Let’s talk about ORGANIC.

Robert Paarlberg’s new book on the food system is out today, and here’s an excerpt.

He’s not a fan of organic, and he makes some good points but misses others.

Here we go.

Organic's biggest shortcoming is that you need more land to grow the same amount of food.

The yield penalty happens in almost every crop, in almost every study.

The gap could narrow with more research/varieties, but it won’t go away.

This has big, bad climate implications.
The second issue I have with organic, which Paarlberg shares, is that its basic criterion is naturalness.

Natural doesn’t mean safe, or even safer. A farming standard based on it forces farmers to sometimes use more dangerous, less effective tools.
https://t.co/Kh8TCgPEBp
On human health, there’s scant evidence that pesticide residues on conventional produce are harmful to consumers (though it’s possible farmworkers could be at risk).

What I don’t want is for folks who can’t afford organic to worry about feeding their kids conventional produce.
On the plus side, Paarlberg acknowledges that the organic standard has some real advantages for animal welfare.

This is why I buy organic animal products.

Many in the organic world would like more regs ensuring animals have decent lives.
Now, what Paarlberg misses. First, there are some environmental advantages. I wrote this a while back, and have since seen some evidence that organic systems may sequester carbon deeper in the soil, where it’s less likely to be re-released.
https://t.co/s1VfzlOmgK
He also misses organic’s success for farmers.

It enables growers to find like-minded consumers willing to pay a premium, and organic farmers are more profitable. This is good for a couple of reasons.
First, as a farmer, but also as a human, I'm in favor of farmers making a living.

If they all could, maybe we wouldn’t have to subsidize them to the tune of $20 billion a year.

But profitable farmers also have the cushion to experiment with new ways to farm better.
The last thing Paarlberg misses is an opportunity.

There has been, in the conventional ag community, a tendency toward sneering superciliousness about organic. Some call to boycott it!

Why? Because SCIENCE!
And I have to say that Paarlberg kicks off his piece with some smugness that I find off-putting.
Why does ORGANIC vs. CONVENTIONAL have to be war?

Because organic is a small slice of ag, I'll trade off its yield penalty for farmer livelihoods & the benefits from the experimentation I’ve seen on farms.

No, we can’t turn all acres organic, but I don’t think that’s a risk.
Bottom line:

ORGANIC: Some enviro benefits; better conditions for animals; farmers make a living

CONVENTIONAL: Better yields; unconstrained by “naturalness,” so can sometimes use safer/better practices; more affordable

I want a food supply with both.

Thanks for listening.

More from Health

Before we get too far into 2021, I thought I’d write a thread recapping some of the research that came out of my lab in 2020. Most of this work was led by my talented team of graduate students, Kerrianne Morrison, @kmdebrabander, and @DesiRJones.

Back in January, a news story was published about Kerrianne’s study showing improved social interaction outcomes for autistic adults when paired with another autistic partner.

A detailed thread about the study and a link to the paper can be found here (feel free to DM me your email address if you’d like a copy of the full paper for this study or any of our studies):


Another paper published early in 2020 (it appeared a few months earlier online) showed that traditional standalone tasks of social cognition are less predictive of functional and social skills among autistic adults than commonly assumed in autism research.


Next, @kmdebrabander led and published an innovative study about how well autistic and non-autistic adults can predict their own cognitive and social cognitive performance.

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12 TRADING SETUPS which experts are using.

These setups I found from the following 4 accounts:

1. @Pathik_Trader
2. @sourabhsiso19
3. @ITRADE191
4. @DillikiBiili

Share for the benefit of everyone.

Here are the setups from @Pathik_Trader Sir first.

1. Open Drive (Intraday Setup explained)


Bactesting results of Open Drive


2. Two Price Action setups to get good long side trade for intraday.

1. PDC Acts as Support
2. PDH Acts as


Example of PDC/PDH Setup given
THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)