[quote=“headhonchoII”]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’m not uninterested, just tardy.
Maybe this is just a quibble, but I see finley as more a tech-head or a science-head than a romantic. I can’t say who’s right or wrong–I know next to nothing about the issues being discussed in this thread–but finley seems to have a passion and a head for tech/science stuff, and I’ve gotten the impression that his gig involves something along those lines.
Page 2 replies:(because I honestly should be doing something productive, but I’m procrastinating 
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[quote=“Fox”]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.[/quote]You know I bet if I looked into solar companies’ prospectii I’d see that same thing as what Fox wrote. We alos know how studiously honest academics are. 
[quote=“Finley”]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.[/quote]The big business boogey man again. 
It’s a business that relies heavily on futures. Farmers like to lock down all their variables to constants. That’s why all that rice land is now growing corn in the US. You can also just not sell. You also have farmer associations that can adequately defend and fight for the profit margins of farmers. Farmers are not some poor underserved 2-3%. I’ve never seen a poor farmer in the US. If anything US inheritance laws, govt regulation and bad business decisions have a higher likelihood of destroying farms. [quote=“Finley”]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.[/quote]I’m just dumbfounded by this statement. It’s literally jaw dropping to me. I’m not ready to condemn 2 billion people to death. I think if you truly understood what you said in proper context, you’d be appalled at what you are believing. I’ll try to get to this later.
[quote=“Finley”]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.[/quote]This was the case about 20-30 years ago. What caused the change was the huge jump in fertilizer prices due to the spiking of natural gas and the need to properly dispose of it. Farmers with animals now have little to no difficulty getting rid of their manure. Often times they don;t have enough for all the demand. Interesting fact, Taisugar became the largest pig producer in Taiwan because they needed the poo to fertilize the sugar crop.
[quote=“Finley”]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.[/quote]No farmer is going to bet his family’s livelihood and his farm on this when he can go with a sure thing. If I described my business decisions as juggling plates to a bank or investors, how much money do you think they’d be willing to invest or lend?
[quote=“Fox”]…They had the following model scenarios and had the model run 1000 times for:
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…[/quote]
Maybe I don’t understand something. Are you saying the four different scenarios all fell within 0.01 percent of each other? That doesn’t seem possible.
[quote=“zender”][quote=“Fox”]…They had the following model scenarios and had the model run 1000 times for:
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…[/quote]
Maybe I don’t understand something. Are you saying the four different scenarios all fell within 0.01 percent of each other? That doesn’t seem possible.[/quote]
Incredible, but true, especially considering the dramatic change to the resultant distribution of agricultural land and pattern of usage.
Actually, the most interesting thing I’ve ever seen on sustainable agriculture is the ‘Accidental Revolution’ in Cuba. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba had to feed itself when it had no access to oil or fertilizer.
[quote]Page 2 replies:(because I honestly should be doing something productive, but I’m procrastinating )
Fox wrote:
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.
You know I bet if I looked into solar companies’ prospectii I’d see that same thing as what Fox wrote. We alos know how studiously honest academics are. [/quote]
The thing about academics and their studies (in climate science and sustainability studies) is that at least they are not just blowhards. They have a crack at quantifying and qualifying things for real. As a reader you can make your own analysis. They don’t say you have to agree with me, in fact quite the opposite they invite you to disprove their findings. That is the process. It is a lot better one than I’m right and you’re wrong, which seems to be your modus operandi.
Most of what you guys are talking about is 'way over my head, but that one got me curious, so I checked it out:
You’ll probably be able to find contrary opinion.
[quote]Most of what you guys are talking about is 'way over my head, but that one got me curious, so I checked it out:
. . . farmers generally do not trade in futures markets. . . .
–Richard E. Just and Rulon D. Pope, A Comprehensive Assessment of the Role of Risk in U.S. Agriculture (2002)[/quote]
Okami is right though. Farmers do often sell their crops at expected future prices. It is a way of securing pricing so they know at what level they must control costs. It is useful for farmers because they are commodity producers and commodities general encumber a lot of price volatility. They don’t usually trade, however, they are primary producers. They have to deliver or hold the stock. They don’t have the facilities to hold generally though sometimes they might try through wheat boards etc.
