Re: Re: [biofuel] Re: sustainable Agriculture? Was Cheap H2
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: all that and not one word about ethanol. You're wrong - check back and you'll see. The whole thing has been about biofuels, very much including ethanol. Many of the references I posted deal with ethanol. Many of them refer to sections of our website, where there's an entire section dealing with ethanol. Ethanol: Journey to Forever http://journeytoforever.org/ethanol.html the burning of wet ethanol and its co products is the silver bullet for substainablty and the model farm is growing in a rice patty in Gueydan La. I think you're wrong here too - I don't think there is such a thing as a silver bullet for substainability. My previous post on this said there is no one-size-fits-all best technology, and explained why. Ethanol certainly isn't always the best answer in all cases. Nothing is. Keith Addison Journey to Forever Handmade Projects Tokyo http://journeytoforever.org/ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor -~-- FREE COLLEGE MONEY CLICK HERE to search 600,000 scholarships! http://us.click.yahoo.com/Pv4pGD/4m7CAA/ySSFAA/FGYolB/TM -~- Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Please do NOT send unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Re: [biofuel] Re: sustainable Agriculture? Was Cheap H2
Yes Keith we disagree on many things I suppose but probably not as many as we agree upon. The scale of serious production farming for food or energy simply does not lend itself to very integrated farming techniques...though perhaps my understanding of these techniques is different from yours. Interplanting, succession crops, organic nutrient, pest and weed control and mulching as opposed to irrigation are some of the techniques I am aware of. Are there others that come to your mind? While these farming techniques are certainly viable for small scale and specialty production as well as subsistence farming they are not realistically applicable to most large scale farming operations. any illiterate peasant can do it without problems, and facing every disadvantage, and millions of them are doing it, with great success. Without problems? I disagree...and for most great success means survival not significant energy or food production. Lets' suppose for a moment that even just 10% of all farmers in the us switched to strictly organic fertilizer (and I am a strong local supporter of organic farming) where would this fertilizer come from? Not enough animals to produce it. Nearly all manure is now used by the folks whose animals produce it to support the feed production part of dairy and meat operations. And it would still tend to drain into the Gulf just as its' synthetic counterpart does to some extent. Sustainable agriculture, Pretty concludes, has most to offer to small farms. I agree completely! I disagree that comparing British farming costs with those of the Midwest US is valid. Very, very different situations. In the US Mid West, for instance, which claims to be feeding the world, it's at the expense of a dead pool in the Gulf caused by nitrogen fertilizer run-off, and anyway it turns out there's very little feeding the world going on in the Mid West, the facts would indicate it's rather the other way round. Etc etc etc. I would be very interested to see those facts which indicate otherwise. The view from here (Midwest US) is that the average farmer grows and ships from 500 to 40,000 times the amount of foodstuffs he consumes. As I said, factory farming is not the way of the future. It's not efficient, it's not economical. It's a dinosaur, the sooner it's dead the better. Not the solution to energy crops either. I fear it will have to do unless we are willing to see mass starvation on a global scale rather that in the relatively small areas of the world which exist now. And by the way, although this was not your meaning I am sure...dinosaurs were the most efficient and enduring form of life on the planet to date. Point taken on China though. They are unsurpassed at local food production through necessity. We COULD learn a lot from them...but much would simply not be transferable to large scale non-labor intensive farming. In the USA, for example, the top quarter sustainable agriculture farmers now have higher yields than conventional farmers Come on Keith...look at this statement. I cannot disagree with it but comparing the top quarter is skewing at its worst. And I am sure that they meant higher yields per acre which puts it in a different context if the goal is total production. Cuba Leads the World in Organic Farming Yes but they certainly don't feed the world do they? Not a major exporter and again subsistence farming borne of a total lack of any alternative. Organic farming is THE fastest growing agriculture sector in the US and throughout the West. Consumer demand is growing even faster and is well ahead of production. I agree. And it is because of consumer demand that it is growing. Demand leads to higher prices and tips the balance sheet so to speak when it comes to small farmers deciding to go organic. It also limits the consumption of organic food to the upper middle class since the cost is beyond the budget of most. And again it certainly has limited potential as a major food or energy producer. I think you didn't read the reference I provided in my original response I have actually. It contains a bit of misleading information which I would be happy to help you correct if you are willing to look at your sources more critically. As a food or fuel treatise it seems to contain a inordinately large amount of anti-US/anti-corporate/anti capitalism slanted statements...with which I mostly disagree...but not entirely. As for fuel cells...they are commercially available NOW which indicates that they are definitely not at the level of development that existed 20 years ago. No longer in the same category as say...cold fusion. Please don't take my often opposing point of view as disapproval of your goals or actions. I admire the obvious effort that you put into contributing to the good future the average earth inhabitant might have and support anyone willing to do so. I personally know the cost(s) of doing so...and the rewards. Besides agreeing to disagree we might be able to
