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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflj@bellsouth.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Fwd: Re: [SANET-MG] yield of conventional vs organic farms
  • Date: Fri, 11 May 2012 12:29:06 -0400



-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [SANET-MG] yield of conventional vs organic farms
Date: Fri, 11 May 2012 11:15:03 -0400
From: Karl S North <knorth@BINGHAMTON.EDU>
To: SANET-MG@LISTS.IFAS.UFL.EDU

It is encouraging to me to see a conversation like this one on SANET. I
had begun to despair that anyone would begin to look critically at the
current “Can organic agriculture feed the world” focus, or more
generally at the limitations of “organic” as a concept on which to build
a disciplinary science, as numerous land grant schools have mistakenly
tried to do.



As some of you have said or implied, from the viewpoint of the discipline of systems ecology, the question of food production needs to be reversed from “feeding the world” to returning our human activities, agricultural and others, to within the limits of the carrying capacity of the biosphere. The Odum brothers, and then William Catton, have made this point many times in the last fifty years. I have yet to hear of a land grant agricultural school that has made the works of these authors central to their agricultural program as I have advocated in my critique of the current scientific paradigm, Reductionist Science and the Rise of Capitalism: Implications for a New Educational Program of Agricultural Science<http://karlnorth.com/?p=511>.




I have enjoyed a thirty year career as a farmer (certified organic for part of that time) and member and educator in the organic movement, so what I am saying here is not meant to criticize the efforts of anyone in this movement. But I think it is time, as we enter an era of permanently increasing scarcity of energy and other strategic nonrenewables, to acknowledge the extent to which the concept of organic and the movement that swears by it bear the marks and constraints of an economy and culture that has enjoyed cheap energy.



Kept in the dark by the powers that be as to the momentous implications of the new era, most organic farmers and agricultural scientists, like most of society, have only slight glimmerings so far of what life and agriculture is going to be like as resource use returns to carrying capacity after the 200 year adrenaline shot of fossil energy.



Here is an example. As an early supporter of FOOD FIRST I read *World
Hunger: 12 Myths* when it first came out, and count myself as a personal
friend of Peter Rosset. I also am a strong advocate of food justice and
food sovereignty. However, the case FOOD FIRST makes for there being enough food to feed everyone ignores the fact that most of that food is at present produced by an industrial system of food production that will gradually collapse in the new era because it is 80-90% dependent on fossil energy.



One would hardly realize it from most of the discussions on SANET, but
there is a lively community devoted to exploring the implications of
depletion, peak production and decline in resource after strategic resource in the era of ‘energy descent’ that now is well under way. And its activity has produced a rapidly expanding literature. One of my own contributions to that literature might be of interest: Visioning County Food Production<http://karlnorth.com/?page_id=9>is a six-part series that describes what a relocalized agriculture might need to look like to feed a New York county in the post-petroleum age. It is also available in print: http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Local-Tompkins-County-TCLocal-org/dp/0615579256 along with papers on other subjects relevant to the energy descent commissioned by our local energy descent organization, TCLocal http://tclocal.org/.
.



Expressed terms of fundamentals, the energy descent future is one in which the laws of thermodynamics and other laws that govern physical and
biological life on the planet (well known to students of ecology and basic physical science) will begin to bite again as they never did in the last two-century binge.



So, as Jeff pointed out, the question cannot be about yield, but about
sustainable yield, which broadens the question to what are the requirements of a durable, healthy agroecosystem. But as Wes Jackson said the last time he visited my nearby landgrant college, there are a lot of people in academia running around saying they are agroecologists, but little training offered in the basics of systems ecology, starting with systems energetics as pioneered by Howard Odum and others. So, with Wes, I don’t buy the idea that at present many agricultural scientists are being truly trained as agroecologists. Is there hope for change in the land grant system? Or are the bigger agricultural schools just so out of touch that, like other dinosaurs in natural history, they are simply headed for extinction in the
new era?


--
Karl North - Northland Sheep Dairy, Freetown, New York USA
http://karlnorth.com/
"Pueblo que canta no morira" - Cuban saying
"They only call it class warfare when we fight back" - Anon.
"My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel."
—Saudi saying





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