

There are interesting nanotech possibilities too. We may become able to do low power synthesis of organic compounds. Whether we use biotech in bioreactors or nanotech is a fine distinction. This is the techno-vegetarian dream when we just press a button to get synthesized food. Tea! Earl Grey! Hot!

The near future task is to make sensible decisions using the methods available. Unreasoning faith in ideologies such as organic agriculture - a form of neo-Ludditism bound up with anti-capitalist, anti-globalization, culture war, pseudo-environmental wanking - isn't helpful. It can be profitable for a few since it provides a brand of sorts that allows charging premium prices that those with more money than sense will pay. It's fashionable nonsense but the market is right. Individual farmers will decide to produce for that market, or not, based on their circumstances.

But when we focus on global needs -  a billion food insecure people now and 2 or 3 billion more expected in coming decades - organic religion becomes a bit obscene. We need higher yield methods that use less lend to feed more people so that we avoid the inevitable environmental destruction and wars that will result from population pressure. If we fail we can expect hundreds of millions of environmental refugees from China alone. They'll do a lot of damage before they starve to death.