> But urban land is in short supply, expensive, often polluted, and unsuitable for horticulture.

Nonsense. This is an argument for expanding access and cleaning up after ourselves - land that is too polluted to grow in is too polluted to live on.

> So does the industrial washing of packed and cut vegetables, which also saves water, compared with household‑level processing.

Also bullshit. People spend more water cleaning vegetables that have already been cleaned from industrial sources than from their yard. Growing vegetables close to home is a resource saver across the board, especially if it were smartly integrated with urban composting projects.

>While ‘handpicked’ sounds attractive to the urban consumer or occasional gardener, this type of manual labour is backbreaking if done all day long.

It is attractive to the urban consumer because if you are picking for yourself and family, the work isn't backbreaking and all day long. I fully believe in automated, roboticized food production as a replacement of slave labor, however it seems fairly sensible to me that, as labor becomes less of an imperative of class, that the quality of a person's labor will become more refined holistic and less machine-like, ie: farming and gardening for exercise instead of going to the gym.

> To top it all, the yield from organic farming is low.

Bullshit!! I don't have numbers handy, but I've been on farm tours, (granted organic is a misleading label these days) and the net yield from farms that depend on renewable, organic resources is higher than industrialized factory farmed produce, and the quality is higher. Only in the narrow calculus of unit per price is the yield higher, but we already know the dirty secret there: factory farmed, mass produced food is subsidized by oil and unsustainable resources, where the true cost is buried in diminishing returns over generational time spans.

> ketchup
haha! the great ketchup argument. Now we know this was ghost written by Ronald Raygunz ghost!

> Double-blind tasting panels have been unable to pick out the greenhouse tomatoes as lacking in flavour, or tomatoes grown without fertiliser as more tasteful.

Manure. Who does the testing? I can't think of an easier study to game. Plus "tomatoes grown without fertiliser" is a tell: not "fertilizer" as organic compost made from cow manure is "fertilizer", but inorganic fertilizer made from petroleum? - yeah, give me the manure tomatoes please.

And here's the last straw in this troll article:

>In complete contrast to the mantra of organic farming, modern greenhouses are now in the vanguard of sustainability.

Because organic farmers have used greenhouses for decades and beyond, and there's nothing incompatible with the organic, sustainable, small-scale, local movements and the greenhouse. So this article can't maintain a consistent argument with respect to its own premise. No one is arguing that sustainability in farming shouldn't utilize the best tech possible, but attacking the best progressive pillars of the movement which are small scale, individual efforts on shoddy grounds to promote the benevolent promise of mass scale industrial agriculture - it's not good work.

I will say that to the extend that these kinds of articles are meant to raise hackles and cause discussion among hipster urban farm types, then well done!