----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, April 16, 2006 3:18
PM
Subject: [Market-farming] A new Article
By Dennis Avery Attacking OrganicAgain
http://www.cgfi.org/materials/articles/2006/april_12_06.htm
Organic Farming: Scary Relic or Future
Hope?
Dennis Avery
Why would all-organic farming be better for the world in the
future than it was 100 years ago?
Until 1900, the world's farming was all-organic. That's
because we had no farm chemicals back then except "natural" but highly toxic
lead and arsenic. That's apparently what the Sierra Club wants
back.
All-organic farming did not produce very good
results.
The all-organic farming of 1900 featured frequent food
shortages, famines, and massive death tolls from the diseases of malnutrition.
Farming without chemicals never supported more than one-fourth of current
human numbers.
Farmers in 1900 were busily plowing up the planet's virgin
prairies and clearing its forests to get more cropland. Low yields pushed the
plows higher and higher on steeper hillsides, and farther into drought-risky
plains. Erosion per ton of food was at least triple today's levels.
Plagues of locusts matching Biblical proportions were common.
There were no pesticide sprays to stop the swarming insects before they
multiplied into their trillions and mowed the ground clear of all vegetation
for mile after mile.
America's Dust Bowl in the 1930s was an all-organic
production. Great Plains farmers had farmed out all of the soil nutrients left
by the manure of the long-departed bison. They had neither industrial
fertilizer nor enough cattle manure to keep their soils healthy. As plains
crop yields spiraled downward, soil organic matter virtually disappeared. When
the dry years hit, there was nothing to hold the soil particles against the
explosive raindrops and the screeching winds. "Black blizzards" of dust rose
miles into the air.
In India, millions of people were held hostage by the fickle
monsoon rains that sometimes failed every other year. When the rains failed,
huge numbers starved, or died from famine-related diseases such as
pneumoniaor even measles. Crops were never big enough to build grain
reserves.
Prehistoric skeletons indicate that nearly half of the males
died violent deaths at the hands of other humansmostly fighting over hunting
grounds, organic cropland, or food stocks.
Our most recent food war was World War II. Japan, with a big
population shoehorned onto tiny islands, invaded the Chinese province of
Manchuria to get both oil and soybean fields. Today, Japan peaceably imports
soybeans from high-yield farmers planting the broad fields of the Western
Hemisphere.
Adolph Hitler told Germans they were fighting for "living
room." He coveted the rich Danube Valley for bigger German grain crops. Today,
thanks to higher yields, Germany's prewar lands produce a German food
surplus.
In Rwanda, neither the Hutu nor Tutsi tribes believed that the
crowded highlands would grow enough food for both peoples in the future. So
the Hutus hacked nearly a million of their neighbors to death with machetes in
1994. It's terrifying to understand that this tragedy could probably have been
forestalled with a relatively few tons of commercial fertilizer or hybrid
seeds.
Farming's most recent miracle is low-till. Instead of plowing,
farmers use herbicides to control weeds, cutting soil erosion by 65 to 95
percent. Organic farmers refuse to use herbicides so they cannot take
advantage of low-tilland thus suffer far higher rates of soil
erosion.
Chemical fertilizers and pesticides play massive roles in
history's most productive and sustainable farming. With continuing gains in
technology, high-yield farms can almost certainly redouble farm output to feed
a peak human population of 8-9 billion affluent humans in 2050without taking
any more land from nature.
An all-organic farming mandate might offer a feeble excuse for
forced abortions. But the fast-declining birth rates in today's food-secure
world will soon achieve a declining human population
voluntarily.
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