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  CORN THREAD, COMIN THROUGH This is a thread about human ecology and the political calculus behind feeding 7 billion people. Human ecology and agroecology are broad interdisciplinary fields that are governed and shaped by economics and politics as much as any other. I studied human anthropology and ecology in undergraduate and am (slowly) finishing up an environmental health science master's degree.  A Few Ground Rules- Please no Malthusian hand-wringing. - Please no arguing about GMOs, the Monsanto thread is there for that  - My posts at least are going to deal with resource cycling and not specifically nutrition. Mentions of “calories” are pretty abstract at an ecological level and tend to relate to sufficiency and efficiency rather than completeness or organism-level health. There's threads up in YLLS if you're concerned about UR GAYNS, but distribution discussions as well as standard of living issues are absolutely on point. I'll start off with some knowledge about basic ecology and soil science, to skip to the Debatable and Discussable, scroll down to the glitter text below the bigger images. - - -  A Brief Primer on Energy and EcosystemsThe primary and original source of energy available to living things on the planet is solar radiation. There's some organisms that have eked out a niche on the ocean floor around geothermal vents, but for our purposes that's pretty much off the table because we aren't big swimmers. A ballpark estimate of about 7x1017 kilocalories of solar energy are captured in plant matter (biomass) every year. A human being needs to secure about 700,000 of those to survive. On a practical timeline, energy flows through organisms on the planet through a series of consumption and conversion loosely referred to as trophic levels. What you learn about in elementary school as the food chain is a simplification of this concept.  Roughly speaking, the available energy decreases by an order of magnitude between each level. This also tends to naturally balance the quantity of organisms that exist at each level. For the example in the graphic, assuming each organism has comparable energy needs, to support one eagle it needs to be able to prey upon ten snakes, which in turn each need to prey upon ten rabbits, which in turn each need to graze or munch on a certain area of plant life. In a natural ecosystem, this all happens on a pretty straightforward basis: plants take resources out of the soil, organisms eat plants, they in turn get eaten, poop, die and return the resources sequestered in their bodies to the soil. Rinse, repeat, self-regulate. Enter human beings. The cool and terrifying thing about humans is that we have developed ways to manipulate the flow of these resources in huge quantities, and in a timeframe relevant to a human lifespan. Agriculture is basically a turbo-charged artificial ecosystem put in place for the purpose of keeping the top trophic level, us, alive and kicking. For most of human history the concentration and lifespan of settled people has been so low that we could essentially move from ecosystem to ecosystem as necessary, depleting the resources available in the local soil and moving on. When you hear “slash and burn” agriculture, this is the phenomenon in a modern context. However, modern urbanized populations can't up sticks and move whenever a field acidifies, desertifies, or gully erodes into the nearest river. So, for the last two thousand years or so, we've come up with increasingly clever ways to maintain existing arable land against the pressures of a natural system that really, REALLY wants to balance itself back to normal.  This clever balance starts with the substrate of the planet, the soil on which we walk, build, and plant crops. Farms are fundamentally dependent on their soil. - - -  Soil Ecology and Chemistry BasicsSoil itself is comprised of three types of inorganic particles differentiated by size:
The ratio of these particles within the soil plays a huge role in how water and other resources flow into and through the dirt, but for our purposes the only real important thing to remember is that a good soil is a blend of all three of these and a healthy balance of organic matter. You might remember from basic chemistry classes that living things are composed primarily of six elements, CHNOPS. Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorus, and Sulfur. For the purposes of farming, Sulfur is replaced by Potassium, elemental symbol K. You can't have plants without these things, and a food crop won't grow without a correct ratio of these resources available from the environment! Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Carbon – these are taken up by the plant both from the soil in the form of water (H2O) or dissolved organic matter, and via photosynthetic processes in the form of CO2, the ol' devil gas carbon dioxide. These are relatively abundant materials. The Big 3 of agriculture are NPK:    Nitrogen – Nitrogen is available to a plant from the soil, but it's technically available from the air as well. In the soil, it is contained within some organic matter that is broken down and released via decay processes as well as through erosion of minerals. It can also be deposited via rain or dust. The principally important thing about Nitrogen is this: you can also plant crops (like soybeans, clover, peanuts, other legumes) to fix atmospheric Nitrogen into the soil via bacterial activity, replenishing it to be available to other crops. Phosphorus – Phosphorus is available to the plant via the soil. It is dissolved from minerals, decayed into a usable form from dead organic material, and can be deposited via rain or dust. Potassium – Potassium is available to the plant via the soil, in a similar fashion to phosphorus via decay, dissolved minerals or deposition. Other characteristics of the soil including pH (how acidic it is), trace mineral pollution, and elevation / slope also play a role in determining just how much food we can yank out of a particular patch of ground.  Soil is also an ecosystem unto itself. It provides a habitat for billions of bacteria, nematodes (holy poo poo, the nematodes), arthropods, annelids, and ultimately even some small macrofauna species. Intensive farming wrecks the poo poo out of the “normal” soil ecosystem in a given environment, and the most productive soils tend to have a very healthy local ecosystem. Biodiversity and productivity are linked, and to a certain degree, the relationship flows both ways. A productive soil helps foster a diverse community of microbes and wee beasties by providing resources and living space in abundance. Various crops require various levels of nutrients and biodiversity support in the soil itself. The critical issue in a global economy with static growing regions is this: When you plant, grow, and then harvest a crop, you are removing those nutrients from the soil to put them into people. In the case of food crops in a distributed economy, you are also removing them from the local ecosystem. In order to then maintain the productivity of the soil, those nutrients must be replenished. The fundamental trick that humans have worked out over the last several millennia has been how to do this, mainly by subsidizing and augmenting natural processes with artificial ones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROrpKx3aIjA This is how we do that. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the development of incredibly advanced extractive techniques enabled us to bypass the planet's resource cycling and start providing NPK directly to crops in tremendous quantities. An enterprising German named Fritz Haber developed a way to synthesize ammonia (NH3) from atmospheric hydrogen and nitrogen in a cataclysmic, crazily energy intensive process that basically allowed us to create huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizer. In one of my favorite environmental health articles ever just for this statistic, 80% of nitrogen found in human bodies today was originally made available by the Haber process. That explosion is a building full of ammonium nitrate in Texas cooking the gently caress off in one go. We mine phosphorus-containing minerals out of enormous, open-pit mines, process the heavy metals out of the naturally occurring deposits (and if lucky dispose of them properly), and ship/train/truck that rock around the planet to sprinkle on food crops. Used to be you could burn down hardwood forests to create potash, the primary source of potassium fertilizer, but we frown on that practice nowadays and so stick to traditional shaft-mining of ancient marine deposits of potassium chloride buried under eons of geological activity. We make all of this possible by burning fossil fuels to provide the energy to sustain enormous mining, shipping, spraying, and in the case of nitrogen hellfire-creating, industries that exist solely to furnish farmland with nutrients. The exchange involves a lot of steps but basically it boils down to how we turn coal, oil and natural gas into food.  You do! The most important reason is "because you need to eat". Just like people 80 years ago needed to eat:  The dust bowl! Interplay of soil ecology, human greed, and weather. Starved the U.S. for the better part of ten years. What's in the news lately?  Venezuelan unrest has been predicated on, among other things, food shortages and chronic lack of availability of food. A quick Google pops up lots of articles opining on the role the global food supply plays in government stability around the globe.  