Normally, success enables people to have seminars, books etc, rather than the other way round…
I love this stuff. You really get to see the fantasy versus the reality. It’s not like you could ever convince someone of it unless they actually tried to run a 45 hectare organic farm. Just like it took running a small business to make George McGovern respect entrepreneurs and capitalists.
Most of the famous organic farms usually depend on tourism, seminars and books. I couldn’t even see it being worthwhile otherwise. No bank in its right mind would give you a loan for it. You also have to master growing and harvesting a variety of plants. You may know everything under the sun about growing grass, but you find that when you grow it with apples which you know nothing about. You end up with not enough grass to be profitable and apple trees that don’t provide enough apples.
Let’s go through some examples given and work out what the real life problems are.
[quote=“Dragonbones”]Yes, and also not flavor. Large-scale commercial production of many fruits and vegetables is often geared toward producing goods that last longer and can endure more handling and LOOK better (hard, bright red, flawless tomatoes, for instance) but which often have no flavor whatsoever (or a poor imitation of what they should taste like).[/quote]When you have to ship something 1000’s of miles away these are important considerations. Fresh fruits and vegetables may taste great, but you can’t ship them farther than a few hundred miles before they go bad. This is why I think organic sells well due to being picked near ripeness rather than for being organic. Nutritionally, there is no difference.
Ok, what are you going to use to meet the nitrogen needs of plants? Legumes or manure? Now 54,000 lbs of food from a half acre is nice, but that’s about 1.5 pounds a square foot a year. Hydroponically, you can do that every 2-3 months. Now lets look at it like a business. 54,000lbs * $4 per pound * 30% profit margin=$64,800, so at $4 a pound the farmer is getting a nice price, but that’s selling wholesale with some farmers market sales, so please kiss your weekends during summer bye bye. If you tried that with grain, you’d be bankrupt most likely as no one wants to buy $4 a loaf bread for sandwiches.
I read the article and it’s the same stuff written by the same people who work 8-9 months a year on the public dime who actually have no experience running a farm. The same people who have a romantic notion of small farms the same small farms the world over people are fleeing for better opportunities in the cities like they have been doing since the industrial revolution. We also have the evil GM seed company out to rip off small farmers when in actually a farmer would guesstimate what his profit margins would be on his own with GM crops or regular crops. He would also make his decision accordingly. This isn’t quite like the Vietnam govt’s policy of moving people into the Hmong mountains and plateaus to grow coffee along with several other countries’ govts doing the same thing leading to a collapse of the price of coffee and starting that whole fair trade BS.
“agroecological” I love how they make up new words. No-till farming started when farmers realized they needed to do something to keep their topsoil. The switch actually happened during my childhood at the large farms in my area. It’s why they also like to keep bans of grass on around their fields and especially in low lying areas. They simply can’t afford erosion. Insect pest control happened much the same way. grape farmers realized that a stand of blackberries kept their grapes free of pests. Nowadays, some grape vineyards in California actually have cameras and monitoring equipment in them.
England has a huge organic liberal movement with Prince Charles leading the way and I wouldn’t trust the UN to tell me what time it is much less if organic works as well or better than modern farming practices.
I don’t get the whole reduce biodiversity argument. It was never made in the article just thrown out there like some belief that you must not challenge. Considering the western world is leading the charge on saving biodiversity, especially by companies like Monsanto, it just makes no sense.
The best part I love about these organic farms is that they are black box businesses. You ask how does it run and when you actually look into it, you come to the painful conclusion that things aren’t always what they seem. It comes with that argument in the Foreign Policy argument that despite using more chemicals we are still barely growing anymore food till you realize we are using less land to grow the same amount of food. That’s why the US has had a rebound in biodiversity in areas with beavers, bears, moose, and especially deer making outstanding comebacks. Most of the lost biodiversity in plants represents species that are difficult to grow but sell for high prices such as American ginseng, peyote cactus and goldenseal root, though farmers are making great strides, except for peyote obviously.
[quote=“ice raven”]Normally, success enables people to have seminars, books etc, rather than the other way round…[/quote]The problem is are they selling books to make ends meet or are they farming? I wish I could remember the small scale grain book’s name so you can read the comments on it. It’s very illuminating.
I have taken students from Taiwan on tours to an organic farm in Australia three times. On that farm they always have volunteer workers from wwoof:
It’s an organization that connects farmers with people who want to learn about organic farming and spend time on their farm. The farm I take my students to is excellent (in a place called Lost Valley in Southern Queensland) and the opportunities to learn by doing on an organic farm are great.
