Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>]

We know all that Paul and so what? What Borlaug did was make agriculture 
"the conversion of oil into food through the means of land" Since there was 
plenty of cheap oil that worked well but there was a price to pay...

Since the start of the green revolution the world has lost an awful lot of 
soil and the nutrition in crops has dropped dramatically leading to a 
plentiful but diseased population. I have been hosting wwoofers here for a 
few years and am amazed at how weak, uncoordinated and generally incapable 
of doing work young people have become. That too should be written on 
Borlaug's slate imo.

So what good has the green revolution brought us? Qualitatively a huge 
disaster but there are now almost 7 billion of us, way above what this 
planet can carry for long. Do we need another miracle to keep on getting 
more plentiful? The sixth extinction is churning away as we write and don't 
forget that the higher we climb the deeper we are going to fall.

john

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
To: <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 01, 2010 4:56 AM
Subject: [Livingontheland] Peak Food: Can Another Green Revolution Save Us?



Peak Food: Can Another Green Revolution Save Us?
http://www.countercurrents.org/arguimbau310710.htm
By Nicholas C. Arguimbau  31 July, 2010

Norman Borlaug, widely seen as the father of the "Green Revolution," was a 
true savior. Many have considered him misguided or worse, but it is hard for 
a compassionate person to argue with what he accomplished: saving "more 
human lives than any other person in history."2 It seems to be a 
professional disease among saviors, though, that only part of their message 
is heeded. The Green Revolution, like so many technical fixes, would only 
be, as he said when he picked up his Nobel Prize, "ephemeral" if we didn't 
deal with underlying social and economic problems, in this case, population 
and poverty.

Borlaug grew up in a remote corner of rural Iowa - a place with twelve- 
grade one-room schools from which most youngsters dropped out by the eighth 
grade, a place with one car, no telephones, no electricity, but the Iowa 
Corn Song ,3 proudly sung like the Star-Spangled Banner at the start of 
every school day:

There was no future, other than growing corn, but "Norm Boy's" grandfather 
had another vision, and inculcated the boy with a determination to obtain a 
higher education. He arrived at the University of Minnesota at age 20, "as a 
student athlete [whose] ability to do university work was questioned" 4 but 
left years later clutching a Ph.D in plant pathology,.

Assigned during World War II to Dupont, where he helped to develop DDT as 
part of the war effort, Borlaug was offered the sky, but given the choice 
between Dupont and sub-subsistence science for sub-subsistence Mexican 
farmers, he chose the. latter, working. with the Rockefeller Foundation, in 
a project to stave off a looming food crisis in overpopulated Mexico.5

The project goal was to breed strains of wheat that could withstand adverse 
climates, survive wheat's fungal diseases, and produce prodigiously on dwarf 
plants, then convince tradition-bound farmers to adopt forthwith the new 
hybrids and the technology that accompanied them.. It was a race against 
time, and an extraordinarily demanding task in the pre-DNA era. Borlaug set 
up field

-1-

operations in two locations with disparate climates and growing seasons so 
he could have plants accustomed to multiple climates, and could grow two 
generations of seedlings each year.

Borlaug shortly achieved his goal, and Mexico's food crisis was over in a 
decade. On to Asia, where the same thing was happening: overpopulation, 
courtesy of modern medicine.. India was home to some of the poorest people 
in the world. Famine was widely forecast for the mid-seventies. It was the 
era of Ehrlich's Population Bomb. Stanford professor Ehrlich was an icon for 
the rising environmental movement, but overnight, stubborn farm boy Borlaug 
appeared to prove him wrong. In a few short years, the Green Revolution 
turned a land of undernourished millions into the second largest wheat 
producer in the world. Borlaug became the hero of millions of peasants, and 
also of those who spoke for unlimited growth, and in the next twenty years 
The Population Bomb disappeared from the environmentalist lexicon, leaving 
the population boom unquestioned.

The Green Revolution, which was to go on producing wonder strains for other 
crops and other countries, had three central parts. The other two were 
irrigation and chemical fertilizer. These changed agriculture fundamentally, 
from a primarily solar-energy craft dependent upon local weather and soil 
conditions, to a fossil-fuel technology designed to force the land to 
produce mightily regardless of its natural limitations. Borlaug, summarizing 
in his Nobel lecture, warned that the new hybrids had not resulted in major 
yield improvements without both irrigation and "a strong responsiveness and 
high efficiency in the use of heavy doses of fertilizers."6 Plentiful water, 
plentiful chemical fertilizer - that's the secret to how in the last half 
century India - and California - turned arid lands almost instantly into 
wildly productive garden baskets. It may not be a sustainable solution, but 
at the time, the world needed a quick fix.

