December 18, 2011
Carbon Dreams
The international party corps extravaganza in Durban was subdued since the world has turned away from ginned up crises to consider real ones such as economic collapse. Clarity of thought has improved a bit and we are seeing more commentary about the absurdity of past party corps predations such as Kyoto. But they haven't given up since it is still a sweet gig to fly around the world and have raves in exotic locations. the World Bank announced plans to turn climate-smart agriculture into the next big thing for the world market in carbon offsets. ... If an agricultural carbon offset program were in place, carbon dollars from Western companies could pay for composting, mulching, recycling crop waste, planting farm trees, and much else on the world’s poorest farms. Those improved soils, richer in organic matter, would grow more crops, help soils withstand droughts and floods, and vital to earning those carbon dollars capture carbon from the...
October 24, 2011
Crap Economics
One of the premier junk journals - the Groan - has a good example of the type of harms done by pop economics. the example of chemical fertiliser is used by economics teachers around the world to demonstrate the law of diminishing returns. Fertiliser reduces soil fertility because chemicals push soil micro-organisms to consume organic material. If nothing is added to replenish this organic supply, the plant has even less to draw on than before. As a result, the frequency of fertiliser application tends to increase and the cycle of needing to provide another nitrogen fix escalates as the soil fertility decreases. In short, whether because of market forces or the facts of chemistry, the cost of delivering the subsidy programme will spiral. Proponents of the programme rightly point out that there is hardly an uncultivated piece of ground in Malawi -- a small country with a large and extremely poor population. Chemical inputs, they say, are necessary to...
October 22, 2011
Competing Narratives
I'm in the grass fed beef business. I have interest. However, I still think about the larger issue of feeding our numerous and diverse selves on this planet. Most of us are still undernourished, or malnourished, and since there are ever more of us these problems may grow worse, unless we also get very much better at producing food. One of the issues in the grass fed beef business is that in the US the genetics of the national herd, though still wildly diverse, have been adapted to industrial production methods over the past half century or so. Animals have been selected for good performance in the current system that is a combination of a traditional phase - in which cows graze pastures and "the range" and produce a yearly calf - and an industrial phase in which that calf, after weaning, is grown to maturity in confinement where it is fed high energy crop based rations that foster...
August 23, 2011
Prescribed Grazing
This is an old idea but not known so widely as it might be. they picked the most difficult challenge they could find, an old gold mine site on which all other restoration techniques had failed. On that barren, eroding slope that supported only a few weeds, they set out to test the hypothesis that it is possible to create a grassland by recreating the interdependence between animals that have evolved to graze and plants that have evolved to be grazed. After broadcasting grass seed onto the site, the Tiptons and some of their team members spread hay over the slope to entice the animals onto it and to reintroduce organic matter into the system. The animals ate some of the hay and stomped the rest of it, along with the seeds, into the barren dirt. Then they fertilized the mixture with their manure and urine and transforming it into the living thing we call soil. Next the cattle...
August 22, 2011
Native Grasslands
This post and the previous comment on articles in Amber Waves, the USDA ERS magazine, which usually has an interesting article or two each month that is not so dumbed down that it is useless but is still accessible to the non-specialist. This article wonders whether government programs cause the destruction of native grasslands. Yes. Federally subsidized crop insurance reduces risk associated with crops grown on converted grasslands and, over time, increases average returns to production by making crop farming more attractive. Other programs, including Federal disaster assistance and marketing loan benefits, also reduce risk and increase returns to crop production on converted grasslands. While these programs can be important risk management tools for farmers, they may also result in unintended, environmentally damaging actions. While programs like crop insurance and marketing loans may be encouraging producers to convert grasslands to cropland, agricultural conservation programs like USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) can encourage...
August 14, 2011
Ranch Weirding
There's not a lot of talk on the grazing lists these days, and the subjects are often drought related. Much of the country is having a bad year. "This is a once-in-a-generation drought," said Billy Cook, senior vice president and director of the Agricultural Division. "We haven't seen this type of heat and lack of precipitation since the record-setting drought of the mid-1950s or even the Dust Bowl. Lloyd Noble established the Noble Foundation to assist producers after he witnessed the devastating effects of the Dust Bowl. ... The extremely dry and hot weather patterns are caused by a La Nina effect, which is an abnormal cooling of Pacific waters that prevents moisture from reaching the southern portion of the United States. "The four months following Thanksgiving were the driest in Oklahoma since 1921, and Texas has experienced a similar record dry spell," Aljoe said. "There has been very little precipitation in the region since September of 2010, and...
July 20, 2011
Grass Farming
Livestock operators who call themselves grass farmers aren't just indulging in some sort of cutesy obfuscation about their work. That's their true job. Whether it's a cow-calf producer selling weaned calves or retaining calves through a stocker or backgrounding program; or a stocker producer adding weight to lightweight calves, the market value of feeder cattle at various weights reflects the value of forage used in the production of feeder cattle. These economic signals are contained in the level of feeder cattle prices and the price relationships between different weights of feeder cattle. Feeder cattle producers are really in the forage business more than in the cattle business. It's worth noting that serious grass farming for raising ruminants didn't come about as a way to pursue premium markets for grass fed or organic products. It made economic sense to grow fine pastures and manage them well no matter what market they were selling into since it is the cheapest and...
July 19, 2011
Ag Dignity
For 50 years India has been ground zero for both hunger and ag technology stories. The massive and deadly famines of the past have not resumed, but there is trouble and hunger still. As much as 40 per cent of all the fruits, vegetables and food grains grown in India never make it to the market. The country wastes more grain each year than Australia produces, and more fruits and vegetables than the U.K. consumes. Food is an all-consuming crisis here. Waste is only one facet. Agriculture, infrastructure, inflation, innovation and corruption are others. ... The article goes on to speak about each aspect of the crisis, beginning with agronomic practices and issues. In many parts of India, the rich loam that once ran 70 metres deep on farm fields is long gone, sapped of its nutrients after years of aggressive farming. As well, groundwater levels in 20 per cent of the country are described by the government as...
May 18, 2011
On War
When engaged at a high enough level, any complex striving is war, so know war. War is in some ways the most human of activities: it is about defining and achieving objectives in cooperation with some people, all-out opposition from others, in a contest that draws on every talent and tests every virtue that we have. Even those of us whose life plans do not involve storming up a hillside under enemy fire can learn from the way Clausewitz analyzes leadership and war. More, to ignore war in an education is to leave students ignorant about one of the central features of civilization and human life. ... In many ways Sun Tzu, the mystical and elliptical founder of strategic thought, and the methodical and systematic Clausewitz are opposites. Yet the work of both leads the observant reader back to the paradoxical nature of strategic thought. Victory demands thorough and systematic preparation, but all systems of thought lead in the...
May 03, 2011
Slow Learners
One encouraging change in the advocacy of tarded greens is that they have, to some extent, at long last, come to see the benefits of grazing for environmental preservation and remediation. Rotational grazing of cattle in native pasturelands in Brazil's Pantanal and Cerrado regions can benefit both cattle and wildlife, according to a new study by the Wildlife Conservation Society. The technique, which has been adapted for a variety of livestock worldwide, calls for cattle to graze in small areas for shorter periods of time before moving onto other pastures. The result is a greater forage base that produces larger, more valuable cattle while reducing incentives for deforestation, uncontrolled burning, and replacement of native vegetation with exotic grasses. ... "The results of this study show a potential win-win situation for the Pantanal and Cerrado's ranches and wildlife," said the study's lead author, Donald Parsons Eaton of the Wildlife Conservation Society. "Using rotational grazing techniques will produce healthier cattle for...
March 05, 2011
Dirt Bubble
One of the consequences of food shortage and high commodity prices is that farm land is increasingly expensive. The surge in prices has been dizzying throughout the Midwest, with double-digit percentage increases last year in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota and Nebraska. In parts of Iowa, prices for good farmland rose as much as 23 percent last year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Just a few years ago, farmers marveled as land prices began to rise in response to demand for corn to make ethanol. More recently, soaring prices for wheat, corn, soybeans and other crops have driven the increase. Corn futures on the Chicago Board of Trade closed at $7.27 a bushel on Tuesday, up from $3.70 a year earlier. Soybean futures were $13.67, up from $9.52 cents on March 1 last year. Average grain prices, adjusted for inflation, are nearing the giddy levels they reached in the late 1970s, the peak of the last...
February 15, 2011
Food Shortage
Food is getting a lot of press and punditry these days. Prices are up, poor people are rioting, governments are teetering, foodies are being ridiculed, and some hare-brained schemes are being publicly debunked. For example the White House compost system is being shamed for both its high costs and its environmental harms: compost produces far more GHGs, and more potent GHGs, than burning it as a fuel for energy systems. The quality of the punditry is, as you might expect, very low due to understandable ignorance. Pop punditry on every subject is simplistic. It's entertainment, not useful discussion, but in a majoritarian political system can still skew policies. I'm not sure if participation in such discussions by those more informed is useful or effective. Consider this most recent discussion at Tyler's house. Is the cow a silo of option value? I was struck by this argument, which I had never heard: The overriding advantage of meat is that demand...
February 09, 2011
Fat Ratios
Grass fed beef is more nutritious than grain fed beef by many measures, but they are both very good compared to other meats. The grain fed beef had a ratio of 5:1 while the grass-fed beef had a ratio of 2:1. Certainly there have been articles, web sites and health professionals that have talked about the benefits of eating grass finished vs. grain finished beef and apparently with some reason. ... the salmon had very low omega 6 to omega 3 ratios. The farmed salmon was under 2:1 and the wild salmon below 1:1. What surprised me was the ratio of the other meats. The pork chop came in at just under 28:1, the skinless chicken breast at 16:1, the natural skinless chicken breast at 11:1, the chicken thigh at 24:1, and the skinless chicken thigh at 11:1. When you look at this list and the ratios, the big difference in the ratios is really between ruminant and non-ruminant...
January 20, 2011
Convergence
One of the old posts referenced in Pasture Posts was Food Fight, written in January 2007, which said in part: I also told Jared that he should focus on grass, lease more land and tune up his grass management skills, because grass would be more valuable when corn was no longer cheap. He's done that some, as much to shut me up as anything, but he's glad he did now. My prediction is that the cost of beef will rise as the cost of corn goes up, but not enough to make up for the cost of feed. This will drive the light feeders (400#-500#) out of the feedlots and back to grass to put on another 300#-400#. That happened in 2008, but things are even stranger now. Feeder and fed cattle prices are at or near all time highs and are poised to keep moving higher. Both feeder and live cattle futures suggest that higher prices are yet...
December 09, 2010
Grass Value
I've done grass farming for longer than I care to discuss. All along my view has been that this is the smartest way to raise ruminants even if there was no farm gate premium for grass finished products. It's both the cheapest and the best way to raise animals that evolved to thrive on cellulose rather than starchy grains. There's a lot more cellulose in the world than there is starch and the animals that can digest it always dominate in natural systems. Pay attention. Mother nature worked all of this out long ago. The idea is catching on. The signals are quite obvious. Calf prices will go higher and higher until there is sufficient incentive to increase cow-calf production. The predicament that we find ourselves in now is that current feeder values are very high and going higher, which makes it difficult to retain heifers and yet we have to push calf prices overall high enough to make...
December 06, 2010
Farmer Savants
Calestous Juma, leading a Gates Foundation funded study of African agriculture has big plans. A part of that is a call for a change of attitude about farm work that is reminiscent of Deirdre McCloskey's ideas of Bourgeois Dignity that have been discussed here. Farming would be viewed as a knowledge-based industry that marries technology and local indigenous techniques and experience. ... the recognition of agriculture as a knowledge industry requires a new generation of universities that combine research, training, commercialization and farmer outreach under one roof. There are many examples of such models, pioneered by EARTH University in Costa Rica which trains young people to learn how to create agricultural enterprises. Juma, Gates et. al. do not seem to grasp the implications of such a change in attitude, and their plans don't seem to truly support the change. It's just a bog standard Great Leap/Society/Whatever top down plan that is sure to fail. The process would be both...
December 04, 2010
Self Improvement
The wack-a-loons at the CAP peddle their authoritarian and anti-progressive nonsense using false narratives. while agricultural innovations have made it possible for 6 billion humans to live comfortably on the same land that once supported only 1.5 billion, many challenges remain to ensuring our global food system continues to support our society in a sustainable way. Yet despite these pressing challenges, Americans have been disinvesting in agricultural research for the last three decades. Our agricultural innovation engine has become too narrowly focused on piecemeal adjustments in plant and animal genetics, to the exclusion of potentially valuable research into alternative, low-input methods such as organic, no-till, and poly-crop agriculture. This leaves us in a dangerous position with too few options for the future. Americans have not been "disinvesting in agricultural research". Equating national government funding levels with American funding levels is an authoritarian ruse, lying with statistics, as a rent seeking strategy by special interests and those who seek ever...
November 30, 2010
Blind Poet
People often get blinded by analogies, mistaking them for empirically valid reality models. Woody Tasch, the guru of socially responsible investing, says the problems associated with the economic meltdown are as basic as soil fertility. The 58-year-old chairman emeritus of Investor’s Circle, a network of angel investors, venture capitalists and foundations working toward a sustainable economy, looks to our multi-layered food system as a metaphor for the rest of the economy. “Industrial agriculture views the soil as a medium in which to prop up plants in order to force feed them synthetic chemicals and maximize yield. Industrial finance views companies as a medium in which to force feed capital and maximize yield,” Tasch says. ... Tasch’s “slow” philosophy can be traced to one of his earlier mentor’s, E.F. Schumacher, whom he discovered a few years after graduating from Amherst College — as an English major. (Tasch, who still writes poetry, is a rare breed among venture capitalists having found...
October 18, 2010
Bug Farmers
Competent graziers often call themselves grass farmers because their focus is on producing a forage crop rather than livestock. This isn't just a cute conceit, it's a basic distinction that differentiates them from most of the present and past pastoral systems....
October 17, 2010
Substitute Forage
Conversation among graziers in the northern hemisphere often turns to stored forage this time of year as winter approaches and pastures start to go dormant. I see it as a special case of the general problem of variable forage productivity....
October 07, 2010
Free Ride
In game theoretic terms many of the agricultural tropes beloved by the "sustainability" crowd are cheating, defection, free riding on the efforts of the rest of the agricultural community. In Wisconsin, 75 percent of the $325 million cumulative economic benefit linked to Bt corn's pest suppression between 1996-2009 went to non-Bt corn growers. Wisconsin currently has about 3.9 million corn acres, with approximately half in Bt corn. "This study is the first to estimate the value of area-wide pest suppression from transgenic crops and the subsequent benefit to growers of non-transgenic crops. In this case, the value of the indirect yield benefits for non-Bt corn acres exceeded the net value of direct benefits to Bt corn acres," says co-author Paul Mitchell, a University of Wisconsin-Madison agricultural economist who conducted the economic analysis for the study. ... The primary benefit of Bt corn comes in the form of reduced yield losses, a benefit that Bt corn growers pay for in...
August 20, 2010
Per Hansa
These guys have a clue. Tallgrass Beef field representative Clay Nash says cattle that eventually carry the Tallgrass label are no more than 30 months of age with a carcass weight of 550-850 lbs., and a minimum live weight at time of purchase of 1,100 lbs. Tallgrass Beef requires fat cover to be ultrasound-verified at a minimum of 0.25 in. at a maximum of 50 days prior to harvest, he says, with an actual ribeye area of at least 10 in. Minimum percent intramuscular fat must be 3.5% and ribeye shape score must equal or exceed 0.30. Tenderness score must register 25 or less. . . John Cotton in Volga, SD, is one of the rare livestock breeders with that kind of genetics.” Cotton, in east central South Dakota, was known during the ’80s and ’90s as “the guy with the little, dinky cows,” he says. “My herd genetics are rooted in what my dad started in the ’60s,”...
August 12, 2010
Seering Beef
How was it in the day? How will it be in future? In the mid-1960's, when about 42 percent of the total beef and dairy cattle slaughter was grass-fed, Bill Helming, veteran and respected agricultural economist and agribusiness consultant came to a startling and contrarian prediction. Rather than continue ticking along to established industry rhythms and mores, Helming forecast that looming economic changes and evolving consumer demand would significantly reduce the tonnage of grass-fed beef in favor of more full-fed, grain-fed beef. At the time he shared his views in a paper aptly titled, The U.S. Hamburger Society-Part 1. History obviously proves Helming a prescient prognosticator. If his most recent prediction is also correct, the industry is poised to come full-circle, with economics and consumer demand forcing a significant shift to more grass-fed and half-fed cattle, at the expense of the grain-fed market. . . “Today, very close to 55 percent of the total beef tonnage sold to and...
August 08, 2010
Government Cheese
Perhaps you wonder how the USDA ERS sees the beef business? [O]ver time, and especially in the last 60 years as land resources became more intensively used, grain finishing was introduced to shorten the beef production period. (Grain-finished beef was also more tender, they added.) Production practices vary, they said, explaining that grain-finished beef comes from cattle grazed on grass for most of their lives, typically until they are 750-800 pound (340-362kg) yearlings, and then placed in a feedlot, where they are fed for 120-200 days until they have gained approximately 500lb (226kg). Heifers are harvested at lighter weights, after gaining 300-400lb (136-181kg). "Calf-feds" are calves that go to feedlots immediately after being weaned, and "long yearlings" are ones that graze over a longer period of time. Grass-feds, as noted, stay on pastures all of their lives. Feedlot rations are scientifically formulated to contain about 80-85pc grain, distillers grains or other starches and 10-15pc hay, silage or other forages,...
July 28, 2010
Wild Ass
They're not just guard animals. Sorting through the most comprehensive sampling of mitochondrial DNA ever assembled from ancient, historic and living specimens, scientists determined that the critically endangered African wild ass -- which today exists only in small numbers in eastern Africa, zoos and wildlife preserves -- is the living ancestor of the modern donkey. . . The ancestors of the domestic donkey were considered vital for collecting water, moving desert households and creating the first land-based trade routes between the ancient Egyptians and the Sumerians . . . Not often mentioned is that donkeys are fierce and tenacious guard animals that will attack and stomp predators such as dogs to death. Cattlemen even use them to protect their herds. Unlike other guard animals donkeys can live with the herd and eat the same forages so they are easy keepers by comparison. But, they don't much like people either since humans are predators too. That can be awkward at...
July 24, 2010
Grass Boom
Amateurism is the bane of grass fed beef. Its recent popularity has drawn in new producers who have no idea what they are doing, and retailers who have no idea what they are selling. With 595,000 acres sprawling across Wyoming's wild and rugged Owl Mountains, the [Arapaho] ranch is home to native grasses, wolves, mountain lions and grizzlies. . . It's the largest certified organic cattle operation in the United States . . . When the Northern Arapaho tribe, which owns the ranch, made a deal with Whole Foods, it was a dream come true—an economically feasible way for the tribe to steward its land in an ecologically responsible way. It created a revenue stream that stands in stark contrast with gas drilling and casino gambling. Whole Foods celebrated the agreement with great fanfare, featuring eagle feather headdresses and traditional Arapaho prairie chicken dances in the parking lot of a Denver store. "[It] was a great idea," says David...
June 21, 2010
Grass War
The dust up in the beef world caused by a report that under certain conditions, by selected measures, grain fed beef has a better fat profile than grass fed beef continues. At the end of Steve’s blog, he states “the FACT of the matter is that grainfed is actually a little healthier.” He’s referring here to a study hat was sponsored by the NCBA and which a lot of people in the grain-fed beef world have been very excited about. Unfortunately, Steve, the NCBA, and everyone excited by the study are confused about what this study means. How do I know that? I phoned up the study’s lead author, Stephen Smith of Texas A&M, and asked him. For those of you who haven’t read it, here’s what it said. Stephen Smith and his colleagues found that if you feed Angus steers on corn for 12 months, their beef is higher in a monounsaturated fat called oleic acid. When this...
June 03, 2010
Red Herrings
The practice of dragging something smelly across the trail to confuse the tracking hounds is common in advocacy, as noted in the previous post. But even when the hounds are too experienced to be fooled by the ruse the trail can be hard to follow. For those readers that don’t think climate change is a real problem, I respect the fact that there is uncertainty in that science, but if the majority position of climate scientists is true, the stakes in terms of human suffering among the poor are too high not to act. For those who think Organic farming is the answer, I’m not trying to argue the whole issue here – I just want to talk about the science associated with climate change and farming. I have spent months reading the scientific literature on this topic. That science points to some very specific changes in how we need to farm. If those changes were compatible with Organic...
