Compassion in World Farming

[nellikin]

I realise this is a total derail by now - please someone split if appropriate.

Seth - I know you see the world as being fit for human destruction, so don't even know why I bother. Yet I do wish to make a few points:

First: biodiversity in soil is not merely a count of the plant species in the soil. Millions and billions and trillions of microorganisms are present in soi, and are represented in millions of species. They are highly efficient at cycling soil nutrients, preventing leaching to groundwaters, receiving bodies or wherever. When mineral fertilisers such as ammonium nitrate and superphosphates are added to soil, as shift in the soil microflora takes place, seeing a great reduction in biodiversity, and hence loss of efficiency at nutrient cycling. This means that, although plant production - which is obviously your measure for optimisation of agricultural systems - may increase in the short term (and by this I mean on a scale of decades to centuries), efficiency, i.e. production per unit input (whether measured as nutrient loading or energy equivalent input) declines rapily. By a large factor. So, although you may double or triple your production, your efficiency will typically decline by a factor of 10 - 50, possibly even higher.

I am well aware that grazing does not require nutrient input - I would be alarmed if it did, as it would be a sign of a soil so highly degraded as to be almost irrovocably destroyed on a human timescale. Grasses do not have high protein content and hence do not require a high nutrient input. However, feed lots with grain fed cattle require agricultural systems with nutrient input. This leads to loss of soil fertility. There a hundreds of scientific papers undermining this fact. Take a look at Geoderma or the European Journal of Soil Scince. You will find too many to cite.

WRT to soil organic matter - organic in soils are great. To date, sequestering soil organic carbon is the only known win-win situation proposed to mitigate climate change. This is because soil organics are highly benficial for soils. They increase nutrient availability and storage, cation ion exchange capacity, water retention, lower bulk density, protect against erosion and promote soil fertility and biodiversity. Soil carbon sequestration is seen as a low-cost, short to mid-term solution for helping reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. I know you couldn't give a flying-fuck about this, but the truth is, even if it isn't good for the atmosphere, it's good for soils, and hence food production for our planet! Read up on it. Currently, hundreds (hopefully thousands by now, but I don't think there are that many of us) of soil scientists worldwide are working on ways of optimising soil organic carbon sequestration strategies.

WRT to climate change. You made some comment about it, seeming to equate what you consider to be a conspiracy concerning climate change with my comments about mining and sustainability. I don't recall having mentioned climate change (but that doesn't mean that I didn't_, and I certainly don't consider these two things equally. Regardless of whether or not climate change will have a detrimental effect on global ecology, sustainability - i.e production and management of resources,in particular food and energy for centuries to millenia to come - is threatened. I see one of the top priorities securing of soil resources worldwide. This is because soils take hundreds to thousands, to in some cases (like in Oz, my continent) millions of years to form. Erosion and degradation of soil - to irreversibility and compete loss of soil functionality - can take place in decades. Since the advent of modern agriculture, we have lost about 30% of the productive soil area, though desertification, settlement, erosion. Ironically, a large proportion of this has been the most fertile soil areas, as historically, humans have settled in fertile areas. As cities have grown, these areas have been expanded and the soils have been sacrificed to urban domains. They are no longer productive, or their productivity vastly reduced. Burrently, about a third of the worlds soils are seen as threatened, and over 50% degraded. I live in the largest coal harbour on earth. Some of the state's (and nation's) most fertile soils are currently being destroyed to extract coal from the ground just up the road from me, and there are fights as to who gets what. The farmers are up in arms, seeing their harvests threatened by the ever encroaching coal pits. The coal seams here are close to the surface, and the coal seam gas not very far undergorund. Once these soils are lost, they cannot easily be restored. Once again, the science shows that only through sustained fertilisation and irrigation, will the post-mining landscapes (which resemble moonscapes when viewed from above - visit google earth for a look) produce. Once irrigation and fertilisation are abandoned, so too the biota disapppear. We don't have the water resources here to maintain that (nor the fertilisers), and it scares me to think that we are sacrificing our food security to the ravages of the post-modern energy consumption.

I consider myself a greenie but am perfectly willing to look for engineering solutions to problems (I am myself an engineer). For example, I don't see desalination plants for water production to be any more harmful than a dam (in fact they can be less harmful) as long as the energy production to feed the desal beast is sustainable. That pits me against many greenies. However, the best solutions work with nature, not against it. And when it comes to soil fertility, natural systems are optimised for efficiency and can likely be tweaked to improve production. Post-modern agriculture is optimised for production and highly inefficient, i.e. the losses of fertiliser and energy equivalents from the system are enormous.

