Conventionalization, Part I: Change is not the enemy

Mostly based off: Ika Darnhofer, Thomas Lindenthal, Ruth Bartel-Kratochvil and Werner Zollitsch. “Conventionalisation of organic farming practices: from structural criteria towards an assessment based on organic principles. A review.” Agron. Sustain. Dev. 30 (1) 67-81 (2010)


We've talked about 'conventional' vs. 'organic' crops (so far, pretty much just leeks, really, but there will be more). That paper was pretty much focusing on those farms and their differences, and how that plays out in terms of impacts. In this post, though, we'll talk more about organic farms potentially getting more conventional - and so theoretically less 'good' in the ways that we want organic to be good. This is referred to as 'conventionalization'. The big question at hand is - how do we tell if conventionalization is happening?


So is my granola bad or not?
Darnhofer and co. seem to be a wee bit annoyed with the current 'debate' about whether organic farms are becoming conventionalized. I've identified with this feeling of irritation previously, while going on about granola and whether the fact that an organic operation had changed and scaled up meant it was necessarily bad. 


So when I got the the part in their paper where they get very snide (in a scientific, proper sort of way) about drawing conclusions from inappropriate data (like farm size! Ha!) to decide whether organic farms are getting worse, I felt a little justified. And I will admit it - when they put in a jab about how studies on the changes in organic farming were being done by social scientists (heaven forfend!) I started feeling a bit of actual smugness. Not that studying neutrinos at some point actually makes me any more qualified to talk about changing farm dynamics than a social scientist.


How would we know?
All my misplaced feelings of superiority aside, it quickly became clear that just because the authors did not like the way the debate was being conducted, did not mean any easy answers awaited.The authors don't disagree that there's very likely a real problem. They acknowledge multiple times that there are 'signs' of conventionalism, and while they may not yet be dominant, they are real and pose a threat. From the pure perspective of outputs, more conventionalized farms may not have the environmental or social benefits that are generally ascribed to organic farms (we'll come back to those). And in diminishing those benefits on a large scale, conventionalism theatens the credibility of organic farming as something that is meaningfully different and more positive than the alternatives. 


The authors talk about a lot of changes that are commonly pointed to as signs of conventionalism, or bad change:

• Larger farms
• More disease treatments for animals
• Intensified milk production
• Less farmer 'concern' about the environment
• Fewer 'mixed' (e.g. completely different crop types, or crops and animals both) 
• Higher usage of 'allowed' fertilizers
• Less direct marketing (e.g. more sales through retailers)

Is change an illusion?

Some of these changes, they argue, may not even really exist. Size, for example. I have a vision in my head of what an organic farm looks like - it's a field, several acres, ten minutes from where I grow up. It's owned by a Skagit Valley family, and boasts a varied veggie stand with a hand written sign. When I hear about organic farms that are hundreds of acres in size, focus on a few crops, and that sell primarily to retailers, I contrast them against that vision and start thinking about how things are 'changing' - but there's not a whole lot of historical data to show that my vision is the 'original'. In fact, the authors note that in Europe, organic farms in 2005 were, on average, twice as large as conventional farms. 

As another example, they also argue that statistics about mixed farms may be misleading. The point of mixed farms with both animals and crops is that the animal waste can then be re-used as a part of the farm fertilizer. However, if some farms that previously had both animals and crops now have just crops, that's only meaningful if there were previously enough animals to put a dent in the farm's fertilizer needs - a dozen pigs aren't going to have much impact on a 50 acre farm, and their loss doesn't impact that overall footprint of the farm much.

Or is change just elusive?

It's not that things are not changing; many things are. There's real data on a number of those bullets I listed a few paragraphs up, and while a statistics don't always make it clear exactly what's going on, they can point at areas that need more questioning. The big point the authors make is that not all change is bad. People learn. New entrants to organic farming may change the demographics of the organic landscape, but they may bring fresh insights, leading to positive change in the end. Markets shift, which might lead to the mix of crops in production shifting in response - not inherently bad. And those who have been in the field for a long time may find different ways to solve problems that work better, bringing about changes that don't in any way represent a negative shift.