In his Nobel lecture, Borlaug talked proudly about how the new practices had 
given near-starving subsistence farmers surpluses they could sell, the money 
to buy oil-driven water pumps and tractors, and the influence to insist upon 
doors opening to the broader world. If you'll permit me a broad brush, the 
Green Revolution had doubled and tripled grain production for multi-millions 
who had been on the brink of starvation, but turned locally self-sustaining 
agriculture into hydroponics. And it turned subsistence farmers, dependent 
on the whims of the soil, sun and rain, into small-time contractors 
dependent on the whims of the discount rate, the commodities markets and the 
petrochemical industry.

It weakened their umbilical cord to Mother Earth, and eased a process in 
which millions would find themselves drawn to seek their fortunes in the 
cities, providing cheap labor to run the Indochinese economic machine. But 
those were events far in the future when Borlaug performed his magic, and 
it's hard to quibble when several hundred million people are about to die of 
starvation..

The agricultural end of food production uses staggering amounts of water. As 
an illustration, here's the author's recipe for a quarter-pound 
cheeseburger:

Ingredient /Water used in production

Lettuce (1/4 cup)..............................0.8 gal
Bun (2 bread slices equiv) .......................... 22.0 gal
Tomato (1 oz paste equiv) ......................... 6.1 gal
Cheese (1 oz.)............................................. 58.3 gal
Ground beef (4 oz) ......................................641.2 gal

TOTAL....................................... 728.4 gal

8-oz. Glass of milk........................... 50.0 gal 7

The reason water consumption for meat and dairy products is so much higher 
than for vegetables and grain, is that, very approximately, it takes two 
pounds of grain to produce a pound of chicken, five pounds to produce a 
pound of pork, and ten pounds to produce a pound of beef.

The Green Revolution doubled the world's irrigated acreage from 346 million 
acres to 690 million acres, and increased by a factor of nearly five its 
consumption of chemical fertilizer .8 Where does all the irrigation water 
come from? Wells, largely; as the World Bank has pointed out, groundwater 
comprises 97% of the world's accessible freshwater reserves.9

Wells are a classic case of Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" 10 - 
if the aquifer is shared by multiple individuals or multiple villages and 
there are no rules on how much anyone can use, then the users are 
individually, although not collectively, better off if they use as much as 
they want until the wells all run dry. So unless everyone follows the Golden 
Rule or there is an elaborate legal "groundwater management plan," 
controlling how much everyone gets, the wells DO run dry. The first thing 
you need to begin fair and sustainable allocation of groundwater supplies is 
records of pumping from wells. They don't exist. And farmers everywhere, 
from the one-acre plots of North China to the 1000-acre ranches of 
California, rebel against interference with their freedom. Even if there 
were the will and the way to adopt rational groundwater management programs 
around the world, the task would take many decades to accomplish - unless 
another farm-boy-savior-scientist comes down from the sky, to whom the 
farmers and bureaucrats can relate.

So where does that leave us? The United States is in a relatively good 
position because only one fifth of its grain production comes from irrigated 
land, but the figure is three fifths in India and four fifths in China.11 
The world-wide picture is bleak:

* The annual overdraft from the U.S. Ogallala Aquifer, producing cattle and 
grain in quantity, is said to be about equal to total yearly flow of the 
Colorado River.12 It was declared by the USDA over a decade ago to be "near 
depletion," with Texas having already lost 1.4 million acres of irrigated 
land and the irrigated land supported by the aquifer expected to be reduced 
50% by2030, an acreage accounting for roughly 10% of US grain production.

* In China, the world's greatest grain producer,13 pumping from a fossil 
aquifer in the North China Plain is relied upon to produce half the nation's 
wheat and a third of its corn, approximately 40 million tons per year or 10% 
of the nation's grain production; 14.