I daresay it is 
I think you’re confusing the mass-market view of “organic” (which, I agree, is often just a consumer scam) with sustainable farming, which I tried to define in the first post.
So are you. Are you suggesting we could synthesize an Okami given the right chemicals and a big vat - simpler and more efficiently than your parents did? I think I know what you’re saying, though: not much has actually been taken out. That’s true, but if you keep doing that, year in, year out, it all adds up. A very big number times a very small number is not zero.
No, it’s not a one-for-one replacement, and any farmer who thinks that it is would be in for a shock. It’s one component of a system of farming that eliminates the need for artificial nitrogen. The principle is simple: whatever you took out, put it back again. The main function of the organic mass returned to the soil is to maintain soil structure; the return of nutrients is a bonus.
I never suggested we should all live in the rainforest, merely that we should, and can, emulate the processes that happen in rainforests. People are doing that right now. I can’t stress this enough: nature does not need synthetic nutrients. You only have to go and look at a piece of abandoned land to see the amount of biomass that nature can deliver with no human assistance. Our species has this conceit that it’s us growing the food. In the old days people called it the rain god, or whatever; today we know there isn’t a rain god (at least I guess there isn’t), but it’s still nature itself that does the actual growing. All we do is decide what grows, and where.
I wasn’t necessarily rejecting automation, although sustainable methods do reduce the need for it, and I disagree that automation is always inherently better/cheaper than manual labour. My main objection to it is that high capital costs put it out of reach of small farmers; and without fuel, it’s just a heap of scrap metal. Unemployment is a massive issue worldwide. Would it really be so bad if more people were working in agriculture?
I won’t say that’s impossible, but it’s less likely to happen when animals are not kept in unsanitary conditions and if their movement is constrained appropriately (they can cause massive damage at certain times of the season, anyway).
How so? Details, please.
Absolutely. That’s why poor countries need sustainable farming. It’s inherently more suited to a ‘distributed’ model that’s less reliant on bulk transport and storage, and can be carried out profitably on small plots (a common scenario).
Again, there’s no point bemoaning the reality and waiting for improvements in governance that will never happen. Sustainable farming allows small-plot farmers to retake control of their own destiny without waiting for handouts from the UN or say-so from their own government. It’s a political solution as much as an environmental one.
Again, we’re not talking about what governments call “organic”; I do agree with you that it’s largely a sop to make the public think everything is fine (and to increase profit margins). We’re talking about a modern, productive system of farming with reduced labour inputs and little or no reliance on synthetic chemicals or energy sources. As for the reliability of gov’t predictions, well, it might all be bollocks, but the thing is: what if you’re wrong about that? Are you feeling lucky? I have much the same view about climate change. It might all be an enormous hoax, but given that fixing the underlying issues will deliver all sorts of benefits (IF done sensibly), I don’t see any problem with erring on the side of caution.
Land doesn’t “run out”. It is destroyed by human action. The entire point of sustainable farming is to prevent it “running out”. I don’t understand why you consider that a pointless endeavour. As Mark Twain apparently said, the thing about land is that they don’t make it any more. It is not disposable. We cannot afford to let land “run out”, because it’s a hell of a lot of trouble to get it back again.
That simply isn’t true. Again, I refer you to Fukuoka’s work, which reported verified grain yields 20-30% higher than chemical-fed farms in his neighbourhood. Bear in mind that he wasn’t some idealistic hippy: he was a trained microbiologist with decades of experience. Consider also that grains are one of the few crops that usually do give (marginally) better yields with industrial methods.
Because industrial farming involves an awful lot of wasted effort. One of the aims of sustainable farming is to eliminate pointless human operations; Fukuoka estimated his farm required less than 1000 man-days per hectare (that’s without any mechanisation beyond some human-powered grain-processing machines) and delivering two grain crops per year.
