Guest essay by Steve Goreham
Agriculture is under attack. Environmentalists label modern farming as unsustainable, blaming farming for polluting the planet and destroying the climate. But today’s food is abundant and nutritious—a modern agricultural miracle.
From 1961 to 2013, world population more than doubled from 3.1 to 7.2 billion. But agricultural output more than tripled over the same period, according to data from the United Nations. We are slowly winning the battle against world hunger. The percentage of chronically undernourished people has fallen from 30 percent of world population in 1950 to about 11 percent today.
Not only the quantity, but the quality and variety of food are much better than in past ages. A 2015 study at Stockholm University compared modern food to recipes from the chef of King Richard II of England in the 1300s. The study concluded that people of today’s developed nations eat better than the kings of old.
In the 1300s, King Richard did not have pepper, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg, which came to Europe from the Far East in the 1400s. He did not have coffee, which was first brewed in Arabia in the 1400s. He did not have oranges, corn, or pineapple, which arrived in Europe from Asia and North America during the 1400s and 1500s. Today we enjoy dozens of varieties of fruits, vegetables, and meats that were not available in past ages.
Today’s foods are a product of thousands of years of efforts to cultivate more abundant and more nutritious crops. Cross-pollination of plants, cross-breeding of animals, and now genetic engineering of plants and animals continues to deliver rising farm output with better food quality and variety. Grains, fruits, vegetables, meats, dairy products, and even seafood continue to improve due to advanced farming techniques.
But environmental groups attack modern farming methods as unsustainable, scorning the farmer’s use of water, land, pesticides, and energy. A 2010 UN Environmental Programme document states:
Agricultural production accounts for a staggering 70% of global freshwater consumption, 38% of the total land use, and 14% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions…The use of agrochemicals is related to ecotoxicity, eutrophication and depletion of phosphorus stocks. Intensive agriculture is related to substantial energy use. The loss of soil and biomass carbon can contribute to climate change.
The attacks on agriculture are too numerous to address in a single article, but one aspect of modern agriculture is not well known. Farmers are now giving land back to nature.
According to UN data, land used for farming is now declining. Total world agricultural area, the sum of crop land and pasture land, peaked in 2000 at 4.95 billion hectares and declined about one-half percent through 2013. Over the same period, world agricultural production increased 37 percent. The recent decline in total farm land use occurred despite 41.3 million hectares added for biofuel production, an area larger than Germany.
An astounding improvement in agricultural yields provides rising output without the need for additional land. Gains in US corn yield are a remarkable example. US land employed to harvest corn peaked in 1918. Today, US farmers produce five times more corn on 11 percent less area than 100 years ago.
The world has passed the point of peak agricultural land use. Today, farmers are feeding the growing world population and providing us with the best food in history, while at the same time returning land to nature.
Steve Goreham is a speaker on the environment, business, and public policy and author of the new book Outside the Green Box: Rethinking Sustainable Development.
It’s almost as if the international socialists need to keep the world in a state of poverty and scarcity in order to push their narrative of “muh it’s all rich people’s fault”. All that science and technology giving cheap, varied, abundant food to everyone may be really ruining their plans…
Let’s briefly contemplate the writing of the 1800’s good Democrat George Fitzhugh’s and his argument ‘society was obligated to protect the weak” ( by controlling and subjugating them) . Fitzhugh wrote: “It is the duty of society to protect the weak;” but protection cannot be efficient without the power of control; therefore, “It is the duty of society to enslave the weak.”
see the pattern?
Before you can enslave the weak, you also must enslave all those who might object to your desire to enslave the weak. As well as all those who might object to your desire to enslave all those who would object to your desire to enslave all those who would object to enslaving the weak.
And so on.
Before you know, everyone but you is a slave.
Which was the goal all along.
Before you enslave the weak, you need to make sure there are plenty of weak to enslave. Hence modern socialist/green policies.
They must also strive to make those that are not weak today weak and therefore needy. Of course the name of the game is control and power. Dang few on the Left go without food to save the world.
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule”.
– H. L. Mencken
those who wish to starve may do so on their own time.
When “environmental groups” stop eating for a few months, I’ll begin to consider their claims.
The gathering of our Dear Leaders at Davos are not having any difficulty keeping themselves well fed, at least on the taxpayer’s dime:
“The special menu for the WEF 2018 at the hotel restaurant “Cantinetta” includes a hamburger that costs just over $70 Canadian. On it: barbecue sauce, cheese, tomato, cucumber, crispy bacon and comes with French fries”
https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/politics/swiss-chocolate-fountain-and-70-burgers-a-glimpse-inside-the-davos-hotel-where-the-pm-s-entourage-is-staying-1.3773652
Price for a Bacon Cheeseburger and fries at Five Guys, under $15. And I bet it tests better, too.
But I hardly blame the restaurantors at Davos. Bunch of rich pompous gits throwing money around like the never had to earn a dime of it? I’d gouge them all, too. They’ll just blow it all on Hookers and Blow, otherwise.
