Philosophical Vegan Forum

Seem like you've had a lot happen in the past few years! I would actually suggest you create a separate thread for each of these, make it a lot easier to tackle each one seperately.

Diana wrote: ↑Thu Sep 07, 2023 5:54 pm The part that I wish I didn't have to do is sometimes I do kill insects using approved bacteria and fungi (there are many that aren't ) but it is a last resort. I use crop rotation and repellents that I make using lemongrass, mint and marigolds that I grow. I don't like killing insects because they are sentient as far as I know.

Yes, that's an unfortunately reality of farming. Foods that are good for us are also good for insects, and they can reproduce very fast to consume crops and spoil them for human use.

You can use insect growth regulators to help prevent eggs from hatching, which terminates them at a probably non-sentient stage. However, I don't think these are certified organic (neem extract Azadirachtin is, but it's less effective and more harmful to humans and other vertebrates) and may harm your income source from having to sell infected crops you had to treat as conventional.

Diana wrote: ↑Thu Sep 07, 2023 6:02 pm Land use: I don't know how my yield per hectare compares to conventional averages, but. We tolerate quite a lot more spontanious plants and we see abundance of predators during the day who have accustomed to us such as Seriema, armadillos, falcons, owls, etc as well as their prey such as lizards, voles, and ants, beetles, etc and at night many wild canids and felids which indicate a rich biodiversity not present in conventional, glyphosate drenched fields.

If you double yield and that allows you to preserve more truly wild land, that's likely to provide more total biodiversity than any amount of biodiversity you can maintain in a field. 30% sterile monoculture field with 70% forest is better than 60% "biodiverse" field and 40% forest.
So I would strongly encourage you to maximize yield of whatever area you farm and make up for perceived harm by hosting more forest.

Pre-sowing glyphosate treatment is unlikely to affect biodiversity significantly beyond reducing weed pressure a little, so I'm not sure what you mean by glyphosate drenched fields. The larger issue for most conventional farms in terms of biodiversity in the field is probably not having stands of permanent native forest near the field in large scale monoculture operations. But I don't think you should worry about your biodiversity in the field, just maximize yield and allow more biodiverse forest.

Conventional crops are higher yield for mainly three reasons: weed competition, pest/disease pressure, and limits of fertilization during periods of fast growth.

For disease pressure, "organic" mineral based fungicides are about as effective as conventional fungicides, which is to say not very effective either way because no fungicides work very well. Other diseases you just need to choose your cultivar carefully and use cultural practices to reduce them. You won't have any GMO options since that's not allowed in organic farming, but there are only a couple diseases that are cured by genetic modification right now, so only a couple crops that benefit from that. If you're not growing papaya or squash then you don't have a drawback in that regard.
In the future, there will likely be more disease resistant GMO crops, and that could put you at a bigger disadvantage. But maybe there will be an organic certification option by then that accepts some GMO which are meant to prevent disease rather than allow increased pesticide use.

You might be able to get a higher yield by reducing weed pressure. This could be done with hand weeding, glyphosate, flame weeding, mulching, cardboard sheet mulching, etc.
There are a lot of organic options there that are almost as effective and only a little more expensive than glyphosate.

Glyphosate is actually not that useful unless you have a roundup ready crop, because you have to stop spraying after your seeds germinate, meaning they only have a small head start on weeds.

There are some pre-emergent herbicides that can keep weed pressure down after your crop sprouts. Conventional forms are pretty effective. Corn gluten is proposed as an organic alternative but I doubt its efficacy. Mulching and cardboard sheet mulching is a gift that keeps on giving in that regard, keeping weed pressure down for months. If you can contact a recycler in your area and get a bunch of cardboard boxes you can do a lot to prevent weeds that way.

Weed control is the only one you really have complete control of with practical mechanical means. I would eliminate weeds as completely as possible.
The third is theoretically possible to address veganically if you're using drip irrigation and you can feed compost tea into your system for a rocket fuel boost to available nutrients when the plants benefit from it. I think this is done on small scale, I don't know about large organic farms.
The trick is minimizing volume of irrigation to prevent washout of the nutrients and delivering them close to the plant so you can use less of the more expensive immediate release veganic fertilizers.

