Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dieter Brand <diebrand@yahoo.com>]

Here are three more stories from Europe, only anecdotal

evidence of course:

 

1) My sister in-law is crazy about horses, so she and her husband

finally decided to buy one for her. They don't have any land,

which made them ask a neighbouring farmer who has a fallow

field just across from their garden fence, if the horse could

graze on that field. Turns out that the farmer gets a substantial

amount of money from the EU to keep that field fallow. And my

brother, who has a good job at a good company, was unable to

pay an equivalent amount. They finally found another field in

another village, and my sister in-law has to drive 10 miles by

car each time she wants to ride her horse.

 

2) After sugar prices in Europe dropped to international levels

following an agreement with the WTO to scrap protection for

the European market, huge tracks of land, previously used

for sugar beet production have become available for other

purposes because costs for producing sugar from sugar

beet in Europe are way above international levels.

 

3) The population in rural Alentejo, where I live in the South of

Portugal, is constantly shrinking because farmers have

continued for many years to leave their land due to harsh

economic conditions. The vast tracks of empty land left

behind are partially converted to eucalyptus plantation

to feed the paper industry. But much land remains empty,

others is subsidised by the EU to grow a cover crop that

is then ploughed under to produce a summer corn that is

so meagre that it is hardly worse harvesting.  Much of

this rolling hill land would be served better to produce

biofuels by a perennial like Jatropha (don't know if Jatropha

can withstand local climatic conditions) to provide biofuels

from the nuts, organic matter and erosion control from the

the plant.

 

I think there are still margins like that, at least in Europe.

Well, and if all else fails we could still eat a bit less meat

so the Chinese can eat more.  It would be all for the better

and provide a cut in medical bills into the bargain.

 

Dieter Brand

Portugal

PS: There is nothing really surprising about that a Bayer

exec is feeling bullish about GM.

TradingPostPaul <tradingpost@riseup.net> wrote:

> "
>  If agriculture hopes to even come close to satisfying global demand, it
> will have to find new approaches... The real challenge will be to maximize
> crop yields on limited amounts of arable land."
>
> (too bad they push GM crops as the solution)
>
> The Choice between Food and Fuel
> http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,530791,00.html
>
> Food prices are skyrocketing. Arable land is becoming scarce. And forests
> continue to disappear across the globe. The world must decide between
> affordable food and biofuels.
>
> All it takes for Hans Dietrich Driftmann, a businessman from Germany's
> northern Holstein region, to explain the way the world works is a package
> of muesli -- or at least to explain the way his world, the world of
> agricultural markets, works.
>
> Driftmann picks up a packet of "Köllns kernige Multikorn-Flocken"
> ("Kölln's Crunchy Multigrain Flakes") and reads out the list of
> ingredients: oats, wheat, barley and
>  rye. Then he slips a set of price
> tables out of a plastic sleeve and does a couple of calculations to
> illustrate how the prices of the muesli's ingredients have changed: rye has
> gone up by 55 percent, barley by 70 percent and wheat 90 percent. The price
> of oats has also skyrocketed -- by 80 percent -- since the last harvest a
> year ago. This final figure is what really hits home for Driftmann.
>
> For the last two decades he has been the CEO of Kölln-Werke, Germany's
> top producer of oats and a major player in the muesli market. It's an old
> family-owned company, founded in 1795 and headquartered in the town of
> Elmshorn, a place with a skyline dominated by enormous grain silos painted
> sky-blue. The silos are beacons for truck drivers approaching Elmshorn to
> unload their grain -- if they come at all these days.
>
> Today Driftmann is grateful for every truck that shows up at his silos.
> This year's oats harvest, he says, was "miserable."
>  His buyers search the
> whole world for grain, even in places like Finland and Australia. Price is
> almost secondary. "The problem is availability," says Driftmann.
>
> Highest Inflation in 14 Years
>
> He ought to be able to achieve significantly higher prices in the
> negotiations with the giant trading companies. He is convinced that a price
> hike of more than 20 percent is justified, but he also knows that consumers
> won't accept such a large increase. Not yet, at least. "We will see quite a
> few price increases in the coming years," says Driftmann.
>
> This is a new experience for agricultural companies -- and presents a
> troubling outlook for millions of consumers. For decades, they have become
> accustomed to stable or even declining food prices. But in September, when
> consumer discount giant Aldi attracted nationwide attention with its
> memorable advertising campaign ("Aldi is here to inform you about upcoming
> price increases"),
>  Germans knew that change was coming. Aldi then raised
> the prices of about 50 items in its stores, and other chains promptly
> followed suit.
>
> Meanwhile, almost all supermarkets appear to have raised prices across the
> board: for bread and butter, milk and cheese, pork and poultry, noodles and
> chocolate, apple juice and beer. The growing wave of price hikes has pushed
> inflation to its highest level in 14 years.
>
> Some of those who were born after World War II and never experienced leaner
> times may only now be learning that food does have a value, even an
> existential one. Suddenly they realize that food is in fact an
> indispensable resource, critical for life, and that they can no longer
> expect it to be available at all times and in all places -- especially not
> at guaranteed low prices.
>
> Too Much Demand, Not Enough Land
>
> When German Agriculture Minister Horst Seehofer, a member of the
> conservative Christian Social Union
>  (CSU), opened this year's Green Week
> agricultural fair in Berlin last week, it was under a completely new set of
> assumptions. For decades, the industrialized world enjoyed the questionable
> luxury of producing far more milk, butter and wheat than its citizens could
> ever consume. The surplus was exported, provided buyers could be found, or
> was placed into indefinite storage or destroyed.
>
> This folly has now come to an end. Europe's mountains of butter have been
> depleted, its grain silos emptied and its lakes of milk drained. "The era
> of overproduction is behind us," says Stephane Delodder, an agricultural
> specialist with Rabobank in the Dutch city of Utrecht.
>
> Worldwide flows of goods are shifting and becoming reorganized. For the
> first time, we are seeing the emergence of a truly global agricultural
> market driven by the underlying force of all economic activity: the
> scarcity of goods. Wheat supplies, for example, have reached a
>  30-year low.
> In only one year, inventories in the European Union have plummeted from 14
> million to one million tons.
>
> Given this situation, the meteorological forecast of a drought in
> Australia, an important wheat exporter, can trigger a minor earthquake on
> the world's futures exchanges, where commodities prices are constantly
> hitting new all-time highs. Nothing fuels the fantasies of commodity