<¿< (looking at you, gore boy)
Bacon cheese burger, a big one, is $5 at the Black Burger Restaurant in Ulaanbaatar. That includes a pair of latex gloves to use while eating it because they are so-o juicy.
A cup of coffee in Switzerland is $7 in a lot of places. They also have very high minimum wages.
I have noticed a repeating theme. When you find an excellent solution to a serious problem, eventually people forget about the serious problem and take the solution for granted. Eventually they see the solution as a problem, totally ignoring the reason that the solution exists in the first place.
Disease -> Vaccines -> Anti Vaxxers
Food insecurity ->GMO Food -> Anti GMO
Expensive Power -> Electricity -> CO2 emissions
Poor Governance -> Freedom of Speech -> PC Police
All of these “solutions” to non-existent problems are driven by the left because they desire to fix issues, but they have forgotten history.
We need to teach people that their lives are based on the best solutions that were created for very serious issues.
yin and yang. every solution contains the seeds of the next problem.
the problem is most people see problems as binary, right and wrong. In reality the problems of the world follow the rule of 3’s. yes, no, maybe. of which you only get to choose 2 as your solution. you can never have all 3 at the same time. and it is the 3rd item that causes every solution to give rise to the next problem.
Yes, but in these cases the initial problem was huge, the solution was elegant and effective and what remains are small problems.
So now we see groups trying to replace the elegant and effective solutions with bad ones because they have forgotten the significance of the original problem.
Well, unfortunately the Anti-Vaxers could be sorry one day for their oversight. When the diseases that the vaccines were created make their rounds again (and eventually they will) it will be only the Anti-Vaxers children that get sick and wither
I agree with you in theory, but in practice you will find that a lot on good people’s children get caught up by preventable diseases because we can’t immunise before about 3 months. Older for some diseases. It would normally not be a big problem because the herd immunity means that there is very little disease going around.
But when anti-vaxers drop that herd immunity, babies start to die of preventable diseases. Not just those of anti-vaxers.
“…problems are driven by the left because they desire to fix issues…”
You are on the right path, Reasonable, but establishment politicians want more control. That would be control over the masses. So they use the Public Schools, Universities and Mass Media to brainwash the malleable minds of societies youth. Fear and guilt are the most powerful emotional motivators. As H. L Mencken correctly observed: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins,all of them imaginary.” And that was nearly a century ago. 21st century government is so much better at branding and messaging. So what we have is endless waves of youthful Don Quixote’s tipping at windmills believing in the delusion that they are saving the world. But in fact all they are doing is chipping away at individual liberty as each generation passes more an more power to the Government.
To any problem there is a cost/benefit to be done. By looking at only one side of the ledger (the cost), no solution is acceptable.
Conversely, no solution is sufficiently bad to be unacceptable.
The thing is, most of our problems today are social problems, and these can’t be solved by Government intervention no matter how well intentioned. The reason is because what we call society is an emergent property of individuals interacting as they go about their daily business. Since the individuals all have, to differing extents, the same human flaws, our society is also flawed. That is why no top-down solution will work for these social problems. They only way to address them is from the bottom up. In other words, if we want a better society, we all need to be better individuals. It really is that simple, not easy to do, but simple in concept.
“All of these “solutions” to non-existent problems are driven by the left because they desire to fix issues [..]“. I don’t think they desire to fix issues, I think they desire to control people. Anything that works is opposed, because it can give people freedom.
Control is big with them and the Green way forward, is to reduce human populations and leave themselves as the sublime masters.
Dig deep enough into their rhetoric and they’ll tell you what they are really all about.
Keep that in mind and their words and actions begin to make sense, from their point of view.
Those on the Left do NOT desire to fix anything. They create fictional problems to create social chaos. Most of them never learned real history so have nothing to really forget. When you argue history with them they blow it off as something archaic and totally unimportant today. They are truly convinced they are wiser or their “priests” are than all those in the past. Remember for years they argued that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were living documents that must be interpreted based on modern mores. When that didn’t work they now argue and teach in university such documents are archaic works only worth studying in history class, certainly nothing to live by. The left has not changed in a hundred years, their game is power and control. They will use any tool necessary to ultimately gain their goal. They truly believe they or at least their monks and priest are the ultimate elites that should control ever aspect of our lives. They believe in tearing down and destroying the good to obtain their goals.
When my children tried to tell me that “everything is different now dad”, I just replied that human nature has not changed in thousands of years. And that is the source of most of our problems.
There is a big billboard along I-95 in south Florida proclaiming “There is NO humane dairy.” There is a big push by greenies down here to close down our dairy farms, including covert footage of mistreatment of dairy cattle. They don’t want us to eat or drink ANYTHING! As soon as all humans (themselves excepted) are gone, they will be happy.
As for me, make mine Skim.
