In article ,
"songbird" wrote:

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

I don't want to seem patronizing, so I'll just give you his bibliography.

CHAPTER 1: THE PLANT: CORN'S CONQUEST
In addition to the printed sources below, I learned a great deal about
the natural and social history of Zea mays from my conversations with
Ricardo Salvador at Iowa State
(www.public.iastate.edu/~rjsalvad/home.html) and
Ignacio Chapela at the University of California at Berkeley. Ignacio
introduced me to his colleague Todd Dawson, who not only helped me
understand what a C-4 plant is, but generously tested various foods and
hair samples for corn content using his department's mass spectrometer.

The two indispensable books on the history of corn a

Fussell, Betty The Story of Corn (New York: Knopf, 1994). Columbus's
quote on corn is on page 17. The statistics on wheat versus corn
consumption are on page 215.

Warman, Arturo. Corn & Capitalism: How a Botanical ******* Grew to
Global Dominance.
Trans. Nancy L. Westrate (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2003).
Other helpful works touching on the history of corn include:

Anderson, Edgar. Plants, Man and Life (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1952).

Crosby, Alfred W Germs, Seeds & Animals: Studies in Ecological History
(Armonk, NY: . M. E. Sharpe, 1994).

‹‹‹‹. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe,
900-1900 (Cam-
bridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: W W Norton, 1997).

Eisenberg, Evan. The Ecology of Eden (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).
Very good on the coevolutionary relationship of grasses and humankind.

Iltis, Hugh H. "FromTeosinte to Maize: The Catastrophic Sexual
Mutation," Science 222, no. 4626 (November 25, 1983).

Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). Excellent on the evolutionary origins
of the plant and pre-Columbian maize agriculture.

Nabhan, G. P. Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant
Conservation (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989).

Rifkin, Jeremy. Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture
(New York: Plume, 19 93). The quote from General Sheridan is on page 78.

Sargent, Frederick. Corn Plants: Their Uses and Ways of Life (Boston:
Houghton Mifnin,1901). '

Wallace, H. A., and E. N. Bressman. Corn and Corn Growing (New York:
JohnWiley &Sons, 1949).

Weatherford, Jack. Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas
Transformed the World (New York: Crown, 1988).

Will, George F., and George E. Hyde. Corn Among the Indians of the Upper
Missouri (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1917).
-----

I await your report.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/2...al_crime_scene