Replanting America: 90 Percent of What We Eat Could Come From Local Farms
http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/06/01/everyone-could-eat-local?cmpid=tpdaily-eml-2015-06-01Eating a local diet—restricting your sources of food to those within, say, 100 miles—seems enviable but near impossible to many, thanks to lack of availability, lack of farmland, and sometimes short growing seasons. Now, a study from the University of California, Merced, indicates that it might not be as far-fetched as it sounds. “Although we find that local food potential has declined over time, our results also demonstrate an unexpectedly large current potential for meeting as much as 90 percent of the national food demand,” write the study’s authors. Ninety percent! What?
Researchers J. Elliott Campbell and Andrew Zumkehr looked at every acre of active farmland in the U.S., regardless of what it’s used for, and imagined that instead of growing soybeans or corn for animal feed or syrup, it was used to grow vegetables. (Currently, only about 2 percent of American farmland is used to grow fruits or vegetables.) And not just any vegetables: They used the USDA’s recommendations to imagine that all of those acres of land were designed to feed people within 100 miles a balanced diet, supplying enough from each food group. Converting the real yields (say, an acre of hay or corn) to imaginary yields (tomatoes, legumes, greens) is tricky, but using existing yield data from farms, along with a helpful model created by a team at Cornell University, gave them a pretty realistic figure.
Still, the study involves quite a few major leaps of faith because it seeks not to demonstrate what is possible for a given American right now but to lay out a basic overview of the ability of local food to feed all Americans. It’s not just projecting yields for vegetables grown on land that is today dominated by corn and soy. The biggest leap of faith is perhaps an unexpected one and is surprisingly underreported: Why do we even want to adjust our food supply to be local in the first place?
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... i.e., while the animals (and their supporting feed) were being reared in smallholdings rather
than CAFs, the efficiency when measured in terms of input to consumed output has decreased
whilst the amount of simple waste (i.e., input discarded and not used, whether at the feeding stage,
the overuse of artificial fertilizer, the development/transport/insertion of hormones & drugs, the
losses from transport, the wastage of the end product - thrown away after the "fresh period"
has greatly increased.
So yes, your point is most definitely valid but so is Nick's.
We all agree that there are far too many people and that is the spark of the problem.
The accelerant is the mindset that the only way forward is to mine/grow/produce/consume more
of everything.
The resulting conflagration is all around us and in the projections for the near future.
JMO.