Re: [biofuel] Re: sustainable Agriculture? Was Cheap H2
Dana, Keith, and all: This is not an either/or proposition, in other words, we do not have to go to the poles of industrial farming as currently practiced OR outright labour intensive organic and/or subsistence farming. Make a recipe that works for where you are and the type of operation you have. There is much potential even on the industrial farms of the Midwest to create systems that are more sustainable, without going over to the practices that are best suited for much smaller organic farms or subsistence farms in other parts of the world. The industrial model for farming will exist, but it has to be shifted to clean production - the rest of industry is doing so, and farming is certainly not going to be exempt from this process, especially after incidents such as Walkerton, Ontario that have focused attention on current practices. There are a number of areas, in fact, that seem to hold out hope for improved profits compared with the status quo, and achieve greater sustainability in farm operations, at the same time. Precision farming is just one example. It will be a gradually process of change, to be sure, as always, and it will not be ideal, just better. A whole lot of blending and adaptation. I think that it is possible to build sustainable systems that work in the context of the Midwest farm - not easy, for sure, but possible. Increasingly, there is the need to practice due diligence and reduce liability in agriculture as in all other businesses. If farm insurers gradually realize that farmers are NOT adopting approaches that are demonstrably viable and that can reduce potential liability (e.g..the spectre of being named in a class action suit from downstream water users, or cited for avoidable emissions of fine particulates, VOC's, etc.), then those farms may in time face very high insurance costs, if they can be insured at all. Can we see your EMS, please? Farms will not always be considered a special case, especially as it becomes more of an industrial model, and obviously not a family farm. They will not be exempted on the basis that they provide us with cheap food, when it becomes obvious that the rest of the cost is simply being externalized, just like the petroleum industry or many other industries. Keep in mind that water rights are firmly entrenched in common law, as well as in the federal anti-pollution laws of many countries, and air quality legislation is increasingly concerned with emissions from diesels and all other sources of fine particulates. So, changing to more sustainable practices is inevitable, even on those huge Midwest (or Prairie) farms. It will still use lots of labour-saving technology (albeit oftentimes different technology than we've been using) - hopefully that technology will be applied intelligently, to achieve a reasonable balance. We've access to a lot of things we did not have even a few years ago, not the least of which is the ability to communicate successful approaches to each other easily, quickly and cheaply. It is difficult, but possible, to get to where we need to be, over time, and we can't afford to ignore the issues and hope they'll just go away because we want to avoid the pain of thinking, and then acting. Ed B. www.biofuels.ca Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Please do NOT send unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Re: [biofuel] Re: sustainable Agriculture? Was Cheap H2
Dana wrote: Yes Keith we disagree on many things I suppose but probably not as many as we agree upon. Probably true, but some of the points of disagreement are critical. First would be that I've provided references and resources to support whatever point I'm making. You don't, just unsupported opinions. It's also apparent that you don't really read the refs provided, though you say you do. The scale of serious production farming for food or energy simply does not lend itself to very integrated farming techniques...though perhaps my understanding of these techniques is different from yours. You're apparently married to the idea of efficiencies of scale in agricultural production and can't see past that. You haven't checked the references: 'Economies of scale might work in a factory, but on a farm it's just an illusion: agricultural economists now accept there's an inverse relationship between farm size and output. 'Small family and part-time farms are at least as efficient as larger commercial operations. There is evidence of diseconomies of scale as farm size increases. -- Are Large Farms More Efficient? Professor Willis L. Peterson, University of Minnesota, 1997. 'Industrial farming as a whole is based on an illusion: factory techniques are a poor substitute for nature's excellent arrangements. There's simply no need for them.' If we are concerned about food production, small farms are more productive. If our concern is efficiency, they are more efficient. If our concern is poverty, land reform to create a small farm economy offers a clear solution. The small farm model is also the surest route to broad-based economic development. If the loss of biodiversity or the sustainability of agriculture concern us, small farms offer a crucial part of the solution. -- Peter M. Rosset, Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy, The Multiple Functions and Benefits of Small Farm Agriculture, FAO/Netherlands, September 1999. http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/policybs/pb4.html Condensed version: On the Benefit of Small Farms: http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/backgrdrs/1999/w99v6n4.html Interplanting, succession crops, organic nutrient, pest and weed control and mulching as opposed to irrigation are some of the techniques I am aware of. Are there others that come to your mind? While these farming techniques are certainly viable for small scale and specialty production as well as subsistence farming they are not realistically applicable to most large scale farming