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  • From: Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@mailman1.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] PROPAGANDA, DISINFORMATION & LIES: 3 Big Myths about Modern Agriculture - Scientific American
  • Date: Fri, 12 May 2017 13:08:28 -0400

On Fri, May 12, 2017 at 12:58 PM, Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
wrote:

> If their stated goal is to transition as many farmers as possible away
> from conventional, chemical, pesticide, gmo agricultural practices,
> phase that out and phase in robust natural practices, then that is
> admirable and I wish them success. The word of success with natural methods
> would spread to untold numbers of farmers around the world and they too
> would use natural methods or rather natural and permaculture, become
> believers, become financially successful and never look back and boycott
> such entities as monsanto and bayer while they were at it.


The first part of the article put me off so I didn;t read the rest. Having
done that I will repost the rest which is excellent:

Their experiences, and the results that I saw on their farms in North and
South Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Ghana and Costa Rica, offer compelling
evidence that the key to sustaining highly productive agriculture lies in
rebuilding healthy, fertile soil. This journey also led me to question
three pillars of conventional wisdom about today’s industrialized
agrochemical agriculture: that it feeds the world, is a more efficient way
to produce food and will be necessary to feed the future.
Myth 1: Large-scale agriculture feeds the world today

According to a recent U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report,
family farms produce over three-quarters of the world’s food
<http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/260535/icode/>. The FAO also
estimates that almost three-quarters of all farms worldwide are smaller
than one hectare
<http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/hlpe/hlpe_documents/HLPE_Reports/HLPE-Report-6_Investing_in_smallholder_agriculture.pdf>
– about 2.5 acres, or the size of a typical city block.

Only about 1 percent of Americans are farmers today. Yet most of the
world’s farmers work the land to feed themselves and their families. So
while conventional industrialized agriculture feeds the developed world,
most of the world’s farmers work small family farms. A 2016 Environmental
Working Group report found <http://www.ewg.org/research/feeding-the-world>
that almost 90 percent of U.S. agricultural exports went to developed
countries with few hungry people.

Of course the world needs commercial agriculture, unless we all want to
live on and work our own farms. But are large industrial farms really the
best, let alone the only, way forward? This question leads us to a second
myth.
Myth 2: Large farms are more efficient

Many high-volume industrial processes exhibit efficiencies at large scale
that decrease inputs per unit of production. The more widgets you make, the
more efficiently you can make each one. But agriculture is different. A
1989 National Research Council study concluded
<https://www.nap.edu/catalog/1208/alternative-agriculture> that
“well-managed alternative farming systems nearly always use less synthetic
chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and antibiotics per unit of production
than conventional farms.”

And while mechanization can provide cost and labor efficiencies on large
farms, bigger farms do not necessarily produce more food. According to a
1992 agricultural census report, small, diversified farms produce more than
twice as much food per acre than large farms do
<http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520272903>.

Even the World Bank
<http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/595651468195548184/On-the-central-role-of-small-farms-in-African-rural-development-strategies>
endorses small farms as the way to increase agricultural output in
developing nations where food security remains a pressing issue. While
large farms excel at producing a lot of a particular crop – like corn or
wheat – small diversified farms produce more food and more kinds of food
per hectare overall.
Myth 3: Conventional farming is necessary to feed the world

We’ve all heard proponents of conventional agriculture claim that organic
farming is a recipe for global starvation because it produces lower yields.
The most extensive yield comparison to date, a 2015 meta-analysis
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.1396> of 115 studies, found that
organic production averaged almost 20 percent less than conventionally
grown crops, a finding similar to those of prior studies.

But the study went a step further, comparing crop yields on conventional
farms to those on organic farms where cover crops were planted and crops
were rotated to build soil health. These techniques shrank the yield gap to
below 10 percent.

