The previous post mugged me after having read a few things in recent days and then encountering Chicks with chicks.

a recent article on The Femivore’s Dilemma, about the prevalence of women in the new old food movement. . .

the more profound ideas behind the article and the commentaries are fascinating. Personally, I’m not sure that there really is a gender divide, and it would be salutary to see this in a global context.

Indeed. I'd add history as well since farming and food are often women's work: in the present in some cultures and in the past in others at similar stages of development.

What had been on my mind was Liberal Purity.

At Yourmorals.org we have always found that scores on the Purity/sanctity foundation are higher on the political right than on the left. Conservatives, particularly religious conservatives, live in a more sacralized world. Liberals, particularly secular scientifically-minded liberals, live in a more materialist, un-magical world.

Yet there are enough hints of “liberal purity” scattered about that we at Yourmorals are actively trying to measure it. (You might want to take our survey, here, before you read any further. You’ll have to register or sign in along the way). It can be seen in the liberal tendency to moralize food and eating, beyond its nutritive/material aspects. (See this fabulous essay by Mary Eberstadt comparing the way the left moralizes food and the right moralizes sex). It can be seen in the way the left treats environmental issues and the natural world as something sacred, to be cared for above and beyond its consequences for human – or even animal—welfare. So how do we define purity/sanctity in a way that can capture the purity concerns of both left and right?

Consider this famous quote from William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience:

Religion “consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”

So as long as you act as though there is an unseen order which imposes moral obligations and limitations on human actions above and beyond the consequences that those actions have for other people (or perhaps animals), then we are in the realm of religion or quasi-religion, and potentially in the realm of sanctity and sacred order.

There seems to be order, but can anyone know it? I think not, or at least not yet, and that those who claim to know it are deluded. Worse, when they seek to impose their delusions on others they become bullies, which leads me to suspect that they are merely bullies who will use some reason or another to justify their predations.

If we seek some sort of improved way to live it seems to me that a first step is to thwart the bullies so that we can more peacefully pursue our studies of order and do our diverse best in the process. Perhaps those who come after us will benefit from our efforts and build on them - or tear them down due to new information, as we have done.

At one point in history people knew what that meant: the money that a woman earned selling eggs from hens that she raised herself, for herself, for as close to no cost as possible. The chickens were fed what she scrimped and saved from table scraps, a little corn, often filched, and whatever the hens could catch on their own. The money was her money, perhaps her only discretionary money, and so had disproportional importance.

What's old is new.

the original “problem that had no name” was as much spiritual as economic: a malaise that overtook middle-class housewives trapped in a life of schlepping and shopping. A generation and many lawsuits later, some women found meaning and power through paid employment. Others merely found a new source of alienation. What to do? The wages of housewifery had not changed — an increased risk of depression, a niggling purposelessness, economic dependence on your husband — only now, bearing them was considered a “choice”: if you felt stuck, it was your own fault. What’s more, though today’s soccer moms may argue, quite rightly, that caretaking is undervalued in a society that measures success by a paycheck, their role is made possible by the size of their husband’s. In that way, they’ve been more of a pendulum swing than true game changers.

Enter the chicken coop.

Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place. Given how conscious (not to say obsessive) everyone has become about the source of their food — who these days can’t wax poetic about compost? — it also confers instant legitimacy. Rather than embodying the limits of one movement, femivores expand those of another: feeding their families clean, flavorful food; reducing their carbon footprints; producing sustainably instead of consuming rampantly. What could be more vital, more gratifying, more morally defensible?

There is even an economic argument for choosing a literal nest egg over a figurative one. Conventional feminist wisdom held that two incomes were necessary to provide a family’s basic needs — not to mention to guard against job loss, catastrophic illness, divorce or the death of a spouse. Femivores suggest that knowing how to feed and clothe yourself regardless of circumstance, to turn paucity into plenty, is an equal — possibly greater — safety net. After all, who is better equipped to weather this economy, the high-earning woman who loses her job or the frugal homemaker who can count her chickens?

One of the sources of my alienation is the knowledge that comes from having lived a rambling life with multiple careers and a bookish nature. The enthusiasms of those who have lived narrow lives bore me since I've literally been there, done that, wore out the t-shirt, and besides, it wasn't new when I did it. Grandma did it. You have to take your satisfaction from doing it, whatever it is, with skill and grace since there is no novelty.

My femivore friends may never do more than dabble in backyard farming — keeping a couple of chickens, some rabbits, maybe a beehive or two — but they’re still transforming the definition of homemaker to one that’s more about soil than dirt, fresh air than air freshener. Their vehicle for children’s enrichment goes well beyond a ride to the next math tutoring session.

I am tempted to call that “precious,” but that word has variegations of meaning. Then again, that may be appropriate. Hayes found that without a larger purpose — activism, teaching, creating a business or otherwise moving outside the home — women’s enthusiasm for the domestic arts eventually flagged, especially if their husbands weren’t equally involved. “If you don’t go into this as a genuinely egalitarian relationship,” she warned, “you’re creating a dangerous situation. There can be loss of self-esteem, loss of soul and an inability to return to the world and get your bearings. You can start to wonder, What’s this all for?” It was an unnervingly familiar litany: if a woman is not careful, it seems, chicken wire can coop her up as surely as any gilded cage.

No matter what you do, or how you do it, in the end you have to live with yourself. It's not someone else's fault that you get bored with yourself. The boredom has nothing to do with any of the complaints and cautions noted above. Subtract 1,000 points for every use of the word equal since that is merely a way to bully someone else and hide your own self loathing and ennui for a short while.

Some are in free-fall.

Look around the food movement -- the majority of faces are female, and they by no means belong just to "yoga moms" shopping at Whole Foods and farmers markets. An about-to-be-released new book, "Farmer Jane" by Temra Costa, introduces dozens of passionate female farmers, moms, businesswomen, chefs, and activists who are changing the way we eat and farm. . .

The growing pressure amongst educated women to feed one's family not only home-cooked but now home-grown food can morph into just another form of guilt for women employed full-time outside the home. In an excellent blog post from 2007, Bay Area writer Jennifer Jeffrey pointed out that "this whole 'eat local' concept is so not friendly for women who work." . . .

Perhaps the most important element here is that of "choice." It was feminists like Betty Friedan who liberated the Betty Drapers of the world, not Swanson's frozen dinners. Processed-food manufacturers were simply smart enough to provide the MREs for an army that was already on the move.

Seems to me that the women who Orenstein and Jeffreys are writing about are in fact the same women. They are simply viewing their time through different value lenses. Women are now waking up to the fact that despite what commercials tell us, cooking does not have to be a stressful nightly chore for the skirt-wearing member of the family. It's possible to make a meal together from fresh ingredients in about the same amount of time as boiling dried pasta and nuking some sauce. And while no one has to know the name of the farm their eggs came from, let alone the actual bird (as Orenstein mocks), taking the kids to the farmers market on the weekend is usually a lot more fun than dragging them through Safeway, and so is planting carrots in the back yard.

This isn't about food and it isn't about feminism, it's part of the confusion of sex and food and religion.

cultural artifacts and forces in the form of articles, books, movies, and ideas aimed at deregulating what is now quaintly called “nonmarital sex” have abounded and prospered; while the cultural artifacts and forces aimed at regulating or seeking to re-regulate sex outside of marriage have largely declined. In the matter of food, on the other hand, exactly the reverse has happened. Increasing scrutiny over the decades to the quality of what goes into people’s mouths has been accompanied by something almost wholly new under the sun: the rise of universalizable moral codes based on food choices. . .

