
Swine Flu Ancestor Born on U.S. Factory Farms - terpua
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/swineflufarm/
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jrockway
Yeah, but think about how much lower the profit margin on pork would be if the
farm owners actually had to clean the shit out of the animal holding areas.
Clearly a few cents on every pig carcass is worth killing a few thousand
people every couple years, right? "Organic" is just too expensive, and we can
just pump the pigs full of drugs anyway.

</very bitter sarcasm>

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biohacker42
I'm not yet convinced organic is more expensive. I mean clearly all the
products currently on the market are.

But that's because they're from small production or the very few that aren't
can still get away with charging that much, so they'll charge that much.

But I think the large scale ago biz sort of backed into industrialized
farming. When pesticides were still new and everything was susceptible to
them, they worked like magic.

But over time, pests have become resistant, soils have started to form hard
pan, affluent consumers are turning away.

What would happen if you practiced organic farming on a grand scale? Would it
still be much more expensive or just marginally more expensive?

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jacoblyles
On the other hand, I would think that one of the reasons that modern organic
products are so inexpensive is because of easy substitution with plentiful,
non-organic alternatives. If food production were to become all-organic, I
would think the resulting shrinking supply would make food much more
expensive.

I'm not an expert, but I would estimate that there's at least one order of
magnitude difference in yield per acre between the much maligned "factory
farming" and less dense production methods. If there is only one order of
magnitude, that's the difference between almost everyone being able to afford
meat, and almost nobody.

The grandparent commenter fails to address possible reasonable objections to
his strident opinion. I'm assuming it's easier to heap sarcasm upon an already
disfavored group - big corporations - and reap the resulting karma.

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biohacker42
That's what I used to think but then I read a study, and now I can't track it
down, about apple farms in England. The conclusion was that when you do
organic right you end up with just marginally higher costs and the _same_
yields.

I think doing organic right involved extensive soil preparation and complex
natural pest control, and using the same high yield apple varieties. But that
was just one study, about apples in England, and I can't even track it down
now.