When change matters

And there's the value judgments coming out - 'positive change', 'not inherently bad', 'negative shift'... Here's where it gets tough. What makes a change good or bad? We end up back at values. What is the 'heart' of organic farming that we do not wish to change? What about 'organic' do we value?

Well, we've talked about values before, and in fact this is the paper that brought those IFOAM standards (which I quite like, by the way) to my attention. The authors argue that if we take those standards as a good definition of the core values of organic farming, the right way to evaluate changes is to assess whether a change somehow goes against those principles. 

Does a bigger farm mean it is less healthful, disrespects ecological systems, is unfair, or indicates a lack of care? Not in and of itself, no. What about disease treatments to cows? More fertilizers? These start to touch on the organic principles, but not in an easily quantifiable way.

So how do we make values into something quantifiable in this case?

More to come...

Fertilizer for thought: What organic means

They can use what?

I asked a friend of mine to read one of my previous posts, in order to make sure it was comprehensible to actual human beings and not just my techno-babble infused brain. As he was going through it, he looked up and asked me, surprised:

"Wait - organic farms can use fertilizer?"

Having been deeply immersed in the details of organic leek farming, I was tempted to brush off the comment with a semi-dismissive 'of course' and move on. But thinking about it, if someone had asked me that question a little while ago, would I have had the same immediate response? I've been buying organic pretty heavily for several years, but could I actually have rattled off what that entailed, and what that didn't entail? Being honest with myself, the humbling answer was no. 

Even while reading the leek paper I had been surprised as I worked through the table discussing the different processes for the conventional and organic farms - a line by line comparison of how they started their seedlings, tilled, fertilized, plowed, harrowed, planted, weeded, sprayed, and harvested. There were a lot of parallels in the processes - more than half the line items were identical. And yes, even the organic crops were sprayed - treated with a natural pesticide (bacteria) to deter moths. There were differences, for sure, particularly in the types of fertilizer and pesticides, and in the much greater amount of weeding needed for the organic farm, which incidentally takes a lot of extra fuel.

Labels vs. ideals

What organic means - as a technical thing you can put on a label and use for marketing purposes - is actually quite specifically defined. Synthetic pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, sewage sludge, genetically modified crops, and sterilization by radiation are covered - that's about it. Not to denigrate that - those items are meaningful and make a real difference on farm impacts. Still, the core point I'm talking about is that you can be organic and look a whole lot like a conventional farm. 

When talking about organic, I know that I at least have a whole bunch of associations with the word that go beyond the items that are actually measured for something to be certified organic. There is a philosophical or ethical dimension to it. The International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements agreed, and took a swing at defining what organic means in a set of principles. They break it down on four axes:

• Health: the relationship between the health of people, communities, and ecosystems
• Ecology: the importance of learning from and harmonizing with existing ecological cycles and systems (holy crap! Is that biomimicry I smell?)
• Fairness: to people and beings present and future
• Care: using the best knowledge we have to make decisions and exercising due caution

Obviously, though, it's a lot tougher to measure these things than it is to measure which pesticides a farm is using. I've talked about this a lot with my old friend, the scientist, who has grumbled a lot about large scale organic operations and how they may or may not be any better than conventional farms. This is a sensitive subject for me, what with my fondness for a particular now-big organic brand which a) started out not too far from where I grew up, and b) produces my very favorite granola. (wow, my inner hippie feels exposed right now.)

Maybe my scientist friend is right, and now that my beloved granola-maker has scaled, they are organic in name but no longer in principle. The issue I have is, how do we know? Just because a farm is bigger or run by a major company doesn't tell you anything empirical about that farm's health, ecology, fairness, or care.

Next up: more on this subject, from a group of scientists who seem very annoyed at their social science counterparts jumping to conclusions based off the 'wrong' measurements:

Ika Darnhofer, Thomas Lindenthal, Ruth Bartel-Kratochvil and Werner Zollitsch. “Conventionalisation of organic farming practices: from structural criteria towards an assessment based on organic principles. A review.” Agron. Sustain. Dev. 30 (1) 67-81 (2010)

Of leeks and land (and units of measure)

(This post primarily focuses on Eline de Backer, Joris Aertsens, Sofie Vergucht, Walter Steurbaut, (2009) "Assessing the ecological soundness of organic and conventional agriculture by means of life cycle assessment (LCA): A case study of leek production", British Food Journal, Vol. 111 Iss: 10, pp.1028 - 1061)

What's in a unit?

