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The 50-year farm bill
Posted by Gail the Actuary on July 18, 2010 - 10:25am in The Oil Drum: Campfire
This is an article by Wes Jackson that was previously published by Solutions Journal. We have included a few Campfire questions at the end.
The Trouble with Agriculture
Across the farmlands of the U.S. and the world, climate change overshadows an ecological and cultural crisis of unequaled scale: soil erosion, loss of wild biodiversity, poisoned land and water, salinization, expanding dead zones, and the demise of rural communities. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) concludes that agriculture is the “largest threat to biodiversity and ecosystem function of any single human activity.”1 Up to 40 percent of global croplands are experiencing soil erosion, reduced fertility, or overgrazing.2 It is likely that agricultural acreage worldwide will expand over the next two to three decades, especially as the human population increases to eight to 10 billion people. The same thing that drives climate change helps drive the agricultural crisis—cheap fossil fuel.
In the U.S., commodity subsidies that focus on bushels per acre, an industrial model that much of the world wants to imitate, continue to drive this increasingly unsustainable agricultural economy. Over the past century, the number of farms in the U.S. has declined as the average farm size has increased. At the same time, the number of commodities per farm—such as corn, wheat, barley, soybeans, alfalfa, tobacco, potatoes, pigs, and chickens—has decreased from an average of five to just one product.3 American agriculture is guided by five-year farm bills and heavily entrenched subsidies. Export policy is the driver designed to offset our nation’s balance of payments deficit, which includes the purchase of foreign oil.
We need a long-term, conserving vision to counteract these trends. Five-year farm bills should be mileposts in a 50-year journey to end degradation of our agricultural capital. Where do we begin? The United States is a big country, and the ecological mosaic is daunting. There are the soils of the upper Midwest, deep and rich in nutrients from the Pleistocene’s scouring ice and watered by the moisture favorably blown from the Gulf of Mexico. What have we done with this land? Soil erosion, nitrogen fertilizer, and pesticides have seriously degraded this gift of good land, the best contiguous stretch in the world. In California, rich valleys and reliable snow pack in a Mediterranean environment lessen the problem of soil erosion. But there is spraying, salinization, accumulation of toxins in the delta, and loss of farmland to sprawl.
One could continue the inventory, but the point is that each region has its own problems and opportunities. We must acknowledge that all successful corrections will be local. And that plays to an often-overlooked point: The decline of fossil fuels will require a higher eyes-to-acre ratio, which means more farmers on the land. Cultural and ecological adaptation become one subject.
Looking broadly, the USDA and the secretary of agriculture should see that our first order of business should be to prevent our soils from eroding and declining in quality—they are the source of most of the nutrients that feed us. If our soils are protected, the water falling on them can be protected and properly used on its trip to the atmosphere, ocean, or aquifer. The United States has about 400 million acres of cropland, with around 36 million acres placed in the Conservation Reserve Program.4,5 The secretary of agriculture must look at the aggregate use of these croplands. At any one time, 80 percent of that land grows annual crops. The other 20 percent is in perennials, such as pastures or hay, although, to be clear, sometimes in a rotation with annuals such as corn or sorghum.
Such an overview quickly draws one’s attention to the core of what might be called “the problem of agriculture”: essentially all of the high-yield crops that feed humanity—including rice, wheat, corn, soybeans, and peanuts—are annuals. With cropping of annuals, alive just part of the year and weakly rooted even then, comes more loss of precious soil, nutrients, and water.
Summary of the possible. Protecting our soils with perennials.
A. 2010: Hay or grazing operations will continue as they exist. Preparations for subsidy changes begin.
B. 2015: Subsidies become incentive to substitute perennial grass in rotations for feed grain in meat, egg, and milk production.
C. 2020: The first perennial wheat, Kernza™, will be farmer-ready for limited acreage.
D. 2030: Educate farmers and consumers about new perennial grain crops.
E. 2045: New perennial grain varieties will be ready for expanded geographical range. Also potential for grazing and hay.
F. 2055: High-value annual crops are mainly grown on the least erodible fields as short rotations between perennial crops.
But the problem of agriculture is about more than the annual condition. It is also about growing crops in vast, unnatural monocultures. This makes harvest easy, but there is only one kind of root architecture in any given field; the living roots are not there year-round, and therefore, manage nutrients and water poorly. Waste of both is the rule.
The trouble with agriculture is not a recent development. Soil erosion and soil salting brought down civilizations long before the industrial and chemical era. Why the crisis now? Simply, a surge in human population—which has doubled from about 3.3 billion in 1965 to almost 7 billion now—with land lost to sprawl and the remainder used far more intensively, and the accumulation of large dead zones in our oceans.
What is the alternative? Prudence requires one to first look to nature, the ultimate source of our food and production, no matter how independent we feel we have become. If we look at essentially all of the natural land ecosystems within the ecosphere, from alpine meadows to rainforests, we see that mixtures of perennial plants rule.6 Annuals are opportunists that sprout, reproduce, throw seeds, and die. Perennials hold on for the long haul, protect the soil, and manage nutrients and water to a fine degree. In this regard perennials are superior to annuals, whether in polyculture or monoculture. The Land Institute’s long-standing mission has been to perennialize several major crops, such as wheat, sorghum, and sunflower, and domesticate a few wild perennial species to produce food like their annual analogs. The goal is to grow them in various mixtures according to what the landscape requires. With the pre-agricultural ecosystem as the standard, the institute is attempting to bring as many processes of the wild to the farm as possible, below as well as above the surface.
A 50-Year Vision - A Brief Summary
Five-year farm bills address:
- Exports
- Commodities
- Subsidies
- Some soil conservation measures
- Food programs
A 50-Year Farm Bill would be a program using these bills as mileposts, adding larger, more sustainable goals to existing programs:
- Protect soil from erosion
- Cut fossil-fuel dependence to zero
- Sequester carbon
- Reduce toxics in soil and water
- Manage nitrogen carefully
- Reduce dead zones
- Cut wasteful water use
- Preserve or rebuild farm communities.
Because these perennial crops will not begin to be ready for the farmer on any appreciable scale for another quarter-century, we must make do by perennializing the landscape in other ways. A first step should be to increase the number of pastures and have fewer livestock in the feedlot by phasing out subsidies for production-oriented grain commodities, that industry’s lifeblood. Saving the soil and allowing water to improve is more important than having too much meat or corn sugar.
What about California and elsewhere across the mosaic, where soil erosion is less serious? First, perennials are superior for managing nutrients and water.7 Second, species mixtures can form barriers to outbreaks of insects and epidemics of disease. So nature’s example can be referred to no matter where the landscape. This will start what Wendell Berry calls a “conversation with nature,” which begins with three questions: What was here? What will nature require of us here? And what will nature help us do here?
To address these issues, the following proposal for a 50-Year Farm Bill is offered for action.
A 50-Year Plan for Change
Current USDA planning uses five-year plans that are really just instruments for protecting our current failing system. They address exports—designed to offset the nation’s deficit, including the purchase of foreign oil—commodity subsidies that focus on bushels per acre, subsidies, food programs, and some soil measures. We suggest using the five-year increments to build a radically different type of agriculture: a 50-year vision of perennial, low-impact agriculture.
In the short run, this plan will encourage farmers to increase the use of perennial grasses and legumes in crop rotations. This will help protect our soils and reduce the need for fertilizer, while preparing farms for the use of perennial grains.
Pastures and perennial forage crops are already available in permanent stands and rotations. We propose incentives that would maintain the present perennial acres and increase their presence in rotations. When perennial grains become available, they will require no financial subsidy, since they will represent a compelling alternative.
As more of our acreage switches to perennial agriculture, and with the 50 years of concerted investment in research, education, and incentives envisaged in the plan, we can expect to see perennial crops increase from 20 to 80 percent of the land.
American agriculture is widely used as a model for the rest of the world. Although a U.S. perennial program would not solve all agricultural problems, it could be helpful around the world: Some perennialized grains could be planted elsewhere. Many techniques developed to perennialize U.S. agriculture could be applied to native plants in other countries. American expertise could be exported much as it is today, to help with the sustainability problems of agriculture elsewhere. In other words, the same American approach to improving agriculture that led to the first worldwide Green Revolution could lead to a sustainable green revolution.
At the Heart of the Plan
We recognize that breeding perenniality into a broad spectrum of grain crops will take time. Even so, prototypes have thrived for several years in Kansas.8 As their yields increase, they will replace their annual relatives—one prototype in as few as 10 years. Initially, these crops will be released on a limited scale, and researchers will work with farmers on agronomic problems, such as seeding density and planting time, as they arise.
Wheat has been hybridized with several different perennial species to produce viable, fertile offspring. We have produced thousands of such plants. Many rounds of crossing, testing, and selection will be necessary before perennial wheat varieties are available for use on the farm. Kernza™ is our trademark name for Intermediate Wheatgrass, Thinopyrum intermedium, a perennial relative of wheat. Using parental strains from the USDA and other sources, we have established genetically diverse populations. In 2009, we harvested 30 acres and planted an additional 126. The overall nutritional quality is superior to that of annual wheat.
Grain Sorghum is a drought-hardy feed grain in North America and a staple human food crop in Asia and Africa, where it provides reliable harvests in places where hunger is always a threat. It can be hybridized with the perennial species Sorghum halepense. We have produced large plant populations from hundreds of such hybrids and have selected perennial strains with seed size and grain yields up to 50 percent of those of annual grain sorghum.
Illinois Bundleflower, Desmanthus illinoiensis, is a native prairie legume that fixes atmospheric nitrogen and produces abundant protein-rich seed. It is one of our strongest candidates for domestication as a crop. We have assembled a large collection of seed from a wide geographical area and have a breeding program. We see this plant as a partial substitute for the soybean.
Sunflower is another annual crop that we have hybridized with perennial species in its genus, including Helianthus maximiliani, H. rigidus, and H. tuberosus (commonly known as Jerusalem Artichoke). Breeding work has turned out strongly perennial plants. Genetic stabilization will improve their seed production.
Upland fields of annual rice are highly vulnerable to erosion, yet millions of people in Asia depend on them. In the 1990s, the International Rice Research Institute achieved significant progress toward breeding a perennial upland rice using crosses between the annual Oryza sativa and two wild perennial species, Oryza rufipogon and O. longistaminata.9 The project was terminated in 2001, but the breeding and genetic populations were transferred to the Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences in southwestern China, where work has been continued with funding support from The Land Institute. The focus is now on the more difficult work with the distantly related O. longistaminata, which, when crossed with rice, produces plants with underground stems called rhizomes.10 In recent breakthroughs, a small number of perennial plants with good seed production have been produced.
Corn and soybeans are two species that, more than any other crop, we need to perennialize. Corn is a top carbohydrate producer, typically grown on more than 70 million acres annually.4 Until soybean acreage increased, corn caused the greatest amount of soil erosion in the United States. It will be a challenge to perennialize this crop, but serious consideration is being given to doing so by exploring two main paths. 1) We could obtain genes from a few distant relatives of corn that are in the genus Tripsicum. All are perennial and at least one is winter hardy. 2.) The other, more likely route would be to cross with two much closer perennial relatives of corn. Unfortunately, both species, Zea perennis and Z. diploperennis, are tropical and not winter hardy. Further research is clearly necessary before we can replace traditional corn.
Several Australian species of the soybean genus Glycine are perennial; they are difficult to breed with soybean but are potential targets for direct domestication, without crossing with soybean. Our exploration of perennializing soybeans has been very limited. For now, we are working to make Illinois Bundleflower a satisfying substitute.
To mimic a natural ecosystem will require some degree of crop diversity, and there is potential for many more perennial grains, including rosinseed, Eastern Gamagrass, chickpea, millet, flax, and a range of native plants. We have elected not to wait until perennial grain crops are fully developed to gain experience with the ecological context in which they will grow. At The Land Institute we have established long-term ecological plots of close analogs in which to compare methods of perennial crop management. Our perennial-grain prototypes, including Kernza™ and bundleflower, allow us to initiate long-term ecological and production research in these plots. For other crops we are forced to use analogs, but eventually, true perennial grain mixtures will replace them. Additionally, ongoing studies of natural ecosystems, such as tallgrass prairie, provide insight into the functioning of natural plant communities. The prairie is now, and will always be, a valued teacher.
Who Will Pay?
We propose that, over an eight-year period, federal funding would sponsor 80 plant breeders and geneticists who would develop perennial grain, legume, and oilseed crops, and 30 agricultural and ecological scientists who would develop the necessary agronomic systems. They would work on six to eight major crop species at diverse locations. Budgeting $400,000 per scientist per year for salaries and research costs would add less than $50 million annually. This is less than 10 percent of the amount that the public and private sectors have been spending on plant breeding research in recent years.
