permaculture

[Saor Stetler <saor@ycbtal.net>]

shades of permaculture?


NEW PROTEIN PRODUCTION SYSTEMS

http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/Out/Ote3_6.htm 


By Lester R. Brown

Mounting pressure on the earth's land and water resources to produce
livestock, poultry, and fish feed has led to the evolution of some
promising new animal protein production models, one of which is milk
production in India. Since 1970, India's milk production has increased
more than fourfold, jumping from 21 million to 87 million tons. In 1997,
India overtook the United States in dairy production, making it the
world's leading producer of milk and other dairy products. (See data at
http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/Out/ch3data_index.htm )

The spark for this explosive growth came in 1965 when an enterprising
young Indian, Dr. Verghese Kurien, organized the National Dairy
Development Board, an umbrella organization of dairy cooperatives. A
coop's principal purpose was to market the milk from tiny herds that
typically averaged two to three cows each. It was these dairy cooperatives
that provided the link between the growing appetite for dairy products and
the millions of village families who had only a few cows and a small
marketable surplus.

Creating the market for milk spurred the fourfold growth in output. In a
country where protein shortages stunt the growth of so many children,
expanding the milk supply from less than half a cup per person a day 25
years ago to more than a cup represents a major advance.

What is new here is that India has built the world's largest dairy
industry almost entirely on roughage-wheat straw, rice straw, corn stalks,
and grass collected from the roadside. Cows are often stall-fed with crop
residues or grass gathered daily and brought to them.

A second new protein production model, which also relies on ruminants, is
one that has evolved in China, principally in four provinces of central
Eastern China-Hebei, Shangdong, Henan, and Anhui-where double cropping of
winter wheat and corn is common. Once the winter wheat matures and ripens
in early summer, it must be harvested quickly and the seedbed prepared to
plant the corn. The straw that is removed from the land in preparing the
seedbed as well as the cornstalks left after the corn harvest in late fall
are fed to cattle. Although these crop residues are often used by the
villagers as fuel for cooking, they are shifting to other sources of
energy for cooking, which lets them keep the straw and cornstalks for
feed. By supplementing this roughage with small amounts of nitrogen,
typically in the form of urea, the microflora in the complex four-stomach
digestive system of cattle can convert roughage efficiently into animal
protein.

This practice enables these four crop-producing provinces to produce much
more beef than the vast grazing provinces in the northwest do. This
central eastern region of China, dubbed the Beef Belt by Chinese
officials, is producing large quantities of animal protein using only
roughage. The use of crop residues to produce milk in India and beef in
China means farmers are reaping a second harvest from the original crop.

Another promising new animal protein production model has also evolved in
China, this one in the aquacultural sector. China has evolved a carp
polyculture production system in which four species of carp are grown
together. One species feeds on phytoplankton. One feeds on zooplankton. A
third feeds on grass. And the fourth is a bottom feeder. These four
species thus form a small ecosystem, with each filling a particular niche.
This multi-species system, which converts feed into flesh with remarkable
efficiency, yielded some 13 million tons of carp in 2002.

While poultry production has grown rapidly in China over the last two
decades, it has been dwarfed by the phenomenal growth of aquaculture.
Today aquacultural output in China-at 28 million tons-is double that of
poultry, making it the first country where aquaculture has emerged as a
leading source of animal protein. The great economic and environmental
attraction of this system is the efficiency with which it produces animal
protein.

Although these three new protein models have evolved in India and China,
both densely populated nations, they may find a place in other parts of
the world as population pressures intensify and as people seek new ways to
convert plant products into animal protein.

The world desperately needs more new protein production techniques such as
these. A half-century ago, when there were only 2.5 billion people in the
world, virtually everyone wanted to move up the food chain. Today there
may be close to 5 billion people wanting more animal protein in their
diet. The overall demand for meat is growing at twice the rate of
population; the demand for eggs is growing nearly three times as fast; and
growth in the demand for fish-both from the oceans and from fish farms-is
also outpacing that of population. Against this backdrop of growing world
demand, our ingenuity in producing animal protein in ever-larger
quantities and ever more efficiently is going to be challenged to the
utmost.

While the world has had many years of experience in feeding an additional
70 million or more people each year, it has no experience with some 5
billion people wanting to move up the food chain at the same time. For a
sense of what this translates into, consider what has happened in China
since the economic reforms in 1978. As the fastest-growing economy in the
world since 1980, China has in effect telescoped history, showing how
diets change when incomes rise rapidly over an extended period.

As recently as 1978, meat consumption was low in China, consisting mostly
of modest amounts of pork. Since then, consumption of pork, beef, poultry,
and mutton has climbed. In 2003 people in China ate some 71 million tons
of meat, close to twice as much as Americans ate. China has decisively
displaced the United States, long number one in meat consumption.

As incomes rise in other developing countries, people will also want to
increase their consumption of animal protein. Considering the demand this
will place on the earth's land and water resources, along with the more
traditional demand from population growth, provides a better sense of the
future pressures on the earth. If world grain supplies tighten in the
years ahead, the competition for this basic resource between those living
high on the food chain and those on the bottom rungs of the economic
ladder will become both more visible and a possible source of tension
within and among societies.


Excerpted from Chapter 3 of Lester R. Brown, Outgrowing the Earth: The
Food Security Challenge in An Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising
Temperatures (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004).
http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/Out/


# # #