Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to the leader of the Green World Campaign, we have to discard the current extractive economy regime of using chemicals to maximise farm yields, and replace it with a more planet friendly organic approach.
How A Regenerative Revolution Could Reverse Climate Change
Lorin Fries
Oct 21, 2018, 04:00pmEarlier this month the world’s leading climate scientists released the most urgent warning on climate change to date.
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Among the ambitious ideas to meet this challenge is to enable a regenerative revolution – one that supplants our extractive economic model, and goes beyond “sustainability,” to draw down carbon and reverse course on climate change. Marc Barasch is among the leaders striving to galvanize such a transformation. He is Founder and Executive Director of the Green World Campaign, and an environmental activist who co-convened a first-of-its-kind conference for a regenerative society earlier this year. In our interview he shares what a regenerative revolution might achieve, how technology can help, and how we could advance this economic transition.
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Fries: Why should we focus on regeneration now?
Barasch: If we stopped emitting carbon from every tailpipe and smokestack on the planet today, it would not solve global climate change. We’re in a crisis, and it’s only the beginning: we need to reverse course, not just hold the line. We have legacy carbon in the atmosphere that has to be drawn back down. Soil, trees and vegetation naturally capture carbon, if they’re healthy. The Rodale Institute has found that if current farmland practices shifted to regenerative, organic approaches, 100% of annual global CO2 emissions would be sequestered. That’s how powerful soil carbon sequestration is – but we’re not practicing it at anywhere near the scale that’s needed.
Fries: What technologies might enable a regenerative revolution?
Barasch: Blockchain is one opportunity. An excellent example is China’s Ant Forest initiative, where 200 million Alipay customers signed up to perform green good deeds in exchange for tree planting tokens, demonstrating a pent-up demand from the public to respond directly to the current crisis. Each person can accumulate enough positive credits to get a virtual “tree” — and for each of these, Alipay plants a real one. They reached a couple million trees already and have a new goal of half a trillion. This shows the hidden funding potential in small contributions, which can be blockchain enabled, to fund a regenerative revolution.
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Fries: How do you see large farms and companies engaging in the regenerative movement?
Barasch: Revising our chemical-dependent, soil-destroying form of agriculture requires a way for farmers to transition. They know that these practices are harming the land that they want to pass on to their children, but they feel stuck in this system. This is a transition that Rodale Institute, Patagonia and a consortium of companies are trying to facilitate through a new regenerative organic standard. Giants like Unilever, Danone and others are also developing regenerative agriculture initiatives and announcing new sourcing commitments.
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Sounds all sweet and natural – but a quick peak at Wikipedia gives a glimpse at the level of abundance all those nasty extractive economy agricultural chemicals have given to our world.
… Crop yields in the Middle Ages were extremely low compared to those of the 21st century, although probably not inferior to those in much of the Roman Empire preceding the Middle Ages and the early modern period following the Middle Ages. The most common means of calculating yield was the number of seeds harvested compared to the number of seeds planted. On several manors in Sussex England, for example, the average yield for the years 1350-1399 was 4.34 seeds produced for each seed sown for wheat, 4.01 for barley, and 2.87 for oats. (By contrast, wheat production in the 21st century can total 30 to 40 seeds harvested for each seed sown.) Average yields of grain crops in England from 1250 to 1450 were 7 to 15 bushels per acre. (470 to 1000 kg per ha.) Poor years, however, might see yields drop to less than 4 bushels per acre. Yields in the 21st century, by contrast, can range upwards to 60 bushels per acre. The yields in England were probably typical for Europe in the Middle Ages. …
Read more: Wikipedia
Nature isn’t human friendly. Any food crop is almost immediately infested with pests, many of which are entirely capable of wiping out an entire field. In the absence of chemicals your only hope of bringing in a decent yield is to sit out there picking bugs off the vegetables, or let the pests have their way and hope predator species control enough of the pests so you get something for your effort.
A few seasons planting without chemical fertiliser depletes a field of nitrates. After depletion, without chemical fertiliser it takes years to regenerate a field back to its original potential, hence the old practice of leaving fields fallow for extended periods.
Farmers don’t go to the trouble and expense of applying all those chemicals because they are too lazy to research alternatives, they do it because they have no choice, if they want to return better than medieval farm yields. The grim reality is, without all those “extractive economy” agricultural chemicals and practices to deliver additional nutrients and control pests, most of us would starve.
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“without all those “extractive economy” agricultural chemicals and practices to deliver additional nutrients and control pests, most of us would starve”
Yeah, that’s what they want. It’s a feature, not a bug, of what they’re extolling.
“most of us would starve”
Not at all.
Without pest-control we can eat the locusts instead.
To get this ball rolling, from the BBC of course.
I’ve not noticed locusts in the UK.
Could slugs be an acceptable alternative?
Only sautéd in garlic.
Besides, with all this catastrophic anthropogenic global warming climate change locusts are sure to come.
No?