Do today’s influential dietary ways of life in effect replace religion? Consider that macrobiotics, vegetarianism, and veganism all make larger health claims as part of their universality — but unlike yesteryear, to repeat the point, most of them no longer do so in conjunction with organized religion. Macrobiotics, for its part, argues (with some evidence) that processed foods and too much animal flesh are toxic to the human body, whereas whole grains, vegetables, and fruits are not. The literature of vegetarianism makes a similar point, recently drawing particular attention to new research concerning the connection between the consumption of red meat and certain cancers. In both cases, however, dietary laws are not intended to be handmaidens to a higher cause, but moral causes in themselves.

Just as the food of today often attracts a level of metaphysical attentiveness suggestive of the sex of yesterday, so does food today seem attended by a similarly evocative — and proliferating — number of verboten signs. The opprobrium reserved for perceived “violations” of what one “ought” to do has migrated, in some cases fully, from one to the other. Many people who wouldn’t be caught dead with an extra ten pounds — or eating a hamburger, or wearing real leather — tend to be laissez-faire in matters of sex. In fact, just observing the world as it is, one is tempted to say that the more vehement people are about the morality of their food choices, themore hands-off they believe the rest of the world should be about sex. What were the circumstances the last time you heard or used the word “guilt” — in conjunction with sin as traditionally conceived? Or with having eaten something verboten and not having gone to the gym?

Perhaps the most revealing example of the infusion of morality into food codes can be found in the current European passion for what the French call terroir — an idea that originally referred to the specific qualities conferred by geography on certain food products (notably wine) and that has now assumed a life of its own as a moral guide to buying and consuming locally. That there is no such widespread, concomitant attempt to impose a new morality on sexual pursuits in Western Europe seems something of an understatement. But as a measure of the reach of terroir as a moral code, consider only a sermon from Durham Cathedral in 2007. In it, the dean explained Lent as an event that “says to us, cultivate a good terroir, a spiritual ecology that will re-focus our passion for God, our praying, our pursuit of justice in the world, our care for our fellow human beings.”

In other words, there is no intellectual content in these fashions, though arguments are marshalled to justify them which selectively use findings and reason in a pseudo-intellectual fashion.

one reason that people today are so much more discriminating about food is that decades of recent research have taught us that diet has more potent effects than Betty and her friends understood, and can be bad for you or good for you in ways not enumerated before.

All that is true, but then the question is this: Why aren’t more people doing the same with sex?

For here we come to the most fascinating turn of all. One cannot answer the question by arguing that there is no such empirical news about indiscriminately pursued sex and how it can be good or bad for you; to the contrary, there is, and lots of it. After all, several decades of empirical research — which also did not exist before — have demonstrated that the sexual revolution, too, has had consequences, and that many of them have redounded to the detriment of a sexually liberationist ethic.

It's not about research findings, and that's not such a bad thing since the research findings of just a few years ago turn out to have been faulty. No matter how closely you reason from evidence your conclusions must still be provisional since the evidence is sparse and often mistaken.

Who can doubt that the two trends are related? Unable or unwilling (or both) to impose rules on sex at a time when it is easier to pursue it than ever before, yet equally unwilling to dispense altogether with a universal moral code that he would have bind society against the problems created by exactly that pursuit, modern man (and woman) has apparently performed his own act of transubstantiation. He has taken longstanding morality about sex, and substituted it onto food. The all-you-can-eat buffet is now stigmatized; the sexual smorgasbord is not.

I'm not arguing that one should not reason from evidence about either food or sex. I'm arguing that in either case the conclusions will at best be poorly grounded since we have so little good evidence. You can't determine how to live "properly" by careful analysis.

This is yet another reason why my general stance is to enable and support diversity rather than any sort of universalism. Don't put all of your eggs in one basket.

California State University Chico, where there has long been focused attention on grass fed beef, has published a new paper comparing grass fed and grain fed beef. It has been getting some legacy media attention.

Beef from grass-fed animals has lower levels of unhealthy fats and higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids, which are better for cardiovascular health. Grass-fed beef also has lower levels of dietary cholesterol and offers more vitamins A and E as well as antioxidants. The study found that meat from animals raised entirely on grass also had about twice the levels of conjugated linoleic acid, or CLA, isomers, which may have cancer fighting properties and lower the risk of diabetes and other health problems.

No news here, but we wouldn't expect news since the report is a survey of existing literature.

While the analysis is favorable to grass-fed beef, it’s not clear whether the nutritional differences in the two types of meat have any meaningful impact on human health. For instance, the levels of healthful omega-3s are still far lower than those found in fatty fish like salmon. And as the study authors note, consumers of grain-fed beef can increase their levels of healthful CLAs by eating slightly fattier cuts.

Better yet, for mega doses of omega-3s eat dairy products from grass fed cows, especially cheese, and have some mercy on the dwindling salmon population. There simply aren't enough fish to go around, so this is an empty option. Supplements squeezed from krill or algae make more sense since they are more abundant and aren't the necessarily rare top predators of the seas like salmon.

But this still misses the point: grass fed beef has a balanced fat profile of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. The objective isn't to get all the omega-3s you can get, it is to get a proper ratio of fatty acids in your natural diet so that you don't need supplements. With grain fed beef - which is usually fatter than grass fed beef - you can get as much omega-3 and CLA but you get far, far more omega-6 and so are out of balance.

Grass-fed beef has a distinctly different and “grassy” flavor compared with feed-lot beef and also costs more. A recent comparison in The Village Voice cooked up one-pound grass-fed and grain-fed steaks. The grass-fed meat tasted better, according to the article, but at $26 a pound, also cost about three times more.

Rubbish. My beef doesn't have a grassy flavor and you can buy my burger for $6 a pound in fancy vacuum bags that will keep for a very long time. The packaging costs almost as much as the beef, but in order to get USDA approval to sell at farmer's markets I have to do it.

in the 1950s, cattle raisers hoping to cut costs and improve efficiency of beef production began to ship the animals to feed lots, where they could be fattened more quickly on inexpensive and high-calorie grains. Grain feeding also increased intramuscular fat in the animals. The result was a marbling effect that made meat more flavorful and tender but also raised fat and cholesterol levels.

Nonsense. Grass fed beef can have just as much marbling when it is raised right. It takes more skill but it costs less due to needing fewer bought inputs. What grass fed beef doesn't have is the thick layer of back fat, so called bark, that has little commercial value. A diet of good grass in ample quantities can easily support the 1.7 pounds a day rate of gain needed for marbling. A steady gain at this rate is good for the animal's health and finishes them young and still tender. In a feed lot on a twinky diet they may gain twice as much a day, but a lot of that is just bark.

Advocates of pasture-raised beef say the reasons to switch go beyond nutrition. The animal is raised in a more humane fashion that is also better for the environment.

