“HGs”? Hominid-something?
Hunter Gatherers.
Also, aren’t most of the vegetables we eat today fairly modern (as in the last few thousand years) creations? All those varieties of mustard–brocolli and cauliflower and cabbage and so on were developed in historic times, weren’t they? They are pretty extreme mutations of plants that needed organized agriculture to develop–a wild carrot is a thin and weedy thing, closer to an herb than a vegetable.
Well, there isn’t much anyone can say to that.
The price of oil in February 2007 was under $60 a barrel. Oil futures for March of this year are at $88. That’s almost $30 in one year.
Missed the edit window above.
Much of the world’s corn crop is limited to a few hybrid varieties. Hybrid corn It was in 1971 as I recall that there was an outbreak of disease that destroyed 15% of the corn in the USA. Few of the older varieties are grown commercially, except for the very small fresh market of the summer months.
These hybrid varieties are generally licensed, the seed must be bought each year, farmers are not allowed to keep seed from their own corn. Some of the hybrid varieties are sterile hybrids. Corn is a voracious feeder and will produce heavily when heavily fertilized. It depletes the soil in which it is grown. Traditional farming methods had corn followed in rotation by other crops, it is common now for corn to be grown on the same land year after year with the constant addition of chemical fertilizers. The heavily fertilized hybrid varieties in particular require a lot of water.
Corn is third in importance as a food grain, next to wheat and rice, in the world. It is the most important grain crop in the USA. Most corn is not eaten as corn, but as the meat from corn-fattened animals and the milk from corn-fed dairy cattle, as the sweetener in pop, in beer, etc. It is almost as important to industry as to food production - if you go into a supermarket, corn in some form or another will have touched nearly everything in it, from the starch and wax on apples and cucumbers to the packaging of tilapia. In economic terms, it can, in fact, be said in some ways to outrank both rice and wheat, due to its industrial uses.
As usual vision has refused to actually comment on any criticisms of his posts,. instead posting a series of non sequiturs.
Sadly typical.
Organic farming is neo-hippie bullshit. Industrial farming is perfectly safe, and it provides better and greater amounts of produce. The chemicals and genetic engineering used have been shown to be safe. It doesn’t ruin the soil, and it doesn’t make you sick. What it does is provide produce at a price people can afford. Organic farming is expensive, and the produce from it is significantly more expensive. So much so that it would be difficult for many families to maintain their current level of produce consumption.
That’s going abit too far.
A lot of organic farming is neo-hippie bullshit, unfortunately this is the type that vision seems ot have bought into. Some of it is perfectly sound agricultural practice.
Nothing in this world is perfectly safe. Industrial famring is accpetablys afe, and there is no evidence it is any less a safe or any more environmentally dmagaing than organic farming.
And that’s the big one. Itis simply impossibel to feed the world using anything but conventional famring techniques. You can’t even come close.
The upshot of which is that organic farming actually causes an increase in illness. Consumption of fresh produce is essential for good health, and the decrease in consumption caused by organic famring would inevitably lead to a massive increse in ill health.
And we’re back to peak oil again! (Not that it’s necessarily irrelevant, but I feel like I should’ve expected it. :))
(And hey, the least Kunstler could’ve done is told my sister about all this before she decided to move to Hawaii! :P)
Were I not already dead and buried from consumption of organic produce my eyes would be doing some high revs after reading that.Probably not, because I’m single and lazy. Would I if I were feeding a family? It would be a higher priority. Being single, I find it difficult to motivate myself to cook food from raw ingredients as often as I think I should. I would make a greater effort if more people ate what I cooked.
(Off-topic, but explaining my statement above. I fixed pancakes from scratch for lunch yesterday, and was surprised again at how simple it was, especially given the absolute failure my last batch of pancakes were, made from a mix. If I were going to fix pancakes regularly for a family, I’d contact my brother and get his even better recipe for buttermilk pancakes. But I’m not, so it’s kinda surprising that I fixed them from scratch for effectively “free” rather than eating at a restaurant for whatever my meal would cost there.)
SmartAleq, Great suggestions, but I am kind of in the middle of nowhere here, 2 hours to the closest big city. So high end restaurants are not really available to me unless I want to drive, and at this point, I really want to focus more on the local market. I hear you on the different animals, and I am looking to eventually expand.
Yes, Yes and Yes. I haven’t heard of any Co-ops around here.
I want to discuss farming techniques, not lab techniques BG, I get what you are saying, but I I don’t see the relevance.