June 02, 2010
Green Eggs
Continuing the theme broached in Food Angst: "all you will get from political advocates is disinformation and misinformation intended to advance their agenda." For example: I know people, you probably do too, who believe that brown eggs are somehow healthier than white eggs. You can explain to them that the pigment in egg shells simply relates to the pigment in chicken feathers, meaning dark hens lay brown eggs and white hens lay white eggs. But you know what? They’ll still pay more for brown eggs. And that’s just fine, because it creates a market for farmers who produce them. Apparently not. Different breeds of chickens will lay different colored shelled eggs. For most breeds, you can tell what color egg they lay by looking at the ear lobe color - there is a correlation between egg color and ear lobe color. Breeds with white earlobes, regardless of feather color, typically lay white eggs. Breeds with red earlobes, again regardless...
May 18, 2010
Agro-Doom
Continuing the theme broached in Food Angst: "all you will get from political advocates is disinformation and misinformation intended to advance their agenda." For example: Here, we tested whether organic farming enhances AMF diversity and whether AMF communities from organically managed fields are more similar to those of species-rich grasslands or conventionally managed fields. . . We suggest that organic management in agro-ecosystems contributes to the restoration and maintenance of these important below-ground mutualists. Is it so? What does "organic management" mean? What does "conventionally managed" mean? As usual, advocates have a thumb on the scales so that their preferred answer gets support, but it's very complicated. I got a whole different look at organic and modern agriculture. I have spent a lot of time researching and talking to big farmers. Modern agriculture methods have got Planet Earth headed down a self-destructive path. We don’t have time to change all agriculture to organic. But, agriculture has to change NOW...
May 15, 2010
Ag Creeps
Organic and "sustainable" practices have been taking some hits lately as a number of studies have exposed the hokum in many of the most strident claims. Like climate hysterics the ag activists tend to make wild and mean spirited accusations against other growers and yet now that their folly has been exposed they whine that they are being abused when others point and laugh at them. Now, they and their defenders are having their own moment to gloat. The evolution of weeds resistant to the herbicide glyphosate, also known as Roundup, is a difficult, but very predictable, challenge for American farmers . . . Twenty years ago, the biotechnology industry promised that Roundup Ready crops and glyphosate would usher in a new era of less toxic weed control. In a stark betrayal of that promise, Monsanto is now subsidizing farmers’ return to older, more toxic herbicides. As an alternative, our report advocated modern sustainable agriculture. This involves rotating a...
May 11, 2010
Silly Question
When reading research press releases an old saying often comes to mind: ask a silly question and you'll get a silly answer. For the study, heifers from the Dixon Springs Agricultural Center were weaned at an average age of 77 days and fed a high-corn ration for the next 146 days to initiate marbling. Then the cattle were divided into four groups: pasture-fed; high starch; intermediate starch; and low starch . The cattle remained on these treatments for 73 days. Then, all cattle were fed the intermediate-starch diet for the remainder of the finishing period. Before being divided into the four treatment groups, the calves were ultrasounded to determine marbling. The ultrasounds revealed that marbling was initiated with the early corn diet. The cattle were ultrasounded again at the completion of the 73-day treatment period. "The cattle on pasture had significantly lower marbling," Shike said. "But there were no differences in the cattle fed varying levels of starch." These...
May 05, 2010
Smart Farming
Good farmers are never "organic". They also aren't conventional as they are characterized by "organic" growers. The caricatures are devised by "organic" advocates to demonize other growers in the hope of somehow elevating themselves. Good farmers are concerned with producing good food and doing good land management so that they and their descendants can earn a living farming in future. The production methods they use are evaluated by that standard rather than a set of taboos or ungrounded regulations. They are realists who will use any available method that helps them achieve their objectives. In practice this means that they do everything that "organic" growers do, but also break useless taboos against the use of certain pesticides, certain fertilizers and certain seeds. It isn't as if "organic" growers do not use fertilizers or pesticides, they just have a list of holy varieties. Good farmers also have preferences but they are based in clear eyed analysis rather than superstition. I...
April 23, 2010
Indirectly
A curious effect of my unending quest to reduce my ignorance is that the magnitude of my ignorance grows faster than I can reduce it. Or so it seems since knowing more about some subject allows one to better understand that magnitude. My fairly recent inquiries into the color of beef fat have revealed how little appreciation I had for the importance of vitamins and minerals in forage. I thought that I was fashion forward on the issue, but that was an illusion. One mineral that has been getting tighter focus is phosphorus. It is phosphorus deficiency in range cattle that contributes to their yellow fat. The beta-carotene that they consume from their forage is inefficiently converted to vitamin A when they don't have proper amounts of phosphorus. Most mineral supplement mixes are heavy on both phosphorus and vitamin A since the growth effects can be dramatic for calves, and the fertility of brood cows rises significantly. It is...
April 16, 2010
Parade Wave
What is "improved agriculture"? There are as many answers as there are pundits - OK, more - but Jeremy has an opinion: My point here is that the examples Pearce gives are precisely what I mean by improved agriculture, and any woman who could bring experience of that sort of diversified, problem-solving, optimizing approach to providing for her future family would be worth her weight in rubies. The big problem remains the “development thinkers” and their clients. Pearce isn't even on the same planet as I am about improved ag. He doesn't seem to understand the idea of agronomic systems, so he picks and chooses practices from a variety of systems that don't add up to a real system but are buzz word compliant for ag groupies. An example of this that I mentioned at Jeremy's house was that Pearce admires the use of manures to increase production, but talks against meat production. That's sheer nonsense. If you propose...
April 15, 2010
National Nonsense
As long as we are bashing brain dead intellectuals such as Sinclair Lewis (see Tea Time), and recycling old references, see Weirder Interstices which makes a pertinent point. The NYT recently published an op-ed in honor of the 100th anniversary of publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. . . “The Jungle,” and the campaign that Sinclair waged after its publication, led directly to passage of a landmark federal food safety law, which took effect 100 years ago this week. Sinclair awakened a nation not just to the dangers in the food supply, but to the central role government has to play in keeping it safe. The only problem with the official version is that it's just about a 180-degree reversal of the truth in every detail. To get around the Art Schlesinger mythology, all you have to do is read Gabriel Kolko's The Triumph of Conservatism, a brilliant work of New Left history on the role of the regulated...
April 13, 2010
Motivated Reasoning
To be taken seriously one must go far beyond confirming your biases, one must reason in good faith. In late 2005, when I proposed a company-wide initiative to reduce the amount of beef and cheese we serve in our 400 cafés by 25 percent as part of our Low Carbon Diet Program, I was equipped with a half-dozen independent studies, mostly from Europe. Beef and other products from ruminant animals, including cheese, clearly had a higher GWP ("global warming potential") than other foods because the animals emit significant amounts of potent methane through their digestive processes—regardless of what they eat (grain or grass) or where they eat it (pasture or feedlot; both have been studied). The greenhouse gases emitted per pound of beef produced were much, much higher than for other foods. . . I debated a rancher on Fox News in January 2009 who claimed that his cows didn't contribute to global warming "because they eat grass." This...
April 02, 2010
Big Beef
Grass fed beef now commands the attention of mainstream beef producers and publications. “We winter the cows on three ranches in the mountains, then bring them down to irrigated pastures for the summer and fall,” he adds. One of these, a 450-acre parcel, irrigates with rinse water from a nearby tomato cannery, providing abundant water during the 110-day tomato-canning season each year. For the past 10 years, the Stones have adhered to natural-beef production standards, refraining from use of antibiotics and hormones, and documenting their production practices. Process verification has helped them gain access to a variety of buyers as the calves qualify for numerous branded-beef programs. Stone says the family has marketed calves through several channels, including retaining ownership through finishing. Today they typically sell most of their calves via video auction, attracting buyers from natural-beef programs such as Harris Ranch and Niman Ranch. A couple years back, the Stones decided to experiment with a new marketing channel...
April 02, 2010
Piggeries
"I’m not against government. I’m just against the idea that it’s got to be some bureaucracy that figures everything out for people." One of the reasons that global warming hysteria has fallen on hard times is that it was the retarded child of authoritarians who foolishly believe that the solution to any problem is found through political means. They aren't particularly interested in issues, that's just a means to an end: find fault with something, anything, and use that to justify seizure by government. However, once in charge, government does little about the issue, it just does its business as usual, which is fleecing society, squandering its wealth, harassing our people, and eating out their substance, as we famously complained about in he Declaration of Independence though the miscreants then were King George’s tax-financed colonial officials. And so, after all the hand wringing about GHGs, nothing of value has been done for decades, as we should expect since climate...
March 31, 2010
Stormy Weather
The front finally moved in and I am inclined to spend more time indoors. Temperatures have plunged and there was as much hail as rain so far. I worry that the hail will have beat the blossoms off of the stone fruit trees, but perhaps they have already been fertilized so there will be a good fruit set anyway. We needed the water, so I'm generally content with having a storm now, and I needed more rest since I'm tired, sore, bruised and nicked up a bit by spring labor. Graziers tend to have a lot on their minds and an interest in discussions this time of year, but they don't have much time to do so. There has been one brief exchange on one of the lists on a subject that interests me: sward height. The background is that each grass species and cultivar has a "power curve" - a range of height when it grows fastest. For...
March 28, 2010
Aye
I think that these guys have the right biochar attitude. BlueLeaf’s vision for the future of the biochar industry would involve the pyrolysis of existing streams of agricultural and forestry biomass. Ideally this would be achieved through the use of small-scale, mobile pyrolysis equipment going to the source of the biomass, processing it on-site and leaving it for application to soils by the farm operators. BlueLeaf hopes to validate this concept as a business model by demonstrating and quantifying the economic advantages of biochar for agricultural purposes. They believe that large scale use of biochar relies on its adaptation by the agricultural industry and demonstrating its economic advantages is essential. In addition to the economic advantages for agriculture, BlueLeaf will continue to examine all potential environmental advantages to biochar in soils, including soil nutrient retention (thereby reducing surface water eutrophication, groundwater contamination, and nutrient input requirements) as well as soil greenhouse gas reductions. BlueLeaf will also examine potential positive...
March 10, 2010
Slight Return
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....
February 22, 2010
Eco-Backlash
A buddy of mine sent me a copy of an opinion piece from a state beef board that sought to debunk grass fed beef claims. It noted that corn was a type of grass and so corn fed beef was grass fed beef. Apparently up is also down. I told my buddy that this would make some sense if they fed the whole corn plant to their cattle rather than just the seeds, and did so while the plant was still alive and vegetative, so that then cattle would get some green with all of that yellow. Better still, grow corn varieties bred for grazing (they exist) that produced more leaf, more nutritious stalks, and less seeds. The article also claimed that grain fed beef has just as much omega-3 fats as grass fed, but that it also had more omega-6 fat, that both kinds of fat are needed, and so grain fed was as good or better. I...
February 21, 2010
Proto-Gaians
For decades most of the fellows in my neighborhood have considered me to be a bit off center, an enviro-wacko, though I wasn't so nutty as to be a typically incomprehensible anti-science spiritual fellow traveler with the fringe. I was nuts, but not completely so. Since then the judgment of the community has softened a bit because many of the things that I said have become more main stream. For example, grass fed beef is no longer considered to be nonsensical and they even like the flavor. It's good stuff and good for you. The improvements to pastures that result from good management are extra benefits. So now they are doing it too and selling their beef and mine at farmer's markets, CSAs and such. There they encounter those who are more truly over the moon and are asking me about them. Is it possible that they have something of value to say as well? Consider biodynamics: In the...
January 27, 2010
Carbon Nutters
Another example of the grass fed pushback by anti-meat miserabilists and climate wackos. Grass-fed beef is shown to produce more greenhouse gas than grain-fed. Critics point out that the pasture used to raise grass-fed beef offers a carbon sink. Experts point out that eating vegetarian is far better from a carbon point of view. . . . The problem, said Christopher Weber of Carnegie Mellon University, is that accurately quantifying how much soil carbon contributes is difficult, and it can vary dramatically from place to place -- even in locations just a few feet away. This uncertainty can swing the calculation one way or another. To Weber's knowledge, no study published in a scientific journal has come to the conclusion that grass-fed beef is better from a greenhouse gas perspective. "There's a lot of range of what the emissions are from beef, and that is real variability," agreed Rita Schenck, Executive Director of the Institute for Environmental Research &...
January 27, 2010
Grass Backlash
As grass fed beef became more fashionable in the past couple of years there were more and more naive articles and books written by advocates. They selected, exaggerated, speculated and did their best to be persuasive. This stung the miserabilist anti-meat crowd and the main stream meat industry. These strange bedfellows are now pushing back, repeating their old and largely discredited advocacy but scoring some hits by debunking some of the slimebag arguments of grass fed advocates. Some of the push back is useful. It doesn't have some wacko or commercial agenda to flog, it just corrects the arguments. On the PBS website for the muckraking documentary King Corn—a film that roundly attacks industrial agriculture—the following declaration is made: “Before WW II, most Americans had never eaten corn-fed beef.” This claim, which has become a mantra in sustainable agriculture, is more often than not dispatched to rally support for grass-fed beef—a supposedly healthier and more environmentally sound way to...
January 27, 2010
Farmer's Fungus
I know, it sounds like some sort of disease, maybe something to do with feet and old funky boots or something, but that's what arbuscular (endo) mycorrhizae is sometimes called since it can be so beneficial for growers. I haven't talked about it much for a while though it was an enthusiasm a few years ago. It isn't that it is less interesting than before, there have just been other novelties and enthusiasms to speak of. My bad. To review, it can be understood by analogy to rhizobia, the bacteria that nodulate in legume roots and live there in symbiosis swapping the nitrates that it fixes to the plant for the sugars the plant photo-synthesizes. The fungus grows inside plant roots but pushes threadlike protrusions called hyphae out into the soil. The hyphae are thinner than even roots hairs of the plant and can penetrate into every nook and cranny of the soil where they find nutrients, even ones...
January 26, 2010
Do Too
Philip says, in response to the assertion in the previous post that "To get it [increased production and sequestration of carbon in soil] started you need manufactured fertilizer and a system to retain the increased production it brings", that "Obviously you don't absolutely need manufactured fertilizer, but for most of us, it is an essential option." True enough, but it is required for the agronomic system as a whole, which was the point I was working. There may be instances where fertilizer can be avoided and get by, but the system as a whole cannot do so. I think this is important to understand since there is a lot of happy talk about not needing it, and a lot of grumpy talk about those who do use it. This is nonsensical. The system cannot function without it now, and if there are hopes of increasing organic matter productivity it is needed even more. The reason that I called this...
January 25, 2010
Gone Wrong
In Yet More Slime I complained that the idea of biochar had merit but that it had been coopted and repurposed by various rent seekers as a way to advance their only tenuously connected agendas, and that opposition to biochar had increased because of it. More specifically: When land is converted to organic farming the soil carbon increases for at least twenty years. If charcoal is incorporated the amount of carbon in the soil increases even more. Industrial farming on the other hand reduces the land’s ability to retain carbon. . . Globally, there are 800GtC (gigatonnes of carbon) in the atmosphere. Every year plants capture 58GtC and transfer most of it to the soil. In due course 58GtC is released back to the atmosphere. This is the carbon cycle: every 14 years the entire weight of atmospheric carbon passes through the soil. The longer this carbon remains in the soil the less of it will be present as...
January 22, 2010
Yet More Slime
Slimebag arguments - those intended to conceal rather than reveal relevant information - seek to persuade rather than inform. They are just as odious when they support your views as when they oppose them. They fail intellectual, ethical and aesthetic measures of virtue and incite the production of counter-slime from the intellectually impoverished opposition. For example, not too long ago biochar was interesting to a very few growers, soil scientists and archaeologists. Then climate nutters and various other rent seekers grew excited about its possibilities for advancing their nefarious objectives and made many laughable claims for biochar while advocating a variety of convoluted subsidies and taxes to realize their dreams and line their pockets. The result was an equal and opposite dung-storm from their opponents and a growing distaste for the whole subject. Something like that is now happening with grass fed beef. Consider the claims about E. coli O157:H7. For many consumers, the case was closed: To avoid...
January 15, 2010
Perfect Pastures
I help one of my buddies design and implement grazing systems. He is promiscuously entrepreneurial in that he will sell material and services of many varieties as well as buy materials and services for subsequent resale. He'll sell you machinery and cattle or buy them from you. He'll sell you a production system and buy your production. He'll sell you some extra labor and hire you to do some work. If there's a way for him to make something from a deal he'll do it, and sometimes he'll do it even if there's no profit in hopes of later benefit. I wrote this for him for use with one of his more astute clients who is getting into the pastured beef business. It's just opinion....
December 31, 2009
Free Food
The food business is, and always has been, a playground for neurotics with eating disorders. Food is right up there with sex as a primate activity that mixes necessity and pleasure, which confuses many and invites superstition. Opportunists play status and dominance games seeking to control others and elevate themselves. It is no accident that religions often have food laws, sometimes in direct opposition to one another, none of them having anything to do with human or environmental health, though they all tend to make such claims in the attempt to justify themselves. In our times one of the chief religious conflicts about food involves those of the quasi-pseudo-semi-socialist persuasion - the loose association of various strivers who seek to elevate themselves by harming others - mostly though not exclusively on what calls itself "the left". And so, there was some consternation when the high priest of a chain of drive-by houses of worship - Whole Foods Market -...
December 28, 2009
Underfoot
So why all this interest in soil carbon? World soils constitute the third largest global C pool, comprising of two distinct components: (i) soil organic C (SOC) estimated at 1550 Pg, and (ii) soil inorganic C (SIC) pool estimated at 950 Pg, both to 1-m depth. Other pools include the oceanic (38,400 Pg), geologic/fossil fuel (4500 Pg), biotic (620 Pg), and atmospheric (750 Pg) (Lal, 2004a). Thus, the soil C pool of 2500 Pg is 3.3 times the atmospheric pool and 4.0 times the biotic pool. However, soils of the managed ecosystems have lost 50 to 75% of the original SOC pool. Conversion of natural to managed ecosystems depletes SOC pool because C input into the agricultural ecosystems is lower, and losses due to erosion, mineralization and leaching are higher than those in the natural ecosystems. The magnitude of SOC depletion is high in soils prone to erosion and those managed by low-input or extractive farming practices. The loss...
December 11, 2009
General Farms
One of the many points buried in the most current Richard Manning manifesto discussed in Serial Advocate is the belated realization by some organic growers - who have long had vegenazi sympathies - that their supposed mimicry of natural systems in pursuit of a more healthful and sustainable agronomics was wildly mistaken since Mother Nature never farms without livestock. To do it well they needed to get over their nonsensical views about animal foods and do competent integrated general farming. Look around, that's how the system evolved. Pay attention. It's been semi-amusing in the last couple of years to hear some of the extremists trying to save face and back away from their ignorant and irrational earlier positions. "Environmental Heretics" speak up now and again to challenge dogmas, researchers unhelpfully disprove health fads, the policies of government agencies such as the USDA are shown to be based on crass political considerations at the expense of the health of the...
December 10, 2009
Soyonara Grass
More on the destruction of the world's grasslands Intense government efforts to keep meat affordable through taxes, export restrictions and price controls have enabled Argentines to eat record amounts of beef this year, but the short-term bonanza has come at a very steep cost. With little or no profit left in meat, ranchers are selling out, slaughtering even the female cows needed to maintain their herds. President Cristina Fernandez, who famously dismissed soy as a "weed," has said her government must protect consumers at a time when booming soy production has taken over 32 million acres (13 million hectares) of grassland once used for ranching. Her government also has paid huge subsidies for massive feedlot operations where previously grass-fed cattle are fattened on corn and grain. Clearly, this is political self-punking rather than agronomic or economic problems. The agricultural economy is already being hit hard, and that will likely mean less revenue for the government. Even with steep taxes,...
