On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 1:57 AM, loren luyendyk <loren@sborganics.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> 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/
>
>
Great post. Recycling on site nitrogen could help reduce off farm inputs of
fertilizer. On Facebook I noticed a post about introducing ducks into an
aquaponics system
so I made a few comments which were followed by another from someone
mentioning the national permaculture infrastructure in Nepal as being very
well organized to serve the people of that country.
He contrasts the ongoing work in Nepal with lack or organization within the
permaculture movement here in the US (and IMO in Australia), with the
latter countries suffering from a faction emphasizing the economic aspects
of bringing permaculture to the country at large.