Like he said. “We starve!!”
yeah right….tell me I have to eat bugs to save the planet
While they buy more mega mansions and planes…
…and the UN IPCC says it’s a deadly poison and we have to stop
but the vast majority of countries can increase their emissions
You don’t even have to look at the science…just the people that push the s c a m
..they don’t even believe their own s c a m
Are any of those people farmers, meaning do they physically involve themselves in agriculture at all? Do they understand even the slightest thing about agriculture?
Even the Amish use fertilizer to increase their crop production. You haven’t lived until you watch a four-gang team of Belgians pulling a plow and relieving themselves of their breakfast at the same time. It’s all good stuff: organize materials plowed back into the dirt, and corn in the corncrib, wheat in the bins. And it doesn’t matter how it’s produced.
But I do have a brilliant idea: the people who make these proposals need to spend at least one year, maybe two, living on what amounts to the yield of grains from a medieval farm, and no access to modern plumbing or conveniences.
If that doesn’t shut them up, nothing will.
No they need to do the work that gives the yields of medieval yields. That people starve under their plans is a feature not a negative as they firmly believe that the only way forward is severely reduced population, of course as long as they are in the population that survives. The real question is who do you think will survive better under their plans? The third world subsistence farmer who knows starvation and lives their plan currently or the fat city dwelling college professor who hasn’t broken a sweat working in a farm field ever? I know who my money is on.
Obviously, the subsistence farmer would survive and outlive the desk jockey professor, simply because the farmer in tune with the the seasons and the weather, and the professor is afraid of any changes in weather from dry to rainy or snowy, warm to cold, etc., and likely wouldn’t know a radish seed from a wheat kernel.
I follow the common practice of mixing radish and carrot seeds before planting in order to cut down on carrot thinning. Radishes grow more quickly than carrots.
Better yet, let ’em work on a farm for a couple of years to get some understanding of the problems before they pontificate on a subject they know absolutely nothing about. Armchair quarterbacking is a destructive disease endemic among academia and other dogmatists.
So, I just did the back of the envelope calculations for the number of trees they hope to plant…
500 Billion Trees
An “unhealthy” forest = 100-200 trees per acre
http://www.sbcounty.gov/calmast/sbc/html/healthy_forest.asp
500 billion / 200 very unhealthy trees =2.5 billion acres of trees
Acres per sq. mile = 640
2.5 billion / 640 = 3,906,250 sq miles
Total sq miles of China = 3.71 million sq miles
Total sq miles of France = 210000 sq miles
So they would like to cover the entire country of China + Most of France in very unhealthy forest.
If we go with a “healthy forest” = 40-60 trees per acre
500 billion / 60 healthy trees =8.334 billion acres of trees
Acres per sq. mile = 640
8.334 billion / 640 = 13,020,833 sq miles
Total sq miles of China = 3.71 million sq miles
Total sq miles of Russia = 6.6 million sq miles
Total sq miles of US = 3.8 million sq miles
Now they are covering China + Russia + the United States in healthy forest!
It’s clear you don’t live in Georgia!
100 trees per acre is nothing. We average that over the city of Atlanta, which is urban, not forest.
Ie. The total number of trees in Atlanta divided by the total acreage of the city gives 111 trees per acre.
For pristine northern Georgia forest it has to be well over 500 trees per acre.
I just checked and if you plant trees on a 8’x 8′ grid you get 680 trees per acre.
I can assure you that on pristine forest land in Georgia the density of trees exceeds that.
” without all those “extractive economy” agricultural chemicals and practices to deliver additional nutrients and control pests, most of us would starve.”
Which is exactly the objective of the green/left cabal.
What do you reckon are the odds that a century from now our descendants will look back and conclude that for reasons they don’t understand very well, they have a generation of mostly idiots in their ancestry?
One can certainly hope so.
Karabar,
With 20th century farming science, you’re right.
With 21st century farming science you’re wrong.
The key difference is in the 20th century they thought it took thousands of years to make a few inches of topsoil, so there was no choice but it fertilize.
In the 21st century agriculturalists know how to make high quality topsoil from clay in just a few years.
The article WUWT readers is making fun of has the science right, not the commenters here with there last century understanding of farming.
full show:
Youtube: 39min57sec: Life Liberty & Levin FOX NEWS | Mark Levin Oct 21 2018
Guest: Dr. Patrick Michaels
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmqqRF9lkfw
shorter video:
21 Oct: Fox News: The truth about global warming
Dr. Patrick Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, provides insight into the debate over climate change and the political games played to create policy.
https://www.foxnews.com/shows/life-liberty-levin
I saw the show. It’s excellent. Recommend to anybody who has a few minutes.
full show:
Youtube: 39min57sec: Life Liberty & Levin FOX NEWS | Mark Levin Oct 21 2018
Guest: Dr. Patrick Michaels
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmqqRF9lkfw
shortened video:
21 Oct: Fox News: The truth about global warming
Dr. Patrick Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, provides insight into the debate over climate change and the political games played to create policy.
https://www.foxnews.com/shows/life-liberty-levin
apologies for double post.