This is often the case, but there is no reason that animals could not have humane treatment while being fed a variety or forages that are not food for humans and so be even better for the environment. In my area there are a lot of packing houses that supply fruits, veggies and flowers to the nation. A lot of perfectly good food doesn't make the cut for human consumption since it isn't pretty enough. Most of it is fed to dairy cattle since it is cheaper than grain and has high food value. It would make sense in many ways to feed such food to grazing animals on pasture in those times in mid summer and mid winter when there's a slump in grass growth. This would violate the spirit if not the absolute letter of the grass fed law (it depends on which grass fed standard you are using, there are 3 or 4).

IMV the issue is good agronomics. The whole integrated food system must be considered to select production systems that do the most good and the least harm while providing superior nutrition for a large and growing population. Use lab testing to prove the quality of the food rather than trying to infer quality from the production system. Full Monty. Show the numbers. Consumers don't have the expertise to make informed decisions based on production methods, but they can read a label.

A paen to Paul Stamets

Stamets didn't get serious about mushrooms until he was 18, when he ingested psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. Hallucinating alone in the Ohio countryside, he got caught in a summer thunderstorm and climbed a tree for shelter. Waiting out the storm, Stamets examined his life. "I asked myself, 'Well Paul, why do you stutter so much?' So I repeated, 'Stop stuttering now,' over and over again, hundreds of times. The next morning, someone asked, 'Hi Paul, how are you?' I looked him right in the eye and said, 'I'm fine, how are you?' I didn't even stutter. That was when I realized mushrooms were really important to me."

Not long after his first trip, Stamets enrolled in college but dropped out to work as a logger. He eventually graduated from Olympia's Evergreen State College, whose unofficial motto, Omnia Extares, roughly translates as "Let it all hang out." While studying biology and electron microscopy, he pioneered research on psilocybin, discovering four new species and writing a definitive field guide. Unable to afford grad school, Stamets started Fungi Perfecti and published The Mushroom Cultivator, which remains a classic within the subculture of mushroom enthusiasts. (He once spotted a copy on the bookshelf of one of the directors of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.)

Stamets began distancing himself from the magic mushroom crowd about nine years ago. "The problem with the psychedelic scene," he told me while driving near his vacation home on Cortes Island, the Grateful Dead playing on the stereo, "is that people contemplate their belly buttons and don't get anything done. I wanted to save lives and the ecosystem." Yet he still credits psilocybin with giving him a sense of purpose. Stamets, who has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, used to spend hours executing complex martial arts routines in the mountains as he tripped. "I had these visions of myself as a mycological warrior in defense of the planet."

The article is deeply flawed by there are some interesting factoids in it that might amuse you: "even though the animal kingdom branched off from the fungi kingdom around 650 million years ago, humans and fungi still have nearly half of their DNA in common and are susceptible to many of the same infections. (Referring to fungi as "our ancestors" is one of the many zingers that Stamets likes to feed audiences.)"

"Paul Stamets is a modern example of the amateur scientist from the 17th and 18th century who made wonderful contributions with only their native curiosity and keen sense of observation," explains Eric Rasmussen, a former Navy physician and researcher for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation, who now heads INSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters), a Google-funded nonprofit that develops tech-nology to control disease outbreaks. "He's listened to in a lot of unexpected corners." In 1997, Battelle, a nonprofit R&D lab and a major Defense Department contractor, asked to screen more than two dozen strains of Stamets' fungi. A few years later, it sent him back a classified report revealing the mushrooms to be highly effective in breaking down the neurotoxin VX, the illegal chemical weapon. Soon afterward, DARPA invited Stamets to one of its brainstorming sessions.

He's a geek, like some of those discussed here recently who obsessively pursue some interest or another while working outside the yakity-yak establishment.

. . . for all the acclaim, Stamets is still an outsider without a PhD or an academic or institutional sponsor. That has made it hard for his work to be taken seriously in some circles—"We are just weird enough that I think we frighten people," he says—but it's an identity that he ultimately relishes. His inherently positive message—that we can tap a renewable natural resource to solve an array of environmental and medical challenges—has inspired a broad set of followers. Stamets leads workshops on "liberation mycology" and delivered the plenary address at last year's national botany conference. In February 2008, he held forth at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference, the annual conclave of deep thinkers and tech gurus in California. Afterward, Google's founders "ambushed" him with an invitation to their exclusive summer think tank . . .

I imagine that there are such geeks working now that won't be heard of much for another few decades. I imagine that the improvement in information and communication technologies will help more such geeks be productive and perhaps better known at an earlier point in their lives.

Miserabilist doomers have added "peak phosphorus" to their strand of worry beads.

Unremarked and unregulated by the United Nations and other high-level assemblies, the world’s supply of phosphate rock, the dominant source of phosphorus for fertilizer, is being rapidly — and wastefully — drawn down. By most estimates, the best deposits will be gone in 50 to 100 years.

This is fortunate. No good can come of politicizing yet another factor of agricultural production by rent seekers and power mad parasites. The idea that "the best deposits" are finite is hardly news and of little significance since the definition of "best" depends on the methods used to mine them and the value of the material being mined. There are vast amounts of phosphate rock that are readily usable when the easiest deposits play out. They would be more expensive to use now, but the cost of mining them in future is speculative at best since technologies will be developed only when they are needed, just as has happened with other mining technologies such as those for fossil fuels, metals and even gems.

peak phosphorus could be the unwelcome sequel to peak oil.

“It’s an emerging crisis,” said Stuart White, director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, and a co-author of two phosphorus studies published recently by Global Environmental Change and the International Conference on Nutrient Recovery from Wastewater Streams.

“Right now, you can get phosphorus if you’re willing to pay for it,” White said. “But global reserves will peak in 20 to 25 years. Africa has not stirred in terms of its phosphorus use. Africa could take off, and that’s very scary.

This is miserabilist nonsense. Phosphorus is in no danger of short supply, though it is in danger of increased cost. It's an economic issue. It is also an environmental issue in the sense that a great deal of phosphorus is discharged into surface waters to the detriment of living things. This will be a self correcting problem. As the cost of phosphorus rises reclamation systems will arise to capture the value stream. This is already in progress.

Both oil and phosphate rock are finite, non-renewable fossil resources that were created in deep geological time, whether from decaying biomass for oil or millennia of pooping seabirds for phosphate. But there are substitutes for oil; there is no substitute for phosphorus, an element that forms bones, sustains cell membranes and gives shape to the DNA and RNA in all living things.

“We are effectively addicted to phosphate rock,” said Dana Cordell, a Ph.D. candidate who works with White and co-authored the recent studies.

Well, it isn't pooping seabirds that created the phosphate rocks. They made a little, but the vast majority precipitated out of sea water, was excrement and bones of sea creatures, or was sediment carried into the coastal seas by rivers. It is a process that continues today.

The idea that there is no substitute for phosphorus is silly. There is no substitute for any of the nutrients, they are elements. We can't reliably produce any of these atoms. We do have clumsy methods to alter things at the atomic level but it is still far easier to mine gold than to transmute lead. Alchemy is based on false premises.

A more sensible view is that "There's no work around for phosphorus as some claim for nitrogen." Nitrogen makes up the vast majority of our atmosphere and there are organisms that can process air to make nitrogen compounds useful to plants, just as they process air to make useful carbon compounds such as sugar. Phosphorus is not an atmospheric gas like nitrogen or carbon, though it is present in vast quantities in water, especially sea water. An individual grower will always have to haul in replacement phosphorus compounds rather than making it on site as he can nitrates and carbohydrates. The same is true for most of the nutrients required in agriculture. Potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, manganese, selenium etc. etc. must be hauled in to replace that which is removed in crops. Duh!

