Debiasification

Looking at farming practices with an open mind

A friend kindly sent me an article from the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago entitled “The Environmental Upside of Modern Farming”, by Mr. Parrlberg. I took a quick scan and got angry with the article. A tail spin ensued. I “knew” the article would preached misconceptions about organic gardening and I started a discourse in my head against Big Agriculture. But I expected the article would be good example of how misrepresentations can mislead people, so I reluctantly went back to the article and, pause for effect, actually read it. Oops. I had misread the first lines. And I had then made up the contents of the article with my quick-draw anti-Big Ag bias. The article was in fact an exploration of how new technology is helping to solve the environmental disasters of soil and wilderness loss which traditional farming has given us.

The article by Mr. Paarlberg wasn’t all in alignment with my views on raising food, but reading it made me recognize that I’d been lumping together ‘modern’ farms with ‘traditional’ ones. Modern farms, as defined in the article, use a number of newly developed tools to improve yields and reduce resource use as opposed to traditional techniques of till-blanket fertilize-spray. Until I’d read the article, I’d thought of them both as traditional, or intensive, farming. These being opposed to organic farming, of course. Which is ironic, given that the oldest farming techniques were organic. But such is the categorizing need of the human mind that we sometimes mislabel things - think about what we actually do on parkways and driveways.

Upon thought, key word there, of course all large scale farms aren’t the same. Large scale farms could even be organic. And organic farming could certainly use some of the technological advances that modernized farms use, and undoubtedly do. Modern farmers use some very clever advances to reduce the need for irrigation, fertilizer application and pesticide use. Lasers are used to level fields to reduce runoff, saving both water and fertilizer, ‘smart’ tractors measure soil nutrients in situ and only apply fertilizers in locations that need them, and genetically modified crop strains (not allowed in certified organic foods) drastically reduce the need for pesticide applications. The result is that to produce a bushel of corn now uses 46% less water, 41% less energy and emits 31% less greenhouse gases than it did in 1980. And even though corn production has increased by 44% over that time, the total acreage of corn fields has fallen by 1/5 over that time. By lumping all non-organic farms together I was making one of those assumptions you make without even realizing it.

But the article had more to teach me. It explained both how traditional farming has caused immense environmental damage and how we need to reduce our meat consumption. There was even a discussion of animal welfare - such as the unacceptable practice of keeping chickens in cages that are so small that they can’t move. And true to the techno-solution slant of this article, it concluded with a discussion of Beyond Beef. Beyond Beef is a lab grown meat substitute, which emits 90% less carbon than a beef burger, requires 46% less energy, 99% less water and 93% less land. I hadn’t eaten a hamburger in 35 years, when my husband brought home a package of Beyond Beef. Over the decades, I had often fantasized about biting into hamburger, so I was keen to try Beyond Beef burger. But it was so like meat, that I couldn’t eat it. My sons gladly finished it off for me. All to say, if you want to try to have another vegetarian / vegan meal in your arsenal and love burgers, give this one a try. So here was lesson number two, intensive farms may be part of our resource depletion problems.

As much as this article taught me about improved farming techniques, there were parts of the article which demonstrated the author’s biases. For instance, the author felt there will be ways ensure animals’ welfare without having to go back to the "yesteryear’s less productive outdoor systems.” What animal wants to live indoors all the time? For my part, that is an unacceptable practice. And the article didn’t talk about the problem of agricultural intensification. This is the practice in which large tracks of land are dedicated to one species, e.g. corn, with a heavy reliance on adding artificial fertilizers and killing pests with chemicals. Both these practices harm the soil column, devastate local biodiversity, and destroy ecosystems down stream - including causing eutrophication in rivers and oceans, such as the giant dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. One would think, that with an emphasis on reduced inputs, modern farming must be better for downstream ecosystems than traditional farming. But that wasn’t addressed.

Most alarming to me in the article was the dismissal of organic farming. The article does away with any need to discuss organic farming by stating that it has not contributed to the reduction in resource use seen in the US since 1950, since only 1% of American cropland is certified organic. But a small coverage doesn’t mean organic farming can’t contribute to, or even drive, sustainable food production globally. I’ve read through a dozen or so reports, mostly from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, on whether or not organic farming can feed the world. Most reports (1, 2) say organic practices can feed the world, summarizing that the problem lies not in food production but in food distribution. Another article I read said organic practices can’t feed the world without a decrease in meat eating and food waste, which of course we need to implement in any event. While a further set said organic practices could be a substantial part of the solution. In particular, a UN review on food security concluded “We need to see a move from a linear to a holistic approach in agricultural management, which recognizes that a farmer is notably a producer of agricultural goods, but also a manager of an agro-ecological system that provides quite a number of public goods and services (e.g. water, soil, landscape, energy, biodiversity and recreation”.

Considering long term goals of humanity’s survival, organic farming may be the only practical way forward, and at least must inform our food production. In particular, organic farms out produce traditional farms in years when weather is unusual, something we expect to see more of in the coming decades. The authoritative dismal of organic practices in Paarlberg’s Wall Street Journal article is misleading, leading the reader to believe that it is a foregone conclusion that organic is not part of the solution. So another lesson was that the way in which information is presented can have a profound impact. Of course I know this intellectually, but it was an excellent evocative example of the power and danger of unsubstantiated blanket statments.

How can we battle our prejudices when discussing and exploring environmental, and societal, issues? The first step of course is to recognize our preconceptions. To be honest that we have a world model that is at times flawed. Humans are susceptible to many biases but there are two which seem to capture many of my experiences: confirmation bias and the boomerang effect. In the first instance of confirmation bias, when we learn about something which aligns with our world model, it strengthens that model. Whereas in the case of the boomerang effect, learning about something antithetical to our world model bizarrely also strengthens it, because we scurry around finding reasons to reject this new piece of data. Being aware of these biases can open us up to new solutions and better connections with others. I have previously clung to these two as the biases as explaining so much of our social divides. But they only explain one side of the conversation. How we speak, or write, is also important for keeping open avenues of productive discourse? Trying to be specific about we’ve heard or read must be part of the solution, but I suspect the main thing is be honest about our understanding. I suppose, both in listening and in speaking, we could summarise by suggesting that we would do well to have grace about our own deficiencies and other’s wisdom.

And is debiasification a word? No. But I think it should be.