Every warning is always the most urgent one to date from “the world’s leading climate scientists”.
You can usually spot the world’s leading climate scientists because they are always an expert in everybody else’s field despite understanding very little about climate.
Yep a Climate Scientist is apparently a master of physics, engineering, economics and ecology having never studied any of the fields and usually knowing less than the general public.
They seem to be ignorant of agriculture too.
I fail to see the difference between regenerative agriculture and things we’re already doing like crop rotation as one example.
I’ve seen this in academics time after time, after time, after time … They assume that other people are too stupid to see the glaringly obvious. Actually, it’s the academics, with their noses stuck in books, who most often miss the glaringly obvious.
“Regenerative” is a fancier, smarter sounding term, sure to fool the less bright into thinking it’s new and better. The term has no real meaning, as is true of most such terms used (like sustainable, a joke of a marketing term). So if one says “crop rotation”, it sounds less educated. “Regenerative” is smart and condescending, perfect for the movement.
Well said. Repeat the message until people get it.
False
Regenerative farming is a 21st century advancement. There is fundamental soil science behind it.
The discovery of glomalin in 1996 started the ball rolling.
I do not care about the terms used, but the truth is that with the increase of CO2, plants are no longer starving for CO2. This means that they can grow more today than in the past. The biology in the soil needs energy to convert N2 to plant available forms. Plants that have more CO2 available can now supply this energy meeting the nitrogen needs of the plants. This is only one of the nutrients needed. Plants have several relationships with bacteria and fungi by which the plants feeds them in exchange for minerals from the soil. Soil scientist are finding out the importance to keep a live root in the soil so that soil life can stay alive. This would have been a problem in the past and also in conventional agriculture.
So, when we learn from nature, nature can take care of itself and be vey fertile. It is us humans that cause the destruction of organic matter, the destruction of life year around in the soil, the destruction of diversity, the destruction of balance then we wonder why we cannot feed the world.
Key in soil health and see what some farmers are starting to do. Key people, Gabe Brown, Ray Archuleta. Look for you tube featuring either one of them.
CommieBob,
Read:
https://www.quora.com/Can-we-reverse-global-warming/answers/34310028
Ignore the title, it’s almost exclusively about regenerative farming.
I’m all about soil rehabilitation and micro-nutrient replenishment, but modern agriculture is still going to require massive chemical inputs on top of that. However, we could be eminently “green” and kill two birds with one stone just by utilizing our already existing garbage stream.
Instead of spending vast sums of money to completely overhaul our agricultural practices at great detriment to ourselves, we should spend a more modest sum to build state-of-the-art trash separating and processing facilities.
All food waste ought to be composted. Then we can dump that on the fields. Paper and cardboard can be either composted, incinerated, or simply shredded into mulch, which we can also dump on the fields. Plastics can be either incinerated or granulated and dumped in the ocean, since we now know that the ocean does a rather good job of eating it up, especially when it’s in small pieces. Metals, of course, can be recycled. Glass can be recycled or simply dumped anywhere; it’s just silica, after all. Whole barges of shattered glass could be dumped a few hundred meters offshore in order to promote reef formation and spur a cottage beach glass industry.
The goal should be a zero waste stream. Everything should be either composted, recycled, burnt, or reduced to its basic elements. We ought to make landfills a thing of the past. I’m not saying this is a solution to anything, nor do I think we can gain a net economic benefit by utilizing our garbage this way. I’m well aware of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, thank you. I’m simply saying that a prosperous and developed society such as ours ought to spend some of its surplus in obliterating its own waste; and if we can do so in a semi-useful manner, so much the better.
The reason human sewage isn’t used on fields is the risk of Cholera and other human pathogens. I suspect this risk would also apply to discarded food waste.
Food waste used to go in the ‘pigs bin’ until various diseases were found to propagate that way.
Open composting will net you a town sized population of rats for neighbours. And that’s a health risk too.
Probably aerobic digestion in sealed tanks is the answer.
Otherwise if it burns, burn it at very high temps, generate some power and then process the slag for anything valuable.
No easy answers in recycling, and no answers at all that are based on ideology.
if human waste is dried and heated theres NO reason at all not to use it as fertiliser
well there wasn’t until recently, now the amount of pharma meds in it and urine, that arent removable are a bigger issue than the minute risk(in 1st world at least) of any disease like cholera or polio.
worms process both manures and food waste extremely well and we should be utilising them
worms cn uptake 10% of their body weight in mercury or other heavy metals
they can then be burnt and the toxic waste captured.
reclmation of poisoned land in Wales some 20? yrs ago was getting good results.
the old adage is to put it back to the land
you only sold off farm the amount to pay your bills and wages, all waste was recycled/fed back.
so very little nutrient had to be brought in to replace it.
massive monocropping, soy corn soy corn etc is insanity
mixed farm with animals to graze n fertilise from the stover etc is far saner and healthier
So instead of renewing my prescriptions, I should drink my own urine?