The authors concluded that the actual gap may be much smaller, as they
found “evidence of bias in the meta-dataset toward studies reporting higher
conventional yields <http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.1396>.” In other
words, the basis for claims that organic agriculture can’t feed the world
depend as much on specific farming methods as on the type of farm.
Cover crops planted on wheat fields in The Dalles, Oregon. Credit: Garrett
Duyck NRCS *Flickr*
<https://www.flickr.com/photos/nrcs_oregon/29653107380/in/album-72157674420338935/>
(CC
BY-ND 4.0) <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/>

Consider too that about a quarter of all food produced worldwide is never
eaten. Each year the United States alone throws out 133 billion pounds of
food <http://www.endhunger.org/PDFs/2014/USDA-FoodLoss-2014.pdf>, more than
enough to feed the nearly 50 million Americans who regularly face hunger.
So even taken at face value, the oft-cited yield gap between conventional
and organic farming is smaller than the amount of food we routinely throw
away.
Building healthy soil

Conventional farming practices that degrade soil health undermine
humanity’s ability to continue feeding everyone over the long run
<http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520272903>. Regenerative
practices like those used on the farms and ranches I visited show that we
can readily improve soil fertility on both large farms in the U.S. and on
small subsistence farms in the tropics.

I no longer see debates about the future of agriculture as simply
conventional versus organic. In my view, we’ve oversimplified the
complexity of the land and underutilized the ingenuity of farmers. I now
see adopting farming practices that build soil health as the key to a
stable and resilient agriculture. And the farmers I visited had cracked
this code, adapting no-till methods
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/11/09/no-till-farming-is-on-the-rise-thats-actually-a-big-deal/?utm_term=.e2cf5e93305e>,
cover cropping and complex rotations to their particular soil,
environmental and socioeconomic conditions.

Whether they were organic or still used some fertilizers and pesticides,
the farms I visited that adopted this transformational suite of practices
all reported harvests that consistently matched or exceeded those from
neighboring conventional farms after a short transition period. Another
message was as simple as it was clear: Farmers who restored their soil used
fewer inputs to produce higher yields
<http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4294993513>, which
translated into higher profits.

No matter how one looks at it, we can be certain that agriculture will soon
face another revolution. For agriculture today runs on abundant, cheap oil
for fuel and to make fertilizer – and our supply of cheap oil will not last
forever. There are already enough people on the planet that we have less
than a year’s supply of food
<http://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-10-28/how-long-can-world-feed-itself/>
for the global population on hand at any one time. This simple fact has
critical implications for society.

So how do we speed the adoption of a more resilient agriculture? Creating
demonstration farms would help, as would carrying out system-scale research
to evaluate what works best to adapt specific practices to general
principles in different settings.

We also need to reframe our agricultural policies and subsidies. It makes
no sense to continue incentivizing conventional practices that degrade soil
fertility. We must begin supporting and rewarding farmers who adopt
regenerative practices.

Once we see through myths of modern agriculture, practices that build soil
health become the lens through which to assess strategies for feeding us
all over the long haul. Why am I so confident that regenerative farming
practices can prove both productive and economical? The farmers I met
showed me they already are.

*This article was originally published on The Conversation
<http://theconversation.com/>. Read the original article
<https://theconversation.com/healthy-soil-is-the-real-key-to-feeding-the-world-75364>.*
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

David R. Montgomery

David R. Montgomery is a professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the
University of Washington.
Recent Articles

- Ancient Chinese Megaflood May Be Fact, Not Fiction

<https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-chinese-megaflood-may-be-fact-not-fiction/>
- A Case for No-Till Farming
<https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-case-for-no-till-farmin/>


Sustainability <https://www.scientificamerican.com/sustainability/>
A Case for No-Till Farming

The slow pace at which soil rebuilds makes its conservation essential

- By David R. Montgomery
<https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/david-r-montgomery/> on June
30, 2008

*This story is a supplement to the feature "No-Till: How Farmers Are Saving
the Soil by Parking Their Plows
<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=no-till>**" which was printed in the
July 2008 <http://dev.sciam.com/sciammag/?contents=2008-07> issue of*
Scientific American.

