Guest essay by Eric Worrall
India’s agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh has publicly suggested that Indian farmers should deal with the stress of climate change, and create positive energy to enhance their crop yields, by practicing “yogic farming”.
According to the BBC;
The Indian agriculture minister has said his government is supporting “yogic” farming to “empower seeds with the help of positive thinking”.
Radha Mohan Singh said it would help improve yield and soil fertility and contribute to making India prosperous.
More than 50% of India’s population depends on agriculture for a living.
But farming in India has been going through a crisis in recent years with thousands of farmers killing themselves in despair over poor harvests.
The minister’s comments follow earlier controversial statements – in July, he was criticised for his bizarre comments that farmer suicides were a result of “failed love affairs” and “impotency”.
…
Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-34254964
Your first response might be to laugh at the lunacy of this suggestion, and to feel sorry for the desperate farmers who are on the receiving end of this government advice. But when you think about it, many Westerners practice a far more ridiculous form of magical thinking, by subscribing to the view that erecting lots of utterly useless wind turbines, at enormous expense, is a cost effective means of controlling global weather.
At least all that Yoga may actually have some positive health benefits, unlike wind turbines, which have been potentially implicated as the cause of serious health problems. Running a few yoga classes is a lot cheaper than erecting a field full of pointless bird choppers. So in a sense, I can’t help thinking that the Indians might be ahead of us on this issue.
So? The Prince of Wales talks to his plants.
But then the Prince of Wales in congenitally batty.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2286883/Prince-Charles-revealed-instructs-plants.html
Are we allowed to have an abdication referendum?
Sort of, a democratic monarchy.
They all sit in a row, and the ones voted out get tipped into a river.
Could even be a reality show…..
R
I’ve no idea of an effective modifier of such advice as given by the helpless to the hopeless.
It is often that faith wins over fatalism. I’d be willing to give yogic a try. The main problem with eco-facsism is it’s rejection of a higher power. They rely exclusively on the power of money.
Hmmmn….
http://environment.brahmakumaris.org/component/content/category/40-yogic-agriculture
At first glance ludicrous but if you strip away the jargon and mumbo jumbo there are probably some sound agricultural and management principles hidden in there.
A bit like biodynamics, an agricultural system invented by Rudolf Steiner, a man who knew nothing about agriculture. Many of its practices are little different to witchcraft but its adherents generally care about what they are doing so they get the results that they want. Not more productive than regular agriculture but more sustainable [that word] in the long term. Or so they say.
Certainly the difference is not in the taste,,
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01094025#page-2
This is two in a row. I have read two articles on the blog today and all there are for comments are ridicule. I am sure there are a sprinkling or meaningful, thoughtful, and even on topic comments scattered in through, but it appears the troll’s new way of attacking the forum is just to pump it full of ridicule and effectively prove that the followers of the blog are ignoramuses, thus the blog itself must be as well. Keep it up, you are doing a good job. Of course, this isn’t the first, nor the last blog that gets this treatment. I used to enjoy reading the comments to articles here because they were so on topic and educational. Now I find that after reading the articles, the best thing to do is just move on since the commenting is no longer worth the time it takes to read. Serious climate discussion isn’t the only topic that is flooded with ridicule, however, as any of the “hot topic” political features are the same. I guess the MSM has found its way to “fight back” against the internet information sources.
One of the best market gardeners in the UK, who is the author of several books on the subject and whose garden is the best I’ve ever seen, says that positive thinking is one part of his armoury, along with lunar gardening, biodynamic gardening and general good soil husbandry.
The assumption would have to be that plants are sensitive to EM waves sent from the brain and that saves from positive thoughts stimulate plants and waves from negative ones stunt them.
Interesting grant proposal that would make, not the least of which would be how to measure the EM waves emerging from your brain and how you could switch on positive and negative thoughts for each group of seeds……..
What??? the global warming that’s not happening? there yah go jogic farming has worked !!
Well, I see this as a perfectly reasonable defense against the corporate juggernaut. Remember the suicides -noted in the article above- were driven by the push to use GM seeds requiring additional fertilizer and water to produce the claimed yield, and then only if planted densely.
This scam was revealed when Indian scientists showed traditional methods allowing space for the growing plant roots was superior. Yet the same scam is being promoted in the south of India again using poor farmers.
It seems the corporate motto is “If at once you don’t succeed, try try again!”
@ur momisugly katesisco
Please see my reply to E.M. Smith above.
For what seems to me to be good reasons, I’m highly sceptical of the anti-Monsanto account. There is more to the story than in the brief article i quote above. There are relative differences in poverty between city and country, which have been magnified by India’s industrialisation and urbanisation, and restrictive and irrational government regulation impacting the farmers as well. I found the accounts to match the productivity data, and the sociological information I have, with no blame to Monsanto nor Bt cotton.
This source, http://www.vib.be/en/about-vib/plant-biotech-news/Documents/BackgroundReport_BT_Cotton.pdf from the Flemish Institute of Biotechnology, surely should have reported such a finding if it existed, but instead it is strongly contradictory of that.
I admit I am highly sceptical of environmentalist reports. I have been since I traced the facts in one of the most bizarre cases of ‘Telegraph’ I’ve ever seen. Environmentalist organisations including Greenpeace called for the ‘US to join other nations in banning GM crops because of their health hazards’. It turned out the cited nations had not banned it. No animals were poisoned. The fact at base was an illiterate Indian pig farmer had insisted that his ill pigs be treated for poisoning after eating Bt crop stubble, rather than for the indigenous disease the vet diagnosed. She treated them for poisoning, and they died from the disease. A tragedy, but surreally absurd to call for banning GM crops on those facts!
That’s not the only instance, of course. I’ve checked over fifty reports from our Green-leaning local paper, and found every case i checked was misreported, most commonly by leaving out the ‘on the other hand’ data.
I hadn’t heard of the experiment you mention, I’d be grateful for a link to a source. I have tried Googling for the source, but failed to find it.
But you can appreciate why I’m sceptical it will hold up.