These are scientific facts. You will likely not accept them as they threaten your core beliefs. Yet I find it disturbing that you would accuse Rum of ignoring scientific facts when you frequently do so yourself, as long as it suits your personal convictions.

[Seth]

I realise this is a total derail by now - please someone split if appropriate.

Seth - I know you see the world as being fit for human destruction, so don't even know why I bother.

Utter nonsense. I was conserving the environment before you were a gleam in your daddy's eyes. I personally have done more in my own life to preserve biodiversity, protect endangered species and improve habitat that most people, and over a period of more than 50 years turned a burned-out, over-grazed, treeless, weed-infested plot of land into a premier wildlife habitat that hosts several different threatened or endangered species including bald and golden eagles, elk, deer, and lots of other wildlife. But I didn't do it by worshiping anything, I did it by hard-nosed business acumen and good management practices that permitted my cattle, which paid for the environmental preservation and improvement, to live in perfect harmony with their environment, and through hard work and careful planning to make sure that the impacts of agriculture were beneficial overall to the land. I did so out of a strong sense of environmental ethics and love of the land.

But I also recognize the practicalities involved and understand that humans are part of nature and will inevitably have an impact on their environment, just like every other living creature. Some impacts are negative, some are positive, but the existence of an impact, or a change in the environment from what it once was (before humans) is not axiomatically wrong, bad, harmful or a blight on the planet. We have a right to exist and to flourish and to use the earth for our benefit, just like every other animal does. Living in harmony with nature does not require living in wattle-and-daub huts and grubbing for roots with sticks. Mitigating and controlling adverse environmental impacts are important, but they are not the only consideration. Your inability to distinguish between this and "fit for human destruction" indicates to me that you've been drinking too much of the ecozealot Luddite Kool-aid. So don't bother trying to teach your grandpa how to suck eggs, okay.

First: biodiversity in soil is not merely a count of the plant species in the soil. Millions and billions and trillions of microorganisms are present in soi, and are represented in millions of species. They are highly efficient at cycling soil nutrients, preventing leaching to groundwaters, receiving bodies or wherever. When mineral fertilisers such as ammonium nitrate and superphosphates are added to soil, as shift in the soil microflora takes place, seeing a great reduction in biodiversity, and hence loss of efficiency at nutrient cycling. This means that, although plant production - which is obviously your measure for optimisation of agricultural systems - may increase in the short term (and by this I mean on a scale of decades to centuries), efficiency, i.e. production per unit input (whether measured as nutrient loading or energy equivalent input) declines rapily. By a large factor. So, although you may double or triple your production, your efficiency will typically decline by a factor of 10 - 50, possibly even higher.

Yeah? Well, here's a little clue for you: The point of plant agriculture is to grow food. Humans need food. Therefore, on a human scale (decades to centuries) short-term efficiency in growing crops is indeed the goal, and microflora will just have to take it up the ass because burgeoning populations need the food. To you it seems that the ideal is hunter-gatherer civilization with nomadic tribesmen roaming the earth in perfect harmony and in perfect balance with nature. That's a lovely, if rather idiotic utopian vision that has nothing to do with reality, so just put it out of your head. Unless you personally want to watch billions of people starve to death, probably including yourself and your family, then you need to come to the realization that the demand for productivity is what drives modern agriculture and nothing is going to change in the foreseeable future. What this means is the soil scientists such as yourself need to quit whining about the good old days and get with the program of figuring out how to absolutely maximize food crop productivity just as far as it will go so that every square meter of cropland produces absolutely as much food as is scientifically possible...so that the rest of the planet, the part that's not currently being used for crop production, can be preserved in its "natural" state, with all the lovely little microorganisms and microflora busily working away doing their thing.

I am well aware that grazing does not require nutrient input - I would be alarmed if it did, as it would be a sign of a soil so highly degraded as to be almost irrovocably destroyed on a human timescale. Grasses do not have high protein content and hence do not require a high nutrient input. However, feed lots with grain fed cattle require agricultural systems with nutrient input. This leads to loss of soil fertility. There a hundreds of scientific papers undermining this fact. Take a look at Geoderma or the European Journal of Soil Scince. You will find too many to cite.

So what? People gotta eat, and they like meat, just like they like to eat the grains they use to fatten them up in bread. And the corn that's not used to fatten cattle is used to make ethanol, and the grain that's going to be fed to cattle is sometimes used to make beer first. And this "irrevocably destroyed" claptrap is just that. Unless the topsoil actually washes away due to erosion, it recovers quickly once cultivation ceases, in a few years. And where necessary, soil biodiversity can be kick-started "artificially" by remediating the soil using chemicals to create the right conditions for seeded microorganisms to flourish. It happens all the time.

