Organic vs Local? Who Cares. Neither is Sustainable.

Tree Hugger
by Kristin Underwood, San Diego, CA on 03. 6.09

While last year we were debating whether its better to buy organic or local (or both), an article in Mother Jones now reports that we have even bigger fish to fry when it comes to our food production. While dreams of our future food system may rely on the romantic image of local farmers, the reality is: this model can't do what we need it to do, that is, feed billions of people.
Future food must also pack a greater amount of calories using fewer resources (water and energy), as well as be affordable, "ecologically benign" and also not abuse laborers and farmers in the process. Most of what we consider "sustainable" today is not - according to the article, only 2% of the food purchased in the US qualifies as sustainable (i.e. adheres to the values listed above). Growing food organically but underpaying workers, or using small-scale local farms really only gets at one part of the equation and won't work to feed the billions of people on the planet long-term.
In that case, is it better to purchase your food from a farmers market, where dozens of farmers truck in their produce each on individual trucks from all over, or purchase your food from a chain store where they ship it "en mass, via large trucks." Considering the transport only accounts for 10% of the emissions from food production, maybe we should turn our focus over to how the food is produced (resource usage). A recent report from Carnegie-Mellon University said, "going meat- and dairyless one day a week is more environmentally beneficial than eating locally every single day."

Where the Rubber Hits the Road in Farming
One farmer, in trying to eliminate erosion on his fields uses no-till growing, meaning that older, dead plants are left where they fall and new seeds and crops are planted right over top of them. This means A) the field looks like a big mess compared with his neighbors and B) that weeds are allowed to grow too. To keep them down, the farmer applies a small amount of herbicide, which now means his food isn't organic and he can't sell his vegetables at the premium price. The word shunned comes to mind.
Looking at the carbon footprint of food vs where it's produced vs how many resources it uses still doesn't get to the issue of whether the system is sustainable or not. When it comes to a farming method that is sustainable, you still must factor in costs vs profits which gets us back to massive, farms that get the most they can out of the harvest and worry about next year, well, next year. Looking at local vs organic boils the system down into something it's not: "we've come to see sustainability as some kind of fixed prescription - if you just do these 10 things, you will be sustainable and you won't need to worry about it anymore."

Growing Organic En Masse
While organic farms uphold to stricter standards, they are still trying to keep up with their conventional rivals in terms of production and that amounts to cutting costs somehow. The organic standards encourage farmers to replenish soils on site, via manure or crop rotations or no-till, from the example above. This is costly and to cut costs, some farmers just truck in manure from feed lots. Trucking in manure (emissions) from feed lots (hormones, and other food safety issues) begs the question - is this organic item still the holy grail of food? Plus, its very hard to keep GMO tainted seeds and food out of organic fields, meaning most of the items we call organic today are just "mostly" organic.

Before you completely write the article off, there are examples of sustainable, organic farms, but they are few and far between, and they take way more work than a traditional farm (meaning they cost more to run). If we were to convert all of the US industrial farms to organic, consider the resources we would need. According to the article, current organic farms are able to replenish their soils with manure, etc because they only represent 3% of the food supply. Ramp this up to feed the 6.7 billion people (and growing) currently on the planet and we've got a problem. If we want to get rid of fertilizers and use cover crops and other alternative farming methods, we would need 2-3 times the amount of farmland currently available - which means knocking down more rainforests and taking over more land for farms.
This brings us back to the example of the no-till farmer from above and how we're going to feed the world. What if instead of strict organic regulations, we focus on trying to use fewer fertilizers and pesticides on the industrial farms. Using no-till and crop rotation to keep soils strong, healthy and sustainable, but also allowing a limited amount of chemicals into the system to keep yields high. Other alternative farming models will also be needed, like vertical farming (massive, glass-walled sky-scrapers capable of feeding thousands of people).

The other part of the equation is money. Money for research into alternative farming methods and organics. Money for offesetting the costs of food - one reason organic has yet to really take off is that it's expensive and with the rising costs of food, most people still have a hard time justifying the extra expense. Also money from government contracts - if they incorporated sustainability instead of just lowest-cost bidder as a criteria, that would also fuel more money into alternative agriculture. As long as industrial farms are allowed to externalize their costs and thus keep their prices down, then the farmers that are adding costs - well-paid labor, crop rotation, organics, etc - are going to have a hard time competing.
Looking at the options, it's still unclear whether we can fix the system and find a healthy, sustainable food production method that can feed everyone, or whether sustainable food production is inherently unsustainable. :Mother Jones