Organic Farms Best For Wildlife

Problem is organic can't feed our ever-growing population, especially since new immigrants are often buying houses in subdivisions on former farmland.

We are already a net importer as it is.

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The midget, Bush, and that Rumsfield deserve only to be beaten with shoes by freedom loving people everywhere.

- Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, The Iraqi Informat

Actually, we have no idea how many people we could feed using organic methods because nobody has inventoried our potential resources. But, we do know that corporate fertilizers require abundant fossil fuel (oil) inputs as do factory farms, so how long are we going to be able to feed people using current methods because we are going to use or burn all our oil?
Everything we do in this senile society relies on fossil fuels and we know that the supplies are dwindling. Fossil fuel dependant farms are not friendly places for living things. They exude all sorts of human warfare chemical compounds that have been reborn as peticides/herbicides/fungicides. The crops are so sick that they can't survive attacks by insects. The crops are not robust and overflowing with nutrients, instead they are feeble facsimiles of their ancestors.

If we are net importers of food, it is by design, not out of necessity.

The only way to do it would be build many greenhouses with public or private money....your right it is by design, and by the frugality of our government and stupidity of our official planners.

Organic farming is a cottage industry. The only way to feed all of Canada with organics would be to send every immigrant that has come here for the last 40 years home, as well as their children and other relatives. Even then you probably would not have enough.

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The midget, Bush, and that Rumsfield deserve only to be beaten with shoes by freedom loving people everywhere.

- Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, The Iraqi Informat

From the article "Eating Fossil Fuels" by Dale Alle Pfeiffer:<br />
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The Green Revolution<br />
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In the 1950s and 1960s, agriculture underwent a drastic transformation commonly referred to as the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution resulted in the industrialization of agriculture. Part of the advance resulted from new hybrid food plants, leading to more productive food crops. Between 1950 and 1984, as the Green Revolution transformed agriculture around the globe, world grain production increased by 250%.(4) That is a tremendous increase in the amount of food energy available for human consumption. This additional energy did not come from an increase in incipient sunlight, nor did it result from introducing agriculture to new vistas of land. The energy for the Green Revolution was provided by fossil fuels in the form of fertilizers (natural gas), pesticides (oil), and hydrocarbon fueled irrigation.<br />
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The Green Revolution increased the energy flow to agriculture by an average of 50 times the energy input of traditional agriculture.(5) In the most extreme cases, energy consumption by agriculture has increased 100 fold or more.(6)<br />
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SNIP<br />
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To give the reader an idea of the energy intensiveness of modern agriculture, production of one kilogram of nitrogen for fertilizer requires the energy equivalent of from 1.4 to 1.8 liters of diesel fuel. This is not considering the natural gas feedstock.(9) According to The Fertilizer Institute (<a href="http://www.tfi.org">http://www.tfi.org</a>), in the year from June 30 2001 until June 30 2002 the United States used 12,009,300 short tons of nitrogen fertilizer.(10) Using the low figure of 1.4 liters diesel equivalent per kilogram of nitrogen, this equates to the energy content of 15.3 billion liters of diesel fuel, or 96.2 million barrels.<br />
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Of course, this is only a rough comparison to aid comprehension of the energy requirements for modern agriculture.<br />
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In a very real sense, we are literally eating fossil fuels. However, due to the laws of thermodynamics, there is not a direct correspondence between energy inflow and outflow in agriculture. Along the way, there is a marked energy loss. Between 1945 and 1994, energy input to agriculture increased 4-fold while crop yields only increased 3-fold.(11) Since then, energy input has continued to increase without a corresponding increase in crop yield. We have reached the point of marginal returns. Yet, due to soil degradation, increased demands of pest management and increasing energy costs for irrigation (all of which is examined below), modern agriculture must continue increasing its energy expenditures simply to maintain current crop yields. The Green Revolution is becoming bankrupt. <br />
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SNIP<br />
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It takes 500 years to replace 1 inch of topsoil.(21) In a natural environment, topsoil is built up by decaying plant matter and weathering rock, and it is protected from erosion by growing plants. In soil made susceptible by agriculture, erosion is reducing productivity up to 65% each year.(22) Former prairie lands, which constitute the bread basket of the United States, have lost one half of their topsoil after farming for about 100 years. This soil is eroding 30 times faster than the natural formation rate.(23) Food crops are much hungrier than the natural grasses that once covered the Great Plains. As a result, the remaining topsoil is increasingly depleted of nutrients. Soil erosion and mineral depletion removes about $20 billion worth of plant nutrients from U.S. agricultural soils every year.(24) Much of the soil in the Great Plains is little more than a sponge into which we must pour hydrocarbon-based fertilizers in order to produce crops.<br />
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SNIP<br />
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Modern intensive agriculture is unsustainable. It is damaging the land, draining water supplies and polluting the environment. And all of this requires more and more fossil fuel input to pump irrigation water, to replace nutrients, to provide pest protection, to remediate the environment and simply to hold crop production at a constant. Yet this necessary fossil fuel input is going to crash headlong into declining fossil fuel production.<br />
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<a href="http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html">http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html</a><br />
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I also find the UK based Institute for Science in Society web site and free email newsletter <a href="http://www.i-sis.org.uk/susag.php">http://www.i-sis.org.uk/susag.php</a> frequently has interesting articles on sustainable agriculture.<br />
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Here is an introductory snip from an article "Sustainable Agriculture: Critical Ecological, Social & Economic Issues":<br />
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Agriculture is facing three major problems and choices:<br />
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(a) Ecology/Technology: Which technology to base the future of world agriculture on? As the chemical-based model is faltering, the private sector and global establishment are looking to genetic engineering as the way ahead. But all the signs are that ecological farming is superior, not only for the environment, but also for gains in productivity and farmers’ incomes. It has not been given the chance to prove itself. It should be.<br />
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(b) The global economic framework: The economic environment has turned extremely bad for developing countries’ small farmers. International Monetary Fund (IMF)-World Bank structural adjustment has put pressure on poor countries to liberalise food imports and abandon subsidies and government marketing boards. The World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) enables rich countries to raise their subsidies and set up astonishingly high tariffs, while punishing developing countries (which cannot increase their subsidies, and which have to liberalise their imports further). Commodity prices have slumped. These three factors are threatening the survival of developing countries’ farms and farmers. The entire framework of global and national economic policies for agriculture has to be thoroughly revamped.<br />
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(c) Land for the farmers: Many small farmers are poor and some are becoming poorer. A main reason is unequal land distribution, where small farmers have little land security or access and lose a large part of their income to landowners. Land reform is urgently required and landless farmers are fighting for their rights. But the landowners in most countries have political clout and are resisting change.<br />
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All three issues have to be resolved, and in an integrated way, if sustainable agriculture is to be realised. Otherwise there will be an absolute catastrophe, especially if the wrong choices are made.<br />
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<a href="http://www.i-sis.org.uk/SACI.php">http://www.i-sis.org.uk/SACI.php</a><br />
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How does your xenophobic attitude fit into a discussion
of a study on organic farming? Funny you are so
concerned about immigrants from the last 40 years. I
am certain Aboriginal people could feed themselves in
North America if all the European immigrants left.

There is no basis for your xenophobia or ignorance
about organics and agribusiness unless you are trying
to fan hate or corporate ignorance to get the discussion
off the point. There is no great advantage to
non-organic farming -- the green revolution was a
failure and continues to be. Or are you writing from work
at Monsanto?

I was involved in the Green Revolution, just outside Cambridge, England, from 1948 till 55. We realized even then that the whole scheme was an idiocy. Like my old mate, George Kester, said it over 50 years ago as we were having lunch one day : "I'm telling you Eddie mate, the only thing we're doing here is breeding bloody superbugs". Actually, George didn't say "bloody", but I'm trying to be polite on this list.