Implementation will depend on endorsement by the secretary of agriculture, the president, Congress, nonprofit organizations, corporations, and citizens. The Land Institute will offer free germplasm and more than three decades of experience with perennials to the project.
Conclusion
Essentially all of nature’s ecosystems feature perennial plants growing in species mixtures, systems that build soil. Agriculture reversed that process nearly everywhere by substituting annual monocultures. As a result, ecosystem services—including soil fertility—have been degraded. Most land available for new production is of marginal quality that declines quickly. The resulting biodiversity loss gets deserved attention, soil erosion less.
Perennialization of the 70 percent of cropland now growing grains has the potential to extend the productive life of our soils from the current tens or hundreds of years to thousands or tens of thousands. New perennial crops, like their wild relatives, seem certain to be more resilient to climate change. Without a doubt, they will increase sequestration of carbon. They will reduce the land runoff that is creating coastal dead zones and affecting fisheries and maintain the quality of scarce surface and ground water. American food security will improve. It won’t be easy to overturn 45 years of American policy and centuries of turning to annuals. There are entrenched interests that can slow change—just look at the recent battle over healthcare in the U.S. Congress—but the social stability and ecological sustainability resulting from secure perennial food supplies make the fight worthwhile. A 50-Year Farm Bill will buy time to confront the intersecting issues of climate, population, water, and biodiversity.
Acknowledgments
This paper was written with indispensable assistance from Land Institute scientists Stan Cox, Lee DeHaan, David Van Tassell, Jerry Glover, and Cindy Cox. Wendell Berry, Joan Jackson, Fred Kirschenmann, and Ken Warren provided editorial help. Joe Roman, Jack Fairweather, Tess Croner, James Dewar, Arjun Heimsath, and B. B. Mishra gave valuable reviews and assistance.
References
- Cassman, KG & Wood, S. Cultivated Systems. In Millennium Ecosystem Assessment: Global Ecosystem Assessment Report on Conditions and Trends 741–789 (Island Press, Washington, DC, 2005).
- Wood, S, Sebastian, K & Scherr, SA. Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems: Agroecosystems (International Food Policy Research Institute and World Resources Institute, Washington, DC, 2000).
- Dimitri, C, Effland, A & Conklin, N. The 20th Century Transformation of U.S. Agriculture and Farm Policy (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Information Bulletin 3, 2005).
- USDA. National Agricultural Statistic Service. (2007).
- Pollack, S & Perez, A. Fruit and tree nuts situation and outlook yearbook (pdf). (2007). www.ers.usda.gov/publications/FTS/2007/Yearbook/FTS2007.pdf
- Chiras, DD & Reganold, JP. Natural Resource Conservation: Management
- for a Sustainable Future, 9th ed. (Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2004).
- Randall, GW & Mulla, D. Nitrate nitrogen in surface waters as influenced by climatic conditions and agricultural practices. Journal of Environmental Quality 30, 337–44 (2001).
- Cox, TS, Glover, JD, Van Tassel, DL, Cox, CM & DeGann, LR. Prospects for developing perennial grain crops. BioScience 56, 649–659 (2006).
- Sacks, EJ, Roxas, JP & Sta. Cruz, MT. Developing perennial upland rice I: Field performance of Oryza sativa/O. rufipogon F1, F4 and BC1F4 progeny. Crop Science 43, 120–128 (2003).
- Cox, TS et al. Breeding perennial grain crops. Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences 21, 59–91 (2002).
Questions
1, Does starting this kind of a 50-year plan now make sense?
2. If it such a plan might work, what secondary benefits do you see? For example, might some of the biomass be helpful for heating?
3. Can you think of any modifications to this plan, that might make it easier or faster to implement in a low carbon world?
4. Are there drawbacks to such a plan?
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Are you kidding me? Any farm bill thrives on government. What I am doing is self sustainability. No GMO, And nothing anywhere near GMO. If I need to sell to the community, if they do not tun on me, I can. Also, I make my own fuel sustainable far from any other source I have. I grow my own food, and my own fuel to sustain myself. Enter CSA, consumer sustained agriculture and I can grow for a small number of people as well. But for now, I have tryed to give talks at libraries about peak oil, nobody shows. So how should I handle the future? How should we all handle the future? Population, energy, yada yada yada. We here on the oil drum know. Confused here, and need your opinion.
Agree.
It all sounds like BAU but with a tilt to Perrenials to solve some of the problems.
The plan still assumes Fossil Fuels, Fossil Water and rapidly declining essentials such as Phosphorous to maintain agricultural output.
How much of these resources will be available in 50 years to feed a growing population.
We have been reading about roads going back to gravel. I am afraid it won't be very long before there are a lot of country roads that are poorly-maintained gravel. It seems like this is going to make it even more difficult to do things like deliver fertilizer and transport grain to market, even if we could get everything else worked out.
I grew up in the country in at the time Third World Brazil, there's nothing wrong with a good gravel road, gravel is just fine...
Anyways maybe we could chose between this:
Or a solar powered tractor:
http://www.solarcarandtractor.com/Cub.html
I think I'll be riding the solar tractor it uses less fuel...
Please quit trotting out this old electric tractor example. It falls WAY short of practical. Ask any one managing anything more than a couple acres.
EVs are a rich mans toy. Zero real life application.
Perhaps you're the one that needs to adjust to the new paradigm accepting that it might make a lot more sense if more people manage just a few acres as opposed to large corporate farms. Obviously we both won't have our way, one of us needs to start thinking differently.
BTW to be very clear when I trot out an idea like the solar tractor I don't have any illusions about it working in the corporate farm paradigm part of why I do it is to start people thinking about different ways of organizing the entire system from the ground up.
I already work with solar energy and quite frankly I'm really getting tired of the constant drumming of: THIS ISN'T PRACTICAL! If you're intent is to maintain BAU, then you are right but that is not my intent.
Case in point The Solar Impulse plane, it isn't intended to fly 300 people across the Atlantic, it is first and foremost an invitation to think in new ways. I'd like to see you convince the people working on it that their plane falls WAY short of practical, they'd laugh you out of the room!
http://www.solarimpulse.com/blog/blog.php?lang=en&group=media
I suggest that people like you stick with the oxcarts, assuming of course that you can grow enough corn to feed them. I think it's more your speed and in line with your lack of vision and courage to embrace change and a new paradigm, which at the end of the day is about moving forward with much less cheap energy. It is thinking like yours that has ceased to be practical and is now very detrimental...
I think I'll be riding the solar tractor it uses less fuel...
And I'll put forth that is the wrong model.
1) unless we have some kind of lightweight energy dense power supply this will add weight to the tractor. The weioght means soil compaction which then limits
2) the tractor takes human skill
Now lets look at the unit:
This Cub was built 50 years ago to replace a team of horses, mules, or oxen at a time
(that means it was a standard 40 hp tractor)
. The battery pack will provide this power for over three hours or enough to plow ½ acre or harrow a smooth one acre.
(than means not a full work day)
I am of the belief the future is small sub 2 HP units for the farming job.
1) Small sub 2HP means 1500 watts which should be less of a resource allocation than 20, 40 or even larger HP units.
2) when one breaks you swap in another unit and repair the broken thing. Lower per unit cost SHOULD allow for spares/spare capacity
3) lighter weight would allow working in wetter conditions
4) Tax law - writing down EQ is less of a hassle than managing labor
5) the machine has intelligence - less needed for the farm hand
6) A map of growth/bugs can be made of the field - thus folar feed could be applied to the weaker plants. Pest management applied to what needs management. Same with water. fertlizer/water/pest management should be contrained items.
7) blind weed manangement http://planetwhizbang.blogspot.com/ - an example of a simple device.
8) eMergy can be added with stereo cameras with lighting filters to help select weeds to remove 'em. Mapping - alert for location if the software can't kill the weeds.
9) Machines can work 24x7.
I actually agree with you! Keep in mind that the tractor in my example was not designed as a solar tractor from the ground up. I think doing so would greatly improve its efficiency and usefulness. Even so note the specs bellow:
I'd actually like to move away from soil based agriculture wherever possible. Think hydroponic beds fed by waste from acquacuture with solar powered pumps and people walking between the beds for tending and harvesting.
Again my posting of the tractor example is only to start getting people think outside the box. The Agricultural model based on ICE tractors, heavy machinery and fossil fuel inputs in herbicides, pesticides and fertilizer is going the way of the dodo, so is a large part of the human population, that's the reality we have to deal with. Wishful thinking isn't going to change that.
I'd actually like to move away from soil based agriculture wherever possible. Think hydroponic beds fed by waste from acquacuture with solar powered pumps and people walking between the beds for tending and harvesting
Low cost long lasting "beds" would be my "concern" in the short term. Long term - cycling the matter.
No matter HOW ya do this Ag thing you are taking sub-soil matter (trees/alfalfa) and moving it to the topsoil layer. How it used to be done is photons + sub-soil was gathered by animals and moved to a central point for gathering/processing (barn then garden) The "good soil" is the leaves of trees that filled in and rotted in a wetland/lake many thousands of years before man showed up.
Unfortunately, not only did man show up, but he multiplied to 7 billion plus and still multiplying.
I don't think that plan "A" is working anymore, and I'm not sure if plans B, C, D, and E will either, but if one of them doesn't pan out soon then we are all FUBAR anyway and the point will be moot...
Cheers!
Well, here's another plan that seems to be working so well -- already -- that lots of surrounding farmers, in alpine Austria, are queueing up to get in on it. See readable material here:
http://www.krameterhof.at/en/
And a reavealing video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9almsBuUzk
(four parts)
I note that Wes seems to be giving credibility to the hitherto orthodox assumption that global human population will continue to rise, and more wild land will be taken for intensive agriculture, over the next forty years.
I suggest that these are now becoming +highly+ questionable assumptions. Instead, try these below; and then think of what might be possible in the way of a re-established and seriously-responsible permanent agriculture; together with widespread remediation of damaged land, also to be taken as a standard responsibility in the near future, as we-all get shocked back into sobriety by events:
First: Human population, which rose with the ramping up of cheap, abundant hydrocarbon use will go down with it also -- whatever we do or don't do. The huge population numbers which we've all been fretting about are never going to materalise. This doesn't depend just on the decline of oil availability alone; many other commodity crises are involved simultaneously also. But the peaking and decline of crude availability alone would do it, even without all the other downward pressures.
Second: No replacement blend of energy sources will be found and organised which can come anywhere near to the current level of energy availability. There is no such blend; nor will it prove possible to create +completely+ the essential infrastructure, even for the blends which are technically possible. All the new infrastructural possibilities require petro and other hydrocarbon energy-subsidies for the foreseeable future, which will be going down inexorably from here on; and also, massive capitalisation efforts would be required too, which probably are never going to be made in practice.
Third: Assume that John Michael Greer's counterspell to unrealistic upbeat can-do thinking, given at the end of this post:
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/06/waiting-for-millennium.html
is precisely correct -- so long as you take serious note of the caveats which he offers in his previous paragraph. The counterspell, which is given to keep oneself free from getting hypnotised and sucked into essentially futile revitalisation movements, goes like this:
"There is no brighter future ahead."
Again, let me underline that you won't get onto the right wavelength of the profound truth of this prophylactic insight unless you look at, and understand, the caveats. Without them, the inevitable response will be denial -- based on misunderstanding.
Instead of following hopeful and well-intentioned initiatives which are, at bottom, attempts to not face an intolerable reality, the only truly viable responses to what's happening seem to be quite otherwise. One line of realistic preparation is, in fact, the general topic of the June and July posts on JMG's blog. I can't recommend them too highly. And with their content in mind, can I suggest that what Sepp Holzer is doing -- and many other similarly innovative wayfinders around the world -- is the way that we have to go now (not just can go, but must) to preserve what we can of our ability to feed ourselves, whilst at the same time not wrecking the fundamental, non-human-controlled life-support system which keeps the planet's entire life-robe going.
Incidentally, the genuine-discussion comments which get going on JMG's blog, together with his brief responses to them, are mostly of as high a standard as you find here on TOD -- and that's an unusually high quality level
Ever since reading JMG's counter-spell that there may not be a brighter future does not exclude a bright future. I use bright as in above average intelligence. We will just have to be smarter about how we meet the necessities of life as well as a few comforts. What it means to live a good life without surrounding ourselves without the toys Madison Ave keeps pushing at us will require a more intelligent paradigm. An example would be how a toddler would rather play with the big box a toy came in than play with the toy. Looking at Europe and the Far East we see folks living the good life with a fraction of the per capita energy use of Americans. Oriental philosophies and Native American culture both decried the accumulation of needless goods. Jesus asked what good is it to gain the world but lose your soul? Turn the question around and we discover that the fulfillment of our souls' desires does not lie in an abundance of goods.
