Is "Sustainable Agriculture" sustainable?

Note: although an unrelated discussion, some of the context for this thread is in “Should Aboriginals be made to shop at Carrefour?”, where it all started. Gman raised the question of whether sustainable agriculture (whatever that means) really is “better” than the industrial farming we’ve used for the last 50 years or so.

That’s a fair point: words like ‘sustainable’ and ‘organic’ are used with an Alice-in-Wonderland carelessness - “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

‘Sustainable’ means a method of farming that improves rather than degrades the soil fertility. There are different technologies (mostly climate-specific) for achieving that result, and some of the techniques branded ‘organic’ are really just industrial agriculture without the chemicals. Undoubtedly, those methods aren’t very effective, and I suspect that’s why most people have the idea that organic farming is never going to work out.

When I talk about sustainable farming, I’m specifically thinking of a farm with the following characteristics:

  1. Any exported mass is returned, in some form or other, to the land, and any unused mass (straw, roots, inedible leaves etc) is added back to the soil, possibly after being first used as animal feed. Practically, that means organic wastes (yes, including human manure) must be collected from consumers.
  2. A rich and complex ecosystem is established and allowed to evolve with minimal human intervention. Typically that means a lot more perennial plants compared to annuals, including shrubs and trees. The function of this ecosystem is to provide a living mulch layer and a matrix of roots for soil stability. Nutrients for commercial crops are provided by the decomposing mulch layer; originally, these nutrients would have been “mined” by deep tree roots and/or by microbial symbiosis.
  3. Animals are an integrated part of the farm, providing manure, performing manual labour (e.g., insect predation and soil management), and “recycling” agricultural waste. They may also provide meat, eggs, dairy, wool, etc.

Mostly because they’re complex and difficult to manage. The main advantage of chemical-fed agriculture is that any idiot can do it. Just follow the numbers in the textbook and you’ll get a yield. Setting up an integrated farm with many different interconnected systems takes years to establish and fine-tune. You will receive not one single penny of government subsidy while you struggle to get it right. You may even get council officials coming around harassing you. There are very few people with the financial wherewithal (and the balls) to cope with that. Then there’s the negative pressure from vested interests. You’ll often hear people reciting received wisdom (such as the “fact” that only industrial agriculture will feed the world) as if it were proven truth, when it’s really just something they read in a Monsanto commercial featuring smiling brown faces and windmills.

Depends what you mean by “yield”. In any other industry, people talk about ($in)/($out). In a farming context, people talk about tonnes/hectare, which is as meaningless as talking about the output of a fashion store in terms of weight. That measure is used because it’s guaranteed to make chemical-fed monoculture farming look good. Spray enough chemicals on 5 hectares and use expensive machines to manage it, and you’ll get 200 tonnes of onions or potatoes. Nobody ever mentions how much those chemicals and machines cost, where the fuel comes from, where the waste is disposed of, who pays for cleaning up the river pollution. Nobody mentions that 200 tonnes of onions represents a ridiculous market mismatch, especially if the farmer lives in some Indian village in the middle of nowhere. All things considered, he’ll make US$50/tonne bottom-line profit, if he’s lucky. That’s why nobody has 5-hectare farms any more.

A properly-managed 5-hectare organic farm might deliver 10 tonnes of much higher-quality onions into local supply chains; there will also be 100-150 tonnes of all sorts of other things, including value-added products like cheese, prepared vegetables, preserves, etc. The organic farm will make 3-6 times more money than the other type because their costs are lower and their output is more accurately matched to the target market. Why is that a good thing? It means that farms don’t need to be large monocultures; they can be dispersed dog-ends of land, and they’ll still make money, even without subsidy.

Isn’t it patently obvious that industrial agriculture, as currently practiced, has spectacularly failed to feed the world? We turned our backs on flint arrows, gas mantles and thermionic valves because something better came along. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Chemical-fed agriculture most especially doesn’t work in the tropics for very specific reasons:

  • In poor countries, there is not the expertise, money, or transport infrastructure required to supply machines, energy and chemical inputs to farms, nor to get large tonnages quickly and reliably to market.
  • Wind, monsoon rains, and sun can devastate unprotected soil (and crops). It has to be seen to be believed. It is not physically possible to farm western-style monocultures in that environment. The soil just washes away and turns to desert.
  • In most of Africa (for example) the soils are naturally infertile, with little in them that typical food plants can access. Local species are of course well adapted to this situation, as can be observed in untouched forests. Modern sustainable technologies attempt to emulate what happens in a natural forest.

Yes, potassium is abundant and we could manufacture ammonia using solar power, but the main issue is phosphorus. There is going to be no technological solution to rock phosphate runout, which most governments agree will happen in our lifetimes. Note also that the retail price difference between sustainably-managed farms and chemical-fed ones is mainly a marketing issue. The ‘organic’ stuff is usually cheaper to produce, and 60-90% of the shelf cost is transportation, storage, and business overhead anyway. A lot of the food you eat is, ultimately, derived from oil.

