The Future of Agriculture: Wired Tomatoes

This post at Technology Review describes the potential for really precision agriculture--essentially applying the "internet of things" to tomato growing in New England.  Did you know New England tomatoes are different than tomatoes grown elsewhere (as in warmer climates)?  There's potential for using technology to monitor growing tomatoes .

I suspect this represents one set of developments in future agriculture, where farmers lose their rednecks (I've got one--from bending over in the garden) by much more intensive use of technology. There will be a further bifurcation of farmers:

So on one hand we'll have the tech-farmers, investing more capital into much more precise control of growth.  I'd count the vertical farmers of leafy greens as other examples.  This agriculture will be seen as much less "natural" than today's.

On the other hand we'll have the artisan farmers, who will be more organic and grow more diverse crops (heirloom tomatoes, etc.)

Haspel on Vertical Farming

I respect Tamar Haspel's work, so I buy her conclusions on the tradeoffs involved with indoor, vertical farming.  Bottomline: because of the energy involved, the carbon footprint of current day vertical farms (of lettuce) is much bigger than for more conventional operations.  Efficiencies might import, and the lettuce produced has some advantages.

I've mocked vertical farming before, but that's the plans relying on sunlight.  I'd observe that growing lettuce is, I'd guess, the choosing the easiest path for artificial light farming.  And while these operations fit the locavore template, they don't fit the organic template.

Locavores Need Wool Suits?

A post here from USDA on the use of sheep to reduce tillage in an organic farming setup.  The idea seems to be to control weeds by grazing sheep on land for a year between row crops.

My comment is, as with other organic rotations like using alfalfa in a rotation, it's fine if you have a market/use for the product.  Sheep herds have declined over the decades as we turned away from wool suits and mutton.  The knitters of the world can absorb only so much wool from small sheep farms (which doesn't mean the prices of skeins of yarn are low). In the old days of horses and dairy grazing you had use for fields of grass; in the days of tractors and barn-housed cows you don't.

Farming like most any human industry is more complex than it looks from the outside.

Organic Does Not Equal Small or American

Modern Farmer has a piece on the costs of converting farmland to organic (it requires a multi-year history of only organic methods being used, which is costly) so Costco is going to finance some vertical integration:

"This first initiative will find Costco partnering with Andrew & Williamson Fresh Produce, based in San Diego, to buy equipment and 1,200 acres of land just south of the border."

As I say in the previous post, the organic premium and demand is there now, but I predict an overbuilding of capacity. 

Organic Does Not Equal Locavore

A Bloomberg piece on the importing of organic grain from Romania and India.  It's certainly not energy-efficient.

This is related to the next post on Costco springing for the costs of converting farmland to organic.  I'd interpret both as saying the price premium for organic is promising enough to warrant these measures.  I'd also guess there will be at some point down the road an overbuilding of organic capacity, because farmers usually overshoot their market corrections.

Small Farmers in the Past

One of the frustrations of dealing with proposals like Mr. Bittman's to create more small farmers is a knowledge of history.  We've been there, done that. Our history shows small farms being consolidated into large farms, small farms going out of production and reverting to trees (see New England and New York), small farms being converted to suburbs.  Our history also shows repeated "back-to-the farm" movements, sometimes with government support, as here. 

My point is, not that small farms are bad, but they have vanished for economic reasons. Unless and until the food movement comes up with structures which change the reasons, small farms are doomed.

Now niche markets will work for some, but they don't represent an "answer" for America, just for a subset of Americans who can afford the tab.

Local Food Is Not Organic,Necessarily

The New York Times had an article the other day on a "vertical farming" project in Newark, NJ.  An excerpt:

Unlike urban vegetable gardens of the past that took advantage of empty lots or evolved in rooftop greenhouses, AeroFarms employs so-called aeroponics and stacks its produce vertically, meaning plants are arrayed not in long rows but upward. Because the farming is completely indoors, it relies on LED bulbs, with crops growing in cloth and fed with a nutrient mist.