[quote=“Fox”]I have taken students from Taiwan on tours to an organic farm in Australia three times. On that farm they always have volunteer workers from wwoof:
It’s an organization that connects farmers with people who want to learn about organic farming and spend time on their farm. The farm I take my students to is excellent (in a place called Lost Valley in Southern Queensland) and the opportunities to learn by doing on an organic farm are great.[/quote]
Yes, WOOFF is a good example Fox of how organic farming doesn’t really make the grade. These farms need to rely on volunteer labour. 
Okami, nice post. When you scratch behind the surface of these hippy permaculture farms, things start to fall apart. They don’t make a living from it. The thing that bothers me most is how this kind of deluded thinking influences development aid to poor countries. It really does needlessly condemn rural communities to hunger and poverty.
Actually the organic farm I go to is over 1000 acres and runs mostly cattle. It’s probably as profitable a beef operation you can find on a per acre basis given the type of cattle they run and that it’s not a feedlot.
http://www.cedarglen.com.au/PhotoGallerypage.html
I don’t think it’s the black box operation Okami is talking about.
Well, obviously, livestock’s a very different kettle of fish, and not what my earlier comments on this thread were responding to.
Here’s an Aussie permaculture website that I like. It helped me get started with my own organic gardening.
http://www.tropicalpermaculture.com/growing-fruits.html
I went to their website and saw the farm was only 1000 acres, but they seemed pretty rich to me in their organic heaven. They’ve owned it for 100 years so they probably don’t have much left on the mortgage.
Watch the show on Cuba’s organic farming, it’s pretty interesting given they had to completely convert from conventional methods (supplying the Russians) to organic methods to feed themselves. Cuba’s unique history of a well educated workforce, low technology and forced nonreliance on external markets and inputs has made for an interesting experiment. They have an abundance of food mostly grown on urban plots.
This communist broadsheet from England, The Guardian, has a good short article on it: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/04/organics.food
[quote=“Fox”]Watch the show on Cuba’s organic farming, it’s pretty interesting given they had to completely convert from conventional methods (supplying the Russians) to organic methods to feed themselves. Cuba’s unique history of a well educated workforce, low technology and forced nonreliance on external markets and inputs has made for an interesting experiment. They have an abundance of food mostly grown on urban plots.[/quote]The great Cuban organic farming myth just won’t die. The Cuban growth in agriculture was not done by organic farming techniques, but by freeing up the natural entrepreneurial nature and the need to feed their belly of the Cuban people. Basically Cubans couldn’t feed themselves through the state farms which are horribly inefficient and the Cuban govt allowed people to sell what they produced. The govt grocery stores basically had empty shelves. Pretty hard to spend your govt salary on food that doesn’t exist to be bought. They don’t grow organically out of love of the earth, but because they can’t afford fertilizer since it’s only dispatched to state own farms. When your only fertilizer is compost, compost is the only fertilizer you use.
Thanks for saving me the trouble of writing a reply to Fox regarding Cuba.
Fox,
I think urban farming is great. It gives people exercise, beautifies cities, educates kids, and it provides people with cheap, tasty and healthy food. I grew up eating veges taken from our own vegetable garden. In fact, I was quite unusual as a kid because gardening was one of my favourite hobbies. Note the word “hobby.” You can’t feed a nation on this kind of small scale non-mechanized farming, well, not at a standard of living that would be acceptable.
You referred to the Guardian as a “communist broadsheet”. Many a true word said in jest. Actually, with the exception of the New Zealand Herald, it’s the newspaper that I probably read most often. There is indeed some wacky leftist stuff on there, and they are very much at the vanguard of this Green Religion - move over Marx, step up Gaia. The Guardian try hard to put Green success stories in their pages to counter the overload of the end-of-the-world-is-coming bullshit, but their articles don’t ask enough hard questions. I’m interested in renewable energy, which is an area that they give quite a lot of coverage to, but I’m invariably left wondering about what wasn’t mentioned in the articles.
I’ve read Intro to Permaculture and Gaia’s Garden amongst other books. Both are excellent guides for subsistence gardening. Aquaponics/Aquaculture is another interesting direction. This article is a great introduction nytimes.com/2010/02/18/garde … gewanted=1 But the folks in Oz are way ahead of the US.
I’m not interested in trying to make a living from selling produce, just support my family with healthy food.
I don’t understand the argument in this thread that Permaculture causes developing countries to remain poor. Utilizing land to support your family without chemicals is common sense. Money not spent on food is money in your pocket.
