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

Comments

[lone_concertina]

AHHHH I'm kind of freaking out because the farm featured in the picture is the one I worked on for 8 months after college! That's so wonderful!!!

[lone_concertina]

WAIT HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE THAT'S ME IN THE PICTURE WEARING THE APRON I MADE FROM ONE OF THOSE CUTE MEXICAN DRESSES WHAT THE FLIP

[lone_concertina]

I'm legit freaked out by this coincidence. A picture of my torso taken in 2007 ends up in a scientific article 4 years later preaching the same thing I preach myself? Geez.

[morbidimpishfae]

That's actually kind-of awesome!

[madman101]

it's about time

[lied_ohne_worte]

Very good points in the article.

Also, when you get extremely large, easily machine-harvestable fields that don't have any of the ditches, banks, or bushes that would separate smaller fields in areas with more farms, interesting things can happen with erosion.

When people are killed in a sandstorm in Northern Germany, something has gone wrong - it was said that the fact that this storm got so bad might be at least in part due to the agricultural techniques in the GDR's agricultural collectives, which was basically to flatten everything so you could run combine harvesters over it from one end of the horizon to the other.

[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

[darxus]

I'm all for small scale, local farming. Hell, I bought a five acre farm with aspirations of producing food. But I suspect it's kind of screwed up to think that it's possible to eliminate malnourished humans. Is there reason to believe that humans, unlike every other species, won't keep reproducing to the limits of our ability to support ourselves?