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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Yield comparisons with industrial farming?

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  • From: Dieter Brand <diebrand@yahoo.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Yield comparisons with industrial farming?
  • Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:47:58 -0700 (PDT)

Many thanks for your suggestions. I have only had a cursory look at the
various documents so far. I think the reports written from an economist’s
point of view will be valuable to convince non-farmers, but I have the
impression that economists find it hard to fully appreciate the value of
fertile soil.

In the meantime, I have found the reference I was thinking about on my
bookshelf. In a book about humus and farming entitled “Humussphäre” (in
German), the author Herwig Pommeresche quotes page 116 of the Szech author
Vaclav Smil’s “Cycles of Life”, published by the Scientific American Library
in 1997.

According to the quoted passage, 1 hectare of land was enough to feed 4 to 5
people in Egyptian, Chinese and Mexican farming 500 years ago, while in
modern US farming, 1 hectare can only feed 1 person. The author goes on to
show that modern farming is even more inefficient if all the external inputs
such as fertilizers and fuel are included in the equation.

I wonder can this information be accurate? That would mean that there would
have to be nearly 300 millions hectares of farmland in the US. That seems a
lot.

Did anyone read “Cycles of Life” by Vaclav Smil?

Here are some biographical data:
Vaclav Smil does interdisciplinary research in the fields of energy,
environmental and population change, food production and nutrition, technical
innovation, risk assessment, and public policy.
He has published more than 30 books and some 400 papers on these topics. He
completed his graduate studies at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of
Carolinum University in Prague and at the College of Earth and Mineral
Sciences of the Pennsylvania State University and until 2011 he was a
Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of
Manitoba. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Science Academy),
the first non-American to receive the American Association for the
Advancement of Science Award for Public Understanding of Science and
Technology, and in 2010 he was listed by Foreign Policy among the top 100
global thinkers. He has worked as a consultant for many US, EU and
international institutions, has been an invited speaker in nearly 300
conferences and workshops in the USA, Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa, and
has lectured at many universities in North America, Europe and East Asia. His
wife Eva is a physician and his
son David is an organic synthetic chemist.





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