Mr. Putin here is upset about (among a zillion other things) the global energy market, which directly supports our ability to mechanize and maintain our farming practices. Also recall that, right before the Arab Spring in 2010, Russia's wheat harvest literally went up in smoke as wildfires ravaged the breadbasket of the country. You probably don't remember this, but:  The Loess Plateau, an enormous, once incredibly fertile region of China that was intensively and irresponsibly farmed for centuries and basically energy-funded the development of early Chinese civilization. In the process the entire area (about 650,000 square kilometers, a mind bogglingly large expanse of arable land) was essentially turned into a desert by human hands. A totally cool dude named John Liu undertook a pioneering attempt to stop local Chinese from cultivating the land for a long enough period to reintroduce a stable ecosystem on a large scale. Surprise surprise, after the interventions, the land could still produce enough edible food to support the local population as well as maintain profitable food export activity. All it took was the government's willingness to support farmers while they learned new techniques and changed their approach to their trade. anonumos posted:Corn. Absolutely ridiculous if we weren't talking about the crop that wins you votes for senate and president in this ridiculous country. Abroad, the global economics of food distribution result in neoliberal landgrabs and desperate monoculture conducted by poor farmers in order to survive. In the absence of education about sustainable practice, this leads into a spiral of devastated soil ecology and reduced yields, i.e., mini-Loess Plateaus cropping up around the world. - - - Some Things To Talk About In This Thread: - Standards of living: China currently faces the rise of a middle class the size of the population of the United States, and what do they want? MEAT. Recall that you lose 90% of the available food energy to go from a plant to a cow or a pig. - Distribution issues: the economics of food are bottlenecked at the distributor leg of the supply chain. You go from thousands of producers to millions of consumers through a tightly-controlled oligopoly of shipping and distributing companies. lovely market forces and good ol' rear end in a top hat capitalism account for an enormous amount of spoilage: 141 trillion calories' worth in the U.S. alone in 2010. If we could optimize a system of distribution to return even 50% of that spoilage to circulation, we could feed another 100 million people. - "Sustainability": This is the buzziest buzzword kicking around since "green", and is really hard to pin down what it means in different contexts. For soil resource cultivation, you technically can't really achieve total "sustainability" because the trophic leap from photosynthesis to harvesting tools is just too great. Usually the goal with farming is to "increase sustainability" or make things "more sustainable". - Environmental issues: The result of chemical intensive agriculture is a lot of runoff and erosion as the soil structure is disrupted and refreshed with what's basically nitrogen and phosphorus powders. This can lead to harmful algal blooms (HABs), displacement of huge quantities of soil, and desertification. - Water: I deliberately left out water from a lot of consideration because it is frequently just "assumed" that a crop will have sufficient water to grow. These days that's a pretty stupid assumption. Suggested Reading: Would You Like To Know More? Cribbed straight from the D&D book thread:
I'm studying this stuff because I think it's awesome that even the adoption of simple farming practices (for example, not plowing or tilling ever) can reduce reliance on chemical inputs and actually increase yields in traditional large farm settings. I will probably be writing my thesis on phosphorus cycling and the impending crisis of dwindling mineral phosphate reserves. The challenge of agroecology goes hand in hand with that of climate change, the surefire thing that's going to kill us all in the next hundred years.
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Dec 19, 2014 21:12
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Epitope posted:"Sustainable" means stationary phase. We know what's next The next big step we would need to take terrestrially would be "Green Revolution" equivalent in reclamation technology. Soil resources never leave the overall planetary system, and the only serious sequestration concern is how many living organisms there are at any given time. Provided we can shift to an energy source (cough, nuclear, cough) that can subsidize the energy needs of reclamation activities without utterly loving the atmosphere, the potential is out there. But blah blah humans are short sighted and greedy blah blah
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Dec 19, 2014 21:57
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The phenomenon by which an increased standard of living exponentially increases energy demand in the form of higher order foodstuffs is balanced quite nicely by plummeting birthrates in developing countries. There's an inverse correlation between the wealth or GDI of a population and birthrate, mainly as women can A) afford to control their own reproduction and B) exist within a system of laws that supports the practice of birth control and provides economically feasible alternatives to makin' babies.