Thank you, Rhisiart Gwilym, A most excellent comment indeed! Especially loved the 4 part video.
Second: No replacement blend of energy sources will be found and organised which can come anywhere near to the current level of energy availability.
Not at the price point of $10 for the energy in 1 barrel of oil.
(I think humankind COULD have more energy at its disposal than it does now, but the model of conduct/what the masses expect is build on the back of sub $10 barrel pricing.)
We owned a Cub tractor exactly like the one in the picture so far as I can tell for a long time.
Without getting into the technicalites of tractor power ratings,I can't say much about the power-but it would could not do even a quarter of the work easily done by a newer tractor we own that is rated at thirty five horsepower.
I expect I could actually work an acre or two with it, or even four or five acres,under ideal circumstances.An idealist willing to put up with the limitations of the tractor and well located so that he or she could sell produce at retail prices or boutique prices can make a modest living on such a small acreage.
No doubt such people are farmers according to any reasonable definition of the word, but "real " farmers usually refer to such small operators as market gardeners or part timers or hobbyists or some similar term.
As a practical matter gasoline at ten dollars a gallon would be a far more workable solution than converting that little tractor to battery power.It can do at least twice as much work per hour on gasoline, and the increased operational flexibility would more than amply offset the fuel costs.
I don't see battery powered tractors taking the place of ff powered tractors within the forseeable future;and when petro gasoline or diesel finally becomes unobtanium, it is likely biofuels-either alcohols or diesel-will still be far more economical and practical than batteries unless there is an order of magnitude improvement in the cost and performance of batteries.
Tractor engines are incredibly durable and very easy to repair;the electrical durability argument isn't going to cut it as far as practical minded farmers are concerned.
A properly maintained tractor can be expected to run at least four or five thousand hours before it needs an overhaul , which is roughly equivalent to three hundred to four hundred thousand miles on a car.Lots of cars go that far, and car engines are essentially throw away engines which as a rule are seldom overhauled, because they seldom wear out;they simply break down and don't get fixed.An overhaul would costs less than the several sets of batteries required to last this long when used under extreme duty farm conditions; and the operators wages are several times the current day fuel expense for a very small tractor.
Given current battery technology, a very small tractor is the only size possible.
I would need about a fifty kilowatt hour battery to power an electric motor for an hour doing the same work our utility tractor does when I am plowing throttle down;and in that hour I would plow at least five or six times what the pictured electric would plow.Maybe ten times as much.It's hard to say for sure, there are too many possible variables.
And for what its worth-(I'm a hands on small farmer, remember) I will give anybody who wants to make a serious bet with me that unless there is some sort of photographic trickery involved and I am SERIOUSLY mistaking the total size of the double ganged discs behind that little Cub, it simply would not even budge them once in soft plowed ground.
The stakes, if anybody is interested:If I lose, you get an hour to draw a crowd to see me kiss your backside;if I win a thousand bucks. The discs gotta go in the ground four inches, which is on the light side of typical;and its gotta be soil, not just dry sand.
Even with the added battery wieght that little tractor has less than half the tractive dead wieght of my model thirty Ferguson industrial(which is not at all the same tractor as an agricultural model thirty, its twice as heavy and twice as powerful) and also less than half the drive wheel footprint.
If I tried to pull that large a set of discs with the wieghts as pictured in plowed ground I would have serious perhaps unmanageable wheelspin problems;and unless the ground IS plowed first,the discs will simply ride on top of the sod and are consequently perfectly worthless.
The picture is no more and no less than a propaganda joke,similar to one recently run here with text claiming that an electric car could be driven x thousands of miles per year from pv panels mounted on a carport roof not much too much larger than the car.
Theoritically it would be possible in terms of the amount of juice that could be generated, but impossible as a practical matter in the real world.
I am all for amply funded research into every aspect of agriculture; small but steadily accumulating incremental improvements in cost of production, sustainability and so forth will pay for the research, and sooner or later there will be game changing breakthroughs.
But no one should delude themselves into believing that we can do away with bau industrial ag within the next few decades;the best we can hope for is to get started on the job.
Ninety nine percent of the public is not even aware there is a problem with agriculture, let alone willing to be bothered with doing something about it.
Most of the idealistic future ag models I see proposed here and in other media could actually be made to work, from a technical point of view;but from a practical pov, getting the public to go along would be or will be next to impossible-until necessity leaves the public no choice except change or starve.
Right this minute I have a fine selection of our own personally grown fresh food in the kitchen;apples, peaches, nectarines, tomatos,peppers,squash, cucumbers, green beans, potatos, sweet corn,eggs, plus beef, pork, and fish in the freezer.More stuff in the gardens.
I am quite knowledgeable in respect to health and nutrition.
I also have a large bag of Cheetos and a twelve pack of Pepsi cola.
I suppose most of the people here tonight can guess in less than three tries what I'm snacking on at this very minute.;)
Apples, peaches and nectarines?
Dunno. But you can go to the guy's website and contact him yourself if you wish. He strikes me as being a pretty down to earth kinda guy but I don't know him personally... and certainly haven't tried to actually farm with his tractors.
http://www.solarcarandtractor.com/Home.html
This is what he says:
As for me I don't know to much about "Real" farming so I'll defer to you on that, though I do know a thing or two about photovoltaics and I'm well aware of its limitations but also that it is a useful tool in the toolkit.
Emphasis mine
That's all I'm asking, that we start the process of thinking differently.
OFM what do you think of that permaculture video posted by Rhisiart Gwilym?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9almsBuUzk.
Anyways today I'll be out and about buying components for a small Solar lighting project to light up a town's welcome sign, this, at least, I really do understand and I know it works.
One little off grid project at a time, many, many millions more to go >;^)
I watched that video, and was struck by the appearance of that Austrian permaculture farm. What, no straight rows? Most of us would certainly call it "messy" or "chaotic". A veritable jungle. The farmer, Sepp Holzer, would probably call it "beautiful" or "natural". He didn't seem to have any trouble finding and harvesting his crops when the time came. I came away with that same reaction after reading about Masanobu Fukuoka's farming methods. It would appear that the "do nothing" style of natural farming represents an approach to life and agriculture that is way too uncontrolled, unhurried and interactive for the average high-tech human to tolerate.
Good morning, FMaygar
I did say that I think I could work a couple of acres under ideal circumstances with such a tractor as the one pictured, maybe even two or three times that.
And I frequently say that I am in favor of research into every aspectof agriculture-it's just that I think a solar powered tractor is an option that promises an extremmely poor likelihood of becoming a reality, at least until such a time, as batteries are several times cheaper and more powerful than at present, if that comes to be.
Biofuels will take care of actual on farm needs nicely if and when it comes to the point petro is not available in adequate quantities to farm;but I doubt either of us will live that long
As far as "real farmers" are concerned that was intended as sort of tongue in cheek to get the point across that these one acre two acre operators can't sell wholesale because they can't get a truckload together, or meet the needs of a large supermarket , or do much of anything at all on a workable scale, unless they can sell outside the mainstream marketing system.
At one time we were capable of loading an eighteen wheeler with fifteen tons of graded and boxed apples in forty five minutes at our own dock.Nowadays we load pickup trucks with fifteen hundred pounds IF we can find a buyer who wants even that many;I am entirely sympathetic to the needs and problems of small growers.
We have out about three acres of "market garden" crops ourselves this year;we will freeze, dry, or can what we need for our own use and sell the rest-IF WE CAN find buyers;we are well off the highway, and most of our former regulars who wanted a car or pickup load of mixed produce are dead or in nursing homes.The local roadside markets have more potential suppliers than they have customers; locally owned and operated supermarkets are nearly nonexistent and soon the last one will be gone.
Damned few modern day homemakers these days, male or female, would have any real hope of putting up half a ton of produce in a day or two for next winter;the skills have been lost, they no longer have the dedicated tools, or the storage space, or the desire to save fifty percent or more on thier grocery bills.
It's hard to sell a modern homemaker even ten pounds of apples ;she would rather pay just as much for three pounds, so help me God, rather than be seen, or have her kid be seen, eating an apple every day for two weeks at lunch.Gotta rotate those snacks just like the stylish clothing, doncha see?
The picture is a propaganda piece because it GROSSLY misrepresents the capabilities of a tractor of that size and wieght, regardless of the source of motive power.
We hear the same sort of technically accurate but intellectually dishonest bullshit all the time in respect to the performance capabilities of electric cars-such as zero to sixty in five seconds or some such malarkey.A few such super fast fast discharges will ruin the thirty grand battery, and the remaining driving range after a couple or three such sprints will prove to be just about enough to get back to the other end of the drag strip-which incidentally is only 1320 feet long.
I hope the battery performance/price miracle comes to pass;but a backyard guy such as the one who built the tractor isn't doing battery research and development, and that's where the problem lies.
I'm quite the backyard artificer myself but I recognize that I an only a tinkerer, and that the days of the low hanging easy come discoveries/inventions/technology game changers are long gone.
(I have had dozens or maybe even hundreds of of great ideas only to find that somebody beat me to ALL of them except one decades or centuries ago;and at the time I had the one, I was just a kid with no resources or skills to do anything about it.
Even then my idea only involved using a commonly known fact in a new way;one of my part time jobs was to trim the church cemetery aka known as the stone orchard.A drive belt started to fray on a tractor and the belt literally destroyed the protective covers around it before it broke.The light went on and I could have built the first weed eater had I been an adult.
Now somebody go ahead and tell me the weed eater was invented even before 1960 or so, but not commercialized;I wouldn't be suprised at all.)
Picture an ad showing a subcompact car towing a twenty two foot boat with two outboards each as big as the car on a tandem axle trailer;such a boat is a big load for a heavy duty pickup truck with four times as big an engine, and drive line to match.
But the car COULD pull the boat around in a nice smooth level parking lot-at high risk of burning out the clutch or transmission in the first hour.(The drive line on the tractor won't break but the tires will slip and spin and dig in .)
I haven't seen the video yet but I will look at it soon.
OFM,
I know that you know the realities of doing stuff with a real tractor. However this is what the the caption on his website says:
He has been featured here on TOD before maybe we should contact him and hear his take on the issue.
As for battery technology, I know we have a ways to go, I'm actually buying batteries for a solar project today... I'm never satisfied with cost, power or durability but it doesn't stop me from actually doing a project.
I agree that using tried and true ICE engines and biofuels might make more sense for now than making solar powered tractors. I look at in the same way as I do with the Solar Impulse plane project, it may not lead to commercial passenger transport ever, however it does stretch the imagination and gets people thinking about what we can do with renewables and less energy.
I just spent the last half hour lookig at the video -not all of it, but enough to get the idea.
The problems associated with bau big ag are real and while the video is a little emotional in describing them it is accurate enough, and I won't quibble.The problem is that it doesn't have anything at all to say about the strengths of bau ag.
Nor does it have anything AT ALL to say about the shortcomings of the so called permaculture system;what works at lab scale all too often fails to work at real world scale, and what this guy is doing will not work at scale for lots of reasons-the primary one is that the amount of hand labor involved would run into several times the value of the crops harvested.
In my wanderings I once worked on a movie production crew for a month or two-I even met a couple of famous show biz people!-and all I have to say is that a movie and the reality behind it are two altogether and totally different things.Keeping those hillsides looking the way they do would require an army in my part of the world-the invasive native species such as yellow poplar trees would overwhelm the mixed plantings that look so pretty in EXTREMELY short order for instance without CONSTANT work.
To be honest since I see no evidence in the video of worn cart or truck paths the only way the fruit could be gotten out of the fields would be on somebody's back-a bushel or apples or plums might just be worth the harvest costs alone, wholesale, under such circimstances-but it might not either!
The yields PER ACRE must be abysmal;in my part of the world property taxes alone would make it impossible to farm in such a fashion.
We used to raise apples by the thousands of bushels on steeper land ourselves, using access roads that were in effect bulldozer built terraces, with no erosion problems at all by simply allowing the native grasses and other smallish plants overrun the ground under and between the trees.But we also spent weeks on end with scythes keeping the grass and weeds trimmed back , a job that necessarily had to be done twice every year.
At some point in time a few people may live on a few acres doing something similar to what this guy is doing;we do some of it, and my grandparents did more.There is nothing really new to be seen in the first half of the video, I didn't bother with the third and fourth parts.
But this is ag and you can take OFM's check to the bank on this one-this sort of agriculture is not going to support very many people not directly involved under any circumstances, barring a return to a peasent lifestyle where most people spend thier lives in the fields,and it hasn't a snowballs chance on a red hot stove of supporting people by the billions in the world as it exists today.
