How would that work? We don't have enough land as it is. And we can't pay for the additional labor small farms need, or food inflation will explode.
Making agriculture unproductive will just push the demand outwards like a beaker of toxic reactants boiling over. We can't impose more trade restrictions on foreign agricultural goods either, for fear of a trade war.
This hopeless romanticism of small organic mom-and-pop farming is misguided. The only solution I see is huge, highly efficient, automated, but also highly regulated farms. That, and veganism.
Small farms are more productive per acre [1] even before considering the increased fossil footprint of 'efficient' farms.
>we can't pay for the additional labor small farms need, or food inflation will explode.
Additional unskilled jobs might well be worth the tradeoff, particularly for the most vulnerable members of society.
>This hopeless romanticism of small organic mom-and-pop farming is misguided.
Russia's Dacha model produces something like 60% of the country's food through hobby 'farms' that regular people mostly go to on the weekends. It's not a hard model to replicate, I'm planting a food shrubland in my suburban home. It won't produce a large part of my food budget but it'll certainly be resource-positive as opposed to a lawn. My labour inputs I'd spend at a gym otherwise. As work-from-home becomes more normalized, the average garden size will probably increase. The problem isn't economic but cultural.
>huge, highly efficient, automated, but also highly regulated farms. That, and veganism.
There seems to be a correlation between belief in factory farming and veganism. Those stances align on pathos but diverge on logos and ethos.
The linked study uses data from peasant farms in developing economies (Madagascar, India, etc.) from half a century ago or earlier. From the point of view of the west, that it would be measuring the productivity of very very small farms vs very small farms where the vast majority of labor is done by hand. Skimming over the article it seems that it concludes that under pre-mechanized conditions, larger farms have less available labor per unit land area. And that labor per unit land area is an important factor in agricultural productivity. This is hardly a surprise.
This is very much not like how farming is done in developed nations or even most developing nations today. And unless you want to force people to live like dirt poor peasants of the past, hopefully won't ever be done again.
Well, the hard part to replicate is destroying economy to force people to use those collective gardens. Shops were next to empty. Commercial variety was non existent. The rigid command economy didn't allow enterprise to address needs. Thus you had 2 ways to have good food - relatives in countryside or your own collective garden lot.
It's both economy in culture. Here in Lithuania those gardens survived well into 90s. During the transition, many people went on to do substance farming in addition to day job. Or, if they were unemployed, in exchange of it. But now people work cushy jobs and less and less people do that. It's down to gardening enthusiasts in the young generation. And even then the pattern is completely different. More about trying out exotic stuff for shit and giggles. Rather than aiming for good amount of food and then conserving it for the winter. Energy costs probably make it cheaper to buy jam rather than cook it too...
Only discussing the land statement here, but we have loads and loads and loads of unused farmland.
At least, that is true in Canada, and I suspect the US, and I know in the EU some are paid not to farm.
In Canada, we have quotas on some things, to prevent over production.
There are two real issues:
* drought, or summers with few sunny days, reducing yields
* random new diseases
So we need that fallow land, just in case, which is why people are given inventives to have farm land, but not use it.
Yet we still have so much farm land, that we sell the best of it to developers, who then create housing.
We have loads of unused farmland.
One last thing. China's population is going to almost halve, over the next 15 years, Russia will have a major population decline, and the most industrialized nations are the same.
Canada has solved this top heavy, old age die off, with immigration. More than 30% of Canadian citizens, for example, we not born in Canada.
But for those with lower immigration numbers, and low birth rates (basically the entire industrialized world), populations will plummet by 30% to 50% in the next 25 years.
China had the one child program, and the birth rate in Canada is less than 1 for every 2 adults, for Canadians boen here. The rest of the West is the same.
So worldwide, our population will plummet very soon.
Yes, especially on the east coast, vast swaths of what was once farmland and pasture is now forest again. For example, most of Connecticut's forests were cut down for not very productive farms before good transportation infrastructure allowed that activity to be moved to more suitable areas. It's now forest again and atlantic salmon are back for the first time in a century.
The current agricultural land in US alone can easily feed by various estimates at least 2 billions people. The trouble is that most of it is used to grow corn etc. to feed animals in the industrial meat production.
There is plenty of land under cultivation. We already produce enough calories to feed every person on earth, they just aren't distributed sufficiently.
Currently you have most of the California central valley planted in high margin crops like almonds and pistachios because they maximize farmer profits (despite their unsustainable demands on the water supply). If the goal was to maximize human nutrition the land use would look very different.
> How would that work? We don't have enough land as it is.
With capitalism there can never be enough of any natural resource. When there is enough, it will be put to more extravagant and wastefull purposes.
The original purpose of a lawn was to show that you are so rich and have so much land that you can dedicate some of it to just grass.