Here’s the point: why are we deploying all this technology when it isn’t even necessary? How did farmers - and rainforests - get by before the Haber-Bosch process? Why, for example, do we need to synthesize ammonia and then use machines to apply it, when we can simply plant leguminous crops, innoculate with the appropriate bacteria, and let nature take care of it? Also, it’s not just about NPK. Trying to micromanage all the required nutrients is painful. What we’re doing with agriculture is a bit like a thirsty guy extracting hydrogen and oxygen from the air and synthesizing some water, instead of just dipping a cup in the river.

Yes - a lot of “old” farmland has been ruined and will no longer produce without chemical inputs. In the US especially there is actually a long tradition of using cover crops to regenerate the soil. It’s really only since 1950 that the problems started.

By not applying chemicals in the first place - so there is nothing to run off. Current research suggests that artificial chemicals are applied in concentrations about 50x higher than they need to be, simply because so much is lost. Heavy mulches (deposited by dense vegetation, not by human activity) perform double duty, acting as a slow-release nutrient source, and protecting the soil to keep topsoil loss to an absolute minimum. That’s why it’s called “sustainable”.

It is not scalable now but it will be soon, what will be the breakthrough? I think I know what will make the difference and will be surprised if anybody guesses it.

Whoa, that’s a pretty heavy opening post. You certainly cover alot of ground. I am not nearly as well informed on agriculture as you are so this should be an interesting discussion for me. I do have a few comments and questions so please excuse any ignorace if I appear to be trampling on any facts.

That’s quite a list! It’s also a pretty rigerous.

Mostly because they’re complex and difficult to manage. The main advantage of chemical-fed agriculture is that any idiot can do it. Just follow the numbers in the textbook and you’ll get a yield. Setting up an integrated farm with many different interconnected systems takes years to establish and fine-tune. You will receive not one single penny of government subsidy while you struggle to get it right. You may even get council officials coming around harassing you. There are very few people with the financial wherewithal (and the balls) to cope with that. Then there’s the negative pressure from vested interests. You’ll often hear people reciting received wisdom (such as the “fact” that only industrial agriculture will feed the world) as if it were proven truth, when it’s really just something they read in a Monsanto commercial featuring smiling brown faces and windmills. [/quote]

Doesn’t simple economics come into it as well?

Based on my experience in several industries this isn’t true. I can’t think of one case where we talked publically about ($in)/($out). In the pulp industry for example we talked about yield as a measure of ton of pulp produced per ton of wood. Certainly attention was paid to how much money was being spent to produce that tone of pulp but that was a measure of profitabilty not yield and those numbers were not made available to the public.

I disagree with this statment as well. I think it is very meaningfull. You have a hard time arguing convincing me that a farm producing 5 bushels of wheat per hectare is superior to one producing 50 bushels per hectare. What am I missing?

How so? I thought farmers paid attention to mass of produce per unit of land long before the advent of chemical-fed monoculture farming or certainly long berfore an industry might be concerned about making it look good.

I’ve heard it talked about quite alot. On the cost of chemicals and machines, I’m reasonably assured that any farmer or corporation is paying very close attention to what their costs are.

I don’t understand. What do you mean by market mismatch?

I’d be surprised anyone would have to ask is this a good thing? The question for me is, is this possible on a large enough scale?

No it’s not patently obvious at all. Right now the world has more than enough food production to feed the world. Where you have famines are invariably due to political factors not food production.

I’ve read up on this as I once considered investing in a phosphate project. I read arguments that there is only enough phosphate rock to last 50 years. I read another report indicating that reserves had been underestimated and that there is actually sufficient phosphate rock reserves to produce fertilizer for the next 300 to 400 years. Also, unlike oil phosporous isn’t destroyed I’d find it pretty hard to believe that there is no techincal solution possible. This phosphorus doesn’t simply vanish into outer space.

[quote] Here’s the point: why are we deploying all this technology when it isn’t even necessary? How did farmers - and rainforests - get by before the Haber-Bosch process? [/quote] I suspect that the answer to that question may be as simple as looking at the world population figures between now and then. Also, before the H-B process ammonia was derived from saltpeter from natural nitrate deposits.

I don’t know. I’m going to guess it’s comes down to the fact that it’s not as simple as planting leguminous crops and letting nature take care of it. You must be missing something.

Is there enough mulch to cover the land needed to produce enough food?

DP

While I would also say that Finley tends to the alarmist regarding this subject I completely agree a system is only as good as its weakest link. So it would be wise to be prepared for that even if technical fixes become available.

[quote]I disagree with this statment as well. I think it is very meaningfull. You have a hard time arguing convincing me that a farm producing 5 bushels of wheat per hectare is superior to one producing 50 bushels per hectare. What am I missing?
[/quote]

Externalities to production, loss of other productive capacity, energy costs, etc. I think it is a very long list. Most of this research into sustainable farming focuses heavily on what is ignored in cost benefit analyses of productive land.

