Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Pete Vukovich <pvukovic1@yahoo.com>]

Actually a good article , but I think his interpretation of the expansion period may be debatable. Just finished reading a book called 'measuring america' mostly about surveying and how it led to land allocation from the 1500's through the 1800's. A couple points it brought up:

1) Gunters surveyors 'chain' and surveying instruments like the theodelite led to a substantial change in farming practices. It changed how land was enclosed and viewed (the original acre was not a unit of size but an amount of land required to feed a family and dependant on soil and conditions). There was a close connection between measuring, commoditizing and driving peasants (and their local knowledge and practices) off the land. These also succeeded in transfering power and property from royal interests to the merchant classes. In some sense this was a set up for industrialized farming, although the transfer peaked at different times in different countries the basic pattern seems to have been the same.

2) The original minimum lot size in america was 640 acres (section, later becoming a half and then quarter section) which was not lowered to 40 acres until after the civil war when congress wanted to sell more land and the number of speculators was running out. Most of land acquisition in the early united states was the result of speculators and not settlers (contrary to jeffersons vision of a democracy), who paid fractions of what congress asked for per acre by buying up veterans warrants for fractions of their face value. Consequently most farming was 'absentee' and some of the current large holdings to date remain that way. These may be the basis of some industrial farm lands, but originally these holdings were not subdivided into workeable units as intended.

Not that I really disagree with the article, its also seemed to me that the switch to industrial farming was a longer term and more complex process than the post world war II mechanization history suggests. In a sense, it started with a search for measuring things differently. Anyway so far the book is pretty good.

--- On Tue, 10/27/09, Tradingpost <tradingpost@lobo.net> wrote:

From: Tradingpost <tradingpost@lobo.net>
Subject: [Livingontheland] Richard Heinberg: Fifty Million Farmers
To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Date: Tuesday, October 27, 2009, 9:47 PM

Richard Heinberg: Fifty Million Farmers
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Archives2008/HeinbergFiftyMillion.html


The Expansion Period (1600 to 1920): Increases in food production during these three centuries came simply from putting more land into production; technological change played only a minor role.

The Mechanization Period (1920 to 1970): In this half-century, technological advances issuing from cheap, abundant fossil-fuel energy resulted in a dramatic increase in productivity (output per worker hour). Meanwhile, farm machinery, pesticides, herbicides, irrigation, new hybrid crops, and synthetic fertilizers allowed for the doubling and tripling of crop production. Also during this time, U.S. Department of Agriculture policy began favoring larger farms (the average U.S. farm size grew from 100 acres in 1930 to almost 500 acres by 1990), and production for export.

The Saturation Period (1970-present): In recent decades, the application of still greater amounts of energy have produced smaller relative increases in crop yields; meanwhile an ever-growing amount of energy is being expended to maintain the functioning of the overall system. For example, about ten percent of the energy in agriculture is used just to offset the negative effects of soil erosion, while increasing amounts of pesticides must be sprayed each year as pests develop resistances. In short, strategies that had recently produced dramatic increases in productivity became subject to the law of diminishing returns.

While we were achieving miracles of productivity, agriculture’s impact on the natural world was also growing; indeed it is now the single greatest source of human damage to the global environment. That damage takes a number of forms: erosion and salinization of soils; deforestation (a strategy for bringing more land into cultivation); fertilizer runoff (which ultimately creates enormous “dead zones” around the mouths of many rivers); loss of biodiversity; fresh water scarcity; and agrochemical pollution of water and soil.

In short, we created unprecedented abundance while ignoring the long-term consequences of our actions. This is more than a little reminiscent of how some previous agricultural societies—the Greeks, Babylonians, and Romans—destroyed soil and habitat in their mania to feed growing urban populations, and collapsed as a result.

Fortunately, during the past century or two we have also developed the disciplines of archaeology and ecology, which teach us how and why those ancient societies failed, and how the diversity of the web of life sustains us. Thus, in principle, if we avail ourselves of this knowledge, we need not mindlessly repeat yet again the time-worn tale of catastrophic civilizational collapse.

The 21st Century: De-Industrialization

How might we avoid such a fate?

Surely the dilemmas we have outlined above are understood by the managers of the current industrial food system. They must have some solutions in mind.

Indeed they do, and, predictably perhaps, those solutions involve a further intensification of the food production process. Since we cannot achieve much by applying more energy directly to that process, the most promising strategy on the horizon seems to be the genetic engineering of new crop varieties. If, for example, we could design crops to grow with less water, or in unfavorable climate and soil conditions, we could perhaps find our way out of the current mess.

Unfortunately, there are some flaws with this plan. Our collective experience with genetically modifying crops so far shows that glowing promises of higher yields, or of the reduced need for herbicides, have seldom been fulfilled. At the same time, new genetic technologies carry with them the potential for horrific unintended consequences in the forms of negative impacts on human health and the integrity of ecosystems. We have been gradually modifying plants and animals through selective breeding for millennia, but new gene-splicing techniques enable the re-mixing of genomes in ways and to degrees impossible heretofore. One serious error could result in biological tragedy on an unprecedented scale.

Yet even if future genetically modified commercial crops prove to be much