Blake, I don’t really understand the animosity in this post, both VISON and I are newbies here, and you may not like our ideas or opinions, but at least VISON has a couple of cites, yours is just your opinion as far as I can see. VISON is female btw.
You make a lot of bold statements as if they are facts. Two in particular I am going to call bull on.
Industrial Farming is acceptably safe? By what standards?
Oxfam says no. cite
Modern industrial crop farming is very damaging to the environment. Over-use of chemicals and water, the environmental damage from both industrial animal and crop farming are huge issues right now. To try to argue otherwise is silly.
Organic farming actually causes in increase in illness. OK, I’ll bite. Please show me some cites to back this up. Reputable please.
PS: Your posts are really hard to read with all the typos. Spell check and preview are your friends.
Really? I think he’s got a good point. Make produce expensive, and people eat mac and cheese and ramen instead. You can survive on that, but then health starts to decline.
Who’s generally healthier in our society: the middle and upper class who can afford to eat lots of fruits and veg, or the lower class for whom a value meal at McDonald’s really is a good deal for dinner? And do you think that will change if we make all produce the expensive kind?
Organic and sustainable costs more. It costs more now because it’s a niche product attracting the well off and because it’s done mostly small scale. It cost more in the past, as we can see by the percent of family income that used to be spent on food. It just costs more. If it was cheaper to produce, you can bet your eyeballs Kraft and Monsanto and the rest would be doing it more!
Criticisms? Contradictions are not criticisms.
I disagree with many of your assertions, and furthermore find your post hard to read. (The last part of that sentence was a criticism.)
Since I disagree with many of your assertions, I sought out and posted links to show why I disagree with specific ones. I can’t devote my whole day to the project, though, so for now that’s going to have to do.
I’m not sure that “our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t eat a lot of cereals” follows from “modern hunter-gatherers don’t eat a lot of cereals”. When people with more advanced agricultural technology move into an area, they tend to displace any hunter-gatherers there out of places that are suitable for growing crops. The farmers take over the land that is suitable for growing cereals, which means the hunter-gatherers don’t have access to them. If the hunter-gatherers had their pick of the land, they might take the areas that grow cereals and eat more cereals, but modern hunter-gatherers generally don’t get first choice of where they live.
Really? Whoa, guess all those thousands of years of agriculture that happened before Monsanto, Dow and John Deere came around was just the human race living on borrowed time! Organic farming is merely the practice of using good, solid, proven by time methods to grow food. It’s not bullshit, it’s not weird, it’s just the way we did things before the “better way” came along.
Considering that “better way” caused the Dustbowl, pesticide resistant bugs, herbicide resistant weeds, loss of genetic diversity in crop plants and salination of farmland I’d say it has a lot to answer for. Monoculture was recognized as a bad idea many hundreds of years ago when crop rotation became fashionable and remains a bad idea to this day. Farmers who plant the same crop over and over have to rely more heavily on fertilizers and pesticides to keep their profits up but in order to do so they have to get further and further into the cycle and now that seed is being gene engineered with a stop code that won’t allow the farmer to grow his own seed crops the agribusinesses are even more dependent on outside technology to get the job done. The spiraling costs of monoculture have already forced thousands of small farmers out of business, enabling the gigantic agribusinesses to flourish, not always to our benefit.
Now let’s just leave aside the plain fact that fifty acres in Alberta isn’t a suitable parcel for agribusiness style monoculture–and we were actually discussing said fifty acre plot in the OP, remember? Let’s also leave aside the fact that the OP isn’t concerned with going organic per se, just SUSTAINABLE. You do realize that sustainable != organic, right? On account of the OP actually gave links to articles about each of those styles so that following posters can all be on the same page regarding what she’s trying to do with her land. You remember the OP, right? Because that’s what the rest of us are talking about.
Sustainable agriculture does go along well with organic methods because the diversity of enterprises lends itself well to heterodyning–raising rabbits is economical because they take up little space, can help eat your extra biomass (weeds, leftover plant matter) and produce a lot of meat for little expense–and skins, you raise the right varieties you can sell the fur for garment trim. Rabbits produce excellent fertilizer, which gets dumped into the fields for free–don’t have to drive to town to spend money on chemical fertilizer. Goats and sheep are larger versions of rabbits, with the additional benefit of milk for cheese. Fishponds create both food and fertilizer for a very low cost outlay and also help keep down bugs because fish can eat a shitload of bugs, as can free range chickens allowed to patrol the rows of crops. Free range chickens and turkeys are a nice source of cash both for meat and eggs.