If most of us become peasants I'm sure we couls support a decent sized ruling class utilizing similar methods-after most of the population succumbs to starvation, dieease or war of course.
But the nature of research work such as this experiment is such that if this guys turns up just ONE useful new trick or ecological relationship preciously unknown or any other new data,the end results will be well worth while because they can be utilized by millions of other farmers.
And if he doesn't remember Edison and his light bulb;he supposedly said after several thousand failures that he knew of thousands of things that WOULD NOT work-knowledge useful in and of itself.
Permaculture is not an alternative to conventional agriculture. It is a successor. An underlying and generally unstated assumption of the whole permaculture concept is an ascetic, low-tech, 'peasant' lifestyle for all the participants, both producers and consumers.
In the particular case of the Austrian farmer, he happens to live near some upscale restauranteurs and neighbors who are willing to buy his produce on a piece-by-piece basis at fairly high prices. Therefore he can afford a tractor, hydro-electric generator, computer and website. He also rents out several cabins to eco-tourists, sells books and makes a little extra money giving lectures and farm tours. He has found a niche in his contemporary economy. This is the case with many small-scale growers these days, like Joel Salatin or Elliot Coleman here in the USA.
Unfortunately, this business model does not scale up to a societal level. Eventually, more and more people will have to lower their lifestyle expectations along with the farmer. If and when that happens, the prices paid for any produce will fall along with the standard of living, and eco-tourism will be an historical curiosity.
Remember John Michael Greer's incantation: "There is no brighter future ahead." The permaculture model is a part of the template for that future. It will not be like today.
Solar powered tractor - this isn't even close to a viable solution.
2.5 (@1860 watts) HP just to move it. How big of a solar panel would it need to have? How many HP to do any kind of farm work?
You can't tell me a bunch of batteries, a solar panel and an electric motor are cost prohibitive to this idea taking off. If this was practical they would be everywhere. Hell I would buy 2!
This is techno-dreaming.
Poorly maintained gravel country roads? What?
With respect, this makes no sense at all. If the only roads available are gravel, you better believe they will be well maintained, and by volunteers from the community if need be.
I live in the country. My road is paved, but many of the roads I use regularly are not, and every one of them is keept in superb shape, even in tough winters. In agricultural areas, keeping the few roads there are in good shape is a very high priority, and our town road crew takes it very seriously.
I don't know where this idea about "poorly maintained country roads" comes from.
Mostly from city slickers who have never lived and worked in the country... Let alone in a third world farming community.
I used to regularly commute on very well maintained gravel road in an agricultural region in Brazil. You got it right when you say the locals will be out there doing the maintenance themselves if need be with their own hands shovels and rakes and they don't even care about getting paid for their labor.
And that's another reason I just can't buy the financial collapse scenario making it impossible to fix and maintain roads. It's a question of survival people will do whatever they need to do.
Though I'd love to harness a few ex bankers to the carts hauling the gravel... and sit on top with a big whip!
gyr: Ilive in the country too, and there are more miles of gravel, by far, than paved roads. Most, if not all, very well maintained. Have seen many a rancher out there fixing parts up till the county boys could get there.
Mostly from people who haven't/don't live on rural township gravel roads.
My township is great about maintaining our gravel roads.
I think Gail's extrapolating. From the Wall Street Journal article yesterday:
"Some experts caution that gravel roads can be costlier in the long run than consistently maintained asphalt because gravel needs to be graded and smoothed. A gravel road "is not a free road," says Purdue University's John Habermann, who organized a recent seminar about the resurgence of gravel roads titled "Back to the Stone Age.""
So right now, it's cheaper to maintain gravel roads than maintain the asphalt ones, because the asphalt roads they're converting to gravel would require major reconstruction. In the future, when you've converted many roads to gravel, the frequent on-going costs to grade the gravel roads will end up costing more than the asphalt roads did.
And yeah, I live on a paved road, but our land is on a gravel road. After every good rain, the gravel road needs work. You can tell when the county goes through to grade it. When they haven't been through for a while, it gets some pretty decent potholes. In the future, when the road agencies have even less gas tax money to work with, I expect many of these roads to turn into the seasonal mud pits they were around the turn of the last century.
I grew up in the 40s in northern Minnesota when most of roads were gravel. I recall 3 major problems: first washboard that could rattle a car into junk in a few years. Next, was spring thaw that made many roads impassible until all the frost heave was finished. And finally, the fall rains and dampness that made many roads rutted and slick. These roads took a lot of maintenance to stay usable - huge road graders were a common sight.
However, I do recall that small back roads on good soil were often usable for many years with little maintenance - but these roads also had little traffic.
Condition of gravel roads really depends on where you live. In NE Iowa the state does a good job of grading them (at least they did in the 1970s and 1980s) but here in Virginia, our gravel road (a town road) is not that well maintained. Yes, the state comes around 3 times a year and grades it but most of the time it is full of pot holes, which do have the added advantage of slowing the traffic down!
BAU with topsoil would have some advantages over BAU with no topsoil. And perennials should need less tillage and thus less fuel.
Or if fuel is not available, less human or animal labor. Amounts of labor input would seem to be important.
By the sounds of it you know a lot about sustainability, so why not teach that instead? And you dont have to talk about sustainability in general, but start with one very small specific part that would generate interest. For example companion planting, I'm amazed at the number of people that don't know about companion planting, and when I explain it everyone loves it (the occasional person remembers it was something their granddaddy did). I'm sure there are lots of other subjects that you have knowledge about that would attract people, making your own fuel sounds fascinating.
Eventually you will get asked "why did you do this?", so you can then educate on the broader problems (PO, population, resources etc). Try not to editorialise about PO (I know its hard), so rather than saying bad things are going to happen when PO hits, just say something like "Yup, its a problem that needs to be fixed". I know its kinda politician speak, but discussion of PO can scare people off if not handled with care (in my experience anyway).
surely statements like this are pure dreaming. Like any facet of future industry they are included to make the target industry appear "Green" or "sustainable".
The Scale Up to any Perennial Farming future will not solve the sustainability issues (water, FF inputs, fertilisers, non renewable natural resources like Phosphorus, population demands, growth of biomass for energy, farmland deterioration, environmental problems etc.)
The future holds less food (and more expensive food) per person no matter which way we farm.
Well, see what Germany has decided. It does not seem like pure dreaming to mee:
http://tinyurl.com/39xgkwc
Germany targets switch to 100% renewables for its electricity by 2050!
Germany already leads the world on renewable energy and could become first G20 country to kick the fossil-fuel habit
Sweden has already started a program (2006) to reduce its dependance on hydrocarbons by 2020.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/4694152.stm
Surely this can be applied to a portion of the US economy also?
Fossil fuel use in electricity production and fossil fuel use in agriculture are two entirely different things. (Besides, the Guardian article and the German claim are all full of "ifs" & "maybes". And the issue of fossil fuel use in manufacture and servicing of the solar and wind generators are not included. Nor are the decreased EROEI fundamentals. These issues have been discussed here on TOD in depth. Therefore the German claim of a 100% renewable electricity system is pure political spin. It won't happen, at least by 2050)
Getting back to fossil fuel use in agriculture
from The Energy Bulletin "Eating Fossil Fuels" by Dale A Pfeiffer http://www.energybulletin.net/node/281
The proposed shift to perennial agriculture will do little to change this overall distribution.
The article also makes the point a number of times that the US agricultural system is one to be emulated. This is the system that uses fossil fuels to mine farmland and fossil water sources to provide food to an ever expanding population. We use 10 calories of fossil fuel to produce 1 calorie of food. It is perhaps the most unsustainable food system on the planet. Does anyone really believe this is the system of an energy depleted future, especially an oil depleted future?
We obviously need a complete overhaul of our food producing system and the use of perennials may play an important role. But I think the claims of 50 year agriculture plans and perennials solving many (if any) of the BAU factory farming problems and lead to a sustainable food producing future are unrealistic.
All of which was discussed here on TOD in the article by Peter Salonius posted by Gail "Long Term Agricultural Overshoot" in December 2009 Go read it. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6048
Seems to me that the two biggies, inorganic fertilizer and field machinery, would be fairly substantially reduced by a switch to perennials, and smaller ones like irrigation and pesticides would be reduced, as well.
As every gardener knows, once perennials become established, they need minimal fertilizer and less water, and they're generally less damaged by insect pests.
And if you've ever lived near farm fields, you'd know that annual crops like corn require multiple passes of farm machinery to produce-- tilling the soil, planting, fertilizing and harvesting. If corn or wheat were perennial, the first two would be nearly eliminated altogether, and the third likely greatly reduced.
Obviously, perennializing major crops doesn't solve more than a part of the problem, but nothing is going to solve more than a part of the problem. The point is the cumulative effect of all the partial problem-solvers adds up to major change.
wotfigo:
Thanks for reminding me. I cannot counter these numbers.
Yet, it somewhat arouses me that you assume NO changes in the behaviour of the post-peak societies compared with todays situation. Burger Shops may and shopping malls may be fewer an further between, one imagines.
Norsk Hydro was founded on a patented process of producing fertilizer by an electricity driven process, no oil involved. Today the fertilizer division is called Yara, and is a world leader: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norsk_Hydro.
Since then, the process has been modified http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
Field machinery is hard to avoid, so is transportation under todays structure of our society.
But, as the "End of Suburbia" dvd indicates: Sending Lettuce across the American continent from producer to consumer must end. Locally produced food does not comply with current economic axioms, but it may fit well with post-peak economics.
Much of todays agriculture output is used to feed cattle or pigs, leading to meat via an extra production process. If we eat less meat, the entire production pattern may be altered. I have no numbers, but if you assume that Germany's (and Sweden's) transition is combined with other structural conversions, it might just be possible.
Go Germany.
Makes me proud to be I2a (P37.2)
I wish we had university programs that were interested in research on simple, doable things with local resources--which plants to plant as companion plants to which other ones, in your part of the country. How to create a well-rounded diet, with local plants and animals (plus what other plants are needed to build fertility, to keep the system going
I think the ideas in this article might be good, if we really had a long time to adapt, and a relatively slow decline. It is possible there are may still be some good ideas, for example, the need to plan for a very long timeframe, for example. And if we could figure out perennials to plant (nut trees, and maybe companion nitrogen fixing trees), that would be all the better. We need to be thinking about what we have now though, not hybridizing something for use umpteen years in the future.
I think Elinor Ostrom's ideas on "the commons" are well worth looking at as a way forward ( http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2009/10/12/ostrom-commons/ ).
In a nutshell, the notion that local interests spoil their resources by overcompeting - the "tragedy of the commons" - and that therefore they are best remotely managed by disinterested parties, has been at the center of all types of management schemes, from rangeland to agriculture and forestry. Needless to say, in the US at least, this has been an abysmal failure. Ostrom gives numerous counter examples to prove that the best management of local resources can be by those who use those resources; basically that adults put in a position of responsibility can develop, implement, and enforce better plans than any distant uninvolved party.
Of course, the way we have run things has discouraged any notion of local or personal responsibility for anything, but as a way forward I am hopeful that "local control of local resources" will play a part.
"I wish we had university programs that were interested in research on simple, doable things with local ................."
Forget it. Land Grant Universities and small colleges with Ag depts climbed into bed with the politicians and big business,big Ag desires looooong ago.
I have been to quite a few USDA sponsored farm on-site programs presented by the Ag Profs who deal with what is now the FSA offices but were once extension and soil offices.
For instance: Feeding broiler(chicken) litter to cattle. This is nasty trash and droppings from confinement fed chickens mixed with rice hulls or other bedding.I have seen chicken legs buried in some of it. One asked there " does it not hurt the cattle who are supposed to eat pasture?"...
Reply: "Well yes some do die but those that don't do eat it. We just ferment it in huge piles and then feed it."
Other meetings discuss how to implement NRCS data and satellites into massive monoculuture farming. The rest deal with genetics and so forth.
There have been none I have attended over the last 30 years that were pitched towards anything remotely resembling sustainable. Way back around the mid80s there was a brief period of 'sustainable input farming' with some errant articles in Ag magazines. It didn't last long. It meant that you grew based on what you inputted and that was supposed to be along the order of making a profit without using government subsidies ,etc......a proposition that didn't last long.
Most farmers ,the big ag types , are very very effective at "Farming the Government and USDA".
So asking about the professors and extension folks is akin to invitations to the fox to please enter the henhouse. They solidly promote "BIG AG"...like as in 'get big or get out' promoted by Earl Butz who was essentially a big ButtHead. But its still rolling on and the woodlands and trees are still being dozed down and burned. The soil is utilized those farming it who could give a s**t less about the soil except for 'maxing it out' for yields.