* Northern India is also overdrawing its groundwater supplies to maintain 
grain production. Although the overdraft is apparently much less severe than 
in China or the United States, nonetheless, if the current level of 
unsustainable groundwater overdraft continues, government experts have 
concluded that "India could face severe water shortages."15

* Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, reports that fifteen 
nations containing half the world's population, rely on groundwater 
overdraft for irrigation.16

These practices cannot go on for long, and in this writer's opinion, water 
development and conservation are unlikely to come to the rescue. large 
surface reservoirs and desalinization are unlikely to save the day, because 
these projects do not ordinarily pay for themselves and for the foreseeable 
future governments are unlikely to be in a position to subsidize 
multi-billion-dollar investments in concrete and steel to feed the poor. As 
for water use efficiency, it might theoretically permit savings of anywhere 
from 10-40%, but implementation and enforcement have all the hurdles of 
groundwater management plans, plus the additional hurdle that tens of 
millions of farmers were taught decades ago that plentiful water was 
essential to high yields. Changes may occur, but they will most likely be 
incremental and slow. So dropping grain production appears
inevitable in the US and China, and likely in much of the rest of the world, 
in the absence of major increases in acreage and/or yield per acre.

As for increased acreage, there is general agreement that the acreages have 
been at best essentially "flat" for decades17 and in any event it is hard to 
envision major investments being made in land development to feed the 
undernourished and virtually destitute bottom seventh of our population when 
the same land could be used, if at all, to produce beef or biofuels for the 
top seventh.

Yields? They are still increasing at approximately 1% per year, not enough 
to keep up with population increase; in fact, world per capita grain 
production peaked in 1986.18 Steady 1% per year yield increases cannot, of 
course, solve the problem of exhaustion of fossil aquifers, likely to occur 
close to the same time as exhaustion of the oil supply. There are disputes 
as to whether or how long genetic tinkering can continue to improve yields. 
Eventually we have to hit the maximum efficiency at which photosynthesis can 
occur, but there are radically different educated views as to how close we 
are.19

In Lester Brown's view, "Unless population growth can be slowed quickly, 
there may not be a humane solution to the emerging world water shortage."20 
The statistics appear to show that he should have said population growth 
must be "reversed quickly," rather than merely "slowed quickly."

So when the aquifers run dry, a return to the days when agriculture was 
limited to natural precipitation, is inevitable. This means, on top of the 
present inability of yield increases to keep up with population increases, a 
relatively abrupt loss of at least 10% of production.

What about the fertilizer? That comes from mining operations, too. That is 
literally true of phosphorus, although it wasn't before we came along. There 
are more phosphorus-rich bones walking the face of the earth than ever 
before in geological history; humanity is hoofing it around with 5 billion 
kg or 11 billion pounds of phosphorus ,21 which comes from mines,22 - NONE 
of it recycled. This has happened only since half of us moved to the cities, 
taking our personal wastes with us; petrochemical fertilizers replaced 
natural ones; and community sewers were invented. Mama Nature can't afford 
this kind of progress for long.

In fact, the world phosphorus reserves are expected to be depleted within 25 
to 70 years, depending upon where you are. Humanity will apparently go 
extinct for lack of phosphorus within a century unless we resume 
recycling,.23 This writer is unaware of any government plans anywhere, to do 
so.

And phosphorus isn't the perceived serious problem. Nitrogen is. We have a 
reasonable amount of nitrogen in the air for the present, but the nitrogen 
has to be processed into ammonium nitrate or something comparable with a 
high energy input, and the starting material is natural gas, 5 % of which 
globally is used for production of nitrogen fertilizers.24 There are 
presently no alternatives. Natural gas accounts for 90% of the cost of 
nitrogen fertilizer, so the cost of the latter is pretty much proportional 
to the cost of the former.25 When the petroleum supply starts to go, 
fertilizer prices will spiral upward.

Of course nitrogen fertilizer can also be produced by nitrogen-fixing 
legumes, but that necessitates alternating between nitrogen-fixers and 
market crops. In his Nobel lecture Borlaug spoke of a dream of 
nitrogen-fixing grains being introduced in 1990 that would free peasant 
farmers from the need to purchase chemical fertilizers, but then, he said, 
he would wake up, disillusioned. It was only a dream. 35 years and 3 billion 
more people later, he would have to tell the New York Times, "This is a 
basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people. Without chemical fertilizer, 
forget it. The game is over."26

So at present, grain yield is not keeping up with the population, and things 
will get worse as fertilizer and water become expensive and scarce. Will a 
large part of the population die when they are curtailed? Not necessarily, 
because of how we allocate the use of the grain we produce.

