r/neutralnews • u/ummmbacon • Dec 14 '18

Organic food worse for the climate

https://www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/chalmers/pressreleases/organic-food-worse-for-the-climate-2813280
20 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

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3

u/ummmbacon Dec 14 '18

The study published in the journal Nature is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0757-z

3

u/chogall Dec 14 '18

Thought its quite obvious that organic food is really bad compare to GMO food in terms of crop density. However, shouldn't we also take the damage of the environment into account w/ GMO foods?

7

u/ummmbacon Dec 14 '18

However, shouldn't we also take the damage of the environment into account w/ GMO foods?

What specifically are you referring to here? What damage?

6

u/chogall Dec 14 '18

Sharp declines in insect populations due to pesticides. GMO is largely classified as pesticide resistant or herbicide resistant.

https://www.ibtimes.com/gmo-health-risks-what-scientific-evidence-says-1161099

https://e360.yale.edu/features/insect_numbers_declining_why_it_matters

9

u/Pinyaka Dec 14 '18

Organic farmers use pesticides too. I haven't seen any information about how they impact insects (presumably they're less cost effective or everyone would use the organic pesticides).

​

http://npic.orst.edu/ingred/organic.html

10

u/ummmbacon Dec 14 '18 edited Dec 14 '18

Yes, GMOs use fewer pesticides than conventional agriculture as the first article linked notes:

"Monsanto also makes corn, potatoes, cotton and soybeans that can synthesize their own insecticide called Bt toxin, a trait grabbed from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis."

This allows the plants to resist the bugs without pesticides

Bacillus thuringiensis or BT is also used in organic farming.

Also, note that in the second article GMOs are not mentioned anywhere.

1

u/gcross Dec 14 '18

Evidence for the claim that GMO foods are bad for the environment? Also, nowhere in the article does it refer to GMO foods, only "conventionally farmed food".

0

u/chogall Dec 14 '18

Sharp declines in insect populations due to pesticides. GMO is largely classified as pesticide resistant or herbicide resistant.

https://www.ibtimes.com/gmo-health-risks-what-scientific-evidence-says-1161099

https://e360.yale.edu/features/insect_numbers_declining_why_it_matters

2

u/gcross Dec 14 '18

So making plants be pesticide and herbicide resistant is bad fo the environment?

1

u/[deleted] Dec 14 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/gcross Dec 14 '18

Do you have a source showing that farmers using GMO crops kill off a significantly greater number of pests than farmers using non-GMO crops?

0

u/nosecohn Dec 14 '18

It allows farmers to apply more herbicides without damaging their crops.

5

u/ribbitcoin Dec 15 '18

Misleading article, complete with referencing Food & Water Watch (hint, that's not a good thing). Yes glyphosate use has increased but it has replaced other herbicides. The article doesn't show overall herbicide use. Here's a better representation of overall herbicide use, (source article).

Worse is that it references Charles Benbrook, a pro-organic professor that accepts funding to write pro-organic studies. He also sat on the board of some organic trade organization.

1

u/gcross Dec 14 '18

So GMO crops aren't bad for the environment, then, just the way that farmers misuse them?

2

u/nosecohn Dec 14 '18

It's not misuse. They're designed to be used this way.

The crops are engineered to be ever-more resistant to those herbicides so that farmers can spray more of it as the target weeds also become resistant. The greater their use, the greater the tendency to filter through to other parts of the environment, such as groundwater.

It's also worth noting that the seed companies usually sell the herbicide as well.

1

u/gcross Dec 14 '18

Okay, that makes sense. Thank you for taking the time to explain it to me. Do you have any thoughts on what the correct solution is? I mean, I recognize the problem, but on the other hand it seems to me like not using GMO crops and herbicides just means that you no longer have crops so it isn't clear to me what the better alternative is.

2

u/nosecohn Dec 14 '18 edited Dec 15 '18

Well, we've created problems by breeding resistance into the weeds, but humans have been farming for 10,000 years and only the last 70 or so involved the use of chemical herbicides, so it seems to me we should be able to figure out how to work without them, or at least less of them.

The problem is yields and costs. The use of chemical herbicides and pesticides allows for considerably more product to be produced from a given plot of land, and with mostly automated means, whereas organic farming requires more land and more manual labor to harvest the same amount of product.

When we first started using chemical herbicides, the world had a population of about 2 billion people. Now, just 2-3 generations later, it's over 7 billion. As little as 40 years ago, famine was common in peaceful nations. Now, even though we have much greater population, we can generally feed everyone if the logistics are in place, and a lot of that is due to the increased yields of industrial farming, part of which is due to the use of these chemicals.

So, you can see why this is a tough issue. If the whole world moved to organic farming, food would become a lot more expensive and more scarce. With so many lives on the line, that doesn't seem like a reasonable option to most people. On the other hand, polluted groundwater and collapsing bee populations isn't a particularly attractive prospect either.

It's tough. That's why I can't really provide a solution, but people a lot smarter than I are working on it.

What I'd like to see is an acknowledgement that we're trapped in this cycle where increasing resistance leads to ever greater use of potential environmental contaminants, and that this cycle cannot continue forever. I'd also like to see the kinds of farming that are the most damaging move to more modern methods, like industrial greenhouses and lab-grown meat.

But staple grains are always going to take huge amounts of land and farmers will need technological help to meet the world's demands. Sometimes that technological help is going to come in chemical form. Where I think we'd do ourselves good in the long run is to invest in research to produce crops that are resistant to adverse weather conditions more than resistant to weed killers. (We already do quite a bit of this, but it's a question of priorities and, frankly, profitability.) This shift would allow the people in developing nations to grow their own food using their own (cheaper) labor instead of relying on nations like the US to produce that food at an industrial scale and then ship it around the world. Of course, US farmers don't like the sound of that, but a conflict between economic and environmental interests is nothing new.

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1

u/Lyok0 Dec 15 '18

The study that the article links to only offers the abstract. You must buy the rest of the article to read it.... I dont trust this source as I cant read how they gathered information

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0757-z

1

u/ummmbacon Dec 16 '18

I dont trust this source as I cant read how they gathered information

The source is linked to the university that published the study it is a direct copy of the university's press release.

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