The definition of sustainable sure is flexible and ever changing. What’s sustainable in one country or in one climate or at one oil price is not at another.

Since nobody was interested in what I think could make a difference in the future in terms of organic/sustainable farming I think a big factor is going to be…robotics. A robot will not get tired with the incessant labour required without the use of chemicals and pesticides to work the soil and reduce pest loads.
The robot could be powered by solar panels.

Finley, I’m a big supporter of organic and sustainable farming and had an allotment in the UK for many years, which I cultivated entirely organically, but I still take issue with some of your statements in your OP.

Firstly, your contention that chemical-based agriculture does not feed the world. Have you heard of the Green Revolution? This is widely accepted by many scientists and other interested professionals, not just agrichemical companies, to have saved millions from starvation in the 60s. One of the aspects of the Green Revolution was the introduction of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. I am not saying that artificial fertiliser is the be all and end all, but undeveloped farming practices of yesteryear were failing to feed the world only a few decades ago.

Also, you say that it’s only since the 1950s that the problems started in the US. In fact, the Dust Bowls of the 30s are well-known. (A small point but worth making.)

Agricultual run-off can also occur from manure as well as chemical fertiliser.

And this point

I think you are over-simplfying here. Some farmers got by before the Haber-Bosch process by burning those rainforests you mention, and some still do. Others were not so destructive but still failed to produce the yields that they can by using chemicals. It is possible to fertilise your soil using legumes, it is true - if you can get the nodules to form. We don’t yet know enough about this to guarantee this will always happen, and many farmers simply don’t have enough land to set any of it aside to grow legumes, then wait for them to rot down to plant another crop. They need a crop or two every year from every bit of land to survive.

For various reasons I had to give up my allotment, but long before then I realised that organic farming was more labour-intensive than conventional farming, and more liable to failure. For example, I had seen friends lose entire crops of tomatoes to blight, which at the time was only preventable by spraying with a copper-based fungicide (actually accepted by the organic association but only because there was absolutely no alternative).

I suppose what I’m saying is I agree with the principle of what you’re saying but I think you’re being simplistic and I think we still have a long way to go before we will be able to farm sustainably and feed everyone.

[quote=“Fox”][quote]I disagree with this statment as well. I think it is very meaningfull. You have a hard time arguing convincing me that a farm producing 5 bushels of wheat per hectare is superior to one producing 50 bushels per hectare. What am I missing?
[/quote]

Externalities to production, loss of other productive capacity, energy costs, etc. I think it is a very long list. Most of this research into sustainable farming focuses heavily on what is ignored in cost benefit analyses of productive land.[/quote]

Sure, but how does that render a measurment of output / hectare as meaningless? Sure it’s fair to say there’s more to farming than bushels per hetare just as you could say the same in any industry. There would be more to the steel industry than a measurement of steel produced per iron ore consumed but, that certainly wouldn’t render such a measurement as meaningless.

I don’t know anything about the details of what goes into a cost benifit analysis of productive land so I have no idea for certian if there are factors that are ignored when analyzing one method over another. I’m not given to conspiracy theories so I have a very hard time believing that if there was a method of farming that produced the same amount of food at a lower cost and in an environmentally friendly manner that it wouldn’t quickly become adopted.

Yes, but I wouldn’t say “simple” economics. The main issue is that the entire supply chain has evolved around the assumption that agriculture is done in one particular way. That means anyone doing it differently is instantly at a disadvantage, unless he simultanously creates his own markets. I’d draw a parallel with electric scooters (which were discussed in another thread). The technology works just great, but nobody is going to buy them because the infrastructure isn’t there. Industrial farming relies on a vast hidden commercial machine to make it operate (and it, in turn, represents a smallish cog in that machine). The corollary is that it will NOT work where that infrastructure is not present - a highly visible phenomenon in less-developed countries.

In bold is the point. The public only hears a highly simplified picture of what happens in agriculture, but to the farmer - to any businessman - what matters is that he’s making a profit. If he makes a profit, usually it’s because the customer likes his product. I’m not a laissez-faire free-market nutter, but there does have to be a sensible commercial basis for any human activity; yet here we are with (for example) European agricultural subsidies consuming 40% of the EU budget.

That the difference is usually de minimis, or in favour of the sustainable methods. It’s never 5 vs. 50 bushels; if you’re talking about wheat, 35 vs. 50 bushels is realistic. I’ve mentioned Masanobu Fukuoka before, who was getting an independently-verified 7-8 tonnes of rice per hectare back in the 70’s using his own specially-developed strain of rice. World average chemical-fed yield is in the 4.5-6 tonnes/hectare range. The point there is that the rice strains in use have been specifically bred to perform better under intensive conditions. Of course if you use the same strain without fertilizer, it’s going to perform poorly.

Of course, but it’s become a completely one-dimensional obsession. If fertilizers are subsidized so that you can double the amount of chemicals you dump on your field (as in Taiwan), you might increase your rice yield from 5t/ha to 6t/ha. I don’t consider that a sensible use of taxpayer’s money.