Geerge was killed by the sprays we were using without any protection, on the advice and assurances of the professors from Cambridge, as were all the other people I've been working with at the time. I was extremely lucky that I quit when I did, but this madness still keeps going on. Albeit, now the workers are wearing something like diving suits, but people are forced to eat the residues of the poisons they're using.

Organic farming is more labour intensive, but human labour doesn't cost anything to an economy and many millions of people would be happy to get the hell out of the filthy monster cities. The yields are highly comparable to chemical farming and don't contain the poisons that can not even be washed off. They're imbedded in the produce, especially in fruits and vegetables.

I find it highly contradictory that it is highly illegal to feed "performance enhancing" drugs to race horses and sports figures, but acceptable and encouraged to stuff meat animals, fish and birds full of them, cover the land with them to increase yields, then act surprised when people, especially kids, become fat pigs and cancer victims from the residues in their food. Also, just recently I've seen a report claiming that male babies are becoming increasingly effeminate on account of the female hormones eaten by their mothers and in their milk.

As an organic farmer in a very harsh climate, we had frost twice this week already, on land without topsoil, we had to build our own topsoil with organic methods for our gardens, but we can grow some great vegetables.

I can assure anybody that the claims that Canada, of all places, couldn't feed its small population with organic methods is not only ridiculous, but a blatant lie. Most likely spread by the chemical industry and economists working on the destruction of family farms. Like an economist by the name of Lang said it on CBCTV some years ago :"We have to subsidize the farmers to get them off the land". This is what this whole game is about: The control of the world's food supply by a few "efficient" corporations.

My friend George was right. We do have the superbugs, not only in our orchards and fields, but also in our universities and governments pushing the criminal theory of neoclassical market economics. I wish somebody would spray them with parathion to make them feel what it is like.
Ed Deak, Big Lake, BC.

We are OVERPOPULATED!

No I am not writing for Monsanto, anddon't being up another native Canadian sob story.

I was simply stating that Organic farming IS NOT capable of feeding our entire population. We do not have a lot of good farmland, and it is being rapidly converted to subdividions.

In the United States, they MIGHT be able to do it, but even they are a net importer....the world has a food surplus, yes, but that is due to chemicals.

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The midget, Bush, and that Rumsfield deserve only to be beaten with shoes by freedom loving people everywhere.

- Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, The Iraqi Informat

I agree with some of what you say Ed, but you can't deny that pestidices and fertilizers DO increase crpo yields.

These chemicals are still relatively recent, and safer ones that break down faster are being created.....no need for a conspiracy.

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The midget, Bush, and that Rumsfield deserve only to be beaten with shoes by freedom loving people everywhere.

- Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, The Iraqi Informat

On this point we have to remember Newton's 300 year old law on reactions. Every action causes equal reaction. Agriculture works on the laws of physics, not the economics departments and the stockmarkets.


Of course, they do increase yields, but they also create unwanted reactions, long term depletion, poisonings etc, etc. The same as the drugging of racehorses and human athletes increases their speed, but at what cost? Before drugs were banned in the Olympics, some of the Iron Curtain women competitors were turned into men and ultimately killed by the drugs they were fed.

In short, there are no shortcuts, no cost cuttings and no "win-win" in anything. It is always "win-pay", or "win-lose".

The book that opened my eyes, after 7 years of chemical farming, was written by Louis Bromfield in the early 1940s, called "Pleasant Valley " . He saw the coming disasters 60 odd years ago and things have been going downhill since, with fraudulent "science" taking over logic.

There's now a big push in certain circles to bring back DDT. I still have enough of that poison buried in my system to spray an orchard with. My old friends have long died from such crimes, and I never could understand how I survived. But as long as I do, I'll fight against these "scientific" criminals to my last breath. Ed Deak, Big Lake.

Kill yourself.