Mature animals, including humans, excrete nearly 100 percent of the phosphorus they consume. But only half of animal manure — the largest organic and renewable source of phosphorus — is being recycled back onto farmland worldwide, studies show. And only 10 percent of what humans excrete is returned to agriculture as sludge or wastewater.

“We need to start talking about our pee and poo more seriously,” Cordell said. “We need to be thinking in terms of 50 to 100 years.”

"We" certainly do take it seriously. Perhaps the average urban denizen has no understanding of these issues, but growers are well aware of them, apparently to a far greater degree than the academic establishment. No surprise in that. Some wet-behind-the-ears grad student is hardly someone that has a useful grasp of reality.

The U.S. now has only a 25-year supply left of phosphate rock, most of it is in Florida and North Carolina, studies show. China has the largest reserves — 27 percent of the total — but has clamped down on exports with a steep tariff. Morocco is occupying the Western Sahara and its reserves and is exporting them to the U.S, even as the U.N. condemns the trade.

Africa is now both the largest exporter of phosphate rock and the continent with the worst food shortages.

“We’re calling this the biggest problem no one’s heard of,” said James Elser, an Arizona State University ecologist who recently co-founded the Sustainable Phosphorus Initiative, a new research group on campus. (Arizona State will send representatives to the conference in Sweden this month, and next year, the university plans to host the second international summit on phosphorus.)

Rubbish. The rock formation being mined in Florida and N. Carolina is part of vast reserves all along the Atlanitic seaboard. They are the tip of a far larger sedimentary formation. They are the cheapest and easiest to mine, so it is reasonable that they would be mined first, but there is plenty more available when the price is right or the technology advances in ways that reduce the costs of mining. The worst thing that could happen is for ignorant politicians and activist groups to start meddling. Their only object is to enrich and empower themselves at the expense of society. We don't need more parasites, we need fewer of them.

they say, reducing demand means bucking a global trend and deliberately choosing to eat less meat. Meat- and dairy-based diets require up to three times as much phosphorus as vegetarian diets.

If the Western world switched en masse to a vegetarian diet, it could lower the world demand for phosphorus in fertilizers by as much as 45 percent, the studies show. If, on the other hand, Indians switched to a meat-based diet, it would triple India’s demand for phosphorus.

“It goes to the heart of what people see as affluence,” White said. “Can we afford to have 9 billion people in 2050 eating as high on the food chain as Americans and Australians do? The answer, clearly, is no. As Gandhi said, ‘There’s enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.’

“It’s not for me to tell other people what they should eat. But people in Western industrial countries have a choice. There is no need to eat meat.”

This is, as noted in the previous post, profoundly ignorant of agricultural reality. It is based on the triple threat stupidity of assuming that all land is the same, all animals are the same and all plants are the same and so it is all fungible. All the ignorant academic or activist needs to do is freely substitute one incommensurable thing for another until they find false but satisfying support for their cherished illusions.

The idiocy of activists and academics masks the real issues. To feed the world requires smarter use of all agricultural inputs and sophisticated agronomic systems. It isn't about peak anything. It isn't about politics or culture war or food fetishes. These are the concerns of the vermin that impede the deployment of sensible systems.

Update: Some detail

The name phosphorus comes from the Greek word phosphoros, which means bringer of light. Phosphorus is mined in the form of phosphate rock.

Phosphate rock is formed in oceans in the form of calcium phosphate, called phosphorite. It is deposited in extensive layers that cover thousands of square miles. Originally, the element phosphorus is dissolved from rocks. Some of this phosphorus goes into the soil where plants absorb it; some is carried by streams to the oceans. In the oceans the phosphorus is precipitated by organisms and sometimes by chemical reaction. Phosphorus-rich sediments alternate with other sediments (geologists say these beds are interstratified). Phosphorus-rich beds usually have very few fossils; however, deposits in Florida and North Carolina contain a large amount of marine fossils. Some geologists believe that the formation of these phosphorus layers occur under a very special condition in which no other type of sediment is present. In addition, it is believed that phosphorus-rich rock is deposited in a body of water in which there is no oxygen; this is called an anaerobic environment. Many theories say that phosphorus is absorbed by ocean plants that die. As they decompose, the phosphorus accumulates. Despite many theories, studies about the formation of phosphate rock continue and theories about its deposition are developing.

In addition to the sedimentary phosphate deposits, there are some igneous rocks that are also rich in phosphate minerals. Sedimentary phosphate deposits, however, are more plentiful.

The importance of phosphorus to agriculture and industry is not in dispute, but the attempts to exploit this importance for instrumental purposes by doomers is reprehensible. What is need are clear eyed approaches to phosphorus use and supply that can satisfy the growing needs of an ever more populous world.

Jeremy nibbled this resource from OK State on livestock breeds. The intro page made a couple of points that I've made before but are perhaps worth repeating.

There are many who feel that because the world population is growing at a faster rate than is the food supply, we are becoming less and less able to afford animal foods because feeding plant products to animals is an inefficient use of potential human food. It is true that it is more efficient for humans to eat plant products directly rather than to allow animals to convert them to human food. At best, animals only produce one pound or less of human food for each three pounds of plants eaten. However, this inefficiency only applies to those plants and plant products that the human can utilize. The fact is that over two-thirds of the feed fed to animals consists of substances that are either undesirable or completely unsuited for human food. Thus, by their ability to convert inedible plant materials to human food, animals not only do not compete with the human rather they aid greatly in improving both the quantity and the quality of the diets of human societies.

And, a third of all human protein comes from animals foods. You can easily get empty calories from plants, and they account for 80% of the total calories consumed by humans in the world, but that's not a healthful diet.

There are other considerations.

Only about one-third of the land area of the world is classified as agricultural. Thus, roughly two-thirds of the land area of the world is not suited for any sort of agricultural use because it is covered by cites, mountains, deserts, swamps, snow, etc. Of the 35 percent that can be devoted to agriculture, less than one-third (or about 10% of the total land area) can be cultivated and produce plant products that the human can digest. The remaining two-thirds of the world's agricultural land is covered by grass, shrubs or other plants that only ruminant animals can digest. Thus, the inefficiency of animals is not a major concern since they represent the only way these plants can be converted to human food. As the human population of the world increases, it is likely that we will be forced to depend more and more on ruminant animals to meet the increased demands for food.

It can be argued that some of the two thirds of ag land used for ruminant grazing would be better left unused, or used less. It can also be argued that some of that one third of ag land used for cropping would be better left unused, or used for ruminant grazing.

It is true that swine and poultry can be competitors with the humans for food if they are produced by the intensive confinement systems widely practiced in the developed countries. In fact the highest proportion of feed grains and other concentrates, such as oilseed meals, fed to livestock in the United States are fed to swine and poultry. Current grain prices make this profitable. This obviously could change if grain prices increase in the future. However, the high reproductive rate and favorable feed efficiency of swine and poultry would keep them as important contributors to the diets of humans.

Informed commentators reasoning in good faith draw very different conclusions about the role of animal agriculture for human food supply than those so often trumpeted by activists with eating disorders and ideological blinkers. Improving human nutrition while also caring for the environment requires improved agronomic systems based on accurate information. All livestock are not the same. All plant material is not the same. All land is not the same. Making intelligent use of these truths to produce abundant and nutritious foods for human consumption while having the least adverse impact on the environment is a requirement as human population increases.

