Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["E. E. Mitchamore Jr" <emitch@att.net>]



Mark wrote: "Stick close to your land and use it to grow food".  I love that!  I can just picture some Japanese Sensei ......  Thanks, Mark.

 

E. E. "Mitch" Mitchamore
www.hillcountrynatives.biz

----- Original Message -----

From: activism98201@verizon.net

To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 2:58 AM

Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Increase In Ethanol Production FromCornCould Signific

The myths of BIOFUELS, meaning trying to convert ANY living fodder for purposes of widespread use.

None of this will scale, not sugar cane, which is higher density energy, "switch grass," or Jatropha!

I have no problem with people here and there doing any of this, but when it starts being subsidized by governments and then pushed to commercial industrial scales then only bad things will happen.

Excerpt from http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=480

"unfortunately what is actually happening does not support this optimistic view that jatropha will provide poor farmers with both cheap energy and significant income. In Africa and Asia there are serious concerns about jatropha’s environmental and social impacts. Western Australia has even banned it because of its toxicity to humans and animals, and because of its capacity quickly to become a hard-to-control, invasive weed.

"Then there is the oft-repeated claim that farmers can grow jatropha without irrigation on poor soils. This is technically the case, but yields are so low in these conditions that the crop’s viability becomes questionable. Indian studies show that, without irrigation, the average yield after five years is 1.1–2.75 tonnes per hectare, compared with 5.25–12.5 tonnes per hectare with irrigation. [2] It seems likely that, instead of being grown in marginal areas, jatropha production for agrofuels will compete directly with the production of food crops on the most fertile, irrigated lands."

Read the whole article.

Stick close to your land and use it to grow food.


-Mark Nagel
Everett, WA