permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 3:32 PM, DONKA RADEVA via permaculture <
permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org> wrote:

> "Norman Bourlag, a Nobel Prize winner for agriculturehas been a leading
> proponent for increasing agricultural yields throughout theworld through
> more intensive use of fertilizers applied to genetically modified crops.
> The justification for increasing yields has been to fight worldhunger. A
> recent paper in the Medical Journal the Lancet (Lozano and 205 others2012 )
> has pointed out thatobesity now is a bigger health problem globally than
> hunger, and the leadingcause of disabilities around the world. Every
> country, with the exception ofthose in sub-Saharan Africa, has experienced
> an 82 % increase in obesity in thepast two decades. Middle Eastern
> countries have seen a 100 % increase.
>
> This suggests that less emphasis should be placed onincreasing yield –
> there already is enough – and more be placed on how thatyield is produced."
>
>
> This is a citation from a book on the matter of the increasing population
> and higher yield needs, which I find very useful.
> This is the source: C.F. Jordan, Chapter 5 Applied Toolsand Practices for
> Sustainable Agriculture, An Ecosystem Approach to Sustainable
> Agriculture:Energy Use 115 Efficiency in the American South, Environmental
> Challenges and Solutions 1, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6790-4_5, ©
> SpringerScience+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
>

Borlaug is a scoundrel, he might be Vlad's uncle, Wheaton's dishwasher, and
Lawton's latrine cleaner. The IgNobel prize means nothing; they gave one to
the creep who invented the pre frontal lobotomy. Here is more from that
unmentionable insignificant assclown,
_If_ you can stand to read it, just so you will know what they are up to,
always useful. As the Who said: "we won't be fooled again". True enough.
There are enough vile asshats like Borlaug to last for the next fifty
centuries. We will survive them all.
<>
http://reason.com/blog/2009/03/26/norman-borlaug-happy-95th-birt

One of the true giants of our time, plant breeder and Nobel Peace Prize
laureate, Norman Borlaug turns 95 today. Borlaug is the person who has
saved more human lives than anyone in history. How? He was the father of
the "Green Revolution" that more than doubled crop productivity in the
1960s and 1970s thus averting the massive global famines predicted by many
doomsayers. I had the honor of interviewing Borlaug nine years ago for
*Reason*. Below are just a couple of his answers from that interview:

*Reason:* What do you think of organic farming? A lot of people claim it's
better for human health <http://www.mofga.org/tabid/166/Default.aspx> and
the environment.

*Borlaug:* That's ridiculous. This shouldn't even be a debate. Even if you
could use all the organic material that you have--the animal manures, the
human waste, the plant residues--and get them back on the soil, you
couldn't feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture
were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically,
spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of
forests.

At the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients
are utilized each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically,
you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the
manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the
forage for these cows? There's a lot of nonsense going on here.

If people want to believe that the organic food has better nutritive value,
it's up to them to make that foolish decision. But there's absolutely no
research that shows that organic foods provide better nutrition. As far as
plants are concerned, they can't tell whether that nitrate ion comes from
artificial chemicals or from decomposed organic matter. If some consumers
believe that it's better from the point of view of their health to have
organic food, God bless them. Let them buy it. Let them pay a bit more.
It's a free society. But don't tell the world that we can feed the present
population without chemical fertilizer. That's when this misinformation
becomes destructive...

*Reason:* Environmentalists say agricultural biotech will harm
<http://www.geneticallymodifiedfoods.co.uk/are-gm-foods-destroying-biodiversity.html>
biodiversity.

*Borlaug:* I don't believe that. If we grow our food and fiber on the land
best suited to farming with the technology that we have and what's coming,
including proper use of genetic engineering and biotechnology, we will
leave untouched vast tracts of land, with all of their plant and animal
diversity. It is because we use farmland so effectively now that President
Clinton was recently able to set aside another 50 or 60 million acres of
land as wilderness areas. That would not have been possible had it not been
for the efficiency of modern agriculture.

In 1960, the production of the 17 most important food, feed, and fiber
crops--virtually all of the important crops grown in the U.S. at that time
and still grown today--was 252 million tons. By 1990, it had more than
doubled, to 596 million tons, and was produced on 25 million fewer acres
than were cultivated in 1960. If we had tried to produce the harvest of
1990 with the technology of 1960, we would have had to have increased the
cultivated area by another 177 million hectares, about 460 million more
acres of land of the same quality--which we didn't have, and so it would
have been much more. We would have moved into marginal grazing areas and
plowed up things that wouldn't be productive in the long run. We would have
had to move into rolling mountainous country and chop down our forests.
President Clinton would not have had the nice job of setting aside millions
of acres of land for restricted use, where you can't cut a tree even for
paper and pulp or for lumber. So all of this ties together.

This applies to forestry, too. I'm pleased to see that some of the forestry
companies are very modern and using good management, good breeding systems.
Weyerhauser is Exhibit A. They are producing more wood products per unit of
area than the old unmanaged forests. Producing trees this way means
millions of acres can be left to natural forests.




-- 
Lawrence F. London
lfljvenaura@gmail.com
https://sites.google.com/site/avantgeared/