In article ,
VickyN wrote:

The cost in buying fertiliser and applying it is not always justified by

even the short-term returns, that is it is applied in excess of the
optimum
in some cases for reasons other than being demonstrated to be cost
effective.
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dile...als/dp/0143038
583/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815576&sr=1-1
(Available at a library near you, as long as they remain open.)

p.45 - 46
it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie
of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer [a] farm produced more
than two calories of food energy for every calorie of energy invested.

or
http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/energy/
A 2002 study from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
estimated that, using our current system, three calories of energy were
needed to create one calorie of edible food. And that was on average.
Some foods take far more, for instance grain-fed beef, which requires
thirty-five calories for every calorie of beef produced. x What¹s more,
the John Hopkins study didn¹t include the energy used in processing and
transporting food. Studies that do estimate that it takes an average of
seven to ten calories of input energy to produce one calorie of food.xi

OTOH I know of no analysis that shows we could feed the
world's
population by organic methods.
http://agroeco.org/doc/organic_feed_world.pdf
"Conversion to small organic farms therefore, would lead to sizeable
increases of food production worldwide. Only organic methods can help
small family farms survive, increase farm productivity, repair decades
of environmental damage and knit communities into smaller, more
sustainable distribution networks * all leading to improved food
security around the world."
- Christos Vasilikiotis, Ph.D.
University of California, Berkeley

There may be some focus on this issue
over
the next few decades as sources of mineral phosphorus compound become
exhausted and the cost of nitrogen fixing rises with energy costs.

I'm not sure what exactly you're getting at here. How is the cost of
buying fertiliser not justified by the short term returns? I also don't
understand your take on phosphorus as there is plenty sitting in soils
all over the world already.
http://westernfarmpress.com/manageme...al-phosphorus-
shortage
Experts fear critical phosphorus shortage
Jim Langcuster, Auburn University
Oct. 19, 2010 3:34pm

³There are estimates we have as little as 50 years left in the current
phosphate mines,² says Charles Mitchell, an Alabama Cooperative
Extension System agronomist and Auburn university professor of agronomy."
---

Farmers may need to go back to the habit of keeping birds (pigeons,
chickens) as a source for phosphorus.

Manure Chicken Diary cow Horse Steer Rabbit
N 1.1 .257 .70 .70 2.4
P .80 .15 .30 .30 1.4
K .50 .25 .60 .40 .60

Soils having such high levels of soil phosphorus no longer need to be
fertilised with more than the amount of phosphorus removed in harvest.
In fact, many agricultural soils in industrialised countries with long
histories of phosphorus build-up from manure or fertilizer application
have accumu*lated so much available phosphorus that little if any
additional phosphorus is needed until phosphorus is drawn down to more
moderate levels over a period of years.

Professor Stefano Grego

Surely we can either harvest it, or implement solubilising bacteria to
help break down the unavailable forms of P. How can there be a P
shortage, even in a few decades, when there is so much in the land
already?
Feeding 7 billion people, soon to be 12 billion hungry people.


Land always needs rotation, especially so if you grow a monoculture.
This
is not limited to where chemical fertilisers have been applied.

Land still needs to be rotated because of high application of
fertilisers building to toxic levels... particulalry P (locks out iron).
Ah, maybe rotated is the wrong word, easy to confuse with ordinary crop
rotation I suppose. So let's just say land is left unusable for certain
periods of time.
Nitrogen input reduces organic material in soil, but micro nutrient
deficiencies arrive slowly enough that amendments can be added to
augment the soil.


Dare you explain the connection between the state of soil bacteria and
humans poisoning themselves by employing poor food handling practices?

Bacteria is a very basic form of life, capable of genetic shifts that
will change it from one thing into another. we eat e.coli all the time.
E. coli is an enteric bacteria. That means it is present in your colon
right now. IIRC natural E. coli is benign. E. coli 0157 H7 though is a
killer, and comes from confined animal feeding operations (CAFO) where
grain is fed to ruminants, acidifying their stomachs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/31/magazine/power-steer.html
Escherichia coli 0157 is a relatively new strain of a common intestinal
bacteria (it was first isolated in the 1980's) that is common in feedlot
cattle, more than half of whom carry it in their guts. Ingesting as few
as 10 of these microbes can cause a fatal infection.

Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way
into our food get killed off by the acids in our stomachs, since they
originally adapted to live in a neutral-pH environment. But the
digestive tract of the modern feedlot cow is closer in acidity to our
own, and in this new, manmade environment acid-resistant strains of E.
coli have developed that can survive our stomach acids -- and go on to
kill us. By acidifying a cow's gut with corn, we have broken down one of
our food chain's barriers to infection.

our stomach acids kill it usually... but something is causing to e.coli
to become virulent, and it is becoming virulent with greater frequency.
There are some that suggest this is down to artificial fertilisation by
man. The reasoning being, I believe, that the fertilisation is killing
off the friendly bacteria and fungi, the beneficials... it is killing
them off because they haven't anything to do. This shift is having a
knock on effect with the bad microbes which is why we're seeing more
cases of virulent e.coli.
I'm not sure i agree with this, but it does make some logical sense so I
cannot discount it easily.



Please provide some evidence for that claim. What are the costs of that

method compared to others? How do you feed cattle or sheep
hydroponically?
Would that be cost effective?

David

I meant only in regards to crop farming. Leaving the land alone for a
while would leave plenty to feed cattle or sheep. we could also still
crop farm, only doing it organically, at least more intelligently. cash
crops could be left to sterile hydroponic growing. Hydroponic systems
may be expensive to set up but are not very expensive to maintain. If
built in the right way you can have hydroponic systems that run with
minimal power. All it takes to keep enough o2 in the water is the
continual motion of that water.

http://www.learner.org/courses/envsci/unit/text.php?unit=7&secNum=2
As of the year 2000, about 37 percent of Earth's land area was
agricultural land. About one-third of this area, or 11 percent of
Earth's total land, is used for crops. The balance, roughly one-fourth
of Earth's land area, is pastureland, which includes cultivated or wild
forage crops for animals and open land used for grazing
-----

The Fatal Harvest Reader by Andrew Kimbrell (Editor)
http://www.amazon.com/Fatal-Harvest-.../dp/155963944X
/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220837838&sr=1-1
(Available at a library near you, until they are closed.)

pgs 19 - 23
MYTH FOUR
INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE IS EFFICIENT
THE TRUTH
Small farms produce more agricultural output per unit. area than large
farms. Moreover, larger, less diverse farms require far more mechanical
and chemical inputs. These ever increasing inputs are devastating to the
environment and make these farms far less efficient than smaller, more
sustainable farms.

Proponents of industrial agriculture claim trial "'bigger is better"
when it comes to food production. They argue that the larger the farm,
the more efficient it is. They admit that these huge corporate farms
mean the loss of family farms and rural communities, but they maintain
that this is simply the inevitable cost of efficient food production.
And agribusiness advocates don't just promote big farms, they also push
big technology. They typically ridicule small-scale farm technology as
grossly inefficient, while heralding intensive use of chemicals, massive
machinery, computerization, and genetic engineering ‹ whose
affordability and implementation are only feasible on large farms. The
marriage of huge farms with "mega-technology" is sold to the public as
the basic requirement for efficient food production. Argue against size
and technology ‹ the two staples of modem agriculture ‹ and, they
insist, you're undermining production efficiency and endangering the
world's food supply.

IS BIGGER BETTER?

While the "bigger is better" myth is generally accepted, it is a
fallacy. Numerous reports have found that smaller farms are actually
more efficient than larger "industrial" farms. These studies demonstrate
that when farms get larger, the costs of production per unit often
increase, because larger acreage requires more expensive machinery and
more chemicals to protect crops. In particular, a 1989 study by the U.S.
National Research Council assessed the efficiency of large industrial
food production systems compared with alternative methods. The
conclusion was exactly contrary to the "'bigger is better"'' myth:
"Well-managed alternative farming systems nearly always use less
synthetic chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and antibiotics per unit of
production than conventional farms. Reduced use of these inputs lowers
production costs and lessens production costs and lessens agriculture's
potential for adverse environmental and health effects without
decreasing ‹ and in some cases increasing ‹ per acre crop yields and the
productivity of livestock management's systems."

Moreover, the large monocultures used in industrial farming undermine
the genetic integrity of crops, making them more susceptible to diseases
and pests. A majority of our food biodiversity has already been lost.
This genetic weakening of our crops makes future food productivity using
the industrial model far less predictable and undermines any future
efficiency claims of modern agriculture. Moreover, as these crops become
ever more, susceptible to pests, they require ever greater use of
pesticides to produce equal amounts of food ‹ a classic case of the law
of diminishing returns. This increasing use of chemicals and fertilizers
in our food production results in serious health and environmental
impacts.

With all this evidence against it, how does the "bigger is better" myth
survive'' In part, it survives because of a deeply flawed method of
measuring farm "'productivity' which has falsely boosted the efficiency
claims of industrial agriculture while discounting thee productivity
advantages of small-scale agriculture.

