Hello all It seems obvious that organic farms should be producing their own renewable fuel and energy rather than using fossil fuels, but I think very few of them do so, at least in the industrialised countries.
It's only a matter of time before locavore-style green consumers who buy their produce start asking embarrassing questions about that, if they aren't asking already - that's the way the dots connect. Here at the Biofuel list we made the connection between biofuels and organic farming seven years ago, they're part of the same picture. But the Biofuel list an exception. Elsewhere, biofuels have become separated from sustainability issues, and shoved aside, especially in sustainable farming, largely because of all the bad press in the last couple of years over the food vs fuels fracas and the confusion of biofuels with Agrofuels. Typically, even before all the fuss over food vs fuel started, one of the sustainable agriculture leading lights announced at a sust-ag list that he'd done a lot of research on biofuels issues and had put it all on a web page as a convenient resource for sust-ag people. He started off by quoting Professor David Pimentel on ethanol, and it didn't get any better after that. Yet any researcher can easily establish that Pimentel's data is wrong. Pimentel knows it's wrong, yet he keeps on and on using it. More here: http://journeytoforever.org/ethanol_energy.html Is ethanol energy-efficient? And here: http://www.mail-archive.com/search?q=Pimentel&[EMAIL PROTECTED] Pimentel But people believe him anyway. For some reason they want to believe him. This organic disconnect needs fixing, though I'm not sure how. We often get emails at Journey to Forever from farmers, I got one today, I get quite a few like this: >Been studing the website and gathering up parts to make my first test batch. Also finding parts to build a 5 gallon mini-processor once I am satisfied with the test batches... >Went to town today and bought 5 gallons of new vegetable oil to start experimenting with, hopefully things work out. The fuel prices here in North Dakota are out of control, for a couple days this fall during harvest I couldn't get fuel to finish with the corn harvest. So its time to start being self-reliant. >Thanks for the website, its amazing how much good information is here. I don't think he's an organic farmer, it sounded more like the usual chemicalised GMO monocrop for ADM or Cargill. Maybe not though. Anyway now he's on the road to making biodiesel. Since it's allegedly a sustainable and renewable fuel, it might set him to thinking about a few other things, as it often tends to do. He might stumble on some of the other good information at the Journey to Forever website and discover sustainable farming there too. There aren't too many web resources that cover both subjects. Most biofuels sites ignore sustainable farming, though if the crops aren't sustainably grown it won't be sustainable fuel, as they usually claim. And at sustainable farming sites they hate biofuels. One result of the split: >... "We don't have much sympathy for the Americans griping about their gas prices, I'm afraid," says Ruth Bridger with the British Automobile Association. > >The prices here are so high, farmer Todd Cameron-Clarke is worried. He logs 600 miles a week, taking his organic meat to market. > >"It's horrific," he says. "You're finding now we're having to increase our prices to try and maintain the same margins we had last week." -- From "Think you overpay for gas in the U.S.?" http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12598777/ How much fossil-fuel does Todd Cameron-Clarke use to run his organic farm, one wonders. Shouldn't it be none at all? This is what Jonathan Dimbleby, the president of the Soil Association, the original organic farming association and Britain's largest organic certifiers, told Reuters about biofuels: >Dimbleby also expressed reservations about biofuels, particularly the rapid expansion of the use of maize in the United States for ethanol production. > >"I think it is quite disturbing in the US that a huge proportion of the land is given out to biofuels. I think it is an avoidance of the problem (caused by diminishing oil supplies)," he said. > >Dimbleby said biofuels might have a role to play in some parts of the world, adding: "I just don't think we should be carried away." -- From "INTERVIEW - Organic Farming Seen Here to Stay" http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/40019/story.htm He hasn't figured out the difference yet between Agrofuels and biofuels. Again, Agrofuels are the same as all agribusiness crops, industrialised monocrops that guzzle fossil-fuels, spew out greenhouse gases, wreck the environment and are unsustainable in every way. Biofuels are essentially local, small and beautiful. Like organic farms. You'd think Mr Dimbleby should know that by now. But he's far from the only one who should know it but doesn't. Meanwhile Misha Gale-Sinex was complaining about it last week at SANET, the Sustainable Agriculture Network Discussion Group: >>Conference planners can "offset" carbon emissions by buying into sustainable energy programs, see for example <http://www.davidsuzuki.org/Climate_Change/What_You_Can_Do/carbon_neutral.asp> > >It's a bit of a greenwashed approach I suppose, like a tobacco company giving money to a cancer ward -- but it's a start. > >It's a start that the organic farming and sustainable agriculture movements haven't even begun to make. Enviro David Suzuki's What_You_Can_Do page proposes wind and solar, but not biofuels. I posted this here 10 days ago: http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/msg71468.html [Biofuel] Post Carbon Institute "energy farms" ... and asked: "Any comments on their energy farms?" There weren't any comments, but maybe that's because there wasn't anything there that looked much like an energy farm either. Pathetic. Then there are the "Dream Farms" Dr Mae-Wan Ho writes about at the Institute of Science in Society in the UK (ISIS), designed by a retired environmental engineer from Mauritius named Professor George Chan. Eg.: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/DreamFarm.php Dream Farms http://www.i-sis.org.uk/DreamFarm2.php Dream Farm 2 - Story So Far Solar, wind, biogas. Frankly it's half-assed, lots of us here at the Biofuel list could do a lot better than that, and some of us are doing a lot better than that. But ISIS is one of the many greenie groups who've been yelling that biofuels is worse than fossil fuel / will starve millions of poor people / is a crime against humanity and so on. Which might all be true of Agrofuels, but how could it possibly apply to biofuels produced and used onsite by a small organic farm, which is what Dream Farms are supposed to be? But in her articles about Dream Farms Mae-Wan Ho spends as much time trashing biofuels as extolling the virtues of biogas. Whence all this anti-biofuels rage? Check it out: http://snipurl.com/1vbf1 Google Results 1 - 2 of 2 from i-sis.org.uk for pimentel David Pimentel again, along with his more recent sidekick Tad Patzek, just a couple of discredited Big Oil shills. Regarding wind and solar and so on, a friend noted recently: "Things like solar energy are likely to be under big business control for a while anyway: I can't make CIGS based thin-film solar panels or fuel cells in my kitchen. Therefore individual interest in it will mostly be restricted to the curiosity of a consumer of big business products." Not Appropriate Technology, in other words. Of course there's an important place for wind and solar, but maybe not as the mainstay for organic farms and Dream Farms of the Future. Wind and solar are not a substitute for biofuels. Biogas is just fine, but it's not a substitute for biofuels either, they should be complementary. And no, the sludge is not a great organic fertiliser as alleged - it does indeed contain what agribiz corporations call fertilisers, or "nutrients", and indeed they're in an organic form, but it'll kill all your earthworms, for starters, if you've got any, and the anaerobic digestion process doesn't cut off the pathogens. The sludge has to be hot-composted first. But, from the Dream Farms link above: "Chan further dismisses the practice of composting nutrient-rich livestock wastes, for this ends up with a low-quality fertilizer that has lost ammonia and nitrite," writes Mae-Wan Ho. :-) Yet she says it's an organic farm. She writes and talks a lot about organic farming, but she doesn't seem to know what it is. Chan isn't a farmer, and he knows nothing about applying animals to the land - in his system the livestock is in feedlots, pens, ponds. Chan calls his system the "Integrated Food and Waste Management System (IFWMS)", based on fish-farming in China. Actually any properly run mixed farm is an integrated food and waste management system. Mae-Wan Ho also isn't a farmer, she's a biochemist. And actually there is no Dream Farm yet, Mae-Wan Ho is still planning the prototype in England. I don't think we can pin our hopes on Dream Farms. About the compost, it's often been found that compost with low Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium content (NPK) can result in bigger crop yields than compost containing more NPK. Not always though. It's a meaningless indicator, soil fertility and plant growth just don't work that way, as real organic growers know. Anyway, if you make it properly compost can end up having 25% more N than it started off with, if you care a lot about N. We're just completing the three-year project we've been doing here developing a new micro-ley farming system. It's been most successful, with more benefits than we'd hoped for. This is a real innovation, a true organic farming system that produces large quantities of both meat and vegetable crops from a very small piece of land (700 sq metres), very adaptible and easily scaled up or down. You can eat meat every day if you want, with a net gain in soil fertility (and carbon sequestered) with every meal. Most of our farm equipment runs on biodiesel. Our TownAce van hasn't been to a gas station for five years, at least not for fuel, and we always have some biodiesel to spare for other people, or even lots to spare. The biodiesel is top-quality fuel made in a 90-litre processor that cost $100 and stands in a corner of the farmhouse kitchen. Anyone can do that. We could have included ethanol and biogas in the system, they fit in easily and naturally, but there's no need to prove anything with small-scale ethanol and biogas, it's done already, and we didn't really have the time. Easy enough to set it up if we have to. This is a real dream farm, and it's not just a dream, it works. There's something about it here, though it's much more advanced than that now: http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/msg62619.html Re: [Biofuel] More Gardening News - micro ley farming It's a whole new section coming at the Journey to Forever website, and it will pull a lot of things together. There's another disconnect in organic farming, not unrelated, the myth of sustainable vegetarianism. It goes something like this: instead of the immense waste of feeding mountains of grain to livestock for meat production the grain should be fed to hungry people, livestock farming should be eradicated, and that will solve the world hunger problem. But it's not because there's a shortage of food that a billion people are starving, and attempts to solve the problem by providing more food usually end up making it worse. See, eg.: Community development - poverty and hunger http://journeytoforever.org/community2.html And there's no way of maintaining soil fertility without animals. Nature never attempts it, and no vegetarian farming system has ever survived, while all the traditional farming systems that have proved sustainable include livestock, and meat-eating. There's certainly nothing sustainable about raising livestock the industrialised agriculture way, in CAFOs - Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations - but that's a different matter. Anyway, back to the myth. Add Agrofuels to the equation, especially fuel ethanol, and instead of food that should be destined for the mouths of the hungry getting guzzled by livestock, now it's also getting guzzled by SUVs. Fill 'er up at the gas pump and starve three 3rd World children, or something like that. This is an important part of David Pimentel's anti-ethanol propaganda - that distilling fuel ethanol from corn is an unethical use of food "needed to sustain human life" and "to reduce malnutrition and starvation". Andres Yver, doing ley farming in Argentina, having discovered it at the Biofuel list (it was the lost half of organic farming until we rescued it), said here a couple of years ago: "Ley farming does not work without farm animals. I have come to believe it is the only sustainable way to farm on a large scale." (And on the small scale too, as we've been proving here in Japan.) Quite a few vegetarians on the list have come to the same conclusion - sustainable farming means farming with animals. See, eg: http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/msg58252.html Re: [Biofuel] New question on oil seed crops and ley farming Ken Dunn, 11/28/05 In the US and elsewhere, CSA farms (Community Supported Agriculture) tend to focus on vegetables. But the organic farms they're modelled on don't, they're mixed farms. Trauger Groh, the German Biodynamic farmer who founded the first CSA in the US, said "A farm is not a farm without animals." Sally Fallon at the Weston A. Price Foundation says CSA farms are "the paradigm of the future", and I agree. She also thinks they need animals. She reports a poll of CSA customers in the US: the biggest demand wasn't for vegetables, it was for raw dairy products, followed by pasture-raised eggs, chicken, beef, pork, and veal. That was a big surprise for the farmers, though it shouldn't have been. But too many well-meaning people think veggies are greener, or that they're the only thing that's green. It seems the customers know better. I wonder what would be the result if a CSA poll included the option of weekly supplies of biodiesel. I think the answer to that might also come as a big surprise to a lot of farmers. I'd like to ask that question at some sustainability forum or other, but I can't think of one where I might get an answer, or won't get involved in a ridiculous row. >From a sideshow during one such crazed row, it turned out that soils scientist Dr Eliane Ingham of soilfoodweb.com, much revered by sustainable farming folk, especially in the US, thinks biodiesel is made by fermentation in an anaerobic digester. :-( The only place I know where these things can be discussed as if they might have something to do with each other is here at the Biofuel list. I've more or less given up discussing biofuels or food-vs-fuel at the organics lists. Every now and then I post replies on organics or composting and often get appreciative responses asking for more and so on, but if somebody says biodiesel is well known for destroying engines because it has such low lubricity and I try to correct it, or reply to someone asking for advice on composting the glyc by-product, I get attacked and reviled (and sod the facts). Aarghh!!! Biofuels! Sacrilege! Blasphemy! Another sust-ag leading light, left without any further arguments, finally admitted he just hated the idea of having biofuels at his organic farm, as if I were proposing he should grow Starlink GMO corn and use paraquat or something. It's an emotional response, knee-jerk, not rational, and it bears the tell-tale signs of opinion implants - they've been spun. What a mess. So it seems David Pimentel has won, for all his falsified data. He seems to have managed to do organic farming more harm than the arch anti-organic attack dog Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute ever managed to do. But it wasn't Pimentel's plan to wreck organics, it was to stop ethanol, but industrial-scale fuel ethanol development did anything but stop, it took no notice of him and boomed. Some people just can't get anything right. Meanwhile D-I-Y homebrew biodiesel goes from strength to strength as ever, immune to the likes of Pimentel and Avery. But these wider issues should concern us. JtF's page on ethanol efficiency and Pimentel does get around, such as this blog: http://snipurl.com/1vd9u over the cliff, onto the rocks.: Debunking David Pimentel But then he goes and says: "Only a tiny fraction of it [US corn] ends up nourishing the bodies of starving children in third world countries. If you truly care about the children, you'll become a vegan and a teetotaller." Huh? He got the first sentence from JtF, but not the second one. Pimentel got him anyway. :-( David Blume's new book "Alcohol Can Be a Gas - Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century", devotes a whole Appendix to setting matters straight about Pimentel's long-running anti-ethanol disinformation campaign. It's the best and most thorough debunking yet. See next post. David Blume is an organic farmer, yet somehow his crops don't shrivel up and die just because he makes Aarghh!!! biofuels! on the premises, just like ours don't either. He told me his book is "destined to be considered the bible of small to medium scale alcohol production", and I thought uh-huh, heard that before. But he wasn't boasting, it's excellent - thorough, detailed and up-to-date, and it covers the whole field, subject and the context, including nuts-and-bolts how-to's on all aspects of distillation, as well as handling the co-products. He's been working with small-scale ethanol for decades and the experience shows. I'll post a review of the book soon, it's well worth getting. From here: http://permaculture.com/ I reckon biofuellers should oppose Agrofuels like everyone else does, for the same reasons we oppose industrial agriculture, among others. And try to explain the difference while we're at it. Best Keith _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