As far as I can tell, the liberal elite bears an innate malice against the majority of the population. Their inhumanity to their fellow Americans is gobsmacking. I won’t be lectured on the humane treatment of cows by people haters.
close down our dairy farms
===========
and who will feed the millions of dairy cows no longer able to earn a living? like horses in the early 20th century. freed from the burden of pulling wagons by the automobile, the horses were turned to hides, glue and feed. today there are only a fraction of the number of horses alive that there were 150 years ago. in effect horses were all but exterminated by the automobile.
Skim?!? Plehhh! Nothing but colored water. On occasion I will “accidentally” purchase whole milk rather than the 1% my wife insists on. Oh brief ecstasy!
In my younger days I shared a house with a chap who was a dairyman, responsible for feeding and milking a herd of 80 Holsteins. He’d bring home a jug of fresh unpasteursied unhomogenised whole milk from the evening milking, and leave it in the fridge overnight. Breakfast cornflakes were a true delight served with the creamy goodness from the top of the jug. His cows were happy, and would walk into the milking parlour from the fields, without having to be herded, as soon as he opened the gate and called them.
I’m not surprised. Full udders hurt.
“billboard…. There is NO humane dairy.”
Getting milked every evening in exchange for free health care, all the food you want, a warm dry place to sleep and no predators. How frightening! /sarc
What do these morons think happens to animals in wild?
You could make a good case that most people are in the same boat as the dairy herd.
Eat, sleep, produce. Luckily, we don’t end up as hamburger meat.
Alan Robertson: “You could make a good case that most people are in the same boat”
Yeah, for us the IRS serves as the milking machine.
Alan R
“Luckily, we don’t end up as hamburger meat.”
That depends on where you live. Never assume anything.
Skim milk has about as much flavor as water; that is until it goes sour two days after you bought it. (Maybe the powdered milk at summer camp left a bad taste in my mouth all these years?)
Make mine full cream…unhomogenised preferably.
I suspect that Animal Rights Activist (a subset of enviros) were responsible for the billboard.
A couple of decades ago I used to hang around an AOL forum called “Animal Rights/Animal Welfare”. Raising animals for food came up and how much water was “wasted” in the process.
I wish I still had the numbers (I got them from the USGS.), but all the water they claim is “wasted” on raising livestock and the food for livestock is mostly returned to the receiving waters. What isn’t returned is absorbed by Ma’ Gaia or evaporates. I think level-headed people call that “the ecosystem”.
PS I remember one person that opposed disinfecting drinking water thought that public water systems should simply pump raw water to homes where their home filters would make it safe. She didn’t like chlorine disinfection. She thought it was harmful to humans.
She also opposed animal research because animal physiology was different than humans. What hurt a critter might not hurt a human and vise versa.
Why was she opposed to chlorine disinfection (and any other water treatment that involved chemicals)?
Chlorine killed bacteria so any amount must be bad for humans.
(I got a headache trying to reproduce her logic.)
Nothing is stopping liberals from eating non-GMO foods, drinking unpurified food and water, just don’t stop the rest of us from eating what we want. I don’t mind they loony ideas, I mind them using the Federal Government to force their loony on everyone else.
Actually, there are some places that have local laws against drinking unpasteurized milk. I say, if people want to take those risks, they ought to have that right.
Bang’s disease (brucellosis) is not pleasant. Unless you own the cow and know it’s healthy, you shouldn’t take the risk.
” places that have local laws against drinking unpasteurized milk.”
Only 20 states ban the sale of of unpasteurized milk. (I don’t know of any state that bans people from drinking it?) https://milk.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=005192
However selling across state lines becomes a federal issue subject to the FDA which disallows unpasteurized milk commerce across state lines as one Amish diary farmer found out the hard way. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/feb/13/feds-shut-down-amish-farm-selling-fresh-milk/
The wrinkle is people crossing from their own illegal raw milk state into a legal raw milk state to buy unpasteurized milk for their own consumption. The FDA doesn’t like that either but concedes that it has no authority to stop it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120103191250/www.fda.gov/Food/FoodSafety/Product-SpecificInformation/MilkSafety/ucm277854.htm
It would be fine IF the people taking the risk had to pay for treatment (not their insurance) and could not write the debt off in bankruptcy. Otherwise, we all pay for their choices.
The fly in the ointment is, of course, children, who trust in their parents’ decisions. If you’re foolish enough to put your own health at risk then so be it, you bear the responsibility and the consequences. Not so much for the kiddies.
Some people think that drinking unpasteurized milk makes you live forever.
So the FDA charge for those buying out of state would be: “Transporting unpasteurized milk across State lines for immortal purposes.”
Very sane comment
While they are at it, I strongly urge them to drink only raw water in the hope that doing so will speed up the Darwin-effect.
http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2018/01/22/raw_water_is_insulting.html
Actually done for a long time, this is call “mineral water”. Some brands are really expensive.
And it is fine, as long as you use water from place known to be safe.
It is arguable that a lot of food is unhealthy and the abundance has lead to poor diets. Farmers and processors produce what people want to buy.
Even the worst foods are made to high standards of quality. People’s choices are the cause of a lot of health problems.