OUTPUT VERSUS YIELD

Agribusiness and economists alike tend to use "yield" measurements when
calculating the productivity of farms. Yield can be defined as the
production per unit of a single crop. For example, a corn farm will be
judged by how many metric tons of corn are produced per acre. More often
than not, the highest yield of a single crop like corn can be best
achieved by planting it alone on an industrial scale in the fields of
corporate farms. These large "monocultures" have become endemic to
modern agriculture for the simple reason that they are the easiest to
manage with heavy machinery and intensive chemical use. It is the
single-crop yields of these farms that are used as the basis for the
"bigger is better" myth, and it is true that the highest yield of a
single crop is often achieved through industrial monocultures.
Smaller farms rarely can compete with this "monoculture" single-crop
yield. They tend to plant crop mixtures, a method known as
"intercropping.' Additionally, where single-crop monocultures have empty
"weed" spaces, small farms use these spaces for crop planting. They are
also more likely to rotate or combine crops and livestock, with the
resulting manure performing the important function of replenishing soil
fertility. These small-scale integrated farms produce far more per unit
area than large farms. Though the yield per unit area of one crop ‹
corn, for example‹may be lower, the total output per unit area for small
farms, often composed of more than a dozen crops and numerous animal
products, is virtually always higher than that of larger farms.
Clearly, if we are to compare accurately the productivity of small and
large farms, we should use total agricultural output, balanced against
total farm inputs and "externalities,''' rather than single-crop yield
as our measurement principle. Total output is defined as the sum of
everything a small farmer produces ‹ various grains, fruits, vegetables,
fodder, and animal products ‹ and is the real benchmark of 'efficiency
in farming. Moreover, productivity measurements should also take into
account total input costs, including large-machinery and chemical use,
which often are left out of the equation in the yield efficiency claims.
Perhaps most important, however, is the inclusion of the cost of
externalities such as environmental and human health impacts for which
industrial scale monocultured farms allow society to pay. Continuing to
measure farm efficiency through single-crop "yield" in agricultural
economics represents an unacceptable bias against diversification and
reflects the bizarre conviction that producing one food crop on a large
scale is more important than producing many crops (and higher
productivity) on a small scale.

Once, the flawed yield measurement system is discarded, the "bigger is
better" myth is shattered. As summarized by the food policy expert Peter
Rosset, "Surveying the data, we indeed find that small farms almost
always produce far more agricultural output per unit area than larger
farms. This is now widely recognized by agricultural economists across
the political spectrum, as the "inverse relationship between farm size
and output."' He notes that even the World Bank now advocates
redistributing land to small farmers in the third world as a step toward
increasing overall agricultural productivity.

Government studies underscore this "inverse relationship.' According to
a 1992 U.S. Agricultural Census report, relatively smaller farm sizes
are 2 to 10 times more productive than larger ones. The smallest farms
surveyed in the study, those of 27 acres or less, are more than ten
times as productive (in dollar output per acre) than large farms (6,000
acres or more), and extremely small farms (4 acres or less) can be over
a hundred times as productive.

In a last-gasp effort to save their efficiency myth, agribusinesses will
claim that at least larger farms are able to make more efficient use of
farm labor and modem technology than are smaller farms. Even this claim
cannot be maintained. There is virtual consensus that larger farms do
not make as good use of even these production factors because of
management and labor problems inherent in large operations. Mid-sized
and many smaller farms come far closer to peak efficiency when these
factors are calculated.

It is generally agreed that an efficient farming system would be
immensely beneficial for society and our environment. It would use the
fewest resources for the maximum sustainable food productivity. Heavily
influenced by the "bigger is better" myth, we have converted to
industrial agriculture in the hopes of creating a more efficient system.
We have allowed transnational corporations to run a food system that
eliminates livelihoods, destroys communities, poisons the earth,
undermines biodiversity, and doesn't even feed the people. All in the
name of efficiency. It is indisputable that this highly touted modern
system of food production is actually less efficient, less productive
than small-scale alternative farming. It is time to re-embrace the
virtues of small farming, with its intimate knowledge of how to breed
for local soils and climates; its use of generations of knowledge and
techniques like intercropping, cover cropping, and seasonal rotations;
its saving of seeds to preserve genetic diversity; and its better
integration of farms with forest, woody shrubs, and wild plant and
animal species. In other words, it is time to get efficient.
--
- Billy

Mad dog Republicans to the right. Democratic spider webs to the left. True conservatives, and liberals not to be found anywhere in the phantasmagoria
of the American political landscape.

America is not broke. The country is awash in wealth and cash.
It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the
greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks
and the portfolios of the uber-rich.
http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/.../michael-moore
/michael-moore-says-400-americans-have-more-wealth-/