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  • From: "John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] The Gas We Eat
  • Date: Sat, 3 Aug 2013 21:48:41 +0100


----- Original Message ----- From: "loren luyendyk" <loren@sborganics.com>
To: "Permaculture Listserve" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 03, 2013 6:31 AM
Subject: Re: [permaculture] The Gas We Eat


I think we all know that permaculture is the solution. The problem is that most of the world is reliant on cheap nitrogen to survive- and my question is: How do we pragmatically shift from fossil fuel food to realtime sunlight food on the global scale?

< We won't Loren. Not pragmatically or otherwise because fossil fuel is a two hedged sword. The one cutting side made it possible for the human population to explode from about one billion to seven and a half billion in little more than a century.
The other cutting side at the same time is responsible for drastically reducing the carrying capacity of our planet. We are now loosing some 250 species per day. That may seem a bit too far from our bed to worry about much but I can see it happening all around me and Ireland is not the worst place in the world. In the last 5 years we lost 95% of all our pollinators. In the last 15 years we lost most of the once plentiful sea fish and shell fish all around the coast here. That are just two examples that have an impact on my way of life directly and there are many more on the way that I can see.>

Fossil fuel food is cheap to produce, at least in the current system which does not account for all the externalities- which is basically environmental damage (ecosystem debit) as a result of food production. Chemical fertilizer is about 1/10th the price of organic. For example, if I am to give each tree 1 lb of actual nitrogen, it means I need to put out 25 lbs of organic fertilizer (4-0-0), or 2.5 lbs of urea (40-0-0). When a farmer who is already struggling to make ends meet looks at this they say its impossible to be profitable with organics. With annual systems you can rotate crops, and it is easier to grow your own nutrient.

<It is certainly difficult for a farmer to be profitable whether he uses organic or chemical fertilizer or nothing at all. Main reason being that a farmer has little to say about the price of the product he produces. In season I could buy 25 metric ton of potatoes straight from a farmer for 70 euros or less per metric ton. Reason that farmer would love to sell to me is that he gets less from the big concerns he has to sell most of his crop to. Now you can look until your eye balls fall out here but you won't find potatoes under 1 euro per kilo anywhere. That is what the regular consumer pays and this means that somebody is making huge money on the farmers back (at least 930 euros per metric ton of potatoes). I could give litterally hundreds of examples like this.
So you could say that I have reasons to think it does not matter what system a farm uses, organic, chemical or permaculture. It will be very hard to make a living wage or real money at farming. There are a few exceptions but most of these are not quite moral or ethical. And before some market gardener feels insulted, I was thinking of a big multinational who has a million hectares cleared of all wild life and local population and then gets to use the land for a number of years for free and without caring whether it will not be a complete desert after that. This happens quite a lot these days in Africa, Asia and South America."

Of course we all know that there are other sources of nitrogen besides granular fertilizer, but this (biology) can take time to develop. Transition from chemical farming to organic can be a slow and expensive process, especially in perennial systems (orchards), so many farmers will not take that leap. The transition to permaculture farming is even slower but potentially less expensive and more productive, as long as you don't have to pay for labor.

<agreed.>

It would take a tremendous effort (ie labor, hands) to produce the same amount of food the permaculture way as opposed to the way most of it is grown now- with machines at super high efficiency (albeit reliant on fossil resources, so not really efficient when we do a caloric accounting). I am not promoting chemical or industrial farming, just making an observation. To feed the world with permaculture farming every family would have to grow their own food, and this is a pretty unrealistic proposal though definitely not impossible.

<Well no, not every family would have to grow their own food. It is well documented that a small family farm can produce many times more calories on an hectare say than is possible in a huge corn field on a similar hectare. And if we look at the food value of mineral and vitamin content and possibly the abscence of toxins there is no comparison at all.>

It is indeed a total conundrum- how would we feed the world without fossil fuels? At this point the system is so entrenched that it is more likely that many millions (or billions) of people would die of starvation without cheap oil and natural gas. And I am sure none of us would really want this to happen, as much as we may loathe fossil fuels.

<Well no, I for one would not like this to happen though I think that the end result will be unavoidable no matter what alternative clean energy can be developed. And I also think that the longer it takes for the end to come upon us the worse it will be. The carrying capacity of our world is being eroded ever faster.>

John in Ireland

<

Loren Luyendyk
(805)-452-8249
ISA Certified Arborist WE-7805A
www.sborganics.com
www.surferswithoutborders.org
www.globalpermaculture.com




From: dhondt@eircom.net
To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
Date: Sat, 3 Aug 2013 00:35:48 +0100
Subject: Re: [permaculture] The Gas We Eat

Well yes, agriculture is sometimes defined as the conversion of oil into
food through the agency of land. And as long as oil is cheap what with all
environmental costs being externalized and companies like Monsanto making
sure that there is no way back to more environmentally sound systems that is
likely to stay for a while. Until oil gets more expensive or until we become
extinct whichever comes first.
Permaculture is our only hope really. I have never used artificial nitrogen-
there are some 8 metric tons of nitrogen gas pressing down on every square
meter of surface on the planet and with a little bit of good management
there are plenty of soil organisms that can convert more than enough of this
into plant useful food. Feed those organisms and you have all the nitrogen
you could possibly want for free. Put out expensive artificial stuff and you
kill them off. Simple to solve I would think.
John



Nearly half of the world’s population owes its existence to food
grown with industrial nitrogen fertilizer produced from natural gas. (1)
In 2004, journalist Richard Manning published an intriguing, if somewhat
controversial, article in Harpers magazine called The Oil We Eat: Tracing
the food chain back to Iraq. Manning notes that growing our food under the
usual practices requires about 10 calories of fossil fuel energy for every
calorie of food energy.
Preparing the soil to grow grains, especially corn and wheat, requires
a lot of energy and maintenance to rip up the soil every year in order
to exclude other plants and create a non-competitive environment for the
seed to grow. In the case of no-till farming, energy is spent to make
herbicides that, like the plow, block the natural process of ecological
succession.

full article:
http://blogs.agu.org/terracentral/2013/04/28/the-gas-we-eat/

Loren Luyendyk
(805)-452-8249
ISA Certified Arborist WE-7805A
www.sborganics.com
www.surferswithoutborders.org
www.globalpermaculture.com




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