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This is a question about economy of scale: Is local, organic, and small-scale always--or ever--green?
Shouldn't massive factory farms and manufacturing facilities be--as a rule--more efficient, and therefore more "green" than smaller organic family farms and handcrafted goods?
After all, a 10,000 acre wheat farm run by a corporation is going to seek the cheapest way possible to produce the greatest amount of wheat. The cheapest way generally involves using the fewest resources and eliminating inefficiencies in the process. It becomes economical for the giant factory farm to use every useable part of the plant, whereas a smaller family farm might not be able to afford the processing facilities necessary to use all of the "byproducts" of producing wheat.
Furthermore, the old family tractor might escape pollution regulator's notice and be emitting far more pollutants per bushel, where as the oversized machinery used on the corporate farm is easier to regulate and therefore the corporation will be more inclined to keep it's equipment in good working order.
Also, the use of herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers means more yield per acre (otherwise they would never have been employed by the corporate farm in the first place) which means less arable land is stressed by the crops, which means less runoff, less soil nutrient depletion, and generally fewer barrels of oil needed per bushel produced.
The drawbacks I see to corporate, large-scale, "inorganic" farming would be scenarios where the regulatory fines on the corporation are less than the costs of implementing pollution controls. However, this situation can be corrected through stiffer penalties for polluters.
The idea of inorganic family farms seems counterproductive in the effort to reduce the amount of resources we consume simply producing the staples of everyday life.
The same goes for small-scale manufacturing processes and small-scale distribution centers (mom and pop stores, rather than big-box retailers). In general, aren't properly-regulated large-scale economic operations more efficient than small scale ones?
If you don't believe this to be true, can you point out any studies which specifically calculate and compare the environmental cost of the small-scale "organic" and industrialized "inorganic" processes?
Please bear in mind that I am only talking about supply-side economics. I recognize that economies of scale make goods cheaper, encouraging more consumption, which brings us into a cycle of overproduction, overconsumption, and waste. But, for a moment, assume that consumer greed could be somehow limited so that consumers could act responsibly and only take what they need, rather than grabbing up all that they can afford (and more). Wouldn't it make more sense for the planet for all goods to be produced by large-scale manufacturers?
I'm a small scale farmer who grows without petrochemicals. I wish more people would spend a week on a small scale family farm so that they had real knowledge of this topic. It would be a huge education for most.
"Economies of scale" - I can supply better quality, fresher food at a lower cost than the grocery store. I don't have the high over head they have to cover.
I can't afford to grow thousands of acres of wheat. I couldn't make a living on hundreds of dollars an acre without getting a tax payer supported subsidy check each year. I can earn a very comfortable living on tens of thousands of dollars an acre.
Answers will be an interesting read. The school bus is on its way so I'm going back to work. I'll check back in at lunch.
This is a question about economy of scale: Is local, organic, and small-scale always--or ever--green?
If you don't believe this to be true, can you point out any studies which specifically calculate and compare the environmental cost of the small-scale "organic" and industrialized "inorganic" processes?
I'm not much help because I am not aware of any studies. But your post is very thought provoking. I really wonder about that. To take it to extremes, it is like the difference in washing your car in your yard and taking it through a car wash. Everyone says the hand cleaning is "green". Is it? All of the water is recycled in an industrial wash versus being wasted. What about all of the cleaners and stuff that go into the ground? Organic cleaners? Yes, but, you remove all kinds of nasty stuff that goes into the ground.
Environmentally efficient isn't always the same as monitarily efficient, and quality isn't as good with the big guys.
Big box stores are more efficient at distributing the majority of the bell curve of items, but terribly inefficient at getting specialty items. Anybody who has tried to buy clothes for skinny people, or adult shoes for small feet knows what I'm talking about. They don't have them at the big box store and no they won't order them.
Need specialty trim to match what's already in your house? Good luck at Home Depot...but Fred down at the local hardware store remembers where to buy it. It'll take a couple weeks, but you get what you need.
That larger scale can be more efficient (efficiency generally being defined as producing proportionally more for less, whether the "less" refers to cost or waste or energy) does not mean that they are even remotely "green."
Take the example of large feed lots, which produce waste in such massive quantities that they can't deal it with it on-site, the way a smaller farm can put all that waste to use. Or the fact that to fatten the cattle, they have to feed them things they can't digest well, hence have to use more antibiotics (beyond what they have to use to prevent disease with so many animals in such close quarters). Large farms pass on "externalities" (waste, massive use of subsidized fossil fuels, run-off of pesticides and herbicides, tax subsidies for growing or not growing) to the public; small farms don't manage that.