I’ve heard it talked about quite alot. On the cost of chemicals and machines, I’m reasonably assured that any farmer or corporation is paying very close attention to what their costs are.[/quote]
For public consumption, they’re often ignored, because everyone assumes that tractors, energy, chemicals and combine-harvesters are as essential as lightbulbs and air-conditioners in offices; farmers also consider them as fixed costs rather than something that can be mitigated, because everyone else is using the exact same equipment and methods.

I don’t understand. What do you mean by market mismatch?[/quote]
Well, imagine what 200 tonnes of onions looks like. HTF are you going to sell that unless there’s a huge army of middlemen to dispose of them for you? There is no instantaneous demand for 200 tonnes of onions at harvest time. And we’re only talking about 5ha, where in reality that onion field might cover 10, 20 or 50ha.

That big commercial machine needs to create that market, by providing storage and logistics to get your 200 tonnes of onions to a widely-dispersed market. That might be OK in (say) England, where the population is dense and concentrated in cities. Now try the same thing in (say) Guyana, with a population of about a million over a larger land area.

Dunno. I’ll freely admit I’m not much of a businessman. What obstacles to commercialisation do you envisage?

No it’s not patently obvious at all. Right now the world has more than enough food production to feed the world. Where you have famines are invariably due to political factors not food production.[/quote]
Sure. But part of the political landscape is a huge push for industrial-style agriculture in developing nations, which has failed again and again (for the technical reasons I mentioned), usually taking a lot of aid money with it.

I agree it’s difficult to estimate, but to use the oft-deployed burning-building argument, it’s a bit like a guy sitting in front of the TV with his house on fire saying “no hurry, it’ll be at least 10 more minutes before it reaches this room”. Why would we take that risk where there is a perfectly viable alternative that doesn’t involve mining phosphorus?

No - it vanishes into the sea. It gets flushed into rivers (where it causes eutrophication), either as land runoff or as sewage discharge. The technical solution is to (a) not use it in the first place and (b) recycle it. However, I get the feeling that most people don’t like that idea simply because it doesn’t involve enough technology.

I agree, population growth is a big issue, and sooner or later it’s going to be self-limiting in the most unpleasant ways. The thing is, however much fertilizer you pour onto a crop, the physical yield limit is determined by sun and water. There’s NO way around that, and it’s dangerous to pretend that we can engineer our way around it.

It works just fine for plenty of farmers, right now, today. It worked for millennia before there was such a thing as a farmer.

It’s a byproduct of the food production process (as it is in nature). It’s not something you need to produce independently. Certainly when starting off a new project, you need to import it. Within 3-4 years, it becomes self-sustaining if set up correctly.

[quote=“finley”]

In bold is the point. The public only hears a highly simplified picture of what happens in agriculture, but to the farmer - to any businessman - what matters is that he’s making a profit. If he makes a profit, usually it’s because the customer likes his product. I’m not a laissez-faire free-market nutter, but there does have to be a sensible commercial basis for any human activity; yet here we are with (for example) European agricultural subsidies consuming 40% of the EU budget.[/quote]

I am a ‘free-market-nutter’ so I’m with you on the government subsidies. However, I’m not sure that subsidies discriminate on what method the food is produced by. When I said made public I wasn’t talking about to the general public. I was speaking interms of being externally available. That would be considered proprietary information. Of course the general public only hears a highly simplified picture of what happens in agriculture just like any other industry. That being said the information is there, again just like any other industry, for those prepared to ask questions or do some digging.

It terms of making a profit. I agree that’s what’s important to any businessman. Hence my suprise that if the sustainable methods you speak of are truely readilily available as alternatives, that they haven’t been siezed on by businessmen.

[quote=“Gman”][quote=“finley”]

In bold is the point. The public only hears a highly simplified picture of what happens in agriculture, but to the farmer - to any businessman - what matters is that he’s making a profit. If he makes a profit, usually it’s because the customer likes his product. I’m not a laissez-faire free-market nutter, but there does have to be a sensible commercial basis for any human activity; yet here we are with (for example) European agricultural subsidies consuming 40% of the EU budget.[/quote]

I am a ‘free-market-nutter’ so I’m with you on the government subsidies. However, I’m not sure that subsidies discriminate on what method the food is produced by. When I said made public I wasn’t talking about to the general public. I was speaking interms of being externally available. That would be considered proprietary information. Of course the general public only hears a highly simplified picture of what happens in agriculture just like any other industry. That being said the information is there, again just like any other industry, for those prepared to ask questions or do some digging.

