Billy wrote:
....
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael
Pollan
p.45 - 46
http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dile...ls/dp/01430385
83/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815576&sr=1-1

The reason Greene County is no longer green for half the year is
because
the farmer who can buy synthetic fertility no longer needs cover crops
to capture a whole year's worth of sunlight he has plugged himself
into
a new source of energy. When you add together the natural gas in the
fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive
the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that
every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a
quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it gallons of oil
per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put another way,
it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to
produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer
the
Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every
calorie of energy invested.
....

ok, i see where the 1 calorie amount comes
from, but i see hand waving for the 2 calorie
amount. is that detailed some other place?


songbird