Large operations are more wasteful because the waste is built in to the system. It's easier to plow under a blighted field or to slaughter sick cows when they only represent 1 or 2 percent of your total production. The small farmer has to stay on top of the health of his crops or livestock, as well as the health of his soil, because even the loss of one cow has an acute effect on his bottom line.
I'm a small scale farmer who grows without petrochemicals. I wish more people would spend a week on a small scale family farm so that they had real knowledge of this topic. It would be a huge education for most.
I grew up on a "small" (family owned around 1000 acres of dispersed corn and soybean fields, not corporate in the 10's of thousands like on the plains.) farm--not "organic" though. We used what chemicals were available to us to increase yields at the time. Nobody was willing to shell out more money for "organic" stuff back then, in fact the word simply meant anything made from living things. So, if you had asked us if our chemicals were "organic" we would've truthfully told you "yes" since they mostly came from petrochemicals which were once living things.
When I moved to the city, I noticed that the lifestyle we had on the farm was considerably more wasteful per person than your average city dweller of equal income and frugality. Where we drove a low-mpg pickup truck for miles just to get to the store, city folk didn't even own cars, and rode on trains powered by electricity which could be produced by powerplants with scrubbers on their exhaust (or clean nuclear/hydro plants; wind and solar were experimental back then). If everyone in the city drove a truck 30 miles to get groceries every other week, they'd have consumed a lot more resources than they were doing by concentrating all their services and production in a small area. When I saw that, it made me think about how concentrating production and consumption in general is more efficient.
Our equipment was leased and we had to drive it from field to field, burning up a lot of gas just hauling stuff around, passing other farmer's fields who weren't sharing the equip with us. If we'd all been in the same co-op (or part of a corporation), we could've saved a lot of fuel just not shifting equipment around, coordinating what areas had which crops, etc.
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"Economies of scale" - I can supply better quality, fresher food at a lower cost than the grocery store. I don't have the high over head they have to cover.
I won't argue the quality, but I wonder if you (and a bunch of independants like you) could fulfill the demands of all the people who buy food at that supermarket with less resource consumption than oversized "factory" farms. I'm sure there's inefficiencies in your process that could be eliminated; say, transporting your crops by rail (or barge, or bigger truck) rather than by truck, were your farm big enough to warrant running a rail line between it and the grocery distribution centers.
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I can't afford to grow thousands of acres of wheat. I couldn't make a living on hundreds of dollars an acre without getting a tax payer supported subsidy check each year. I can earn a very comfortable living on tens of thousands of dollars an acre.
Yet thousands of acres of wheat are needed to feed everyone--even if people only took what they needed. So, in manufacturing the staples, isn't large scale better than small scale?
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Need specialty trim to match what's already in your house? Good luck at Home Depot...but Fred down at the local hardware store remembers where to buy it. It'll take a couple weeks, but you get what you need.
But fred is going to burn extra electricity calling around to find that specialty trim, then you're going to burn extra oil going and getting it (or getting it shipped to you). The green thing to do is to just live with the trim available at the big box store.
Now, this is a real "inconvenient truth" because, seems to me, the "Green" way to live is for everyone to be eating vitamin protein slop like in that Matrix movie (or maybe being fed intraveneously like the battery people) and minimizing their physical activity so they burn up fewer calories. That way, we can cram the maximum number of human beings into the Earth and still feed/cloth/shelter all of them.
So, obviously, there has to be a balance struck between the population, the available resources, and quality of life. It seems to me that we need to either:
1. Limit our population - Good luck forcing people to do this. Education and wealth seems to make populations self-limit (like Europe), but education and wealth are not being spread to the majority of Earth's population fast enough to avoid overpopulating the planet.
2. Limit our resource consumption - This is the main thrust of "green" living, but there's a limit to what people can stand, and you still will run up against the population problem eventually, so this seems lik a loosing proposal. Unless you like factory farmed slurry. I think this is only a temporary fix.
3. Find more resources - This is how we've always done it, but the planet is fully mapped and it's stock of resources is on it's way to depletion due to our growing population. The only solution seems to be to look for resources in space. But it is difficult, dangerous, and requires extremely advanced technology to even get to space, let alone figure out how to grow crops (or mine for copper) on the Moon, Mars, or asteroids.