A fundamental drawback of conventional farming is that it fosters topsoil
erosion, especially on sloping land. Tillage leaves the ground surface bare
and vulnerable to runoff, and each pass of the plow pushes soil downhill.
As a result, the soil thins over time. How long this process takes depends
not only on how fast plowing pushes soil downhill—and wind or runoff
carries it away—but also on how fast the underlying rocks break down to
form new soil.

In the 1950s, when the Soil Conservation Service (now known as the Natural
Resources Conservation Service) began defining tolerable rates of soil
erosion from agricultural land, hardly any data on rates of soil production
were available. The agency thus determined the so-called soil loss
tolerance values, or T values, on the basis of what farmers could do to
reduce erosion without “undue economic impact” using conventional farming
equipment. These T values correspond to as much as an inch of erosion in 25
years. But recent research has shown that erosion rate to be far faster
than the rate at which soil rebuilds.

Over the past several decades, scientists have determined that measuring
the soil concentrations of certain isotopes that form at a known rate
permits direct quantification of soil production rates. Applying this
technique to soils in temperate regions in coastal California and
southeastern Australia, geologist Arjun Heimsath of Arizona State
University and his colleagues found soil production rates ranging from
0.00118 to 0.00315 inch a year. As such, it takes 300 to 850 years to form
an inch of soil in these places. My own recent global compilation of data
from soil production studies, published last year in the *Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences USA*, revealed an average rate of 0.00067
to 0.00142 inch a year—equivalent to 700 to 1,500 years to form an inch of
soil.

The soil on undisturbed hillsides in temperate and tropical latitudes is
generally one to three feet thick. With natural soil production rates of
centuries to millennia per inch and soil erosion rates of inches per
century under plow-based agriculture, it would take just several hundred to
a couple of thousand years to plow through the soil in these regions. This
simple estimate predicts remarkably well the life span of major
agricultural civilizations around the world. With the exception of the
fertile river valleys along which agriculture began, civilizations
generally lasted 800 to 2,000 years, and geoarchaeological studies have now
shown a connection between soil erosion and the decline of many ancient
cultures.

Clearly, then, if we are to conserve resources for future generations, we
need alternatives to conventional farming practices. No-till systems
simultaneously reduce the erosive force of runoff and increase the ability
of the ground to hold onto soil, making these methods remarkably effective
at curbing erosion. In a study published in 1993, researchers at the
University of Kentucky found that no-till methods decreased soil erosion by
a whopping 98 percent. More recently, investigators at the University of
Tennessee reported that no-till tobacco farming reduced soil erosion by
more than 90 percent over conventional tobacco cultivation. Although the
effect of no-till on erosion rates depends on a number of local factors,
such as the type of soil and the crop, it can bring soil erosion rates down
close to soil production rates.

In the mid-1990s Cornell University researchers estimated that undoing
damage caused by soil erosion would cost the U.S. $44 billion a year, and
that it would take an annual investment of about $6 billion to bring
erosion rates on U.S. cropland in line with soil production. They also
estimated that each dollar invested in soil conservation would save society
more than $5. Because it is prohibitively expensive to put soil back on the
fields once it leaves, the best, most cost-effective strategy for society
at large is to keep it on the fields in the first place.

No-Till: How Farmers Are Saving the Soil by Parking Their Plows

The age-old practice of turning the soil before planting a new crop is a
leading cause of farmland degradation. Many farmers are thus looking to
make plowing a thing of the past

- By David R. Huggins
<https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/david-r-huggins/>, John P.
Reganold <https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/john-p-reganold/>

John Aeschliman turns over a shovelful of topsoil on his 4,000-acre farm in
the Palouse region of eastern Washington State. The black earth

[the rest is behind a paywall]

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




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