I think you miss the point - they spray more than the plants need because (1) they can’t spray at the frequent intervals that would enable a drastic reduction in quantity and (2) most of what gets sprayed just gets washed away, rather than taken up by the crop. It is, after all, highly soluble.
Malthus was right. He just couldn’t have predicted catalytic synthesis of ammonia, which enabled us to postpone the inevitable just a little bit longer. Our ultimate limit on crop production, as I said, is thermodynamics.
[quote=“Fox”][quote]Most of what you guys are talking about is 'way over my head, but that one got me curious, so I checked it out:
. . . farmers generally do not trade in futures markets. . . .
–Richard E. Just and Rulon D. Pope, A Comprehensive Assessment of the Role of Risk in U.S. Agriculture (2002)[/quote]
Okami is right though. Farmers do often sell their crops at expected future prices. It is a way of securing pricing so they know at what level they must control costs. It is useful for farmers because they are commodity producers and commodities general encumber a lot of price volatility. They don’t usually trade, however, they are primary producers. They have to deliver or hold the stock. They don’t have the facilities to hold generally though sometimes they might try through wheat boards etc.[/quote]
Ah, I misunderstood. Thanks, Fox. I apologize for that, Okami.
Thanks for that. I am, as it happens, a techhead (electronics and realtime software), and I’m not a luddite. Two projects I’m working on at the moment: a radio-networked system for monitoring water flow and storage on (sustainable) farms, and an unusual MPPT controller for PV solar. What I object to is technology being used thoughtlessly and with no real purpose. There’s an old truism: when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Agricultural “solutions” are often generated by companies or people with a very narrow view of how things work. Even I catch myself thinking, when faced with some particular farming problem, I wonder if I need a computer in there somewhere?
Fox’s result doesn’t surprise me in the least. I’ve done similar estimates (although far less rigorously - back-of-an-envelope stuff) and come to the same conclusion: industrial farming and sustainable farming produce about the same amount of food, given a specific $ and labour input. The difference is that sustainable farming has all sorts of positive externalities, while industrial farming has only negative ones. As for the debate about when oil or phosphorus will run out, we know they will become more scarce and more expensive. They are being consumed. If it doesn’t happen in our lifetimes, it will happen to our children or grandchildren.
btw, thanks for posting the Cuba stuff, which is of course living proof that this isn’t just pie-in-the-sky willy-waving.
The financial aspect is indeed a critical point, and I suspect it’s yet another reason why industrial agriculture doesn’t work well in third-world places. I mentioned earlier that vast tonnages of output over short harvest periods can’t be absorbed instantaneously by the market, and there must be reliable financial systems in place to mirror the physical storage of goods and to hedge against bad harvests etc. The ‘sustainable’ answer to all that involves a combination of farm management (using different varieties and planting times to spread the harvest time) and less emphasis on food as a commodity; personally, I envisage a future food distribution chain where even small farms participate in a virtual market, allowing existing and (estimated) future stock to be traded directly between consumers (or storage brokers) and producers, with a much-improved transport system permitting rapid low-cost delivery of smallish quantities over wide areas. And I guess there we’re talking about HH’s robots again, except possibly not in the form he envisaged.
Neither am I, but I believe that’s precisely what Borlaug did (unintentionally, of course). He perhaps imagined that increased food output would result in higher incomes, which would in turn cover the high financial and environmental costs of his methods. Or he may not have understood how expensive, inappropriate, and damaging it might be to promote chemical-fed farming. Either way, it didn’t work out (and you’re surely not going to assert that it did?). Imagine if the knowledge we have now about sustainable farming and tropical soils (none of which was mainstream knowledge at the time) had been available to him. Africa might now be one of the most prosperous continents on the planet, instead of a deforested, polluted, unhappy shithole.
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.[/quote]
I think it has to do more with its easier for beaucracy to subsidize 1 large-scale industrial farm than it is to subsidize 5-10-20-100 small scale sustainable operations.