Anyway, I think any conversation about "Green Living" needs to take a look at the hard facts and hurdles we face as well as the fluffy "buy small-scale organic" or "buy a cloth shopping bag" easy (and sometimes even counter-productive) stuff where we pretend we can just throw more money at the problem and make it go away. More money helps. Conservation helps. Being healthy is always good, but there are serious problems that we need to solve.
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Take the example of large feed lots, which produce waste in such massive quantities that they can't deal it with it on-site, the way a smaller farm can put all that waste to use.
But the large feed lots can justify large waste-treatment and reclamation facilities while the small farmer doesn't go around collecting cow chips from his fields. The large feed lot doesn't increase runoff pollution and soil erosion (per head) like free-range cattle do. Also, it only takes one regulator one day to inspect the waste being produced by 10,000 head at the feedlot, while it takes that same regulator several days to get an idea of the environmental impact of 10,000 head of free-range cattle scattered between a half-dozen ranchers--if he even bothers. Plus, it's easier for those ranchers to hide their environmentally damaging practices if they don't care to take their pickup's used oil to a reclamation center or something. After all, it's just a few quarts of oil and he's got a lot of empty land, what's the harm in dumping it, as opposed to spending the time and money to collect it and take it in to be processed?
Just because the environmental impact is spread out over thousands of acres and is harder to measure doesn't mean it's not there.
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Or the fact that to fatten the cattle, they have to feed them things they can't digest well, hence have to use more antibiotics (beyond what they have to use to prevent disease with so many animals in such close quarters). Large farms pass on "externalities" (waste, massive use of subsidized fossil fuels, run-off of pesticides and herbicides, tax subsidies for growing or not growing) to the public; small farms don't manage that.
No argument on the feed or antibiotics, but I doubt they outweigh the other costs/environmental impact savings.
It should be easier to fix the waste problems, because it's TECHNICALLY easier to regulate and control large farms. Now, maybe because they have more money, they can bribe their way out of trouble more often, but I'd like to keep this discussion on the technical aspects of large-vs-small scale.
Small farm - plant an apple tree in your yard. When you see ripe apples, walk outside and pick them. When the tree dies, burn it to heat your house. Use the leaves for a mulch pile.
Big Farm - grow apples using illegal labor driven from Arizona to Washington. Increase yields using petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides. Import bees to pollinate the field. Pack apples into cardboard boxes and refrigerate. Trucks haul apples to distribution center where they are placed on more trucks to go to the stores. People get in cars and drive to and from the store to get an apple. People drive to and from work at the farms, distribution center, and stores. Accountants keep track of all those people and cut down small forests to keep track of their salaries, P&L, insurance. Marketing department puts ads in magazines and newspapers, as well as grocery store fliers. PAC makes campaign contributions to make sure government subsidies keep coming in. Compnay distributes paperwork to stockholders and institutional investors, files reports with SEC, and other government regulatory bodies, etc., ad nauseum...
Small farm - plant an apple tree in your yard. When you see ripe apples, walk outside and pick them. When the tree dies, burn it to heat your house. Use the leaves for a mulch pile.
And what of the other 5 billion people who have no yard in which to plant an apple tree?
What about when winter comes in your region and you need fresh fruits and vegetables?
There is a support system in place to feed Earth's 6 billion. Small-scale operations are an effective niche market; good for the small % who live in agricultural areas and the ultra-wealthy (compared to the world average) who can afford to buy "organic."
However, I am beginning to think that conversion to the dispersed production and dispersed pollution of small-scale or "organic" farms en-mass may not be as green as the concentrated yields and managing the concentrated pollution of large-scale agribusiness.
Wishing for a time when the population was small enough for every family--or even community--to be self-sufficient does not seem to address reality very well.
I'd guess that most of the world's food is raised on small farms around the world. Those small farmers sell their surplus product to the large agribusinesses. Most small villages are going to raise most of their own food, just as they have done for thousands of years. The huge American megafarms just aren't going to exist in places like China that have been around for thousands of years, and also because arable land is in such tight supply there.
Large scale operations work in places like the US that have large sections of land that have never been heavily inhabited, but to convert most of the world's farm production to the same model would displace millions and leave many people unable to fend for themselves as they have been able to do since before there were cities.
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