with kaleidoscopes. These guys have kaleidoscopes implanted in their heads to eliminate any accidental contact with reality in an unguarded moment. They are always selling. It's a competitive business and you have to believe your grift to be any good at selling it to others.

Consider this bit of fantasy.

the reason that industrial agriculture remains dominant is that it's so much more productive, right?

Wrong.

According to a new study in the Feb. 15 edition of Environmental Science & Technology, a journal of the American Chemical Society, sustainable agriculture techniques like those mentioned above, introduced to developing world farms over the last decade, improved farm yields by an average of 79% in four years. And not just in a limited set of locations: the study covered 286 different projects in 57 developing countries. That's over 12 million farms, or 37 million hectares -- about 3% of the cultivated area in poor nations.

79% of what? Compared to what? How much would industrial ag have increased yields? I guess that bit didn't fit the kaleidoscope pattern. So what are these "sustainable agriculture techniques"?

In "Resource-Conserving Agriculture Increases Yields in Developing Countries," Jules Pretty of the University of Essex in England, along with colleagues in Thailand, China, Sri Lanka and Mexico, concentrated on seven key sustainable agriculture methods:

• (1) Integrated pest management, which uses ecosystem resilience and diversity for pest, disease, and weed control, and seeks only to use pesticides when other options are ineffective.
• (2) Integrated nutrient management, which seeks both to balance the need to fix nitrogen within farm systems with the need to import inorganic and organic sources of nutrients, and to reduce nutrient losses through erosion control.
• (3) Conservation tillage, which reduces the amount of tillage, sometimes to zero, so that soil can be conserved and available moisture used more efficiently.
• (4) Agroforestry, which incorporates multifunctional trees into agricultural systems, and collective management of nearby forest resources.
• (5) Aquaculture, which incorporates fish, shrimps, and other aquatic resources into farm systems, such as into irrigated rice fields and fish ponds, and so leads to increases in protein production.
• (6) Water harvesting in dryland areas, which can mean formerly abandoned and degraded lands can be cultivated, and additional crops can be grown on small patches of irrigated land owing to better rainwater retention.
• (7) Livestock integration into farming systems, such as dairy cattle and poultry, including using zero-grazing.

Integrated pest management, integrated nutrient management, and conservation tillage are industrial agriculture techniques. They aren't "sustainable" by any rational definition of the word, but they are smart.

The other 4 techniques are just old fashioned, small scale agriculture. The details vary with time and place, but wood management, fish management, water management and feeding wastes and coproducts to livestock are just old fashioned general farm methods. They are all good, but not sustainable by any rational definition of the word.

What they can do is set folks on the path to development. That's what happened in the past and seems likely to happen again. When people become more food secure they begin to dream of a better life. They educate their kids, nurture special skills and differentiate. In this way the "zero-grazing" system of confining an animal, feeding it wastes and coproducts, and using dung for a variety of purposes becomes a factory farm - a confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) - the bane of industrial agriculture.

Strip away the grift and hustle about "sustainability" and what is left is a technology transfer of time tested techniques from more developed cultures to less developed cultures. There are even instances where the technology originated with the ancestors of those in developing countries, but had been lost due to the disruptions of disease and colonialism. In the best case such technology transfers are continuous and peer-to-peer, farmer to farmer with no politicians or NGO grifters in the middle. Technology diffusion of this sort took place at slow speeds in the past, and had difficulty jumping geographic and language barriers. But the world is shrinking due to information and communication technologies. Techniques can jump across the tropics from temperate zones in the northern hemisphere to those in the south. Farmers all over the world can share methods and puzzle about one another's issues.

So what is it that has the reactionaries who tout sustainability so chuffed? It's the 12 million farms even though they have an average size of just 3 hectares each and account for a mere 3% of land under cultivation. The reactionaries are charmed by boutique farming and peasant life styles - so long as they don't have to live like that.

It's nonsensical wanking but they make a living bilking rich world do gooders with such stuff. More serious and caring folks need to look away from the kaleidoscope and consider all of the issues in the large. There is an immediate need to improve the lot of those who lack functional agricultural systems. Efforts to teach them methods like those listed above are useful for this pressing need. But they need to be much more productive than those methods can achieve in order to raise themselves up, and the production is needed to feed growing populations. World food production needs to at least double in the next 3 decades or so. A 79% improvement is good, but not good enough and the methods advocated won't go the distance.

The focus must be on productivity to avoid a wreck in future. If the idea of sustainability is to be rehabilitated from its current idiotic usage then economic and demographic considerations must be made part of it. That means it has to be a dynamic concept rather than static as it is now. The issue isn't preservation, it is adaptability. A practice isn't sustainable if it fails to scale up and provide for future needs. It will be abandoned under pressure.

The challenge is to gentrify industrial agriculture as it it practiced in developed countries to reduce the negative impacts of present practice, or develop an alternative that is equally productive and efficient. In either case the technologies must continue to advance to produce more food and fiber using less land and fewer inputs if we are to live well and long on the planet. It is the 97% of cases that we need to look at, not the 3% boutique cases that thrill the wankers.