It terms of making a profit. I agree that’s what’s important to any businessman. Hence my suprise that if the sustainable methods you speak of are truly readilily available as alternatives, that they haven’t been siezed on by businessmen.[/quote]

I think you don’t get how well subsidies discriminate on method farmers use because you aren’t that familiar with agricultural subsidies. They are radically different than say industrial subsidies or tax breaks, which are a really small percentage of their business model. Ag subsidies can often pay a much more significant portion of the costs of an operation, and sometimes pay for costs + some extra to give the farmer a profit. For example, I grew up in the rural south in north carolina (in a few counties that were known as the chicken capital of the US.) I had friends whose families’ operating expenses were covered by 80-100% cost of production. And occasionally, at times when the market was going to overproduce, and cause the value of eggs or chicken meat to radically drop, the gov’t would step in and give a subsidy so large, to pay off some farmers to not produce or bring anything to market that year. It would often be in the tune of a $30-60K profit for a household, to basically just sit on their land and keep it ready for agriculture in case it is needed in the future to begin production again.

And to qualify for these subsidies, you had to be capable of mass producing a certain amount of product, which means that you HAD to use “industrial” farming methods. In terms of livestock, this meant rows of grain-fed (grain is a lose term here which also includes other dead chicken waste like feathers bone, etc, manure and other things like that, in addition to chemical supplements) chickens locked in their own cages unable to even move. Definitely not an organic, free-range operation, that uses sustainable methods to provide feed, as those operations tend to be too small, largely for the logistics involved. As another poster mentioned, the cycle of a sustainable operation is complex, and a smaller farm is far easier to manage.

Sustainable development simply broadens the rubric to include the agricultural economy into the ecological economy. The ecological economy includes water quality, pollination, waste absorption, nutrient cycling, CO2 sequestration, and biodiversity conservation. Some of these are hard to quantify. Traditional farmland economics is based on the principal of profit maximization. Modelling for Taiwan has shown that including traditional farming into the the eco-economy can produce a greater dollar value because of biocapacity considerations. I know this because I edited the study at NTU. I’ll see if I can find it.

I think I understand that well enough. I’ve heard of sugar farmers being paid in the US not to grow sugar and here in Taiwan my Father-in-Law is paid not to grow rice on his land.

Interesting point. But, doesn’t that point indicate that sustainable farming is unable to compete with modern agriculture methods? After all, you are saying that the subsidies require a minum amount of production and that this discriminates against sustainable methods because those methods cannot match that output.

Interesting discussion. Looking forward to more of it.

Farming is not a nice business to be in these days. As others have described above, the subsidy regime is designed (possibly intentionally) to exclude sustainable businesses. The distribution chain is controlled entirely by large conglomerates (I believe it’s something like five or six companies controlling 80% of the US/EU bulk operations, and two or three supermarket chains controlling 80% of retail food sales in the UK). Those companies have enormous bargaining power, and the farmers are little better than slaves. No investor in his right mind would get involved in that. The only people doing it are the little guys who can drop into some niche market for high-quality stuff, and they succeed largely by bypassing the existing market structures and creating their own, usually in co-operation with others. The industrial farmers (and their distributors) are operating on such thin profit margins that it will only take a 20,30% hike in resource prices to bring the small guys to cost parity. Governments will no doubt try to subsidize their way out of it, but eventually pure market economics will bring sustainable farming into the mainstream.

I disagree with your use of terminology. “Sustainable” is the modern method. Chemical-fed is outdated, and only kept alive by the subsidies. Surely the fact that subsidies exist implies that it isn’t inherently profitable?

Pingdong was describing the subsidy regime in Taiwan, which offers a certain quota of fertilizers to farmers at a cut price. Obviously, that means a farmer who doesn’t use fertilizers is effectively missing out on free cash; thus the subsidy subtly skews the market to favour the fertilizer user. The subsidy is offered precisely because the fertilizers don’t actually create enough economic benefit to justify their use. Simplistically, imagine two farmers have a hectare, with the chemical guy achieving 5t and the organic guy 3.5t. If they both get a bulk rate of $15K/tonne, they end up with $70K and $49K respectively. However, fertilizer and pesticides for a field in poor condition would be $10-15K (on an open market), plus spraying costs, and we’ve ignored pollution externalities and the “depreciation” on the sprayed field, which will lose value every year. Ultimately, the bottom-line profit is more-or-less the same for both farmers … until the government rewards chemical guy for using chemicals. In practice, the organic guy will have other things going on (ducks, for example) and his rice will be of a higher quality, both leading to higher profits. I’m sure Fox’s study spells it out with less hand-waving - hope he can post a link here.

I’m not familiar with the exact subsidy structure esc1221 mentions, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

IMO the Green Revolution was the worst thing that happened to the third world. It’s true that their existing farming practices were inappropriate, but the application of brute-force technology simply swept that under the rug. Sure, you can do all sorts of stupid things and still get a yield … with enough fertilizers and irrigation. You can grow plants in the desert, or in glass jars. That’s not a solution - it’s an almighty great band-aid, the biggest kludge the world has ever seen. Sustainable methods are slowly making inroads into third-world countries, usually promoted by NFP organisations, and delivering massive yields. The sad thing is that these methods meet with resistance from the locals because they’ve been brainwashed into thinking that fertilizers and pesticides are essential. When they’re actually convinced to try the new technology, they’re blown away by the results and become evangelists for it.

