Eco-agriculture: how to solve the food crisis AND the climate crisis!

[openspace4life]

These days a lot of people are receiving a rude reminder that agriculture is the foundation of civilization--if it fails, we all fail. But if you feel like a heapin' helping of hope for the future, check out Natural Capitalism from your local library and read Chapter 10, "Food for Life" (or download it from the Natural Capitalism website). There's too much good stuff here to summarize in paragraph form, so I'll try an outline-type format instead:

• Solar-drying fruits and grains:
• Requires no electricity.
• In a silo, evaporatively cools food "making any insects infesting it too sluggish to move and eat," eliminating the need for pesticides.
• Solar-air-dried food needs no preservatives.
• Greenhouses with superwindows:
• Trap heat "so efficient[ly] that they burn no gas for heating," even in cold and cloudy climates.
• Improve prospects for urban farming ("Some 15 percent of global food is already grown in cities.")
• Reusing farm waste:
• If cars could make 90 MPG (which doesn't require plug-in hybrids--see Chapter 2), "the straw burned in the fields of France or Denmark would run those countries' entire car fleets year-round."
• Even back in the early 1980s, "cotton-gin trash in Texas" would have been enough "to fuel with alcohol every vehicle in Texas."
• "Altogether, the diverse streams of farm and forestry wastes can probably provide enough sustainably grown liquid fuels to run an efficient U.S. transportation sector, without any further reliance on special fuel crops or fossil fuels."
• These inputs could also include "manure-to-biogas conversion" to reduce methane emissions from livestock.
• Maintaining naturally rich soil instead of using fertilizer:
• Avoids industrial farming's tendency to destroy the "20 to 30 times as much biomass below the surface as [exists] above-ground" (because fertilizer puts "soil bacteria, fungi, and other biota out of work"), thus keeping the carbon locked up in these organisms instead of letting it escape during decomposition.
• If fully converted to these "organic or low-input practices, . . . U.S. cropland alone . . . could thereby offset about 8-17 percent of U.S. carbon emissions" rather than contributing to those emissions.
• Farmers could then make money selling carbon credits in countries with cap-and-trade policies.
• There are "5 billion acres of degraded soil" which, if restored using low-input practices, "could absorb about as much carbon as all human activity emits. This would also improve soil, water and air quality, agricultural productivity, and human prosperity."
• Imitating natural "rotational" grazing patterns:
• Frees up crops for human consumption that would otherwise be fed to livestock, all but eliminating the "carnivore's dilemma."
• Allows a farmer to use "more cattle, more intensely resident for shorter and less frequent periods" on any given patch of grass.
• "The grazing cows yeild slightly less milk than confined animals but at far lower capital and operating cost, hence higher income per cow."
• Allows "manure to return to the soil, closing the nutrient loop" and eliminating the current "gigantic [manure] disposal headache" as well as making the soil more erosion-resistant.
• "Biointensive" crop farming "modeled on complex ecosystems":
• "[I]nterplanting of mixed species [tends] to foil pests."
• A healthy quasi-ecosystem "can provide for a vegetarian's entire diet, plus the compost crops needed to sustain the system indefinitely, on only 2,000 to 4,000 square feet," compared with 10,000 for "[s]tandard U.S. agricultural practice today."
• Very non-labor-intensive, because "nature does most of the work," such that "an elegantly conceived sequence of plantings provides the weed control, composting, and other services automatically."
• Can eventually be applied to large-scale farming, basically turning the American midwest back into a sort of quasi-prairie, friendly to grazing animals, "occasionally harvested by combines" but requiring "no chemicals, no cultivation, no irrigation" (particularly impressive given that "[a]griculture is [currently] responsible for about twice as much of total U.S. water withdrawals as all buildings, industry, and mining combined").

Comments

[bdunbar.livejournal.com]

Maintaining naturally rich soil instead of using fertilizer:

Amusing - I was watching a show last night that claimed the invention and use of fertilizer helped avoid starvation in the 17th and 18th centuries.

[scifiben.livejournal.com]

No question, fertilizer use can provide rapid improvements in yields (though some might argue about the nutrient value per gram of the resulting food). The claim is that the more natural methods, if done right, can achieve almost the same yields per acre, but at considerably lower cost and with greater resilience in the face of changing conditions, diseases, etc. One obvious question, then, is why organic food is currently so expensive; part of the answer is relatively low demand and limited economies of scale, but I'll have to do more research on that.