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It's not Just Joel Salatin anymore
Bert Hyman wrote:
In Billy wrote: I'm not arguing for local food because it tastes better or because it's better for you. I'm arguing that we have no choice. In a world more prone to drought and flood, we need the resilience that comes with three dozen different crops in one field, not a vast ocean of corn or soybeans. In a world where warmth spreads pests more efficiently, we need the resilience of many local varieties and breeds. And in a world with less oil, we need the kind of small, mixed farms that can provide their own fertilizer and build their own soil. Who's going to be the person to tell 2/3 of the earth's population that they're going to have to starve? Will that be when oil becomes so expensive that it cannot be used to make fertiliser and the broadacre crops' yields drop to pitiful? You are right (if I understand you correctly) that we don't know how to feed the world sustainably yet. Altering how we do agriculture is only part of the solution. Unless we also deal with over-population all other resource problems will be exacerbated to breaking point. We will only go back to an agrarian economy if the present system has a catastrophic collapse, followed by a population collapse, and nobody wants to see that. The alternative is to work out how to do sustainable agriculture and reduce our population. We have to make that choice or nature will make it for us - and then the results won't be pretty. Whether McKibben has it right and this requires breaking production up into local units remains to be seen. I suspect that some degree of localisation will have to be part of the plan in order to reduce transport costs and that implies eliminating huge monocultures too. There are of course other reasons for doing that besides the transport difficulty. We need more people to work on making the conversion to a sustainable way of life a soft landing instead of a crash. Saying "we will all be ruined" and using that as an excuse to keep the present system will become self-fulfilling. David |
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