> traders quite as effectively as a bushel of wheat or a hectoliter of
> rapeseed oil.
>
> Of course, the current uproar over rising food prices revolves around a lot
> more than consumers paying a few extra euros for milk, cheese and bread.
> The real issue is how mankind will be able to feed itself in the future --
> and at what price.
>
> How can agriculture feed a world that grows by 80 million people each year?
> A world that is increasingly exposed to climatic extremes? And, most of
> all, a world that doesn't just need food for people and
>  feed for livestock,
> but is increasingly consuming fuel derived from plants?
>
> 'Desperately Need a Good Harvest'
>
> The problem is that there is too much demand and not enough land. In a
> world hungry for agricultural products, the dilemma is that each hectare of
> arable land can only be used for one purpose at any given time. Potatoes
> can't be grown where corn is cultivated. Where rye is grown, there is no
> room left for oats. And when rapeseed is converted into biodiesel, there is
> no seed left to produce rapeseed oil. This fundamental conflict drives up
> the prices for agricultural crops. There are growing fears that the world
> could soon face a food crisis, and that the current bottleneck could expand
> into widespread starvation.
>
> "We desperately need a good harvest to ease the current situation," says
> Klaus Schumacher, chief economist at Toepfer International, a large
> agricultural trading company headquartered in Hamburg. "If
>  that doesn't
> happen, we'll soon face a genuine supply problem."
>
> Kölln CEO Driftmann's assessment of the outlook for agricultural
> production is even more skeptical, especially in developing countries where
> a large share of food products has to be imported and where many people
> live a daily struggle to survive. "I am afraid that we are slipping into a
> global food crisis," says Driftmann. "And I'm extremely concerned about
> it."
>
> At the Global Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which began on
> Wednesday, the world's elites have identified the scarcity of agricultural
> commodities as a critical global risk. "The world's food production
> system," say the forum's organizers, "is about to face a true test." The
> United Nations has already warned that food shortages could lead to unrest
> in some countries. In Mexico, for example, tens of thousands of people took
> to the streets a year ago to protest the explosion in the price of
>  corn
> meal, a staple of the Mexican diet. This "tortilla crisis" signaled the
> beginning of the distribution battles the planet is about to face --
> struggles over the most productive farmland, the most favorable supply
> contracts and the best seed.
>
> A debate is taking shape over how human beings will be able to secure the
> basis of their livelihood, and whether they should use genetic engineering,
> for example. What represents the most effective use of valuable
> agricultural resources -- as a source of food for the world or as fuel for
> our cars and trucks? Bread or gasoline? Or is it possible to have both: a
> full belly and clean-burning cars?
>
> German farmers derive a certain sense of satisfaction from the current
> debate. Until recently, they were seen as a dying breed. They were
> ridiculed as the notorious recipients of Brussels' welfare bureaucracy, and
> as the beneficiaries of a peculiar market logic: The less land the
>  farmers
> farmed, the more money they collected. Now, for the first time in many
> years, German farmers can enjoy the pleasant sensation of being in demand.
> In fact, they are even respected again -- and able to make money.
>
> Farmers are investing again, taking out loans to buy additional farmland,
> build storage buildings and put new machinery in their barns. Food
> production -- still Germany's fourth-largest industry after automobile
> manufacturing, machine tool production and chemicals -- is suddenly turning
> into a growth sector. Gerd Sonnleitner, the president of the Germans
> Farmers Association, welcomes this "new form of liberation for farmers,"
> now that supply and demand rule the market and buyers are setting prices
> once again.
>
> Farming Has a Future
>
> "I even got calls asking if I had any grain left for sale when I was
> sitting on my combine," says Hans-Jürgen Sandvoss, 57, referring to last
> year's harvest. He and his wife
>  have been running their farm in
> Honerdingen, a bucolic little 17th-century village in the northern German
> state of Lower Saxony, for the past 26 years. The family has owned the farm
> for generations, and Sandvoss hopes that his son will keep the tradition
> alive. The son, 19, plans to complete a training program on a farm after he
> finishes high school, and then follow in his parents' footsteps and study
> agriculture. "Until recently, I advised him against becoming a farmer,"
> says Sandvoss. But now he is encouraging his son to pursue his plan after
> all. Farming has a future once again.
>
> Today's farmer can also act as a businessman. His portfolio consists of
> crops like wheat, rapeseed, rye, brewer's barley, corn, potatoes and sugar
> beets. The key to a farmer's success is being able to predict the demand
