Like the illusion of Wall Street, with its vast and powerful investment banks, now shuttered, China too is an illusion perpetuated by the Globalists that gave us the 15,000 mile Caesar salad, poisoned cat food and lead based paint on babies' pacifiers. Like the illusion that money would come from thin air to always push housing prices higher, China has spent a generation pursuing its illusion. Pursuing an unattainable dream to be like the West, while 6000 years of its carefully shepherded top soil blows into the sea.
Joined: Oct 23, 2005 Posts: 1851 Location: East of Eden
Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 9:55 am Post subject: Re: Organic Farming can Feed the World
Me too. Makes sense, it seems pretty clear that at some point we'll mostly be eating less meat whether we want to or not. Might as well start planning for it. Completely vegan I would have a tough time with though. I do hope to at least have some eggs! _________________ "If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst." — Thomas Hardy
Joined: Oct 23, 2005 Posts: 1851 Location: East of Eden
Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 9:56 am Post subject: Re: Organic Farming can Feed the World
mos6507 wrote:
coyote wrote:
But that wouldn't include their grain and protein needs, right?
Couldn't potatoes, nuts, and beans fill in?
Yeah, I was just wondering if that would take more square footage. _________________ "If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst." — Thomas Hardy
Joined: Dec 27, 2004 Posts: 13191 Location: naive idiot fantasy world
Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 11:20 am Post subject: Re: Organic Farming can Feed the World
coyote wrote:
mos6507 wrote:
coyote wrote:
But that wouldn't include their grain and protein needs, right?
Couldn't potatoes, nuts, and beans fill in?
Yeah, I was just wondering if that would take more square footage.
Potatoes are one of the staple crops of the One Circle diets. They are the most productive calorie crop per square foot. Beans are not productive per square foot, so they will take much more room. Nut trees also take a lot of room but are important because certain kinds provide needed fatty acids and all provide a lot of calories per pound of food.
Grains in general take a large amount of room to grow, and are not included in the One Circle diets for this reason, though most of us are used to eating them. It would be difficult to get used to eating the One Circle diets, which are so different from what most of us are used to eating, but it would be better than starving. The book suggests buying the foods at the grocery store to see if you can transition to the diet before or while you're learning to grow them. I haven't tried doing this, because I like my pasta and cheese! _________________ "...powerdown so soft and fluffy you'll think you're living in a pillow." - jboogy
Joined: Aug 03, 2007 Posts: 4590 Location: Boston Suburbs
Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 12:12 pm Post subject: Re: Organic Farming can Feed the World
Ludi wrote:
I haven't tried doing this, because I like my pasta and cheese!
That reminds me. Getting enough calcium would be a challenge without dairy. What's the best solution there, supplements? _________________ http://doomsteaddiary.blogspot.com/
Joined: Dec 27, 2004 Posts: 13191 Location: naive idiot fantasy world
Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 12:20 pm Post subject: Re: Organic Farming can Feed the World
mos6507 wrote:
That reminds me. Getting enough calcium would be a challenge without dairy. What's the best solution there, supplements?
Collards have more calcium than milk per unit of weight (140mg for collards versus 113 for whole milk per 100gr). Other members of the cabbage family are similarly high in calcium.
USDA nutrient database
The nutrients lacking in these vegan diets are some of the fatty acids and iodine. However, the true main failing point for the diets is the difficulty of getting enough calories, especially for men. Men need to eat significantly more calories than women, and this is difficult on a low-fat vegan diet of this kind. If at all possible, I recommend supplementing with some kind of animal foods, such as chickens for eggs and meat, or rabbits (very easy to raise in the right climates), or from hunting. This would also solve the problem of fatty acids. I don't personally advocate vegan diets. _________________ "...powerdown so soft and fluffy you'll think you're living in a pillow." - jboogy
Joined: Aug 03, 2007 Posts: 4590 Location: Boston Suburbs
Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 12:54 pm Post subject: Re: Organic Farming can Feed the World
Ludi wrote:
If at all possible, I recommend supplementing with some kind of animal foods, such as chickens for eggs and meat, or rabbits (very easy to raise in the right climates), or from hunting. This would also solve the problem of fatty acids. I don't personally advocate vegan diets.