There is a market for heirloom varieties of many fruits and vegetables–I don’ t know about anyone else but I get really sick of endless red and green delicious apples covered in wax and “ripened” by acetylene gas. I’m quite pleased that Hood River exists and is full of neo-hippies who recognize that variety in fruit is good and that tree ripening is best, and oddly enough I pay LESS for those fabulous apples than for some grotesque California mush ball that was trucked up here to be sold in the local Safeway. Repeat as necessary for pears, peaches, apricots, cherries and strawberries. The only downcheck to these fruits is that they don’t ship well for long distances. Therefore the only real criterion agribusiness has for how “good” a variety is is shippability. Not nutritional value, not taste, not looks–only how well it ships. This is “better?” Oooo-KAY!
As for it being “impossible” to feed the world using any methods other than agribusiness, that’s nonsense. It’s just easier to do it that way. If all the suburban lawns and patios in the US were dug up and put to cultivation I think many people would be shocked to find out how viable it is to produce sizable percentages of needed calories just from quarter acre city lots. If fuel prices keep driving the cost of groceries up I think we’re going to see a lot more people turning to home gardens to take some of the sting out of the grocery bill–try Googling “victory garden.” Per Wikipedia up to 40% of the vegetable produce consumed in the US during WWII was grown at home. Doesn’t sound too impossible to me–just a bit inconvenient, perhaps. If we could get county and city governments to relax restrictions on raising food animals and slaughtering onsite (blood makes excellent fertilizer too, did you know that?) the average suburbanite could get, if not self sufficient, at least less reliant on agribusiness to stay fed.
Farmer Chick, look into “fainting goats” if you decide to go with goats at all–the spasms cause them to come it at about 40% higher yield of meat due to muscle density over other species and they’re FUNNY! Easy to catch, too!
Great post, SmartAleq. No time to respond properly, but keep up the good work!
Yes,from your open mind,that perspective is possible.My response to Blake has more to do with an agenda he has involving lots of heat and no light in yet another OT diatribe.He seems knowledgable and passionate,I could likely learn something from him,but the cut 'em off at the knees approach is off-putting.
For your question,I don't think Joe McMacaroni or his wife who works at the widget factory have ever purchased Organic TM produce.I read an item in the paper years ago about the target consumer for convenience stores-(this before they sold gasoline)- it was the working class,with the offered food groups being caffeine,nicotine,sugar and fat.Many who go to the salt mines hit the malt signs after work to complete the food pyramid.
For the middle and upper class,expensive produce is a lot like gasoline prices,yeah,there's some bitchin',but few have traded in their SUV's and Hemi Road Dominators.
Funny,my grandparents and everyone they knew ate exclusively organic.I doubt he made more than $10k/year.Grampa would have hurt anyone who called him a hippie.Yeah, that’s Blake. He scared the shit out of me a few times when I was new here, but I’ve gotten used to him. He’s like a pug dog - he’s got this big fierce bark that serves to keep the burglars away, but the kids in the neighborhood know he’s just a cutie-wutie smooshy face playmate when he’s not acting all bulldog-like.
He is, however, very, very knowledgeable, if a little too pro-status quo (on some issues) for my antiauthoritarian tastes. Don’t dismiss what he says just because of how he says it. He’s the one Doper, more than any other, who has taught me that the first question to my hippie friends should be, “No, seriously, what is wrong with X?” Where “X” is any mod con they’re up in arms against, from free trade to cold medicine, from farming to indoor plumbing. Sometimes X really is the best option, sometimes it isn’t, but just because something else might be more “natural” or “old-school” or “alternative” or “global” doesn’t always mean it’s the best option. **Blake **has taught me to stop that knee from jerking when the subject is new-fangled. Let’s really explore it and make some useful decisions about it, not just throw out everything “mainstream” simply because it is mainstream.
I don’t know “Blake” my only interaction is this thread. Whether or not he is knowledgeable is not my issue, My issue is as a newby, and to include VISON because she too is new, his attack is just rude.
My points and opinions are just as valid as anyones, I have always enjoyed a good discussion/debate. BUT, when someone comes along that seems to feel the need to steamroll and ridicule others, well I just need to wonder what their motivation is.
I prefer fun and interesting suggestions myself, the place for vitriol is in the pit…
by the way, have you heard of straw bale planting ? We think we are going to try it for the next few years as a way to get more mulch into the clay pit we call our garden =)