No one in their right mind would advocate trusting authority except those who stand to profit from such intellectual error.

Trust is never more important than when citizens are asked to make sacrifices for a brighter future. Mistrust of the government making this request could be the harbinger - even the cause - of national decline.The writer, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Trust is never sillier than when there is something at stake. It is trust, in this case, that brings monotonic social degradation and national decline. That doesn't mean that no work can be delegated to government, it means that they must be continuously monitored and managed and only given tasks suited to their abilities. When things go wrong - not if, when - you don't get a do-over, it happens to you. It is foolish and irresponsible to trust government, or blame it when trouble comes.

Often misread as an expression of national arrogance, "American exceptionalism" denotes a sociological fact. The US differs from other advanced democracies in two respects above all - religiosity and suspicion of state power. The former moved to the centre of American politics in the decade just ended; the latter may well dominate the decade just begun. The lack of trust in government has framed, and weakened, the Obama presidency thus far. And rebuilding trust may well be the administration's most important political task.

The notion that there are other advanced democracies needs unpacking. Other democracies were late arriving and partial at best. They never really advanced to the point of self rule, clinging instead to older forms of authoritarian existence. They made their kings and aristocracy a bit more accountable, and changed their titles, but the form of government and its relationship to society is much the same. The bloody twentieth century is a fine demonstration of the error in this behavior, though the bloody eighteenth century was lesson enough for those who were paying attention.

Consider the most recent survey conducted by CBS News and The New York Times. Only 19 per cent of respondents - near the record low - said they trusted the government to do what is right all or most of the time. Only 29 per cent thought they had much influence on what the government does, while 78 per cent believed the government to be run by a few big interests, not for the benefit of the people.

Not surprisingly, these sentiments helped shape attitudes about the exercise of public power. Only 35 per cent thought that government should do more to solve national problems, versus 59 per cent who believed it already did too many things better left to individuals and the private sector. Some 56 per cent would prefer a smaller government offering fewer services; only 34 per cent favoured a larger and more active government.

These sentiments are not without precedent in US history. From the beginning, doubts about government have been part of America's cultural DNA. Around the middle of the 20th century, however, it was possible to believe that anti-statism was a thing of the past. Between 1933 and the mid-1960s, the federal government had fought the Great Depression, prevailed in the second world war, contained the Soviet Union, and presided over the greatest expansion of middle-class prosperity in human history. Little wonder that public trust in government reached 76 per cent by 1964.

The trauma of the world wars era and the profoundly negative impact it had on American society is a bizarre argument for trust in government. Compared to what? Decades of regimentation in a fight to survive can create a more obedient and unquestioning population, but that's not a good thing. This was also the era of government excess and intrusion - McCarthyism comes to mind as well as segregation - that sowed the seeds of its own defeat.

And then the tide turned. Influenced in part by perceptions of deceit over (and defeat in) Vietnam, trust in government fell to 53 per cent in 1970. After Watergate, it fell again, to 36 per cent, in 1974. After the Great Inflation of the mid- and late 1970s, it collapsed to only 25 per cent by 1980. The economic recovery that began during the Reagan administration in 1983 moved trust back up for a while, but it stood at only 29 per cent on the threshold of Bill Clinton's presidency. After rising again during President Clinton's second term and George W. Bush's first, it fell rapidly after 2004 and stood at just 17 per cent in the weeks before Barack Obama's historic victory.

To the surprise of many - including, one suspects, the incoming administration - Obama's inauguration did little to increase trust in government. While the American people had invested their hopes in a promising young leader, they had not withdrawn their reservations about the institutions from which the change he had promised would have to flow.

The tide turned a decade earlier than 1970, it just took a while for that to become apparent to the government - the times they were a-changin'. Americans were heartily sick of the swollen government that had come into being during war and wanted nothing more that a return to normalcy, which is what those who don't quite grasp what America is about call exceptionalism. That's why every would-be dictator that comes to power in America tries to start a war of some sort. Wars on poverty, drugs, pollution, obesity, whatever - they all want to lead a Great Leap or found a Great Society. America is already a great society: not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but much further along the path of self rule and rational governance than other societies.

As schoolchildren, most Americans encounter the ancient maxim, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty". Within limits, it is. But taken too far, the spirit of vigilance yields what the late historian Richard Hofstadter termed the "paranoid style in American politics". Most political observers dismissed last summer's raucous town meetings and "Tea Party" demonstrations as an angry fringe phenomenon. That cannot be said today. In a CNN survey released two weeks ago, 56 per cent endorsed the proposition: "The federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens". This is deeply troubling. Moderate anti-statism helps preserve liberty. But extreme anti-statism undermines democratic self-government.

There's nothing extreme about the current opposition to overwheening and inept government. Our political class and bureaucracy are a bunch of bumblers, time servers who are squatting on the neck of society. Their cost far exceeds their benefit. It is perfectly rational - not extreme - to demand relief from their predations. They simply aren't very good at what they do and need to be downsized like any other enterprise that has lost its focus and no longer produces value.

To some extent this is correctable, even self-correcting. All else being equal, as economic growth resumes and unemployment declines, trust in government will increase. And the Obama administration has it in its power to bring promise and performance into closer alignment. It is better to under-promise and over-perform than the reverse; the mistaken optimism surrounding the stimulus package can and should be a one-off, not the administration's modus operandi.

Incompetence is less noticeable and objectionable during boom times. A broken automobile manufacturer - say General Motors - can drift along aimlessly during a boom, but booms always end. Hoping for a new boom in order to avoid necessary restructuring is profoundly bad strategy.

But there are deeper forces at work, and they offer less hope. Economic inequality in the US stands at levels not seen since the 1920s, and polarisation between the two principal political parties is deeper and more pervasive than at any time since the 1890s. Scholars have linked both these trends to intensified public mistrust.

This is bad news, given the challenges facing the US. Over the coming decade, political leaders must convince Americans that the current fiscal course is unsustainable and that only unpleasant changes can rectify things.

Political leaders have no idea what they are doing. They need to listen rather than preach so that they can become marginally less incompetent. Scholars are, after all, just as confused and overmatched by events, though it is supposedly their jobs to be aware of the situation. Instead, they are repeatedly blind sided by their own mistakes as well as the unexpected. It has always been so. That's the main lesson that both scholars and politicians must grasp: you don't know what you are doing so proceed with caution rather than blundering blindly ahead full tilt with your obsessions and confusions.

It isn't that there is some magic formula, some set of politicians and policies that can make huge, centralized authoritarian societies work well. They can't work well. It's a silly idea that arises from muddled thinking that glosses over the particularities of systems. It a juvenile notion that belongs in a jar kept by the door where you place your cherished illusions when leaving your cloister to engage with the reality of the world at large.

OK, it's more like groundhog decade or something, but I seem to be caught in a hard loop. Many current events are repeats of what has been going on for some time, and I've already said my piece. Fortunately, I forget the specifics after having ranted. Unfortunately, I sometimes stumble on some old post and realize that I have nothing new to say.

