National Research Council study quoted in article: "A well-managed alternative farming systems nearly always use less synthetic chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and antibiotics per unit of production than conventional farms."
There's a certain disingenuousness in this rhetoric. A skilled, professional bicycle frame builder can build a frame that's stronger with less materials than the frames that come out of semi-automated plants in Korea. But that doesn't mean the framebuilder is "more efficient".
Industrial agriculture is far more efficient in terms of labor. That's what matters in the process of transforming society. Notably, the labor freed up by industrial agriculture can be used to very efficiently accumulate more resources to be put into agriculture and even more knowledge.
Which isn't to say small scale farms don't some virtues but let's be clear what's going on.
I don’t think it’s disingenuous to say that certain types of farms use less harmful chemicals. But if you know that they take more labor then one could ask, how can we reduce the labor requirements of small farms to make those benefits scale? For my part I’m designing a solar powered farming robot that is totally open source, with the hope that this will lead to low automation costs for small regenerative organic farms.
I wouldnt say it is disingenuous, but rather tautologous (true in virtue of the statement).
Ind Ag is more efficient at producig food. Europe was starving until modern mechanised ag. But now we have too much and it is poisoning the world and we ned to move to the next solution: integrated ecological management.
It requires far more knowledge: an in depth understanding of the agriculture relating sciences. But less pesticides, less fertilizers, no-till certainly reduces the labor.
> But less pesticides, less fertilizers, no-till certainly reduces the labor.
How do you figure? Pesticide, Fertilization, Tilling and Harvesting are precisely the types of labor that has been automated and is now done 60-feet wide by 4 miles an hour.
The automatization is far from being the norm (if you mean autonomous tractor). Then automatization applies to both type of agriculture. But there how do I figure? Not sure to properly understand your question, because less works mean less labors. Automatized or not.
The parent just said "automated". Using a tractor driven by a person to till a field is a vast savings over using a horse or person, as was done previously.
Autonomous vehicles and AI have been vastly oversold as a mean or a source of automation. There's been a huge amount of automation through applying regular machines to things that were previously done by hand and that's still where most labor-saving improvements happen.
They do: less inputs mean that the farmer has to spend less time on the fields. Fertilizer isn't put in one shot. It is done multiple time over the year. Less means it will be done less times.
There's a certain disingenuousness in this rhetoric. A skilled, professional bicycle frame builder can build a frame that's stronger with less materials than the frames that come out of semi-automated plants in Korea. But that doesn't mean the framebuilder is "more efficient".
Industrial agriculture is far more efficient in terms of labor. That's what matters in the process of transforming society. Notably, the labor freed up by industrial agriculture can be used to very efficiently accumulate more resources to be put into agriculture and even more knowledge.
Which isn't to say small scale farms don't some virtues but let's be clear what's going on.