The most unhealthy of all is no food. Hunger will make almost anything acceptable. Most parents have found that children get much less picky when they get more hungry. Time to let a few activists get hungry.
Abundance does not lead to poor choices—lack of education, concern for one’s health and overall lousy planning skills do. People without much make do with what is a hand, nutritious or not. One could argue the problem is not the food, but the EBT card that lets people buy the food without working for it. It’s all a result of people becoming increasingly lazy, both physically and intellectually.
Sheri-
Maybe I overstated that. The convenience and availability of junk and fast food is a factor. The national food guides also give erroneous guidance. People naturally like sweet, salty and greasy snacks.
The abundance of food is certainly good. People need to inform themselves and make good choices.
The American farmer and agricultural industry has given us a wide variety of plentiful and nutritious fruits, vegetables, grains and meat, all at very reasonable prices. From a socialists perspective, this dynamic expression of capitalist competition and efficiency MUST be destroyed by any means possible. They use their ‘environmentalist’ front groups to pursue the attack.
If the basis of your world-view is that humanity is a virus that must be wiped out (save for the select few overseeing the wiping out,of course), then anything that helps to sustain more human beings on our planet, such as abundant food, cheap electrical power, and so forth, must be resisted and, if possible, closed down. Exactly the same people who are pushing the climate change meme, which is fundamentally an objection to cheap and abundant energy, will, I suspect, be objecting to GMO’s and all types of modern farming.
This attitude goes clear back to Malthus. Read Merchants of Despair by Robert Zubrin. You will be shocked by how many millions of people the elite of this country and England have deliberately let die, preventing aid. Just because they aren’t of European extraction. In this country, most of them Democrats.
This one hits closer to home with the morning joe.
WSJ…
In California, Where Cancer Warnings Abound, Coffee Is Next in Line
Judge is expected to rule whether 1986 state law, meant to warn of potential harms, applies to coffee
Coffee is on the hot seat because of the presence of acrylamide, a flavorless chemical produced during the roasting process.
Coffee is on the hot seat
============
Californians have been putting it in the wrong end for years.
R Guy:
California declared a while ago that marijuana smoke contains 33 known carcinogens.
Under Proposition 65, warning label is required as given here:
https://www.cannalawblog.com/california-proposition-65-and-marijuana-know-your-obligations/
Don’t worry, California will want the taxes on the sales and forget their warning.
So let the coffee sellers accept a special tax, no more problem.
“Don’t worry, California will want the taxes on the sales and forget their warning.”
If they smoke enough they will forget everything. In certain cases that can be a pleasant gift to the others.
Imagine how much more cropland could be returned to nature if we weren’t wasting so much food by trying to turn it into fuel.
And inefficiently at that. Sugar cane for ethanol? Yup, positive energy balance. Probably. Corn? Not even remotely close but that takes us to a discussion on farm subsidization.
I was also thinking about palm oil and a few other boondoggles.
Easy: ZERO.
No food is turned into fuel.
Now, if you mean corn, palm, etc., well, sure, some crop are specially dedicated to fuel, and, sure, this is a stupid scheme than wouldn’t exist without subsidies. But they are not food any more than plants cultivated to be turned into starch, sugar, alcohol, perfumes, clothing, recreative smoke, animal and microbe feed etc.
As a rule of thumb, only half of the crop are meant to be food.
Corn isn’t food. Interesting.
@MarkW
Nothing is food, unless actually eaten, or at least meant to be eaten. A large proportion (more or less, half) of grown corn, wheat, potatoes, etc. never were meant to be eaten by humans, and are grown accordingly (not the same seeds, not the same treatments, etc.). Few of what was grown for other purpose would be accepted for food (because of taste, pesticide or naturally toxic contain, etc.), unless in dire need; people usually don’t try eating it, but you could, if you insist (expect some paperwork from the provider, disclaimer that this was not meant to be eaten, and you accept fully responsibility for doing so).
Bon appetit.
After you try, you will tell us if this corn is actually food.
Paqyfelyc,
Would you have been happier if Mark had said “crops” instead of “food”. With that substitution, I agree with him completely.
@Paul Penrose
Well, this just means you agree with watermelons, who just don’t accept that humans turn pieces of Nature into some sort of factory, not just for food, but also for a endless list of industrial uses. (Actually, many of them not even accept that humans “exploit” Nature for any purpose, food included, wishing we only live out of some God/Nature given Manna, no more, without agriculture, fishing, hunting ).
As I said, this is surely a bad idea to subsidize turning plants into fuel. this either don’t need subsidies, or must but dropped. In which case, the cropland wouldn’t return to Nature, but rather to some other usage humans see fit.
Year on year the world is harvesting bumper crops- a little search through google illustrates that benign weather has often been instrumental. Agriculture will always be the thorn in the alarmists side.