Pests are a hard problem for organic farmers, and by not controlling them at the egg stage it's possible you would do more harm killing adult insects e.g. with insecticidal soaps and poisons like neem (which can be just as bad as or worse than conventional poisons). It's a bit of a dilemma.

Arguably certain IGR are veganic but not organic, because they can reduce eventual harm to insects from adulticides.

Diana wrote: ↑Thu Sep 07, 2023 5:43 pm Test - oh no It looks like a really long reply I wrote got Lost!
Is there a limit on words?

I'm sorry about that. There shouldn't be any word limit at all. You may have issues with cookies on your browser. You can look in the URL and see if there's something that says session ID or SID or some text along those lines. It tends to mess up when it does that.
If you log in and select to stay logged in so it keeps a cookie, then this topic URL should only look something like this:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7946

There's actually an auto-save feature. You can click "load quick draft" under your post, and as long as you're replying to the same post, it should hopefully be in there. But that might not work if you had some session ID stuff in the URL.

Out of habit I select all then copy text any time I submit a form. That way if it gets lost I can just click the link and paste.

Diana wrote: ↑Thu Sep 07, 2023 6:09 pm Land use continued:
Brazilian law requires rural landowners to reserve at least 20% of their land for native vegetation, forbidding comercial use or any domestic animal from entering It. You can't even take dead wood or leaves out.
According to lawyers I know, however, this is routinely violated; many use 100% of their useable land, intensively.
But organic growers cannot get away with that because we are audited yearly or twice yearly (semi-annually.) My property hás 30% set aside, and other organic farmers I know have 50% Forest reserve.
There are other reasons land use is less of a problem with organic farms if anyone wishes to discuss

The world will be fed. It doesn't really matter where the crops are grown, so I don't see a big difference with using 100% or only 50% of your land. If you're not producing enough food to feed the world, forests will be cut down somewhere else.
The big issue is yield. The more food we produce as a planet on the amount of land we farm will mean more people fed and less land cleared for farming.

Diana wrote: ↑Thu Sep 07, 2023 6:22 pm Now the bad news:
I do rent part of my land to three other farmers. Two grow bananas conventionally.

Bananas are a fairly efficient crop. I don't know what the difference in yield is between conventional and organic bananas specifically, but the price of organic bananas is about 20% higher which may imply a difference in yield of up to that much.

There's no harm in the rental to the conventional banana farms. Quite the contrary; it's providing a more ethical and healthier food source than most people consume on a regular basis. It's all about feeding the world while doing less harm.

Diana wrote: ↑Thu Sep 07, 2023 6:22 pmWell, I can't truly call myself a vegan since I make money from this. And I want to get out of It. It's not really for the money as it's about a quarter per hectare that the banana guys pay me.

I'm glad you may be able to make more renting to the banana guys.

Diana wrote: ↑Thu Sep 07, 2023 6:22 pmI feel so bad for the cows and their babies. I was walking by them and started to apologize to them and then stopped because It was so phony. Why should they ever forgive me?
I guess I try not to think about It.
I have dreams about the future that don't include exploiting such worthy animals. I have 4 bovines as pets and take good care of them but am such a hypocrite.
I have to find a way out of this

Does he have a lease signed with you?

I would just make sure to give him enough notice so there won't be any problems. Make sure to not say it's about money or he may offer more, just say you need the land for something else that's very personal in nature (like easing your conscience), hopefully he doesn't ask more questions.

You could even say the land is sold to a new owner or something. You can make it true by selling it to a trust (I think that would be the right term) established to keep it wild forever. The trust could even rent part of the land to farm bananas and use that to maintain itself and protect the rest of the land. One option if you want to have it out of your hands so there's no room for an uncomfortable situation with the farmer.