Watched "Food Inc" today, its US based and a nasty peak inside thier corporate controlled food industry
Source
Interesting to see some of the big corporations getting into the organic industry as well
As discussed before, besides the GM crops grown in the US, agricultural practices over there and in Australia would be almost identical.
I haven't watched food inc, but one thing that seems to come up in the article in the link was how unsustainable agriculture is now under a high yield, high input, oil based system.
This photo of the dust bowl years of the US was from a drought in the 1930's.
The soil fertility was gone. The soil was mined of it's nutrients, and the nutrients left the farms as grain and food in trucks and trains. Chemical fertilizers had only just been invented. No herbicides ment ploughing the ground was the only weed control method available, so the soil was ploughed and ploughed until it was a fine powder. Then drought hit, and the wind blew it all away. Google "US Dust Bowl".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
The US has now been hit by another drought.
http://www.abc.net.au/rural/news/content/201207/s3557045.htm
I'd calculate that 90 million tonnes of corn alone has been wiped out, or twice Australia's total grain harvest. Soybeans, which are planted later than corn, are now being hammered, and the yields of soybeans are now crashing too. Grain prices have risen 50% globally in 6 weeks, Yet yields will still be high, despite no rain in the grain fill. Yields will still be double or triple that of 80 years ago in a normal season. The soil is more fertile now than ever, and it is covered in a layer of mulch, as it is not ploughed anymore, but sprayed with herbicides. There will be no dust storms in the US this year.
For me, it's like I've won lotto, but thats another story.
The organic food industry still depends on the nutrients spewed out by high yield, oil based agriculture. As I explained in this post,
http://somersoft.com/forums/showpost.php?p=767366&postcount=125
Magic bullet, bragging about his staw bale garden and somehow thinking it was the organic answer to food production. It's hilarious!!. The straw bales were made from straw imported from a grain farm. The compost that he put in the straw beds was made from animal manure, animals fed grain, and then even more straw, all mixed together in an energy intensive, machinery intensive process, all these inputs from a conventional grain farm. This conventional farmer who exported all this stuff from his farm now has no straw there to protect his soil, and will now have to replace the nutrients removed, so will order in more fertilizer.
If todays agriculture is really unsustainable, I don't know why everyone on here is talking about buying houses. If it's unsustainable, you would go and buy some arable dirt, because that is where the profit will be when everything crashes and burns. Plus some guns and ammo, and build a bunker. And when conventional agricuture crashes, so will organic, because it won't get anymore straw and manure and compost from conventional farms, from the billion tonnes of grain that is fed to animals.
Agriculture today is not unsustainable. Yields are still rising, although platueing out, as there is not much else left to do to increase them higher. Soil erosion is now under control, as the soil is fertile and covered in mulch. Nutrients are now replaced at the same rate as removal. If agriculture is really unsustainable, then so is about 5 billion people! If you really analyse organic agriculture, and follow the inputs it uses, and where they come from it is all so obvious.
The blokes who made that movie should take some time to explain how the world would be fed, without all this nasty fertilizer and chemical farmers use. And if it was not used, farmers would be the only winners, as food production crashed.
See ya's.
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