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  • From: "John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] [SANET-MG] yield of conventional vs organic farms
  • Date: Sat, 12 May 2012 00:36:25 +0100


"Modern agriculture is the conversion of oil into food while using up natural resources such as soil and marine life."
Can't remember who said that first but since it is true I don't mind repeating it.
john



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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