I can’t see any contradictions here. It seems you have difficulty equating organic farming with entrepreneurship. I have no such difficulty nor do I insinuate anything of the kind; however, I think it is true that most of your average Cuban’s tucker comes from organic food grown on urban farms. Yes, it is out of necessity, but so what. When has necessity been such a dingleberry? I don’t get the knee jerk reactions and dismissive attitudes. What’s wrong with successful organic farming?
The problem for me Fox is that I can’t admire subsistence farmers forced to use crap(pun intended 
) methods because of govt regulations on land, fertilizer and market access. The difference is a 20kg bag of compost versus a handful of standard chemicals(around 10-12 in a hydroponic solution). The Cuban organic revolution only applies to the private small plot subsistence farmers as the state farms still use man-made fertilizers. Cuba still has trade relations with every country except the US and fertilizer is a fungible commodity. They could easily buy it from/through Mexico, Venezuela or the Dominican Republic. Now I would be quite impressed if they were using the compost for mushrooms before using it on their gardens. With the current crackdown on small businesses in Cuba, I don’t see them becoming more than a state sanctioned prop.
Even if it works better small scale rather than large scale, why can’t it be beneficial and intelligent?
I was talking to some Russians a couple of weeks ago about this, and they said that under communism every family was given a small plot of land outside the city on which they could grow food. This land could only be used for food production, and anything produced could not be sold, thus quelling the desire to plant cash crops instead of feeding themselves.
It would seem to me that if organic farming can be sustainable, done without pesticides or fertilizers, and could produce more food due to greater biomass, then it could be very applicable for some poorer countries. I’m not saying that it’s the end all and be all, but it certainly has it’s place.
Most people in Sweden that live in the cities and don’t have their own garden has what is known as a “kolonilott” or allotment. It’s very popular to have one and these day’s they’re not easy to get. I saw a few in London as well, but it doesn’t seem to be all that common in the UK and there are tons of them in Germany as well. This is the same idea, you grow your own veggies and berries and maybe even have a couple of fruit trees there depending on the size. There seems to be similar things here, although I highly doubt that most of them are legal. If that ain’t small scale and in most cases organic growing of food, then I don’t know what is. But then again, I don’t think that was the subject in mind when this topic kicked off.
It’s an interesting field, but is it an efficient field? Given the high costs of renewable and alternative energies, many governments have to use feed-in tariffs just to make renewable energies affordable when compared with other energy sources that are much cheaper.
So government should subsidize these renewable resources? 
Many grassroots leftists and rightists were against government bailouts of Wall Street and the Detroit auto industry, but yet the entire left seems to have no problems with subsidies when it comes to alternative or renewable energy?
And just how efficient is renewable energy? Let’s face it—most developed countries live in the colder Northern hemisphere, right? (or New Zealand equivalents in the South where sheep wool and activities with sheep keep everyone toasty warm 
) Buying a solar hot water heater (5K or so) is probably affordable to most upper middle or upper class people, but are other renewable sources affordable? Getting Photovoltaic (PV) panels to power the entire house only makes sense in jurisdictions such as California. In most Northern US and Canadian places, it would take 99 years to pay back the original outlay costs of 80 to 100K if you want to heat the entire house. Wind energy has similar expenses. Not only do you need to pay about 30 grand or so to pay for a turbine, but you have to pay city taxes, repair costs etc., and make sure you have enough wind in your area to justify the cost. Water power is cleaner but still requires oil in many stations, right? Again, like with organic food, religious enthusiasm for this becomes a hobby and a fad for the pampered affluent. It is important too look at alternatives sources, but I doubt most of them will end up revolutionizing society.
It certainly doesn’t hurt to tinker and innovate with these renewable methods, but will they replace oil, natural gas and coal? I don’t think so. Just as organic food will never replace GM good and it would be an environmental catastrophe if it did. And should governments around the world subsidize renewable energies? I don’t think so. It’s hard for governments of any kind to pick winners. Let the private sector decide. Leave it to Silicon Valley and other bastions of innovation (Tel Aviv, Hsinchu, India etc.).
These concerns assume that the costs of such equipment will remain exorbitant. With new scientific breakthroughs discovering cheaper materials and methods and more efficient energy outputs, costs in these areas are certain to come down.
[quote=“Chewycorns”]
It’s an interesting field, but is it an efficient field? Given the high costs of renewable and alternative energies, many governments have to use feed-in tariffs just to make renewable energies affordable when compared with other energy sources that are much cheaper. [/quote]
So far. But renewable and alternative energy industries are new industries, and as Chris pointed out as technology improves they will get cheaper. It’s already happening; solar panels seem to be advancing at almost the same rate as computers. The price has remained the same for a solar panel compared to five years ago, but the efficiency has tripled. On the other hand, the only way for the price of oil and coal to go is up - hence industry reliant on fossil fuels will become increasingly expensive.
