Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
Is it? I would have thought industrialized agriculture would be far more efficient. Maybe there are a few edge cases, but in general, industrial agriculture has to be far less resource intensive on a per unit basis.
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I have a book here... let's see if I can find it.... here it is "How Bad are Bananas?" by Mike Beners-Lee.
For the title of the book, bananas themselves are not all that bad. They are grown in natural sunlight and don't require intensive farming practices, require very little packaging and they keep well so 99% of the world's supply of bananas are shipped by boats.
But since banana's can't be grown locally, I'll find a better example from the book. Let's say strawberries. Growing them indoors, such as in greenhouses, has slightly more emissions than producing them in Mexico and flying them to Canada. Either way would be about 1.8kg of CO2 per pound of strawberries. But buying them locally from the Farmer's Market is about 180g of CO2 per pound. One of the biggest issues with transporting strawberries from abroad is wastage as almost 25% spoil between the field and the checkout. So, in season, getting strawberries locally is 1/10th the CO2 compared with buying from a more southern country. But in spring and fall, we are much better off buying internationally as the carbon cost of growing inside is higher than the transportation cost.