Sure, if you apply it excessively. Intensive dairy operations are usually desperate to get rid of all their cow manure, so anyone who can take it and spread it on a field will go overboard. Fukuoka was applying about 5 tonnes/ha chicken poo. 50t/ha is a common application rate for fresh (unrotted) cow manure. The root of the problem is that there is too much factory-farming of animals going on, and not enough sustainable farms to use the manure.

Well sure … but again, just because they were doing it wrong doesn’t mean the solution is to just tip chemicals on it. The correct solution, surely, is to do it right. Organic farming is not merely farming without chemicals - it’s a completely different technique.

The exact biochemistry is poorly understood, but we know enough to make it work. The nodules form if the correct bacteria are present (inoculant for common food crops is available from any ag. supply house) and if the soil is nitrogen-deficient. If either of those conditions are not met, they won’t form. But you’re absolutely right that yield is critical, especially in poor countries; sustainable methods do address that requirement. Normally, that’s achieved by growing the legumes concurrently rather than as a separate rotation. In the US, lablab is often used for that purpose; Fukuoka in Japan was using clover with grains. It’s a bit like juggling plates, but it is possible to do.

With a stand of trees (typically but not necessarily Fabaceae) and other perennials, plus a small army of browsing animals, annual nitrogen-fixers can often be eliminated entirely; rotting mulch/manure provides all that’s required.

[quote]Since nobody was interested in what I think could make a difference in the future in terms of organic/sustainable farming I think a big factor is going to be…robotics. A robot will not get tired with the incessant labour required without the use of chemicals and pesticides to work the soil and reduce pest loads.
The robot could be powered by solar panels.[/quote]

I’ve occasionally wondered about that myself - birds, for example, could be scared away from ripening fruit by flying robots. I’m sceptical that they have broad application though. Can you imagine some illiterate Indian guy who’s only just figured out how to use his mobile phone going down to the robot shop to see what’s new? Most of what you probably have in mind could be achieved with animals. Pigs, for example, can be employed to do a little light plowing. Chickens can be trained to eat slugs. Animals are a lot cheaper, don’t need specialist fuels (or solar panels), they make more animals for free, and they’re often delicious.

It’s a long post by Finley and I’d like to answer as much of it as possible. I know my chances of actually convincing Finley are low, but I feel some perspective is needed.

[quote]‘Sustainable’ means a method of farming that improves rather than degrades the soil fertility. There are different technologies (mostly climate-specific) for achieving that result, and some of the techniques branded ‘organic’ are really just industrial agriculture without the chemicals. Undoubtedly, those methods aren’t very effective, and I suspect that’s why most people have the idea that organic farming is never going to work out.[/quote]Organic farming is one of the great scams of modern times. Probably placing right up there with climate change. What people are really buying from organic farms is a better product due to farmer care and time of ripeness. Anyone who has grown up in the Midwest knows how bad fruit can be.

[quote]1) Any exported mass is returned, in some form or other, to the land, and any unused mass (straw, roots, inedible leaves etc) is added back to the soil, possibly after being first used as animal feed. Practically, that means organic wastes (yes, including human manure) must be collected from consumers.[/quote]The plain fact is plants are mostly air and water. They’ve known this for roughly 150+ years now. What you are replacing is the chemicals that plants need such as fixed nitrogen, iron, calcium, phosphorous, potassium and magnesium. There might be some micro-nutrient problems but the does are counted in the ppb. Animal and human waste is not an absolute substitute for nitrogen in modern agriculture.

[quote]2) A rich and complex ecosystem is established and allowed to evolve with minimal human intervention. Typically that means a lot more perennial plants compared to annuals, including shrubs and trees. The function of this ecosystem is to provide a living mulch layer and a matrix of roots for soil stability. Nutrients for commercial crops are provided by the decomposing mulch layer; originally, these nutrients would have been “mined” by deep tree roots and/or by microbial symbiosis.[/quote]“Minimal human intervention” is a pipe dream because we all can’t live in the rainforest. Those plants need to be pruned and products need to be picked. It’s a great idea for a suburban family with an extra acre, but not for feeding the mega-metropoli of the future. That’s why you see the ever increasing mechanization of labor. Labor is scarce, expensive and hard to control. Hence the use of robots, ever increasing specialized machines and automation.

[quote]3) Animals are an integrated part of the farm, providing manure, performing manual labour (e.g., insect predation and soil management), and “recycling” agricultural waste. They may also provide meat, eggs, dairy, wool, etc.[/quote]They also spread diseases and can possibly foul the crop, just like they did with spinach in the US a few years back. It’s also hopelessly inefficient.

