Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[paul@oneseedling.com]

People don't tend to change the things they do until forced to either by 
economic or political situations. Paul the Skeptic

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 1, 2010, at 4:27 PM, "John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net> wrote:

> 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 fo