Small Farms FTW

[crossfire]

Small farms may be better for food security and biodiversity
We often assume the only way to feed the world's rapidly growing human population is with large-scale industrial agriculture. Many would argue that genetically altering food crops is also necessary to produce large enough quantities on smaller areas to feed the world's people.

But recent

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[cheez_ball]

"Chappell and Lavalle point to research showing "that small farms using alternative agricultural techniques may be two to four times more energy efficient than large conventional farms." Perhaps most interesting is that they also found studies demonstrating "that small farms almost always produce higher output levels per unit area than larger farms.""

That's nice, but the product that reaches the shelves is more than double the price of the product coming from hydroponic (absent from the blog post) and factory farms. If people can't afford to eat fresh foods already they certainly won't be able to afford the higher priced food coming from alternative farms.

The blog post acknowledges that much of the problem is infrastructure and distribution but then talks about factory farming vs small scale farming as a cure to the problem. However if you have a severe drought in one region you're still going to have a resulting famine if you can't effectively use the infrastructure. And let's not forget about political problems.

Before we even have the conversation about what type of farming is best on a global scale we need to discuss things like infrastructure, distribution and the political influence of nutrition on a global scale. Because when a single chicken means the difference between a family eating protein for a week or not, no one cares whether the chicken was organically raised in a free range environment.