It will be interesting to see what happens during the next agricultural revolution – advanced greenhouses. My suspicion is that almost all non-grain production will move indoors one way or another. Augmented lighting will be the norm, and the byproducts of one line will be the fertilizer for the next. The greenhouses will be hooked up to NatGas generators allowing a 12 month growing season, 1,000 ppm CO2 and warming during winter months. I expect the productivity per acre to nearly double. If Allan Savory’s holistic management techniques are validated over the next decade then there will be a lot less land used for corn-fed beef as well.
It will be interesting to see what happens.
The problem with that idea, Chad, is that it’s expensive and energy intensive. While it would produce extremely high yields, the $/bushel cost of production will increase geometrically. Greenhouse produce has been around for over a century, but it just doesn’t compete due to the sheer expense. It’s cheaper to move produce across the planet than to grow it in a greenhouse. Unless you have a dire shortage of land, there’s no reason to do it.
Remember that efficiency changes over time – it isn’t a fixed constant. I had to keep reminding people that the efficiency of retrieving fossil fuels would increase, and therefore the reserves would keep expanding over the last 30 years, and OMG did fracking proof me right (although I had no idea what technology would eventually succeed, history told me one would).
The same applies to producing food – through time new breakthroughs will change the equations for what is profitable and what is not. I think producing large volumes of fresh vegetables within mega-cities will succeed, not necessarily because it is cheaper but because it fresher (a better product that can be eaten without storage). I don’t know if these will be a lot of little “factories” or a few big ones, but as people’s wealth grows, so will their willingness to spend more money on a slightly better product.
It may be that some foods lend themselves to being grown in a factory environment so well, they become profitable. Reduction in use of pesticides, water, and other factors, plus a much higher yield might just push it over into a profitable adventure. Think about desert or near desert environments in the case of water usage where they want a fresh food. What if regulations make the use of fertilizers much more expensive? (to control over use and runoff) – a factory environment addresses this. There are all sorts of unknowns that could change what is profitable.
While in general sentiment I agree with you – producing massive amounts of food over wide areas will remain the most effective/profitable means for a good while longer, I think there will be a slow shift to local grown foods for various reasons that eventually may account for 10% to 20% of all food grown (wild guess).
I’ve read about greenhouses that use exhaust gasses from power plants.
They can also circulate the warm water from the cooling towers as well.
There is no problem with that idea, it is long being used on an industrial scale (minus the continuous light).
http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/08/the-greenhouses-of-almeria.html
“Temperatures can reach more than 45 degrees Celsius inside”
Great….. Where ‘natural’ solar energy is efficiently used to economically grow nutritious food plants in natural fields, you want to supplant that with completely artificial, labor intensive, energy intensive, highly expensive production methods! What an nonholistic and unsavory vision that is!
Should the vision of the Malthusians ever come to pass, and the planet actually start getting over crowded, it’s a potential solution.
Should the planet start to slide towards another ice age, it’s a potential solution.
Worth talking about. Not worth doing anything about, at this time.
If my memory serves me correctly ; About 40% of the food, mostly vegetables I assume, needed to supply the population of Lagos in Nigeria, Greater Lagos has an estimated polulation of 21 million, is grown within the Greater Lagos city limits.
Water and fertilisers for this production of vegetables isn’t a problem apparently as the food crops are frequently grown on small acreages in human waste from a sewerage system that doesn’t exist in many locations.
Methink the next agricultural revolution is simply the end of agriculture, replace by chemical food processed directly from oil (maybe with the help of yeasts and other microbes specially engineered for this purpose).
Why go through the hassle of turning energy into fertilizer, light, heat, just to boot the inefficient photosynthesis engine providing sugar to the plant, a fraction of which will be edible?
This will please animal and plants lovers, who think eating them is disgusting.
Then we all can become like Princely Charles and just talk to the plants. At that point the whole earth would become a “funny farm”, so we wouldn’t even have to move! Long live the Queen!
Propane burned and vented in the greenhouse might cause problems with food. It was introduced to tobacco kilns about the early 80’s and toxins showed up in the leaf that were so toxic even the tobacco companies banned the practice (it was very energy efficient).
The answer to this conundrum lies in the words of Robert A. Heinlein – “Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.”
Those who wish to control others care little of anything other than expanding their control. They are myopically obsessed with the idea that they know what is best for everybody else, and feel compelled to take charge of everything ‘for the common good.’ It matters not that they have no concept of the consequences of their efforts in an increasingly complex and non-linear world.
There is so much wisdom in that quote.
Exactly! The desire/lust/compulsion to control the lives and property of other people is the ROOT of all evil.
Indeed, I have recently come to the conclusion that ALL my left wing friends and relatives are inherently EVIL and I must do everything in my power to hinder them. Starting next week at the wedding…
Wow… Was that the definition of a Progressive? It sure sounded like one…
Good post, tadchem. Right to the bottom line: There are those who wish to control others, and those who don’t have this desire. Those who don’t have the desire to control others, resist the efforts of those who do.