WRT to soil organic matter - organic in soils are great. To date, sequestering soil organic carbon is the only known win-win situation proposed to mitigate climate change. This is because soil organics are highly benficial for soils. They increase nutrient availability and storage, cation ion exchange capacity, water retention, lower bulk density, protect against erosion and promote soil fertility and biodiversity. Soil carbon sequestration is seen as a low-cost, short to mid-term solution for helping reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. I know you couldn't give a flying-fuck about this, but the truth is, even if it isn't good for the atmosphere, it's good for soils, and hence food production for our planet! Read up on it. Currently, hundreds (hopefully thousands by now, but I don't think there are that many of us) of soil scientists worldwide are working on ways of optimising soil organic carbon sequestration strategies.

Yeah, that's all really lovely, but unless soil carbon sequestration can be accomplished as a part of increasing crop yields, or at least at no cost to the farmer either in labor, money or crop yields, it's not gonna happen because agriculture is already a low-profit enterprise. If people want to subsidize agriculture with direct infusions of money and pay farmers to sequester carbon for them, then fine, I'm sure farmers will be happy to farm carbon, but not if it's going to cause them more work or money through reduced crop yields. This is simply a hard truth that you need to face. It's a great idea, and most of what you mention agriculturists (like me) know far better than you do because we actually live and work on the land and we see the effects of soil fertility every single day, and we sweat it every single day while we wait for a hailstorm to come along and wipe out a year's work, or for an infestation of grasshoppers or locusts to eat it all in a day, or for the rains to fail so the crops wither and die. Don't try to tell me about erosion or soil fertility, I've been dealing with the practical aspects of soil management for longer than you've been alive. You academics really need to get your heads out of your asses and go buy a piece of agricultural land and live and work there and make your living and your ability to eat and have a roof over your head bound up in the land before you try to tell people like me how to manage our property or tell us that we "couldn't give a flying-fuck" about it.

You're just an ignoramus about the realities of agriculture, and all your ivory-tower education does is give you an arrogant attitude that give those of us who actually know what the fuck we're doing a pain in our ass.

Get back to me after you've spent about 50 years living on a ranch where your ability to eat depends on how carefully you observe nature and manage your land. Then, and only then will I take advice from you.

WRT to climate change. You made some comment about it, seeming to equate what you consider to be a conspiracy concerning climate change with my comments about mining and sustainability. I don't recall having mentioned climate change (but that doesn't mean that I didn't_, and I certainly don't consider these two things equally. Regardless of whether or not climate change will have a detrimental effect on global ecology, sustainability - i.e production and management of resources,in particular food and energy for centuries to millenia to come - is threatened. I see one of the top priorities securing of soil resources worldwide. This is because soils take hundreds to thousands, to in some cases (like in Oz, my continent) millions of years to form. Erosion and degradation of soil - to irreversibility and compete loss of soil functionality - can take place in decades. Since the advent of modern agriculture, we have lost about 30% of the productive soil area, though desertification, settlement, erosion. Ironically, a large proportion of this has been the most fertile soil areas, as historically, humans have settled in fertile areas. As cities have grown, these areas have been expanded and the soils have been sacrificed to urban domains. They are no longer productive, or their productivity vastly reduced. Burrently, about a third of the worlds soils are seen as threatened, and over 50% degraded. I live in the largest coal harbour on earth. Some of the state's (and nation's) most fertile soils are currently being destroyed to extract coal from the ground just up the road from me, and there are fights as to who gets what. The farmers are up in arms, seeing their harvests threatened by the ever encroaching coal pits. The coal seams here are close to the surface, and the coal seam gas not very far undergorund. Once these soils are lost, they cannot easily be restored. Once again, the science shows that only through sustained fertilisation and irrigation, will the post-mining landscapes (which resemble moonscapes when viewed from above - visit google earth for a look) produce. Once irrigation and fertilisation are abandoned, so too the biota disapppear. We don't have the water resources here to maintain that (nor the fertilisers), and it scares me to think that we are sacrificing our food security to the ravages of the post-modern energy consumption.

Yup, loss of cultivatable soil is indeed a serious problem and urbanization is one of the primary culprits. That's what happened to my ranch. The costs of remaining in business became too high due to the rise in property values caused by EVERYONE AROUND ME selling their agricultural land for development, which I resisted for as long as I possibly could in order to preserve my ranch as open space and natural habitat. I was wrong to do that however, because I waited quite literally six months too long to sell the ranch, and got caught in the housing melt-down and the value of my property was cut exactly in half from what it was just a few months earlier, so what was going to be a very comfortable retirement has turned into what will be a parsimonious and very carefully planned marginal fixed-income existence. Fortunately for the environment, the people who live in my former community did value my property, one of the premier wildlife and nature habitats in the increasingly-urbanized area, so they bought it from me to preserve it as open space...at half what they had contracted for (but reneged on) six months earlier. Whether it will ever be used for agriculture again is unknown, but they may lease parts of it out to other local cattle ranchers as they have done with other parcels they have purchased for open space.

