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  • From: Mark <mpludwig@facstaff.wisc.edu>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Fwd: Sustainable farming - PC and large scale farms
  • Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 16:52:32 -0500

Thought this was a great post, lots of good stuff. A few comments follow....

At 11:52 AM 8/29/02 -0700, you wrote:
Corporate industrial farming in the USA is highly subsidized
by the government, and the availability of cheap commercial
fertilizers and water for irrigation makes them profitable,
but not efficient. It is important to understand the crucial
distinction between profitability and efficiency. I strongly
suspect that the Indian farmer is more efficient in terms of
net productivity than the US industrial farms when all relevant
factors are honestly and completely evaluated.

This is right on. I know some of you are going "huh? this guy was just saying industrial farming was adaptable, economical etc." I stand by that, but this post teases out an important distinction to be made, industrial ag works in the present context, cheep fuel, floor prices, export subsidy, etc. I think this context will change, is changeling really. This free trade fetish is certainly forcing this and so many other issues, and it's leaving a swath of chaos behind it which I think will settle out over the next few years with many subsidies banned and payments to farmers directly for conservation methods. This is already a strong trend in Europe and is expanding in the US. The developing world farmer is surly in a hell of a situation though, with markets forced open and commodities sending markets this way and that and no subsidies for conservation development. Exacerbating their situation is a generally poor system of clear land ownership which is ripe for abuse and a barrier to investing in PC or anything else on a given site. Handmade food is generally more efficient, but in the first world the labor cost kills you, hence labor is replaced with machines, poisons or sloppy management that mortgages the future (fortunately most of the time you can pay the mortgage at some point).

In any case, neither can expect to produce more than the
productive potential of the land, and the one universal constant
is the amount of water actually AVAILABLE to the plant; how
much water the plant can assimilate to enable it to convert
minerals into biomass. Even Genetically Modified Organisms
(GMO) cannot evade this limitation

There certainly are many creative ways to stretch that water, even on "industrial farms". Building a healthy soil 50 cm deep lets you grow a better root system and exploit what water does fall. I've seen it in gardens, and I've seen it in corn fields.


Mark P. Ludwig
Poultry Research Lab
University of Wisconsin -Madison
608-262-1730 WK
608-846-7125 HM





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