Yields and dollars are all that matter now. Soil is just a medium to be used, sprayed, fertilized by huge buggies, monster combines and spray coupes,helicopters and aircraft to spray as need be. Burn down chemicals to keep the weeds in check.
There is NOT one single worry about 'stewardship of the soil'. Not a bit.
And so farmers are really NOT farmers. They are AG Businessmen. Almost a factory operation. The government and the USDA types are heavily into this program.
The small sustainable farmers has NO voice nor is given any succor. He in fact usually has to FIGHT those above to even be allowed to produce. Such as in CSA's that have to fight for the right to sell locally. You find this out when you try to find someone to butcher a hog or calf for your freezer. When you try to find some food grown without the usage of heavy chemicals or raw milk products.
Regulations are not there for such as far as I can see. I also no longer see those once ubiquitous 'Home Maker' enclaves that used to exist all over the rural areas.
Replaced by Wally World excursions to bring home the 'groceries'. Industrial food that is. Earlier this year I paid $1.50 a pound for tomatoes that were not worth throwing out on the compost pile.
Most farming operations now are concerned with just two crops. Corn and soybeans. Period. Sometimes milo but more and more rare. Less and less wheat except in the upper midwest.
Drive through the state of Illinois and note what you see in the fields.
I hear you, wonder if things might be changing tho...
Here's the homepage of the University of Nebraska Organic Ag program:
http://organic.unl.edu/
You are talking gardening, not farming. The two are very different.
This is about gardening, not farming. The two are very different.
"I make my own fuel sustainable far from any other source I have. I grow my own food, and my own fuel to sustain myself"
Link please
What is your daily/weekly diet ?
How many acres to grow your food ?
Link? Link to what, his/her freezer-cam? I don't understand your point.
I live on two acres of land. I have a kitchen garden plot about 35 by 25 feet and grow a substantial portion of my food on it. If I expanded that a bit and had a flock of chickens and a single cow, which I have room for but not the labor to manage, I could feed myself almost entirely, with the exception of optional things like coffee, salt, cooking oil, sugar, flour, etc.
A 10-acre woodlot, which also I don't have but most people around here do, would keep me in fuel permanently.
Obviously, you can't do that in the city or even most suburbs, but you sure as heck could grow a lot of your own food in the burbs if you wanted to.
Well right now we grow with only 1 acre and we seem to think that is enough for food, and enough weeding, ha ha. Alcohol fuel is new for us this year. We have 2 acres of mammoth sugar beets right now and are working on planting cattails, but we need to figure out the whole cattail thing as of yet. In the winter we have a greenhouse. For heat we permaculture the heck out of trees. We grow 5 trees for everyone we cut down. While we may have enough trees for heat for 10 years, we still want to grow more than we cut. We have chickens in tractors outside and in the winter they go inside.
Diet? Fresh veggies, eggs and pasturized chicken. Not bad. One of the things we have learned is growing a variety otherwise January can get kinda boring. The greenhouse helps, but putting away food is key.
www.mybackachers.com
corporatism doesn't care about the commons...
congress is owned by the corporatists...
it would erode short term profits to adopt strategies that preserved the long term commons...
it's cheaper to invest in lobbying legislatures... to write coporate-profit friendly legislation... pay the ocaisional fines...
see tony hayward of bp... he want his life back... watching his $750M yacht...
or goldman sachs... $550+M to settle conflicts of interest...
or microsoft... $600M to EU for consent decree violations last year re: media player (yes MS isn't energy intensive... but...)
if i'm a coporatist... and my corporation makes $100M in profit... WHY would i want to put ONE PENNY into sustainable agriculture... the better investment would be towards MORE big agibusiness so i can make $110M profit next year...
like george bush said about how history would write this... "we'll al be dead"...
taxpayer funded elections might be a good start though...
No kidding. All I kept thinking through this piece was Monsanto.
Monsanto doesn't even want farmers to save their own seed and has developed some terminator seeds - seeds that produce crops with sterile seeds so that farmers are forced to buy seeds each year. Will they allow perennial crops?
Don't get me wrong - I appreciate the ideas in the article. But corporate power should not be underestimated...
lilith
Can't we spray that with RoundUp or something and get rid of it once and for all?!
Sounds like a really nasty invasive...
I dont think we can spray it cause it will all be Round Up ready! Heh! Heh! Its real sad.I grew up in a small farming community in SE Wyo. It has changed so much. It used to be the County Fair was THE social event of the year! Not so, now. Real sad.
I've seen several comments about Monsanto's terminator seed on TOD, and it seems that some of the readers believe that seed is on the market. If it is, farmers aren't aware of it. Our government nixed that plan before it got to market. Perhaps that rule has been changed recently. I challenge someone to show proof the terminator seed is on the market.
I've personally heard Wes Jackson speak a couple of times, and was impressed with his grasp of our agribusiness situation (I can't in good conscience call it agriculture--the culture is gone). I believe he is one of the few seminal researchers in the world looking to replace annual crops with perennial analogs. Something that stands out to me is the reduced yield. A lot of people will die to end up with a population to match the new lower yields. As others have pointed out already, there is no easy solution, perhaps no solution at all.
However, I salute Wes Jackson and the Land Institute for their work and vision. They may actually invent a new and better wheel, metaphorically speaking.
To answer the questions: 1) a 50 year plan for agribusiness is a nonstarter--too many entrenched powers. After a major upheaval, maybe those who are left can make such plans if there's enough of civilization left.
2)Secondary benefits--forget the biomass, as has already been stated; the soil needs it to fuel the microbes and to slow down raindrops so they don't erode the soil. The more stable and extensive root mass of perennials is the secondary benefit.
3)I don't see Jackson's plan as being particularly better than the current system, except for the more stable root system. A farmer would still have to have machinery for no-till planting, as the perennials do die off slowly and need to be replanted (not mentioned in this article). Really, what farmer would trade off a 50% yield reduction in order to reduce his tillage? He can already reduce his tillage to near zero with no-till practices and Roundup-type weedkillers, and get increased yields as a bonus. The biomass left on the surface protects the soil from erosion. There is no mention in this article of weed control. As a longtime grower of alfalfa, I know weed invasions are the problem to longevity of the perennial. Does Mr. Jackson plan on farms being so small that the fields can be weeded by hand? If so, good luck being able to have enough land to sustain oneself and sell something for cash. Better off fencing in potatoes for starch and rotational graze livestock for protein. The two ways to implement this plan are to ram it down the farmers' throats or pay them big bucks to change. Both the farmers and the lenders will require large payments, dwarfing any farm bill to date, in order to change BAU. Good luck passing a more expensive farm bill.
4)Drawbacks--change farming practices to go after perennials that haven't even been developed yet? Sorry--first invest billions of dollars in perennial research and have several species absolutely ready for planting before changing any farm bill. Do we have enough time for that before lack of oil shuts all of it down?
God (or nature for you athiests) has already provided a stable, varied perennial food source--fruit, nuts, berries. In many ways they don't lend themselves to large corporate farming, except for nuts.
Question: How much genetic modification is allowed, such as crossing annuals with perennials to get perennial grains (that doesn't happen in the field by itself), before it gets labelled GMO? It looks to me that this system is all GMO, just not the way Monsanto does it.
Finally, somewhat as an aside, I have wondered for some time now if Monsanto should be allowed to release the terminator gene. We would all know right away exactly how much genetic contamination is happening by the reduced germination % of neighboring nonGMO crops. It might cause a tremendous uproar, or it might be OK, as all genetically contaminated seeds would be sterile.
Wes Jackson is obviously an idealist. A dreamer. Maybe even impractical. However, he is trying a new approach instead of stubbornly sticking to established ways or giving in to despair or fatalism.
That's what we need more of these days. Impractical dreamers.
Who would have imagined that an aircraft could fly for an entire week on solar power alone? Somebody did. Now that it's a reality, the military are eager to adapt the technology to spy planes. They're always quick to pick up on impractical ideas, just like they picked up on nuclear power 65 years ago.
So let the solar tractor idea and the perennial wheat idea and the permaculture idea go on out there and we'll see what happens. Maybe nothing, maybe something. Natural selection.
We can't let the military and the big corporations have all the fun.
+10
As`for letting the military and the big corporations having all the fun, it won't be much fun fighting them but either we fight them or we all become slaves and die anyway.
We need to draw lines in the sand and pick sides!
NH license plates that say 'live free or die' are made by prisoners in state lock up. Irony?
I'd like someone to do a study on the effects of the reduction/elimination of agricultural subsidies here in the US. I doubt it would kill the agribusiness corporations, but i wonder if it would level the playing field a bit?
A friend of mine who studies 'gasp' economics suggested that the elimination of subsides would not be a silver bullet. That response did not surprise me. (Side note, he opposes ag subsidies because they distort the market, for what its worth)
Especially if it were coupled with removing regulations which make it difficult to operate small farms.
This elimination would reach across levels of government, so it would be hard to coordinate.
For instance, 'veggie libel laws' were written and implemented at the federal level and protect the Monsanto types from any meaningful research into the health effects of GMOs. At the same time, local zoning laws and home owners covenants effectively make backyard barns (for chickens, for example) or urban agriculture illegal.
Perhaps we need both kind of dreamers. I really liked the solar panel for keeping the sun off you. and the rain. That's all the cab you really need!Those old steel seats weren't all that bad either.
Try sitting on one for 8-12 hours a day for a couple of weeks and then try telling that to us again. There is a good reason why the seats on ag equipment is cushioned!
Oh, after that couple of weeks on the cold/hot metal ag seat, do plan on a trip to your doctor to have your newly discovered hemorrhoids treated (for the rest of your life!)
Real farmers don't get often hemmoroids, which are usually a result of sitting around for years without getting any exercise;there are lots of things that must be done other than sit on and drive a tractor;but doubtless a few operators have managed to organize thier work so that they sit all the time, and somebody else gets all of the exercise.
Nevertheless I am glad our newer tractors have padded seats.
Really, what farmer would trade off a 50% yield reduction in order to reduce his tillage?
One that can't afford fuel in some nasty brutish future?
Drawbacks--change farming practices to go after perennials that haven't even been developed yet?
That's like betting on EESTOR caps or low energy nuclear reactions as the tech saviors.;
Question: How much genetic modification is allowed, such as crossing annuals with perennials to get perennial grains (that doesn't happen in the field by itself), before it gets labelled GMO
We humans have GMed plenty of plants. Its how we have corn from the grass it started with. While some purists would have issues with a "GMO" 'that doesn't happen in the field by itself' - depending on how the process is helped along, how the resulting plant crosses back and the big issue - what is the health effect of the consumption of the resulting product.
The GMOs that feature Bacillus thuringiens seem to have a health effect with consumption by mammals.
I am glad to see you posting this work on the oil drum. My answers to your questions are:
1. Yes this work, if successful would be a cornerstone of sustainable agriculture. The resources required are quite modest and the potential payoff
enormous.
2. The change to available biofuels is likely to be negative, because perennial
crops will require biomass to remain in place to sustain the crop. The major energy impact is to reduce the energy required for farming.
3. I think that the amount of resources (80 plant breeders etc.) is an order of magnitude or two too small. I would rather see 800 or 8000. This is important work!
4. Of course. Most importantly it is not clear to me as an only moderately informed layman, that the necessary yields can be attained.
Drat.
I thought perennial, nitrogen fixing wheat was my bright idea. You guys are way ahead of me.
When my forefathers were trekking through the Karroo in their ox wagons they could be holed up for a week as the springbok migrated. They would be surrounded from horizon to horizon by a sea of moving meat for a week. When the lions appeared they knew that the tail of the migration had arrived and they could move again.
The springbok migrated to where the rain had fallen.
And then my forefathers put in fences.
And replaced the springbok with sheep.
Points to be drawn from my story.
1 Climax ecologies maximise production.
2 Food production, like defense, is a national concern. It is ill suited to capitalist principles.* If that springbok herd was nationalised, laws would have prevented harmful practices such as putting up fences.
*From a purely capitalistic perspective food only accounts for 2.5% of GDP therefore it can be sacrificed to derivatives on wall street with minimal impact on cash flows.
A couple of thoughts on why the proposed change might not be so good:
It would seem like perennials wouldn't need as many seeds as annuals. For that reason alone, it seems like yields would go down. ( I suppose that is wahat they are working on higher yields).
Also, if climate is changing, it seems like annuals would adapt a lot more quickly to the change, especially if the seeds that have the best genes for the new climate are the ones that survive each year.
As the little blurb up in the corner says, "It takes as much energy to plan as to wish." Or something like that.
Is this a plan or a wish?