I have argued repeatedly that scientists, science writers and the media in general as well as politicians that use doom scenarios as wedge issues are the cause of doubt, that they have ruined their own credibility, and that they must rehabilitate themselves by changing their behavior so that they can serve the useful social purpose of informing society. Shouting louder or seeking clever ways to disguise speculation doesn't overcome public distrust of science, it makes it worse. Gilland is wrong that there is "a reluctance to believe anything but scare stories", few believe them anymore than they believe other political assertions. It's just ammunition to attack political opponents and people continue to live in ways that demonstrate their lack of belief. Looking at what they do rather than what they say in the heat of battle reveals their beliefs.

We need some maturity in the science community, recognition that by presenting speculation as data they have diminished the ability of society to respond, slowed reaction time to legitimate threats.

For related posts see Unanimous Fallacies and Affective Forecasting Accuracy

Also mentioned were Waffling with Dignity and dnE ehT ... toN

Here's an example of a mechanism of poor decision making.

many of the climate modellers I spoke to were keen to point out that simulating the climate with more complex models may well lead to greater uncertainty about what the future holds. That’s because including sources of large feedbacks – such as forests that can expand or die or tundra that can release vast amounts of methane – adds a whole new suite of factors to which the climate can respond.

So, it’s quite likely that the next IPCC report will have much larger error bars on its estimates of future temperature or precipitation, compared with AR4. Climatologist Jim Hurrell of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, who is heading up development of the NCAR Earth-system model, had this to say:

“It's very likely that the generation of models that will be assessed for the next IPCC report will have a wider spread of possible climate outcomes as we move into the future".

So why include more complexity in the model, if it will produce results that are less useful for decision-making?

The idea that greater realism is less useful for decision making is starkly nuts. Good decisions must be based on good information and good analysis. It is only bad decisions that benefit from sloppy thinking.

Here, it’s worth remembering that for climatologists, models are not just tools that can give a glimpse of what the future holds; they are also an experimental playground – a replica world on which they can test their knowledge of the climate system. Without the ability to conduct global-scale experiments in the lab or in the field, models are the only tools they have. So while the results from more complex models may, in the short-term, be less informative for policy makers and the public, they will help scientists better understand what drives climate change and lead to better simulations in the long-term.

It's an odd sort of logic that considers better information to be less information, as if bad information should have equal weight. The desire to make hasty and uninformed decisions is one of the reasons why resistance to technocratic rule is wise. They aren't as smart or reasonable as they think they are, but in their arrogance they blunder about wreaking havoc. They lack the required intellectual maturity to be trusted, as well as having glaring character defects that ought to disqualify them from decision making tasks.

The issues discussed in the previous post are relevant to this sort of bizarre behavior.

Robin ruminates about a study of beliefs. The study notes that:

Adult intelligence predicts adult espousal of liberalism, atheism, and sexual exclusivity for men (but not for women), while intelligence is not associated with the adult espousal of evolutionarily familiar values on children, marriage, family, and friends. ... Childhood intelligence at age 10 significantly increases the probability that individuals become vegetarian as adults.

Robin wonders:

The results are interesting and worth pondering, but it is still far from clear to me why the modern world should push smart folks in these directions. Is it that smart folks are more open minded and willing to adopt new beliefs? If so, why do they differ only on some topics but not on others? Is it that some beliefs are newly rewarded in the modern world, and smart folks are faster on the uptake? This makes some sense of monogamy values, since the farming revolution has preferred that institution (longer term investments, easier to hold women). But how does this story make sense of smart folks being more liberal, atheist, or vegetarian?

The beliefs of smart folks are not related to intelligence. In an old post I grappled with the same issue.

How do seemingly intelligent and informed people speak such transparent nonsense that can so easily be refuted by even the most casual observation? Herb Gintis once spoke about such things in a mailing list.

First, two basic cultural transmission mechanism lead humans to accept statements that they do not personally subject to scrutiny for factual validity. One is conformist transmission, whereby people see what the majority are doing, and copy it (Boyd and Richerson, 1985, Henrich and Boyd 2001). When there is much to learn and the cost of testing is high, this is a fitness enhancing strategy for a large fraction of the population, especially when the costs and benefits of different behaviors do not change rapidly over time. The other is the transmission by socialization, through which new members of society are induced to accept norms and values that they choose to follow. Norms and values cannot be scrutinized for truth value, since they have none. But, people can generally believe that those who subscribe to the norms and values of their society have higher fitness and well being than those who violate these norms. Moreover, this believe that "those who do good will do well" is generally true in most societies, so this belief can be personally validated.

Second, there is no guarantee that these two cultural transmission mechanisms will produce fitness enhancing beliefs. People can conform to grossly inaccurate and harmful practices (e.g., blame sickness on an enemy who invoked a hostile spirit to harm you), and they can have beliefs that lead to the very demise of a society. See, for instance, Robert B. Edgerton, Sick Societies (New York: The Free Press, 1992). Norms and values can similarly be deeply fitness reducing for a society---a grim example being the way values have led many nations to respond suboptimally to the AIDS epidemic.

Third, these two cultural transmission mechanisms lead human societies to have a very low within-group variance of behavior, thus enhancing the power of between-group selection. Specifically, groups that have fitness-enhancing cultural forms are likely to expand (through war, imitation, and population growth) at the expense of those that do not. It is this between group selection process that leads cultural forms to be fitness enhancing.

One beautiful example of this is the tendency for the world's great religions (as measured by number of adherents) to embrace prosocial values (e.g., love Thy neighbor, honesty will open the doors of heaven to you) as opposed to the myriad of religions and cults found in small-scale societies, many of which have deeply fitness-reducing aspects).

Fitness enhancing, however, does not always mean true in the scientific sense. Thus, many untrue beliefs have proliferated in even the most advanced societies.

Fourth, advanced intellectual sophistication is not a counterweight to any of the above assertions. Think of our own society, where the most educated classes have believed such things as (a) autism is cause by poor mothering, (b) fat is bad for you and carbohydrates are good for you, (c) colds are caught by sitting in a draft, (d) second hand smoke is so bad for non-smokers that smokers have absolutely no right to smoke in public. And so on. Not to mention whole ideologies, such as Freudian psychology and Marxian political theory.

Fifth, humans, like all other animals, do not maximize fitness, but rather an objective function (which may be called a preference function) based on immediate costs and benefits, that has evolved to correspond to fitness enhancement. For this reason, a mutant human who does not believe the dominant myths and does not accept the dominant norms and values of society need not prosper, unless he can accurately distinguish which among the cultural forms he faces in fact enhances his personal fitness, and which do not. But agents do not choose to maximize fitness, but rather utility, as prescribed by their preference function. There is no way to achieve accuracy in assessing fitness effects , in part because humans (like other animals, although much less so) tend to have preference functions that are excessively present-oriented, and so undervalue behaviors with long-term payoffs (Google Ainslie, Laibson, and Loewenstein for documentation). Cultural beliefs and values that counter this tendency (e.g., be slow to anger, invest in good hunting skills) are fitness enhancing but will be judged to be welfare reducing by the sociopath who assesses them according to his own preference function.

It follows that the widespread existence of false beliefs and personally harmful values, despite producing major maladaptions in many cases, nevertheless contributes to the success of Homo sapiens. In particular, the above-outlined mechanism allow for the evolutionary stability of altruistic cooperation and punishment, which are the basic underpinnings of social cooperation in humans

It is my hope that fewer episodes of mass delusion such as the Freudian psychology and Marxian political theory that Gintis mentions will occur as the speed and scope of communication increases. Such ideas need a certain amount of protection from the light of reason to flourish. Both conformist transmission and transmission by socialization are more difficult in open societies where contrary views and analyses are more difficult to filter out.