Personally, if it comes down to that, I'm certainly not going to raise rabbits for food. I'd rather do the aquaponics deal. Quiet, nonobtrusive, and low enough on the food chain not to anthropomorphize.
Also, I noticed your book recommendation is not available right now on Amazon. Did it cover different climates? You'd think you'd need more square feet to grow enough food in climates with a shorter season, and you'd have to grow different things with an eye towards storage for the winter. _________________ http://doomsteaddiary.blogspot.com/
Joined: Dec 27, 2004 Posts: 13191 Location: naive idiot fantasy world
Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 2:56 pm Post subject: Re: Organic Farming can Feed the World
mos6507 wrote:
Personally, if it comes down to that, I'm certainly not going to raise rabbits for food. I'd rather do the aquaponics deal. Quiet, nonobtrusive, and low enough on the food chain not to anthropomorphize.
Yes, I should have mentioned aquaponics! I couldn't raise rabbits for food either, too cute.
mos6507 wrote:
Also, I noticed your book recommendation is not available right now on Amazon. Did it cover different climates? You'd think you'd need more square feet to grow enough food in climates with a shorter season, and you'd hav to grow different things with an eye towards storage for the winter.
Here's a source for the book One Circle
The diets and growing plans definitely need to be customized for specific climates. Those with short growing seasons or other difficult climates will need to make changes and probably will need more space. I wouldn't personally want to put all my eggs in one basket by depending on one crop, for instance potatoes (that didn't work out well for some folks in the past). That's why I generally promote permaculture along with biointensive - One Circle is based on biointensive methods, which I think are rather difficult and demanding, at least they are for me! _________________ "...powerdown so soft and fluffy you'll think you're living in a pillow." - jboogy
Joined: Oct 27, 2004 Posts: 675 Location: Salt Spring Island, Cascadia
Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 10:28 pm Post subject: Re: Organic Farming can Feed the World
mos6507 wrote:
Getting enough calcium would be a challenge without dairy.
Actually, no. You can easily get all the calcium you need from greens. _________________ :::: Jan Steinman, Communication Steward, EcoReality, a forming sustainable community. Be the change! ::::
Joined: Oct 27, 2004 Posts: 675 Location: Salt Spring Island, Cascadia
Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 10:31 pm Post subject: Re: Organic Farming can Feed the World
killJOY wrote:
The whole reason the industrial model of agriculture arose is BECAUSE ORGANIC FARMING DIDN'T WORK to feed the burgeoning population.
Not true. It arose because it could -- due to cheap energy. People were feeding themselves just fine before fossil fuel, but when it became possible for more of them to leave the land, they did.
In summary, I think you have the horse before the cart. The pre-fossil-fuel population fed itself just dandy. The "burgeoning" part is the direct result of fossil fuel. _________________ :::: Jan Steinman, Communication Steward, EcoReality, a forming sustainable community. Be the change! ::::
Joined: Dec 27, 2004 Posts: 13191 Location: naive idiot fantasy world
Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2008 6:11 am Post subject: Re: Organic Farming can Feed the World
Bytesmiths wrote:
when it became possible for more of them to leave the land, they did.
Don't forget, many were forced from the land due to competition from industrial farming. Small farmers couldn't compete with agribusiness.
see "The Unsettling of America" by Wendell Berry _________________ "...powerdown so soft and fluffy you'll think you're living in a pillow." - jboogy
Joined: Oct 27, 2004 Posts: 675 Location: Salt Spring Island, Cascadia
Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2008 9:28 am Post subject: Re: Organic Farming can Feed the World
Ludi wrote:
Bytesmiths wrote:
when it became possible for more of them to leave the land, they did.
Don't forget, many were forced from the land due to competition from industrial farming. Small farmers couldn't compete with agribusiness.
No argument there.
My point was that organic techniques were working just fine before this energy spike. It isn't because organic "didn't work," it's because the world became flooded by a temporary pulse of cheap energy that temporarily changed the rules, and now the rules are going to change back.