That’s a very, very good point, and thank you for bringing it up. Let’s look at cars: in the 1960s and 1970s Japan began heavily subsidizing car manufacturers. Consequently, they were able to undercut competitors and gain market share, and over the course of those two decades they were producing cars on such a scale that cost of production had come down drastically for them, and had learned so much that when people began demanding economic, efficient, “green” cars, they were able to pull designs out of the mothball drawer and produce new cars to match demand. THIS is why investing in alternative energy is the smart thing to do: to gain future market share, or at least to remain competitive in the industry.
The big american car manufacturers, OTOH, sat on their arses, making big, heavy steel cars (as per American demand) year after year, and failed to adapt. When the environment changed, they suddenly faced extinction. With the government bailout, they will survive, but will remain decades behind their opposition. So that’s the real question here, whether to invest in new technology and hopefully capture a fledgling industry with a bright future, or whether to invest in failed dinosaur companies that have already lost market share and are already behind?
How efficient are computers? And when they become efficient enough to be widespread, and produced on a massive scale, do you want to be the one with the technology, know-how and production features, or the one buying them?
Assuming average American household uses about 10,000 kWh yearly, wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_ener … sehold_use,
10,000/365 = 27.4 kw/h /day
And given that we can now buy 225w solar panels for $600, affordable-solar.com/solar.panels.htm
which with assumed 12 hours of sunlight give 2.7 kw, we then need ten solar panels which would cost $6,000. Yes, you still need installation fees, maintenance fees and batteries, but it’s a long way short of 80-100k.
Why pay 30 gs? Who the hell wants a big industrial windfarm turbine on their house? You can make a cheap 12v 400w one for $700, fastfurnishings.com/ProductD … e=AEE_1008 or DIY for a tenth of that, according to youtube.
What society? They already are. Fresnel lenses cost about $150 bucks greenpowerscience.com/SHOPFRESNELHOME1.html . They are being used in some places in India and Africa to revolutionize cooking. Solar powered, they easily have the power to boil water and cook. The heat created by bacteria in composting can be used to heat water, or at least preheat it. Again, this is being used in Africa and India, and while it’ll never be appropriate for cities, it’s possible that farmers and small homesteaders will increasingly adopt the idea. One day I expect to see Fresnel lens / stirling engine trains…
Some of these technologies will aid small segments of society, but be useless for others. Some will become beneficial for all. I can see people driving electric cars. I can see more and more people having solar or wind (or both) power for their households. I see green energy initially supplementing oil, gas and coal, and slowly overtaking it. How quickly that happens depends on the relative cost, science, political will, supply of oil, and so on.
Should governments invest in it? I think so, partly because there’s a good chance they can profit, and also because it grants more independence over their energy supply. If there are major wars in the middle east or Indian region, especially over fuel or water, this could affect supply of oil. Having a greater proportion of a national energy grid based on non-oil alternatives insulates nations more from such events.
[quote=“ice raven”]
That’s a very, very good point, and thank you for bringing it up. Let’s look at cars: in the 1960s and 1970s Japan began heavily subsidizing car manufacturers. Consequently, they were able to undercut competitors and gain market share, and over the course of those two decades they were producing cars on such a scale that cost of production had come down drastically for them, and had learned so much that when people began demanding economic, efficient, “green” cars, they were able to pull designs out of the mothball drawer and produce new cars to match demand. THIS is why investing in alternative energy is the smart thing to do: to gain future market share, or at least to remain competitive in the industry.
The big American car manufacturers, OTOH, sat on their arses, making big, heavy steel cars (as per American demand) year after year, and failed to adapt. When the environment changed, they suddenly faced extinction. With the government bailout, they will survive, but will remain decades behind their opposition. So that’s the real question here, whether to invest in new technology and hopefully capture a fledgling industry with a bright future, or whether to invest in failed dinosaur companies that have already lost market share and are already behind?[/quote]
I don’t believe subsidies or profit have anything to do with efficient vehicle design. Demand and necessity do however. This isn’t a simple open and shut case. There are too many factors which add up to efficient design. Japanese industry was dwarfed by both European and American competitors at the beginning, but the Japanese had the advantage of being relatively new on the scene and were able to incorporate a lot of R&D developed by the West into their new designs. This often still plays into their strategy today. They will often wait for another manufacturer to develop a technology and spend their own R&D away before the Japanese take the technology and refine it. Japan has stupid tax laws which limit people to buying smaller engined cars. This becomes an incentive for the Japanese manufacturers to provide smaller engined vehicles with larger power outputs, incorporating turbos and other technologies which both increase performance and [can] improve fuel burn which can in turn reduce consumption further. This is not to suggest however than forcing people to give up their new cars early because of tax hikes on older cars is the way to go. New cars consume enormous quantities of fuel during production and in the case of Japan will certainly exceed the fuel costs of running much older and larger vehicles.