December 08, 2009
Some Perspective
One of the reasons that the advocacy of fellows like Manning discussed in the previous post is so over the top is that there are so many destructive myths to overcome. PORTO VELHO, Brazil: At an experimental government farm in the western Amazon's Rondonia state, researchers analyze grass seeds under microscopes, shake soil samples in test tubes, and measure the milk production of a new breed of cows. While high-profile police raids targeting illegal ranchers and loggers in the Amazon grab more headlines, these scientists may produce a more important solution in the long fight to save the greatest rainforest. Their aim is to reduce the pressure for forest destruction by raising the productivity of pastures through fertilization, better choice of grass, and planting trees. Brazil's ability to meet its ambitious 2020 target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent from 2005 levels depends largely on the ability of its agriculture sector, and particularly its huge cattle industry,...
December 08, 2009
Serial Advocate
I've written about Richard Manning many times before. See Cereal Killer for a fairly recent example, and Cereal Killer, the alternative universe version, for a much older one. I've always been somewhat critical of his writing but only in the sense of correcting defects in a generally sensible thesis. His ideas have been sometimes poorly targeted, and always over the top, but he's working in a fruitful area and improves over time. That's rare indeed. I have been fascinated by the permanence and healing power of grassland for 15 years now. If we respect the great original wisdom of the prairies, I’m convinced we can heal the wounds inflicted on the American landscape by industrial agriculture. But in America, the question is always does it scale up? This is the critical test of any potential solution to a major environmental problem. Is a given practice feasible, and are there mechanisms for spreading it to cover a whole landscape? Well,...
November 17, 2009
Slow Elk
In Dysrationalia it was noted that the arguments advanced by many supposedly bright people are not well reasoned from good data and valid premises. Feeding domestic animals is a far more inefficient way of using plant biomass than eating it directly: for example, it takes about four kilograms of good feed to produce a kilogram of chicken meat, for boneless lean pork the ratio is around 10 and there is an even higher ratio for beef depending on how much time an animal spends on pasture and in a finishing feedlot All cats are gray. The assumption here is that all animals eat the same things - biomass is biomass - and that those things are also food for humans. This is wildly inaccurate, as anyone with even the smallest amount of actual knowledge is aware. Cattle, and other ruminants, don't naturally eat the grain on which this analysis is based, but even poultry and hogs don't eat such...
November 08, 2009
Nitro Confusion
The popular myths about nitrogen are counterproductive. A single patent a century ago changed the world, and now, in the 21st century, Homo sapiens and the world we dominate have an addiction. Call it the nitrogen fix. It is like a drug mainlined into the planet’s ecosystems, suffusing every cell, every pore — including our own bodies. In 1908, the German chemist Fritz Haber discovered how to make ammonia by capturing nitrogen gas from the air. In the process he invented a cheap new source of nitrogen fertilizer, ending our dependence on natural sources, whether biological or geological. Nitrogen fertilizer fixed from the air confounded the mid-century predictions of Paul Ehrlich and others that global famine loomed. Chemical fertilizer today feeds about three billion people. Kristian Birkeland and Sam Eyde had already synthesized nitrogen using nothing but electricity from hydro electric dams in remote Nowegian fiords. The Birkeland-Eyde process for the production of Norgesalpeter - Norwegian Saltpeter, i.e. calcium...
October 31, 2009
Measuring
There's a saying: "you can't manage what you can't measure". You can, of course, but not well in most cases. In managed grazing that's long been one of the big issues since you need to be able to measure dry matter content of paddocks on a daily basis to do good management. A variety of instruments have been offered to help with this but they are either expensive and unreliable, or labor intensive. Most graziers end up reverting to guess-timating, relying on experience to quantify the highly variable content of paddocks as the seasons change and swards evolve in a succession of species and growth stages. Dry matter mesurement isn't enough since the nutritional value also varies. One longs for some sort of Star Trek tricorder hand gadget that could quickly and precisely tell you all about whatever you point it at. It isn't just forage that requires measurement, it's also the livestock and the soil. The end result...
October 30, 2009
Natural Gas
There's been a discussion fitfully proceeding over the past couple of weeks on the biochar list prompted by the livestock smears by the climate change slime machine - chiefly Stern and Worldwatch. These were also brought up in the comments following Greener Grass. A recent list message mentioned this Allan Savory lecture and poster given at a Feasta meeting in Dublin: Keeping Cattle - cause or cure for climate crisis?. A message comment by Peter Read was "For me, yet more evidence of how much more efficient good management is than natural reslience (especially when the latter is exploited by bad management)". I replied: -------------- You don't have to live in Dublin to have access to the knowledge and thinking that Allan Savory promotes. He has written books on the subject as have many others for many decades. It is common knowledge for those that have some measure of interest in agriculture. It isn't that good management is much...
October 22, 2009
Short Course
We have a new guy in our grazing group, so I gave him the short course on grass varieties and cattle. It's seems worth posting here too. ------------------------ The best forage grasses - those that make what is called a "dairy quality pasture" - are the ryegrasses. There are three main types: annual, perennial and Italian. Annual ryegrass is a wonderful forage with a good balance of protein and energy (complex carbohydrates): very productive but short lived. It can yield from late fall to late spring if well managed with irrigation, then it goes to seed and dies. Perennial ryegrass is also an excellent forage. It doesn't yield as bountifully as annual rye and it has more protein, so it is a slightly less well balanced food. If you plant the right variety it will yield 12 months of the year, though it grows slowly in the dog days of summer since it is a C3 grass, and also...
October 09, 2009
Grass Wanking
Grass fed is no longer an indication of agronomic virtue because there is now a USDA AMS standard and a mechanism for verification. It's a nasty kluge, necessarily so since the idea of a single standard to apply to such a large and diverse nation with such variability in climate and land guarantees a brain dead bureaucratic pile of nonsense that is antithetical to good environmental practice or the production of healthful foods. As with other USDA systems the objective is to protect large and influential entities from competition by strangling smaller producers in record keeping and inspections. It's an unholy alliance of big business and big government that inflates production friction and siphons off rents from the public to pay for a bureaucracy. It's a jobs program for leather bottomed time servers. The key to understanding where it all went wrong is the explanation for the standard: this is a marketing claim centered on a production method. That...
October 06, 2009
Winter Is Coming
Every year at this time the grazing lists are buzzing with talk about how best to feed animals over-winter. The graziers want to be all grass all the time and get the best product, but reality rears its ugly head and they have to compromise their principles. Usually I just listen and do my talking here: the folks on the list are either master graziers that I should listen to, or novices that have nothing useful to say. I broke down and spoke up today, which may cause a flame war. I said: Do the animals need to stay in top condition over the winter? If you have a dairy and have to fill the milk tank every day then you must feed them, but beefs are different. Gestating beef cows only need 1/3 the feed of a lactating cow, and can live off back fat to some extent for a while with no harm to the fetus. Steers...
September 30, 2009
Rough Trade
Some previous posts have lamented the rise of grain cropping and grain finished beef in S. America. Consider the situation: The United States and European Union agreed in May to end their two-decades-long row over an EU ban on hormone-treated beef by increasing the European quota for other beef. . . A document circulated to WTO members by the EU and U.S. missions at the WTO, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, confirmed that the European Union would admit an extra annual duty-free quota of 20,000 tonnes from August this year. If the two parties agree to move to a second phase, the additional quota will rise to 45,000 tonnes in the fourth year. The EU already admits a quota of 60,000 tonnes of beef, of which the United States has a share of 11,500 tonnes, charging a tariff of 20 percent. Imports outside that quota pay 100 percent. Under the agreement, the definition of high-quality beef...
September 11, 2009
Come a Cropper
There have been a number of articles of late about Agentina and grass fed beef. This one isn't the best, but it is recent. Cattle once ruled the seemingly endless grasslands here, delivering decades of prosperity for Argentina and producing a brand familiar to the world -- natural, grass-fed beef. But a quiet revolution has arrived on the famously fertile pampa, a swath of plains bigger than Texas. Instead of roaming freely and eating to their hearts' content, a growing number of Argentine cattle are spending a third of their lives in U.S.-style feedlots. . . all over the pampa, ranchland that was home to Angus and Hereford cows has in recent years been replaced by fields of soybeans, corn and wheat as commodity prices skyrocketed by more than 300 percent. This year, a third of the 15 million animals expected to go to slaughter will fatten up in the now-ubiquitous feedlots, three times as many as in 2001....
September 05, 2009
In A Word
How well does the hype machine work? Understanding consumer preferences and willingness to pay for organically grown and locally grown fresh produce helps producers and retailers determine what type of fresh produce to grow and sell, what to emphasize in marketing efforts, and what prices to charge. Intense competition from large-scale growers has forced small-scale farmers to find new niche markets for their commodities through value-added marketing. But information related to consumer preference and willingness to pay for both organically and locally grown fresh produce is sparse, presenting a fertile field for researchers. . . Participants were asked "When you buy fruits and vegetables, how often do you buy locally grown (or organically grown) fresh produce when it is available?''. For locally grown produce, 14% of participants chose "always", 40% chose "most times", 38% chose "sometimes", and 8% chose "seldom" or "never". For organic produce, 6% chose "always", 15% chose "most times", 39% chose "sometimes", and 40% chose "seldom"...
August 25, 2009
Anecdotes
I'm disappointed at the progress with biochar. Rather than increasing knowledge about the mechanisms involved all we see are political shenanigans and flowery narratives. The so called field trials don't measure and monitor enough factors to answer any questions, leaving only the wild eyed narratives of activists with agendas and their thumbs on the scales. It may be that I need to be a bit more patient, that real science is being done somewhere by someone, and that there are answers forthcoming, but it's been a long time coming. I've been yacking about it for 3 years and don't really have any more knowledge than I had then despite assiduous attention to the subject. That's par for the course in a lot of ag commentary. The biggest threat from climate change has less to do with rising sea levels, shifting of agricultural regions, more hurricanes in the Gulf, or why the heck it rained so much during the dog...
August 17, 2009
Carbon Madness
For many of the bureaucratic wankers of the world there is only one subject: climate. The tunnel vision resulting from their hyper focus on this subject leads them to make crushingly stupid remarks. Simple land management practices – like planting trees, improving the efficiency of nitrogen fertilization, and adding more organic inputs to the soil – could contribute significantly to avoiding greenhouse gas emissions, providing 25 percent or more of the solutions available in the near term. . . Carbon contracts could help, but their transaction costs are prohibitively high for the smallholders who make up the great majority of land users in the developing world, which accounts for nearly 90 percent of the potential for capturing carbon through improved land use. As a result, it simply isn’t worth farmers’ while to undertake the monitoring, reporting and verification necessary to prove mitigation. . . According to Smukler and Palm, remote-sensing capabilities are improving, as new technologies with better resolution...
August 13, 2009
SPIN Dizzy
Jeremy asks: Urban farming: the new dot com? Roxanne Christensen, co-author of the SPIN-Farming online learning series, says a wave of innovators is developing profitable models for sustainable alternatives to industrial agriculture. These new entrepreneurs are developing breakthrough technologies, approaches and business models that, she says, "can help create a post-industrial food system that is less resource intensive, more locally-based, and easier to monitor and control". . . SPIN's [S-mall P-lot IN-tensive] growing techniques are not, in themselves, a breakthrough. What's novel is the way a SPIN farm business is run. SPIN provides everything you'd expect from a good franchise: a business plan, marketing advice, and a detailed day-to-day workflow. In standardizing the system and creating a reproducible process, it doesn't sound all that different from McDonalds. . . Areas represented at Agriculture 2.0 will include controlled climate growing systems, building integrated agriculture, urban agriculture, closed loop irrigation and waste processing systems, mobile food processing, aquaculture, and appropriately-scaled marketing...
August 10, 2009
Justice
Just as I finish complaining about the low quality of the debate and pervasive misinformation an exception surfaces. Proponents of urban and peri-urban agriculture, ourselves included, have a poster-child: Cuba. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union as a big market for sugar exports, the Cubans became more self reliant and replaced the food they could no longer afford to import with bounteous harvests from small urban plots. Alas, all is not quite so rosy in the organopónico. A new book, noted at HungryCity, points out that these plots supply just 5% of Cuba’s food. Furthermore, 75% of Cuban farmers use agrochemicals, and 83% would apply more if they could. Despite masses of evidence that organic land in Cuba really was more productive than conventional farms, the country is reverting to a conventional model. The "masses of evidence" are apparently disputed by those who know best: the growers themselves. Urban agriculture is a hobby and a...
August 10, 2009
Injustice
Justified. Last week the United Kingdom's Food Standards Agency published an extensive report on organic food that concluded with this bombshell: "There is no evidence of a difference in nutrient quality between organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs." The finding—based on a review of 55 relevant studies conducted over the past 50 years—now threatens an organic food industry that has been growing at an annual rate of 20 percent for the past couple of decades and is now worth something like $23 billion in global sales. The overwhelming success of the organics market has a lot to do with the pervasive belief that eschewing synthetic pesticides and fertilizers makes food more nutritious. Now we know that belief may be unfounded. . . First, the demographic profile of organic consumers makes this debate one that's hardly worth having. There's no broad public health issue at stake here. Organic food costs 60 percent more than conventional and comprises a mere 2.5 percent...
August 03, 2009
Get Real
The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals [via A&L Daily] when . . . asked if I used organic farming, I said no, and left it at that. I didn’t answer with the first thought that came to mind, which is simply this: I deal in the real world, not superstitions, and unless the consumer absolutely forces my hand, I am about as likely to adopt organic methods as the Wall Street Journal is to publish their next edition by setting the type by hand. . . He was a businessman, and I’m sure spends his days with spreadsheets, projections, and marketing studies. He hasn’t used a slide rule in his career and wouldn’t make projections with tea leaves or soothsayers. He does not blame witchcraft for a bad quarter, or expect the factory that makes his product to use steam power instead of electricity, or horses and wagons to deliver his products instead of trucks and trains. But he...
July 30, 2009
Fashion Victims
And fashion as a victim. Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said consumers were paying higher prices for organic food because of its perceived health benefits, creating a global organic market worth an estimated $48 billion in 2007. A systematic review of 162 scientific papers published in the scientific literature over the last 50 years, however, found there was no significant difference. . . Sales of organic food have fallen in some markets, including Britain, as recession has led consumers to cut back on purchases. The Soil Association said in April that growth in sales of organic products in Britain slowed to just 1.7 percent in 2008, well below the average annual growth rate of 26 percent over the last decade, following a plunge in demand at the end of the year. It isn't news that organic foods are not more nutritious. Many studies have shown this and there is no way that they could...
July 28, 2009
Total Fertility
There's more than nitrogen in hay. That's all that was discussed in the previous post about the nitrogen cycle but all primary and secondary nutrients are contained in good hay. Phosphorous, potassium and all of the secondary nutrients and trace minerals are found in varying amounts depending on the hay species and its quality. You can do forage tests and find out just how complete it is if you want to be precise. This brings up an interesting point: what I'm advocating, seen from an external perspective, is strip mining the hay grower's land to fertilize my own. Unless that grower is dosing his land with balanced nutrients then his land degrades in proportion to my land's improvement. If he does then I am in effect dosing my land with those nutrients too, but it is concealed in the bought in hay. In the end somebody has to pay the bill by digging up rocks and spreading them on...
July 22, 2009
Tomorrow
I've followed The Land Institute for several years. This old post from an alternate universe 6 years ago can serve as introduction. They assert that agriculture is a problem, not that it has problems. The whole idea of digging up natural ecosystems and planting shallow rooted, annual seed bearing plants creates unsolvable problems. It kills beneficial soil, reduces ecosystem resilience, and is subject to erosion, drought and pests. It has been a problem for humanity for 10,000 years that has ruined land all over the planet, wherever farming has been practiced. The main problem is grains - wheat, maize, rice, oats, soya, barley etc. - which provide 75% of the calories humans consume. They are all shallow rooted annuals that have had their brains bred out of them and so need constant coddling and protection. They are juiced up, chemical dependent freaks that can't survive on their own. They are not just unnatural, they are anti-natural. TLI seeks to...
July 19, 2009
Laughing Gas
There's a cautionary tale told among dryland graziers of animals starving to death standing belly deep in dry grasses. They are stuffed full from having eaten as much as they could, and somewhat bloated due to having plenty of drinking water to slake their thirst. The problem is that the dry grasses are low in protein and without sufficient protein they can't digest the cellulose of the dry grasses and get the "energy" (as cattlemen call it) value of the complex carbohydrates contained in the dry grasses. The digestive system of ruminants can be understood by analogy to a compost pile. If you don't have enough nitrogen then the bacteria can't work and the pile just sits there, a cold and soggy mess rather than a rapidly decomposing proto-soil verging on being hot due to the feverish activity of bacteria which release great quantities of heat as well as gasses as they munch their way through the carbon in...
July 02, 2009
Charily Conflicted
A message came in on one of the lists from Bakary Jatta, who has a .gm email addy, noting some of the complexities of biochar subsidy schemes and emissions trading scams. There would be a rapid response by the establishment if the UNFCCC process was introduced to them. Money is of great interest. The amount of money would have to be compared to the value of the charcoal as a fuel sold in the urban area. It is illegal to produce charcoal in the Gambia, so it is 'supposed' to come from Casamance province, in fact from disputed territory. Legal or not, law enforcement staff buy and use it, and levy an informal tax on it and other substances at a large number of check points along the main highway. There would be great difficulty to monitor production and use of biochar, so in my opinion carbon credits would be additional income for those involved in the charcoal trade....
July 01, 2009
Ag Land
Worth repeating. there is enough space in the world to produce the extra food needed to feed a growing population. And contrary to expectation, most of it can be grown in Africa, say two international reports published this week. . . "Some 1.6 billion hectares could be added to the current 1.4 billion hectares of crop land [in the world], and over half of the additionally available land is found in Africa and Latin America," concludes the report, compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). If further evidence were needed, it comes in a second report, launched jointly by the FAO and the World Bank. It concludes that 400 million hectares, straddling 25 African countries, are suitable for farming. Models for producing new crop land already exist in Thailand, where land originally deemed agriculturally unpromising, due to irrigation problems and infertile soil, has been transformed into a cornucopia by...
May 20, 2009
Squishy Thinking
A number of recent posts (Bio-Bubble, Grass Geekery, Lame Journalism, Rote Engagement, Ch-Ch-Ch) have criticized the perversion of enhanced agronomic methods by dark siders - advocates who lose themselves in pursuit of power. They exploit modest best practices, such as biochar, for political purposes. They have personality disorders that make them prone to exaggeration and magical thinking. Some notion will give them a thrill and they just let it run. A reference to one such victim came in on a list this morning. Today Converted Organics announced that they are supplying to Whole Food Stores their all-natural fertilizers. They have previously announced supply to Home Depot and with these high level associations have created a market for a new line of fertilizer products that are not dependent on oil and chemicals. I believe this is a giant step in the right direction. This is just an old fashioned anaerobic digester company that uses municipal wastes as feedstock to produce...
May 11, 2009
Active Ingredients
In my work as a grazier there's a lot of loose thinking and suspicious claims about methods and results. A recent example of that is a claim that animals raised in cold climates - either due to latitude or altitude - have higher levels of omega-3 and CLA. Why? This seems preposterous since most of the forage for most of the year in such places is stored forage - hay, silage, dried grains etc. My reaction is that this claim can at best be true only for a brief period each year, and that I suspect that it has more to do with the species of forage available than the cold climate per se. It's hard to get straight answers from researchers since they seem to have an agenda. The research on this subject wants to show a benefit to cold climate grazing in order to justify continuation of the practice even though it is comparatively unproductive and expensive....
May 07, 2009
Rote Engagement
Thinking is hard, and so is real argumentation that truly engages issues and other perspectives. Consider: How much of rationality -- of being a good Bayesian Ninja or whatever -- isn't about intelligence, or knowing how to think, but about having the self-control and discipline to exercise those capacities? And what does it mean for our attempts to become more rational if, as a lot of recent psych research has been suggesting, our self-control generally is a limited resource? How can we overcome rote cognition, if it sticks around even when we're trying our best to be mentally alert and careful? One method is experimental apostasy. Let's say you have been promoting some view (on some complex or fraught topic - e.g. politics, religion; or any "cause" or "-ism") for some time. When somebody criticizes this view, you spring to its defense. You find that you can easily refute most objections, and this increases your confidence. The view might...