Pre-fossil-fuel, it took fifteen families on the land to feed one in the city. Today, with the help of coal-fired electricity, fertilizer from natural gas, and diesel fuel for mechanized agriculture and distribution, a single farmer can support a thousand in the city.
This will not continue. _________________ :::: Jan Steinman, Communication Steward, EcoReality, a forming sustainable community. Be the change! ::::
Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2008 1:22 pm Post subject: Re: Organic Farming can Feed the World
Organic worked, but theres no way it can feed the current population levels! How many can it feed? Who knows?
Bytesmiths wrote:
Ludi wrote:
Bytesmiths wrote:
when it became possible for more of them to leave the land, they did.
Don't forget, many were forced from the land due to competition from industrial farming. Small farmers couldn't compete with agribusiness.
No argument there. My point was that organic techniques were working just fine before this energy spike. It isn't because organic "didn't work," it's because the world became flooded by a temporary pulse of cheap energy that temporarily changed the rules, and now the rules are going to change back. Pre-fossil-fuel, it took fifteen families on the land to feed one in the city. Today, with the help of coal-fired electricity, fertilizer from natural gas, and diesel fuel for mechanized agriculture and distribution, a single farmer can support a thousand in the city. This will not continue.
Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2008 8:14 pm Post subject: Re: Organic Farming can Feed the World
From a parallel I think very illuminating Post: link
I'll quote David Blume in a response to a 'post to the bioregional listserve from a woman at ATTRA who said something like "Of course you couldn't feed the world with such a hippy-dippy, hunter-gatherer, landscape system like permaculture."'
Quote:
Dear Folks,
I would like to inject some real world experience into this otherwise abstract discussion of food and permaculture.
In addition to being an ecological biologist, a permaculture production food farmer for 9 years, and an expert on biomass fuels, I have also been teaching permaculture since 1997 and have worked in many countries on food/energy production design issues. I have certified more than 400 people in permaculture design since 1997. For more info on this see my site at www.permaculture.com
So in light of my experience I have a couple of things to say. Let us dispense, for the moment only, with the talk of hunter-gatherer models since, to return to that state or to imitate it with design would meet limited acceptance. This is not the core design goal of permaculture although some of our small scale subsistence agriculture designs vaguely look like a hunter-gatherer paradise (i.e. it never existed like this in nature.) The issue of private property as we now define it also complicates that model. We are living in an agricultural age and permaculture offers huge benefits to both production and subsistence agriculture.
As far as I know I was one of the only farmers fully utilizing permaculture to produce surplus food for sale in the US as a full time occupation. On approximately two acres— half of which was on a terraced 35 degree slope—I produced enough food to feed more than 300 people (with a peak of 450 people at one point), 49 weeks a year in my fully organic CSA on the edge of Silicon Valley . If I could do it there you can do it anywhere.
I did this for almost nine years until I lost the lease to my rented land. My yields were often 8 times what the USDA claims are possible per square foot. My soil fertility increased dramatically each year so I was not achieving my yields by mining my soil. On the contrary I built my soil from cement-hard adobe clay to its impressive state from scratch. By the end I was at over 22% organic matter with a cation exchange capacity (CEC) of over 25. CEC is an indirect measure of soil humus or the ability of the soil to hold nutrients available to crops. The higher the number the more nutrients are stored and available. For reference, most Class I commercial agricultural soil is lucky to hit 2% organic matter—the dividing line between a living and dead soil—with a CEC around 5.
At most times I had no more than half of my land under production with the rest in various stages of cover cropping. And I was only producing at a fraction of what would have been possible if I had owned the land and could have justified the investment into an overstory of integrated tree, berry, flower and nut crops along with the various vegetable and fruit crops. The farm produced so much income that I was routinely in the top 15% of organic farms in California (which has over 2000 organic farms) in most years on a fraction of the land that my colleagues were using. I grew over 45 different kinds of crops so my financial success cannot be attributed to growing a few high value crops like Yuppie Chow (salad mix).
