permaculture

[Mark <mpludwig@facstaff.wisc.edu>]

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