April 21, 2009
Weirder Interstices
You have found one of them! The proof of this apparently (should you have any doubts), is that the dreaded HR 875 was discussed here a month ago. "One of the interesting meta-aspects of this story is that it has played out almost entirely in the weirder interstices of the Net". Critics say that the proposed Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 (H.R. 875), introduced in early February by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), will “effectively criminalize organic gardening,” conceivably outlaw “seed banking,” and will serve as part of a concerted Monsanto conspiracy to drive all but corporate agri-business out of the food production racket. . . 875's supporters are mostly just asserting that since the bill’s explicit language doesn’t empower the Food Safety Administration (FSA) to undertake specific tasks or impose specific prohibitions, then it’s rank and absurd fearmongering to suggest otherwise. But that presumption ignores a long history showing what happens when Congress creates regulatory agencies and delegates...
April 14, 2009
Soy Suckers
The headline reads "'Natural' nitrogen-fixing bacteria protect soybeans from aphids", but naturalized is a more accurate and useful word to use. "Soybeans are from Asia and so there were originally no nitrogen-fixing bacteria that would colonize soybeans in U.S. soils," said Consuelo De Moraes, associate professor of entomology. "The rhizobia had to be transferred here." The soybean aphid is also not native to North America. This pest only began to infest soybean fields about 10 years ago but are now fully established pests requiring pesticide applications to avoid the loss of as much as 40 percent of the crop. . . "Our results demonstrate that plant–rhizobia interactions influence plant resistance to insect herbivores and that some rhizobia strains confer greater resistance to their mutualist partners than do others," . . . "The bacteria that were used initially to inoculate the first crops of soybeans are growing wild in the soil now," said Mark C. Mescher. "They are now considered...
March 29, 2009
Cereal Killer
This post from 5 years ago (almost to the day) discussed the views of Richard Manning, the author of the Mother Earth News article cited in the previous post. He has long been crusading against grain feeding of animals but his views have subtly changed since he wrote Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie in 1995. Then he opposed cattle, preferring bison, but now he supports them and the technologies that modern management intensive graziers use. This Audobon review of his 1995 book gives a taste of his old ideas. It is a plea to change our attitudes toward what was North America's largest biome. Now it is the most altered and degraded. Manning writes, "Our culture's disrespect for its grasslands has produced an environmental catastrophe. It will be the best measure of the maturing of the American environmental movement when it begins to understand and combat this destruction." But our lack of understanding...
March 29, 2009
Market Shifts
Big beef seems to be paying more attention to grass. “Pasture-finished beef cattle are usually marketed between 16 and 24 months of age. Select animals that have mature weights under 1,100 lbs., as these will most likely finish at the proper time,” he says in “Cattle Production: Considerations for Pasture-Based Beef and Dairy Producers” (http://attra-ncat.org/attra-pub/pdf/cattleprod.pdf). That means an early-maturing animal that can put on external fat and marble quickly and easily. . . For this reason, he says the moderate body-type English breeds usually fit best with grass operations. “However, it is important to remember that there is wide variability in the expression of the traits important for pasture-based systems, even within breeds. . . The Arkansas research, a nine-year study conducted during the 1990s, found small-framed, early-maturing and intermediate-framed, early-maturing cattle finished on pasture had carcasses with higher marbling and quality grade scores than larger-framed, later-maturing cattle. Steers in the intermediate-framed category were current pedigree Angus, and the...
March 19, 2009
Food Myths
The drum beat of crushingly stupid regulatory efforts from the floundering Obama administration continues unabated. Now it's farmers who are being attacked. Obama also said he will ask Congress for $1 billion in new funds to add inspectors and modernize laboratories . . . "There are certain things only a government can do," Obama said. "And one of those things is ensuring that the foods we eat, and the medicines we take, are safe and do not cause us harm." . . . Obama noted in his address that many of the nation's food-safety laws "have not been updated since they were written in the time of Teddy Roosevelt," and said the FDA was "underfunded and understaffed" during Bush's tenure. . . Consumer groups, food-safety advocates, patients' organizations and others from across the political spectrum praised the choice of Hamburg and Sharfstein for the FDA, which has struggled to retain public confidence amid outbreaks of food-borne illnesses, poisoning scares...
March 05, 2009
Wrong Song
The bane of environmental activism and reporting is the arrogant, authoritarian mindset of those who self select to be involved in such pseudo-professions. Every dollop of information is poorly analyzed and coupled with nonsensical policy prescriptions. researchers . . . found that using 30-60% less nitrogen kept crop yields the same but halved nitrogen loss to the environment. The team studied two double-cropping systems – waterlogged rice/upland wheat in the Taihu region of east China and irrigated wheat/rainfed maize on the North China Plain. All four crops showed different nitrogen behaviour, "depending on climatic, soil and management practices". The team calculated that the rice/wheat system had an annual nitrogen surplus of 87 kg per hectare. This system had large losses by denitrification, which the scientists reckoned could be reduced by improving carbon management and controlling the water regime. The wheat/maize system had a 212 kg per hectare nitrogen surplus and large nitrogen losses from ammonia volatilization. The researchers say...
March 04, 2009
Dogma and Karma
One of the annual discussions on grazing lists is about what grass fed means. Do stored forages count or must it be only grazed forage? That's hard for most temperate zone graziers since they get real winters. And, if stored forages are sometimes OK does it matter what kind of forage? Does lucerne (alfalfa) count or must it be baled grass hay? Since maize is a grass, as are all cereal grain plants, are they OK if the whole plant is used rather than just the grain? What if it is grazed when immature, before seed heads form? Although there is some useful information in such discussions I find the question to be misguided. It's the same way that organic systems went wrong. By trying to strictly define a dogma the key objectives of such agronomic systems are lost. For grazing, that objective is the production of good food in environmentally benign ways. The methods will vary with the...
February 19, 2009
Jerked Beef
These are hard times for beef and dairy producers. Since the first of the year, milk prices have dropped to near $10 cwt in many dairying areas. This is half the price dairymen were receiving last summer when Australia and New Zealand were in a severe drought. American dairymen expanded to fill these countries’ export markets and to help supply the growing Chinese demand for dairy products. Since then Australia and New Zealand have recovered, the American dollar has risen and the Chinese are scared to death of any dairy product since the melamine scandal. Dairy cows that were worth $3000 last summer are selling for $800 today and male Holstein calves are only worth $5.00 a head. Add to this a severe drought in California that has sent alfalfa hay prices through the roof . . . Dairy cow slaughter is up 30% over last year whereas beef cow slaughter is down 14%. Last week DFA held a...
February 18, 2009
No Till
No SOC loss. The effect of no-till conversion of land that had been in smooth bromegrass for 13 years to no-till corn production on soil organic carbon in eastern Nebraska was observed for 6 years by USDA scientists. The bromegrass was killed with herbicides in late fall of 1998 and corn was planted directly into the killed sod in the spring of 1999. No plowing or cultivation was conducted during the entire period of the study. Weeds were controlled with herbicides. Soil samples were collected at three different depths at the beginning and several times during the study and were analyzed for soil organic carbon. Carbon isotope ratio analyses made it possible to determine the amount of soil organic carbon that originated from bromegrass or corn. . . During the 6 years of the study, the origin of the soil carbon in the two upper soil layers (0- to 5-, and 5- to 10-cm depths) changed with the soil...
February 14, 2009
Details
A Lincoln speech to the Wisconsin Agricultural Society, rearranged as free verse. Ripped from the Bird Dog. Every blade of grass is a study; And to produce two, Where there was but one, Is both a profit and a pleasure. And not grass alone; But soils, seeds, and seasons Hedges, ditches, and fences, Draining, droughts, and irrigation— Plowing, hoeing, and harrowing— Reaping, mowing, and threshing— Saving crops, pests of crops, diseases of crops, And what will prevent or cure them— Implements, utensils, and machines, Their relative merits, And [how] to improve them— Hogs, horses, and cattle— Sheep, goats, and poultry— Trees, shrubs, fruits, plants, and flowers— The thousand things Of which these are specimens— Each a world of study within itself....
February 11, 2009
Eco Bias
It isn't only macroeconomics that is muddled by motivated disagreement over theory, macroecology is burdened with a closely analogous problem. Disputants don't reason from evidence to draw conclusions, they assemble evidence that supports conclusions that they favor. Researchers have identified a link between the diversity of crops grown in farmlands and the pollution they create in lakes and rivers. . . In areas where farming is scarce or absent, however, the authors found no perceptible change in dissolved nitrogen concentrations since the early 1900s. Broussard thinks this indicates that the impacts might be reversible if policy changes included incentives for farmers to rotate more crops, decrease their field size, increase the edges of fields and sizes of buffering zones, and incorporate more native perennial grasses into farms and in between fields. "There has been great progress made to reduce the footprint of agriculture, but there is still room for improvement," says Broussard. "The American farmer is caught in a...
February 02, 2009
Sweet Day
We are enjoying a break between storms. The days are getting longer, the sun is getting stronger, and the night frost burns off by 9:00 AM now. By noon it's shirt sleeve weather if you are in full sun though it's still chilly in the shade and soil temperatures are still low. My calves are in a stupor - like people after a feast - due to their increasingly rich and plentiful diets. I'll soon need to increase my stocking rate to keep up with the spring flush and keep the pastures from getting rank and unproductive. I've been supplementing them with some minerals to balance their pasture intake. They get plenty of protein from the pasture, but they can make better use of that diet if I dose them. Being frugal, and burdened with my environmental sensibilities, I supply them with packing house wastes rich in minerals but of little or no value to humans. I'm using raisin...
February 01, 2009
Opti-Pessimist
James Lovelock is a desiccated old stick at 90, but he's still only half baked. Most of the "green" stuff is verging on a gigantic scam. Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It's not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it'll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning. . . There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste - which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering - into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast. . . The biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly; we put in only 30 gigatonnes. Ninety-nine per...
January 19, 2009
Another Pinhole
A post at Heliophage links this Tim O'Reilly post which discusses the Berry essay mentioned in my previous post. Tim says: The essence of Berry's argument is that we as a culture need to get away from single-issue movements to fix this or that, and instead embrace holistic thinking about how society as a whole should be organized to achieve our goals. As a farmer, essayist and poet, Berry's focus, is, of course, not on political organization, or industry, but on the more fundamental issue of where our food comes from and how best to produce it. Talk about a narrow focus! Holistic thinking, if it means anything at all, must be far larger in scope than producing food. It's a big issue for me, but that's my trade and I'm well aware that it is only a small part of what holistic thinking must mean. Bad policy prescriptions are inevitable when focus is so narrow. Berry concludes that:...
January 07, 2009
Green Wash
There's always a lot of fashionable nonsense but it has reached a fever pitch of late with various "miserabilist" notions including organic agriculture. There's nothing novel or insightful about bog standard regulated organic agriculture, it's just conventional agriculture tarted up with superstitious nonsense. Organic farming started with small operations that rejected modern agriculture's huge, chemical-dependent fields in favor of diversified plots fertilized with old-fashioned compost, manure and cover crops. . . Synthetic fertilizers don't present food safety risks, but the organic movement has always opposed them because they take a great deal of energy to produce, decrease natural soil fertility and can pollute water. Rubbish. Organic farming started when agriculture was invented. Operations were large or small depending on mechanization and labor force size. There was a hobby farming movement that had a lot of superstitious beliefs and used traditional farming methods, but they didn't invent anything and were not originators in any sense. Fertilizer is fertilizer. The urea,...
December 03, 2008
Carbon Concerns
Here's another study about managing soil carbon loss in biofuel production. . . . scientists from Michigan State University report on the effectiveness of carbon augmentation practices, including the integration of cover crops, manure, and compost, to supplant carbon loss in corn stover removed cropping systems. The results indicate that corn stover based bioenergy cropping systems can be managed to increase short-term carbon sequestration rates and reduce overall net global warming potential by using no-till planting methods and a manure-based nutrient management system. The research team measured soil carbon changes as well as nitrous oxide and methane gas emissions from corn stover-ethanol field plots managed under various carbon augmentation practices. In addition to the gas emissions measured in the field, other carbon emissions assessed included estimates for the manufacturing carbon cost of crop inputs; methane emissions from the livestock manure source; methane and nitrous oxides generated during manure storage and application; and the fuel used in crop production and...
December 02, 2008
Lesser Evil
I often hear this sort of argument. "From a purely carbon perspective, our research indicates that putting perennial biofuel crops on landscapes that are dominated by annual row crops will have a positive effect on soil carbon." The finding "seems to walk you right into the food for fuel debate," DeLucia said, referring to the controversy over using agricultural land for fuel production. But because the U.S. is already devoting about 20 percent of its corn crop to ethanol production, he said, it would make sense to eventually use that land to produce a much higher yielding biofuel feedstock that has the added benefit of increasing organic carbon in the soil. I don't buy it. It's not as if there are no better policy options. This report starts with an assumption that crop lands will be used for biofuels, and then seeks less harmful biofuel systems. "From the time that John Deere invented the steel plow, which made it...
November 28, 2008
UFOs
That's ag snark for Unconfirmed Field Observations. It's the bedrock of "alternative agriculture" (alternative to what?), organic advocacy etc. Robert asks some pointed questions about one example of UFOs in rice cropping. [The System of Rice Intensification] SRI is a system which consists of transplanting widely spaced very young individual rice plants, using organic fertilizers, and not permanently saturating the fields with water. . . The BBC reported a doubling of yields in Nepal. . . In a rather thorough review, in 2006, McDonald, Hobbs and Riha found that it sometimes works (in Madagascar), but that generally yields are 11% lower with SRI, not higher. What is one to think then? Do newspapers blindly follow NGOs, and do farmers say what is scripted? Another case of overselling? Or is this a true farmer/priest led breakthrough, which scientist at fancy universities and research institutes just do not get? . . . When SRI ‘works’, it is hard to know what...
November 20, 2008
Organic Slime
I've spoken several times about slimebag arguments, those that conceal rather than reveal, that tell part of a story and intentionally omit critical segments since they refute the thrust of the argument. Arguments for organic agriculture are high on the list. Why are our soils losing carbon? One reason could be that higher temperatures increase the levels of microbial activity and respiration, another could be modern farming practices such as intensive grazing, the use of inorganic fertilisers, or breeds with shallower root systems. Whatever the reason, Gundula Azeez, who used to be the SA's policy manager, has been looking into organic farming practices and has concluded that they could hold the answer to this problem. She found that in 34 different studies of soil carbon levels, 31 showed organic farm soils to have higher carbon levels than non-organic. Now, this isn't at all surprising, given that the use of organic fertilisers such as compost or green manure is the...
November 20, 2008
More Buttons
I think that for some people their stupid button is stuck. To me, the most novel feature of the current ongoing collapse is the coincidence of huge shocks with apparently different triggers. Who would have thought that an epidemic of bad loans in America, steep ramp of energy prices, and biofuels tightening the link of energy to food prices would coincide, against a backdrop of lower economic firewalls between countries and increasingly intense food limitation of the human population, with almost no scope for growth of the food supply. It’s a wonderland for testing resilience ideas and a global tragedy, all at the same time. A lot of people worried about bad loans, energy prices and biofuels. I did. It was obvious that there would be a reckoning as credit was extended to less and less reliable borrowers who were dependent on ever rising real estate prices. It was screamingly obvious that biofuels - burning food - was a...
November 20, 2008
Dirt Nerd
I am reminded - not for the first time - that this stuff bores the snot out of most people. By 2030, when today's toddlers have toddlers of their own, 8.3 billion people will walk the Earth; to feed them, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, farmers will have to grow almost 30 percent more grain than they do now. Connoisseurs of human fecklessness will appreciate that even as humankind is ratchetting up its demands on soil, we are destroying it faster than ever before. "Taking the long view, we are running out of dirt," says David R. Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Journalists sometimes describe unsexy subjects as MEGO: My eyes glaze over. Alas, soil degradation is the essence of MEGO. Nonetheless, the stakes—and the opportunities—could hardly be higher, says Rattan Lal, a prominent soil scientist at Ohio State University. Researchers and ordinary farmers around the world are finding that even devastated...
November 10, 2008
Whiplash
As government interference in systems increases their volatility rises. They are no longer tethered to reality. It isn't that reality is placid and reliable and so protected from volatility, it's that government interference makes things worse. You have risk either way, but attempts to reduce risk by inserting extraneous ungrounded factors increases risk. For example: Corn prices climbed to nearly $8 a bushel in futures markets this summer amid strong global demand that pushed gasoline to almost $4 a gallon. But pump prices have since tumbled to nearly $2 a gallon as a credit crisis and looming recession put the brakes on driving. Irwin says corn prices have mirrored that slide, falling to about $4 a bushel. He predicts prices will likely hover there until the economy rebounds from a recession that could be the nation's deepest since World War II. . . Despite the dramatic slide, Irwin says corn prices remain well ahead of the $2.42 a bushel...
October 22, 2008
Ashes
I've talked before of using ash from our local co-gen plant as soil amendment for our foothill soils. Its very high PH (about 12) can do some of what we often use lime for and it has useful minerals too. I plan to use many truckloads for that gravel pit renovation project mentioned in an earlier post. But I leaned something new today. There are two types of wood ash generated at the wood fired cogeneration power plant. Bottom or boiler ash is the ash produced by furnaces after combustion; it is coarse and has very high carbon content. The fly ash is captured in the plants multi clones and stacks and is finer in texture with finer carbon particles. I suspect that bottom ash would be most useful as soil amendment. The fly ash and the bottom ash are mixed via screw conveyers at the plant and quenched with water before it is delivered to WAI's disposal site...
October 22, 2008
Pie Time
I've been away. Well, I've been here, but not posting because it's harvest festival time and there have been guests and events and such. Our local Apple Festival had the most impact since it fills our normally sleepy little town (no stop light) with people and vendors in one of those street fair affairs. I go into town and brave the crowds for one reason: to get an apple pie baked by the Women's Community Club. It's tradition. It's also excellent pie. I'll use this bit of fluff as a warm up post. Scientists have found that the potential of no-till farming to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from soils, is offset by increased nitrous oxide emissions - at least in some soil types. Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a very potent greenhouse gas. Importantly, the results hint at the fact that biochar may be a better soil conservation strategy when the goal is reducing net emissions, because biochar has been...
October 16, 2008
Buzzword Bingo
There has been an ad campaign running for some months that features a corporate motivational speaker in a variety of situations droning on about the future of the company, repeating every gee-whiz catch phrase but not actually saying anything. In one scene a group of prospective clients asks him how he will do that and he answers "we don't know yet". In another scene a group of young employees are playing bingo as he speaks, marking a box for every empty buzzword spoken. That series of ads came to mind as I revisited the nonsense article posted about yesterday. My intent was to do some of the work recommended in that post: "each facet of the false narrative must be verified - accepting some, rejecting others, and modifying some of the rest - which is a long and tedious task." That article is a treasure trove of buzzpseak. It will take a few posts to unbuzz it. Food policy...
October 15, 2008
Future Shock
Faced with accelerating change due to advances in transportation and communication, and pressure to advance even faster due to population growth as the planet becomes ever more gentrified, weak minds yearn for a simpler past. That past was not in fact simpler, but they have a muzzy false narrative about it which selects oddments of semi-factual data to assemble a myth of a lost Edenic past. Being weak minded, they then resort to political activism to force their deformed visions of society. All this suggests that a political constituency for change is building and not only on the left: lately, conservative voices have also been raised in support of reform. Writing of the movement back to local food economies, traditional foods (and family meals) and more sustainable farming, The American Conservative magazine editorialized last summer that “this is a conservative cause if ever there was one.” Local food economies are fragile. Food production varies from season to season, year...
September 29, 2008
Orchard Prunings
Orchards and vineyards produce a great deal of woody organic wastes that are traditionally burned. The pruned wood of pecan, a byproduct of forested trees, is usually burned as an economical means of disposal. Increasingly though, pruned pecan is being chipped and incorporated into the soil as an environmentally viable method of handling the waste. Although more expensive than burning, chipping and soil incorporation avoid burning controls recently imposed by many states and the Environmental Protection Agency. To adhere to current EPA regulations, more producers are looking to chipping and incorporation of pruned wood as an alternative to burning. The practice has gained acceptance in many areas of the United States, including the San Joaquin Valley California, where strict environmental regulations have forced growers to adopt alternative ways to deal with waste. . . This is a perfect biochar application. The prunings have no value as forage except to mushrooms, and they prefer oak. The biochar would be a...