As used to be common throughout Asia, human excrement is still employed as fertilizer in North Korea. Hence the giant round worm infestation of the recently defected, wounded Nork solider.
Another example of “hygiene doesn’t mean soap”, contrary to what some of the most retarded vaxxers believe.
Noting new up here in Ottawa. The municipality spends truck loads of moneu hauling away our kitchen waste to a composting site
https://ottawa.ca/en/residents/garbage-and-recycling/green-bin-and-leaf-and-yard-waste
It is terribly expensive and wasteful, no pun intended.
10 years to toxic nano-particle doom! … we have to stop this waste industry’s madness … give us money!
Commercial scale dairy’s and poultry producers trialed a huge rotary composter developed at Texas A&M Commerce back in the 90’s. I did a few lit review papers about them and other methods of disposing of litter, manure, feed waste, and even carcasses mixed into the rotary composter.
It’s basically an insulated, large diameter pipe with a few baffles in it to keep the input moving toward the output end. The temperature and moisture content is monitored, the rate of flow is monitored, and the transit time (iirc) is about a week to ten days. What they are intended for is the rapid degredation of manure and urine saturated bedding/litter (wood shavings) and small carcasses. The bacterial action in this aerobic digester can cause the temperature to reach up to 180F, which is more than sufficient to destroy typical disease causing organisms. Whole birds would be reduced to a few large bones, beaks, and the rakis of primary feathers. Testing of the composted material coming out the other end was routinely pathogen free and ready for land application and incorporation.
I saw one in California in 2003 at a massive dairy along one of your interstates. So they must have some use.
Thank you.
Is there a little red climate book?
I think Al Gore wrote one, maybe any IPCC door stop.
The idea that the 125ppm CO2 added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution (according to IPCC) will stay up there for thousands of malignant years, is as likely that we or anything can ‘reverse’ climate change. And how does the atmosphere know which CO2 molecule is which?
The good CO2 is green.
Do they know that plants need a certain level of CO2 to live?
You mean, do they care.
Excerpt from the article:
“We have legacy carbon in the atmosphere that has to be drawn back down. Soil, trees and vegetation naturally capture carbon, if they’re healthy. The Rodale Institute has found that if current farmland practices shifted to regenerative, organic approaches, 100% of annual global CO2 emissions would be sequestered.”
Complete nonsense! Plants need atmospheric CO2! More is better! It IS that simple!
If someone thinks CO2 is driving dangerous or runaway global warming, they are delusional – there is NO evidence that this is a serious problem.
I was speaking to a nurse last week, an educated woman, and it was clear that she confused real air pollution (NOx, SOx, and particulates) with CO2. This was a deliberate hoax perpetrated by the warmist thugs, and it has been successful.
The successful strategies of the left are based on the stupidity of the average person, and there sure are a lot of really stupid people out there.
The Rodale Institute has found that if current farmland practices shifted to regenerative, organic approaches, 100% of annual global CO2 emissions would be sequestered.”
Along with 97% of the human population no doubt.
Stop this enviromental madness!
“How to Lie with Statistics”, or just make them up, is so popular among the snotty, self-excluding elite.
Sequestered yes, but for how long? As soon as it rots, it’s back into the atmosphere for the carbon in those plants.
BTW, farmers have been plowing crop stubble back into the soil for generations.
MarkW,
With regenerative farming, plowing is avoided. Hip-hop is used.
Plowing degrades the AMF network and supporting that network in soil is critical to the goal of regenerative farming.
AMF – arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi
Dang spell check!
I meant no-till is used instead of plowing.
“Regenerative agriculture” is just another catchphrase. “Sustainability” is losing its fad power because it, too, is emotional rather than scientific.
In reality, conditions and results fluctuate. Innovations are hard to predict. Stasis is neither achievable nor desirable. If you could have frozen agricultural yields at some point in the past, what year would you name? What level? What would you say to farmers who say, “I know we can do better.”?
Allan, you said, “The successful strategies of the left are based on the stupidity of the average person, and there sure are a lot of really stupid people out there.”
Allowing for damaged neurons from recreational drug use, and head injuries from sports and accidents, more than half of adults have below average IQs.
Hi Clyde.
The great American philosopher George Carlin explained it thus:
“Think of how stupid the average person is; and then realize half of them are stupider than that!”
Notes:
Median, mean, meh!
“NOx, SOx, and particulates”
Add water to NOx, SOx and you get nitrate and sulfate, two more fertilizers need for making plants greener.
Well, good luck. I’ll check back when they reach one percent of their goals. Of course I like the idea of planting trees just as much as the next person, but I don’t think they realise just how big half a trillion is as compared to just a couple of million. Green schemes so often seem to be hatched by people with a poor practical grasp of numbers.
“A few seasons planting without chemical fertiliser depletes a field of nitrates.”
