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  • From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] [SANET-MG] yield of conventional vs organic farms
  • Date: Fri, 11 May 2012 11:05:19 -0700

> I had begun to despair that anyone would begin to look critically at the
> current “Can organic agriculture feed the world” focus,

This was exactly my response. What the cited study said to me, seeing that
organic has lower yields than chemical farming, was that in order to have a
less damaging agriculture, we need to accept lower food yields as one of its
corollaries. At my talks, I often get asked if permaculture can feed the
world, and I answer that the only thing I know of that can feed 7 billion is
a lot of cheap oil.

One of the most destructive things we could do is to try to keep producing
enough food to keep the human population expanding or at current levels. We
need to be putting a lot of thought and effort into bringing our numbers
down, or nature will do it for us, and she's not always nice about how she
does that.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com


On May 11, 2012, at 9:29 AM, Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:

>
>
> -------- 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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