How about presenting a plan which attempts to describe the detailed steps required to transition from the BAU agricultural system described as needing change to the point where we have enacted legislation to implement the "wish" described in the above 50 year cycle? Enacting legislation to allow this new paradigm to come into existence should not take much more than a lifetime or so.
The entrenched commerical and political intrests which control our industrial agricultural policies are not just going to roll over and agree to this idea. The public is not going to make them either.
If one wanted to implement this kind of change (warts and all) it would be necessary to become the entrenced power base that has control. How is that going to happen?
Guess I am cynical tonight.
ON the plus side the farmers markets are doing well this summer. Remember the Maginot Line.
Wyo
Here's my first step in that plan: Either pass legislation to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment, in which the Supreme Court recognized corporations as persons. Or, we need to be able to apply a corporate death penalty to corporations that cause grievous harm to the commons which should be considered crimes against humanity. We could then put Monsanto on trial and execute them...
That's my idea!!
The personhood of corporations is a legal absurdity promulgated to assist the legal profession.
Tell the legal profession not to be lazy and do their job.
Attorneys feel their job is to make themselves and their benefactors rich.
Kill them all and feed them to the swine.
What have you got against the poor swine?!
But by all means, preserve Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific Railroad, which provides equal protection under law...
My understanding of the case
from this wikipaedia report is that the court left the decision of the personhood of the company to the court reporter, Bancroft Davis??
How much do you pay these people?
It might start with the local soil conservation board and then move to the Wyo legislature and then........??? Just a thought.
While perennial grains are an admirable goal, why bother?
They are poor nutrition, and take lots of labor.
Better to convert the area to a buffalo common, reduce the biocide and ethnic cleansing of mono cultures, and increase diversity and sequester carbon from plants that evolved to be grazed.
Domestication of wheat was humans biggest mistake.
Our local newspaper (Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel) has an article about using abandoned manufacturing/industrial space for agriculture - in this article it is fish and lettuce.
http://www.jsonline.com/business/98569659.html
How significant is this type of venture? Can it actually make any difference in the big picture of supplying food to a local population?
- over population is a bitch fella's...must watch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xvyRd-uVqM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpAxV6uUxsM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGxBizeiL3s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wiRhVzsXFM
Hi Ty Shorts,
Enjoyed the youtube videos. If you have read many of my previous comments (other threads) you can appreciate that I think human population is issue number one. The question is: how can human population be reduced in the least painful fashion? I have many suggestions regarding that question, but few people think there is a "problem" that warrants any serious remedies. The professor type in one your youtubes hit the nail on the head regarding the primary need to simply recognize that there is a problem.
I'd really like to know myself. As I read the article they mention lighting and electricity costs in passing but don't say what kind of lighting they use. They also say they are looking into roof top wind for power generation. I'd like to see a study done on ultra efficient LED grow lights being used in similar circumstances.
Combining hydroponics and aquaculture in urban environments such as abandoned malls and empty office buildings that have been retrofitted with light Pipes, LEDS, and solar and wind with possible grid tie to take advantage of low cost electricity at night seems like a no brainer to me. Using and recycling fish waste as fertilizer is another component in the cost benefit analysis of such systems. A lot of the work that needs to be done could take advantage of the vast numbers of unemployed right now.
Where are the grants and incentives for this kind of thing? All we get are BAU whiners who keep telling us that none of this will work. We won't know what will or will not work until we all get off our collective lazy butts and start changing the way we think.
I'd really like to know myself.
In theory you can go there and 'volunteer' - aka work for free and observe the operation.
Other data on running the operation would be in the hands of the Indian tribe that took casino money and funded the Universities water institute that spent coin on researching on ways to grow the skittish Perch.
The other ways to make the thing "pay" for itself - charge $5 a fish, charge $ for tours, and get the taxes deferred/building/land "under market rates".
All we get are BAU whiners who keep telling us that none of this will work.
From an eMergy flow issue - the farmed fish won't compete with wild harvest due to the external costs of wild fish being at a discounted rate. The plan is using coal powered electricity and has slave labor (errr volunteers) - how is that 'working' in the context "we" think of here at TOD?
The operation looks pretty energy intensive. It seems like, for the long run, we need simple techniques that use little in the way of inputs, except natural inputs (rain, soil, seeds).
Totalitarian Agriculture
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPRJQpWhE0o&feature=related
In California, we are running severe budget and water deficits. Something like 80% of our water goes to agriculture and 20% to urban use. (This represents an ongoing battle.) Unfortunately, our total water allocations were determined by the 1922 Colorado River Pact, which was made after several wetter than normal decades and are unrealistically high. We are still pumping the same amount of water but are pulling the deficit out of our aquifers. Finally, add to this a history of severe weather cycles where we have had 200-year long droughts followed by epic floods (data from tree rings, sediments, etc.)*
What I am coming to is the proper selection of climate-appropriate crops. Based on those old 1922 water availability estimates, we grow a lot of cotton and alfalfa and rice; all very thirsty crops. For example, every acre of California alfalfa requires 3 or more acre-feet of water. Although it was thought in decades past that these were appropriate crops, better knowledge of our weather cycles show that growing animal feed crops were not sustainable choices.
* For example, Leland Stanford had to take a row boat to his inauguration in 1862 and when he returned home, he entered through a second story window. But, during the 1250-1350 AD drought, Mono lake fell below even its recent diversion caused low levels.
Decreasing arable acreage, higher priced hydrocarbons, hydrocarbon shortages, declining infrastructure, increased population, diminishing levels of social complexity, social unrest produce malnourishment and starvation. Then, reduced resistance to disease, inability to perform physical labor. A positive feedback loop. Result? Dieback.
Land could go out of production because there isn't enough available labor power or exosomatic energy for that labor power to employ.
We have overshot the environment's capacity to support us. We have forced nature's hand and she's holding a royal flush.
Nice to see these comments go in predictable places.
Tonight on PBS I watched Food inc. for the second time.
I felt sick because we had wings tonight after a trip to town, wings instead of the usual home produced stuff, and I ate too many of the damn things.
"No kidding. All I kept thinking through this piece was Monsanto."
Then burped wings and wine and compared my animals and their lives to what I saw on the tube.
My wife and I talked about the show for a long time because for those who have not seen the doc., they interviewed farmers who were wiped out by legal costs after saving their own seeds. Ah, the free democracy shows its true colours. The Monsantos of the world own it, and regular people had best keep their heads down and not step on their toes because they will stop you.
I believe that if anyone has a few bucks and a way to get off the treadmill then get some land or figure out a way to set up in a safe place. I wouldn't wait for a change in the system to look after a new plan of sustainable agriculture. If you can't get land then skill up and throw in with folks who can build and produce and figure out a way to carry your share of the load. If now is not the time then what signals will there be that indicates just when?
"What I am doing is self sustainability. No GMO, And nothing anywhere near GMO. If I need to sell to the community, if they do not tun on me, I can."
I have chosen these two quotes from readers who best describe what I believe. Big multi nationals don't give a whit about people and they run the show, and ultimately it will be up to individuals to set forth and find solutions that work in your location.
After the doc I spread new bedding for the sheep, walked the fence and cursed the wire breaking elk, looked at the garden and poured a good stiff drink. Of course TOD fell into the mix along the way.
I hope we all find community along the way.
If now is not the time then what signals will there be that indicates just when? Comments and ideas most welcome because I am feeling uneasy.
On topic....#1 Does starting this kind of a 50-year plan now make sense?
No. Fifty years? Come on. In fifty years the answer will be made for us.
Thank you.
Pablo
Yes, the Food Inc doc. we are being cut off from the land, and viable seed. It is a felony crime for a farmer, or an individual, to clean and sort foundation seed...thanks to Monsanto.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqQVll-MP3I
If you liked Food Inc. read The Omnivore's Dilemma
Dear Paulo,
Anyone who is not uneasy these days is somehow ignoring what is confronting all of us.
Thanks,
Steve
Look, guys! Wow! The answer to overpopulation! Cover the world with crops that only produce half as much! Gee, why didn't I think of that...
Seriously, though, the problem isn't annuals. The problem is giant monocrop (or is that monocorp?)agribusiness.
There was a story in Drumbeat too about gene modding plants to be more aggressive in root systems, to seek out Phosphorus. Now there's a gene I just can't wait to see jump to the weeds- more aggressive roots. Combine that with the RoundupResistance gene which has already jumped to the weeds, and boy oh boy! Funfunfun!
When I saw the name Wendell Berry in there, I gave a mental groan. I have not read any of his works, but have seen him adulated in print a number of times, particularly in Manny Howard's book My Empire of Dirt- which was pure rich-people-phoofeyness. Mr. Berry seems to attract a following of starry-eyed idealogues; and sure enough, this one is too.
Hate to judge a man by his followers, though...can anyone recommend a particular work of his to get me properly acquainted?
Try "The Unsettling Of America"
Is that correct? I thought the increase in weed resistance to roundup was due to evolving weeds in heavier herbicide use in GMO crops.
Has the gene jumped out of the GMO's? Tell me it isn't so.
That comment jogged my memory--Monsanto, et al, insists that the inserted gene material stays in the plant and transfers only to new plants through cross-pollination. Since corn is so different genetically than the weeds (I'm referring to Roundup resistant genes), the transfer simply won't occur. On the other hand, you'll not see Roundup ready milo, because it's too closely related to Johnsongrass and shattercane, both nasty invaders in a corn field. Plants have a cornucopiea of genes and some of them carry resistance to Roundup, thus surviving the spray and spreading their genes to more offspring.
But here's the kicker: Humans, for example, have snippets of rat genes; indeed, we have snippets of genetic material from all kinds of sources. How did we get them? Viruses. Study how viruses replicate, and you'll see a whole new avenue for spreading genetic material around. While most of those genes won't express themselves and remain as tagalongs, sometimes they do get turned on, usually with disastrous results.
Do the Monsanto geneticists know this? Remember, the mantra for moving forward with an idea or invention is the cost/benefit ratio, not necessarily to the whole world, but to the inventors goals. I suspect Monsanto, et al, has taken a giant leap of faith that God/Nature won't hit them with the usual disaster of unintended consequences.
While viruses are certainly implicated in gene transfer in some organisms, specifically with respect to rat and human genomes, it is mostly because of evolution and mutations, plain and simple.
Example:
http://www.jimmunol.org/cgi/content/abstract/174/2/970
The Rat Expresses Two Complement Factor C4 Proteins, but Only One Isotype Is Expressed in the Liver1
Christian Roos*, Ralf Dressel{dagger}, Bernhard Schmidt{ddagger}, Eberhard Günther2,{dagger} and Lutz Walter3,*,{dagger}
* Forschergruppe Primatengenetik, Deutsches Primatenzentrum, and Abteilung {dagger} Immungenetik and {ddagger} Biochemie II, Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
The complement component C4 is well known for its complex genetics in human and mouse where it is part of a tandemly duplicated module. For the rat, no such information had been available until recently. A C4 gene duplication could be identified also in the rat, but the duplicated module maps ~200 kb centromerically from the canonical C4-1 gene. In this study, we present the genomic organization of the two C4 gene-containing modules and the expression of the two C4 genes in the rat (Rattus norvegicus). The duplicated module contains an intact C4 gene as well as Cyp21 and Stk19 pseudogenes. Quantitative mRNA expression analyses revealed that both C4 genes are transcribed in various organs and tissues, but displaying ample differences of C4-1 and C4-2 expression. Most notably, C4-2 is not expressed in the liver. At variance to the mouse, the expression of the rat C4 genes does not exhibit any sex dependency. By using two-dimensional gel electrophoresis and mass spectrometry, products of both C4 genes could be identified in rat serum samples. These two rat C4 isotypes are nearly identical, but differ in a functionally important amino acid residue that is known to influence the functional properties of the C4 isotypes in human.
http://galton.uchicago.edu/~eriksson/papers/2-treeSVD-slides.pdf
Phylogenetic tree construction
Nicholas Eriksson
Department of Mathematics
University of California, Berkeley
Rat Genes, eh?
Now I understand the personality of my last boss..(The job I quit)
And I thought she was just a workplace psychopath.
Wotfigo:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/business/energy-environment/04weed.html
Victorian,
I agree with Lee Rust, start with "The Unsettling."
There is nothing flaky about Wendell Berry... he is one of the most grounded, sensible & insightful observers of American life and what has been lost.
If I had to go to the proverbial desert island, and could take only one hour of film to watch (and don't anyone ask how I'd power the video machine), it would be the thought-provoking documentary called "Promise of the Land" which was aired on PBS over 20 years ago.
It focuses on Jefferson's hopes for a nation based primarily on the careful efforts of small farmers, and contains interviews with Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson.
