Five misused food and farming terms, from natural to intense — and what they really mean

Many words we use have a hidden ballast. For example, we tend to assume that local, natural, and grass-fed foods are good for our health, the environment, and animal welfare, while intensive farming is bad in these areas. However, the evidence often does not support this.

Here are five food-related terms that we need to clarify.

1. Local

All polluting activity is local somewhere. However, many assume that lower “food miles” always mean “better for the environment”.

When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, what you eat matters far more than where it comes from. Although transport is a key sector for climate change, the transport of food from farms to us (‘food miles’) accounts for on average only 6% of the total carbon footprint of products.

Very little food is shipped by air, which causes high emissions and should be avoided. Most journeys are made by ship, train and truck, with significantly lower emissions per kilometer. Of course, other things being equal, fewer food miles mean fewer emissions, and there are other reasons people want to buy local produce.

Changing the way people travel is far more important than food miles. If you’re looking to reduce emissions from transportation, helping yourself and others avoid flying or taking the bus instead of driving makes a much bigger difference than not using bananas shipped by ship buy.

Traffic emissions (in red) are relatively small compared to land use change (e.g. deforestation, soil erosion) or agricultural emissions (e.g. fertilizers, methane from cows).
Our World in Data (Data: Poore & Nemecek, Science, 2018), CC BY-SA

2. Intense

“Intense” is rarely used in a positive context for agriculture. People tend to associate it with a lack of animal welfare, pollution, and faceless corporations.

However, there are many different types of intensive farming, and it is worth asking what types of inputs are meant. Do we mean many human workers? High energy and power consumption? High fuel consumption? High use of pesticides? Do we consider the input amounts per hectare, per ton of product and per 1,000 calories?

Many fruits, vegetables and other products, from strawberries to mushrooms to vanilla, rely on manual labor to be harvested. However these types of produce are grown, they are very labor intensive compared to arable crops, which can be harvested by fewer people with combines and tractors/trailers.

Organic crops are often used as a counterexample to “intensive farms”. They use fewer pesticides and are therefore less intensive in this regard. However, organic farming tends to require more intensive use of fuel and machinery to mechanically crush weeds without herbicides, or additional human labor to control weeds manually.

Intensive farming is often used as an abbreviation for high-yield farming—that is, farming that produces more food per hectare. Space efficiency in food production is generally rated positively. High-yield agricultural systems with low pollution, low soil loss, etc. per tonne of product are arguably the single most important way to feed the world with the least environmental damage.

The alternative to intensive, high-yield farming is extensive, low-yielding farming, which ironically requires much more land. Land that could instead be used for reforestation, wetlands, solar or wind farms, homes or parks.

3. Industrial

Similar to “intensive,” this is almost universally used negatively in relation to animal welfare, sustainability, and agriculture. The guess is that before the industrial revolution, agriculture was always sustainable. However, this is not the case.

Both ancient and modern farming systems can cause significant damage to land and wild ecosystems. The peasants in the Roman Empire severely damaged their soils.

Norse settlers in Iceland deforested the landscape for their crops and livestock, leading to widespread loss of the island’s erosion-prone volcanic soils. These historic agricultural practices continue to impact the country’s ecology today.

Iceland is treeless today, but forests once covered up to 40% of the island.
Oleg Troino / Shutterstock

4. Lined with grass

Grass feeding is generally viewed positively. However, grass-fed beef and lamb have huge carbon and land footprints compared to pork, chicken, and high-protein crops like peas, beans, and lentils.

In many countries, most grass-fed livestock are also fed crops. That means the meat they produce can use up more arable land per kilogram — farmland, let alone grazing land — than peas or beans.

5. Of course

Similar to ‘local’, ‘natural’ is a friendly-sounding term that many assume food is good for us and the planet. Of course is good. Unnatural is bad and, well, unnatural.

However, many natural foods are toxic and dangerous. As biologist Ottoline Leyser has pointed out, “Nobody sends their kids into the forest and says, ‘Eat whatever you can find.’ ‘It’s all natural, so it has to be good for you.'”

Meat is often seen as more natural than vegan meat alternatives that are brewed in vats with many different ingredients. But modern livestock farming requires millennia of artificial selection and is a far cry from what most people would consider natural.

Animals are unable to move and form family and social bonds like they would in the wild. You will not see a domestic cow or chicken in nature, as they will be eaten by predators in a very short time. These animals only exist because humans evolved them from less palatable and less manageable wild ancestors.

Meat alternatives – as unnatural as they may be – generally have a much lower carbon and land footprint than meat. Unnatural can be better for nature.

So the next time someone talks about intensive farming or natural eating, ask them exactly what they mean.

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