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Originally Posted by screener
Cricket tragic, you said, "Stubble retention with minimum to zero tillage practices are ideal for reversing these problems. " I was wondering how ideal that is when in order to farm under that kind of regime you're either adding manure or chemical fertilizer, and the latter is unsustainable.
Then you said "You need to remember that fossil fuels are just an energy source." That's a little like saying the oceans are mostly water. Fossil fuels are the basis of "modern" farming and it wouldn't exist without the cheap oil and gas of thirty and fourty years ago. Since then reality is coming home to roost. IDEAL becomes a little different when more factors are considered. Whatever the energy source of the future it will be more expensive yet, unless society goes along with subsidizing ourselves again.
No til and even gm may have a place in the future of agriculture but society will have to recycle it's sewage into fertilizer cleanly, which is an idea whose time came twenty or thirty years ago.
Personally I think there is enough agricultural land around the globe that farmers are able to produce enough food using local sustainable resources, water, energy, and fertilizer. We just have to stop giving all our returns to the oil and agribusiness giants, and the banks.
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Who says chemical fertilizers are unsustainable? They are only so if you take the view that fossil fuels are the only way to make them. For nitrogen, there is plenty of N in the atmosphere, you only need an energy source to fix it. In principle you could use solar to fix N into fertilizer, although I suspect we might use some other energy source. Phosphorus is 0.12% of the earth’s crust. It is only a matter of extracting it. If it is cheaper, we can get it from the ocean although it is only 85 ppb there. Phosphorus doesn’t disappear, it goes back into the system. We just need to move it from waste to use. If fertilizers become expensive enough, some of these things will occur. Food will become more expensive of course and that will be a problem.
Frankly there is not sufficient arable land to feed the current World’s population with organic farming. You would need to at least double the land used for grain cropping to account for the need for non-crop rotations. You might make some of that back through pasture in the non-crop year, but not enough. You additionally have the problem of average yields in organic being lower, so even more land required. If you use the land for crop growth, you can’t use it for something else, like forests.
While I would dearly like not to have to give any money to banks or any one else, that won’t mean any more food is grown.