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Dec 19, 2014 22:18
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computer parts and GhostofJohnMuir you're both correct: computer parts is talking about metabolically, how much energy is required to grow a chicken full stop, and relative to the amount of energy required to grow an equivalent amount of cows his math checks out. GoJM is approaching it looking at the... I guess the part of the animal we're "after" in that regard. Because a chicken is far from all protein, obviously there's fat and skin and feathers etc. and protein is the least calorie-dense part of the animal. This where my caveat in the OP comes sort of sneaking in, people don't just eat straight-up chicken protein. The animal grows how it grows and to really efficiently utilize the first trophic level calories you'd want to eat every goddamn bit of that bird. It is pretty well understood that of factory-farmed domestic animals, chickens are the way to go. They also eat drat near everything, bugs, grains, grasses, weeds. In that way they are part of a potential strong farm ecosystem as well if they are left to free-range feed. Gunshow Poophole fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Dec 20, 2014 |
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Dec 20, 2014 03:45
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^ beaten while posting, I can only imagine the reaction to "bug slime"GhostofJohnMuir posted:Ah, ok if we're going by what percentage is edible what I'm reading up to 80% of the cricket is edible as opposed to 55% for chicken and pigs and 40% for cattle, which don't seem like minor differences to me. I mean, again I don't think this necessarily means that insect eating is the way to go, but these seem like some pretty significant gains if you shifted to crickets from any of the traditional animals, the type that can't just be brushed off with "they're icky". Absolutely agreed. The challenge (that I'm sure some brilliant entrepreneurs would innovate rapidly if really pressed) would be to mechanize and scale up cricket production in the way that we've done it with chickens and cows. At first blush the advantage of macrofauna protein sources seems to me, clearly not an industrial engineer, to be that separation of edible from inedible Bits is somewhat straightforward. Cricket exoskeleton / chitinous bits are teensy and somewhat noxious even in small amounts, I would guess there would be a chemical process involved and everything would get reduced to a paste anyway.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:10
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Ardennes posted:Americans may eat way too much meat, but that isn't necessarily the same thing as protein. If anything the key would be to produce that protein is a more sustainable and less intensive way. If you want to talk about the economics of food here please do. I don't know nearly enough about that particular subject which is why I mainly alluded to neoliberal monoculture encouragement etc. rather than tried to do a full breakdown.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:31
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I hope you didn't interpret my remarks on birth rate v. energy consumption to be anything other than statistical, ghost of Mussolini, I didn't mean to imply that women are only good for popping out babies, just that the data on maintaining the population and general dietary needs bears that correlation out.
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Dec 21, 2014 06:35
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:It's energy intensive, and the equipment is a lot more expensive. Hydroponic food costs a good 3 or so times or more what the regular stuff does. That said, if something came along to make regular food cost more then it would look increasingly viable to farmers. This, hydroponic farming takes the problems that I detailed in the OP and actually makes them worse (for the most part). You've got dirt out there, why not utilize it? At the very least, soil is slowly creating more of itself and reclaiming small portions of resources from the environment via deposition effects. The energy problem could be addressed via non-fossil-fuel means, but for the foreseeable future scaling it up to staple farming is physically very challenging. echinopsis posted:Whole pasture You joke, but this is going to be an integral part of how we address near-term issues. The overarching idea of "agroecology" is to once again find a niche for the human organism in a broader ecological context. There's more farms doing this these days, I think an important example of which is Veta La Palma in Spain. You essentially foster an ecosystem that you can disturb minimally to harvest your food crop (in their case it's fish) and it doesn't even blink because the biodiversity and density of resources remain balanced. Theoretically you can also incorporate other foods into the ecosystem and harvest some of them as well. Of course, the annual fish harvest is only about 1500 tons off of 8000 acres of aquaculture. For reference a similar area of corn field would probably give you something to the tune of 37,000 tons of grain.
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Dec 22, 2014 17:58
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rudatron posted:Economic alternatives have to be developed first before they can be introduces, and that takes time and money. Simply assuming that an 'incentive' necessitates a 'solution' is to assume that instantaneous development and infinite work capacity. Research grants need to be pushed to solve this problem now. If they aren't ready in time, a lot of people are doing to die. Yup, and the "economic alternatives will become viable as traditional practices become more expensive" is the neoliberal version of "technology will provide a solution" or "science will save the day".
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Dec 22, 2014 18:53
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Wait what? The problem isn't that natural gas is sort of a good source of the most abundant element in the universe, the problem is that it takes a shitload of heat and pressure (which needs to be provided by power plants or other sources of energy) to turn Nitrogen into a bioavailable form. You get the nitrogen from air, hydrogens can come from literally any fossil fuel. Current market prices define natural gas as the cheapest source but ain't nothing stopping LPGs from becoming that.
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Dec 22, 2014 20:11
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Yeah, but it's not like it's a mystery on how to use other sources of energy, or other feed stocks (Electrolized water, for example.) The idea that as fuels decline we're going to suddenly find ourselves with out fertilizer is a pretty common one, and it doesn't make any more sense than the sort of people that think one day oil is just going to disappear (I wish it would.) Ammonia fertilizer no, but we're not doomsaying about that element. Nitrogen is freely available in the atmosphere and can be fixed by ecological processes. Phosphorus is the problem. So is potassium, although chloride salts of that are common as heck.
