by Iowaprodigal

Created on: December 06, 2007

Even if locally grown organic food was affordable and convenient, it still would not be a practical source of all food demand. Consider the logic: local organic foods are grown on tracts of land not conducive to mass production. This may be still be an acceptable solution for those in the fertile, small-town Midwest, but large cities on the East and West coasts would need millions of acres to grow food via less-efficient organic methods. Additionally, crops would have to be rotated annually with legumes, plants like peanuts and soybeans that naturally add nitrogen (a fertilizer) to the soil. The organic farms, unable to add chemical fertilizers, would be forced to plant twice as many acres (half legumes, half product crop) so that they can provide the steady flow of crops that the region demands.

Consider the economics of the issue as well. Locally grown organic food certainly stimulates the local economy. However, it does so with an observable cost: higher prices. The money that local consumers would save, even by purchasing organic goods from large farms with lower operating costs per unit, would be significant, and could be invested in the community in more beneficial ways. Consuming only locally grown organic food doesn't make any economic sense.

Of course, there must also be a market for local organic foods if they will even reach the consumers. Rural food stands by highways could, again, be convenient for Midwesterners, but urbanites would have exceedingly more difficulty obtaining the foods. In fact, only a few established organic farms would be able to afford shipping food into a city, gradually pushing other farms out of business and establishing monopolies. A food market monopoly around costal cities would be difficult to break, and the high price tolerance for organic food would allow the monopolies to increase their prices at will.

In sum, growing all food organically and locally is excessively Utopian. Perhaps if cities were abolished, and every person lived in communal villages scattered throughout the land. Of course, that would mean the return to sustenance agriculture and the decline of a civilization whose culture is linked inexorably to cities. The absurdities of this idea are plentiful, and successful implementation is blissfully ignorant of the limitations of reality.

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