September 28, 2008
Heavy Heads
We are discovering what we have been doing all this time. . . . the team measured the activity of invertase within a normal strain of rice, in which the GIF1 gene lacked any mutations, and within a mutant strain of rice, in which the GIF1 gene contained a mutation that caused a defect in the invertase activity. The scientists found that invertase activity in the mutant strain was only 17 percent of the activity that was observed in the normal strain, suggesting that the GIF1 gene does, indeed, control invertase activity. The team then created transgenic lines of rice in which the GIF1 gene is overexpressed and found that, compared with normal strains, the transgenic rice had larger and heavier grains. According to Ma, the team was surprised to find that the GIF1 gene was so specialized in controlling invertase activity in a particular part of the grain -- the vascular tissue, which transports nutrients, including sugars generated...
September 28, 2008
Burnt Offerings
Biochar, agrichar, carbonized whatever, etc. seems to be getting better known and discussed. See Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, an australian government submission by Australian Biochars Pty Ltd. Also see this round up and overview at The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand. There's nothing new or insightful in them, but they can serve as reference collections of sorts....
September 22, 2008
Nutrient Recovery
Last April I said: "I'd wager that we will see growers producing crops for cellulosic ethanol who use biochar amendments to reduce their costs and increase their profits." It looks like I'd have won that wager. . . . they are looking at nutrient recycling in a holistic manner by replicating the nearly closed nutrient cycle of integrated crop and livestock systems. These integrated systems, once widespread, use manure as fertilizer and make use of legume plants such as alfalfa and clovers to replace nitrogen in the soil. To help close the nutrient cycle in the case of cellulosic biorefineries, the research team is experimenting with two types of alternative cropping systems, and examining how effectively switchgrass, used Nutrient Recovery from Integrated Cellulosic Biorefineries as a biofuel feedstock, utilizes nutrients recovered from biorefineries. In the process of converting switchgrass and other kinds of biomass into liquid fuels, the researchers hope that nitrogen (as gaseous ammonia) and other nutrients (as...
September 20, 2008
Orgochar
Organic farming is a boutique activity incapable of producing enough yield to satisfy demand. It's a hobby for many, a premium market for the few who are near those with more money than sense, and the default system for food insecure subsistence farmers just one snafu away from disaster. But, it can be improved. The use of biochar can help it to be more productive and so less environmentally destructive. Already I have managed to achieve surprising results. For a start, it has become clear that less water and fewer fertilisers are needed in soils enriched with biochar. Acidic soils benefit by being sweetened, earthworm populations increase and bacterial and other forms of life in the soil become more complex and balanced. There is some evidence that methane gas emissions from the soil are also reduced, as well as those of nitrous oxide, a deadly greenhouse gas that is 310 times more destructive to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide....
September 18, 2008
Fish Food
Increasingly that's coming to mean something like "cheese food" - meaning that it's something like cheese, but not cheese. Farmed fish are like fish, but less so. Dennis Hedgecock described the big wave of domestication in our time: aquaculture. Within a decade or so, there will be more fish produced on farms than caught in the oceans. Recent research shows that such fish have a worse fat profile than bacon. The problem is that they are grain fed and that creates an imbalance of omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids. That research focused on tilapia and catfish - two of the most commonly farmed fishes. Other research has cited problems with shrimp and shell fish farming creating pollution and spreading disease to wild fisheries. These may all be solvable problems in future but it's not clear that they are getting much attention now, especially since a great deal of such farming is done in developing countries. So what is all...
August 30, 2008
Wrong Ethic
Carl Dyke, in comments to one of Timothy's posts, cites Weber's views about the incomparability of science and politics. I still think Weber was right when he argued in the essays on science and politics as vocations that the ethics of science (scholarship) and politics are fundamentally incompatible. The scholar’s ethic of getting it right produces an infinite process of approximation and revision. No question is ever settled and discussion is always open. “In science, each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years.” For the politician the ethic is to get things done now, based on an existential gamble and a sense of commitment to ultimate values or to responsibility in the present. Politicians can’t wait for science to grind through its process. “To take a practical political stand is one thing, and to analyze political structures and party positions is another…. The words one uses in [a political meeting]...
August 27, 2008
Fertility Tech
Environmentalists are proud of their ignorance. For them, it's a sign of right thinking to disparage fertilizer as undifferentiated whitish granules of some sort, with a sneer. But someone who was actually interested in the environment would be fascinated and seek to learn the details about this major environmental issue. Some history: About 75% of fertilizers and fertilizer technology used around the world today were developed or improved during the 1950s to 1970s by scientists and engineers at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the United States . . . TVA developed high-analysis fertilizers with high nutrient content as well as more efficient manufacturing processes. The fertilizers include urea, diammonium phosphate (DAP), triple superphosphate (TSP), sulfur-coated urea, and liquid fertilizers. TVA improved the manufacturing processes for ammonium nitrate and other products that help commercial producers provide efficient fertilizers to farmers worldwide. TVA's ammonium-granulation and bulk-blending technologies improve the efficiency of the manufacture of many mixed fertilizer grades. TVA generated...
August 26, 2008
Small Beer
Cattle are becoming fashion accessories for semi-crunchy lifestylers. For between £200 and £2,000, people can buy a cow that stands no taller than a large German shepherd dog, gives 16 pints of milk a day that can be drunk unpasteurised, keeps the grass “mown” and will be a family pet for years before ending up in the freezer. The Dexter, a mountain breed from Ireland, is perfect for cattle-keeping on a small scale, but other breeds are being artificially created to compete with it, including the Mini-Hereford and the Lowline Angus, which has been developed by the Australian government to stand no more than 39in high but produce 70% of the steak of a cow twice its size. Home on the range for the Farrant family is a detached house with a large garden on the outskirts of Ashford, Kent. Bernard Farrant and his wife Sue, both teachers, have bought four Dexters. Actually, there is nothing new about miniature...
August 22, 2008
MEGO
"With eight billion people, we're going to have to start getting interested in soil," he said. "We're simply not going to be able to keep treating it like dirt."...
August 17, 2008
Famine
And disease. As developing countries confront the first global food crisis since the 1970s as well as unprecedented water scarcity, a new 53-city survey conducted by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) indicates that most of those studied (80 percent) are using untreated or partially treated wastewater for agriculture. In over 70 percent of the cities studied, more than half of urban agricultural land is irrigated with wastewater that is either raw or diluted in streams. . . "Irrigating with wastewater isn't a rare practice limited to a few of the poorest countries," said IWMI researcher Liqa Raschid-Sally and lead author of a report on survey results. "It's a widespread phenomenon, occurring on 20 million hectares across the developing world, especially in Asian countries, like China, India and Vietnam, but also around nearly every city of sub-Saharan Africa and in many Latin American cities as well." Wastewater is most commonly used to produce vegetables and cereals (especially rice), according...
August 12, 2008
Crapaholics
The earlier post No Data Please referenced yet another study showing that organic foods were no better nutritionally than other foods. Many earlier posts also have talked about how they are worse from an environmental perspective when all externalities are counted. That's not to say that there are not conventional growers who produce unsatisfying foods in destructive ways, it's just that they are bozos. Some folks can screw up a wet dream. The study referenced in that post was one of many recent articles - research and opinion - expressing doubt about, or outright debunking, fashionable food fetishes. The market speaks. Whole Foods Market Inc. -- or, as it's become better known recently, No. 48 in the bestselling book "Stuff White People Like" -- has problems. Chiefly, there are fewer people, white or otherwise, interested in paying a premium for its ethically-cultivated, fair-trade, organic gourmet fare. . . Consumers didn't have to shell out a lot of dough for...
August 07, 2008
Higher
And wider. The fertiliser industry is very large by New Zealand standards – about $2 billion now. It is also totally deregulated. Anyone can put up their shingle, call themselves an expert, and sell anything as a fertiliser or a fertiliser substitute. And they are - Mr Morris of Agrissentials sells ground basalt rock and Mr Ewan Campbell (Probitas) sells ‘marine deposits’. We have now all the ingredients required for an explosion in snake oil merchants and pseudo-science - after all a 1% stake in market share represents an income of about $20 million annually and rocks and marine mud carry a good margin when you pretend they are fertilisers. So, here is my prediction: over the next few years we will see more muck and mystery products on the market or those already present will gather a larger market share. That's New Zealand, where ag is a major part of the economy, though it's a small economy. In...
August 07, 2008
No Data Please
Organic is all hat. Many people pay more than a third more for organic food in the belief that it has more nutritional content than food grown with pesticides and chemicals. But the research by Dr Susanne Bügel and colleagues from the Department of Human Nutrition, University of Copenhagen, shows there is no clear evidence to back this up. In the first study ever to look at retention of minerals and trace elements, animals were fed a diet consisting of crops grown using three different cultivation methods in two seasons. The study looked at the following crops – carrots, kale, mature peas, apples and potatoes – staple ingredients that can be found in most families' shopping list. The first cultivation method consisted of growing the vegetables on soil which had a low input of nutrients using animal manure and no pesticides except for one organically approved product on kale only. The second method involved applying a low input of...
July 23, 2008
Higher Still
Do you think food is expensive now? Some see costs rising further, and soon. "When are the good times going to end? Could it be next year? And what happens if a drought or some other disaster cuts yields dramatically?" While farmers will likely absorb some of the added costs, Schnitkey says consumers also should expect to pay more for products ranging from cereals and syrups to grain-fed beef. "There's not going to be a reduction back to lower food costs as long as we have these higher production costs," he said. "Energy prices are driving a lot of what's going on and ultimately that hits the consumer." Along with fertilizer, grain farmers also will see hefty cost increases next year for inputs ranging from seed to fuel for tractors and other machinery, according to the study. The study projects non-land production costs for corn will total $529 an acre next year, up 36 percent from 2008 and nearly...
July 21, 2008
General Farms
In the day all farmers used livestock to help them get in crops and get maximum benefit from their farming efforts. Even though their main cash crop might be grain, such as wheat, they also raised cattle or at least fed some cattle in winter for ranchers. After the crop was harvested they would put in the cattle to clean up residues. The cattle got fat on crop trash, which included some amount of grain that escaped the combines due to lodging or shatter, and the fields got fertilized by dung and urine. Fields in higher latitudes where winters were cold and snowy got special handling. Swath grazing is a way to revive the once widespread practice of letting cattle graze all winter in the Northern Plains. With swath grazing, farmers pile crop residue into rows, known as “swaths,” that stand as high as 16 inches. Cattle can usually push with ease through up to 2 feet of snow...
July 21, 2008
Inoculants
No serious grower will plant legumes of any sort without inoculating the seed with the proper strain of rhizobia, the bacteria that infects root nodules of legumes and live in symbiosis with them, secreting mineral nitrogen that the plant uses for food while consuming some of the carbohydrates the plant produces using those nitrates. Rhizobia are pervasive in the soil but having the right strain at the right time assures peak performance, so the seed is often sold with a coating of the proper bacteria. Raw seed is also sold as are bags of dry rhizobia, a powder that can be used by a grower to do his own seed coating. Dump a bag of seed and a small bag of rhizobia spores into a common half bag cement mixer, add water and something sticky like a bit of honey, and you can do your own seed coating. There are more seeds per pound in uncoated seed since the...
July 17, 2008
Cool in School
I'm always surprised when I read someone arguing that fertilizers depend on fossil fuels. That's like saying that electricity depends on fossil fuels, confusing a production method with the thing produced. There are lots of ways to make electricity and lots of ways to make fertilizer, but that doesn't seem to be well understood. Fertilizers can be very good news, of course, but if they’re based on fossil fuels then a priori they are not likely to be sustainable. There has to be an overall move towards boosting soil fertility in other ways, making use of nitrogen fixing crops, green manures, bio-char, animal wastes and so on. Fertilizers are not based on fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are often used to make them, but that's because they are, in this era, cheap and abundant. When that is no longer the case then other feedstocks will be used, again, as they have been in the past, and will be in future....
July 05, 2008
Better Living
Jeremy links to LEISA magazine, one of those irritating advocacy rags for peasant agriculture. The current issue has a series of articles about soil improvement. The lede editorial: Working with the soil’s living processes means using practices that build up rather than deplete the soil organic matter. For instance, continuous use of agro-chemicals to improve the availability of nutrients, without applying organic materials like compost or residues, can deplete the organic matter. Also, while farmers commonly till the soil to loosen it, prepare the seedbed, and control weeds and pests, tillage also breaks up the soil structure, destroys the habitat of helpful organisms, speeds up decomposition, and increases the threats of erosion and compaction. Practices such as burning and deforestation without replenishing the soil also lead to degradation. With time, farmers notice that their soils get “tired”, their yields decline, and erosive processes become accelerated. These soils are more vulnerable to environmental forces such as wind erosion and flooding,...
June 27, 2008
Tasty Toms
We often hear anti-tech nutters claim that improved crop cultivars are necessarily inferior to heritage cultivars. Their proof is that mass market tomatoes are insipid. This does not support their claims, it just shows that the traits selected for in those varieties - mostly suitability for machine harvest - are insufficient. Perhaps they are getting better? For generations, agriculturalists and scientists have bred tomatoes for size, shape, texture, flavor, shelf-life, and nutrient composition, more or less, one trait at a time. With the advent of molecular biology, mutagenesis and genetic transformation could produce tomatoes that were more easily harvested or transported or turned into tomato paste. Frequently, however, optimizing for one trait led to deterioration in another. For example, improving flavor could have a negative effect on yield. The revolution in genomics, with a wealth of data emerging from sequencing and simultaneous expression analysis of thousands of genes, has made it possible to study the numerous pathways and regulatory...
June 22, 2008
Revolution 2
A theme that has been developing, mentioned in several earlier posts, is the growing realization that the world has been misguided about agriculture in recent decades, indulging various declensionist dialogues and false nostalgia for peasant agriculture, as if the agricultural theme parks of heavily subsidized western countries were real and could be the basis for world agriculture. That realization has been sharpened by the food shortages, even riots, that have been in the news. Consider: India’s supply of arable land is second only to that of the United States, its economy is one of the fastest growing in the world, and its industrial innovation is legendary. But when it comes to agriculture, its output lags far behind potential. For some staples, India must turn to already stretched international markets, exacerbating a global food crisis. . . The Green Revolution introduced high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat, expanded the use of irrigation, pesticides and fertilizers, and transformed the northwestern plains...
June 07, 2008
Air Ball
Activists can screw up anything. No matter how good the idea, or how important the subject, once some activist organization decides to exploit the issue it all turns to crap. Carbon-negative bioenergy is the most radically green energy concept, because all other renewable technologies are carbon-neutral at best, slightly carbon-positive in practise. Radical green is not a valid reason for anything. Carbon-negative bioenergy is a good idea because it is potentially cheap, abundant and, for the pyrolysis method, provides valuable inputs to agriculture. It makes sense without climate hysteria, and will still make sense once that fever has passed. It's good independent of any fashion claims or political exploitation. Biopact has always been surprised to see that other organisations, claiming to take the climate fight serious, have not heard of the concept or haven't been willing to take it serious. This is now changing, at last. The reason for this change is a recent paper [*.pdf] by NASA's James...
May 08, 2008
Loose Sleeves
That's so there's room to keep lots of stuff up them. Diversified, low-external-input (LEI) farming systems offer one possible approach for maintaining adequate productivity and profitability while reducing pollution by agrichemicals and still improving water quality. Sounds kind of good, but what does adequate mean. In a world where there is a large and growing shortfall in ag production this doesn't sound so good after all. Conventional rates of synthetic fertilizers were applied in the two-year rotation, whereas composted cattle manure and reduced rates of synthetic fertilizers were applied in the three- and four-year rotations. Where did the manure come from? How was it produced? Isn't this just a hide-the-pea game again, a way to sneak fertilizer in by having some other grower launder it, like gangsters do with money by passing it through dummy corporations or offshore banks before they spend it at home? Weed management in the two-year rotation was based on conventional rates of herbicides, whereas...
May 07, 2008
Global Outlook
For agriculture. This USDA report says nothing new, but it's all in one place and could be a useful reference. Abstract World market prices for major food commodities such as grains and vegetable oils have risen sharply to historic highs of more than 60 percent above levels just 2 years ago. Many factors have contributed to the runup in food commodity prices. Some factors reflect trends of slower growth in production and more rapid growth in demand that have contributed to a tightening of world balances of grains and oilseeds over the last decade. Recent factors that have further tightened world markets include increased global demand for biofuels feedstocks and adverse weather conditions in 2006 and 2007 in some major grain- and oilseed-producing areas. Other factors that have added to global food commodity price inflation include the declining value of the U.S. dollar, rising energy prices, increasing agricultural costs of production, growing foreign exchange holdings by major food-importing countries,...
May 06, 2008
Shaky Ground
More Economist bashing. Reasoning from false premises gives false results. Fertiliser, which has enabled the world to generate enormous growth in agricultural output, is largely produced from petroleum. This seems to place a long-term constraint on food output, absent some new innovation. Nitrogen fertilizer is produced from methane, not petroleum, but that's not the first or only way to do it. Methane is just a convenient and still relatively cheap source of hydrogen - CH4 - and that is useful for making ammonia - NH3. Water is also a source - H2O. Though not as rich it is certainly abundant compared to methane. That's one of Mother Nature's favorite methods. There are many ways to make hydrogen, none as cheap as methane at current prices, but that seems set to change. It takes energy to make hydrogen from water. Mother Nature uses lightning. One recent suggestion is to use wind power, which is intermittent, but that doesn't matter when...
May 06, 2008
Dust Devils
It might be worth expanding on the significance of part of the description of Brazilian ag from Grim Romance: To give one remarkable example, the time between harvesting one crop and planting the next, in effect the downtime for land, has been reduced [to] an astounding thirty minutes. But in the Ukraine: Fallow agricultural land and steppe-formation processes are evidently capable of having a much greater effect on global air quality than was previously assumed, according to researchers who examined a dust cloud that formed over parched fields in southern Ukraine and led to extremely high concentrations of particulate matter in Central Europe. . . Since the 1930s wind erosion in what was then the Soviet Union has increased considerably as a result of collectivisation in agriculture and the resultant large field areas. In particular, this has affected the regions north of the Caucasus, the lower reaches of the Don river and eastern and southern Ukraine. It is possible...
May 05, 2008
More Precisely
The food crunch in India. India "needs another green revolution", the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Unescap) recently urged. "Growth and productivity in agriculture are slowing, and the green revolution has bypassed millions." India has the most to gain from improvements in agriculture because it is home to nearly two-thirds of Asia's poor, most of whom rely on farming, Unescap said. Middle-class Indians are eating more and better food. Yet its population of 1.1bn is growing at about 1.4 per cent and food grain production increased just 0.9 per cent last year, according to ministry of agriculture statistics. Agricultural growth has steadily decelerated because of years of under-investment as attention has focused on high-growth manufacturing and service industries. It's somewhat understandable that this has happened given that the economic rewards for investment in manufacturing and service industries are high, and those for agriculture have been so low in the past. Food was cheap. But...
May 05, 2008
Gas-X Grass
When organic matter decomposes, rots, in anaerobic conditions the types of micro-organisms that do the work emit methane as a waste product. That's why swamps, rice paddies, lake bottoms and land fills emit so much methane. When there is air present, oxygen to be more precise, aerobic microbes that emit carbon dioxide wastes do more of the work. Ruminants such as cattle, sheep and goats harbor anaerobic organisms in their guts, something like human intestinal flora, that decompose the tougher bits of grasses and forbs, the cellulose, and emit methane in the process. Though this is completely natural and has happened for eons as giant herds of ruminants roamed the continents before humans ever domesticated some of them (think bison), it has become a target of climate change nutters. Scientists at Gramina, a joint biotech venture by Australia’s Molecular Plant Breeding Cooperative Research Centre and New Zealand rural services group PGG Wrightson Genomics, are developing a grass that will...
