Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

As we said, growing more food on less land while rebuilding soil organically 
and conserving water and fossil fuels is no longer a novelty but an urgent 
need. Therefore, sustainable, biointensive growing in beds with succession 
cropping and season extension techniques must take over the megafarms and 
gardens wherever people produce food. This article is from a British paper 
but it's the same in the USA. And profits can only go up for small growers 
who use these methods to raise production while avoiding the rising cost of 
machinery, fossil fuel-based pesticides & fertilizers, long distance 
transport, and the middleman's cut.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
------------------------------------------

March 6, 2008
Who knows there's a food crisis?
The early signals are there, but the world seems to be sleepwalking towards 
disaster
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/magnus_linklater/article3492123.ece

To explain the exact connection between a newly opened hamburger joint in 
Beijing, Sir Richard Branson's biofuelled planes and the strip of wild 
flowers running round my farmer friend's field in Cambridgeshire would take 
more than the 970 words allotted to me here but, believe me, they will be on 
the front page of this and every other newspaper before long, because they 
spell the beginnings of a full-blown food crisis.

You can see the early signals already - the doubling of wheat prices, the 
mounting cost of bread, the steepest increases at the supermarkets for 14 
years, demonstrations on the streets by pig farmers threatened with 
bankruptcy, “tortilla riots” in Mexico, the drying up of aid to the Third 
World.

And this is only the start of it. In the words of Tim Lang, Professor of Food 
Policy at the University of Leeds: “We are sleep-walking into a crisis.” At 
the very least he predicts the end of the era of cheap food, which will of 
itself amount to a big shift in our eating habits. But if the process of 
rising costs and diminishing supplies of grain accelerates, as it may well 
do, we could witness actual shortages of basic foostuffs. One report last 
month said that the world is only ten weeks away from running out of wheat 
supplies after stocks fell to their lowest level for 50 years.

The causes are many and various, but at their heart is a change in global 
consumer habits that has crept up on us almost without our noticing. In China 
and the Far East, growing wealth has been accompanied by a taste for Western 
diets, including, principally, beef, which is now being imported in 
increasing quantities. There was a time when the idea of an American-style 
hamburger would have turned the stomach of the average Chinese; not any more. 
McDonald's is rolling out a chain of drive-through fast-food outlets in 
China's 30,000 petrol stations, and opening restaurants across that vast 
country to cater for a new appetite for Western meat.

The world market for beef, and the resulting need for cattle feed has 
coincided with a decline in the production of grain, as the maize farmers of 
America switch from producing their standard crops to growing biofuels as an 
alternative source of energy. Worried by the instability of oil and 
gas-supplying states throughout the world - from Russia to the Middle East - 
the US Government has encouraged farmers to turn their fields over to 
producing ethanol. Production of this alternative fuel is predicted to rise 
by 30 per cent by 2010. As one farmer put it: “Once I grew food for a 
bullock, now I grow fuel for a Buick.”

Enter Sir Richard, heralding a new era of carbon-free aviation travel by 
sending one of his passenger jets across the North Sea, its tanks brimming 
with biofuels. His feat is, of course, widely applauded, with giants of the 
global-warming era such as Bill Clinton and Al Gore congratulating him on a 
pledge to spend $3 billion on developing his alternative Virgin fuels. So, 
just at a time when we should be considering how best to increase our 
production of grain, we in Britain are switching off one main source of it.

Here then, one might imagine, would be an opportunity for Britain, with its 
long tradition of highly efficient farming, to begin filling the gap. As 
Professor Lang, in a lecture this week at City University, London, pointed 
out, Britain has turned round its farming industry to become one of the most 
productive in the world. Too productive, perhaps. By the 1970s Britain and 
Europe, aided by massive subsidies, were contributing to grain, beef and 
butter mountains that had become a source of international scandal.

The Common Agricultural Policy began switching its grant system away from 
production towards more environmentally friendly schemes. Farmers were 
encouraged to grow verges round their fields, where wild life could flourish. 
Hedges, ripped out to increase the size of fields, were carefully replanted. 
Ponds, small copses, water verges and species-rich grassland were actively 
encouraged. It did wonders for biodiversity, and made a great deal of money 
for some. My East Anglian farmer friend reported happily on the marked 
improvement the new grants had made to his bottom line.

He is less happy now. With wheat at £180 a ton, he would dearly like to rip 
out the thickets and meadows where birds and bees so happily congregate, and 
go back to doing what he is best at - producing grain. But he is locked into 
a ten-year scheme and, for the time being at any rate, he is unable to make 
the switch. Elsewhere, there are some signs of flexibility: in Scotland a new 
scheme is being introduced, aimed at encouraging farmers to co-operate, and 
become more competitive and more market-orientated. But overall there is 
little sign that policy-makers have grasped the enormity of what has 
happened. The UK is now barely 60 per cent self-sufficient in food.

It is clear that the Government has yet to react to the dimensions of the 
looming world food crisis. It needs to begin a debate with the EU on the 
whole direction of Europe's agricultural strategy and rethink it from 
scratch, devising a strategy for sustainable production, then begin to 
educate the public about the realities ahead. It will mean a change in 
culture that is a million miles from the Tesco-driven consumerism we have 
grown lazily used to over the past 20 years.

Professor Lang suggests we may need to go back to the ground-breaking reports 
of the 1940s, which led to a wholesale shift in Britain's approach to food 
production. If that means a revolutionary change in the national diet, then 
so be it. Maybe that would be no bad thing.