It's still just a hope, but there does seem to be some slight change in the air at this moment. Some of the nonsensical ideas believed by "smart folks" are being exposed as nonsense, just the bizarre customs of a sick culture which are transmitted to youths via conformist socialization. The point worth emphasis here IMV is this: "advanced intellectual sophistication is not a counterweight". The beliefs of intelligent people are no more interesting or truthful than those of the population as a whole. They may be different, but not more sensible.

In the continuing struggle of technocrats against society a variety of methods to eliminate democracy and skew systems of governance toward technocratic domination have been proposed. Consider National Juries.

The reason so many bad policies are good politics is that so many people vote. … Ignorant voters … are biased towards particular errors. …

The best way to improve modern politics? … The number of voters should be drastically reduced so that each voter realizes that his vote will matter. Something like 12 voters per district … selected at random from the electorate. With 535 districts in Congress … there would be 6,420 voters nationally. A random selection would deliver a proportional representation of sexes, ages, races and income groups. This would improve on the current system, in which the voting population is skewed … the old vote more than the young, the rich vote more than the poor, and so on.

To safeguard against the possibility of abuse, these 6,420 voters would not know that they had been selected at random until the moment when the polling officers arrived at their house. They would then be spirited away to a place where they will spend a week locked away with the candidates, attending a series of speeches, debates and question-and-answer sessions before voting on the final day.

This is an old idea that surfaces from time to time. The key attribute of such a system is that the number of people is drastically reduced so that it becomes possible to control their minds. Isolating them from society and controlling their information inputs allows their views to be shaped.

Good decision making requires far more than the carefully crafted advocacy of candidates for office as input to the decision processes. It is very often the case that none of the candidates or the information selected by technocrats address the valid and significant concerns of society.

More here. This logic is simple and strong enough for most folks to both understand and accept. Yet most would still prefer our current system – why?

My guess: aside from status quo bias, it just doesn’t feel like the political ideal in the back of our minds – how our nomadic forager ancestors long ago would meet every few months to make major band decisions. All 5-15 men could talk, they wouldn’t break until they’d all had their say, decisions were by informal consensus of all, and dissenters could leave the band.

My guess is that the defects in this system are apparent but difficult to articulate. People are rightfully suspicious of technocrats who have so little grasp of social systems due to their narrow intellectual development, and so reject such proposals even if they can't explain precisely what seems distasteful about them.

I'd state the problem differently. The reason so many bad policies are good politics is that so many people vote. … Ignorant voters … are biased towards particular errors like any other sales pitch arguments for and against various policy proposals are dishonest, intended to confuse and stampede buyers into making bad decisions. It's obvious that reducing the number of buyers and subjecting them to more intense sales pitches will not help.

The underlying issue is that the vast majority of such policies are not intended to help society, they are just what the politicians and bureaucrats want to sell for their own benefit. It's their business. It's no different than the behavior of a manufacturer selling widgets of some sort or a service business selling some sort of performance product. They try to create desire for their particular products with marketing strategies, in a context of a consumer culture trained to seek out things to consume.

A better approach to bad decisions is to make fewer decisions, just as wiser purchases are made when they are less frequent. We need less politics not more if the objective is good governance, but it isn't. The objective is to grow the business, sell more product. By analogy it's like a sport - say football - that makes money not only on the contests but also all of the associated merchandising and infrastructure - everything from before and after contest consumption of food and beverages to parking fees and broadcast revenue. There are lots of jobs at stake and huge amounts of revenue. The difference between politics and football - or automobile racing or reality dating shows or movies about "smart" people chatting wittily while trying to figure out how to have sex with one another - is the all of society is burdened by the outcomes of essentially meaningless contests.

There's always trouble in agriculture, and so politicians are always meddling. In one sense they have a mandate to govern, and policies to assure adequate food supplies are a major concern. More importantly, no politician can long survive if they are opposed by farmers. In much of the world farmers are numerous and when riled up are a potent force due to sheer numbers, but even where they are a tiny minority their concerns are influential since food is an emotional issue and they get sympathy and support from city dwellers.

Political tinkering in agriculture is very nearly always destructive. The more they tinker the worse things get and the more tinkering they do.

In the 1970s, India dramatically increased food production, finally allowing this giant country to feed itself. But government efforts to continue that miracle by encouraging farmers to use fertilizers have backfired, forcing the country to expand its reliance on imported food. . .

Behind the worsening picture is the government's agricultural policy. In an effort to boost food production, win farmer votes and encourage the domestic fertilizer industry, the government has increased its subsidy of urea over the years, and now pays about half of the domestic industry's cost of production. . .

Farmers spread the rice-size urea granules by hand or from tractors. They pay so little for it that in some areas they use many times the amount recommended by scientists, throwing off the chemistry of the soil, according to multiple studies by Indian agricultural experts.

Like humans, plants need balanced diets to thrive. Too much urea oversaturates plants with nitrogen without replenishing other nutrients that are vitally important, including phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, magnesium and calcium.

The government has subsidized other fertilizers besides urea. In budget crunches, subsidies on those fertilizers have been reduced or cut, but urea's subsidy has survived. That's because urea manufacturers form a powerful lobby, and farmers are most heavily reliant on this fertilizer, making it a political hot potato to raise the price. . .

In the early years after India gained independence in 1947, the country couldn't even dream of feeding its population. Importing food wasn't possible because India lacked the cash to pay. India relied on food donated by the U.S. government.

In 1967, then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imported 18,000 tons of hybrid wheat seeds from Mexico. The effect was miraculous. The wheat harvest that year was so bountiful that grain overflowed storage facilities.

Those seeds required chemical fertilizers to maximize yield. The challenge was to make fertilizers affordable to farmers who lacked the cash to pay for even the basics—food, clothing and shelter.

Back then, giving cash or vouchers to millions of farmers living all over India seemed like an impossible task fraught with the potential for corruption. So the government paid subsidies to fertilizer companies, who agreed to sell for less than the cost of production, at prices set by the government. . .

In 1991, with the cost of the subsidy weighing heavily on India's finances, Manmohan Singh, then finance minister and now prime minister, pushed to eliminate it. Most fertilizer companies lobbied fiercely to retain the program. Many legislators also resisted ending the subsidy, fearing a backlash from farmers.

"The business interests lobbied and the business interests prevailed," says Ashok Gulati, the director in Asia of the International Food Policy Research Institute, a Washington-based think tank, who was involved in the policy discussions at the time. A last-minute compromise eliminated the subsidy on all fertilizers except for urea.

"That's when the imbalanced use of fertilizers began," says Pratap Narayan, ex-director general of the industry group, the Fertilizer Association of India.

With urea selling for a fraction of the price of other fertilizers, farmers began using substantially more of the nitrogen-rich material than more expensive potassium and phosphorus products.

In the state of Haryana, farmers used 32 times more nitrogen than potassium in the fiscal year ended March 2009, much more than the recommended 4-to-1 ratio, according to the Indian Journal of Fertilizers, a trade publication. In Punjab state, they used 24 times more nitrogen than potassium, the figures show.

