NC Ch 10 : Food for Life

Making modern food production sustainable is a complicated issue. Industrialized farming is very detrimental to the environment. However, it has also made food affordable. At the same time, since food production has increased, so has population, which offsets the gains and further strains our natural resources.

"The food sector uses are 10-15% of all energy in the industrialized countries, and somewhat more in the US" (p192). Industrialized farming is more energy efficient than it was in 1978, and it is much less labor intensive, but farming uses energy from oil, "perhaps ten times are much fossil-fueled energy in producing food as it returns in food energy" (p192)

Two issues are underlying causes for a lot of the problems with food production, which is the degradation of soil quality and the cultivation of "monocultures." "Monocultures' chemical dependence requires enormous amounts of fertilizers to make up for the free ecological services that the soil biota, other plants, and manure provide in natural systems" (p197).

Innovations to save energy in agriculture:
- Bill Ward - a way to dry grain in the silo
- Marcello Cabus, solar hot-air dryers
- using big slow fans instead of fast fans in barns
- pig shelter, Canadian "hoop structures"
- California Rice Industry Association - flooded rice fields after harvest for ducks instead of burning rice straw

Changing the way we raise livestock
- desubsidizing livestock production, especially for cattle, which emit about 72% of all livestock methane. ultimately reduce the amount of cattle, especially in rich countries
- reducing the rich countries' dairy output to match demand rather than propping up demand with subsidies. dairy cows emit extra methane because they're fed at about three times maintenance level to make them produce more milk
- improving livestock breeding, especially in developing countries, to increase meat or milk output per animal, consistent with humane practices
- regulating or taxing methane emissions from manure to encourage manure-to-biogas conversion for useful combustion
- reforming US beef grading standards to reduce the inefficient conversion of costly, topsoil-intensive grains into feedlot fat that's then largely discarded
- encouraging ultralean, organic range beef as a replacement for feedlot beef so that they receive no antibiotics, are healthier, can cost less, emit less methane
- for feedlot beef, shifting some meat consumption to less feed- and methane intensive animals and to aquaculture, maybe also reduce rice-paddy methane (?)

Another featured farming practice is Management-intensive rotational grazing (MIRG) for beef, pork, and dairy farming in the midwest, discovered by Allan Savory, a Zimbabwean wildlife biologist (p208). This is where cattle grazes intensely for short periods of time and then move on to another place, not returning to places they've grazed before until they're fully recovered. This seems like it would require more area, but perhaps that's not true.

The authors claim that "organic farming goes a long way toward providing better food from far smaller and more sustainable inputs" (p209). While I categorically believe in the merits of organic farming, if it's so much better, why was farming industrialized then? The only answer I can think of is that organic farming requires more labor and labor is more expensive than energy and chemicals.

Biointensive minifarming is also a productive practice that has a lot of potential. "There are four principles: deep cultivation to aid root growth, compost crops, closely spaced plants in wide beds to optimize microclimates, and interplanting of mixed species to foil pests." "Since nature does most of the work after the initial bed preparation, the upkeep is quite small and the yield can be high for crops and much higher for nutrients" (p209). "Masanobu Fukuoka's 'do-nothing' system of organic farming" has had some impressive yields.

Name dropping:
-Dr. Christine Jone's team at New South Wales's Land and Water Conservation Agency are even developing a new "pasture cropping" technique with controlled grazing on perennial grass cover but also annual grains sown into the grass in its dormant season.
-'ecoagriculture'
-Natural Systems Agriculture - Wes Jackson, Janine Benyus, and Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, are looking into replacing annual monocultures with perennial polycultures to form a diverse ecosystem that looks rather like native prairie, doesn't erode, builds topsoil, and requires virtually no inputs.