Why is organic food so *#@! expensive?? | Ali Partovi | TEDxManhattan

Translator: Mercia Costa Reviewer: Denise RQ I've invested a lot of my own money in

organic

and sustainable farming, and converting American farmland to

organic

, and I'm here to dispel some misconceptions about organic

food

s. The idea prevails that organic agriculture is more

expensive

and less sufficient, right? And that we need industrial agriculture and factory farms to feed the world. "Feed the world." Well, I'm here to break down some of the assumptions behind that logic and share information that leads to a very different conclusion. We all know that organic

food

s are

expensive

. This is a fact. And therefore it is logical to assume that it is for the 1%, the food-loving elites, the rich, not for the common people.

Well, actually that's not the correct logic, and I'll show why in a second. It also leads us to assume that if organic food is expensive, organic farming must be more expensive, which then leads us to wonder, surely, it can't feed the world, and again conclude that it is only for the 1%. Well, those assumptions are actually wrong too. The idea that organic food is only for the rich, only for the 1% is powerful and has huge implications for both business and policy. And we need both business innovation and policy changes in this country to support organic. Think about it: If you are a businessman or a politician, the way to succeed is to come up with products or policies that serve not the 1% but ordinary Americans.

That's why we need business owners and policymakers to recognize that organic food is not just for the 1%, but for everyone, for everyday Americans. And the first step in that change is to change that perception. So who buys these expensive organic foods? Who in the United States is buying it? According to research from Nielsen and NMI, three in four Americans have consciously chosen to buy organic foods over the past year. Some of them may have only purchased a single organic product, but there is a subset of so-called devout organic shoppers, who account for the vast majority of all organic food consumption in this country.

These so-called foodies are not the 1%, they are the 25%, one in four Americans. Now let's take a look at these elite foodies. What is the elite foodie like? Two in five of them have an annual family income of less than $50,000. One in five has an annual household income of less than $30,000. These elite people are approximately 20% people of color and another 15% Hispanic. Six out of ten shop at Walmart. How does that profile compare to that of the general US population? It's exactly the same. The general population of the United States is approximately two in five with incomes less than 50,000, and one in five with incomes less than 30,000.

About 20% of people of color, 15% of Hispanics, and about six in ten shop at Walmart. In all respects, the food elite who buy organic products are ordinary Americans. And it's one in four Americans, and they're already buying organic products despite how expensive it is. Imagine how many more Americans would buy organic foods if they weren't so expensive. Well, we actually know some of the answers to that. Walmart asked its consumers and found that 91% of them would buy organic products. So why are organic foods so expensive? It must be because organic farming is more expensive, right? Is not true;

Organic farming actually saves a lot of money on many very expensive inputs. Fossil fuel is expensive. Fertilizers are incredibly expensive. The chemicals, the antibiotics that factory farms use. These things are very expensive. Not only their externalized costs, but also their real dollar costs are very high. Well, maybe organic farming saves money but maybe it produces less food. That's not necessarily true either. This is not a general statement – ​​it varies by crop and region – but there are many ways that, when done right, sustainable organic farming can produce more food. One part of this is rotating crops and livestock, so that nutrients are recycled in the soil.

Grow multiple crops at the same time, increasing income from the land. Exploit natural synergies. One of my favorite examples of this is sheep and asparagus. Sheep love to graze but they don't like the taste of asparagus. And so, when the asparagus farmer has a weed problem, instead of spending a lot of money buying a chemical herbicide to spray the fields, he can invite a sheep farmer. The sheep will remove the weeds. The sheep farmer gets free grass for his animals and the asparagus farmer gets free weed control. And the sheep add fertility to the soil. You must be thinking, "Well, great, but industrial agriculture, for all its ills, surely at least the only thing it has going for it is that it's more efficient, right?" I would say it has the illusion of efficiency and is short-lived.

For example, think about topsoil. America's topsoil, perhaps the greatest national treasure this country has, this rich topsoil, is like a bank account that we withdraw from every year. Withdraw money and never deposit it again. That's not efficient. It is inefficient and unsustainable. The same goes for how we treat nutrients. Nutrients are supposed to come from the soil, pass through the body of a plant, reach the body of an animal, and return to the soil. We all learned that in high school. And that is not how the vast majority of North American agriculture works today. Instead, we are extracting minerals in Morocco, shipping them across the Atlantic, spraying them on fields, only to have them washed into waterways and end up in dead zones and places like the Gulf of Mexico.