Also a few minutes of a wise farmer in Home, Kansas whose multi-generation farm has never been touched by pesticides, thanks to his father's insistence.
Their crops looked wonderful.
PBS ought to show that film annually, just to remind people.
I would also recommend Berry's "What are people for?"
I have a couple of questions for those of you who are far more expert than I am... my expertise limited to growing a kitchen garden and flowers. What does France do that is different than here? I say different because the fruits and vegetables tastes 1000 percent more flavorful than anything I have encountered in chain grocery stores here. Why can't we do what they are doing? Why don't we move toward "slow foods?" I am more than happy to not eat foods that are not in season. And, I am happy to pay for and eat less meats if it means locally produced without antibiotics and pesticides. Seems to me Europe has got it right on food production. What stops us from following their example?
Because the PTB in the USA claim the Europeans have it wrong. Its citizens are suffering unnecessarily from high food costs because they don't see the glorious truth of GMO's. Haven't you heard? The science has been settled (just like the science of global warming and evolution). Oh, we can splice in flavor genes,too.
What is the "PTB?" I guess I want to know if the argument against the European model of food production is it is not feasible here. If so, why not? I live in the mid-atlantic which is very farm rich and in Philadelphia we have farmer's markets,(the Amish) urban organic farms, and slow food restaurants popping up, including projects of urban farming in economically devastated neighborhoods to provide fresh, organic produce (at affordable prices and sometimes subsidized and given for free) and demonstrations on how to prepare them. We have high school projects for urban farming. Again, why is this not reproducible across the country?
It seems to me that we simply cannot continue to have foods trucked across the country, pesticides, gmos, and all the ways that food is currently produced. Bigger is not better. And, the QUALITY of food produced locally is so superior, it just seems crazy to not move to local produced.
The Powers That Be--a ubiquitous phrase that jabs at the elite that live in their own world disconnecte from ours, except to get us to work for them and/or buy their stuff.
The local produce plan does work, but only for those willing to be more involved in their own lives other than selling their bodies to the highest bidder. I live in a farming community and it is remarkable how many simply don't have the time to prepare their own food, much less grow any. It's a cash culture, brought to us by our friendly neighborhood bankers. We have urban friends who are blown away by the flavor and refrigerato shelf life of our beef. Our wheat, ground fresh and used in homemade bread or pancakes adds nuances of flavor that can't be found in stores. And we're not wholly organic, either.
Seriously, the solution lies in local people changing their parameters to spend their time going after quality food. The PTB's will outlaw it, and if that doesn't stop it, will figure out ways to make money off it, but I don't believe new farm programs are the answer. It's been said that a culture loses its sanity en masse and regains it one person at a time. Talk to your neighbors. Share your flavorful, quality produce. Some will notice the difference enough to change their plans.
Another aside: I worked for awhile in two different boy juvenile delinquent facilities. It amazed me how many city guys would turn up their noses at fresh vegetables out of our garden and pine for a McDonald's burger and fries.
During the recent volcanic eruption in Iceland, it was interesting to note that the disruption in air transport shut down the flower & produce supply to Europe from places like Kenya, causing a bit of a panic.
Good question. Just a guess, though-- for one, the culture of France vis-a-vis food is a lot different than ours, and they won't stand for stuff that's as tasteless as ours, though that may be eroding some from what I've heard.
Also, my guess is that European countries in general are far less dominated by giant agribusiness because by the time the technology for giant farms came along, the land wasn't available. In any case, the food grown in France doesn't have to survive week-long truck hauls to get to their city markets.
But my main guess is that it's a culture, and therefore also a government policy, that heavily favors smaller farms and retail businesses generally, and which may be more willing than we are to pay slightly more for food.
U.S. agribusiness has long put a priority on large size, uniform appearance and sturdiness of produce over flavor and nutrition. Example A to my mind would be what's happened to the once great Idaho potato of my youth, which was abandoned in favor of a newer variety developed to produce substantially greater yields, greater uniformity of size, and less deterioration from the damage done in mechanical harvesting.
When I was a kid in school, I read Brian Aldiss's "Earthworks"
The horror of it still haunts my much older mind.
Imagine an impoverished world, where the nutrient levels of the soil are so low that mental lucidity is compromised. The story is told in the first person so that it is disjointed and hallucinatory.
I have just got my "High Frontier" by O'Neil
It is the antidote.
O'Neil would be right at home here at the campfire. He deals lucidly with the oil problems we face.
It is my opinion that industrial civilisation either leaves the planet or is extinguished.
I re-iterate. We humans are a special organism. (So are fungi.)
Civilisation is good. (I love my dentist.)
Our purpose as a subsystem of Gaia is consciousness. That will be greatly diminished without the Internet.
Therefore industry must continue.
I applaud your efforts.
Do you have any Mycologists in your organisation?
Capitalism is not a good model for food security.
Being a security related activity it should come under the umbrella of the Department of Defense.
If I were a military planner I would take a keen interest in food security.
Abused agricultural land needs to be rescued by the military and made communal.
In my opinion Permaculture principles should be applied on a national scale, and on communal ground.
After a climax ecology is established, food would become the birthright of the citizen. She would have a right to harvest what she needed from the artificial Climax ecology.
In exchange she would cede her birthright to have as many children as she wanted.
I am guessing that this will eventuate, whether by plan or by the unfolding of events.
I considered Mycology very seriously while at University, but in the end, Entomolgy was my calling...albeit, I still dabble with Mycology to this very day, as the insect and fungi kingdoms have a well developed symbiotic relationship.
p.s. has anyone seen any Sweat Bees (Dialictus zephrum) this year?
Seen 'em - stung by em.
I'll let others worry about the top-down approach to growing food. Here's how it works for me:
Whether you have 2 acres or 2000, divide and conquer, one rain barrel, one plot, one compost pile, one raised bed at a time. When you have been succsessful at the one, do it again or try something else. I define success as having defined these things; What will grow best right here, how will I water and weed it, how will I rejuvenate the soil, how can this one hundred square feet be its most productive and how can I sustain this production year after year with a minimum of input? Annual? Perennial? Rotate 2 or 3 crops into this small space? Is the energy I expend to grow and harvest this one space worth the energy returned? Can it produce enough value to trade for things I'm not growing? How will I utilize this food energy? Eat as you go or preservation? How much wasted?
It's like Stonleigh says; Demand is not defined by need but by how much you can pay for. I find the same rule applies to producing food. This will become more apparent as time goes on. If perennial grains produce less per acre-year but can be sustained (payed for) much better over time, then perhaps it's a good choice, but there are no silver bullets in food production or energy. We're going to have to solve these things "one plot", one weed, one problem at a time. Americans in particular want BIG answers so they can go about their lives as they have been; unincumbered by little problems like where their food and energy comes from.
Most of american's calories(15 thousand plus calories per week) come from fat.
that includes vegetarians
Many Americans are fat. I bet that will change when more of them have to grow their own food.
The first people you will have to convince are the various camps of environmentalists.
They are at a crossroads. They can adopt your policy, which requires large-scale adoption of GMO crops. This means they give up their current "organically pure" party line.
They can stick with the organic purity line, and be limited to heirloom crops, and body-breaking manual labor, unless renewable energy-powered agricultural robots arrive fairly soon. (Think of a robot good enough to pick strawberries or cucumbers, and do the hand weeding.) To be fair, this is the system that we know has worked since at least feudal times. But it is not resilient to climate change. (See The Little Ice Age by Brian Fagan.) And there is serious doubt that this can feed 7 billion people. And all these small farms would increase the net impact humans have on the land. In other words, a lot of farmland that has been allowed to go fallow (in conservation reserve) because of the high productivity of BAU would come back into production at lower but sustainable levels of output. A good deal of returned forest land in the Eastern US would be cleared again and put back to crops, bumping up global warming a bit more. Oops.
Or there is the BAU side, which is evolving on its own to no or low-till agriculture, which requires GMO crops of a different sort, and chemical herbicides and pesticides. Note that the amount of oil required for the chemicals is fairly trivial, and will still be available post Peak Oil, and could probably be made from coal tar just as well.
Then there is the hydroponic food skyscraper concept, which ditches the dirt as a hopeless anachronism, and adopts a "grow the food where it's needed" methodology. This reduces the human footprint on the planet to its minimum. A few cities connected by rail, with most of the landscape returning to its natural state.
Some group of environmentalists opposes at least one of all the above. They will have to unite, and all pull the same way, or Monsanto and Cargill will ensure their profits will run the show.
PV: Agree with you there. Have done a bit of thinning and weeding sugar beets in my younger days. Pretty hard on a feller. Alot of people dont really understand how much work is involved. Party lines get dropped fairly quick as manual labor is introduced.
(Think of a robot good enough to pick strawberries or cucumbers, and do the hand weeding.)
The 1st ones will be blind in between the row weeding.
Next gen - gathering field data, watering, some type of pest control (aphids via compressed air)
Then interplant weeding
Harvest of 3 dimensional vining crop is going to be hard. The robot would have to be big to provide stability.
Then there is the hydroponic food skyscraper concept,
When power is "too cheap to meter" - sure. Till then...not so much.
Industrial Agriculture aka the Green Revolution is here to stay.
There's no way you could feed 7 billion people without it.
Before Industrial Agriculture there were lots of FAMINES.
IMO, permiculture can contribute good ideas but is not a starting point.
Instead of turning back the clock, more people should be thinking about ways to base industrial agriculture
on renewable energy sources.
Of course people do need to make healthy food choices, less animal products if only to reduce health costs.
Farmers produced all their own fuel before the oil revolution - Hay and grain. Today's farmers can switch to all home produced fuel (alcohol and biodiesel) when petroleum fuels are no longer available or cost effective.
But, the switch to all farm produced fuels will cause an immediate reduction of 50% or more in the produce that is available to sell from the farm. Call that "Farm ELM". And it is coming to your grocery store in the near future. Higher prices and food shortages. Mass starvation deaths in many parts of the world that depend on food imports is a near certainty.
We will not need or use more people in Farming. Lots of people may do more gardening, but I repeat, no more people required in farming. All of the energy to continue large scale farming can and will be produced on the farm. But that will reduce off farm sales by 50% or more (see above comments)
But most of those CRP acres are poor or marginal ground that can never be made to produce high yielding crops. And much of it is so rocky that it beats the heck out of any equipment that you might try to use to grow things on it. You can not factor that these acres can ever produce like the high yielding acres.
Population is THE problem.
But, I am tired of hearing about the "dead zones". These are just areas that are low in dissolved oxygen. Ask any kid what happens to their fish tank when you turn off the air pump.
So build some electric wind mill size air driven air compressor pumps and put them up in the current "dead zones" and re-oxygenate the water and the sea life will come back. Not just come back, but really thrive as all that "pollution" will feed an abundance of fish food!
It really isn't rocket science.
There can never be a "sustainable" green revolution until you find a way to reduce the population of the USA to under 100 million and the rest of the world to similar reductions in their populations.
Too many people is the very basic problem. The rest is all symptoms of the basic problem.
http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/13157-population-overshoot-is-de...
Population Overshoot Is Determined by Food Overproduction
Written by Steve Salmony, Monday, 03 May 2010
Even after more than ten years of trying to raise awareness about certain overlooked research, my focus remains riveted on the skyrocketing growth of absolute global human population and scientific evidence from Hopfenberg and Pimentel that the size of the human population on Earth is a function of food availability. More food for human consumption equals more people; less food for human existence equals less people; and no food, no people. This is to say, the population dynamics of the human species is essentially common to, not different from, the population dynamics of other living things.
UN Secretary-General Mr. Kofi Annan noted in 1997, “The world has enough food. What it lacks is the political will to ensure that all people have access to this bounty, that all people enjoy food security.”
Please examine the probability that humans are producing too much, not too little food; that the global predicament humanity faces is the way increasing the global food supply leads to increasing absolute global human population numbers. It is the super-abundance of unsustainable agribusiness harvests that are driving population numbers of the human species to overshoot, or explode beyond, the natural limitations imposed by a relatively small, evidently finite, noticeably damaged planet with the size, composition and ecology of Earth.
The spectacular success of the Green Revolution over the past 40 years has “produced” an unintended and completely unanticipated global challenge, I suppose: the rapidly increasing supply of food for human consumption has given birth to a human population bomb, which is exploding worldwide before our eyes. The most formidable threat to future human well being and environmental health appears to be caused by the unbridled, corporate overproduction of food on the one hand and the abject failure of the leaders of the human community to insist upon more fair and equitable redistribution of the world’s food supply so that “all people enjoy food security”.
We need to share (not overconsume and hoard) as well as to build sustainable, human-scale farming practices (not corporate leviathans), I believe.