 I've been critical of some vertical farming concepts, particularly the ones which rely on sunshine and ignore shade, or use fluorescent lights.  LED's are more efficient than fluorescents so it's possible that such setups are energy-efficient when you add in the energy savings on transporting produce to market.

Meanwhile Sec. Vilsack is pushing local food:

Local food gives consumers a chance to know the farmers producing their food, to access fresher food and an opportunity to keep food dollars in the local economy, he said. In short, “local and regional food systems create a better connection between people who produce and people who eat.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/agriculture-secretary-tom-vilsack-locally-grown-food-116830.html#ixzz3X2JkLXKm

 But the organic types have reservations:

A definition for local would help organic farmers make the case for why their often more expensive produce is worth the cost, argues Laura Batcha, director of the Organic Trade Association.
“There is definitely an issue with the public differentiating between local and organic,” Batcha said. “In many cases, both things happen together … but the public, I think, assumes that local is organic.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/agriculture-secretary-tom-vilsack-locally-grown-food-116830.html#ixzz3X2K3LQGQ

Who Polices the Police: Organics in Poland and Junk Bonds Here

When I read this piece at Vox on how the organic certifications and EU subsidies work in Poland, I was reminded of how the securities ratings firms work in the US (as in assigning AAA ratings to various securities leading up to the 2008 crash).

And ‘everyone’ includes the organic certification companies, who, on their own admission, do not conduct on-site inspections of either fields or harvests, because they are not legally obliged to do so. “If the certifying company nonetheless expresses some reservations, it will quickly be replaced by one of its more indulgent competitors,” explains Teresa Ropelewska of Agro Bio Test. Worse still, overzealous certifiers may even risk court action. As a result, discipline and discretion have become watchwords for companies that want to keep their customers.

Locavore and Organic

Technology Review has a piece on LED lights in greenhouses.  Includes this surprising factoid:

Consequently, the number of commercial greenhouses and the area they occupy is rocketing. In the Netherlands, for example, greenhouses occupy around 0.25 per cent of the land area of the entire country.

 It reports on a study showing LED lights would be much cheaper than sodium lights, with the interesting possibility of tailoring the color spectrum output to match plant characteristics--certain plants use some parts of the spectrum and not others, etc.

I wonder whether greenhouse plants can be organic, if grown under unnatural lights.

Can You Truly Buy Organic at Walmart?

A Slate article argues that Whole Foods is losing its edge in organics, due to the competition from Walmart.  Maybe it's time to sell my Whole Foods stock?  If the difference(s) between organic and non-organic apparent to our senses are most evident in the label, maybe Walmart can win this fight.  Meanwhile there's a fight over organic certification.

Can you have industrial organic agriculture?    Or how about this startup aiming for a substitute for eggs? Is this the point where the food movement and the environmental movement follow different paths? (I see they're selling through Whole Foods!)

Stop the Presses: Foodie Says Not All Industrial Food Is

Evil!!  Mark Bittman, the NYTimes resident foodie, has a piece with that title.  He finds some virtue in the canned tomatoes produced by a California grower in Yolo County and canned by a co-op.

The grower is: "

Rominger Brothers Farms is a progressive, diversified family farm and ranch located north of Winters, California. Brothers Rick and Bruce Rominger are fifth-generation Yolo County farmers. They produce many different crops using organic and conventional techniques, including winegrapes, processing tomatoes, rice, wheat, corn, safflower, sunflower, onions, alfalfa and oat hay. As stewards of the land, Bruce and Rick are committed to growing crops in ways that protect the environment, such as minimizing the use of crop protection materials, using drip irrigation to conserve water and using sheep to graze crop residue."

They've 6,000 acres, 40 employees, grow 80 acres of tomatoes and hope to clear $500 an acre. Best I can tell the tomatoes aren't organic.

Bittman's impressed that the canned tomatoes taste better than fresh supermarket ones, but I wonder whether he did a taste test controlling for salt levels.  But still, I have to give him credit for having an open mind.