> for certain products and plant his fields accordingly, taking the
> requirements of crop rotation into account.
>
> The price of
>  farmland has jumped considerably. The Bodenverwertungs- und
> Verwaltungsgesellschaft (BVVG), an agency in Berlin that leases and sells
> government-owned farmland, is reporting record profits. In the first half
> of 2007, the average market price of a hectare (2.47 acres) of agricultural
> land in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt was €7,400, a 23-percent
> increase over last year's price. Prices are even higher in western Germany.
> In the state of North Rhine Westphalia, for example, the asking price for a
> hectare of farmland can be as high as €25,000 -- and there are buyers to
> be found.
>
> The cost of leasing farmland has also increased in the state and €1,000
> per hectare is no longer a rarity. "Any farmer who enters into leasing
> negotiations nowadays has my sympathy," says Rüdiger Fuhrmann, an
> agricultural expert at NordLB, a major bank based in Hannover. Johann
> Kalverkamp, an agricultural consultant in Lingen, a city in Lower
>  Saxony,
> has also noticed a rapid increase in land prices. "Land is the scarcest
> resource on earth," says Kalverkamp.
>
> 'Shortages Will Intensify Dramatically'
>
> The fact is that arable land cannot be increased at will. Over the past
> three decades, the amount of arable land worldwide has stagnated at about
> 1.5 billion hectares (3.7 billion acres). While new agricultural land is
> being added in Russia or South America, more and more land is lost to
> residential and industrial development in Asia and Europe. In China, eight
> million hectares (20 million acres) of land under cultivation have vanished
> within a decade. For comparison, just under 12 million hectares (30 million
> acres) of land are currently used for agriculture in Germany.
>
> These spatial limitations would be tolerable if the world's population
> wasn't growing at such a breathtaking pace. A person born in 1950 has
> experienced mankind more than doubling its numbers from
>  2.5 billion to 6.6
> billion people today. If the population grows to nine or even 10 billion by
> 2050, "the world will see an enormous need for additional biomass produced
> in agriculture," warns Franz Josef Rademacher, a mathematician in the
> southern German city of Ulm. Rademacher, a member of the Club of Rome,
> believes that "shortages will intensify dramatically."
>
> At the same time, millions of people are changing their lifestyles and
> eating habits. The new middle class in Shanghai, Hanoi and Jakarta, no
> longer satisfied with a diet of rice and beans, has a growing appetite for
> pizza and pasta, burgers and pork chops. Meat consumption has doubled in
> the last 25 years and continues to grow. Meat production, though, requires
> large amounts of feed. A hog farmer needs three kilos of feed to produce a
> kilo of pork, and for beef the ratio is even higher: seven to one. Vast
> amounts of water are needed to produce the grain that goes into
>  feeding
> livestock. It takes about 900 liters of water to grow enough corn for one
> kilo of feed.
>
> Feeding a Quarter of the World's Population
>
> The impact of new eating habits is especially significant in China. In
> Mao's day, the Chinese diet was predominantly vegetarian. With growing
> affluence, the Chinese have expanded their menus considerably, adding large
> amounts of meat to dishes like their traditional noodle soup. The huge
> country will not be able to even remotely satisfy this growing demand with
> domestic resources. The People's Republic already lives well beyond its
> means today. China has a quarter of the world's population to feed, and yet
> it has only about 10 percent of its arable land. As a result, the country
> is steadily buying up the world's food resources. China now imports more
> than seven times as many soybeans as it did only a decade ago. Corn
> shipments from abroad increased by a factor of 15 in 2006
>  alone.
>
> Paradoxically, it wasn't too long ago that China was an important exporter
> of food products. But that was when crude oil was still affordable and
> climate change was a topic that interested a handful of meteorologists at
> best. Nowadays, with the energy and climate crisis at the top of the
> political agenda, the Chinese, and the rest of the world, for that matter,
> see plant-based fuel as a way out of the environmental trap -- but at the
> price of agricultural commodities becoming scarcer and more costly.
>
> Governments spend billions to promote the production of plants that can be
> used to produce fuel and the development of production capacity. Growing
> amounts of rapeseed are being refined into biodiesel while corn and
> sugarcane becomes ethanol. On Wednesday, the European Commission examined
> ways to implement its ambitious climate resolutions. Marian Fischer Boel,
> the European Union's agricultural commissioner, is convinced
>  that if Europe
> hopes to achieve its goal of a 20-percent reduction in CO2 emissions by
> 2020, "there will be no getting around biodiesel and ethanol." The demand
> for plant-based alternatives to fossil fuels increases along with the price
> of oil -- with far-reaching consequences for consumers. The EU is calling