To see the whole picture, we need to understand a little about the grain 
market, which is the dominant food market.. There are at this time three 
competing demands for the commodity: food (i.e. direct consumption by 
people), fodder, and fuel. Before fuel became part of the mix, the division 
between food and fodder was 60:40, with the "fodder" component capable if 
used as food, of providing the caloric needs of 3.5 billion people.27 But we 
are squandering the 40% "cushion."

The mix in 2008 was said by Worldwatch Institute to be 47% food, 35% fodder, 
18% fuel. The 18% figure may not be a 2010 reality, but no one claims less 
than 9%, and use of grain for bioalcohol is projected to double in the next 
decade.28 The 18% that we burn or apparently will burn is more than 
sufficient to fill the stomachs of the record 1 billion people who are 
undernourished today. Does it give you a warm and fuzzy feeling that we burn 
the grain that is sufficient to eliminate world hunger? Me neither. And If 
we engaged in a modest conservation program in our gasoline use and gave the 
saved grain to the hungry, no one would have to go hungry, at least for the 
moment The feed use is increasingly for beef, and the fuel use is primarily 
bioethanol - an attempt to use the "cushion" in world grain production to 
let the middle class, particularly in the
US and China, indulge in quarter-pounders and gas guzzlers for a few more 
years, while the poor's burgeoning undernourished try to maintain themselves 
on an ever-slimmer portion of the grain production.

Feed and fuel compete with food not only for consumers, but for land. The EU 
has adopted a policy requiring 17% of its farmland to be devoted to biofuels 
in place of food.29 Land from Brazilian deforestation (which of course many 
of us would rather see not at all) could produce grain for food, could 
support range cattle, or could produce sugar cane (or grain) for ethanol. 
Not surprisingly, biofuel and beef are Brazil's primary products from 
destruction of the rainforest.30 Food comes out as a poor third in 
competition with feed and fuel both for grain and for land. No wonder there 
were riots over bread in 2008.

And we have hardly looked at the inevitable consequences of an agriculture 
dependent for more than half its productivity on fossil fuels, outside the 
control of one-acre farmers in the Third World or even of thousand-acre 
farmers in the US. Two of the simpler ties between fossil fuels and food are 
the costs of fertilizer and water for a typical Third World one-acre farm. 
With most of the cost of fertilizer(although varying widely year-to-year and 
place-to-place, $100/acre is a reasonable figure) coming from the cost of 
natural gas, its cost is going to go up rapidly as oil runs out and (if it 
happens at all) as the world starts to do something about global warming. 
And the cost of gasoline at $3/gallon for pumping the water from 
an -all-too-typical 500-foot-deep well sufficient to irrigate an acre for a 
year is about $200.31 So rising fossil fuel costs are likely on the near 
term to drive up fertilizer and water coss by hundreds of dollars per acre 
The Ogallala-Aquifer farmer may be able to "pass the cost along to the 
consumer"(Brace yourselves, Americans!), but the farmer in India or China or 
Bangladesh has mostly to pass the cost on to herself. Where will it come 
from? Less fertilizer, less water, less food, with one billion people hungry 
already. These are of course just illustrative costs, but he writer suspects 
they are more accurate than the assumptions made by the U.N. Food and 
Agricultural Organization in its food supply projections for the next 
decade, that the international community will invest $200 billion per year 
for technological improvements in agriculture, that oil production will meet 
demand and that its costs will hardly budge.32 So even if the world can 
produce enough food, most folks may soon be unable to pay for enough.

The story of how we got here is complex - a confluence of population boom, 
oil boom and bust, the tragedy of the commons, misallocation of resources 
between rich and poor, the almost-deliberate blindness of America to the 
consequences of biofuel production -. the list goes on. There is an ongoing 
academic argument about whether the plight of the poor is one of inequitable 
distribution "or" population, but it is quite clear at this point that the 
answer is "Both." There is also a sociological factor - the separation of 
people from the land, which has allowed us to "commoditize" land, to block 
the recycling of phosphorus and nitrogen, to separate sustenance from daily 
life, to warehouse in China's cities the millions who had recently been 
attached for millenia to the cycles of sun and rain and soil. Out of sight, 
out of mind. We will not treat the earth sustainably when we do not see it 
and feel it in our daily lives and know directly that what surrounds us is 
what keeps us and our descendants alive and healthy.