In my first read-through of ‘the leek paper’ (as I shall refer to it), I found myself flummoxed by something that seemed like it should be very simple - the ‘functional unit’ definition. This is a core life-cycle analysis concept, and at first it seemed obvious - this was the unit of measure we were going to use. This is science - we always need units of measure. No problem, right? The paper defined two functional units; ‘one kilogram of leeks’ and ‘one square meter of leek production’. These were what we were going to compare the environmental impact of between conventional and organic farming methods.

While I ‘smiled and nodded’ on reading about those two units, my inner pragmatist subconsciously seized on the kilograms right away, and didn't let go for the entire first readthrough. This was the only thing that intuitively made sense to me. After all, if we are growing leeks, what matters is how many bundles of leeks we grow, right? That's what we will sell and, more importantly, eat. The amount of land seemed useful (to my subconscious mind) only as an underscore - as in, kg/m^2 (how many kg of leeks can I grow in a square meter?)

After these units were chosen, the authors covered a lot of other ground - the scope of the analysis, the source of the data, and the farming processes under analysis (planting, fertilization, weeding, harvesting, etc.) They also covered the types of environmental impacts they would measure, which I talked about at some length here.

Massive yields

Before digging into the environmental impact per functional unit, the authors called out a key point, one that had popped back into my head back at the beginning of the paper: kg/m^2. It turns out that the organic leek farms yielded a lot less product per area of land. 27% less, to be precise. For the same amount of land where Clive the conventional farmer produces 10 kg of leeks, Oliver the organic farmer next door gets only 7.3 kg. To make up that extra 2.7kg, Oliver needs to farm 37% more land. (2.7kg is 37% of 7.3; 2.7/7.3 = .369) This ends up making Oliver have to use more diesel to get his tractor around all that extra land, and also use a whole lot of extra manure to cover the additional acreage as well.

This starts making a big difference when you look at your environmental impacts by the kilogram. It several categories (for more about what these categories are and what the units mean, go read this), it ends up with organic leek production actually being environmentally worse -

• abiotic depletion (kg antimony equivalents) 
• ozone depletion (kg CFC-11 equivalents) 
• photochemical oxidation (kg. acetylene equivalents)
• eutrophication (kg phosphate equivalents)

So with Oliver's kilogram of organic leek production, there's slightly more damage to soil and water systems, slightly more ozone damage, more smog-forming compounds in the air, and more nasty algae blooms.

Now, even with the lower yields, the organic leeks win out on several categories, even with a kg unit:

• Human ecotoxicity (kg of 1.4-dichlorobenzene equivalents)
• Terrestrial ecotoxicity (kg of 1.4-dichlorobenzene equivalents)
• Climate change potential (kg of CO2)
• Acidication (kg SO2 equivalents)

The toxicity is pretty much due to all the pesticide Clive puts on his conventional crops, it turns out - which Oliver isn't allowed to use in this case. Climate change potential for the organic leeks is about half of that for conventional ones; even with Oliver's extra tractor use, the nitrous oxide in the mineral fertilizers used by Clive's conventional farm ends up dominating that - the manure fertilizer used by organic farms doesn't have the same kind of impact, though it is responsible for the eutrophication mentioned above. And acidification is marginally lower for Oliver, also due to the differences in fertilizer.

But still - in fully half the categories, the environmental impacts for the organic leeks are actually worse. This doesn't seem great, even if the organics are only a bit worse in most areas.

Happy land

Now if you look at the impacts per square meter of leek production, you see a different story. In every single category, conventional farming has a worse environmental impact than organic farming. Some are closer than others, but there's no question which is less damaging when you are going by area of land.