operations. Large scale farming operations are not appropriate to efficient production of agricultural products. any illiterate peasant can do it without problems, and facing every disadvantage, and millions of them are doing it, with great success. Without problems? I disagree...and for most great success means survival not significant energy or food production. Again, you haven't checked the references: The Greener Revolution, New Scientist, 3 February 2001 -- It sounds like an environmentalist's dream. Low-tech sustainable agriculture, shunning chemicals in favour of natural pest control and fertiliser, is pushing up crop yields on poor farms across the world, often by 70 per cent or more. A new science-based revolution is gaining strength built on real research into what works best on the small farms where a billion or more of the world's hungry live and work. For some, talk of sustainable agriculture sounds like a luxury the poor can ill afford. But in truth it is good science, addressing real needs and delivering real results. An Ordinary Miracle, New Scientist, 3 February 2001 -- In the world's largest study into sustainable agriculture, Jules Pretty, professor of environment and society at the University of Essex (UK) analysed more than 200 projects in 52 countries. He found that more than four million farms were involved -- 3 per cent of fields in the Third World. And, most remarkably, average increases in crop yields were 73 per cent. Sustainable agriculture, Pretty concludes, has most to offer to small farms. Its methods are cheap, use locally available technology and often improve the environment. Above all they most help the people who need help the most -- poor farmers and their families, who make up the majority of the world's hungry people. See: Reducing Food Poverty with Sustainable Agriculture: A Summary of New Evidence Centre for Environment and Society, University of Essex http://www2.essex.ac.uk/ces/ResearchProgrammes/ SAFEWexecsummfinalreport.htm See: 47 Portraits of Sustainable Agriculture Projects and Initiatives Centre for Environment and Society, University of Essex http://www2.essex.ac.uk/ces/ResearchProgrammes/ SAFEW47casessusag.htm This is not just a bunch of paper, I've done it, I've seen it being done in many places. Subsistence? Increased crop yields of 73% average is subsistence? These are millions, literally, of mostly illiterate peasants. Sure,
Re: [biofuel] Re: sustainable Agriculture? Was Cheap H2
Hi Ed Dana, Keith, and all: This is not an either/or proposition, in other words, we do not have to go to the poles of industrial farming as currently practiced OR outright labour intensive organic and/or subsistence farming. Make a recipe that works for where you are and the type of operation you have. That's quite right. But I'd add that I wasn't proposing labour intensive organic and/or subsistence farming. Nor any anti-technology ideas. Appropriate Technology standards should indeed apply, as everywhere, but that doesn't mean lo-tech, or no-tech - all it means is technology that works well in that context, whatever it may be, without successions of unexpected side-effects or unfortunate externalisations that others have to pay for. If you can figure how to automate the whole thing via a G4 and a bunch of robots, it all makes sense, the figures add up nicely and it works well, well then, no problem. What matters most is what fits best, with the local environment and the local community. Well, I think you know all this, but still. For instance, a rotational ley system of grass and arable mixed farming is highly productive and highly sustainable, with minimal off-farm inputs and minimal externalities. Excellent - but not quite right for a vacant lot in an inner-city. A Chinese-type farm with dozens of crops a year growing in intricate successions and inter-plantings in an overall pattern of mutual benefit with big pay-offs in yield, input reduction, pest-suppression and soil fertility maintenance, and with its poultry, fish-pond and 15 pigs per hectare, is far more productive on an acre-for-acre basis than a ley farm - than just about any farm - while labour input can vary from less than one to 25 workers per acre. But you're not going to cover the prairies with such farms, they just wouldn't fit. In and around the cities, they'd fit just fine, with whatever necessary adaptations. (Not to say that's the only place they'll fit just fine, however.) Please see what I've said in my other post on this subject about transferring technology: the technology itself is far less important than the context it's to be transferred to. That context has to come first, before any technology selection. There is no one-size-fits-all best technology. That said, when it comes to growing things, there is a sustainable system that will fit or can be adapted to fit virtually any situation. Now if you take energy cropping as a situation, it's essential to make sure that it's done sustainably, or we'll just be back to another version of the same old wasteful and destructive nightmare that fossil fuels has been, and still is. I think most of us see the green aspect of biofuels as a most important one, but it could easily be lost as biofuels join the mainstream. As Steve Spence pointed out here a while back concerning ethanol, it's possible to do anything badly - adding that we could all be fighting Big Ethanol tooth and nail within a decade, for many of the same reasons we're fighting Big Oil now. There's no reason to expect people like ADM and Cargill to do it any other way than badly, unless forced. By whom? By us, actually, Biofuels list members, and others who're working with biodiesel, SVO, DIY ethanol, etc., at this early stage, who're in a position to see it coming. It's said we're going to run out of oil. We're offered projections, peaks and slumps, dates when it'll all be over. Frankly, I just don't believe it - I don't think we'll ever run out of oil. We most certainly will, and must, change the way we use it, and extract it, and regard it, but we won't run out of it. In the end our use of it will accord with the hard fact that it's not renewable, we'll have