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Dec 23, 2014 00:34
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Rent-A-Cop posted:We already produce more than enough food for the entire population of Earth and there's enough nuclear material lying around to keep that expenditure going until the sun goes out. Yes in la la land where anybody anywhere wants nuclear power infrastructure constructed. Theoretical energy isn't a problem. Actual energy sure as gently caress is, because we won't be actually using nuclear power to generate it. In fact we've gone backwards in that regard. This is more appropriate for the energy generation thread but the issues are so closely intertwined it's impossible to address one outside the context of the other.
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Dec 23, 2014 00:50
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Rent-A-Cop posted:We could probably burn coal until the ice caps melt and drown us all. Nobody is running out of poo poo to turn into electricity any time soon. Uh yeah, but the solution can be reached without either negative result so that's the point I'm driving at. The energy "problem" pertains not only to being able to energy fund agriculture, but also to not loving up the context in which we conduct said agriculture. Better, even, is that we can, with enough good messaging and education, tie the two issues together quite closely. It's hard to sell climate change as a concept (at least to Idiots I guess ) but it's much easier to sell potential starvation
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Dec 23, 2014 01:10
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blowfish posted:...and thus starts the My only concern would be that the "land sparing" approach creates additional barriers to scaling up which will compound with the energy challenge which is already staring us pretty bleakly in the face. I'm of the (not particularly scholarly, at this point anyway) opinion that we have the capability to create and foster productive human-feeding ecosystems that maintain the diversity and... I guess safety of the agricultural areas we have available. Obviously this is to be held in balance because deforestation sucks and we've already lost so much biodiversity via human activity anyway. Scorchie posted:I disagree on the distribution problem. It was shown by Amartaya Sen in "Poverty and Famines, 1981" that major food crisises around the world where driven by a decline in food access not food availability. This is understood as an inability for consumers to buy/grow their food. Causes are usually a lack of input(drought, lack of fertilizer, etc) in agricultural systems or a drop in purchasing power due to economic issues. I'm confused by this post, the guy you respond to says that supply isn't really an issue (it's not, seriously, we have calories coming out our ears... of corn), you disagree, and then you say that some author supports the idea that supply isn't an issue? I think it's mainly semantics, "distribution" in the sense that I'm using it encompasses all factors that prevent captured calories from reaching people. As... I dunno, idealistic as that sounds. Food is an economic commodity as well as a means of energy capture and utilization. An "inability for consumers to buy/grow their food" means the same, to me, as having a distribution problem. Because the primary issue is not the amount of energy captured by food crops being grown.
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Dec 23, 2014 18:35
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, things like vertical farming would be the logical end point for land sparing.
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^  this tooScorchie posted:people starve because they can't afford food, not because there is no food available to them. All right I understand where I guess the two terms... draw the line? along the route of taking energy out of the ground and putting it into people, but these two clauses mean the same thing. If you cannot afford food, it is not available to you. It just seems an arbitrary distinction but I can see where in a policy context, the terms become more meaningful. And also this is what I was hoping to get out of this thread, so thanks for the knowledge!
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Dec 23, 2014 22:12
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^^Fish of hemp posted:Could rodents be used as source of meat? I mean rats, guinea pigs, rabbits and so fort. I'd think that a hare doesn't need as much food as a cow and could be slaughtered earlier. Sure could, although rabbits are not ideal in this regard, they tend to graze pretty heavily (I've heard between 80-100 rabbits eat as much as one cow, big round numbers that's about 350 versus 500 pounds of boneless meat) and also carry some fun human pathogens (Leptospira and tularemia bugs). However, bunnies DO mature quite quickly, so there could be a return on total input given multiple slaughter seasons, I just haven't bothered with the math. Bunnies are picky and really really like to die for no reason, as well. I don't know about guinea pigs other than that they're delicious. After some quick googling, an interesting aspect of rabbit cultivation is their practice of coprophagy, they eat their own poops. As an analogue to ruminant multiple-stomach processing I'm not sure if there are any advantages to this, but it could very well encourage better NPK return to pasturage they're raised on. In general meat-talk kind of misses the forest for the trees, there's a 10:1 conversion factor to get calories into meatform regardless, and that's going to be the fundamental problem from an ecological perspective. Even assuming that you're raising animals on otherwise utterly-worthless land, it's a LOT of energy to put in and that's not counting the mechanical requirements of slaughter techniques. To speculate wildly for a bit, in addition to developing novel resource capture and remediation techniques, there's going to need to be some Meat Moderation public health campaigns in developing countries that make the anti-smoking efforts of the last 40 years look like a child's lemonade stand advertisement.