Here’s a timely example of the Left’s desire to control the population:
http://dailycaller.com/2018/01/24/podesta-stabilize-the-population-to-fight-global-warming/
PODESTA: ‘Stabilize The Population’ To Fight Global Warming
This article is making me hungry for a nice sizzling steak with steamed imported GMO veggies covered in real butter and garlic.
This just proves that “Environmentalists” know jack diddly squat about the environment, particularly the biosphere and the live-giving things it produces.
Bill
Modern agriculture is giving us food that has a far lower nutritional value than the food our grand parents ate. Read “Growing a Revolution” by David Montgomery.
Total BS.
You will have to show me more evidence than that.
http://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/azVNv1Z_700b_v1.jpg
It’s typical religious beliefs and an anti-science mentality. By religious, I don’t mean a belief in a “God” but instead a fervent belief in “Mother Nature” and that science is a perversion. Humans seemed to be programmed to hold mysterious beliefs that defy facts, and a deep distrust of anything they do not understand. They look to the priests (like Climate Scientists) to explain the mysteries to them.
Industry has not helped, especially in the past, because by chasing profit they often produced harm (environmental, abused workers, etc.) Somehow this becomes the fault of science, but actually its a problem in regulating safety. (Yup, I said that… and meant it. There is such a thing a the proper amount of regulation, and of course over regulation, but I would never want to go back to no regulation because people in power are inherently greedy).
Somehow, otherwise perfectly sane people come to believe that something grown Organic is better than something grown on a modern farm using modern practices, but often the opposite is true. Somehow a crop that has a new gene in it is a monster – never mind it saves the lives of millions. Let’s all fear and distrust anything produced by science.
Now that I have that out of my system, there is a lot to improve on the modern farms. Soil erosion, overuse of fertilizers, reducing water usage, over use of pesticides, and more can still be improved upon. So can the crops we grow using GMO techniques. Our modern farms have produced miracles in production, but they leave a lot of room for improvement. And this will take regulation to achieve.
Over-regulation is as dangerous a no regulation. You must leave room for innovation. Much regulation simply limits who can produce food. Some is just silly and GMO prohibition is one.
I do not agree that it will take regulation as the primary means to deal with the issues of soil erosion, overuse of fertilizers, reducing water usage, overuse of pesticides, etc. Why? Because farmers pay high prices for agricultural land and it is already in their self-interest to reduce soil erosion, water usage, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Without quality soil their crops suffer. Water, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides are input costs and agriculture is a tremendously competitive marketplace with all commodities traded daily through electronic marketplaces. Reducing the use of all these inputs reduces their costs. To be effective as a farmer today, you either need a lot of real world experience or you go to one of the land-grant universities and get a degree in one of the agriculture majors. These same universities do research on methods of addressing all of the issues you mention. If I go to the University of Nebraska and do a search for terms like soil or crop management, I.find dozens of courses, internships, etc for each of those topics.I only see three areas where regulation would make sense. One is addressing the quality of water in streams and rivers. That is where runoff from agricultural lands impacts others. We already do this but the difficulty lies in assessing where the contributions, particularly nitrates, come from. The second area is improper application of pesticides or herbicides that affects neighboring farms. On one hand, there is already a civil means of redress through lawsuits. On the other, South Dakota regulators recently addressed issues of farmers not following instructions during application. In regards to water, no farmer wants to see his water table drop to where he can not irrigate. Most agricultural states have regulations already dealing with the access to water to attempt to avoid depleting aquifers of reducing river flows. At the same time, it costs money to bring water to the crops and more efficient and less wasteful methods are to the farmers advantage. The third area, which is mineral depletion in topsoil, is perhaps the most difficult to address. If the mineral is essential to crop yield, the farmer will try to retain the necessary levels out of self-interest. If the mineral is valuable to nutrition but not to yields, then we are in an area that will require some enterprising efforts. “Organic farming” addresses some of these issue indirectly but not always successfully. Also, “organic food” is not available to many due to cost. The ultimate solution may be to test crops for nutritional quality for the purpose of labeling in the marketing process. Thus crops with higher nutritional value could actually sell in the agricultural markets at a premium. This is not an easy area to address because we still struggle with what is proper nutrition. This should not be regulated because our government scientists have been giving us bad advice for over a half-century as illustrated by recent research, especially on fats and carbohydrates in our diets.
A few years back I read about a software system that tied the tractor into a GPS system, and using maps generated from satellite images, the farmer could continuously adjust the amount and type of fertilizer that was being sprayed onto his field depending on what that section actually needed.
Modern industry is safer because we are wealthy enough to afford more safety. It had nothing to do with government regulation.
Workplaces have been getting safer for as long as records have been kept, going back more than 200 years.
There was no change in the rate of improvement after government got into the act.
Using mapped for nutrients in field and using GPS positioning to adjust fertilizer application across the field both when seeeding and later during the growth of the crop was being trialled here inAustralia’s croplands back in the late 1990’s just before I got out of farming.
It finished up that any increase in yields [ and there were also some minor decreases ] did not make up for the cost and of the equipment and the extra work involved in the handling and application of the fertilisers.