In the U.S. the C.A.F.E. standards which were introduced during a fuel crisis (1975 I think) were implemented to reduce fuel consumption of American fleet vehicles. Certainly fuel consumption went down after initial implementation of the standard, but not because of the new laws, only because of fuel shortages. Since then average fuel consumption in the U.S. has only ever gone up. This is partly to do with 40% of the U.S.'s vehicles which are now over 8,500lbs so that they may escape the C.A.F.E. standard legislation. Its also partly because consumers realise that larger vehicles which don’t have to conform with legislation are better value for money as these vehicles don’t suffer the adage of further R&D in order to bring them into line with the rules.
The smallest and most fuel efficient vehicles however don’t get off blame free. Since 1975 the average number of miles travelled in the U.S. has doubled. This is partly to do with the cheaper cost of transportation and smaller and/or more efficient vehicles. This raises the overall fuel consumption figures.
So what can we draw from this? Well, only that education and vehicle sharing are going to reduce fuel consumption in the long term, not technology alone.
One of the biggest fuel savers of all time was the limitation on vehicle manufacturing. Germany banned new car production after the second world war in order to reduce its demand on foreign oil as well as offer itself a respite and reduce its foreign deficit. It worked. Some estimates put Germany’s fuel consumption savings due to the ban at 30% just due to production banning. This, while at the same time improving overall employment figures due to the knock on growth of the car servicing and repair sector.
Personally I don’t believe for a second that ramped up vehicle production and money for new technology will be the key in answering the world’s fuel saving needs. Technology is only one element in reducing fuel consumption.
The biggest element is human population numbers. The more of us there are, the less there is to spread around and the quicker our demise. This doesn’t simply pertain to fuel, but all resources.
I believe that one of the key elements for Western countries is to abolish the present financial system which forces governments to try and increase the population in order to service its own debt. A few countries are even paying people to have babies at this time because of this very situation. Cash for clunkers was a ridiculous program which vastly ramped up fuel consumption as well as other resource consumption with the single purpose of reducing the debt of large companies. This was a clear indicator for me that the government only cares about one thing at the end of the day, and that one thing certainly isn’t the environment or managing our resources in the best manner.
I don’t trust anything with affordable used in the name tag. 
The price, of course, depens on how much energy you consume. In colder climates, where residential houses can use as much as 12,000 KWh per year, you’ll need to buy a lot of panels for full self-sufficiency. You often don’t pay back your investment for 20-30 years. That’s a lot of original outlay for just breaking even after 20 years, wouldn’t you say?
[quote]Why pay 30 gs? Who the hell wants a big industrial windfarm turbine on their house? You can make a cheap 12v 400w one for $700, fastfurnishings.com/ProductD … e=AEE_1008 or DIY for a tenth of that, according to youtube.
[/quote]
Again, that is for a cheap model. Wind turbines do require maintainance and you can be sure if you bought a cheap model, you’ll be fixing it a lot. With labour running 100 dollars an hour (depressing fact for us uni grads hahahahaha) for many trades in many parts of North America, that isn’t going to be cheap. It costs $2,000-$8,000/per kilowatt to purchase a small wind turbine. However, the wind turbine costs represent only 12%-48% of the total cost of a small wind electric system. You also need to pay for other components of your wind energy system, such as inverters and batteries, as well as sales tax, installation charges and labour. So you have, according to the American wind association, between 6000 to 22000 in original outlays combined with the other associated costs…I’d say my original computations are correct.
awea.org/faq/rsdntqa.html#Ho … systemcost
Governments profit? :roflmao: :roflmao: That surely ain’t the SOP. I’m all for diversifying to hedge risk, but give government the smallest possible role in this. Bad track record of picking winners. Create low tax environs that attract bright people and let the private sector do the rest.
I’m not sure what’s more annoying, your ignorance or the way you trumpet it.
While alternative energy was prohibitively expensive and thus off corporate radars, it was government backed research which continued to advance the science and ultimately the affordability. This has since flowed back into the corporations who are now making handsome profits out of this technology.
HG