There are too many of us to go "back to the land," but we must preserve the 
connection. In coming decades necessity will dictate that everyone produce 
their own food wherever and however they can, but more important, we must 
reconnect ourselves to the earth we have abused. You who put aside a little 
corner of your urban homestead where things green can flourish are 
preserving the connection as best you can, and must teach others to do 
likewise. You are preserving an essential thread to our past, which will, if 
we are lucky, allow us to have a future.

But it's a slim thread.

It didn't need to be this way. Norman Borlaug, far from viewing himself as 
the man who proved the doomsayers wrong, knew what was coming if we didn't 
take care. In his Nobel lecture he described the Green Revolution as giving 
the world a "breathing space" until the year 2000, but then referred to an 
"impending doom" imposed upon us by the "Population Monster ," and told his 
audience that"the frightening power of human reproduction must also be 
curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral 
only."

Dr. Borlaug said in his lecture that whether and how we deal with the 
population problem is a"test of the validity of "sapiens" as a species 
epithet." We have so far failed the test and squandered the thirty years he 
gave us. But the substantial fraction of the grain crop not used directly as 
food can, if we act quickly, allow us without famine to put ourselves on a 
sustainable population track, one recognizing that we don't presently feed 
ourselves and that on the present track, things will get much worse. And of 
course no technical fixes can give the bottom seventh of the world 
population the wherewithal to pay for what they eat, so the looming food 
crisis will not just be fixed with a theoretical food supply for which they 
cannot pay. These things must happen. Is that likely? Probably not, given 
past history. But it is necessary.

Once again we 6.9 billion people are on our own, without leaders or 
guidance. But we know what we must do, as individuals and nations: we must 
avoid gasohol and beef, because we cannot take food from the mouths of the 
hungry; we must manage and conserve our diminishing water supplies, we must 
work to eliminate abject poverty so that people can pay for what they eat 
and we must begin to decrease our numbers by limiting ourselves to one child 
per family.33 There is no evidence that we can avoid famine otherwise. The 
Green Revolution was a one shot deal, because we cannot again double 
irrigated acreage or multipy use of chemical fertilizers by five; and 
because the Green Revolution was a program of the oil age, which is fast 
departing. Modest crop-yield increases may keep up with population growth 
for a while (although they haven't for 25 years), but all indications are 
that the prices of what food there is will rapidly climb above the budgets 
of billions of us.

"Norm Boy," the Iowa farm kid, died last year. He was 95.
........................................
The writer is a California-licensed attorney currently residing in 
Massachusetts. He has had professional experience trying without success to 
implement groundwater management in California's vast agricultural San 
Joaquin Valley. Research and writing were supported by Urban Garden 
Magazine, which reserves copyright and all other republishing rights except 
the right to online submissions by the author. He wishes to thank Patricia 
Lemon and David Steele for invaluable editorial assistance.

1. This article will be published by Urban Garden Magazine in mid-August.

2. Bruce Alberts, President, NationalAcademy of Sciences

3.For the full lyrics, see
http://www.netstate.com/states/symb/song/ia_corn_song.htmor
http://iowareunionclub.com/iowacornsong.aspx

4.Mark Yudof, President, University of Minnesota.

5.Biographical information from Vietmeyer, Borlaug, Volume 1 (2004), unless 
otherwise indicated..

6. Dr. Borlaug's Nobel lecture:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1970/borlaug-lecture.html

7.See Dr. Thomas Stein, sakia.org, 2007,
http://www.sakia.org/cms/fileadmin/content/irrig/general/stein_2007_water_use_c
harts-units_converted.pdf for a general compilation of different foods and 
their
water needs for production, together with a link for explanations as to how 
these
were determined..

8.See chart, Global Education Project, Food and Soil,
http://www.theglobaleducationproject.org:80/earth/food-and-soil.php. A 
hectare,
a 100-meter square, is 2.2 acres. Spend an hour studying these charts, and 
you
will know more than the average Ph.D. about modern agriculture.

9. World Bank, Groundwater,
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTWAT/0,,contentM
DK:21633297~menuPK:4620525~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:460
2123,00.html.

10. (Garrett Hardin, 1968 paper published in the journal SCIENCE 
(162:12431248).
If you aren't familiar with it, read it, and then go for a vacation and
meditate on it for a week.

