Disturbing news,or not?

If the farmer next to me is anything to go by, I'm not enamoured by their methods. It is a dairy farm, the cows are kept in big sheds permanently and he has been muck spreading of late. He runs a pipe from the farm, attaches it to a big tractor in the field and then trundles round the field creating a semi-lagoon, after a few days, it soaks in and then he does it again. Today he was doing it for the 3rd time. In another field, he has a solid mountain with a moat round it.

His 'business' is likely computer derived quantities for food to stuff in one end of the animals then probably automatic milking machines with big silos/lagoons to store the shit etc coming out the other end which he then needs to dispose of.

Infrastructure wise its -
Much the same here, Mark. I have 4 GHs, one I bought in 1970 something and have moved it each time we moved house - this is its 3rd garden. The other 3 GHs were freebies, ones from next door. The old shed came with the house, the second shed was my brother's and moved to my allotment before coming here. The third shed is actually a chicken house. I don't have a polytunnel.
The propagators are years old and 2 of them were freebies.

The fields behind the house are used for horse grazing/livery stables which contribute nothing in terms of agriculture. There are sheep in the next fields over and cows in the fields to the west. The developers have always got their beady eyes on this land. So far we've managed to fend them off.

I just read a similar article in the Telegraph which was more doom and gloom than this one. At least this one mentions the good aspects of growing your own.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20...140408.htm

 Bob listened to a program on this on radio 4 yesterday. Apparently it’s true! I’d still like to know where they got their stats from. There’s a whole forum of people here that would change the balance of their findings,  if we’d been asked. 
I'm still not convinced that this isn’t just scare mongering.

You have to remember, this is just one study and science is always a work in progress. This study will be used as a basis for the next study and so on, and the findings will be improved upon.

The newspapers have made a big deal out of this like they do with a lot of studies. Newspapers want clicks and their science reporting is often poor, one week coffee is good for you and the next week it's carcinogenic.

In my view the study has a few flaws: they relied on self-reporting and made a lot of assumptions. Self-reporting is notoriously unreliable, and they have assumed that everyone's compost piles are anaerobic and that gardeners replace their raised beds and sheds every 5 years. They also only analysed one growing season.

The researchers actually discuss the limitations of their work at the end of the study and suggest how it could be improved:

"Collaboration with citizen scientists was fundamental to achieving our large sample size... These tools, however, require reliable data on farm inputs and outputs, the collection of which was hampered by the turnover of personnel and volunteers at UA sites. For example, incomplete recordkeeping made it difficult to collect reliable data on water consumption. "

"Better data are needed on carbon fluxes of composting at UA sites. We found composting contributes substantially to the carbon footprint of UA. Despite this, little is known about differences in GHGs from various composting techniques"

"Furthermore, we only analyzed the 2019 growing season. Future work should include multiple years to develop a more representative snapshot of UA."

My takeaways from the study are positive: you should reduce, reuse and recycle as much as possible, and anything new should be used for as long as possible.