Organic & Local is So 2008

interesting article about the challenges of sustainable agriculture, and how local and traditional organic, despite good intentions, have significant challenges to address larger populations.

I found through Mark Bittman's blog linking to original article at Mother Jones

Highlighted excerpts:

• According to a 2008 report from Carnegie Mellon University, going meat- and dairyless one day a week is more environmentally beneficial than eating locally every single day.
• If we wanted to rid the world of synthetic fertilizer use—and assuming dietary habits remain constant—the extra land we'd need for cover crops or forage (to feed the animals to make the manure) would more than double, possibly triple, the current area of farmland, according to Vaclav Smil, an environmental scientist at the University of Manitoba. Such an expansion, Smil notes, "would require complete elimination of all tropical rainforests, conversion of a large part of tropical and subtropical grasslands to cropland, and the return of a substantial share of the labor force to field farming—making this clearly only a theoretical notion." That doesn't mean sustainable agriculture can't happen. But if we want to build large-scale capacity, we're going to need to broaden our definitions of sustainable practices.
• the risks of pragmatism must be weighed against the risk of perfectionism. We can't wait for the perfect solution to emerge; we need to start transforming the food system today—most probably with hybrid models, like Fleming's or Liebman's, that take the best of both alternative and mainstream technologies and acknowledge not only the complexity of true sustainability but the practical reality that the perfect is often the enemy of the good