May 03, 2008
Grim Romance
Some interesting comments by the panel of economists at an FT blog. The remedy to high food prices is to increase food supply, something that is entirely feasible. The most realistic way to raise global supply is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies supplying for the world market. To give one remarkable example, the time between harvesting one crop and planting the next, in effect the downtime for land, has been reduced [to] an astounding thirty minutes. There are still many areas of the world that have good land which could be used far more productively if it was properly managed by large companies. For example, almost 90% of Mozambique’s land, an enormous area, is idle. Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues...
May 02, 2008
Dirt Deficit
Perhaps the various soil improvement agronomic system ideas that have been expressed here (and many other places, of course) will be more memorable if expressed in conventional crisis terminology: Peak Soil, like peak oil. By 2050, according to Rattan Lal, a professor of soil science at Ohio State University, "All the necessities of food, feed, fiber, and fuel are going to be met by less than one-tenth of an acre per person, on average. And we already have seriously degraded a lot of the available land. So unless you can restore some of it you will just run out." People have been improving as well as degrading soil for millenia. Some civilizations develop more successful systems than others. The results can be catastrophic. It may be that we can learn to make soil, in a formal way. Dick Haynes, a soil scientist at Australia's University of Queensland, has created a synthetic soil from industrial waste products: fly ash from...
May 01, 2008
As Specified
Horrors! Swedish researchers have discovered that adding biochar to soil causes microorganisms to increase in number! In their study, charcoal was prepared and mixed with forest soil, and left in the soil in each of three contrasting forest stands in northern Sweden for ten years. They found that when charcoal was mixed into humus, there was a substantial increase in soil microorganisms (bacteria and fungi). These microbes carry out decomposition of organic matter (carbon) in the soil, and consistent with this, they found that charcoal caused greatly increased losses of native soil organic matter, and soil carbon, for each of the three forest stands. Much of this lost soil carbon would be released as carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Therefore, while it is true that charcoal represents a long term sink of carbon because of its persistence, this effect is at least partially offset by the capacity of charcoal to greatly promote the loss of that carbon already present...
April 30, 2008
Agro-perversion
A perhaps not so loosely related thought on the Agriculture of Tomorrow. [via Cosma, in an indirect way which involved some searching inspired by a tossed off comment that he probably could have given a citation for and saved me the work, but no, he speaks mostly to insiders who don't need to search it up. Their jokes may be numbered, to save them the time needed to tell them. ] The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which has not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural. Consider so simple and time-honored a process as...
April 30, 2008
Dryland
Continuing an old thread most recently discussed in Rootless Bloviation: More about African Ag The wheat is a new variety, one that is high yielding and resistant to drought. As a result, small farming families are realizing harvests on farmlands once considered too poor to cultivate, to the country´s social and economic benefit. The progress is life-saving at a time when wheat crops in Kenya and other African countries are plagued by a virulent new strain of fungus called "wheat rust" that threatens the region´s farmlands. . . Scientists and crop researchers at Kenya´s Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) developed the new wheat seeds over the past decade. Through a process called "mutation plant breeding", they applied radiation-based techniques to modify crop characteristics and traits. The story is from the International Atomic Energy Agency. I've always been stonkered about the acceptance of mutagenic cultivars produced by heat, chemical and radiation induced mutation, while controlled genetic alteration is treated with suspicion....
April 27, 2008
Food Energy
There was once a food economy and an energy economy, but the boom in biofuels is now merging the two. . . Global fertilizer prices rose more than 200% in 2007 as farmers applied more fertilizer to maximize production of corn -- now used for ethanol -- at record prices; hardest hit are African farmers who need fertilizer to replenish nutrient-depleted soils. The unprecedented rise in fertilizer prices - more than 200% in the past year - is creating a fertilizer crisis for resource-poor farmers in developing countries. . . Particularly hard-hit are farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. Farmers there need fertilizers desperately, to replenish their nutrient-depleted soils. But fertilizer use in Africa is the world's lowest - about 8 kg per hectare. The lack of fertilizers in Africa accentuates hunger and poverty. The biofuels debacle accentuated and accelerated a problem that was always there and growing ever more focused. There never were two economies - food and energy -...
April 08, 2008
Plastic Food
An example of the environmental consequences of the grain shortage. Thousands of farmers are taking their fields out of the government’s biggest conservation program, which pays them not to cultivate. They are spurning guaranteed annual payments for a chance to cash in on the boom in wheat, soybeans, corn and other crops. Last fall, they took back as many acres as are in Rhode Island and Delaware combined. . . Such problems were never contemplated when the Conservation Reserve was conceived as part of the 1985 Farm Bill. Participants bid to put their land in the program during special sign-ups, with the government selecting the acres most at risk environmentally. Average annual payments are $51 an acre. Contracts run for at least a decade and are nearly impossible to break — not that anyone wanted to until recently. . . “If the government lets the land out and then crop prices fall, that’s going to hurt a lot of...
March 31, 2008
Old Tech
Researchers propose designer soil to sequester CO2. A team from Newcastle University aims to design soils that can remove carbon from the atmosphere, permanently and cost-effectively. This has never previously been attempted anywhere in the world. . . The concept underlying the initiative exploits the fact that plants, crops and trees naturally absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) during photosynthesis and then pump surplus carbon through their roots into the earth around them. In most soils, much of this carbon can escape back to the atmosphere or enters groundwater. But in soils containing calcium-bearing silicates (natural or man-made), the team believe the carbon that oozes out of a plant’s roots may react with the calcium to form the harmless mineral calcium carbonate. The carbon then stays securely locked in the calcium carbonate, which simply remains in the soil, close to the plant’s roots, in the form of a coating on pebbles or as grains. Well, it may never have been...
March 24, 2008
Sweet Nothings
Piles of dung attract flies. The new study. . . used . . . an open-air research lab that can expose the plants in a soybean field to a variety of atmospheric CO2 and ozone levels – without isolating the plants from other environmental influences, such as rainfall, sunlight and insects. High atmospheric carbon dioxide is known to accelerate the rate of photosynthesis. It also increases the proportion of carbohydrates relative to nitrogen in plant leaves. The researchers wanted to know how this altered carbon-to-nitrogen ratio affected the insects that fed on the plants. They predicted the insects would eat more leaves to meet their nitrogen needs. When they exposed the soybean field to elevated carbon dioxide levels, the researchers saw the expected effect: Soybeans in the test plot exhibited more signs of insect damage than those in nearby plots. A closer inspection showed that soybeans grown at elevated CO2 levels attracted many more adult Japanese beetles, Western corn...
March 13, 2008
Post Toasties
On second thought . . . Over the past years Biopact has been instrumental in getting a simple message across: if biofuels are going to produced, it would be interesting to take the potential of the Global South into account. . . In order to help small farmers in Africa - which has always been our prime goal - there are perhaps more elegant and straightforward strategies. . . There is a new land use strategy that could make more sense. It is based on biochar - charcoal obtained from the pyrolysis of biomass - used as a soil amendment. Biochar cures unhealthy soils and makes them fertile. This way, slash-and-burn farmers can halt deforestation, and grow more food and biomass. Biochar also doubles as a carbon sink for which credits are available. . . The Biopact sees an interesting opportunity in the concept. This is why it has created the Biochar Fund, a small social profit organisation aimed...
March 09, 2008
Partners
Acid soils occur all over the world and have limiting effects on agriculture. One approach to improving production on such soils is to amend them using higher PH materials such as lime or ashes. This can be expensive since large amounts of material need to be spread. Another approach is to select cultivars that tolerate acidity better. The effect of rhizobial strain and lucerne genotype on the nodulation of lucerne seedlings growing in solution cultures maintained at pH 5 was measured in two greenhouse experiments. . . The work demonstrates that there remains substantial opportunity to increase the potential of lucerne to nodulate at low pH. Gains would appear to be most easily made by changing the strain of rhizobia that is used for inoculation. I've often been frustrated by less detail oriented growers who pay little attention to rhizobial strains, considering it a nuisance activity rather than a management control with large potential to affect outcomes. This research...
February 24, 2008
Fat Soil
I've noticed a slow evolution in paleo-environmentalist dogma regarding land management in general and grazing in particular. Stewart Brand could add this to his list of environmental heresies. Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbanization, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power. Reversals of this sort have occurred before. Wildfire went from universal menace in mid-20th century to honored natural force and forestry tool now, from “Only you can prevent forest fires!” to let-burn policies and prescribed fires for understory management. Environmentalists still have only the dimmest glimmer of comprehension, so they get the specifics munged up and can't reason usefully from such faulty premises. The result of conventional agricultural practices such as artificial fertilizing, ploughing, stubble burning, bare fallows, etc is to run down the organic matter in the soil, and it is this organic matter that is the source...
January 30, 2008
Hysteresis
Speaking of willful ignorance. The benefits of the industrial agriculture era are high productivity, cheap food and relatively high levels of sanitation . . . At the turn of the century, Americans were spending close to 50 percent of household income on food, he explained. Today, the figure is closer to 8 percent. But big problems exist with the state of today’s agriculture industry, Mackey said. Fossil fuel consumption by the food industry has soared and environmental degradation is rampant. Plus, animal welfare concerns are largely nonexistent in industrial agriculture, he said. CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) have been around for just 40 years, enabling the U.S. population to consume animal foods, which was not the case at the turn of the century. Ignorantia affectata, a contrived ignorance, an ignorance too useful to abandon. At the turn of the century almost half the US population worked in agriculture, though that number was rapidly declining due to automation and industrialization....
January 20, 2008
Full Circle
Most proposals for GHG management fail to consider all of the factors. This one does a better job. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from New Zealand dairy farms are significant, representing nearly 35% of New Zealand’s total agricultural emissions. . . Dairy farms have a high demand for electricity, with a 300-cow farm consuming nearly 40 000 kWh per year. However, because only ~10% of the manure produced by the cows can be collected (e.g. primarily at milking times), a maximum of only ~16 000 kWh of electricity per year can be produced from the effluent alone. . . A solution for smaller farms is to co-digest the effluent with unutilised pasture sourced on the farm, thereby increasing biogas production and making the system economically viable. A possible source of unutilised grass is the residual pasture left by the cows immediately after grazing. This residual can be substantial in the spring–early summer, when cow numbers (demand) can be less than...
January 18, 2008
Cool Country
We hear a lot of farmer bashing by some segments of the politicized paleo-environmentalist community. One of their standard attacks is about irrigation, claiming that farmers use too much water leaving less for instream flows and downstream cities. We also see bizarre interpretatons of research findings. Some way is found to claim that nearly any finding supports climate change religion. Consider this press release from Livermore which trumpets: "Human activities contribute to California's global warming". Recent research by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the University of California, Merced and the National Center for Atmospheric Research shows that California temperatures have jumped statewide by more than 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit between 1915 and 2000. This warming is likely related to human activities. . . But all California climate trends during the 20th century aren’t so clear. For example, less warming is observed in summer. This warming, which mainly occurs at night but not during daytime, is not well explained...
January 16, 2008
Empty Rhetoric
Bad arguments by advoates desperate to justify their positions don't help. They are bad arguments even when the positions held are truly defensible. Lobbyists who argue against the practice of greening one's food options once the decision has already been made are stuck with the hard line: that there is no difference whatsoever. That's plainly false, just as it is false that there is no difference whatsoever between food brands or between food that comes from Guatamala or Iowa. Now that the decision has been made, the burden of proof is on the lobbyists to demonstrate that there is absolutely, categorically no relevant difference between the several options. By my reckoning, that'll be mighty hard, since differences like the living conditions of chickens plainly matter, even if not morally, at least to some people. Maybe that's why someone would revert to inane strategies like suggesting that cafeteria operators are "hooked by propaganda." Foodfights like this can only be made...
January 16, 2008
No Change
I read an item or two from The Edge's World Question Center 2008 now and then, usually because someone else posted about some response. I then read a few others on the page. Some are useful, others, not so much. Today following Hanson's pointer to Sabbagh, I read on to Colin Tudge. I have changed my mind about the omniscience and omnipotence of science. I now realize that science is strictly limited, and that it is extremely dangerous not to appreciate this. . . In the matter of GMOs we are seeing the crude simplifications still in their uncorrected form. By genetic engineering it is possible (sometimes) to increase crop yield. Other things being equal, high yields are better than low yields. Ergo (the argument goes) GMOs must be good and anyone who says differently must be a fool (unable to understand the science) or wicked (some kind of elitist, trying to hold the peasants back). But anyone who...
January 09, 2008
Even Less Smoke
The earlier post Up In Smoke discussed better nitrogen compounds and smarter application methods to increase yields while reducing nitrogen use. And then there's better genes. Arcadia says its GM rice requires less nitrogen fertiliser . . . Arcadia is working to apply the reduced-nitrogen technology to GM wheat, rape seed oil, sugarbeet, maize, sugarcane, cotton and turf for golf courses and landscape gardening . . . The Arcadia technology inserts a gene that improves the nitrogen uptake, which means less fertiliser is needed to produce a given yield of crop. All of these materials, methods and cultivars could be used together for significant savings and increased yields. Another relevant post is Everything Changed. It discussed the use of soil amendments and improved cultivars to open The Cerrado, the closed lands, in Brazil. The acidity and high aluminum content of these soils had prevented their cultivation. Little would grow. Those same soils are found in Africa, which was once...
December 18, 2007
Up In Smoke
Much of the nitrogen fertilizer used in the developing world never makes it into a plant. A lot of it evaporates or leaches away from the root zone, and so increases the cost while decreasing production. The losses to air and water are environmental problems since some are GHGs and some cause eutrophication of water. Better nitrogen compounds and smarter application methods can make a big difference. UDP [urea deep placement] is the insertion of large urea briquettes into the rice root zone after transplanting. UDP cuts nitrogen losses significantly. Farmers who use UDP can increase yields by 25% while using less than 50% as much urea as before. . . broadcasting is a highly inefficient application method because most of the nitrogen is lost to the air and water. Only one bag of urea in three is used by the plants. . . UDP technology was introduced in Bangladesh in the late 1990s; by 2006 more than half...
December 16, 2007
Tabloid Journalists
I suppose it has always been so but it is becoming increasingly apparent that there is no difference between tabloids and supposedly serious newspapers, especially as politics has become so shrill. One agricluture related offender I've called out before is Michael Pollan, an opportunist who has been riding high on food scare stories. For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial agriculture as “unsustainable” . . . Would the aquifers run dry? The pesticides stop working? The soil lose its fertility? . . . Two stories in the news this year, stories that on their faces would seem to have nothing to do with each other let alone with agriculture, may point to an imminent breakdown in the way we’re growing food today. The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS . . . The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that...
November 23, 2007
Stated Plainly
What do biochar advocates really think? Mathews keeps a bag of biochar on his desk, because he sees it as key to the future of the earth. He applauds the initiatives by Sen. Salazar and New South Wales and contends that the time is right for individual countries to promote pyrolysis and biochar. Kyoto's cap-and-trade approach "can never get CO2 levels down fast enough or far enough. The biochar approach can solve global warming by biosequestration of carbon direct from the atmosphere using the power of photosynthesis," he says. There's a compelling logic in this. The idea of avoiding a fall off a cliff by going more slowly is just silly. You have to stop, turn around and head a different direction. Still, who cares what the carbon wankers think? Isn't biochar valuable even in a world that has no climate issues? Brown and many other biochar advocates believe that the economic key to unlocking the potential of biochar...
November 12, 2007
More Snakes
Randall launches an anti-biofuel rant that sounds some of the points made here in Snake Oil as well as a few others. . . . the push for biomass energy from Brazil and other equatorial countries is leading to huge CO2 emissions as forests get ripped down and burned. A lot of this is happening to feed a growing population of humans. Also, Asian industrialization is increasing the amount of spending money people have for food and so Chinese, Indians, and others are spending more on types of foods (e.g. meats) that require more land usage to produce. This increases food imports by these countries and forest destruction by food exporters. Making a bad trend even worse, some Westerners who pose as environmentalists are promoting biomass energy usage. Well, because of the CO2 released by rainforest clearing equatorial region biomass production expansion causes a net boost in CO2 emissions. So people who worry about global warming and therefore advocate...
October 01, 2007
Everything Changed
We hear a lot of bleating about Brazilian rain forest loss, but that's not the interesting ag story. From only 200,000 hectares of arable land in 1955, the Cerrado had well over 40 million hectares in cultivation by the year 2005. The phenomenal achievement of transforming the infertile Cerrado region into highly productive land over a span of fifty years, the world’s single largest increase in farmland since the settlement of the U.S. Midwest, has been hailed as a far-reaching milestone in agricultural science. The Cerrado is an arid brush savanna stretching over 120 million hectares across central Brazil from the western plains to the northeastern coast. With soils characterized by high acidity and aluminum levels that are toxic to most crops, Brazilian farmers had long referred to the area as campos cerrados – “closed land,” with little promise for sustaining production. . . The Cerrado region now provides 54 percent of all soybeans harvested in Brazil, 28 percent...
September 26, 2007
Pump It Up
A variant of the make or buy debate. Consider make. Large vertical pipes could, they [James Lovelock and Chris Rapley] say, be used to mix nutrient-rich waters from hundreds of metres down with the more barren waters at the surface. This could cause algal blooms at the surface, which would consume carbon dioxide (CO2) through photosynthesis. When the algae die, some of this carbon could sink into deep waters. The algae may also produce chemicals [dimethyl sulphide aerosols] that spur cloud formation, further cooling the planet. . . The idea may seem far-fetched. But a wave-driven 'ocean upwelling system' to absorb CO2, very similar to what Lovelock and Rapley are proposing, is currently being developed by a company called Atmocean, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Phil Kithil, chief executive officer of Atmocean, estimates that a pump-driven up-welling system, if deployed across 80% of the world's oceans, could help bring down to the ocean floor an additional 2 billion...
September 24, 2007
Easily Said
So, to continue, how do we "seek balance in our agronomic interventions, and so get more vegetation for our efforts with less N2O,"? How do we persuade Nitrosomonas spp. bacteria - which convert ammoniacal and urea nitrogen fertilizer to nitrite, so that Nitrobacter can convert it to nitrates, which must be done before the denitrification bacteria can convert nitrates to N2O - to back off? Nitrification inhibitors, such as nitrapyrin, dicyandiamide, and ammonium thiosulfate, slow the conversion of ammonium to nitrate by affecting the soil bacteria. This blocks denitrification for 2-6 weeks depending on which inhibitor is used as well as soil temperatures. What's more . . . Nitrogen applied as anhydrous ammonia is all ammonium once it dissolves in the soil water. Anhydrous is toxic to the ammonium-converting bacteria in the injection zone and it takes about 2 weeks for them to repopulate the application zone soil and begin converting ammonium to nitrate. This doesn't help when nitrogen...
September 23, 2007
Nitrogen Tarnish
Bottom line: Just because lots of governments decide some path is a good idea doesn't mean they all aren't being stupid. That's Randall's conclusion about the world wide rush to biofuel production though there are arguments that doing so produces more GHGs than equivalent fossil fuels would produce. The nub of the argument in this case is denitrification - the microbial breakdown of nitrates applied to crop lands. In doing so these soil bacteria emit nitrous oxides and other gases, and the N2O is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a clear, colorless gas, with a slightly sweet odor. Due to its long atmospheric lifetime (approximately 120 years) and heat trapping effects —about 310 times more powerful than carbon dioxide on a per molecule basis — N2O is an important greenhouse gas. Nitrous oxide has both natural and human-related sources, and is removed from the atmosphere mainly by photolysis (i.e., breakdown by sunlight) in...
September 11, 2007
Excited Soil
I just love it when Philip talks dirty. An equivalent measure of redox potential is pE. Just as pH is the negative log of the hydrion activity, pE is the negative log of electron activity (source). Soil pE and soil pH are equally important to predicting charge state of metals and nutrients. However, because measuring pH is relatively easier by far, and because knowing pH tells us volumes about expected pE, soil pE is a less discussed subject. It is important to bioremediation, industrial chemistry, and wetland science. Not a household term. These two are more than a mirror pair, although mirroring is their most notable characteristic. When pH changes, pE must also change in response. The reverse is true also. In soil, that response departs from simple mirroring. So much so that it can seem to be two separate dances. Soil pH and pE have different causes of change and different effective buffering agents. The term 'buffering' is...