11. Lester Brown, Aquifer Depletion, 2006,
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Aquifer_depletion

12.Patricia Muir, http://people.oregonstate.edu/~muirp/waterlim.htm

13. UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), Agricultural Outlook 
20102019
(2010)

14. Lin Shujuan, China's water deficit 'will create food shortage', Science 
and
Development Network, 2007,
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/china-s-water-deficit-will-create-food-shortage-.html;
and Lester Brown, WATER DEFICITS GROWING IN MANY
COUNTRIES: Water Shortages May Cause Food Shortages,
http://www.greatlakesdirectory.org:80/zarticles/080902_water_shortages.htm.

15. T. V. Padma, Thirsty Indian farming depleting water resources, Science 
and
Development Network,
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/thirsty-indian-farming-depleting-water-resources.html,
quoting scientists from NASA and also citing the Indian Ministry of Water 
Resources..

16. http://www.eoearth.org/article/Aquifer_depletion,

17. See e.g. the graphs shown in Staniford's article cited below.

18. Patricia Muir, http://people.oregonstate.edu/~muirp/waterlim.htm

19. Stuart Staniford, Food to 2050, The Oil Drum,
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3702, discussing both sides of the dispute. 
See
also Grain Production, http://www.whole-systems.org/grain.html, and 
Science's
February, 2010 issue devoted to food security.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/327/5967/812

20. Lester Brown, WATER DEFICITS GROWING IN MANY COUNTRIES:
Water Shortages May Cause Food Shortages, above.

21. http://www.random-science-tools.com/chemistry/chemical_comp_of_body.htm

22. UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), Current world fertilizer
trends and outlook to 2011/12, Table 4, 
ftp://ftp.fao.org/agl/agll/docs/cwfto11.pdf

23. For a recent and very readable discussion of the phosphorus situation, 
see D.A.
Vaccari, Phosphorus: A Looming Crisis, Scientific American June 2009,
www.ScientifiAmerican.com.

24. Wikipedia, Fertilizers, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer.

25. GAO, Domestic Nitrogen Fertilizer Production Depends on Natural Gas
Availability and Prices, 2003, http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d031148.pdf.

26. K. Bradsher and A. Martin, The Food Chain: Shortages Threaten Farmers' 
Key
Tool: Fertilizer, New York Times,
http://bigteaparty.com/fertilizer-soaring-foodprices-key-to-health-bad-for-environment/

27. United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Food from Animal Feed, World
Food Supply, 
http://www.grida.no/publications/rr/food-crisis/page/3565.aspx). R.
Segelkin, US could feed 800 million people with grain that livestock eat, 
Cornell
ecologist advises animal scientists, Cornell University Science News, 1997,
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/aug97/livestock.hrs.html.

28. Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs, Grain Harvest Sets Record, But 
Supplies
Still Tight, 2009, http://www.worldwatch.org/vs2009.. The UN Food and
Agricultural Organization says the figure is only 9% for biofuels at this 
time, but
also says that the amount of grain being turned to alcohol will double in 
the next
decade. OECD-FAO, Agricultural Outlook 2010-2019. So if 18% isn't correct
today, then it is likely to be correct in a decade...

29. X. Navarro, The European Commission says no to reviewing biofuel
percentage goal,
http://green.autoblog.com/2008/04/15/the-european-commissionsays-
no-to-reviewing-biofuel-percentage/.

30. OECD-FAO, Agricultural Outlook 2010-2019.

31. 1 gallon [U.S.] of automotive gasoline = 97,181,192.2530305 foot pounds.
1 acre pumping from 500 ft.: 3 acre-feet of water = 975,000 gal water x8 
lbs/gal x
500 ft = 3,900,000,000 ft lbs/ 97,181,192.2530305 ft lbs/gal gasoline = 
40.131 gal
x $3/gal = $120, assuming a 100% efficient pump, or $200 assuming a 60%
efficient pump.

32. OECD-FAO, Agricultural Outlook 2010-2019

33.There is a time lag of 30-40 years built into any population policy based 
upon
birth control, because a rapidly-growing population over-represents the age 
group
under reproductive age. Consequently, a "ZPG" birth rate does not result in 
ZPG
for decades. Moreover, the water and energy problems imply that an overall
population reduction is necessary.


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