He does end with a plea for more unionization (though the co-op is unionized) and/or upping the minimum wage.  How he reconciles that with the acknowledgement that " the processed tomato market is international, with increasing pressure from Italy, China and Mexico..." I don't know. 

A side note--the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture in the Clinton era was Richard Rominger; I wonder if there's any relationship?

No GMO Organisms

The Times has an article today on the search for supplies of commodities which aren't GMO.  Seems to be particularly inspired by Whole Foods decision to emphasize such products.  (I own some stock in Whole Foods.)  It cites a premium of $1.50 to $2 per bushel for grain, and discusses the difficulty in doing a dual-track supply system.   It also includes this, which I found astonishing:

And farmers cannot simply replace genetically engineered seeds with conventional ones, because soil in which genetically modified crops have been grown may not be immediately suitable for conventional crops.

“There’s a transition period required,” said Richard Kamolvathin, senior vice president at Verity Farms, which sells meats, grains and other products derived from conventional crops, as well as natural soil amendments. “You don’t just stop growing G.M.O. seed and then start growing non-G.M.O. seed.”

 Now I understand moving from conventional to organic production requires a 3-year phase in, but just switching seed?  I suppose there might be herbicide/pesticide residues, but how long do they last?

Liberrals in a Bind on Organic Checkoff?

Liberals, being mostly urban types, tend in my observation to have little sympathy for the various agricultural promotion programs.  And libertarians definitely think they're an encroachment on the freedom of the individual producer. 

So this line from todays Farm Policy'  may set up an interesting conflict:

"Mr. Lies also noted that, “Schrader said he also is working on an amendment with Rep. Reid Ribble, R-Wis., to establish a national checkoff program for organic producers.”

Why?  Because I think liberals are also more favorable to the organic movement.  Do they support a checkoff to promote organics or do they resist to promote freedom?

Planting the White House Garden?

Obamafoodorama reports on the planting of the White House garden.  We've had a cool, rather dry couple of months which has delayed everything, particularly the cherry blossoms. 

In our garden we got the peas and lettuce, etc.in fairly early, though not as early as Al, who always beats us.  His peas and lettuce have been showing for a couple weeks now, while I just saw ours this morning.

Mrs. Obama is planting wheat, planning to focus on whole grain foods when it's harvested in the summer. The garden is up to 1,500 square feet, and as they have in the past, they're using seedlings, not seeds so much, which probably explains why they're slower than we are, even though their garden is probably a half zone warmer. 

No mention in the posts about whether the kids are doing any weeding--I think it's safe to say they aren't.  I'm not a parent, but I suspect it's tough to get teenagers to do anything like that.

Crop Insurance and Organics

Sustainable AGriculture highlighted RMA's dropping of the 5 percent surcharge for organic insurance, which seems to have been counterbalanced by their acceptance of OIG recommendations on transitional yields and loss adjustment for organic crops.

This OIG report finds that FCIC/RMA has been offering "transitional yields" (the crop yields assigned to a farm for years when there's no actual production history availabe) for organically grown crops which are too high.  For example, if the transitional yield is 125 bushels an acre for organically grown corn, and the true yield is 11...  Congress has pushed the expansion of crop insurance to organic crops, RMA has responded, but had a contractor evaluate the experience. Excerpts:

The contractor recommended that transitional yields be lowered by 35 percent for insurance plans that use APH yields as the basis for the production guarantee in order to better reflect experience data and lower loss ratios. RMA acknowledges that transitional yields for organic crops are generally too high, but has not implemented the recommendation because it considers the production data currently available to be too “thin” to support a methodology for setting separate transitional yields for organic crops.

We found that insured producers for 35 of 48 organic crop policies with losses did not have production histories supporting that they could grow the insured crops to reach the yields used to determine the production guarantee or amount of insurance.16 This occurred because RMA directs AIPs to apply transitional yields and underwriting standards established for crops produced using conventional farming practices to crops produced using organic farming practices. As a result, at least $952,000 of $2.56 million in indemnities that RMA underwrote were excessive. In addition, insured producers with organic crops experienced a programwide loss ratio of 105 percent.17 In contrast, insureds with conventional crops experienced a loss ratio of only 67 percent.