;
When I started farming or at least obeying the instructions of my farming father back in 1954. in western Victoria in the SE of Australia, we could expect to get about two tonnes a hectare [ 30 bus / acre for americans ] of wheat yield.
And that was every second year on land that had been worked hard from when the country was opened up for settlement in the very early 20th century.
This year, 63 years later, an average year for some and very mediocre for others due to frost on the crops, the better wheat yields unaffected by frost and in our 400 mm average winter rainfall zone, reached over 6 tonnes a hectare or 3 times that amount of grain grown on the same land in the same region as those 63 years ago.
BUT and it is a very big BUT indeed, between a grain crop every second year, the farmers are now planting a variery of pulses such as lentils, beans, peas, broad beans and etc plus Canola and a range of other minor crops in the alternate years to a grain/ cereal crop on the same land and fields
And it often happens that the profitability of the the alternate year pulse and oil seed crops are higher than the grain / cereal crops.
Again technology has enabled such an every year planting of crops into the same field, in our case amongst the lowest rainfall only cropping nations on the planet.
The technology is a one pass only, no presowing preparation in the form of a cultivation, sowing technology where the GPS and automatic steering of the tractors and sowing equipment including shifting the sown equipment behind the tractor a few centimetres left or right at the drawbar when the tractor is not tracking correctly, so as to stay with in a two centimetre sowing band of the sowing Tyne’s which enables the farmers to sow between the 18 cm to 20 cm wide gaps between the rows of standing stubble from the previous year’s crops.
Weed control is doneon the growing crop at 20 plus kph running 30 to 40 metre wide 800 litres capacity boom sprays, always down the same original spray boom tracks accurate down to a couple of centimetres accuracy .
A spray program which might entail the boom spray going over the same crop and same paddock of few hundred to a thousand hectares, some half a dozen times both before and during the 6 month growing periods of our crops.
GPS controlled steering all the time with automatic GPS positioning switch off/ switch on of sections or all of of the boom spray whilst turning at the ends of the field and / or prevention of overlaps or around objects like trees and etc
Not far from where I live they are now growing cereal crops in an annual rainfall zone of just 10 inches average rainfall each year and achieving two or thee tonnes a hectare [ 30 to 45 bus / acre ] due to the huge improvements in crop genetics.
And the yields continue to rise due primarily to those utterly ignored, unsung heros of the scientific world and the true saviours from mass starvation of all of mankind, the plant breeders and their back up of plant geneticists, plant pathologists and so many other field and technical staff at the plant breeding centers of the world crops of every type..
You may discuss everything else in food crop technology but the core of the increasing crop yields and their increasing human health qualities are those unsung heroes in my opinion, the crop and plant breeders and the plant geneticists,
[ I have been privileged to have known a few of the best in the global Ag food crop field ]
Without those plant breeder scientists and there are only a handful of them around the world working on food crops of every type and thinking years ahead on the qualities, disease resistance, ability to both harvest and still retain the grain in the head until the harvester reaches them , rain resistance for retention of quality and many and many etc’s , there are I think about 56 different qualities required for a plant breeder to meet in a new variety of wheat alone before it is even tested for other qualities.
And thats only for wheat let alone the other few dozen major global food crops..
Without these plant breeders and plant geneticists and pathologists and etc there really would have been outbreaks of mass starvation around the world by now as we very nearly saw happen in 1974 when there were only some 5 billions of humanity on this planet ,
And the other always ignored factor in global human food sustenance is thanks indeed to fossil fuels and the incredible global shipping and land transport systems that rely tottally on fossil fuels which have enabled areas of shortage to rapidly, as in about two weeks, to get very large tonnages of food from areas of food plenty anywhere in the world to those areas of food shortage.
My post was in response to the one that claimed that farms were the source of most of the fertilizer, etc. run-off. I was giving an example of the lengths farmers had been willing to go to avoid using more chemicals than necessary.
I did not mean to imply that such technology was a major, much less sole reason for improvements in agricultural production.
The use of agrochemicals is related to ecotoxicity, eutrophication and depletion of phosphorus stocks.
Solved (soon)!
From Bloomberg Businessweek …
This Army of AI Robots Will Feed the World
And it could do it while eliminating herbicides, replenishing topsoil, and reducing carbon consumption. If all goes to plan.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-01-11/this-army-of-ai-robots-will-feed-the-world
And it should make a few bucks for John Deere.
LOL, that will happen when we get the flying cars that when I was a kid they said we’d have by the year 2000.
I got mine, I’m just not allowed to fly it anywhere.
“If all goes to plan.”
Which tells you exactly how likely the outcome is. 🙂
Richard Patton and AllyKat. Read the article.
In September the farm equipment multinational [John Deere} bought the three-year-old Silicon Valley startup [for $305 million]. “It was clear that Blue River was becoming the industry leader in robotics and machine learning and that this for us would be a perfect synergy,” he says.
If Amazon can use machine vision and AI to eliminate cashiers in grocery stores how hard can it be to recognize weeds and kill them? Pretty hard a few years ago. Today, not so much.