Oh come on!
A few seasons of planting the same non-nitrogeneous crops again and again depletes a field of nitrates. Have you heard of crop rotation? A lot of farmers have, centuries ago.
Advances in farming will obviously include better multi-cropping, gene insertion and the optimal use of soil bacteria-feeding to break down soil particles making bound elements available to plants.
This latter ‘technology’ is used in India and is as simple as adding sugar to the soil to feed bacteria that can grasp, then release P and K, for example, that are not available to plants at present. Agriculture is not stuck in the Middle Ages.
“Adding to the soil?”
Sounds a lot like “fertilizer.”
Fixating nitrogen is energy intensive – around one percent of the world’s energy is currently used to produce ammonia, most of which is used in fertiliser.
Nitrogen fixating crops can’t replace artificial fertiliser, they’re better than nothing but the amount of nitrogen fixated even by the best nitrogen fixing crops is low.
That sugar being thrown on the fields represents time, energy and nutrition wasted growing sugar for throwing on someone’s field, instead of it being consumed by humans.
Eric
Before dismissing the technology, which is locally discovered, adapted and driven, please consider the total cost and whether it actually works. Growing a little sugar cane on the margin of a field to create one’s own sugar syrup is very easy in a sub-tropical climate. It frees the farmers from having to buy fertiliser at all (assuming it is not short of boron etc).
tweak:
Adding sugar to the soil is adding a fertilizer, but not for the crop. It is for the beasties that are capable of breaking down the mineral-bound elements needed by the crop which are already in the soil by in an insoluble form. After living for a short time they die and make the elements available in a soluble form. As far as I know this is not done in the West. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
A second technology tested at ARDRI in Pune (Dr AD Karve) is the use of plastic “walls” in fields dividing them into cells. This collects and holds the CO2 emitted at night so they can re-absorb it in the morning (it is heavier than air). It works well in low wind conditions. It is a form of fertilization by the crop itself.
I’m not suggesting it wouldn’t work, what I am skeptical of is whether it would work well enough to replace the chemicals. If we can’t maintain current yields a lot more arable land will be required to maintain output. Or we’ll have to learn to live with less. Neither are desirable outcomes.
People have a hard time grasping “scale”. You see it in energy all the time—Fred’s new magic energy generator makes enough energy to light 3 light bulbs, therefore, we can power LA with it if the evil power industry doesn’t block us. Something works in a country the size of Rhode Island, so it will work everywhere. Scale completely eludes these folks.
Eric,
I normally like your efforts, but you’re uneducated on 21st century soil science.
Read this interview:
http://ecofarmingdaily.com/interview-sos-save-soils-dr-christine-jones-explains-life-giving-link-carbon-healthy-topsoil/
I know you’re on Quora, follow Scott Strough and read his answers.
“This latter ‘technology’ is used in India and is as simple as adding sugar to the soil to feed bacteria that can grasp, then release P and K,”
Very interesting! I may have to try that in the garden next year. 🙂
Before you do that, buy any of the AMF inoculating products out there. AMF inoculation is the key to getting off of the fertilizer bandwagon. Not filling your garden is the another key. Third is to keep a growing plant on it year round (a cover crop).
AMF – arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi
Amazon has a bunch grouped under “MycoGrow”.
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?field-keywords=Mycogrow&url=search-alias%3Dlawngarden
Pemnington is now incorporating AMF in their top of the line lawn fertilizers and grass seeds:
https://www.pennington.com/all-products/fertilizer/pennington-ultragreen–lawn-fertilizer
Note the red banner in corner of the package trumpeting the “Myco Advantage”.
The Myco Advantage is real, but you don’t have to get it from Pennington.
You wouldn’t insinuate that some part of “science” is stuck in the middle ages, or at least in the 19th century, would you?
Only if one is insinuating it’s “science”. 🙂
I think they would need a tree planting project in Haiti. Because the Haitians didn’ t have access to cheap electricity, they chopped down and burned every tree they could find. Only 30% of the land is covered with trees now. Estimates predict that over next 10 years the tree cover will drop to 26%. So in 70 years every last tree will be gone in Haiti.
What energy source replaced the trees in Haiti? How does anybody cook any more in Haiti without access to charcoal? Or do the people rely on precooked meals from NGO’S and foreign governments?
No, they rely on smuggled charcoal from the Dominican Republic. 115 tons of charcoal per week is smuggled across the border. So the world is spending trillions on green energy and global warming dead ends while the population of Haiti has to depend on foreign largess of food and smuggled charcoal.
The “greens” often complain that we have too many people on the planet (another assertion without substantiation). One way to decrease the population is by starvation, another is by disease, and yet a third by war.
I often say that the whole attack on DDT back in the 60’s was really just an attempt to increase disease and in particular death by malaria. This reduction in food productivity is targeting the starvation tool.
Maybe we should start by reducing the greens population and see how that works first. If someone tells you there are too many people on the planet, hand them a knife and say “Okay, let’s start with you”.