That's not efficient, it's incredibly wasteful. Not only ecologically, but also economically. Similarly, what I said earlier about fossil fuels, antibiotics to feed factory farm animals. And all this to increase the yield of corn and soybeans. Crops that humans don't even eat. We are maximizing the per-acre yield of corn and soybeans, but the vast majority of American farmland does not feed humans. It is used to create ethanol or to feed livestock. Approximately less than 10% of the corn crop in this country goes to feed humans. Is this the system that is supposed to feed the world? Well, it doesn't really feed the world today.

If measured, the correct way to measure productivity in agriculture is not corn yield per acre or soybean yield per acre, but human food yield per acre. And when you measure how much human food is produced per acre, the United States is not a leader. We're not even average. We are behind the world average, and we are behind countries like India and China, which are doing a much better job than us of feeding the world's population. So if you were smart, you would realize that what's really behind that status is the fact that these other countries consume less meat than the United States.

And so who is going to produce all the growing appetite for pork in China? And surely, American industrial agriculture and factory farms are going to step up to supply all the meat. Well, I'm not sure that's true either. The world's leading pork exporter today is Denmark. Denmark is a country that has prohibited the use of subtherapeutic antibiotics in livestock for many years. One of the most disgusting and reckless practices of American factory farming has been banned in Denmark; However, Denmark has continued to maintain high yields and low prices for its pork, and is the largest exporter of pork to places like China.

Ironically, China has recently banned pork imports from several American producers due to antibiotic use. However, the real question is: what is the most efficient way to produce food if people are going to eat more meat? Well, if you look at an acre of corn, it can produce enough corn to feed a head of cattle. This is an approximation, it is not very exact mathematics. That same acre (I wouldn't recommend growing organic corn to feed cattle) that same acre can produce enough grass to feed a head of cattle. Now, it is not exact mathematics. I'm getting close and there are a lot of other things that change the equation.

Corn is a more efficient crop in many ways. It is a wonderful crop, it allows much more control, it has less seasonality, but it also has many other costs on the balance sheet. After all, it is not certain that industrial agriculture is more efficient, even for producing meat. Now, the truly most efficient way to feed humans is to use that land to grow crops that people eat, such as fruits, vegetables, wheat or rice. But the benefit of growing meat on pasture is that at least those animals fertilize the land, and if you rotate between those animals and fruits and vegetables, you can actually produce more on that same land.

So it must be about the money, right? These so called evil corporations like McDonald's and Monsanto. Maybe they are shoving this industrial food down our throats because it is more profitable, right? Well, that's not true either. In fact, using the techniques I just described, Farmland LP, in which I am a large investor, converts farms from conventional crops to organic and significantly increases their profits. They did a cohort analysis of farmland that they progressively converted to organic and, in doing so, significantly increased land income, from something like $100 to $450 per acre. You might think, "Well, that's great, but maybe it can't scale." Well, the answer is actually that organic and sustainable agriculture is increasing.

On the one hand, Chipotle, which is the closest thing we have to an organic fast food company, is the fastest growing fast food company in the last decade. And more generally, organic farmland in the United States has grown enormously, more than tripling in less than two decades. So organic saves money, is less expensive, can produce as much or more food, is more profitable, and is scaling. So what...why the heck are organic foods so expensive? And the answer is that the demand for organic foods is growing even faster. That graph of organic farmland cultivation remains a drop in the bucket and pales in comparison to the increasing demand for sustainable organic food in this country.

The total amount of organic farmland in the United States is approximately 1% of the agricultural land in this country. The total amount of organic food consumption is between 4 and 5%, and that doesn't even reflect the total demand. That is the amount that has actually been consumed. One in four Americans is a devout organic shopper, and 91% of Walmart customers say they would be interested in purchasing organic foods. The demand that we must satisfy is not only that 5%. But one might ask, where does that 4 or 5% of organic food come from if it is not from our farmland? It is being imported.

And where do organic foods grow on this planet? Developing countries. 80% of certified organic farmers are in developing countries. The country with the most organic farmers is actually India. So the poor countries of the world are feeding the foods that the majority want to eat. So I think America should stop worrying so much about feeding the world and focus a little more on feeding itself. The solution to this is actually relatively simple. We need sustainably managed organic farmland in this country to increase dramatically to meet the huge demand. I put my own money into what I say and I've put a lot of money into Farmland LP, as I mentioned, which is converting land to organic land, and I think we need both policy change and more business innovation to accelerate expansion. of sustainable organic agriculture in America.

Thank you so much. (Applause)