There’s still the issue of time. I suspect it will be quicker to spray weeds than pluck them for a few years yet.
Autoscan 30 metre wide GPS guided auto steer spray booms with weed recognition algorithms are already in some limited use around here.
The weed is detected at speed and cops a burst of chemical from the appropriate individual spray jet as the main boom passes over the weed.
Works on some weeds and works on cultivated land where the contrasts between the reflected weed spectrum and soils reflected spectrum is high.
Saves a lot of chemical in the right circumstances but is not yet a viable economic proposition for most broad acre farmers.
ROM, are you saying that the technology is capable of telling different kinds of weeds apart?
I was literally only commenting on the statement “[i]f all goes to plan.” Things rarely go exactly to plan. This could well have a very positive effect on things, but it will probably happen differently than forecast or hoped. Regardless of the outcome, the actual process will likely vary from current projections – which is normal. 🙂
Agriculture is under attack from the Greens on a number of fronts. Fossil fuels, artificial fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides have increased the yields of crops to staggering proportions in a few short years.According to the Greens “All fossil fuel usage is bad.” So fuel usage and fertilizers must also be bad. So in a strange way the Greens are causing more fossil fuel to be used per acre of farm land rather than less. How so you ask. The “New Low Emission” diesel engines that farm equipment was forced to use are causing farmers to burn 15% to 20% more diesel for no gain other than to drop the instant CO2 and NOX emissions by a small amount. These new engines have idle regeneration periods where the engine goes into a forced higher idle to “regenerate” to reduce the exhaust outputs. During this regeneration the unit it is installed can not be used and on some engines this can be a period of up to 20 to 30 minutes of high idle. So you stand idly by watching your tractor or combine roar away for nothing. So rather than trying to become more fuel efficient and using less fuel the new regulations are wasting a valued resource and pushing the costs of the farmers up for no real gain. Another wonderfully stupid regulation brought to you by Obama, the EPA and the Green meanies.
For a chuckle, check this out, about the ‘true cost of food’:
https://tvo.org/video/programs/the-agenda-with-steve-paikin/finding-the-true-cost-of-food
The article’s use of percentages for chronically undernourished people is weak because critics could say there were more chronically undernourished people is 2013 than in 1950 and they would be correct (7.9 million versus 7.7 million).
What is missing is that in 1950 there were 2.5 billion people who were not chronically undernourished and in 2013 there were 7.9 billion people who were not chronically undernourished. Which is good news,
What can also be said is that the number of chronically undernourished people has remained relatively constant which may be the result of living in a #not_a_sh!thole_country.
Where would the bong smoking green intellectuals get their munchies from? Their bong smoking is inhibiting forsight.
“Where would the bong smoking green intellectuals get their munchies from?”
From the supermarkets of course.
Where do you think food comes from?
/sarc
why would anyone want to feed the world anyway?
its far too crowded.
we need death on an industrial scale.
green policies will provide it.
QED
Environmental watermelons claim modern agriculture is unsustainable only because they want it to be unsustainable.
There is a “green” activist pattern clearly related to disrupting democracy, freedom, business and industry, consumption, prosperity, population and civilization itself that arises from a deeply rooted clinical neurosis of self loathing in the main, and out and out psychosis in the shrillest extremists. A good example is, when it was believed that we had reached peak oil and gas, it wasn’t worth their while to do much against a declining “problem”. They went full bore against coal. However when the fracking miracle became known, a massive campaign ensued including the ever present phoney claims of harming people’s health. It even helped reduce coals prominence and cut greenhouse gases, but they didn’t want the prosperity of cheap fuel for homeowners and industries.
Because dialogue to bridge gaps and lead to understanding is impossible (because of the nature of their illness) a world leader like Trump was essential for stifling a confident, hell bent, heavily financed movement to Neomarxist world domination. Needed was an impossible person who had no qualms about upending major positions, saw no organizations too big to fail, didn’t hesitate to undo agreements, initiatives in process for decades, to defund and withdraw from Global organizations, to stick fingers in Iran’s, North Korea’s and Syria’s eyes. Any other GOP hopeful would have, at best, negotiated a slower trip to oblivion for Western Society. The ugly self loathing misanthropes that have held sway for several decades needed a deep shock and an unceremonious rooting out without warning. They are the crocodiles that snap at the backsides of those trying to save even them! In a few months, a two decade problem of ISIS and earlier iterations of savagery were pounded into the ground, North Korea with its bluff called is now having talks with South Korea and even marching in the Seoul Olympics. The world needed a heavy footed, pounding walker carrying a very big knobbly stick as it always has to protect a prosperous, productive and free way of life in an enclave surrounded by brutishness that needs a model to aim for. Even Mugabe who was being groomed for a ceremonial post at the UN and maybe a Nobel Prize for life achievement was slapped out of power and put under house arrest. Other seemingly unrelated things like this will continue to occur with the new sheriff in town.