July 29, 2007
Flawed Heroes
"I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anemic desuetude, and then to death." -- Aldo Leopold Randall comments on a press release regarding a new paper from the OSU College of Forestry which notes further confirmation of the benefit of top predators in healthy ecologies. The wolves are back, and for the first time in more than 50 years, young aspen trees are growing again in the northern range of Yellowstone National Park. The findings of a new study, just published in Biological Conservation, show that a process called “the ecology of fear” is at work, a balance has been restored to an important natural ecosystem, and aspen trees are surviving elk browsing for the first time in decades. . . “We’ve seen some recovery of willows and cottonwood, but this is the first time we can document significant aspen growth, a tree species...
July 23, 2007
Tough Tucker
It may be that there is some confusion about ruminant digestive systems that contributes to the mistaken ideas discussed in More Cranks. Pundits loosely talk about forage as if it was all the same, just vegetable matter that could be consumed by people as well as ruminants, and so it seems inefficient to feed it to animals. This is profoundly mistaken. People can't digest grass. They can't digest the vast majority of plant material. To people it's just fiber, something that passes through them intact. No animals except ruminants can digest this material. The complex carbohydrates that make up the stiffer bits of plants, the stuff that allows them to stand tall rather than being just a gooey mass on the ground, can only be digested by bacteria. Ruminants have complex multi-stage digestive systems that harbor these bacteria, and gives them a mechanical assist by finely grinding the material. That's what cud chewing is about. The material is chewed,...
June 05, 2007
NodD Off
In recent years it has been observed that there have been some declines in crop yield per unit of nitrogen fertilizer added, and a decline in symbiotic nitrogen fixation by rhizobia in legume crops. A novel explanation has been proposed. The most common explanation for the observations is an overuse of agrichemicals applied to legume crops. That practice sets up "a vicious cycle," Fox said, because it reduces a legume crop's natural need for nitrogen fixation but leaves a shortage of natural nitrogen in the soil for the next year's crop to utilize. Thus, she said, there is the need for yet more fertilizer. Other reasons, Fox said, have been poor soil quality due to overuse, which strips nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous from the soil, and to tillage, which interrupts root structures and disturbs the nitrogen-fixing bacteria when soil is turned. "Our research provides another explanation for declining crop yields," Fox said. "We showed that by applying...
June 05, 2007
Bio-energy
Johannes Lehmann has a paper pending in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment that covers some of the issues I've been fretting about with biochar. Nutrients are retained and remain plant available in soil mainly by adsorption mechanisms to minerals and organic matter. While we are usually unable to change the mineralogy of a given soil, we can change the amount of soil organic matter. Typically, the ability of soils to retain cations in an exchangeable and thus plant-available form (called cation exchange capacity – CEC) increases in proportion to the amounts of soil organic matter and this also holds for bio-char. Bio-char, however, has an even greater ability than other soil organic matter to adsorb cations per unit carbon (Sombroek et al. 1993) due to greater surface area, greater negative surface charge and greater charge density (Liang et al. 2006). In contrast to other organic matter in soil, bio-char also appears to be able to strongly...
June 01, 2007
Try Again
IMO we would do well to do more agrichar trials in more places, sooner rather than later. Australia seems to be on point here. The huge potential of agricultural soils to reduce greenhouse gases and increase production at the same time has been reinforced by new research findings at NSW Department of Primary Industries' (DPI) Wollongbar Agricultural Institute. Trials of agrichar - a product hailed as a saviour of Australia's carbon-depleted soils and the environment - have doubled and, in one case, tripled crop growth when applied at the rate of 10 tonnes per hectare. 10 tonnes per hectare, about 4 tons per acre, is a lot of material to handle, so this is a non-trivial expense even if the material is free. It may be best done over a couple of years, especially if used as a top dressing rather than being incorporated through plowing or disking. NSW DPI senior research scientist Dr Lukas Van Zwieten said soils...
May 24, 2007
Food Writing
Christopher Shea writes about changes in perspective in recent food writing. [via A&L Daily] Time was, a war of words between a food writer and an organic-foods retailer would have attracted the interest of maybe seven people in your local food co-op–a bit of chatter over the brown-rice bin and everyone would move on. Those of us in a Safeway with our Perdue roasters and our broccoli avec a hint of pesticide would not have known that an argument took place. But the recent exchanges between Michael Pollan, author of the 2006 bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, and John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, are, if not squarely in the mainstream, awfully close to it. Shea meanders through the various claims of newly relevant food writers contrasting their strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, on the other hand, but there's no gripping hand. He concludes: Organic food presently accounts for only 2.5...
May 06, 2007
Soil Reefs
Philip Small rounds up some early reports from Attendees at the just finished International Agrichar Initiative 2007 Conference in Terrigal, new South Wales, Australia. Philip comments: From the reports, it is clear that the number of players, and their diversity, is growing exponentially. One reason for this diversity is that the process of making terra preta nova appears to be as adaptable to a wide range of soils and climates as it is scalable. You can have regional collection and distribution approaches coexisting with processes adapted to individual enterprises. One of the reports Philip points to, Birth of a new wedge: agrichar (terra preta) by Kelpie Wilson, makes some interesting observations. According to many researchers at the conference, agrichar has the potential to store billions of tons of carbon safely away in soils. The attendees were clearly excited by this potential, and, unlike other meetings concerned with climate change, an electric buzz of optimism was in the air. Joe...
April 15, 2007
Sweet Soil
I try to be rational, semi-scientific, pragmatic and provisional about agricultural practices. It's a field rife with voodoo enthusiasms - like health care perhaps - that is subject to fads and fashions. We are so ignorant that it's easy to be superstitious. Since no one has definitive answers, wild claims about miracle products and practices crop up like weeds and are difficult to root out. Despite my skeptical and pragmatic stance there are two soil amendments that I struggle to stay rational about. One is the recent enthusiasm for bio-char and the other is the ancient enthusiasm for lime. I usually tell those I work with that the first thing they should do is sweeten their soil with lime. If they can't afford the time and expense to do much, at least do that. Unless they have calcareous soils that are already too sweet, this is the single most effective thing they can do and is the foundation for...
February 28, 2007
Feed Me
Enthusiasts are often frustrated when attempting to intervene in natural systems. Things don't turn out as planned, and the effects of intervention are seldom quick to manifest. I see that a lot when working as an advisor or consultant to others. The interventions that I propose take time and have variable results depending on initial conditions as well as the specific interventions. Over time it is usually necessary to adjust management in response to the effects of previous management. It can look like I'm making it up as I go, and to some extent this is true, but it is more useful to see it as adapative management. One of the old sayings among growers is that the best fertilizer is the grower's footprints. Fields and swards that are closely observed by principals do better. It can be time consuming but it is time well spent since amendment is adjusted to reflect observations. One day we may be able...
January 23, 2007
Soiled Stories
Philip Small reviews a brace of articles from E/The Environmental Magazine The Scoop On Dirt: Why We Should all Worship the Ground We Walk On, part I and part II, by Tamsyn Jones. It is beautifully written, but settles into a tired view of soil. As a soil scientist, it irks me that this essay flubs the opportunity to celebrate the unfolding understanding of this dark and patient resource. . . Ultimately it works into a description of Third World soil erosion, chemical burn-out and exhausted productivity. We are told that without aid from the powers that be, the soil, and those it supports, will suffer. I accept that on face value, without hesitation. Third World nations are requesting training in soil management and nutrients to replenish their exhausted soil. We should help them in this. . . There is much to like about this piece. Soil seldom gets such professional treatment. However, because it is so well-written –...
January 21, 2007
Food Fight
There's been some talk about the competition for grain between ethanol producers, livestock operations and people this week. A number of blogs picked up on the comments of Mexican president Felipe Calderon about the rising cost of corn, a staple of the Mexican diet, especially for poor people. Dave Halliday has been on the story, quoting a CBS News article. President Felipe Calderon signed an accord with businesses on Thursday to curb soaring tortilla prices and protect Mexico's poor from speculative sellers and a surge in the cost of corn driven by the U.S. ethanol industry. . . Tortilla prices rose by 14 percent in 2006, more than three times the inflation rate, and they have continued to surge in the first weeks of 2007. The rise is partly due to U.S. ethanol plants gobbling corn supplies and pushing prices as high as $3.40 a bushel, the highest in more than a decade. There may be other issues as...
January 13, 2007
Cheese Food
An earlier post, Ag Outlaws, linked a Joel Salatin rant Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal, in which he enumerated the ways that the regulatory system thwarted his efforts to produce and market superior foods. Everything I want to do is illegal. As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal’s office. And it doesn’t stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process. . . Every T-bone steak has to be wrapped in a half-million dollar facility so that it can be sold to your neighbor. The fact that I can...
December 16, 2006
Ag Outlaws
See this semi-angry yet humorous ag rant, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal. Everything I want to do is illegal. As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal’s office. And it doesn’t stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process. . . Every T-bone steak has to be wrapped in a half-million dollar facility so that it can be sold to your neighbor. The fact that I can do it on my own farm more cleanly, more responsibly, more humanely, more efficiently, and in a more environmentally friendly manner doesn’t...
October 24, 2006
Glomalin Critics
This is another post about strings used to get here. I repeated the search to see what would result but didn't find any actual "glomalin critics". I did find this older overview that had some information that was new to me. In 1996, Dr. Sarah Wright and colleagues at the USDA's Agricultural Research Service isolated a glycoprotein called glomalin that literally "gums up" the soil rhizosphere (the interface between soil and plant roots) with carbon fixed from the atmosphere. The compound is produced by common soil fungi called mycorrhizae that frequent the roots of many crops. When Wright removed glomalin from soil samples, the result was a lifeless mineral powder. The soil had lost its tilth - the substance that conveys texture and health. She had inadvertently discovered the fundamental factor of soil welfare, elusive for over 10,000 years. Humic acid, previously thought to be the main contributor to soil carbon, could muster only a tiny percentage of glomalin's...
September 21, 2006
Come a Cropper*
Though I am sometimes mistaken for an environmentalist many of my posts castigate them for their stunningly obtuse behaviors and beliefs which actually harm the environment. I've tried to make that distinction, calling them paleo-environmentalists and folks like me real environmentalists, but it's stretching the word and concept too far out of shape. So, no, I'm not an environmentalist as the word is generally used since my focus is on the actual environment rather than a grab bag of loopy, pseudo-religious baloney, what Lovelock calls "urban-based superstition about nature". Besides, environmentalists are primarily political activists aligned with various confederacies of dunces, and many of their positions are instrumental, designed to advance some other agenda that is sometimes, even usually, inimical to the environment. One of the craziest positions these loons have taken is opposition to grazing. I'm a grazier, I have interest, but it's not the reason I criticize environmentalists so strongly on this issue. I wasn't always a...
August 11, 2006
Black is Back
Actually, for us earthy types it never left, but more glitzy urban pseudo-environmentalists disappeared up their own bungs looking for a paler shade of green. They found brown of course. Fortunately, others followed a more fruitful course. In 1879, the explorer Herbert Smith regaled the readers of Scribner's Monthly with tales of the Amazon, covering everything from the tastiness of tapirs to the extraordinary fecundity of the sugar plantations. . . The secret, he went on, was "the rich terra preta, 'black land', the best on the Amazons. It is a fine, dark loam, a foot, and often two feet thick." Last month, the heirs to Smith's enthusiasm met in a hotel room in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during the World Congress of Soil Science. Their agenda was to take terra preta from the annals of history and the backwaters of the Amazon into the twenty-first century world of carbon sequestration and biofuels. They want to follow what the green revolution...
August 01, 2006
Net Gains
John sent a link to this interview of Tad Patzek - of Pimentel and Patzek fame - one of the prominent critics of biofuels. He and Pimentel have claimed that it takes more fossil fuel energy to make ethanol than it yields when used as fuel. The hurrier you go the behinder you get with biofuels. There has been a flurry of papers claiming that ethanol does have a net gain in energy, though slight. The dispute boils down to how the calculations are done. Well, we are stuck on this little argument and it basically boils down to throwing numbers across fences that is how I call it. The listeners have to realize that in fact there is a little simplistic model of reality, which is called this net energy balance, which is not a balance at all, by the way. It is a manipulation of certain inputs and outputs to the corn ethanol cycle from which there...
April 25, 2006
Community Relations
I've been focusing on plant secretions and such that affect sward composition. It's part of a comprehensive effort to make my swards happy places for the species I value as forage. After working on moisture, PH, tilth, organic matter and nutrients I shifted to bacteria and fungi. For the most part if the other things are good then the bacteria and fungi will thrive but there are exceptions. One well known one is tannins such as are found in oak leaves. They harm many forage species in part by being toxic to nitrifying bacteria such as nitrobacter. There's not a lot you can do on a large scale. You can't realistically rake acres of semi-forested pasture, and the trees have other value. You just live with that problem. Another known issue is juglone. "Juglone is found naturally in the leaves, roots and bark of plants in the Juglandaceae family, particularly the black walnut." It too retards nitrifying bacteria, though...
April 14, 2006
Rock Fertilizer
Or, Fossil Fertilizer part II. There's a story sometimes told of strange fossil bones brought back by Thomas Jefferson - as well as others - from Big Bone Lick in Kentucky. At the time there was no knowledge of dinosaurs - the word was coined decades later in 1842 - and it was not generally believed that creatures could go extinct. Jefferson, an amateur naturalist like many of his era, had dug fossils of large creatures in his home area and so entertained the notion that they might still roam the west. The bones brought back from Big Bone Lick in Kentucky were Mastodon. But, Jefferson's personal inventory was lost when one of Jefferson's slaves pounded the fossil bones to dust to use as bone meal soil amendment, just as was done with all bones produced on the farm. At that time it had newly been learned that phosphorus promotes growth in plants and animals, and that pulverized bones...
April 08, 2006
Fossil Fertilizer
Or, Petroleum Fertilizer Part II. One expression of the we're-all-gonna-die peak oil agenda is the claim that the world is dependent, or addicted, to fertilizer made from fossil hydrocarbons, and that when they run out we will starve to death. It might be useful to investigate the history of such fertilizer - especially nitrates - since these nitrogen compounds get the majority of sneers. There's nothing new about the world quest for nitrates which began in earnest in 1241 when the Mongols brought Chinese black powder - gunpowder - with them during their frolic through Poland and Hungary. They used it for bamboo pipe bombs which were good for blowing down city gates to admit attackers. It didn't take Europeans long to twig to the potential, and coupled with their skills in metallurgy, especially large cast pieces, resulted in their inventive contribution - the bombard or cannon. The Europeans had gotten very good at making fine cast pieces in...
April 07, 2006
Petroleum Fertilizer
I've noted before that this is a nonsense phrase used by activists of various shades to hype an anti-fossil fuel agenda, an anti-fertilizer agenda, and/or a we're-all-gonna-die peak oil agenda. Natural gas, methane, is a common feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer production since it has four nice hydrogen atoms, which is what is of use for fertilizer, and it is used as an energy source for heat and pressure production to enable the catalyzed reactions to take place. But that's just one way to make ammonia, the simplest type of nitrogen fertilizer. At the turn of the century ammonia was a waste byproduct of coke production from coal that was sold as an industrial chemical and later as fertilizer. This is still so. But coal is still a fossil fuel albeit a much more abundant one. This debunks the peak oil whingers but not the anti-fossil whingers. The earlier post Fire Down Below noted Iceland's use of geothermal energy and...
March 31, 2006
Dead Dirt
There's been a flurry of news articles about African agriculture lately - everything from the horrors of Chinese designed irrigation systems and dams to increasingly impoverished soil. Although drought may be the best known barrier to successful crops in Africa, the poor soils are a huge part of the equation. Farmland in Africa has been robbed of chemicals such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, which are vital for plant growth. And these have not been replaced with organic and chemical fertilizers, as they are in most other countries, because of the expense. The nutrient-starved soils have become one of the major factors preventing the 200 million malnourished people in the continent from growing enough food to eat and sell. "Poor soil fertility is the fundamental cause for low agricultural production in hunger-endemic areas," notes Alfred Hartemink of World Soil Information (ISRIC) in Wageningen, The Netherlands. . . In their analysis, the researchers totted up the nutrients that feed the...
March 28, 2006
Eat Your Piggies
A lot of sites have pointed to the research reports of recent work to create pigs that are high in omega-3 fatty acids which seem to be good for human mental and physical health, especially for those getting a bit long in the tooth. There's also the constant susurus of semi-informed quasi-environmentalist opprobrium about pork in general and factory farmed pork in particular. When you add in the religious and food fetishist squick about meat in general and pork in particular it's a paradox of sorts that genetically engineered pigs might come to be health food. For those who are not infected with any of the above named fetishes, those who relish pork and eat it with discernment, there are other issues. The problem with modern pig production for them isn't so much the common worries about the environment or fantasies of sustainability, it's that the meat of standard factory pig lacks aesthetic qualities they cherish. In an article...
March 21, 2006
Dirty Business
As predatory opportunists try to whip up another crisis - this time it's water and of course the UN is the focal point of hysteria - agriculture is as usual fertile ground for the opportunists to plow. Agriculture relies on water as well as land and nutrients. In a sense water - along with air - is the major nutrient for agriculture. This has been so since the dawn of agriculture. It is no accident that it developed in river delta areas and at the base of high mountains which had ever flowing rivers from snow melt even in the hottest and driest parts of the year. Water management has been a driver for the development of civilization as groups banded together to do massive water projects, inventing novel engineering hacks and new intellectual tools in the process, to bring water over long distances to crop fields. One of the more interesting historical themes is the advance and decline...
March 06, 2006
Thumb Tricks
Organic nutters are deceitful in general but never so much as when they are trying to "prove" that fertilizer is bad. Organic farming has long been touted as an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional agriculture. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) provides strong evidence to support that claim. Writing in the March 6 online edition of PNAS, Stanford University graduate student Sasha B. Kramer and her colleagues found that fertilizing apple trees with synthetic chemicals produced more adverse environmental effects than feeding them with organic manure or alfalfa. . . During the yearlong experiment, organically grown trees were fed either composted chicken manure or alfalfa meal, while conventionally raised plants were given calcium nitrate, a synthetic fertilizer widely used by commercial apple growers. Trees raised using the integrated system were given a blend of equal parts chicken manure and calcium nitrate. Each tree was fertilized twice, in October and May, and given...
March 05, 2006
More About Muck
For general farms that keep livestock as well as plant field and/or row crops manure isn't a problem, it's an asset that can be recycled to the fields to great benefit. It's more common to specialize, to either keep livestock or plant crops but not both, and confinement feeding has largely replaced free range finishing. Manure has become more of a problem than an asset. One way to deal with it is to install systems that process the manure to yield methane fuel. But is this a smart thing to do? Some say not. TALK of reducing our dependence on foreign oil through alternative energy sources like biomass is everywhere these days — even on our president's lips. As a livestock farmer and environmental lawyer, I've paid particular attention to discussion about using manure as "green power." The idea sounds appealing, but power from manure turns out to be a poor source of energy. Unlike solar or wind, it...
March 04, 2006
Darwinian Debts
I've been banging on about the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids for human health for a long time in internet years - more than a decade. Research papers on the subject were sparse in those early days but they have become common now. A new one notes that omega-3 is a psychoactive substance that helps us be mellow. In a study of 106 healthy volunteers, researchers found that participants who had lower blood levels of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids were more likely to report mild or moderate symptoms of depression, a more negative outlook and be more impulsive. Conversely, those with higher blood levels of omega-3s were found to be more agreeable. "A number of previous studies have linked low levels of omega-3 to clinically significant conditions such as major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, substance abuse and attention deficit disorder," said Sarah Conklin, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scholar with the Cardiovascular Behavioral Medicine Program in the department of psychiatry...
February 25, 2006
NAIS
That's the USDA proposed National Animal Identification System. Use a chicken, go to jail. ndeed, the only general systems of permanent registration of personal property in the United States are systems administered by the individual states for two items that are highly dangerous if misused: motor vehicles and guns. It is difficult to imagine any acceptable basis for the Department to subject the owner of a chicken to more intrusive surveillance than the owner of a gun. For example, whereas the owner of a long gun generally can take the gun and go hunting beyond the confines of his or her own property without notifying the government, the Department proposes that the chicken owner, under pain of unspecified "enforcement," must report within 24 hours any instance of a chicken leaving or returning to the registered property. (Standards, pp. 13, 18-19, 21; Plan, p. 17.) Even more important than the trammeling of basic property rights under the program is the...
