ah awesome. I was just posting to ask you to do so. I will read these and edit this post after I am done.
Alright. So, perhaps in the future I should revise my communication because I consider a hydroponic grower a "farmer." Based on your reply, perhaps this isn't the case for everyone. Hydroponics can be just as feasible an option as their traditional brother. In fact, most of the fresh greens I buy come from this local source.
In reference to organics, I apologize if I ever came off in a way that suggested organic was better than alternative methods because I know this is not always the case. However thanks for the link to Chitosan because I had never learned of this before and I found the read enlightening.
So this actually often moves things in favor of large-scale farming and things like Hydroponic rather than local farmers with limited knowledge of all these advances developed over centuries of progress.
I like your presentation to me, however, I would respectfully ask you to not make statements such as this. Hydroponics, in my case, IS a local source of fresh produce and you have no knowledge about the farmers and their knowledge in regards to farming. As you said, the native americans were effective in their growing method, and I'm sure they had no idea about micro-nutrients such as the ones you presented. However, if you have a source that illustrates the differences in nutritional content from a conventionally grown spinach (along the same guidelines you recommended) and a hydroponically grown spinach, I will give it audience. It seems like since the hydroponics I buy aren't all that expensive anyways, it would be good to know how much of a nutritional difference this choice is.
If you would like to extrapolate on the concepts in your final two paragraphs, perhaps it would be better to PM me. Look forward to hearing from you.
Charles, of course I agree with you that hydroponics is a kind of farming, and that it has to be located somewhere and therefore geographically it will have to necessarily be 'local' to whoever just happens to live near them, like in your case, which is awesome.
I still stand behind my statements because the concern I am raising is not that something local to your area can't happen to be the best choice, but that it's not necessarily a good criteria to find the best farming practices. You might just be unlucky and live in a region where local farmers there are not interested in modern, healthier and more green methods that work with nature, and just keep depleting the soil, hurting the environment and giving you lower quality products for example. And if everybody just selected foods from local sources, there wouldn't be much incentive in improving anything or maintaining quality or setting prices to reasonable values.
All I am trying to say here is that what I was objecting to was not a specific local farmer, but using 'local' as the only criteria (not necessarily you specifically but anybody that might read and jump to oversimplified conclusions "local=good"). As an analogy, if you decided who to hire because their name has 5 letters, that wouldn't seem a good criteria, but I am not saying that someone with a 5-letter name would not be qualified. I am saying that the number of letters shouldn't really be a criteria.
Now, of course I understand why you want to try to keep things local, because odd pricing of some things that could be grown around here end up getting imported from distant places unnecessarily creating a heavier carbon footprint etc. I don't disagree but I am just pointing out additional things to consider.
Plus personally I think those situations driven by economic distortions should be fixed in better and more permanent ways that don't risk creating all sorts of other problems. For example by improving our ability to make better cost-effective and high-quality produce anywhere with technology, and fixing broken regulations, subsidizing rules etc which would have much greater far-reaching benefits.
In addition I would be concerned of possible things that could go wrong if everybody started oversimplifying and thinking that they can just look at "local" and assume it's good. The US already has a scary trend toward introversion, lack of education and things like "local news that matter to you" that just remind me of the scenes from the movie "idiocracy", and that's a trend we want to avoid.
I won't discuss this much here and I don't know if I'll have much time to discuss things like the benefits of globalization to ecology in PMs with you at the moment since I have several deadlines that are keeping me very busy, but I am just suggesting you might want to try and seek out documentaries and well-written counterpoints to some of the arguments you read so far, just to make sure you have a more balanced view and can fully put things into context, or at least can be aware of those discussion points.
As far as difference in spinach, I haven't looked at that specifically, so I would encourage you to first try to find studies yourself for both your differently fed meat and differently grown vegetables, and ask me again if you have trouble finding some. I think rough numbers for nutritional content changes for vegetables based on how they are grown were as high as a 75% decrease in nutritional content for various nutrients, plus more specific differences where the nutritional content would actually change significantly and produce changes as large as the death of large portions of the population. I am not sure if anything as noticeable has been seen in cows fed grass vs grain or soy, or how many people died throughout history because of any such difference but I really never looked since as you know I don't hurt or eat animals and they can eat ice cream all day if they really want as far as I am concerned
