permaculture

[Dieter Brand <diebrand@yahoo.com>]

Many thanks for your suggestions.  I have only had a cursory look at the 
various documents so far.  I think the reports written from an economist’s 
point of view will be valuable to convince non-farmers, but I have the 
impression that economists find it hard to fully appreciate the value of 
fertile soil.

In the meantime, I have found the reference I was thinking about on my 
bookshelf.  In a book about humus and farming entitled “Humussphäre” (in 
German), the author Herwig Pommeresche quotes page 116 of the Szech author 
Vaclav Smil’s “Cycles of Life”, published by the Scientific American Library 
in 1997.  

According to the quoted passage, 1 hectare of land was enough to feed 4 to 5 
people in Egyptian, Chinese and Mexican farming 500 years ago, while in 
modern US farming, 1 hectare can only feed 1 person.  The author goes on to 
show that modern farming is even more inefficient if all the external inputs 
such as fertilizers and fuel are included in the equation.

I wonder can this information be accurate?  That would mean that there would 
have to be nearly 300 millions hectares of farmland in the US.  That seems a 
lot.

Did anyone read “Cycles of Life” by Vaclav Smil?

Here are some biographical data:
Vaclav Smil does interdisciplinary research in the fields of energy, 
environmental and population change, food production and nutrition, technical 
innovation, risk assessment, and public policy. 
He has published more than 30 books and some 400 papers on these topics. He 
completed his graduate studies at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of 
Carolinum University in Prague and at the College of Earth and Mineral 
Sciences of the Pennsylvania State University and until 2011 he was a 
Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of 
Manitoba. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Science Academy), 
the first non-American to receive the American Association for the 
Advancement of Science Award for Public Understanding of Science and 
Technology, and in 2010 he was listed by Foreign Policy among the top 100 
global thinkers. He has worked as a consultant for many US, EU and 
international institutions, has been an invited speaker in nearly 300 
conferences and workshops in the USA, Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa, and 
has lectured at many universities in North America, Europe and East Asia. His 
wife Eva is a physician and his
 son David is an organic synthetic chemist.