However, here's where I got stuck - why do I care about the area of land? The authors of the paper spend quite some time discussing how there's not a real consensus on what is the 'right' functional unit to use for this kind of comparison. And they (along with some others they cite) point out that an assessment by area tends to end up looking more like an environmental impact assessment than anything else. Of course it's nice to know that the acre of organic leek farm across the way from my house is less likely to poison me than the acre of conventional leeks down the street by a neighbor I don't like so much. (hypothetically, of course)

Which is fine, but I keep thinking - isn't how much food is grown the real value of agriculture?

Land is more than leeks

The authors allude to this a couple of times, but agriculture can be seen as a producer of more than just food. Any good use of a piece of land can produce other 'ecosystem services'; carbon capture, water and soil retention, habitat for useful creatures such as pollinators, local climate control, and so on. On my second readthrough of the leek paper, that's what started to make the idea of a land-based functional unit make sense to me. 

The issue is, it's easy (relatively) to know and understand the value of a kilogram of leeks. It's a lot harder to wrap my brain around the 'value' of healthy honeybees living in Oliver's fields (Clive's pesticides killed the bees in his), or the fact that Oliver's farming practices might keep the topsoil in his fields around longer and in better health. 

I'm predisposed to be in favor of sustainable farming practices, and without an easy way to talk about these 'added values', even I find myself drifting back to thinking about straight up crop yields. But if we can define a suite of ways to measure environmental impacts, can we come up with a set of methods to quantify environmental services and benefits that are equally measureable?

Without that, I don't know if it will be possible for most people to get past the ultimate measure of agriculture being a bundle of leeks, and not an acre of healthy land.

How bad is it, really? Putting units on environmental impacts

(This post primarily focuses on Eline de Backer, Joris Aertsens, Sofie Vergucht, Walter Steurbaut, (2009) "Assessing the ecological soundness of organic and conventional agriculture by means of life cycle assessment (LCA): A case study of leek production", British Food Journal, Vol. 111 Iss: 10, pp.1028 - 1061)

I have a lot of thoughts on this paper, as it was the first one I really tried to tackle (and in retrospect, perhaps not the best choice to start with, given how much the authors cite one of the other papers on my list - Schau and Fet, 2008). But it allowed me to start wrapping my brain around a number of things, including the topic of this post, which is: 'how do you actually measure environmental impacts'?

This is actually the third 'step' of the paper (after their scope determination and initial data collection) but I think the ideas stand nicely on their own.

General approach - pick a scapegoat

The authors presented a fascinating suite of categories and accompanying models and units for measuring environmental impacts. Almost every single type of impact was represented in a similar way (though obviously with different models and units). For each type of impact, a single culprit element or chemical was chosen as the unit of measure, and then other big contributors to the same category were converted into equivalent units of that original chemical.

Example: Climate change = carbon dioxide

An example that I found reasonably accessible with what I already knew was their measurement of 'climate change potential'. The unit of measure for this was equivalent kilograms of emitted carbon dioxide - not too surprising, considering how often it seems to be the molecule we talk about when discussing climate change. So to get your total number, you start by calculating (based off the amount of diesel burned by your tractors for instance) the actual amount of C02 emitted. You then add in other important greenhouse gasses, like methane and nitrous oxide, by converting them into equivalent kg of C02. So if methane is 20 times worse of a greenhouse gas than C02, then your one kg of methane becomes 20 of CO2. (Equivalent kg CO2 from methane = 20 * kg of methane)

Example: Green gunk = phosphate

Other units were less familiar to me, but fun to figure out. For example, eutrophication. Quick aside for anyone who isn't quite sure what that is: eutrophication is a term used to talk about biomass in water - so when you see a bunch of green pond scum (which is actually algae) in water, eutrophication is pretty high, quite possibly due to a bunch of fertilizer runoff. Meanwhile, that green gunk may be choking out whatever else lived there before, in addition to dying, drifting to the bottom, and getting decomposed by bacteria that consume oxygen, leaving fish and other bottom dwellers unable to breathe. (want to know more about eutrophication? Wikipedia provides.)

In this case, the unit of measure is equivalent kg of phosphate - both a common fertilizer ingredient (for both organic and conventional farms - more about the interesting overlapping practices of conventional/organic later) and a compound known to stimulate the kind of growth associated with eutrophication - not surprisingly, it can make both wanted and unwanted things grow. So first you take your amount of phosphate in the fertilizer being applied. Then other compounds with similar fertilizing properties (nitrate, ammonia, etc.) are converted into equivalent phosphate and added to the original phosphate number, just as with the climate change gasses being converted into and added to the carbon dioxide.

