“Flowers begin arriving past night and bidding starts before dawn. To ensure their lilies and hyacinths are ready for the auction block, growers move them from cold storage onto carts in the early morning, or else rush them from Schiphol after overnight flights from Quito, Nairobi, and Tel Aviv. It’s impossible to see, much less make sense of, the Aalsmeer at eye level, as the floor of its central warehouse is a thicket of carts bearing blooms, all waiting their turn. This is the world’s largest commercial building at ten million square feet, more than twice the size of Chicago’s Willis Tower or Merchandise Mart….” (Page213).
“From a catwalk running above, you can study the crazy quilt of tulips, sunflowers, azaleas and hydrangeas bleeding into daubs of orange or pink on the horizon. The quilt constantly changes colors and patterns as burly Dutchmen at the wheel of one-man tugs trail daisy chains behind them.” (Page 213)
What is interesting about these passages, concerning the marvels of the vast flower-auction market in Holland, and the global reach of this business made possible now due to aviation and refrigeration, is that the author does not fall into the usual stale bromides about how all this aviation-led trade is killing the planet. I liked this passage, on page 232-3:
“Food miles cannot begin to compare in toxicity with flatulent cattle. Anyone who’s read the Omnivore’s Dilemma can recite chapter and verse on the perils of force-feeding corn to livestock in feedlots. Cows produce methane, a greenhouse gas thirty times more potent than carbon, as a by-product of digestion…..A breakdown of the Big Mac revealed that nearly a third of its [carbon] footprint stems from feed production, another third from storage, and much of the rest from slaughtering, frying, and baking. Food miles contribute 3 per cent.”
Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda. 2011.
If we say for the moment we believe the CAGW hypothesis, has anyone done any work on the relative “harm” done by growing food (or flowers) in hot climates and flying them to cooler marlets, compared to growing them in artificially heated conditions nearer the market?
Wow, how that takes me back. My mother’s family is ‘in de bollen’, and as a yoot I spent many an early-morning hour at the auction, watching and then helping flowers get loaded into trucks.
Even then, and even to a callow yoot, the order and system of the vast enterprises of the flower auction were easily grasped with just a few words of guidance. Such a system works based upon surprisingly-few cast-iron principles, and IIRC, it all worked without any state oversight at all. When your product is that perishable, and what is worth a fortune at 2.00 am is just so much compost if it’s not in a florist’s shop in Dusseldorf at 9.00 am, there tends to be a clear focus on business which has not time or place for the machinery of the state.
I’d like to go back and see it now, after reading this description.
llater,
llamas
MarkE – yes,such things have been studied, and there isn’t a simple answer because of the number of variables involved. But it is definitely the case for at least some items that they can be grown overseas and flown in more energy efficiently than being hot-housed here.
Many perishables are flown in the freight hold of passenger flights. The overseas workers win, the airlines win and the final customer wins.
The whole methane cycle is much misunderstood, although it does seem likely that intensively raised feed-lot corn fed cattle do emit a fair amount of methane. Grass fed though…it is likely that on healthy pasture grass fed cattle have little net methane output. And methane has a short cycle time and is part of a “natural” cycle anyway.
The major contributors to atmospheric methane are rice cultivation and boreal forests. Animals are almost insignificant sources.
Like all such, a bit of thought, or a bit of thought experiment, is enough to guide us. Obtain a sample of 1 ruminant, then consider the amount of food, forage, what you will, that our ruminant consumes in it’s lifetime.
Now let us not feed it to our ruminant, but rather leave it in a big pile to…?
Yup it will rot, decompose, decay, whatever you will, and produce…? Yup, very often, methane. Methane is produced by the decomposition of organic materials in anerobic conditions.
It’s not the ruminant that ‘produces’ the methane, it’s the organic matter that it eats.
If you get around that by burning the material, then you’re producing CO2, ennit? Can’t have that.
http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/000429.html
http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/001899.html