Blood and bone makes excellent fertiliser, if depopulation is needed, the greenies can be used to fertilise the fields,killing two birds with the one stone so to speak.
Greenie Pol Pot of the Sorbonne did that – the Killing fields.
Sent any edicated to the fields, no tech, emptied the cities.
Boy, the looney CAGW propaganda has been turned up to 11! Time to shoot back with a few home truths, or even better some Monty Python!
Oh if you insist.
200 million Alipay customers signed up to perform green good deeds in exchange for tree planting tokens… They reached a couple million trees already and have a new goal of half a trillion.
200 million customers have raised the money to plant 2 million tress. So the new goal is half a trillion. That’s like 250 thousand times what they have done so far. Either they need 50,000 trillion people signed up to plant 1/2 trillion trees. or each person will have to spend 250,000 times as much, or some combination of the two.
Someone check my math that’s too many zeros to be tracking this time of night.
Hello? Hello? Mr Alipay customer? Yes, you spent 1,000 last year through us to help plant trees. We’ve got a new goal and you’ll need to spend 250,000,000 this year. We’d ask you to sign up 250,000 of your friends instead, but we just figured out that across our customer base that a few orders of magnitude more friends than there are people on this planet, so we’re going ask you to increase spending instead. Hello? Hello? Dial Dial Dial… Hello, it is Alipay here again, why’d you hang up? Hello? Hello?
Can barely mock this drivel anymore.
Just to add to the absurdity, I wondered how many trees there are in the world. First article up on Google cites a 2015 study claiming that there are 3 trillion trees in the world, much larger than the previous estimate which was only 400 billion.
The headline…? Well, apparently despite there being about 8 times as many trees in the world as previously thought, they are disappearing fast because climate change. I sh*t you not.
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/how-many-trees-are-there-on-earth-10483553.html
This is probably successful due to the Chinese “social credit” system.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
People are buying indulgences.
For those interested in the factors involved in growing wheat, there is an experiment at Rothamsted Research Station that has been ongoing since 1843/4 where wheat has been grown continuously in the same field.
http://www.era.rothamsted.ac.uk/Broadband
I remember at the 150th anniversary of the experiment on a visit to the field being told that the wheat yield from the no fertiliser plot was the same as the average world wheat yield!
Yet now in the UK yields of 10,000 kg per hectare are not uncommon.
Weed control and fungicides alongside new varieties that respond to higher nitrogen levels have been mainly responsible, with insect pests less of a problem.
Other major nutrients such as phosphorus and potassium need to be replaced owing to the higher removal in higher crop yields.
Sulphur has become essential as the air has become cleaner with the closure of many of the sulphur emitting industries. I can remember doing surveys of high sulphur demanding crops in the 1970s which showed adequate sulphur being deposited from the atmosphere.
Trace elements tend to be a problem associated with particular soil types, mainly magnesium, copper and manganese.
Trace elements
Perhaps we can invent a nitrogenous weed.
Stephen,
If you’re into soil science, Google glomalin. It was discovered in 1996 and has totally transformed soil science in the last 20 years.
Much like the discovery of atoms transformed chemistry 100+ years ago.
Here’s a couple USDA brochures on glomalin:
https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb1144429.pdf
https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/12650400/glomalin/brochure.pdf
A few seasons planting without chemical fertiliser depletes a field of nitrates. After depletion, without chemical fertiliser it takes years to regenerate a field back to its original potential, hence the old practice of leaving fields fallow for extended periods.
No. This may have been how it was in medieval England but it is not how it was in 1870 England. They had higher yields than in the Middle Ages by doing better farming. Crop rotation had been practised since at least the 18c, which is not leaving land fallow, but growing crops which return the nitrogen. They also practised mixed farming, which gave a source of milk, meat and fertilizer.
Its labour intensive. But there are not too alternatives, nitrates and pesticides on a grand scale, or medieval levels of productivity. There is a third, and you can still see it in England in a lot of farms.
Late 1800s England had access to Guano, a natural fertiliser which was rapidly depleted. That is why artificial nitrogen fixation was developed.
Around then some genius in Liverpool imported 80,000 cat mummies from Egypt for fertilizer only to find the market turned up its nose.
And another firm brought back bones from battlefield to be ground up for bonemeal.
The long term problem with soil nutrients is leakage, only partly replaced by the weathering of parent materials which mainly release potash.
Phosphorus will be a problem in the long term as there are limited sources of phosphate rock, and much of the phosphorus in our diet ends up in graveyards or flushed away.
Organic farming does try to improve the efficient return of nutrients to the soil, but having to use legumes as nitrogen fixers means that the rotations necessary restrict the number of arable crops that can be grown, and the amount of nitrogen fixed by legumes can be weather dependant as well as running the risk of nitrogen being leached by heavy rainfall before planting a crop. With ‘bag nitrogen’ the quantity and timing of application can be matched to the requirement and growth stage of the crop. Nitrogen fertilizer is too expensive to throw about will-nilly.