Unlike other organic farmers, I almost never used even organic pesticides on my farm. The permaculture ecosystem I designed was so self-managing and self-maintaining with natural controls such as carnivorous insects, toads, lizards, snakes, owls, bats, and other allies, that it was rare that I needed to intervene (I can count the times on one hand that I intervened over 9 years). On the few occasions I did, I used coffee solution made from waste cafe coffee. You didn't think plants made caffeine to get you high did you? Caffeine is an extremely effective natural insecticide, which degrades in the sunlight or air in about 24 hours after use.
On the subsistence agriculture level, we permies regularly have designed productions systems around the world, which feed everyone living in a given house within a 50-foot radius of the house. This rule of thumb holds pretty well because the more folks who live there, the bigger the house, the larger the surface area, so no more than 50 feet is really necessary.
The math is easy. With a polyculture, yields of 3-10 pounds of food per square foot are easy to come up with in most climates. For comparison, commercial agriculture in California , which is way inefficient, routinely runs about 1.5-2.5 pounds per square foot per year across a wide variety of crops. People need to eat about two pounds of mixed food a day if active, or around 750 pounds a year. In a good but somewhat sloppy design, you need about 500 square feet per person MAXIMUM. In a very good design, 200 square feet will do the job. If your diet is heavy on grain you'll need more space but not an astronomical amount. Utilize a greenhouse to extend seasons and exchange air rich in carbon dioxide from chicken houses or human houses, which otherwise would go to waste, and yields ratchet up even more. Take a little more space and include ducks and aquaculture into the mix and the yields become quite diverse and substantial. This sort of system is typical in Vietnam now and there is no longer any measurable hunger there. Wouldn't it be nice if the US could do that with its "superior" first world agricultural system?
Can't do this on a commercial scale? Tell that to Archer Daniels Midland who operates many acres of greenhouses in Decatur using partially integrated production of fish, lettuce and other vegetables using waste carbon dioxide, grain by-products and other by-products from its 100-million gallon per year alcohol fuel production facility, while delivering these profitable agricultural products in trucks running on biodiesel (made from the corn and soybeans they process). This qualifies as commercial scale, very rudimentary permaculture that is wildly profitable and productive.
As a reality check, I'd like to remind everyone that in the 1850's, prior to refrigerated transport, New York City supplied all its food for a population of over a million from within 7 miles of the borders of the city. (It wasn't worth the cost of horse feed and time to go further than 7 miles to export food into the city). No one would discount a system of community food security for one million people as non-commercial.
There are two main reasons known for the dramatically increased productivity of a polyculture?\the benefit of mycorhyzzal symbiosis (which is destroyed in chemical agriculture) and less solar saturation. Solar saturation is the point at which a plants' photosynthetic machinery is overwhelmed by excess sunlight and shut down. In practice, this means that most of our crop plants stop growing at about 10am and don't start again until about 4 in the afternoon. Various members of a polyculture shade each other, preventing solar saturation, so plants metabolize all day. Polyculture as we pursue in permaculture uses close to 100% of the sunlight falling on its mixed crops. Monoculture rarely can use more than 30% of the total sunlight received before saturation. How long could you run any business without external support at 30% efficiency? When you look at a simple Mexican permaculture example, growth of the three sisters of corn, beans and squash (not even counting the 200 vegetables of various sorts growing in the shade of the sisters) you get close to 90% solar efficiency. When you total up the pounds of food from a Mexican acre you get FAR MORE FOOD than the highest yielding nitrogen soaked Iowa cornfield. This is the myth of the green revolution; that the highest total food yields occur in chemical monoculture.
Enough of this. The argument that we don't have enough food to go around is specious anyway. We currently produce more than twice the amount of food we need to feed everyone, even with the extremely inefficient model of monoculture. What starving people lack is money to buy food which is not considered a right but a commodity. Even being able to buy the food isn't a guarantee of access. Midwesterners find it cheaper to burn 5 cent a pound corn in stoves for heat even though Mexican families are willing to pay up to $1 a pound for corn to feed their family.