adapted our technology and use of it to negate its pollution potential and emissions problems. Compared with today, the future picture of its use will be virtually unrecognisable. Same goes for industrial farming. I agree with you, it's not going to vanish, not overnight, probably not ever - but it will have to change very radically, in ways that will make it virtually unrecognisable when compared with today's unsustainable practices, which indeed they are. Industrial farming operations that seek to adhere to those practices, continue to demand the right to externalise the damage to the rest of society, resist the required changes to sustainability, these are dinosaurs and must die, and the sooner the better. I agree that there are plenty of ways forward, and it should lead to better, more efficient, and indeed more profitable operations. And better food. And a more equitable system in general. And people fight it instead of straining at the leash? Another major factor that will force these changes, since it seems they need forcing, is that of environmental cost accounting, which will come, it's just a matter of time - you can see it taking shape already, in many different forms. Your
Re: Re: [biofuel] Re: sustainable Agriculture? Was Cheap H2
all that and not one word about ethanol. the burning of wet ethanol and its co products is the silver bullet for substainablty and the model farm is growing in a rice patty in Gueydan La. From: Keith Addison [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 2001/09/29 Sat AM 09:45:43 EDT To: biofuel@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [biofuel] Re: sustainable Agriculture? Was Cheap H2 Dana wrote: Yes Keith we disagree on many things I suppose but probably not as many as we agree upon. Probably true, but some of the points of disagreement are critical. First would be that I've provided references and resources to support whatever point I'm making. You don't, just unsupported opinions. It's also apparent that you don't really read the refs provided, though you say you do. The scale of serious production farming for food or energy simply does not lend itself to very integrated farming techniques...though perhaps my understanding of these techniques is different from yours. You're apparently married to the idea of efficiencies of scale in agricultural production and can't see past that. You haven't checked the references: 'Economies of scale might work in a factory, but on a farm it's just an illusion: agricultural economists now accept there's an inverse relationship between farm size and output. 'Small family and part-time farms are at least as efficient as larger commercial operations. There is evidence of diseconomies of scale as farm size increases. -- Are Large Farms More Efficient? Professor Willis L. Peterson, University of Minnesota, 1997. 'Industrial farming as a whole is based on an illusion: factory techniques are a poor substitute for nature's excellent arrangements. There's simply no need for them.' If we are concerned about food production, small farms are more productive. If our concern is efficiency, they are more efficient. If our concern is poverty, land reform to create a small farm economy offers a clear solution. The small farm model is also the surest route to broad-based economic development. If the loss of biodiversity or the sustainability of agriculture concern us, small farms offer a crucial part of the solution. -- Peter M. Rosset, Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy, The Multiple Functions and Benefits of Small Farm Agriculture, FAO/Netherlands, September 1999. http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/policybs/pb4.html Condensed version: On the Benefit of Small Farms: http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/backgrdrs/1999/w99v6n4.html Interplanting, succession crops, organic nutrient, pest and weed control and mulching as opposed to irrigation are some of the techniques I am aware of. Are there others that come to your mind? While these farming techniques are certainly viable for small scale and specialty production as well as subsistence farming they are not realistically applicable to most large scale farming operations. Large scale farming operations are not appropriate to efficient production of agricultural products. any illiterate peasant can do it without problems, and facing every disadvantage, and millions of them are doing it, with great success. Without problems? I disagree...and for most great success means survival not significant energy or food production. Again, you haven't checked the references: The Greener Revolution, New Scientist, 3 February 2001 -- It sounds like an environmentalist's dream. Low-tech sustainable agriculture, shunning chemicals in favour of natural pest control and fertiliser, is pushing up crop yields on poor farms across the world, often by 70 per cent or more. A new science-based revolution is gaining strength built on real research into what works best on the small farms where a billion or more of the world's hungry live and work. For some, talk of sustainable agriculture sounds like a luxury the poor can ill afford. But in truth it is good science, addressing real needs and delivering real results. An Ordinary Miracle, New Scientist, 3 February 2001 -- In the world's largest study into sustainable agriculture, Jules Pretty, professor of environment and society at the University of Essex (UK) analysed more than 200 projects in 52 countries. He found that more than four million farms were involved -- 3 per cent of fields in the Third World. And, most remarkably, average increases in crop yields were 73 per cent. Sustainable agriculture, Pretty concludes, has most to offer to small farms. Its methods are cheap, use locally available technology and often improve the environment. Above all they most help the people who need help the most -- poor farmers and their families, who make up the majority of the world's hungry people. See: Reducing Food Poverty with Sustainable Agriculture: A Summary of New Evidence Centre for Environment and Society, University of Essex http://www2.essex.ac.uk/ces