For a moment let us reflect upon words from the speech that Norman Bourlaug delivered in 1970 on the occasion of winning the Nobel Prize. He reported, ” Man also has acquired the means to reduce the rate of human reproduction effectively and humanely. He is using his powers for increasing the rate and amount of food production. But he is not yet using adequately his potential for decreasing the rate of human reproduction. The result is that the rate of population increase exceeds the rate of increase in food production in some areas.”
Plainly, Norman Bourlaug states that humanity has the means to decrease the rate of human reproduction, but is choosing not to adequately employ this capability to sensibly limit human population numbers. He also notes that the rate of human population growth surpasses the rate of increase in food production IN SOME AREAS {my caps}. Dr. Bourlaug is specifically not saying the growth of global human population numbers exceeds global production of food.
According to recent research, population numbers of the human species could be a function of the global growth of the food supply for human consumption. This would mean that the global food supply is the independent variable and absolute global human population numbers is the dependent variable; that human population dynamics is most similar to the population dynamics of other species. Perhaps the human species is not being threatened in our time by a lack of food. To the contrary, humanity and life as we know it could be inadvertently put at risk by the determination to continue the dramatic, large-scale overproduction of food, such as we have seen occur in the past 40 years.
Recall Dr. Bourlaug’s prize winning accomplishment. It gave rise to the “Green Revolution” and to the extraordinary increases in the world’s supply of food. Please consider that the sensational increases in humanity’s food supply occasioned by Dr. Bourlaug’s great work gave rise to an unintended and completely unanticipated effect: the recent skyrocketing growth of absolute global human population numbers.
We have to examine what appear to be potentially disastrous effects of increasing large-scale food production capabilities (as opposed to small-scale farming practices) on human population numbers worldwide between now and 2050. If we keep doing the “big-business as usual” things we are doing now by maximally increasing the world’s food supply, and the human community keeps getting what we are getting now, then a colossal ecological wreckage of some unimaginable sort could be expected to occur in the fairly near future.
It may be neither necessary nor sustainable to continue increasing food production to feed a growing population. As an alternative, we could carefully review ways for limiting increases in the large-scale corporate production of food; for providing broad support of small-scale farming practices; for redistributing more equitably the present overly abundant world supply of food among the members of the human community; and for immediately, universally and safely following Dr. Bourlaug’s recommendation to “reduce the rate of human reproduction effectively and humanely.”
Dear John Kutz, Fred Magyar, Wes Jackson and Gail Tverberg,
It appears to me that y'all are beginning to wrap your heads around the formidable predicament before all of us. We share a passion for the study of the human condition, with particular attention paid to the colossal human-induced global predicament the human community faces in our time.
Somehow we have to keep talking about this human-driven predicament, even it happens to threaten leaders with vested interests in existing patterns of behavior. There is no other way forward that makes any sense to me.
I agree with you, John Kutz. Human overpopulation of Earth is the number one problem, the proverbial "mother" of problems before the human family. It is so huge that all other global challenges, when taken together, do not present us with kind of colossal threat which is posed to us by the projected unbridled growth of absolute global human population numbers fully anticipated in the next four decades. There are many ways absolute global human population numbers could be dramatically reduced, either by human action or by natural occurrence. But if we have learned nothing about the predicament we are in now, others who come after us will likely make the very same errors that bring us now to this point in human history and space-time. Just now, I am reminded of Nietzche’s idea of the “eternal recurrence”. If we choose to willfully ignore scientific evidence, reason and common sense regarding human population dynamics and human overpopulation in order to satisfy the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us who organize and manage the existing order of "life as we know it" for their own benefit primarily, then surely the colossal mistakes of the present will occur in the future, I suppose, over and over and over again. On the other hand, if top rank scientists with appropriate expertise, who have remained electively mute, speak truth to the powerful, and thereby fulfill their responsibilities to humanity and duties to science, then a chance exists for making necessary changes in the behavioral repertoire of human species leading us away from what can be seen now as unsustainable behavior and toward alternative ways of living in the world. Rightsized, human-scale business enterprises and sustainable lifestyles could become the order of the day.
There have got to be similarly situated, top rank scientists in our planetary home who are ready now, here, to stand with Professor Emeritus Gary L. Peters in acknowledging the distinctly human-forced predicament confronting the human community; in overcoming the suppression of scientific evidence in silence; and in ending the collusion "underpinning" the global gag rule on open discussions of human population dynamics. We need many experts with the highest degree of skill and knowledge regarding population dynamics to speak out loudly and clearly regarding whatsoever is true to you, as best you can see and articulate what could somehow be real.
Thanks,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://www.panearth.org/
Hi Steve,
Thanks for your courage and all you have been doing to raise awareness of this most fundamental dilemma facing humanity.
I have been staying out of the recent threads here on TOD mainly dedicated to the technical issues of stopping the leak in the Gulf and populated by mostly by engineers and tech heads, many of them newcomers to the Drum. While that topic is interesting and challenging in it's own right it is much too narrowly focused and misses the big picture issues that many of the staff, regulars and old timers here seem more equipped and willing to openly discuss.
I did however feel compelled to respond to this one post by JamesRWhite:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6753#comment-682555
I reprint my response here because I fear it will be lost in the discussion about casings and BOPs, ROVs, oil seeps etc..etc..
People in denial of resource limits, Peak Oil, Global warming? Mono culture agriculture, excessive use of pesticides and herbicides, antibiotics? Destruction of rain forests, ocean fisheries, sensitive ecosystems? Failure of ecosystems that have been pushed past tipping points and are no longer able to recover and support us...
This is unacceptable. This safety culture is unacceptable.
But we continue with BAU regardless of all the accumulated knowledge that a change of course is urgently needed. Economic growth, pedal to the metal! Drill Baby Drill!
KABOOOOOM!! Uh, what happened? Nobody could have seen this coming...
Are humans safer than yeast?
Hi Fred,
Always glad to have your perspective. The is no doubt in my mind that human beings are capable of acting safer and smarter than yeast, ostriches and other non-human species, even though we appear to adopt occasionally the behavioral repertoire of non-human creatures. When this occurs, it is usually not a pretty sight.
Let us estimate conservatively that the world’s population of 60 year olds is 675 million this year. Then according to the UN estimates, in 2050 the number of people over 60 years old will increase to over 2 billion people.
According to UN Population Division estimates of the total human population on Earth, there is a total population of 6.7 to 6.8 billion people in 2010, with a fully anticipated, forty percent increase to a total of 9.1 billion people in 2050.
What can possibly be good about this “demographic picture”? It reminds me of a terrifying nightmare. The family of humanity will soon be confronted by emerging and converging, human-induced global threats that appear to be the direct consequences of the unbridled growth both of huge numbers of old people and gigantic numbers of young people. The fact that fertility rates are declining worldwide must not be allowed to blind us to the equally evident fact that absolute global human population numbers are continuing to skyrocket now, just as they have been during my lifetime.
The human community is not providing for the basic needs of the people on Earth in our time. Over 3 billion people are existing on resources valued at less than $2 per day. What possible good can come from adding 2+ billion more human beings to the family of humanity in the next four decades?
Can you envision that by the year 2050, a mere 40 years from now, if a substantial portion of the family of humanity was to achieve Stage IV described in Demographic Transition Theory, then it would require several planets just like Earth to provide the adequate resources to sensibly sustain a global population of 9+ billion people?
The widely shared, consensually validated and commonly held interpretation of global human population data by many too many experts, per the theory of the demographic transition, appears to be fatally flawed. The Demographic Transition Theory appears to be founded in preternatural thinking, is descriptive not predictive theory and, furthermore, is directly contradicted by unchallenged scientific research of human population dynamics.
Perhaps members of the The Oil Drum community will speak out loudly and clearly by expressing their concerns about this predicament, and also invite population scientists, human demographers, conservation biologists and other top rank experts to break the silence that is suppressing the open discussion of vital evidence regarding the human population.
Thank always,
Steve
It appears to me that too many of us are failing the children and coming generations because we think only of ourselves, benefactors and minons; choose to comfortably "play around the edges" of the formidable, human-driven predicament looming before the human family; and refuse to take responsible action in the face of clear and present dangers.
Many interesting comments to-date.
Perennial crops are fine, but I don't think we should have that as a primary focus, but as part of a diverse, resilient mix.
Other approaches we should examine are drought-resistant crops, which can include existing grains such as quinoa and amaranth, shown below respectively.
Since most (~80%) of our corn currently goes to animal feed, I would prefer to see grass-based approaches used instead. Corn's nutritional value to humans is low, and takes vast amounts of fertilizer and water.
Very surprising that no one is discussing aquaponics here.
quote:
Aquaponics is a sustainable food production system that combines aquaculture (raising fish in tanks) and hydroponics (growing plants in water) so that both grow better.
* Aquaponics uses less than 2% of the water that traditional farming does.
* Aquaponics is energy-efficient: our current systems use one-tenth of the energy conventional farming does!
* Aquaponics has eight to ten times more vegetable production in the same area and time.
* Aquaponics is fully scalable from indoor systems to backyard family systems to full commercial systems.
* Aquaponics is pure, clean, and natural: USDA Certified Organic and Food Safety Certified.
* Aquaponics is easy to learn and operate: anyone can do this!
In contrast to hydroponics systems, where the aim is to have a sterile system to avoid disease outbreaks, aquaponics systems are teeming with life. They are miniature human-made ecosystems: there are mosquito fish, prawns, tilapia, water fleas, and little red worms in our systems. Those are just the things visible with the naked eye; there are also myriad smaller creatures and bacteria, all of which contribute to the incredible health, dynamic strength, and stability of these systems.
check it out, this guy is doing it:
http://www.friendlyaquaponics.com/
Very surprising that no one is discussing aquaponics here.
Because it is energy intensive.
Pay for the heat and light VS getting it "for free" via being in a warm and sunny place.
This story is a couple years old, they are in full production today.
quote
In two to three weeks, Friendly Aquaponics will be in full production, generating 4,000 pounds of vegetables and 600 pounds of fish per month. Friend estimated the farm's monthly cash flow to be between $19,000 and $20,000.
> The only so-called drawback, Friend said, is one is forced to be organic.
>
> "It doesn't allow the farmer to cheat because any pesticide or chemical applied to the vegetables goes directly to the fish and kills them," she said.
"You create your own world and opportunities. There's always a way to do what you want to do."
http://www.westhawaiitoday.com/articles/2008/09/20/local/local01.txt
My feeling is that a climax perennial that will choke out most weeds on its own is not going to be high grain yielding. Example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festuca_arundinacea
Having to plant every year is part of the payback for plump seeds like corn or wheat. Low mechanical and chemical effort growing can be done in ridges or furrows where the crop is easily aerated and blade weeded. The flip side this time is low utilisation of space. Maybe the days of the $2 loaf of bread are gone.
Back in 2008 I think it was the FAO suggested we get more of our starch from root crops like potatoes. They can be grown easily in the suburbs in fixed beds perhaps fertilised with humanure. Contrast that to wheat growing on the prairies using vast amounts of diesel, NPK and bug killers. Instead of a sandwich you eat a boiled potato kept in the fridge. That approach may work out simpler than perennial grain crops.
xxxxx
While requiring a little TLC during growing, adding sweet potatoes and other high value root crops would supplement the nutritional value off regular potatoes;
http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=george&dbid=69
Growing up on a farm, my dad used to take a baked sweet potato with him out into the fields for a mid-morning energy boost before lunch (didn't have to eat a big lunch then) and another after lunch for a mid afternoon snack (didn't have to have a huge dinner then). My grandfather claimed that such an approach helped them get more work done after (lighter) meals, and they could turn in early each day.
Remembering a great scientist, Professor Stephen H. Schneider.....
I wonder what Steve and Galileo are doing tonight.
Steve Schneider, Rachel Carson and Galileo chose intellectual honesty, moral courage and scientific integrity.
These great scientists stood up and spoke out while many too many other experts allowed silence to vanquish science and permitted the politically convenient and economically expedient to trump the best available knowledge. Please note that extant science of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth was eschewed virtually everywhere for a decade while a global gag rule was in place. The unfortunate choice to remain electively mute would not be a such a problem if the human-induced global challenges already visible in the offing were not so formidable and so likely to threaten human wellbeing and environmental health in the fairly near future.
Whatsoever the odds, and no matter how daunting the human-driven challenges which loom ominously before the family of humanity on the far horizon, human beings have undeniable responsibilities to assume and solemn duties to perform as best we can with the steadfast hope of making the world we inhabit a better place for the children to live in. To do otherwise, much less choose to do nothing but more of the same unsustainable things we are doing now, is anathema to me. What do you think?
Perhaps necessary changes toward sustainable lifestyles and eco-friendly business enterprises are nearly at hand.