[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]

Re: The Limits To Growth



bds@ipp-garching.mpg.de (Bruce Scott TOK ) wrote:

>Mike Asher (masher@tusc.net) wrote:
>: As an aside, I will note that the majority of agricultural land in the
>: world is farmed with low-tech inefficient methods.  Expantion of the use of
>: modern agriculture, new species, and good infrastructure, can more than
>: double world food production.  All without an additional acre being farmed,
>: though, in the US at least, agricultural land usage has been on the decline
>: for many years.   Perhaps you have some statistics here?
>
>You are welcome to calculate the increase of the crude oil drawdown rate
>if the rest of the world farms the way the US does.

There is nothing here about the rest of the world farming "the way the
US does."  Feeding chemical fed corn to cattle is a singularly stupid
way of both using land and feeding people.
 
The major hindrances to the productivity of land are the lack of
potassium and of nitrogen.  The United States burned its eastern
forests to export potash to Europe, then conquered the Pacific to get
the islands it authorised itself to seize under the Guano ct of 1899.

Modern agriculture -- modern, not American, being Asher's keyword --
replaces these olde tyme moves with the simple strewing of phosphate
rock, available in vast quantities in Saskatchewan, Idaho, California,
Peru, and elsewhere.
 
In American agriculture the main source of nitrogen is ammonia, which
used to be made out of electricity, and is today made more cheaply
>from  natural gas.  This is not the only way of doing it. India and
China both built large populations on small land areas by planting
nitrogen fixing plants, lentils and soybeans, respectively. 

It will be a quick fix, literally, in Sudan once the civil war ends,
to alternate soybeans with millet on the Bor uplands.  This will mean
an immediate, cheap, and huge improvement of productivity; the
necessary survey work has already been done, by satellite, and is on
file on the Internet at University of Arizona.  My partner's family,
those who have not been murdered by the government, own some of the
land, and bide their time in universities in Europe, Canada, Botswana.

 
I think there is an automatic Nobel Prize in either chemistry of peace
for the person who comes up with the nitrogen-fixing grain, tuber, or
fruit tree.  As genetic engineering -- think of it as a new kind of
biodiversity -- proceeds, I expect these prizes to be claimed over the
next few years.
 
                                   -dlj.
 
                                  



Follow-Ups: References: