In article , Jangchub
wrote:
On Wed, 20 Aug 2008 02:02:11 -0700 (PDT), RichD
wrote:
On Jul 30, dejure wrote:
Is it really
superior to petrochemical fertilizer, or is it
guilty conscience liberal feelgoodism?
No, the petrochemical producs are better. They sell better
and the market doesn't lie.
In support of your smile: *When farming, we would dump around seven
hundred tons of compost on a single one hundred acre unit. *This
reduced our dependence on [incomplete] chemical fertilizers (heck, it
was winter, we had nothing else to do). *The biggest "upside" was we
were not growing nutritionally hollow food. *People often commented on
the better taste of things grown with compost and mineral
supplements. *For example, try a garden fresh tomato with good soil,
then try one from a hot house supplier. *The only reason we turned to
chemical (e.g., thousands of gallons of nitrogen pumped through the
irrigations circles) was to survive/compete on the market and, in the
end, the corn looked damn good. *Still, just like us humans, plants
are more than just a little nitrogen, potassium, and ....... *On a
side note, go look at the soil on many of the farms. It's dead.
FungiCIDES, pestiCIDES and so forth kill everything. *Everything works
together, but we have a better way.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/sc...v.html?_r=1&em
"If everyone switched to organic farming, we couldn't
support the earth's current population - maybe half."
What do you base this on? Don't you think drought, overpopulation,
weather related crop failures and ignorance about how to farm to
produce foods as being harder to come by?
It was a politically motivated false statement that places like Monsanto
propogandize. In reality "modern" methods are directly responsible for a
lot of starvation & loss of once-farmable land.
A University of Michigan study (outcomes published by Ivette Perfecto &
Catherine Badgley) established that organic farming in developed countries
produced yields equal to those of non-organic conventional agricultural
methods. But more importantly they established that in developing or third
world countries, organic farming can result in double or triple crop
yields. One of the key discoveries was that a single "green manure" cover
crop between crops produces enough nitrogen to equal synthetic
fertilizers; organic methods preserve soil, conventional methods deplete
soil so that increasingly expensive fixes are required.
Professor Perfecto said, "My hope is that we can finally put a nail in the
coffin of the idea that you canąt produce enough food through organic
agriculture." But the propoganda of industrialists is hard to counter with
mere scientific facts. "Corporate interest in agriculture and the way
agriculture research has been conducted in land grant institutions, with a
lot of influence by the chemical companies and pesticide companies as well
as fertilizer companies‹all have been playing an important role in
convincing the public that you need to have these inputs to produce food."
The reality, as Professor P. notes, is that the whole idea that half the
world would starve if organic principles were universal, is plainly
"ridiculous."
-paghat the ratgirl
--
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http://www.paghat.com
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