Other units used

The other categories took a similar tack. I'm not going to go into each quite as deeply, but here they are in a more abridged form. (note - each one of these models comes from a cited paper, so there's a lot more going on that I'm glossing over!)

Ozone depletion (in the stratosphere, which is where ozone is supposed to live) is another familiar one - the reference unit there is equivalent kg of CFC-11 (yes, that's the old classic CFC freon, that was used as a refrigerant back in the bad old days).

Abiotic resources - which means 'resources that are not living', like soil and water - depletion was measured in equivalent kg of antimony, a toxic element used in a lot of flame retardants.

Both human and terrestrial (ecosystem) toxicity were measured in equivalent kg of 1.4-dichlorobenzene. I didn't recognize this one, but apparently it's likely a carcinogen and causes illness when consumed. This one also included some segregation by the different effects of chemical concentration in air, different types of water or soil, and so on, with different toxicity weights for each.

Photochemical oxidant formation was a new term for me too, but as near as I can tell it seems to be the formation of pollutants in the lower atmosphere, which can take the form of smog. Acetylene (C2H2) is an organic compound prone to reacting and forming these kinds of chemicals, including low atmosphere ozone (which is not good for people or plants)

Acidification, on the other hand, is more familiar. Sulfur dioxide is the big culprit and reference substance here, due to its unfortunate ability to mix with water in the atmosphere and create one of the most famous environmental problems - acid rain.

Now what?

Obviously each of these is something of a simplification, but they each provide a way to get a grip on a type of pollution known to cause real problems. With these defined, we can use them as points of comparison for environmental impact. More on that coming...

Biomimicry in food production - an introduction to ‘the project’

This blog was started with a particular purpose in mind, though it may digress from that purpose in time. That purpose was to discuss my thoughts on a series of papers I have been reading, which discuss different ways of looking at food production systems. Before I dive in, I wanted to talk a bit more about the genesis and intent of this project and what I'm hoping to do in this online space.

Biomimicry and permaculture give me warm fuzzy feelings

One of my old friends and  I have been talking about science for a long time - over ten years, now. During one visit, we got to talking about one of my favorite ideas that I’ve been longing to do something with - biomimicry. 

Having read ‘the’ book (Biomimicry by Benyus) several times, I find my mind keeps returning to the idea of biomimicry in agriculture. The chapter in the book focuses on a particular group - the Land Institute, whose founder I have since seen speak in person. They endeavor to grow food ‘like a prairie’. I find this idea - essentially, that of localized permaculture - innately appealing. The first time I read the chapter, I immediately began to wonder about how you take something so locally specific and transfer the principles - in the Pacific Northwest, would we grow food like a forest? What might that look like? (some temperate, less flammable version of the later part of this talk, perhaps?)

The more I thought about it, the more I got excited. I realized that I want to believe this permaculture approach might be 'the one'. It seems like it should be far more sustainable - emulating existing ecosystems seems like it must be better than tromping over them with mono-cultures, pesticides, and fertilizers. We would be reconnecting to the world we live in at the same time we grow food! The whole concept just seems elegant, beautiful - it speaks to me on an aesthetic and emotional level. It 'feels' right. 

But can you measure it?

My inner rational empiricist finds this talk of grand ideas and feelings troublesome. She wants facts, data, measurements - oh, and also, concrete plans on 'how this even works' would be nice too. She asks me: How do we scale a permaculture approach? Can it even begin to compete with conventional or even large-scale organic agriculture? How on earth do you measure that, when a permaculture farming approach is so different from even an organic farming approach? (multi-crop vs. single crop in one ‘field’, more complex harvesting, longer time to get set up, many other things) And when you get down to it what are you even measuring? Just yields? But isn’t part of the point that there’s more to farming than just the crop you produce? What's more? How can you collect data on it? (I’ll talk more about this in my next post, where I grappled with this issue far more than I thought I would.)