[quote]Mostly because they’re complex and difficult to manage. The main advantage of chemical-fed agriculture is that any idiot can do it. Just follow the numbers in the textbook and you’ll get a yield. Setting up an integrated farm with many different interconnected systems takes years to establish and fine-tune. You will receive not one single penny of government subsidy while you struggle to get it right. You may even get council officials coming around harassing you. There are very few people with the financial wherewithal (and the balls) to cope with that. Then there’s the negative pressure from vested interests. You’ll often hear people reciting received wisdom (such as the “fact” that only industrial agriculture will feed the world) as if it were proven truth, when it’s really just something they read in a Monsanto commercial featuring smiling brown faces and windmills.[/quote]There’s a lot to farming, not just any idiot can do it. The govt regulatory regime plays a huge role in it like you mentioned. Monsanto makes money for the simple fact that you will make more growing under their products than someone else’s they have a vested interest in seeing farmers succeed.

[quote]Depends what you mean by “yield”. In any other industry, people talk about ($in)/($out). In a farming context, people talk about tonnes/hectare, which is as meaningless as talking about the output of a fashion store in terms of weight. That measure is used because it’s guaranteed to make chemical-fed monoculture farming look good. Spray enough chemicals on 5 hectares and use expensive machines to manage it, and you’ll get 200 tonnes of onions or potatoes. Nobody ever mentions how much those chemicals and machines cost, where the fuel comes from, where the waste is disposed of, who pays for cleaning up the river pollution. Nobody mentions that 200 tonnes of onions represents a ridiculous market mismatch, especially if the farmer lives in some Indian village in the middle of nowhere. All things considered, he’ll make US$50/tonne bottom-line profit, if he’s lucky. That’s why nobody has 5-hectare farms any more.[/quote]Impoverished countries with small farms generally see those farms destroyed by World Food programs rather than cheap produce. You don’t just spray chemicals and get a crop. There are myriad factors like season, the crop type and futures market. Lack of infrastructure hurts small farmers tremendously. Countries with good road networks don’t have famines and people starving to death, yet for all the money thrown at Africa, that’s still what you get people starving because the food they need can’t be brought to them by truck.

[quote]Chemical-fed agriculture most especially doesn’t work in the tropics for very specific reasons:

  • In poor countries, there is not the expertise, money, or transport infrastructure required to supply machines, energy and chemical inputs to farms, nor to get large tonnages quickly and reliably to market.
  • Wind, monsoon rains, and sun can devastate unprotected soil (and crops). It has to be seen to be believed. It is not physically possible to farm western-style monocultures in that environment. The soil just washes away and turns to desert.
  • In most of Africa (for example) the soils are naturally infertile, with little in them that typical food plants can access. Local species are of course well adapted to this situation, as can be observed in untouched forests. Modern sustainable technologies attempt to emulate what happens in a natural forest.[/quote]There’s tons of expertise, money and transport; but there’s no regulatory regime to allow the business climate to flourish. Why should they when 75% of their budget comes from aid organizations and foreign govts. The 2nd point we don’t really know because the transportation network to make it work along with larger farms is just not there. For the 3rd part, Brazil had the same problem so they fixed the soil and are now a top producer of soybeans. They were also formerly large users of smuggled Monsanto Round-up soybeans.

[quote]Yes, potassium is abundant and we could manufacture ammonia using solar power, but the main issue is phosphorus. There is going to be no technological solution to rock phosphate runout, which most governments agree will happen in our lifetimes. Note also that the retail price difference between sustainably-managed farms and chemical-fed ones is mainly a marketing issue. The ‘organic’ stuff is usually cheaper to produce, and 60-90% of the shelf cost is transportation, storage, and business overhead anyway. A lot of the food you eat is, ultimately, derived from oil.

Here’s the point: why are we deploying all this technology when it isn’t even necessary? How did farmers - and rainforests - get by before the Haber-Bosch process? Why, for example, do we need to synthesize ammonia and then use machines to apply it, when we can simply plant leguminous crops, innoculate with the appropriate bacteria, and let nature take care of it? Also, it’s not just about NPK. Trying to micromanage all the required nutrients is painful. What we’re doing with agriculture is a bit like a thirsty guy extracting hydrogen and oxygen from the air and synthesizing some water, instead of just dipping a cup in the river.[/quote]Govts get so much wrong and kill so many people, how any intelligent person could take them or their predictions seriously is beyond me. What you said about phosphate, they said about oil and anyone paying attention knows how that has turned out. The difference between organic and non-organic is a label set by govt standards in such a way that what you think is organic is not really what you are buying but it says organic.

We need oil because people want to do more. Oil contains enormous amount of energy for the space it takes. Energy people are willing to pay a premium for. We got by before the Haber-Bosch process by slash and burn agriculture. The entire east coast of the US was farmland, now they have bears beavers and all types of other animals showing up because those farms were given up due to the land running out before the Haber-Bosch process was invented. Without Haber-Bosch, you’d have to kill 50% of the population. Leguminous crops don’t produce enough nitrogen and then who’s going to pick the crop. Labor is one your biggest headaches on a farm.

