Can organic agriculture attain ‘miraculous’ productivity?
Some organic farms seem to attain very high productivity, such as this farm which claims to produce one million pounds of food on three acres.
I asked some of our p2p foundation associates with expertise on food production for commentary.
Here is Steve Bosserman:
“These articles have some truth, but they don’t tell the whole story. For instance, here’s a similar operation to what the Wake-Up World post highlights in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA area: www.growingpower.org/. They have a spin-off facility that specializes in aquaculture: sweetwater-organic.com/. They offer training programs to help people in communities across the U.S. setup their own food / composting / aquaculture systems. The founder of Growing Power, Will Allen, even won a MacArthur Foundation “genius award” to promote his program. And he was selected as one of Time Magazine’s Top 100 influential people in the world for 2010.
The problem is, as even Will Allen will say, that these food production systems require constant subsidy through gifts of time, materials, and money, grant funding, or high-end markets where clientele can afford to pay a premium for local food. In other words, they are not sustainable. Furthermore, they only provide a small percentage of the calorie requirements for the local populations they serve.
The answer rests in the community adopting a production-to-consumption local agriculture system rather than attempting to establish a sustainable food supply through production only. That means the entire value chain gets taken into consideration when designing the local system. And it means starting at the point of consumption, i.e., total number of affordable, accessible, and healthy calories required to sustain local community members, designing the system backwards to the points of production, and allocating the revenue from sales of calories to community members such that all participants in the value chain, i.e., preparation, processing, production, and distribution, can, at a minimum, cover their costs. Such a system is very different than a “destroked” global system which is what one has when only localizing production.”
July 23rd, 2011 at 2:14 am
When I saw your Facebook post on the million pounds on three acres my first impression was, this has the overall tone of an infomercial.
Anyway, I offer necessary constraints of “consumption possibility frontiers” as a possible mathematical model for what you call “starting at the point of consumption.”