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Jan 20, 2015 17:10
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It becomes a time scale issue as well, much like deforestation: it takes decades and generations of plants to "create" good soil, one wrong rainstorm can destroy it.
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Jan 20, 2015 17:24
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:I agree that less meat eating would be a good end goal, but there's still a pretty big place for grazing. I mean, there's a lot of grazing in west Texas, and a massive deer population on top of that. Obviously ever environment is different, but grazing animals are a natural part of a lot of environments, and that should be taken into account. Totally agree, I am thinking more along the lines of I guess factory meat-eating and its institutions as they exist today. And also what Slurpee here is bringing up. ToxicSlurpee posted:
Yeah this is where I'm heading with the public health interventions. Undoing the "status" of beef specifically, and to a lesser extent meat-eating generally, as a wealth signifier is going to be incredibly challenging. It's also where this field starts to go interdisciplinary with a quickness. Looking for literature on meat eating and social history of the phenomenon is frustrating, because for whatever reason this has been a subject that loonies cotton to EN MASSE. It's like vaccines except bigger.
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Jan 20, 2015 18:19
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Shbobdb posted:Way not to read the previous paragraph and way not to understand context. Since you can't seem to handle any ambiguity in the written word, I'll help. The "it" refers not to "spoilage" but to "flavor". It'd be better if you could construct your sentences appropriately because that paragraph break should be used there specifically to detach the context from that of the previous graph, and there is no other way to read what you wrote. While we're not being tremendous assholes, though, I agree that the public health aspect (what you're calling marketing because that's pretty much what it is) will be formidable. Beef and Milk have powerful lobbies specifically in the United States, but I don't think "yuppies" would be an appropriate, shrinking, target. Stereotypically those people probably are already vaguely aware of the issue, and the challenge is not to arrest the behavior of those engaged in it, but to prevent that behavior from becoming established in the first place.
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Jan 22, 2015 15:02
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Peven Stan posted:Don't generalize white Americans preference for beef onto a global population. Pork is such a big deal in China that the government has a strategic pork reserve to smooth out shocks in supply. Won't need to generalize, the beef industry will project tastes onto people for us. Pork is a big deal in China because it's a big place. and for decades pork was basically and traditionally the only meat available cuz of lack of space to graze ruminants, but as it continues to westernize and import feed grains you'll see others take off.
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Jan 23, 2015 04:22
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blowfish posted:A billion people eating more pork is less bad than a billion people eating more beef, so that's alright. Yeah and after some quick googling, USDA has some predictions and data saying that chicken consumption is actually picking up faster'n beef is in China. It'd be interesting if the phenomenon went in reverse, even pork is more efficient per pound of feed than beef is.