February 23, 2006
Secret Ingredients
One of the reasons that environmental activists seem to be mean spirited twits spreading disinformation for personal gain is that this is true. They are social predators, entrepreneurs of sorts, who make their way in life exploiting the troubles of others. Their creative energies are squandered in trying to identify some segment of society that has related problems, and then trying to organize them into a rent seeking grievance group. The oblique benefits the social predator gets are jobs in organzations such as NGOs, government offices, political organizations and publications. Consider this twisted article. As bad as the annual flood of cheap corn is for our health -- nutritionally worthless high-fructose corn syrup, cheap feed for confined animals pumped full of antibiotics and hormones -- it may be even worse for the environment. Bolstered by government subsidies that have averaged about $4 billion annually since 1995, U.S. production accounts for nearly 40 percent of the world's corn output. Grain,...
February 18, 2006
Bio-Char
Charcoal in other words, but not necessarily made from wood, any organic material will do. A Cornell researcher is begging for funding by touting his work with "so-called bio-char -- similar to charcoal" as a double dip ag practice that improves yield and sequesters carbon in soil as a durable compound that can last for ages. "The knowledge that we can gain from studying the Amazonian dark earths, found throughout the Amazon River region, not only teaches us how to restore degraded soils, triple crop yields and support a wide array of crops in regions with agriculturally poor soils, but also can lead to technologies to sequester carbon in soil and prevent critical changes in world climate," said Johannes Lehmann, assistant professor of biogeochemistry in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Cornell University, speaking today (Feb. 18) at the 2006 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Lehmann, who studies bio-char and is the...
February 07, 2006
Grassland
Many people blame science for our surpluses of farm products. They say the trouble is that science taught us how to grow two blades of grass where one grew before. I think the trouble is that that is exactly what science did not teach us. Instead it taught us how to grow something else where two blades of grass grew before. -- Henry A. Wallace, June 21, 1940, Secretary of Agriculture, The Strength and Quietness of Grass Wallace wasn't the only Secretary of Agriculture in the 40s who understood grass and farming. In 1948 Clinton P. Anderson, then Secretary of Agriculture, stressed the need to expand grassland farming, which, he said, is "the foundation of security in agriculture." 1948 Yearbook of Agriculture: Grass has become a cult classic among grass farmers and general farmers who use leys or pastures in their rotations. One of the special projects of The Leopold Center is to reissue that book. The 1948 yearbook...
February 05, 2006
Horse Puckey
Manure isn't a useful source of nitrogen for crops. There is a small amount of nitrogen in it, but little of that small amount is in a mineralized, plant available, form. Worse, it is already spoken for by the bacteria that have the job of decomposing the manure - composting it in effect - to recycle it back to soil. Putting manure on your fields reduces available nitrogen and retards plant growth. There is a small net benefit after time has passed and all the workers have done their jobs to release and reform the organic nitrogen, but it is a mistake to equate manure with fertilizer. For example, a typical load of dairy manure - which would have some urine in it and that's where most animal nitrogen is excreted as urea - might give you 10 pounds of nitrogen per ton. A ton of urea fertilizer - same stuff - such as you can buy would give...
February 04, 2006
Early Exit
Marty Bender, retread naturalist who trained initially in physics and chemistry, has died of cancer way before his time. [via Nature Noted] Bender, who taught himself calculus in junior high school, was naturally made for science. But as a self-described city boy from Dayton, Ohio, he was not a born or bred naturalist. He graduated, cum laude, with a degree in physics and chemistry before developing the interest in biology that would take him to The Land Institute. "I look back," Bender said at the institute's Prairie Festival in 2004, when a nature trail was named for him, "and find it hard to believe that during the first 25 years of my life, the only things I could actually name were robins, blue jays, cardinals, pigeons and nighthawks." I've valued his work in quantifying agricultural energy flows. From the obit: Bender's answers were both blunt and exacting, what institute board Chairman Conn Nugent called a "tough theology": "Will biofuels...
February 03, 2006
Still Twirling
The earlier post Twirling Ethanol claimed that: When you decode the buzz words - bio-fuel, bio-mass, oil-free, foreign oil, etc. - you end up with proposals to revert to an earlier time in history when plants and dung were all the fuel we had. Food was scarce enough that gloomy predictions of impending doom were made while beasts of burden consumed large quantities of crops. For a few decades food production increased greatly while at the same time beasts of burden were replaced by fossil fueled engines. It desn't seem to make sense to have our engines replace beasts as competitors for food even if our technologies are very much more advanced than they were in the past since there are also lots more of us. So how much stuff did those draft animals eat? [via Knowledge Problem] At the turn of the last century, America's transportation system was fueled by biomass: 30 million horses and mules, give or...
January 27, 2006
More Fun . . .
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?...
January 26, 2006
Twirling Ethanol
One of the common varieties of cognitive kaleidoscope on the market today is the bio-fuel version. It's a fairly complicated device with lots of odd shaped bits that can be selected and rotated to make all sorts of pretty patterns - almost any pattern you want. There are a couple of favorite patterns though and a heated dispute between advocates of one or another. The ethanol pattern has been both praised and criticized. A new argument that finds it beautiful comes from a group that has reconsidered previous arguments, fixed their defects, modernized them and concluded that the critics were just twirling improperly. They assessed the studies' assumptions and then reanalyzed each after correcting errors, inconsistencies and outdated information regarding the amount of energy used to grow corn and make ethanol, and the energy output in the form of fuel and corn byproducts. Once these changes were made in the six studies, each yielded the same conclusion about energy:...
January 23, 2006
Insecure Arguments
Alex Tabarrok likes this Nick Szabo post "about the interaction between historical agricultural productivity and security." ...two large islands which have been largely or entirely protected from invasion for hundreds of years, Japan and Britain, also had among the highest agricultural productivities per acre during that period as well as the greatest cultivation of even marginal arable lands.... Contrariwise, this theory predicts agricultural productivity will be lowest in unprotected continental regions. Indeed, interior continental regions easily reached by horse tended to be given over to much less productive nomadic grazing. Security constraints were probably what prevented any sort of crop from being grown. I don't think so. There were several prior constraints, not least the fact that they aren't very good places to do farming. Besides, the premise is false. Britain was repeatedly invaded and conquered. That's one of the main aspects of British history. The Norman invasion, the Vikings, the Dutch, the French and a long tradition of...
January 03, 2006
Semi-Crunchy
Breakfast of Champions - or so it seems if you accept this Economist history of wheat, Ears of plenty - The story of man's staple food. IN 10,000 years, the earth's population has doubled ten times, from less than 10m to more than six billion now and ten billion soon. Most of the calories that made that increase possible have come from three plants: maize, rice and wheat. The oldest, most widespread and until recently biggest of the three crops is wheat (see chart). To a first approximation wheat is the staple food of mankind, and its history is that of humanity. It continues with a pocket history of humanity and wheat that is both interesting and informative though many who have detailed knowledge of some aspect of that sweeping history will find much to quibble about. A theme that weaves through the story is successive technological improvements in agronomics that averted disaster - everything from the horse collar...
December 18, 2005
Ag Subsidies
The recent WTO agreement to end export subsidies by 2013 needs some unpacking. What's an export subsidy? Who benefits from their elimination? An export subsidy is a payment to a producer when their goods are exported to another nation, just as you would expect from the name. In agriculture they arise due to government efforts to prop up domestic prices or enhance security. When the government sets a price floor they have an obligation to purchase excess production at the floor price. That can be wasteful and expensive since things can spoil and facilities to store them are expensive. A cheaper solution is to dump the excess on the world market at below cost prices. Thus, export subsidies. The US spends about $1 billion on such subsidies and the EU spends 4 times as much. Ending them is a mixed benefit. World prices will rise and make life harder for poor countries that import more than they export, but...
December 13, 2005
Hedgehog Herd
The direct benefits of modern agricultural technologies to humanity and the environment in the 20th century have been elucidated in numerous scholarly articles on agriculture by Indur Goklany. For instance: If agricultural-technology development had been frozen in 1961, we estimate, using data from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (see FAOSTAT 2003: apps.fao.org), that cropland would have had to increase from its present 11% to some 25% of the planetary surface to produce the same amount of food now.(Nature, vol 423, p.115) In this way Kendra Okonski defends a Tim Worstall critique of a Zac Goldsmith article in the Times UK. Worstall asserts: THE COST of the food on your table has been falling since Neolithic times. Thanks to the onward march of technology — inventions such as fertiliser, the horse collar or exciting methods of turnip weeding — yields have been increased over the past 10,000 years, so reducing, for example, the price of each extra turnip produced. This...
December 05, 2005
More ID Theft
I regularly take pseudo-environmentalists to task here for advocacy that is destructive to the environment as well as society in general. Their motives for doing so are varied but in general are a confusion of political and cultural desires with sensible environmentalism, a certain mean spirited priggishness, a neurotic tic associated with their authoritarian personalities and the impulsive cringing, whingeing and aggressiveness that's part of that whole package. But their ignorance is more important than their motives since there is a slim possibility that ignorance can be cured. When events conspire to refute them unambiguously their biases can be overcome and in spite of everything they can actually learn. A post from the old Crumb Trail blog, Brain Death, noted the environmentally destructive advocacy of an article in Grist Magazine. Grist is one of the most destructive sites with the stupidest advocacy. One of the most damaging gaffes of environmentalism, right up there with the stupidity of the punitive...
June 21, 2005
Fine Grain Analysis
Don Lloyd points to this old Richard Manning article in Harper's without much comment: "there must be controversy in there somewhere." There's some, but it is yet another statement of themes Manning has voiced for a long time, most thoroughly in his book Against The Grain. (see Cereal Killer for discussion, and see The Wheel for more Manning related discussion.) Manning asserts that the growing of field crops - mainly maize, wheat and rice - are a colossal blunder that has been extremely harmful for life on this planet. It wrecks the earth, sickens humans and drives other species to extinction. There's merit in his arguments. Grain is evil. But it is also the engine of civilization. While counting the sins of agriculture in general and grain in particular one must enumerate the blessings as well as the sins to get a full understanding. Ag and grain are mixed blessings, pornography with redeeming social value. There was something fine...
May 27, 2005
Bio-Fuelish
Several posts (see Lose-Lose for a recent one) have excoriated bio-fuels since they are produced from crops, adding more pressure to an already troubled world agricultural system that must double its production in the next few decades to feed a couple of billion more people and raise the nutrition of a billion food insecure people already here. The continuing degradation of environments from industrial agriculture and the biodiversity losses from expansion make it pretty clear that "dirt burning", as bio-fuel use is sometimes called, is self-punking. This cure for the various symptoms of fossil fuel use is as bad or worse than the disease. Philip points to a possible exception. At heart, biofuels are a form of solar energy, as plants use photosynthesis to convert solar energy into chemical energy stored in the form of oils, carbohydrates, proteins, etc.. The more efficient a particular plant is at converting that solar energy into chemical energy, the better it is from...
May 26, 2005
Tree Fluffers
Trees are powerful symbols - heap big magic. Sages from Buddha to Newton have found enlightenment nestled at the base of trees. You could jazz on this tune forever and not exhaust it. Unfortunately, some who come under the spell lose the ability to appreciate other biomes, and so become less human. Enlightenment isn't the only gift of trees. This Beeb article by Sue Branford - a perennial environmental scold devoid of useful knowledge or insight - is an example of a debilitating case of tree fever. Each year we learn more about the importance of the Amazon rain forest. We know that, by destroying it, we are accelerating global warming and disrupting the world's climate. Yet we, in the developed world, go on eating more and more meat. And this in turn encourages Brazil, which is burdened with a heavy foreign debt, to export more beef and more soybeans. It certainly is a problem that the forests of...
April 23, 2005
Habitat Management
While we're on the subject of natural systems management it may be interesting to review earlier posts on the subject. The decline of the bay checkerspot butterfly due to loss of native forbs when its habitat was invaded by Eurasian cool season grasses (see Butterfly Effect), and the more general concerns for "poverty plants" that grow in nutrient poor soils, something that is less common due to the use of fertilizers and emissions from the use of fossil fuels (see Fat and Happy), are aspects of a general issue: you get what you manage for whether you realize what that is or not. Good range managers pay attention and use the natural inclinations of swards to achieve their purposes. By varying the timing and species mix of sward predators they determine the composition of the sward. A couple of years ago the post Going Dutch noted some work by Dutch researcher Liesbeth Bakker. The researchers studied a number of...
April 10, 2005
Ologies and Urgies
Don Boudreaux's recent post Living in Harmony with Nature takes issue with the idea that technological civilization is disharmonious with nature. To live harmoniously with nature is to understand and accept natural forces. The greater this understanding and acceptance, the greater the harmony. Because we know so much more today than we did before about physics, chemistry, meteorology, biology, physiology, metallurgy, and on and on with our ologies and urgies, we live so much more harmoniously with nature. Pre-Columbian peoples lived simply, to be sure, but let’s stop mistaking ignorance and poverty with harmony. It’s an utter myth – we might say an urban myth – that primitive peoples lived with nature harmoniously. Nature devastated them. Nature battered them into early graves. Their ignorance of nature prevented them from achieving much material wealth. This is mistaken. At the time European conquerors arrived pre-Columbians were in many ways more informed about nature and lived longer, healthier lives than the Europeans....
December 01, 2004
Off Road Hunger
Norm posts a long excerpt from am article in the Melbourne Age advocating increased aid to fight hunger. Famines create headlines, but chronic malnutrition is a wider problem. About 800 million people in the world regularly do not have enough to eat... John Howard's comment that non-government aid agencies should stop complaining about Australia's foreign aid level because trade globalisation is the answer to development - echoing Alan Oxley's argument on this page (on November 19) that aid does not work - seems unthinkingly cruel... ...aid does work, has worked, is well-documented, by the World Bank, the UN and many other international bodies. The international aid group Oxfam was originated by a group at Oxford (including Australian-born Gilbert Murray) in response to the terrible Greek famine of 1941. But what of the famines, in the lifetimes of most of us, in India, China, Bangladesh, and other parts of Asia and south America, that regularly killed millions upon millions? These...
August 02, 2004
Agricultural Problems
This post, Baguettes-to-go, by Nicole-Anne Boyer is a quick, light mudge about fast food and the cultural price paid for convenience but it also makes casual reference to an earlier post, Getting Into The Dirt, at her personal blog Fuzzy Signals. Flipping through the Financial Times this weekend, I found a little article most people would just scan over: "Threat to fertile soil blamed on farming practices" by Clive Cookson (Feb 14/04.) As the article leads off, " the loss of good quality soil because of poor agricultural practices is a serious problem around the world but it receives little attention compared with other big environmental threats..." I knew this distressing situation already, but what caught my trolling eye was something else: the fact that the brilliant evolutionary anthropologist, Jared Diamond , the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, was ringing the alarm bells and even making this his next topic of study. As he observes, "the over- exploitation...
May 19, 2004
Fat Chance
Helen Pearson has an NSU article about recent calls for a ban on trans-fatty acids such as those found in vegetable oils and margarines used extensively in processed and packaged foods. Such fats are preferred by industry because they are versatile and last longer. But nutrition experts say trans-fats are disastrous for your health. Whereas saturated fats raise both 'bad' low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL) and 'good' high density lipoproteins (HDL), trans-fats boost LDL without affecting HDL, increasing the risk of heart disease. Nutritional guidelines have long advocated cutting back on the saturated fatty acids found in meat and dairy products, and boosting unsaturated fats abundant in nuts, seeds and vegetable oils. But trans-fats have taken longer to attract attention because their effects on health were less clear. If you have been paying any attention at all to nutrition you're aware of the failures of the conventional dietary advice symbolized by the FDA food pyramid and associated recommendations. Obesity,...
May 13, 2004
Tudge Mudge
Colin Tudge is often in the vicinity of agricultural wisdom but always succeeds in escaping contact. This article is a classic example. ...we have a mantra embraced by the World Bank, the IMF, the World Trade Organisation, and the US and British governments: "Agriculture is a business like any other." This dogma is leading the world in totally the wrong directions - and within it, GM crops have become key players... For agriculture qua business must seek to maximise profit. So it must maximise turnover and output. Scientists and politicians claim this must be good - for there still are famines, and the world population is set to increase by 50% to around 9 billion by 2050. But the recent famines have rarely resulted from inability to produce food. Almost always you find civil war in the background, corruption, or - as in the Ireland of the 1840s or recently in Argentina - starvation in the midst of plenteous...
March 11, 2004
Grass Economics
The previous post dealt with the agricultural and ecological ignorance of the claim that the environment would be well served by eating grain rather than grain fed beef, even though grain is not needed for beef. That same Grist article makes a second idiotic claim. Cattle and other ruminant animals, whose numbers would have to rise by 25 percent to supply our [Atkins] dieters, get a large share of their food from pasture and rangeland. If most of the additional animals were raised on current range and pasture that are already fully stocked, the result would be overgrazing and degradation. If new pastures were to be created for, say, half of the additional animals, a billion more acres would have to be found. Most of this would probably be obtained by deforestation, which could mean that 10 percent of the Earth's remaining forests would have to go. In the US Cattle are grazed on marginal land, often semi-arid land,...
March 11, 2004
Ley Lady Ley
One of the most persistent bits of ignorance peddled by pseudo-environmentalists devoid of either agricultural or ecological knowledge is that eating beef is harmful to the environment. This Grist article is a case in point. If all of those people went on an Atkins-style diet, their requirement for animal protein would rise to about 100 grams. A billion dieters each eating an extra 44 grams could not easily be satisfied by giving them a bigger share of current animal protein production. As it is, humans worldwide average only 28 grams per day. Instead, by our calculations, the meat, dairy, poultry, and seafood industries would have to increase output by 25 percent. The dieters would no longer get much of their protein from plant sources (grains being too heavily "polluted" with carbohydrates), so less cropland would be required for that. Still, the net result of their big switch to animal protein would require almost 250 million more acres for corn,...
January 25, 2004
Hi-Tech, Red Neck
One of the most serious problems in conservation agriculture is the profound ignorance of those in advocacy and leadership positions. This article from Conservation in Practice by Brian DeVore, though not the worst example of this problem, demonstrates a number ways that conservation is harmed by this ignorance. The article begins with a sneering account of advances in precision agriculture to set the stage for dismissing it. “We think this is the first step toward totally automatic farm implements,” crowed a Stanford researcher while the tape was rolling. Indeed, while thumbing through a farm magazine four years later, I spied a photo of a John Deere tractor pulling a sprayer. It caught my attention because there was no seat or steering wheel on the tractor—it was a prototype of a GPS-guided driverless field implement. Such technology proves that the importance of knowing the land intimately has not been lost on the boosters of industrial agriculture. Their response has been...
November 16, 2003
Creative Kit
Listening to new ideas and choosing those that seem useful on a case by case basis allows each human to assemble a kit of techniques that in their judgement is useful. The composition of the kit is thoughtful and inventive, an idea in its own right.
November 15, 2003
Categories
Ag Systems (218)
Ag-tech (93)
Agrophysics (1)
Crash (12)
CrumbTrails (24)
Energy (136)
Enviro-Politics (405)
Food (24)
Forestry (17)
Health (124)
History (18)
Materials (8)
Media (28)
Meta (38)
Money (6)
Natural Systems (266)
Pasture (6)
Psychoceramica (44)
TechnoSocial (79)
Tools (42)
War (9)
Water (4)
biotech (1)
cognition (99)
culture (161)
education (1)
environmentalism (16)
nanotech (8)
people (1)
politics (160)
science (29)
Ag-tech (93)
Agrophysics (1)
Crash (12)
CrumbTrails (24)
Energy (136)
Enviro-Politics (405)
Food (24)
Forestry (17)
Health (124)
History (18)
Materials (8)
Media (28)
Meta (38)
Money (6)
Natural Systems (266)
Pasture (6)
Psychoceramica (44)
TechnoSocial (79)
Tools (42)
War (9)
Water (4)
biotech (1)
cognition (99)
culture (161)
education (1)
environmentalism (16)
nanotech (8)
people (1)
politics (160)
science (29)