The purpose of a tough guy wearing a massive golden chain in a bad neighbourhood is to show that noone dares touch him
And the purpose of a yaht is to show off - the yahts dont even cross the ocean, billionaires hire special ships to lift the whole yaht and move it across atlantic.
So whether its yahts or aingle use plastic cups, or bitcoin mining, there is never enough.
Probably better to stop propping up the small farms and let the unproductive land be reclaimed by nature. Extensively use pest resistant GMO crops to increase yields on less land and overall lessen the land needed for farming. At the same time, lessening sprawl would be quite helpful. I see plenty of people 'move out to the country' and then spray pesticides over their entire 5 acre lawn.
They've been visiting politicians their homes with torches, threatening them and explicitly their kids, blockading highways with burning rubble, blocking highways with asbestos, using their tractors to rip out doors out of government buildings.
What is most aggrieving to me is that the police is pseudo on the side of the farmers. The head of the police said that he 'fully understands the plight of the farmers' and will keep on a policy of de-escalation. Scant few fines too.
Meanwhile a couple of climate protestors that tie themselves to a bridge get their head bashed in and then get fines of €300-5000.
I mean placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers was absurd. They should have started with severe controls on importing goods from countries with high levels of pollution
They were blamed not for climate change, instead for nitrogen disposition.
This is a uniquely Dutch problem, largely unrelated to CO2. In larger countries, there's clear zoning and distance between protected nature and intensive agriculture. Not in the Netherlands, where these two things are directly bordering each other. Hence, the agriculture very directly destroys its surrounding nature. Not by CO2, by nitrogen.
Do you have a source of the government "placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers"? The Dutch government wanted[0] to curb emissions, and since (high intensity) farms are huge polluters, some of the measurements affected farmers.But I can't remember them placing the blame on the farmers.
> placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers was absurd
Nobody is doing that, this is blatant misinformation that is being spread by interest groups that profit off Dutch farmers.
Most of the discussion around farmers over here has to do with nitrogen. As the OP mentioned, it is causing acidification of nature areas, which is negatively impacting all sorts of wildlife. It's a mostly local problem, often caused by intensive farming and is mostly unrelated to climate change.
> Most of the discussion around farmers over here has to do with nitrogen.
Yes, and nitrogen fertilizer yields nitrous oxide which is a greenhouse gas implicated in climate change [1]. This is not just "misinformation", this is part of the reason behind the push to ban nitrogen fertilizer.
> this is part of the reason behind the push to ban nitrogen fertilizer
Sure, that might be true, but it is definitely blatant misinformation that Dutch farmers are being blamed for climate change. It is not part of the discussion that's currently ongoing in The Netherlands and that is purposefully being misrepresented in (mostly American) right-wing media. This needs to be clear, because the violent protests by framers in The Netherlands are being abused by foreign interest groups who frame them as protests against those farmers being blamed for climate change.
This is a real issue, because this is starting to become an actual discussion point for those who are supporting the farmers. They are, for example, asking why farmers are now targeted and airports are not, while farmers cause 88x more nitrogen emissions than flights in the Netherlands. Also, those emissions are less focused on the problem areas.
Misinformation is incredibly harmful in this discussion and therefore it's incredibly important to keep the facts straight. Otherwise all discussions and arguments will mix and there will never actually be anything done.
Given that climate change is the primary reason for restricting nitrogen fertilizer, it's implicit that the farmers are contributing to climate change. Are the people claiming that the farmers are being blamed for climate change saying that the farmers are the only or primary driver for climate change? That would obviously be incorrect, but the former claim is absolutely correct.
Maybe it's not part of the conversation in the Netherlands, but I'm not seeing what's factually wrong about it. Are they actually claiming that climate change is part of the discussion in the Netherlands? If this isn't part of the conversation in the Netherlands, what exactly are they talking about?
Given that climate change is the primary reason for restricting nitrogen fertilizer
That's simply not true. The primary reason for restricting nitrogen fertilizer in NL is habitat change (i.e. it has profound effects on the habitats of native species), not climate change.
> Are the people claiming that the farmers are being blamed for climate change saying that the farmers are the only or primary driver for climate change?
All the comments in this thread are replies to someone who seems to do exactly that by defending farmers "visiting politicians their homes with torches, threatening them and explicitly their kids, blockading highways with burning rubble, blocking highways with asbestos, using their tractors to rip out doors out of government buildings." by saying "I mean placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers was absurd."
This video is full of blatant misinformation and misrepresentation. Our current discussion is not about climate change, it's about acidification and that's it. No matter how true your comments may be, it has nothing to do with the situation in the Netherlands and it continues the spread of this misinformation. Please stop, it's harmful.
Good to know, but I don't see why it's harmful. Here in Canada they're also contemplating nitrogen fertilizer bans for reasons of climate change, so it's not like this argument isn't being made.