[quote]By not applying chemicals in the first place - so there is nothing to run off. Current research suggests that artificial chemicals are applied in concentrations about 50x higher than they need to be, simply because so much is lost. Heavy mulches (deposited by dense vegetation, not by human activity) perform double duty, acting as a slow-release nutrient source, and protecting the soil to keep topsoil loss to an absolute minimum. That’s why it’s called “sustainable”.[/quote]Farmers prize top soil. They have no inclination to see their soil wash away and take appropriate action to keep it from doing so. With the recent spate of academic fraud and the well known use of propaganda by environmental organizations I can’t see farmers being dumb enough to spray 50x more than needed when the newest tech allows them to do targeted spraying of just what they need due to the ability to do testing in real time.

I’ll go through the rest of the thread later. Mostly I just see the ghost of Malthus all over this.

Back in the day agriculture was “sustainable” because you just burnt a new field after the old one was exhausted or set it out for pasture. It made financial sense at the time, but doesn’t now. It’s one of the reasons Europe has been so deforested. Funny, but no one ever mentions that. :ponder:

Labor has become such a big problem that robotics and the increasing mechanization has taken place. For tree companies they now have trials for robots to move plants. The recent crackdown on illegal immigration in some states has helped hasten this.

[quote=“Fox”]Externalities to production, loss of other productive capacity, energy costs, etc. I think it is a very long list. Most of this research into sustainable farming focuses heavily on what is ignored in cost benefit analyses of productive land.[/quote]They said the same thing about internet companies in the 00’s and about green companies now. Unfortunately it’s not working. :wink:

Nice sane post, Petrichor :thumbsup:

[quote=“Finley”]Dunno. I’ll freely admit I’m not much of a businessman. What obstacles to commercialisation do you envisage?[/quote]This explains a lot right here. For my income needs, farming only makes sense in a few niche industries. I’ve ran the numbers again and again. In some cases it’s odd that they don’t rent out the land instead of farm it. The impediment to commercialization is dealing with multiple small producers. It’s so much easier and nicer to deal with one person and his ego rather than 10 people and their egos. Sort of like the saying, if it wasn’t for my customers this job would be great.

[quote=“Finley”]Sure. But part of the political landscape is a huge push for industrial-style agriculture in developing nations, which has failed again and again (for the technical reasons I mentioned), usually taking a lot of aid money with it.[/quote]You’re making the mistake of assuming that aid money is actually meant to develop the countries. It’s not. Just like UN peacekeepers aren’t meant to actually keep the peace or protect anybody. It’s just jobs for some well-connected bureaucrats from corrupt countries.

[quote=“Finley”]I agree, population growth is a big issue, and sooner or later it’s going to be self-limiting in the most unpleasant ways. The thing is, however much fertilizer you pour onto a crop, the physical yield limit is determined by sun and water. There’s NO way around that, and it’s dangerous to pretend that we can engineer our way around it.[/quote]We have, we are and we will. Norman Bourag showed us the way. Corn was the size of your thumb with about 5-10 kernels, now look at it. We still haven’t done much of anything with millet and sorghum yet. I’d not be surprised to see them go the way of salmon and lobster as food. At one time apprentice contracts limited how much salmon they had to eat and lobster was served to prisoners.

[quote=“Finley”]It works just fine for plenty of farmers, right now, today. It worked for millennia before there was such a thing as a farmer.[/quote]No, it didn’t. It was slash or burn and living on a flood plain and hoping the river worked with you. It was about being a poor peasant hoping you lived past the age of 5 so you could spend the rest of your life in hard toil for your masters. It was about famine, parasites, natural disasters and disease.

It’s a business and you need to drop the romantic view of how it used to be and how it should be. I think the one thing we can agree on is the truly despicable incentives and punishments of govt subsidies.

I don’t think people who seriously look at sustainable farming take an all or nothing approach. They try to integrate the best of all farming practices.

They take the point of view that there are ecological services that need to be costed properly for sustainability to occur in the farming sector. As I mentioned earlier, these might be quality water, biodiversity, pollination, sink capacity for pollutants etc.

In the study I was editing, the geographer modeled land use for the Jia-Nan Plain with consideration for such practical things as distance of farmland from water, distance from roads, slope, soil ph, rainfall, soil moisture as the drivers for land allocation among energy crops, rice, and green manure (planting some type of fertilizer crop e.g., legumes to be plowed back into fallow land). The goal was to see which combination of cropping produced maximum profit, how land usage would change and what actions policy makers could take.

They had the following model scenarios and had the model run 1000 times for:

  1. Maximizing profit based on cost minimization i.e., no consideration for ecological services
  2. Maximization of profit with consideration for ecological services described by weakened soil fertility due to no fallow practices.
  3. Maximization of profit with a mixture of fallow and non-fallow practices.
  4. Maximization of profit with fallow practices.

The results were all very close. The order from most productive to least productive was 4, 3, 2, 1 – the range was 3,719,731,000NT to 3,719,482,000.

The landscape change was quite dramatic for scenario 4. The difference wasn’t much in my opinion, but the results definitely favored sustainability practices as being more profitable.