Incidentally, about 10 kg per hectare of nitrogen is fixed by thunderstorms. This nitrogen this applied over thousands of years to the American prairies was cashed in by the sod-busters ploughing up the original grassland over a relatively short time.
Stephen, I wish nitrogen was to expensive, than we would not have all the nitrate in our ground water. Nitrogen is fixed as needed and therefore there is no leaching of nitrate. Since that nitrogen is bound in the plant, it will be slowly released as that plant material breaks down in the soil. As long as there is no follow time, as long as there is a plant to absorb the nitrogen as it is being made available, there will be no leaching. On the other hand, commercial nitrogen is applied in excess of plants need at the time. This nitrogen is very soluble and since no one needs it at the time, the rain leaches this nitrogen from the soil. Also, if the ground is saturated and goes anaerobic, bacteria’s will use the oxygen from the nitrate and release nitrogen gas. Another waste of our resources in the name of higher yields.
Point remains.
Crop rotation AND mixed farming – sheep and cows. The choice is not between perpetual monculture with nitrates or medieval productivity. There is something in between. There was an English farming revolution before guano, in the 18c. It consisted in crop rotation and mixed farming.
Its labor intensive, and its not as productive as monculture. But it works, and its better than medieval.
“ … Average yields of grain crops in England from 1250 to 1450 were 7 to 15 bushels per acre. (470 to 1000 kg per ha.) Poor years, however, might see yields drop to less than 4 bushels per acre. Yields in the 21st century, by contrast, can range upwards to 60 bushels per acre. The yields in England were probably typical for Europe in the Middle Ages. … ”
I’ve not heard the word “bushel” used since I was a boy, and I had no real idea what a bushel was then either. I’m betting most don’t know. It’s kind of imprecise. I was told as a boy that a ‘tea-chest’, of tea leaves, a sort of thin plywood box held together with tin and tacks at its corners, was equal to “one bushel of tea”. If it fit inside the box, that was a ‘bushel’.
So, to remove all confusion:
“ … A bushel (abbreviation: bsh. or bu.) is an imperial and US customary unit of weight or mass based upon an earlier measure of dry capacity. The old bushel was equal to 2 kennings (obsolete), 4 pecks or 8 dry gallons and was used mostly for agricultural products such as wheat. In modern usage, the volume is nominal, with bushels denoting a mass defined differently for each commodity. The name “bushel” is also used to translate similar units in other measurement systems.
1 imperial bushel
= 8 imperial gallons
= 4 imperial pecks
= 36.36872 litres
≈ 8.2565 US dry gallons
≈ 9.6076 US fluid gallons
≈ 2219.36 cubic inches
1 US bushel
= 8 US dry gallons
= 4 US pecks
= 2150.42 cubic inches
≈ 9.3092 US fluid gallons
≈ 35.2391 litres
≈ 7.7515 imperial gallons
Bushels are now most often used as units of mass or weight rather than of volume. The bushels in which grains are bought and sold on commodity markets or at local grain elevators, and for reports of grain production, are all units of weight.[4] This is done by assigning a standard weight to each commodity that is to be measured in bushels. These bushels depend on the commodities being measured, and on the moisture content of the commodity. Some of the more common ones are:
Oats:
US: 32 lb[4] (14.5150 kg)
Canada: 34 lb[5] (15.4221 kg)
Barley: 48 lb[4] (21.7724 kg)
Malted barley: 34 lb (15.4221 kg)
Shelled maize (corn) at 15.5% moisture by weight: 56 lb[4] (25.4012 kg)
Wheat at 13.5% moisture by weight: 60 lb[4] (27.2155 kg)
Soybeans at 13% moisture by weight: 60 lb[6] (27.2 kg) … ”
—
Why we use metric.
For most grains, US farmers still use bushels. Some crop yields are however measured in US tons per acre. For wheat, a ton is about 33 bu.
In my county, wheat yields vary from 20 to 120 bu/A. But dryland farms typically summer fallow, ie alternating a crop with nothing the next year, to conserve moisture, or alternating wheat with a N-fixing legume, although the market for peas has been in the tank for decades.
Not heard of a US dry gallon before!!
My farm manager neighbour (UK) reckons you never get the yields with fertiliser you get from land out of decades of fallow. But it only lasts a couple of years.
Organic mixed farming is all very well, but it can’t beat chemical agriculture on yields. You only need to look at the rise in population since it was introduced.
And you only need to look at per worker productivity since mecahnical farming was introduced. One manm and a tractor/combine can till/harvest a thousand acres or more.
In order to feed the green drivelling ignorant urban populations of leftys, it takes a very intense amount of farming.
Which they object to.
Sometimes Id like to make my county independent, and start charging London for its food, water, electricity, sewage disposal, at rates that would make us stinking rich and them as poor as their absoluet idiocy and lack of productivity deserves.