OIG also found the loss adjusters did not follow procedures for adjusting organic crops.·

Twenty-two stated that the AIPs do not require them to obtain and/or review the organic plan and inspection report.
·
Seven said that the loss adjustment requirements for adjusting crops produced using organic farming practices were no different than for crops produced using conventional farming practices.
·
Five stated that the agent and underwriter collected the organic plan and inspection report.
·
Five loss adjusters gave varying reasons for not obtaining and reviewing the organic plans and inspection reports.

 Bottom line: Organic crops can't actually match conventional cropping in yields, at least not on available data.  It will take years to build the data and the loss adjusting experience to do a good job on organics.

The Iowa State Nearly Organic Study

Mr. Bittman discusses a 9-year Iowa State study of organic agriculture in Sunday's Times (I'm just getting caught up with my reading).

From the abstract: we conducted a field study from 2003–2011 in Iowa that included three contrasting systems varying in length of crop sequence and inputs. We compared a conventionally managed 2-yr rotation (maize-soybean) that received fertilizers and herbicides at rates comparable to those used on nearby farms with two more diverse cropping systems: a 3-yr rotation (maize-soybean-small grain + red clover) and a 4-yr rotation (maize-soybean-small grain + alfalfa-alfalfa) managed with lower synthetic N fertilizer and herbicide inputs and periodic applications of cattle manure. Grain yields, mass of harvested products, and profit in the more diverse systems were similar to, or greater than, those in the conventional system, despite reductions of agrichemical inputs. Weeds were suppressed effectively in all systems, but freshwater toxicity of the more diverse systems was two orders of magnitude lower than in the conventional system. Results of our study indicate that more diverse cropping systems can use small amounts of synthetic agrichemical inputs as powerful tools with which to tune, rather than drive, agroecosystem performance, while meeting or exceeding the performance of less diverse systems.

So it wasn't "organic"in the pure sense. And that raises a question: currently "organic" food gets a significant price premium.  Is it possible for "nearly organic" food to get a price premium? (A quick skim of the report says they didn't assume higher prices for outputs of the alternative systems.) Is it possible to rally public support for farm programs helping "nearly organic" farmers?

I renew my question from previous such studies: where is the market for the increased production of alfalfa?

Organic Food

Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy posts on a meta-study of the nutrition values of organic food.  It says no consistent support for the idea that organic food is safer or more nutritious. Apparently it's true there are differences between organic and non-organic food, but the evidence that the difference is enough to make a difference in human health is lacking.

Big Organic and Dairy

NYTimes has two pieces today:  an article on how big food has taken over many organic food operations, along with a claim they've used their influence on USDA's organic standards board to approve ingredients which shouldn't be included in "organic food"; and a Mark Bittman diatribe against milk.  Yes, I realize my bias is showing in calling it a "diatribe", but Mr. Bittman's bias is also showing: he blames milk for years of his own health problems, which makes a strong case that nobody should drink milk.

They're currently 2nd and 3rd most popular NYTimes articles today.

Organic = Smug Self-Righteousness?

That's my impression from the research reported on at Barking Up the Wrong Tree.   It's not eating the organic food which makes one a jerk; it's being exposed to the concept.  Apparently the logic is the exposure makes one more conscious of morality, hence more judgmental and less willing to help others.

Meta Study of Organic Farms

The LA times reports on a study in Nature which looked at studies of organic agriculture, finding an average 20 percent difference in productivity.  The impact varies by crop, with annuals more affected than perennials and fruits.  

One commenter spins:

In fact, in cases in which growers used techniques that are considered to be the best practices for organic farming, the gap between organic and conventional yields narrowed to 13%.
"If you do things as well as you can, then the yield difference is very small," Cavigelli said.

There's no indication of whether the non-organic farms were using their "best practices", but my cynical self suspects they weren't.  There's also no indication of whether the comparison was crop to crop, or acre to acre (the latter meaning the total productivity of an acre over several years).