Well, that’s was a bit disappointing. I thought we had a good lively debate going on there, then it all just stopped. While I’m happy to admit that ‘sustainable’ isn’t going to happen with the (current) 2% or so of the population involved in farming, and that subsidies will maintain the status quo a while longer, I still haven’t seen a solid argument that sustainable agriculture is bullshit; that is, that it’s no more sustainable than the artificially-fuelled variety. Nor have I seen any proof that the existing system will not become impractically expensive within - at the outside - a couple of hundred years, thus forcing our descendants to attempt sustainable systems on devastated land. We’ve also got Fox’s report, which comes to the (quite common) conclusion that chemical agriculture is neither more nor less effective than the better sustainable systems; it’s just a whole load of extra work and expenditure for no obvious benefit.
Nobody going to take another shot?
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.[/quote]
I think it has to do more with its easier for beaucracy to subsidize 1 large-scale industrial farm than it is to subsidize 5-10-20-100 small scale sustainable operations.[/quote]
small farmers don’t have a large enough lobbying power. subsidies are retarded in the first place.
[quote=“finley”]Well, that’s was a bit disappointing. I thought we had a good lively debate going on there, then it all just stopped. While I’m happy to admit that ‘sustainable’ isn’t going to happen with the (current) 2% or so of the population involved in farming, and that subsidies will maintain the status quo a while longer, I still haven’t seen a solid argument that sustainable agriculture is bullshit; that is, that it’s no more sustainable than the artificially-fuelled variety. Nor have I seen any proof that the existing system will not become impractically expensive within - at the outside - a couple of hundred years, thus forcing our descendants to attempt sustainable systems on devastated land. We’ve also got Fox’s report, which comes to the (quite common) conclusion that chemical agriculture is neither more nor less effective than the better sustainable systems; it’s just a whole load of extra work and expenditure for no obvious benefit.
Nobody going to take another shot?[/quote]
In my Community Planning grad school days, the idea of sustainable development (anything really including agriculture) was that you had to strike a balance between 3 points. Economy, Environment, and Equity (social justice).
Essentially all 3 of these were touched on in some form or another in this thread. It was pretty clear in school that even academics haven’t come close to understanding this dynamic in its entirety, and many have looked at agriculture specifically. To me, sustainable agriculture is just like most other sustainable movements (solar energy, green roof, etc). Its only in the infancy stages. Its mostly an idea with very few tangible results. The minor economic share they have is not anywhere near cost effective levels yet (I.E. economies of scale).
The ideas of sustainability haven’t been around long enough to really measure environmental impact. Heck, we can’t even really measure environmental impact of more established practices with any agreeable certainty. You have find studies that support just about any side of this argument. And in my experience, none hold water.
And simply, with social justice, the political will is just not there.
Those things are not static, though. Since it’s virtually impossible to predict any one of them with any certainty 30 or 50 years into the future, it’s best to design for the worst-case scenario. That’s what you’d do if you were building a bridge, and I don’t understand why anything different is acceptable in agricultural planning.
I’d also say that the whole point of sustainable design is that we can have our cake and eat it too. I realise that traditional planning assumes a zero-sum tradeoff between economy and environment, but that flies in the face of everyday experience: the places that are most careless with their environment might derive transient benefits but ultimately end up in poverty. All economic benefit derives ultimately from the environment; technology simply channels those benefits into preferred places (or wastes them, or hampers their normal functioning). Sustainable design aims to maximise the use of every available ecosystem service so that the amount of artificial effort is minimized.
That’s perfectly true, but it’s not an argument for just maintaining the status quo, even though it’s often used as such. Fukuoka demolishes it pretty thoroughly in his books, from both western (formal logic) and eastern (philosophical) points of view. His basic point is that it isn’t necessary to ‘understand’ something in its detailed entirety in order to use it, and it seems likely that it’s beyond human capability anyway. It’s enough to observe that it works and has no adverse effects (or works better than some other option, and has fewer adverse effects). in fact, all proponents of sustainability emphasize observation and optimisation for local conditions. Unfortunately, that means there is no ‘farming by numbers’ formulation. As I mentioned, that’s probably one reason for the slow uptake.