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Jan 23, 2015 20:24
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Bit of a necro for my own thread to cross post an article from the ol' Climate Change thread: The current state of California agriculture is basically hosed and it's tied directly to the energy economy of large scale ecosystems. A nice object lesson that I'm sure zero people will internalize and go forward to utilize. Freshwater usage in the country is split about 40/40/20 between power generation, irrigation, and public use respectively. The touted solution of large-scale desalination plants buttressing public water systems in California only shifts the burden of that usage towards power generation: boiling or filtering salt out of water takes a lot of electricity and creates a lot of waste. Without commensurately enormous increases in (water-preserving, low-impact) energy generation, desalination is pretty well a non starter for any but the wealthiest municipalities. It also doesn't fundamentally address the problem, because you're going after the smallest fraction of general water use. It doesn't help that California makes about a third of the entire country's food. There's going to be serious shocks to produce prices on the horizon in 2 years or so if the problem isn't seriously addressed. I'm going to guess that the eventual "solution" will be something along the lines of just cannibalizing surface and aquifer freshwater sources further and further north. Too bad the snowpack in the PNW is also at record low levels this year. As an update on the work I'm doing, our work in general has been stunted pretty seriously by lovely weather here in South Carolina. It was only in the last ten days that we started accumulating sufficient degree-days to get our winter wheat past tillering stages. We're about 2 or 3 weeks of growth behind where the same plots were last year. The Southeast in general has been the only place in the country that's been colder than average all winter! And to hit the ol' D&D trifecta with this post, I just finished a journal article that invoked Agenda 21 in the first paragraph hahaha
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Mar 17, 2015 20:11
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Can we get some brain marbles on this problem?! If only there was a decentralized attention based food source. Maybe those sun worshipers have it figured out after all.
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Mar 18, 2015 03:40
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Thing is, to an extent, nature DOES know best, it's just crunchy types don't seem to put 2 and 2 together when they gush platitudes about it. Ecosystems have evolved to an equilibrium over time pretty much everywhere because that's how competition and natural selection and energy flow work. We have the knowledge and capability, in TYOOL 2015, to incorporate this fact into how we define our agricultural processes. The "eating locally" phenomenon should be generalized to "growing locally" as much as possible. The difference between "strip mine soil resources via corn and cotton" and "determine an optimal rotation based on soil series and climate" is some pretty simple and straightforward land survey methods. Easy targeting analysis is available and pretty cheap monitoring solutions are out there to help track your soil health and yield based on fertility treatments. The rest is up to the weather, but systems are sort of in place to shield farmers from that portion of their economic risk. Things like checkerboarding, eliminating tillage, rotation diversification, detritification and cover-cropping all work to reduce or actually eliminate external inputs, pretty spectacularly in some cases. A lot of the sustainable farming methods work especially well in places with long growing seasons. Cover cropping has been shown to be an amazing tool for soils that have been traditionally farmed for decades, because we've saturated these places with excess N/P/K and it's just waiting 6+" down to be brought up for crop consumption. There's an economic shift that will happen with broader adoption of conservation tillage: crop advisors won't be selling as much chemical fertilizer. We saved one (just one) of our dudes $420k last year by cutting 20 pounds/acre of nitrogen from his fertilizer rotation. The other really strong argument in favor of cover cropping and not tilling is encouraging resistance to water shocks. The soil holds water infinitely better as organic matter content increases. Get them roots in the ground, it'll act as a natural water reserve after a few seasons of growth and termination. Gunshow Poophole fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Mar 19, 2015 |
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Mar 19, 2015 18:51
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:
I mean, get prickly all you want, but sustainable practices certainly aren't being pushed hard enough. Or... I actually can't comment on the "push" but the adoption / mandate of adoption certainly isn't. DAT drat GUBMINT is also fighting an incredible institutional inertia that spans the industry: the chemical fertilizer producers, the seed distributors, the failure of the land grant university system, and the farmers themselves. Four of the five guys (the ones older than 35) I work with all related the same anecdote to me about starting our project: "When I went to plant last year and I consciously did not till my soil up, I was afraid my daddy was gonna dig himself out the grave and slap some sense into me." People have been told for a hundred years: till that poo poo, add chemicals, harvest. It isn't just a practical or economical concern, it is a moral issue, that you need to care for your land, specifically via conventional, Borlaug-era ag practices. Without some serious regulation and education put in place it will take that long (so... between 2 and 10 times the amount of time we realistically have available) even to preserve the arable soils we work right now.
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Mar 19, 2015 19:21
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Not to mention, it's getting to the point where if you cover/companion/checkerboard correctly, very few pest species have an opportunity to become established, so IPM has p much already taken care of macrofaunal crop afflictions. the right soil microbial communities could possibly do the same for a lot of bacterial/fungal problems. It's pretty complex but the immense leaps in shotgun sequencing over the last ten years (ridiculous leaps, really, holy poo poo is genetic sequencing hot these days) are allowing commensurate leaps in analysis of and treatment suggestions for bacterial issues.
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Mar 19, 2015 23:47
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