> for fuels to include at least 10 percent biofuels by 2020.
>
> When grain ends up in our fuel tanks instead of on our plates, food prices
> increase, as does the cost of feed such as corn silage and soybeans. Higher
> feed costs make it more expensive to raise livestock, which translates
> directly into higher prices for beef and pork. The price of oil -- OPEC in
> other words -- ultimately determines how much a pork chop costs at the
> supermarket.
>
> The Americans, in particular, have high hopes for biofuel making them less
> dependent on oil-producing countries in the Persian Gulf region. US farmers
> produced more corn last year than
>  they have since the end of World War II.
> Tim Recker, a 43-year-old Iowa farmer, says that he and his fellow farmers
> get as much as they can out of the ground. "We're farmers. Our goal is to
> produce, produce, produce."
>
> At a recent lunch on Recker's farm -- the meal was steak and beans -- his
> mobile phone gave a quick buzz: a text message with grain prices. Recker
> receives similar text messages about three times a day, and the news is
> almost always good. He and his neighbors are experiencing their own,
> personal economic miracle. Brand-new grain silos are popping up in the
> fields around Recker's farm, shining, rocket-like symbols of their
> builders' faith in the future. Many Iowans already refer to their state as
> "the new Texas," as if biofuel could serve as a complete substitute for
> oil.
>
> During harvest season, Recker drives his truck down a road along the
> Mississippi several times a day, carrying 27 tons of corn with each
>  load. A
> major exporter has set up underground storage facilities next to the river.
> >From there, the bulk corn is loaded onto freighters, which carry it down to
> New Orleans, where it is transferred to larger ships. From there the corn
> travels through the Panama Canal and to destinations around the world.
>
> A Handful of Corporations
>
> In places like New Orleans, it becomes clear that even in the America of
> high-tech companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft, the traditional
> agricultural industry still plays a powerful role -- and it's an industry
> in which a handful of corporations dominate the world market.
>
> The largest is Cargill, a family-owned company from Minnesota founded in
> 1865. With its 158,000 employees and $88 billion (€60 billion) in sales,
> Cargill is in the same league with major international corporations like
> BASF, Samsung and Hewlett-Packard. In company literature, Cargill aptly
> describes itself as "the
>  flour in your noodles, the salt on your French
> fries and the corn in your tortillas, the chocolate in your dessert and the
> sweetener in your soft drink."
>
> Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Bunge form the legendary ABC
> complex. No one who hopes to be a player in the global business of
> renewable commodities can get around dealing with at least one of these
> companies. The agricultural multinationals buy grain and oilseed from
> farmers and cooperatives, store it in their own silos and dry and process
> it. They ship their products through their own transfer terminals and
> charter fleets of freighters to dispatch them to every corner of the world.
> They grind wheat into flour, process soybeans into animal feed and --
> currently an especially lucrative activity -- convert rapeseed into
> biodiesel. ADM operates Europe's largest biodiesel plant at the Hamburg
> harbor, where anyone driving past the facility is immediately engulfed by
> the
>  penetrating odor of French fries. By controlling the entire process,
> from harvest to finished product, these conglomerates manage to secure the
> most profitable part of the value-added chain for themselves.
>
> The focus of their business is shifting more and more to the southern
> hemisphere. Vietnam and Thailand, for instance, have become important rice
> exporters, Indonesia and Malaysia have developed significant plant oil
> production industries, and both India and China export large volumes of
> sugar.
>
> No Enthusiasm for a Grain OPEC
>
> The biofuel boom has also resulted in a renaissance for southeastern
> Europe, traditionally Eurasia's breadbasket. "The region around the Black
> Sea has enormous potential," Rabobank analyst Delodder says
> enthusiastically. Russia, for example, is fast becoming an agrarian
> superpower. At last year's Green Week, Russian Agriculture Minister Alexei
> Gordeyev pointed out that about 20 million hectares (49
>  million acres) of
> arable land are still fallow. Should Europe need anything, the minister
> assured his audience, Russia would deliver. But his idea of forming a
> "grain OPEC" with Ukraine didn't exactly meet with enthusiasm.
>
> Agricultural conditions in Ukraine are at least as promising as they are in
> neighboring Russia. During World War II, the Nazis shipped Ukraine's "black
> earth" back to the German Reich by the ton. The soil is so fertile that
> Ukrainian farmers are often able to produce two harvests a year. It comes
> as no surprise that Ukraine and other former Soviet bloc countries are
>
> === message truncated ===

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