I'm not sure where you're headed with this line of questioning. Are you going to come back and recommend we depopulate the Earth to a nice, sustainable population of 220,000,000 people?
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Food production should be localized as much as possible, with farms growing diverse crops of plants and animals fertilized with locally produced composts.
I believe all people should buy locally. But are you suggesting the people living in the Arctic go back to eating only walrus and whale? And that bananas only be eaten in the sub tropics? Should we all drive to Washington to get an apple?
Production of food has not changed because we are using food to fertilize our plants. Farmers are not out there with the intention of growing lawn fertilizer. But an awful lot of them are raising animal feed instead of human food. Besides that it is not handled or stored properly for human consumption. The corn we use is not sweet corn suitable for humans. This is the stuff left over after the brewers, sugar manufacturers, and animal handlers have taken what they want. Secondly, the amount we use is a mere drop in the bucket compared to what the animals get. If you are suggesting that people in Africa are starving because we are spreading corn on our grass, I would suggest that people are starving in Africa because their leaders want them to starve. We send them food, and the leaders dump it in the ocean. It politically regulated starvation.
Remember that picture in your 4th grade social studies book of the "indian" teaching the Pilgrim how to grow corn by putting fish in the hole with the seeds? We're doing something like that. We're taking a material that is in relative abundance and redistributing it to grow something we enjoy. It would be more natural if the fish just jumped into the hole and died but we are not that lucky. Similarly corn does not die and fall on my lawn. Animals do not die on my lawn. I suppose I could grow my own corn and grind it into fertilizer, but I can guarantee you I would use more water, gasoline, and electricity per pound of corn than the industrial farmers down the road. Commercial agriculture has gotten so efficient that an apple grower in Argentina can make a profit selling apples in Washington.
Other than the fact that we are using biological materials to feed and protect our plants, there is little that is natural about organic gardening. We are starting with Mother Nature's natural approach (feeding food to the soil microbes) and enhancing it the best way we know how. The alternative is to take artificially created salts and spread those on the soil. You have to be careful with those, because an overdose of the chemicals is poisonous to the plants. Think of what that can do to our precious soil microbes.