Yes, solar is a good comparison. The technology is actually very mature. Its deployment is hampered because it is forced to fit into a marketing model and technical architecture optimized for point sources and continuous output (gigawatt-scale power stations), which negates many of its advantages. We’ve also become used to wasting energy on a massive scale; if the price structure of energy penalised such behaviour, it would quickly stop, with no actual loss of economic benefit. Agriculture is exactly the same. The existing system is propped up by government subsidy, by the marketing requirements of big buyers, and by general structural inertia. The solution, in both cases, is for smaller entities to take the initiative and bypass existing strictures. That will happen slowly because (at the moment) there are no large investors willing to take that risk. It’s all small-scale private equity.
It’s been around for about 40 years, and has been tested and studied quite extensively all over the world. How long are we supposed to wait? There are degrees of sustainable; the ideal is zero impact on the environment, but that isn’t physically possible. Thermodynamics says so. However, if system A produces the same output as system B, and system A has fewer non-renewable inputs and fewer undesirable outputs than system B, it’s pretty obvious that system A is more sustainable and has no economic downside. In practice, it’s usually quite easy to make that kind of assessment with a reasonable level of confidence. The big studies tend to trip over their own shoelaces by comparing ALL sustainable farms with ALL chemical-fed farms, which introduces so much uncertainty that the result is useless.
True, but again, that’s no reason for doing nothing. If we relied on governments to make things happen, we’d still be bashing each other over the head with sticks and eating boiled grass for lunch. Probably not even boiled.
Interesting article on the possibilities with sustainable agriculture in Africa here: nature.com/news/african-agri … or-1.10311
Yes, interesting, thanks petrichor … but a bit depressing. Pushing for chemical fertilisers in Africa is a recipe for disaster - I’m appalled that public money is being spent on promoting it, and that there are “experts” strutting around telling people that sustainable methods are a waste of time.
Tropical soils don’t work like they do in temperate climates; it’s not just that they lack nutrients, they also (usually) have a low CEC (cation exchange capacity) which basically means nothing gets held and made accessible to plants. More importantly, extreme climate effects such as strong sun and rain just washes everything away, so you’re basically left with desert. Yes, of course you can slosh chemicals on it and get a yield, but you can do that in a glass vat too. That’s not agriculture, it’s hydroponics.
If you look at the lush vegetation in that photo, the reason it’s there is because there is a thick humus layer on the soil which prevents the soil from drying out or becoming waterlogged and acts as a slow nutrient-release system. The multilayered canopy protects plants at lower levels from high solar irradiance. Agroforestry is not some new-fangled hippy invention - there is basically no other way to grow things in the tropics. I know this because I’ve been experimenting with it. On one of my test plots, I have a mixed crop of legumes and similar fragile annuals. On a shaded ridge, and on an area under a tree dripline, they’re doing just great. On open ground, nothing survives. It either gets baked, or pummelled by rain. The obsession with per-hectare yields is both misplaced (since bare-field monoculture isn’t physically possible) and irrelevant: many African countries have low population density.
I can’t help wondering if the people running the schemes mentioned in the article have any practical experience with what they’re attempting, or whether they’re just random do-gooders who heard that you can replace ammonium nitrate with legumes. For example, the poor nitrogen-fixing performance observed is most likely because the unprotected, abused soils are sterile - there are no natural rhizobium. The normal way around this is to use an inoculant, but the article doesn’t mention if that was done or not. Likewise, the poor germination performance in the nursery suggests they’re using the wrong species and should use something else - perhaps a local landrace. Personally, I’ve had poor results with sesbania (a favourite in the sustainable movement) but very good results with local peas, beans and acacia. Fabaceae is a huge family. There are lots of options. The trick is to find something that works in your target climate, and THEN promote it. Fortunately, there are some organisations out there who are doing this very successfully.