My friend and I are both scientists at heart, though he currently practices more than I do. We both agreed that somehow, the potential of permaculture must be measurable, complex though it might be. We just weren’t sure how to get there - and for all we knew, someone had made good progress on this question already! 

A research project is born

We decided that perhaps the best thing we could do was just start digging through the literature and reading about how other systems of agriculture have been analyzed and compared what literature existed on permaculture, and anything else relevant we could find. Perhaps we could then build a working knowledge which we could use as a jumping off point to do some writing and researching of our own.

We’ve been reading through the papers we found in our first search ever since then. We didn't have luck finding anyone who had specifically compared permaculture with conventional or organic agriculture, so we decided to broaden our search to 'how do you analyze/compare various forms of food production (ideally, with sustainability as a factor)'. We then planned to figure out how those ideas and concepts might be extended to talk about permaculture. It's a bit of an odd assortment of articles, and I'm sure our various searches missed some other relevant items, but it's a starting point.

Here, I hope to ‘think out loud’ through what I’ve been reading and thinking - what’s interested me, what has confused me, and what has gotten me really excited. And, while someday I might like to pull these thoughts together into a coherent, analytical form, for now I relish the opportunity to put these thoughts down in a slightly less... formal tone. (though hopefully still thoughtful and interesting.) Scientific literature is expected to be written with an audience of only other scientists (and often only in the same field), which can make it opaque to a lot of people who might otherwise be interested. While I understand why that's the case, it bothered me back when I was in astrophysics and it still bothers me now. My hope is that any of my friends and family might be able to read these posts and come away with at least a decent understanding of what I am talking about.

Sources

Here’s the list of papers we are starting with, in case anyone should find this blog interesting enough to want to read along. Hopefully we’ll add much more before this is done.

Eline de Backer, Joris Aertsens, Sofie Vergucht, Walter Steurbaut, (2009) "Assessing the ecological soundness of organic and conventional agriculture by means of life cycle assessment (LCA): A case study of leek production", British Food Journal, Vol. 111 Iss: 10, pp.1028 - 1061

Ika Darnhofer, Thomas Lindenthal, Ruth Bartel-Kratochvil and Werner Zollitsch. “Conventionalisation of organic farming practices: from structural criteria towards an assessment based on organic principles. A review.” Agron. Sustain. Dev. 30 (1) 67-81 (2010)

Schau EM, Fet AM (2008): LCA Studies of Food Products as Background for Environmental Product Declarations. Int J LCA 13 (3) 255–264

Ivan Muñoz & Llorenç Milà i Canals & Amadeo R. Fernández-Alba; "Life cycle assessment of the average Spanish diet including human excretion." Int J Life Cycle Assess (2010) 15:794–805

Holzschuh, A., Steffan-Dewenter, I. and Tscharntke, T. (2008), Agricultural landscapes with organic crops support higher pollinator diversity. Oikos, 117: 354–361.

Gareth Edwards-Jones, Llorenç Milà i Canals, Natalia Hounsome, Monica Truninger, Georgia Koerber, Barry Hounsome, Paul Cross, Elizabeth H. York, Almudena Hospido, Katharina Plassmann, Ian M. Harris, Rhiannon T. Edwards, Graham A.S. Day, A. Deri Tomos, Sarah J. Cowell, David L. Jones, Testing the assertion that ‘local food is best’: the challenges of an evidence-based approach, Trends in Food Science & Technology, Volume 19, Issue 5, May 2008, Pages 265-274, ISSN 0924-2244

Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews; “Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States.” Environmental Science & Technology 2008 42 (10), 3508-3513

Why the cherry tree?

Why is this blog called 'Dreams of a Cherry Tree'?

Well, it's very simple. It's all because of Cradle to Cradle, one of my very favorite books, and a particular image used therein. It represents nature's bounty and glorious excess, and draws a contrast with our views of (and the current impacts of) human waste. It points towards a possibility that we as humans might strive towards. Rather than endlessly trying to do less harm, or heedlessly doing more harm, we could instead someday restructure our way of living so that we produce an excess that is as beautiful and benevolent as that of the cherry tree and its thousand blossoms.