Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

My thoughts on it interspersed.

paul, tradingpost@riseup.net
---------------
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our 
most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its 
renewal is our only hope.
   - Wendell Berry
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 4/30/2006 at 12:30 AM Keith Addison wrote:

>Yet many small farmers and homesteaders in the US are using biogas right
>now.

Ok, but the question remains, what makes it practical or economical for them 
- if it is - and would it be practical across the board for family farms in 
different climates, and those without large numbers of livestock? I'm 
suspecting it's most practical for large feedlots which we really find 
abominable.

>They (Nepalese) don't compare it with the cost of fossil fuels. Smallscale
>biogas units are in use all over the world.

Where they have plenty of livestock and few alternatives for fuel, they might 
find biogas practical.

>They're not wildly conflicting and they're not all government
>studies. Eight studies over the last 10 years show a net gain of
>between 15,000 and 30,000, only Pimentel shows a 33,500 loss - 45
>btu's less than he claimed 10 years previously, despite considerable
>changes in farm practice in the meanrtime, as shown. Anyway, who
>cares about Pimentel and ADM? It's just irrelevant to a real soil
>farmer.

Pimentel as you know headed a government panel to study the economics of 
ethanol, and I see no obvious reason to throw him out and credit the later 
studies by similar panels. I just don't give much credibility to followup 
government studies and corn growers' studies to justify enormous subsidies 
for corn ethanol. To me, it sends up red flags all over the place. My 
personal view on that.

>$200 to build a 5 gal per hour still with a 55-gal oildrum boiler?
>Hardly. People are doing this right now on US farms. This is nothing
>new, go back 25 years to when Pimentel's figures might have had a
>little more reality:
>The Butterfield Still -- Farm-scale ethanol fuel production plant
>http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library.html#butterfield
>Farmers in the US were doing that then and a lot more of them are doing it
>now.

But we're not seeing the whole economic analysis of it. The startup cost may 
be low, but the opportunity cost is overlooked. In other words, how much do 
they lose in not selling or using their ethanol crops for food, compared to 
what they save by substituting ethanol for gasoline?

>... Please see:
>"How much fuel can we grow? How much land will it take?"
>http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html#howmuch

That page states  "A sustainable mixed farm can produce all its own fuel, 
with much or possibly all of it coming from crop by-products and waste 
products without any dedicated land use, and with very low input levels."

But I have a problem with that. Which byproducts and crop waste is *not* 
needed to return to the soil? None I can think of. Again, there's the 
economics of it, the opportunity cost. Anything used to produce fuel could 
instead be returned to the soil directly or composted. Is anything gained 
when you turn crop waste into ethanol and have to truck in organic matter to 
take its place in soil building?

>No, livestock do though, and that's what's done with most of the corn
>anyway

But we don't need more livestock; we need to eliminate corporate feedlots and 
devote more land to people food instead of grain for cattle. If this country 
cuts way, way back on beef (and other meats) as it ought, there won't be many 
livestock to eat that ethanol-processed corn. Of course, it could still be 
composted ;-)

>It's not just theory. Most people are only starting to think about
>this now, when it's beginning to hurt. We've been watching it playing
>out in the real world for six years and it's been going on much
>longer than that.

We'll see.

>Best wishes
>
>Keith Addison
>Journey to Forever
>KYOTO Pref., Japan
>http://journeytoforever.org/