The goal of 21st century organic farming is to maintain soil health permanently that is similar to the land laying fallow for years.
But, you get to grow crops on it without any fallow period.
The first to starve would be the blacks in third world Africa who get our excess grain as foreign aid to keep their people alive. It would initiate mass genocide of sub-Saharan African black populations to the tune of tens of millions.
Wrong, China is busy there. Africa , today with only 98,000 tractors for the entire continent (2 million in Germany) will be a breadbasket with its own food production. Refilling Chad from the Congo – the Transaqus Project has got a MOU, after 30 years delay.
We flush away tons of useful nitrates in the form of urea every day… urine be recycled…
Recycling human waste is dangerous – difficult to eliminate the pathogens.
Effluent from the City of London has the highest cocaine content in the world. Not sure what that would do for the pathogens….
Eric,
One could try gamma irradiation to sterilize it. Another possibility would be to burn the methane produced from the sewage water digesters to evaporate the some of the water and produce distilled water along with a solid residue for fertilizer.
Legacy Carbon! Wow! Where can I order my piece. I’d like a nice cube of Legacy Carbon about 6 inches square to put on my mantle piece so I can show visitors I’m saving the planet too by keeping it safe. Perhaps it could come signed by Al Gore in a nice grey black colour shade.
Your mind has to have a concept model of farm plants resembling machinery that converts some chemicals called nutrients into others called food. The name of the game is to minimise the cost of nutrients while you maximise the yield of food, with the natural available inputs of CO2, some SO2, water and sunlight as continuing, though limited, inputs.
The optimum settings, particularly for trace elements, can be hard to discover and they will change from year to year and change a great deal from crop to crop. There are all sorts of second-order effects like where the amount of molybdenum needed is affected by the amount of calcium present and both interact with the pH of the soil. Time can be a factor, such as the rusting of iron nutrients and attempts to make ferrous iron more available by chelating chemicals that can resist oxidation.
This second paragraph means that the optimum result requires on-going research and intensive management. Simply adding a large excess of a nutrient to last a few years can lead immediately to reduced yield, a poisoned outcome. And run-off losses.
Adding nutrients in a form made from grown plants, like a compost, has no possibility of survival. All you are doing is taking nutrients from where the compost crop is grown and shifting them to another location for depletion. So you have 2 areas to manage against depletion, not one, and a larger freight bill.
Fortunately, planet Earth has known locations where nutrients like phosphate and potash are naturally enriched and can be mined. This mining is essentially redistributing needed chemicals from a high-concentration source to a lower one. Nothing to get emotional about, just common sense.
The notion that the world of people can survive if we stop adding nutrients is simply dangerous, childish babble. It has no value worth considering. End of this story. Geoff
Your mind has to have a concept model of farm plants resembling machinery that converts some chemicals called nutrients into others called food. The name of the game is to minimise the cost of nutrients while you maximise the yield of food, with the natural available inputs of CO2, some SO2, water and sunlight as continuing, though limited, inputs.
The optimum settings, particularly for trace elements, can be hard to discover and they will change from year to year and change a great deal from crop to crop. There are all sorts of second-order effects like where the amount of molybdenum needed is affected by the amount of calcium present and both interact with the pH of the soil. Time can be a factor, such as the rusting of iron nutrients and attempts to make ferrous iron more available by chelating chemicals that can resist oxidation.
This second paragraph means that the optimum result requires on-going research and intensive management. Simply adding a large excess of a nutrient to last a few years can lead immediately to reduced yield, a poisoned outcome. And run-off losses.
Adding nutrients in a form made from grown plants, like a compost, has no possibility of survival. All you are doing is taking nutrients from where the compost crop is grown and shifting them to another location for depletion. So you have 2 areas to manage against depletion, not one, and a larger freight bill.
Fortunately, planet Earth has known locations where nutrients like phosphate and potash are naturally enriched and can be mined. This mining is essentially redistributing needed chemicals from a high-concentration source to a lower one. Nothing to get emotional about, just common sense.
The notion that the world of people can survive if we stop adding nutrients is simply dangerous, childish babble. It has no value worth considering. End of this story. Geoff
unless youre taking waste material that would be burnt or buried then you dont IMport compost material
you USE every skerrick from your own land
ie removing thistles and taking them to the tip is lunacy
they bring up calcium from deep down to the surface
either mowing them in and not using a cather or dig them out and compost them down
best option os allow an animal to eat gain benefit and proces it right back to the soil
it also feeds the biota that break down minerals from rocks etc as a bonus
have you ever watched Joel Salatins vid clips?
maybe you should.
“….200 million Alipay customers signed up to perform green good deeds in exchange for tree planting tokens, demonstrating a pent-up demand from the public to respond directly to the current crisis. Each person can accumulate enough positive credits to get a virtual “tree” — and for each of these, Alipay plants a real one.”
Games, games, games. Why doesn’t Alipay just plant the cotton pickin trees w/o needing “tokens”?