Responding to J
Reader J (and blogger) offers some a great response to my post on liberalizing agriculture on the comments page. I'd like, however, to point out one exception to his comment:
Fertilizers and pesticides have a series of unsustainable problems, from oil supply to runoff to increasing cancer rates in humans to the "pesticide treadmill" where the use of pesticides rapidly creates resistance to the pesticide while killing natural predators; integrated pest management while more difficult, is almost certainly more efficient
I suspect that J is making a mistake here of conflating value with efficiency. My experiences with agriculture, which were both participatory and extremely limited, have been that "difficult" is, by definition, "inefficient." Simple spray-on fertilizers and pesticides yield a "good enough" result for the average farmer with much less effort than more difficult methods. From the standpoint of the single rational actor, whose timespan is probably no more than one or two generations, this makes it the most "efficient" method. The problem of course, is that we have collective considerations (like overall consumer quality or environmental degradation) which are more valuable collectively than to the individual rational actor tilling his field.
Integrated pest management is unquestionably more valuable than industrial spraying. However, my personal experience leads me to believe that integrated pest management is an awful lot of work for very little material reward.
1 Comments:
Having wrote this offline, I'm not entirely sure how clear this is. Anyone wanting the quick version is best advised to skip to the last paragraph. But here goes.
I am not quite sure how difficult and efficient are interrelated de facto, much less the same thing, if you are talking about a whole cycle analysis -- i.e. outcomes and inputs. It is more difficult to make a good friend than an aquaintance; but if you want to find a source of constant contact and intellectual stimlulation, it will likely be more efficient to make a friend than to bother new strangers every day.
To use a less silly parallel, what Geoff is saying in chemical terms is that its much more efficient to conduct, say, alloy production by setting different metals on top of each other. It is far easier, it just takes slightly longer for the molecules to interpenetrate. Or, you know, we should conduct combustion at room temperature. It still happens, just slowly, but it's less difficult ergo more efficient, right? No need to worry about the efficiency of, say, enzymes that work better at a certain energy level, because it's "easier" to do them at a lower level. [Re-reading this, I realize it doesn't fit with my later def'n of efficiency in terms of outputs and inputs... but I think it does go to easiness not being a completely useful concept in terms of efficiency -- J]
Alright, sorry, but seriously -- if one says it is less difficult, and therefore efficient, for a farmer to sit on a tractor and harvest and sow mechanically, then you're right -- if you discount/ignore the resources needed to go into the fuel, tractor parts, tractor maintenance, and problems with pesticide resistance (an inevitable occurrence that most evidence says is increasing, and is an externality costing ~3X the entire size of the pesticide sector). By virtue of the farmer not having to procure the various sources and create the various intermediates, s/he has an easier time. But I can't see how easier is in ANY way necessarily related to efficient -- may as well equate "enjoyable" and "efficient".
To simplify, my technical definition of efficiency is essentially the ratio of inputs (energy, matter) to useful outputs; the lower the input:output ratio (that is, the less stuff you need to get stuff out) the more efficient. The methods of conventional farming are only economically possible at a large scale (and even then only economically possible because of distortionary petroleum subsidies by government -- I don't hold all subsidies are wrong, though I do hold *this* subsidy is wrong). At a large scale, you need more capital in to take advantage of the system. As you obtain more capital, for most farmers, their debt increases; and at some point the margins become too thin, and they're bought by an even larger landholder. [A broad generalization perhaps, but not unrepresentative -- J]
As I explained before, larger landholdings are less efficient in that it takes more inputs (manpower + mechanical capital + pesticides/fertilizers) for comparitively less outputs. Small landholdings are almost inevitably more efficient in terms of energy + matter in for usable energy + matter out. The only way the more difficult route (comparable perhaps to "activiation energy") is less efficient is if you ONLY count manpower of the farmer as input.
(While this result has been shown to be true statistically, I suspect the underlying mechanics are largely due to increased efficiency of biological actors, i.e. a farmer using more of his/her own work rather than a machine's, vs. industrial entities. To use a tractor, the ores for its construction and the petroleum for its function must be harvested; then, it loses 95% of the energy of internal combustion to heat loss. And, as I said, large farmers typically use all of their land, which has varying degrees of suitability, which means even areas more appropriate for another crop get used, requiring an even higher input for diminishing rewards.
So at the scale of a single rational actor, I can only see how Geoff is right in terms of “Do I want to sit on a tractor and sweat, or do it with simpler tools and sweat more?” This farmer apparently doesn’t care about money or yields (as organic methods can yield equal or great yields; see work by Lockeretz, Rossett, Pretty & Hines, Vandermeer, Perfecto, and soon, me and some of my colleagues; also see the UN Ag page’s organic info). There is strong, though not definitive, empirical evidence that small farms are more economically viable with alternative methods than conventional, i.e. generate higher profit margins than larger farms. Additionally, work by William Lockeretz implies alternative farming keeps more money inside a community, which theoretically can only be good for the community in terms then of their economic well being and choices. So the atom of a single rational actor in Geoff’s analysis, as far as I can see, doesn’t care about money, yield, erosion, pesticide resistance, passing the land on to his/her children, sustaining his/her community, and decreasing his/her family and everyone else’s health via runoff and other various emissions. This seems to me to define efficiency in such a way as to make it a useless concept.
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