[Greenbuilding] Food vs Fuel

[YankeePerm at aol.com]

In a message dated 1/21/08 8:32:46 AM, Scott at Geis-Companies.com writes:


> I think you are making some assumptions at to the why agricultural
> production has peaked. Maybe the production is sliding because there is
> no money in it.
> 
Reply: No, per acre yields have dropped off.   Erosion, both wind and water, 
continue at fantastic rates.   Soil organic matter continue to decline.   
Also, corporate takeovers of farms continue, so that people running farms are 
employees, not owners.   The corporations view farms as a depreciable resource.   
When I was living in Kansas, it was commonplace for corporations to buy land, 
install pivot irrigation and knock out bumper crops until salinity ruined the 
land.   They were getting their profits out quickly, including as a cost of 
production (instead of seeing it as capital), the land.   Once the land is 
ruined, they move on to other quick return investments.   Moving people off the 
land and farming large tracts depresses yields in and of itself.   An old (1980s) 
study showed that average home gardeners got six times the yield per unit 
area that farmers got.  They can just interact with the cropping area better 
because it is human scale.   The bigger the farm, the less the farmer knows about 
the general condition, let alone what may be going on from day to day, in any 
one area.   And the more inefficient (on as yield per unit area basis) 
one-size-fits-all technologies are applied.   Total profit increases, maybe, but not 
profit per acre.   

This is not new information.   Those of us working in this area have been 
aware of the trends for decades.   Meanwhile, the economic need to simplify and 
industrialize farming has lead to treating a varied and dynamic environment as 
static and uniform.   Crop varieties are dropped as it is more economically 
efficient to carry and plant just a few 'standard' types.   Larger and larger 
areas are put into monoculture, resulting in the need for more and more inputs.  
 When you wipe the Mother Nature's banquet table clean and just grow one kind 
of food, everything learns to eat it.   It is like wildfire in an even-age 
stand of conifers.   So there are more sprays, more herbicides, more fertilizers 
(because there is no balance between what one kind of plant removes and what 
another removes.) Livestock and plant crops are separated and the fertilizer 
is not returned to the fields, mostly.   Transport to huge urban areas moves 
fertility away from the farms and creates a disposal problem.   Ad infinitum.   
The solution is to return to a gardening population, but that solution is 
blocked by the concentration of people in cities and by the almost total loss of 
any cultural basis for treating the land well in most urban zones.   Suburbs 
are theoretically the best bet for efficient land use, but again the culture (if 
I may misuse the word to call it that) opposes food self reliance.   
Increasingly, bylaws and covenants mitigate against practical use of suburban land.

Dan Hemenway





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