So you say, "Well if you're such a wiseguy and you obviously would make so much more money from the greater yields of a simple three crop permaculture system, why don't corporations in the Midwest do it to make more money?" This gets to the core of the problemw—hich is not population/resources and/or biological models of overpopulation which typically apply to wild animals.
Capitalism is concerned with more than just making money. The reason why monocultures are favored by corporations EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE THE LEAST EFFICIENT WAY OF PRODUCING FOOD in pounds of food per acre is that it can be done with the least amount of labor. To harvest the three sisters you would need a digital harvester—i.e. two hands—not a combine. Even though the increased labor would be totally justified by the increased profit, corporations are totally allergic to dealing with labor. Labor is messy. It organizes, it wants a fair share of the profit, cities want tax money to pay for worker habitat infrastructure and other pesky things that corporations will avoid at all costs. Our current form of agribusiness is a textbook case of design maximizing the advantage of capital to the disadvantage of labor facilitated by the artificially low cost of energy.
The other reason is control of the market. It is now estimated that 80 percent of the world's arable (read European-style plowed) agricultural land is now in the hands of multi-nationals. It has served their needs to keep productivity low to make it possible to get a hold of as much of the means of production as possible. Farmers who are barely making a living sell their land for a fraction of those making a good profit. Midwest corn farmers generally net only about $50-75 per acre on corn on a gross income of $300 per acre.
My discussion above is not to be taken as a suggestion that population growth is not a problem, it is. So let me make a quick comment on population, from a designer's point of view, which is totally related to the structural issues above. I dare anyone to find an example in which population is stable yet there is no system for security in old age. It has been shown in countless studies that the ONLY consistent reason why population stabilizes is that people know they will have security in their old age. At that point they stop having excess children. Why? It has absolutely nothing to do with the biological resource-population relationships. We are not wild animals and have markedly different behavior. In a developing country, or any country for that matter, without a secure social security system for the aged, you need at least two kids to support each elderly adult. In virtually every case studied where stabilization of social systems occurred, women immediately find systems to end unwanted pregnancy. Herbal indigenous methods for ending fertility are known all over the world. In my own Italian heritage—hardly a herb-oriented aboriginal tribe, even into the 1900's, utilized ergot obtained from the local apothecary to end unwanted pregnancy.
So structural adjustment—the neoliberal formula the World Bank and IMF impose on the developing world—ensures population growth. By intentionally eliminating a secure social safety net as a condition of borrowing money, population growth—and therefore market growth for various consumer goods—continues to grow. Therein lies the rub. If population doesn't continue to grow, capitalists rapidly run out of customers. Can't let that happen now can we?
Permaculture design offers an alternative security for old age when the family has even a little land. In the Deccan desert of India , where there is huge success with permaculture turning hundreds of square miles of man-made desert back into productive designed rain forest, there is a saying: "Trees are better than sons." Sons might take care of you in your old age but income or trade from your productive trees (food, timber and fuel) definitely will. This approach offers families security to limit population growth and takes the supply of old age security back into the people's hands.
Restorative agriculture?\which goes far beyond sustainable agriculture—depends on solar energy replacing fossil fuel use. Buckminster Fuller and I discussed this back in 1983 when he wrote the foreword for my book Alcohol Can Be A Gas!, that accompanied my ten part PBS television series at that time. (Alcohol is a virtually pollution free engine fuel which is superior in almost every way to gasoline.) World photosynthesis in its fully undesigned state, produces biomass in wasteful agriculture and in the wild which far exceeds human need. Our analysis shows that world biomass photosynthesis produces between 6 and 15 times what we used to power every human need every year, including food, electricity, transportation, and heat.
In a designed system, especially a permaculturally-designed system, we could increase the biomass produced by an order of magnitude and in so doing supply all our needs in a much smaller footprint. For instance, you only get about 200 gallons per acre of alcohol fuel from corn, but 1000 gallons from sugar beets, 1200 from Jerusalem Artichokes, 1500 gallons from annual sugar cane in southern states and a variety of other crops which, when properly designed for climate, might yield 2500 gallons per year from two crop cycles. This would be done while increasing soil fertility and providing all the animal food we need as a by-product (replacing the corn which largely goes for animal feed now) at a fraction of the energy cost of corn-soybean agribusiness. This is all possible right now without any new technology.