If you want to save your food security, all you have to do is pay the agriculturist who owns the land more for his production of food than what his land is worth for coal mining. It's really a very, very simple equation. Everyone around me sold out and made a bundle by selling for development of subdivisions. I held out because I cared about the land and the environment. As a result, I got fucked up the ass by the economy, but my land is still in it's natural state and now will (hopefully) never be developed. That's only because the community valued the land in its natural state enough to agree to tax itself to buy it from me, albeit at half of what they promised to pay for it.

If you value the land in your area, then you will have to suck it up and pay for it one way or another. Farmers don't generally want to sell to coal companies, but when the coal companies come along and offer them a tidy packet that will allow the aging farmer whose sons and daughters don't want to take on the incredibly hard work of farming and who have all gone to the city for a cushy job in an office, to sell his land and retire for the rest of his life in comfort, who the fuck are YOU to condemn him for doing so? What did YOU ever do to ease his burden or make his life more profitable? What did YOU and the rest of your urban ilk do except complain about food prices and keep his profits low so that you can eat a cheap cheeseburger and salad?

This is the hypocrisy of know-it-all academics pontificating about soil science when they know absolutely nothing whatever about the realities of actual agriculture or what it takes to be successful as an agriculturist. Here's a little wake up call for you Nellikin, go do some research on the average age of farmers in OZ, and look at what the trend in the average age of farmers has been over the last 50 years. Then look at the statistics about how many people are ENTERING agriculture versus how many are leaving it.

That research alone, if you have a brain in your head, will tell you much of what you need to know about the utility of all your lovely academic research into soil biodiversity.

If nobody's farming, soil biodiversity will proceed naturally...and you will starve.

If you wonder why large-scale "factory" farming exists, that's the reason. Nobody else wants to do it, and the few who are willing to take on the incredibly difficult and stressful job of being a farmer or rancher, with it's annual uncertainties that give people like me heart attacks and strokes all the time, have to use modern technology and the economies of scale in order to eak a living out of the land on crop prices that have essentially remained the same for the last four decades while the costs of producing the crops has risen tenfold or more.

Go work out how to get more crops from a piece of land using anything that will work and help the farmer to make more money, and be willing to pay ten times what you are paying right now for an ear of corn or a hamburger, and go put your life in the hands of the weather, bureaucrats, and the parsimonious eating public before you try to tell someone like me how to run a farm or ranch, please, because you simply do not know what the fuck you are talking about outside your very, very narrow and blindered areas of expertise.

I consider myself a greenie but am perfectly willing to look for engineering solutions to problems (I am myself an engineer). For example, I don't see desalination plants for water production to be any more harmful than a dam (in fact they can be less harmful) as long as the energy production to feed the desal beast is sustainable. That pits me against many greenies. However, the best solutions work with nature, not against it. And when it comes to soil fertility, natural systems are optimised for efficiency and can likely be tweaked to improve production. Post-modern agriculture is optimised for production and highly inefficient, i.e. the losses of fertiliser and energy equivalents from the system are enormous.

Yeah, but the food it produces keeps you alive, so qwitcherbitchen unless you yourself can do it better, which I doubt.

These are scientific facts. You will likely not accept them as they threaten your core beliefs. Yet I find it disturbing that you would accuse Rum of ignoring scientific facts when you frequently do so yourself, as long as it suits your personal convictions.

Listen, you have no fucking idea what my "core beliefs" are, so keep your insults to yourself until you've spent 50 years as an actual agriculturist rather than a theoretical academic sitting in an office at a university and likely sucking off the public teat while doing so.

I know more about the realities of agriculture than you likely ever will from a very real and practical perspective, so until you've shoved your arm up a cow in the middle of a blizzard only to watch the calf die along with it's mother, or watched your ripened wheat crop pounded into the ground by a hailstorm, keep your fucking insulting opinions to yourself.

All your theories and studies are very nice and everything, but unless they a) reduce the immediate costs and labor of crop production substantially; or b) improve crop yields substantially without increases in labor or cost, you should probably just shut the fuck up about them unless you're willing to put your money and your future where your mouth is and invest everything you own in a piece of land upon which you can PROVE the utility of your ideas through your own personal labor and economic risk.

It's easy to spout off about how you THINK things work, or should work, but it's meaningless academic bullshit unless you can prove that it actually works, in the real world, where shit happens that you wouldn't believe and life is hard.