"This type of ratio is a disaster," Mr. Gulati says. "It is keeping India from reaching the production levels that the hybrid seeds have the power to yield."

It's a tragedy of errors. The political necessity to "do something" results in dumb policies and the continuing necessity of political meddling. Politics is stupid.

The possibility of dramatically increased production with modern agronomic systems coupled with the pressure from a food insecure population resulted in muddled policies. They couldn't just decree that impoverished and illiterate farmers would miraculously become sophisticated growers with deep knowledge, and they couldn't trust their bureaucracy to honestly administer a subsidized agronomic system, so they faked it. By subsidizing fertilizer producers rather than users they destroyed all natural incentive for wise use. They eliminated the crucial price signals needed for decision making, and turned those who once farmed the land into supplicants who now farmed the government.

That was bad enough, but it got very much worse with continued political tinkering. They couldn't afford to continue the subsidy system, but depended for their political lives on the special interests that had been conjured up by the subsidies. So they did the worst thing possible and abandoned the whole idea of an agronomic system, eliminating subsidies for some types of fertilizer but not others. Anyone with a functioning brain could predict the result: increased use of subsidized types of fertilizer, decreased use of other type, a total lack of balance in the system and monotonic degradation of the sector including destruction of the foundation of agriculture - the soil itself.

I often hear nonsensical criticism of agriculture and proposals for wild schemes of increased political control. A favorite tactic is to demonize fertilizer, which is complete nonsense given that nothing grows without it. Like ignorant politicians they backpedal a bit and target their criticism a bit more precisely to demonize "chemical" fertilizers, though all fertilizers are chemicals. Manufactured urea is identical to the stuff in your everyday urine.

Nothing sensible is ever said by such critics though there is abundant need and ample opportunity to do so. The idea of balanced fertility with all required nutrients made available to plants in the proper quantities at the proper times as part of an agronomic system designed to improve the quality of the primary asset - the soil - and so enjoy increasing returns over time is beyond them. It makes a sort of abstract sense but there's no hate in it, no political opportunities, little room for graft or corruption. Worst of all, the result of assiduously applying such a system would be an ever more secure and independent farming sector with ever less need or interest in politicians. The political machine would go redundant. All of the bureaucrats, NGOs and associated industries would be out of work.

One of my secret, sometimes guilty pleasures is reading a variety of things on the net and allowing them to mingle in my mind, sometimes sparking connections that may or may not be valid when investigated further.

For example, a message from a biochar/gasification list today noted that the type of charcoal making system used for centuries in the western part of Maharashtra State, India used what we now call TLUD (Top Lit UpDraft) technology. TLUD stove designs on a small scale are advocated as a simple, cheap but effective improvement on the old 3 stones and a pot cooking system, and which also produces biochar if the burn is quenched at the right moment.

The TLUD idea is that air flow through the feedstock is controlled so that it is mostly the pyrolysis gases given off from heating the feedstock that burn rather than the feedstock itself. The traditional charcoal making system in India did the same thing. In the words of the message author, A.D. Karve:

The wood to be charred is heaped on the ground and the heap is covered with mud to form a crude kiln. An opening is left in the mud plaster at the top and there are also a few openings at the base of the kiln. The wood is ignited through the opening at the top of the kiln. The openings at the base provide the air. The fire traverses from top to bottom, leaving charcoal behind, while the air traverses from the bottom to the top, providing oxygen to the zone where wood is burning. The air passing through the charcoal zone is devoid of oxygen. This air, which also contains tar vapour, passes out of the kiln through the top opening. The kiln keeps burning for several days. When the fire reaches the bottom of the kiln, the smoke coming out of the top opening is no longer black, because it no longer contains tar. After this stage, it is the charcoal that burns. The changed colour of the flue gas is an indication that the charring is complete. Then the holes at the bottom and also the one at the top are sealed with mud to quench the fire. The charcoal is removed after the mass has cooled.

How did this system get invented?

'Who do you think made the first stone spear?" asks Temple Grandin. "That wasn't the yakkity yaks sitting around the campfire. It was some Asperger sitting in the back of a cave figuring out how to chip rocks into spearheads. Without some autistic traits you wouldn't even have a recording device to record this conversation on." . . .

She has always thought socializing was boring, and she famously described herself as "an anthropologist on Mars" to neurologist Oliver Sacks when explaining her interactions with typical people. As a teenager, while her peers fixated on boys and pop culture, Ms. Grandin was consumed with scientific experiments. . .

People on the "spectrum" tend to be just as obsessed with things and the way things work as they are uninterested in social relationships. And, as Ms. Grandin observed, people interested in things make important advancements—particularly in engineering, science and technology. . .

"It's important to get these autistic kids out and exposed to stuff. You've got to fill up the database." Silicon Valley and the tech companies are like "heaven on earth for the geeks and the nerds. And I want to see more and more of these smart kids going into the tech industry and inventing things—that's what makes America great."

The possibly spurious connection that I got was that like the caveman obsessively chipping stones it was some ancient Indian geek with sub-par social skills who made the TLUD charcoal kiln. But that's not the end of this chain of connections. When you read up on the eons old system of metallurgy in India, especially steel making, that TLUD kiln may have been an important part. The same design used for making charcoal is also capable of producing the high heat needed for making quality steel. Instead of quenching the reaction once it reaches the bottom, increase the air flow and you have a charcoal burning blast furnace.

When you read the sparse accounts of ancient steel making in India, especially what is called Damascus steel made from wootz eggs imported from India, the methods seem very much like the traditional charcoal kilns still used today in some parts of India, though they have forgotten how to make the wootz. The fuzzy story is that small amounts of iron ore mixed with some charcoal and other impurities, and encased in clay containers, were inserted into such kilns and left to endure the inferno through the whole process from start to finish. The resulting high carbon steel alloyed perhaps with vanadium impurities was world renowned - once properly refired and hammered into blades (folding, pickling, yada yada) - for its quality and beauty.

In the Amazon where Terra Preta was discovered they lacked ores and didn't do metallurgy. But, they did pottery - big pottery if the archaeologists can be believed. They obviously had to have had kiln technology. They had wood and mud, so it seems that the type of TLUD system used in India could have been done there too, but we would have no record of it now since such kilns would not have survived the ages since then. Also, wherever Terra Preta is found it is littered with broken pottery. Perhaps such sites weren't just middens, the garbage dumps and land fills of antiquity. Perhaps they were potter sites which would in the normal course of events become suffused with charcoal and failed, broken pots.

The Amazonians would have had their fair share of geeks too. In addition to my imagined potter geeks obsessively playing with fire and mud the way that the notional cave man sat chipping his stones, there might have been agro-geeks who noticed that abandoned potter sites grew magnificient weeds and so would make really good kitchen gardens. In this way the Terra Preta super soil system wouldn't have to have been invented from scratch, derived from first principles. It was generations of diverse geeks each hyper focused on a singular obsession.

This doesn't neatly tie up all the factors of this mystery since there are also areas of extensive semi-improved ag lands in the Amazon - the Terra Mulata areas that are better but not as good as the Terra Preta spots - but they might be understood as later and lesser applications of the same principles but achieved with a variant of the standard slash and burn swidden system - slash and char. Some geek had an inspiration, or maybe just enjoyed fire experiments.