The Department of Energy-sponsored program to reduce the cost of cellulose-dissolving enzymes. Soon, yields based on that carbohydrate (cellulose) rather than the relatively scarce starch or sugar carbohydrate scenarios described above will ratchet up cost-effective yield another order of magnitude. (We could do it right now with current technology but the fuel would be about $1.65/gallon wholesale). Once again this is just scratching the surface.
I could go on for two weeks non-stop about this?\my colleagues and I do so in my permaculture design courses. The point is that although humans are great at creating deserts and poverty, we also have the incredible capacity to design ecological systems that work for everyone—even some corporations. The argument that we can't produce enough ecologically is, at its source, promoted by corporations who benefit from a view of scarcity and limited resources which they control. Their constant cry is TINA "There Is No Alternative". Right, and the wizard says, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"
Around the world people are demonstrating that, not only are there alternatives, there are alternatives that allow us all to take care of each other and the rest of the species we live with, and to direct surpluses from our designs back to this care. These are the three main tenets of Permaculture design. We aren't waiting for governments, corporations, or bureaucracies to solve the world's problems. We will do it with or without their help. We are already doing it and no one can stop us because we can't be forced to buy what we don't need anymore. Since few of us in permaculture education are hired by anyone in business or government, we can't be fired or threatened.
I like to say, if you want to end transnational capitalism, (the very opposite of bioregionalism), then stop giving them your capital. To do that you need to start producing what you need—plus some surplus for others—bioregionally and I would respectfully suggest that permaculture design is a good tool to begin that process.
Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2008 11:16 pm Post subject: Re: Organic Farming can Feed the World
Quote:
The math is easy. With a polyculture, yields of 3-10 pounds of food per square foot are easy to come up with in most climates.
I have no idea where he came up with this figure. Grains produce several thousand pounds per acre or a fraction of a pound per sq. ft. Potatoes are the most prolific crops, and in Florida, under ideal conditions, will yield 43,100 pounds per acre. That is still only .9 pounds per harvest per year.
Quote:
For instance, you only get about 200 gallons per acre of alcohol fuel from corn, but 1000 gallons from sugar beets, 1200 from Jerusalem Artichokes, 1500 gallons from annual sugar cane in southern states and a variety of other crops which, when properly designed for climate, might yield 2500 gallons per year from two crop cycles.
These numbers are off also. He under-measures corn (400 gallons per acre) and overestimates other crops (sugar beets 525 gallons per acre) to suggest they are panaceas. They are not, as is evinced by the failure of the corn ethanol lobby. Plant ethanols have a negative energy return or eroei.
Quote:
This would be done while increasing soil fertility and providing all the animal food we need as a by-product (replacing the corn which largely goes for animal feed now) at a fraction of the energy cost of corn-soybean agribusiness. This is all possible right now without any new technology.
This is impossible without copious additions of petroleum-based fertilizers. You can not extract nutrients or energy from the soil repeatedly without off-farm inputs.
Quote:
The Department of Energy-sponsored program to reduce the cost of cellulose-dissolving enzymes. Soon, yields based on that carbohydrate (cellulose) rather than the relatively scarce starch or sugar carbohydrate scenarios described above will ratchet up cost-effective yield another order of magnitude. (We could do it right now with current technology but the fuel would be about $1.65/gallon wholesale). Once again this is just scratching the surface.
He is describing the holy grail of biofuel production that has never been achieved at a reasonable rate of energy or monetary return. There are no inexpensive cellulose-dissolving enzymes.
I am not going to continue critiquing this guy except to say he is a charlatan of a particular odious breed. He promotes himself and false data using a soft and romantic cover--permaculture. I do not like him at all. _________________ ree rah rip ram. sunofabitch godamn. hidey didey christ almighty. rah rah crap
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ree rah rip ram. sunofabitch godamn. hidey didey christ almighty. rah rah crap 
