Subject: (none)
From: [email-masked] (Larry London)
Date: 19 May 1994 00:20:08 -0400
Newsgroups: alt.sustainable.agriculture

Path: bigblue.oit.unc.edu!concert!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!spool.mu.edu!news.clark.edu!netnews.nwnet.net!news.u.washington.edu!psaltery.chem.washington.edu!user
From: [email-masked] (Allyn Weaks)
Newsgroups: rec.gardens
Subject: Re: Articles About Killing Things
Followup-To: rec.gardens
Date: Mon, 16 May 1994 17:23:51 -0800
Organization: University of Washington
Lines: 36
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
References: <[email-masked]> <[email-masked]>
NNTP-Posting-Host: psaltery.chem.washington.edu

In article <[email-masked]>,
[email-masked] (Michael E. Matthews) wrote:

> Don't use Japan as as example of the wonders of organic
> gardening. Good or bad, they use lots of herbicides,
> pesticides, chemical fertilizers, machinery, new strains of
> rice, and havexD as long as anywhere else has.

Yes, they now mostly farm the western european way, but basically only
since World War II.  This includes not only chemicals, but heavy tillage,
and very large fields - no hedgerows to get in the way of tractors, but
therefore nothing to give habitat to birds and predatory insects to keep
down pests.  Small fields also help prevent wide spread crop disease.

> Ancient Japanese agriculture was not so productive. Most
> people never tasted rice, for example. They were required to
> grow it to pay as taxes, but could not afford to grow it for
> themselves. They barely subsisted.

Just because the serfs weren't allowed to eat the fruits of their labor
doesn't mean there weren't any.  Serfdom as a political system is unrelated
to the biology of agriculture.

The point is that in Japan and China there are plots of agricultural land
that have been in continuous intense production, supporting a fairly large
population, for at least a couple of thousand years with no reduction of
fertility.  That land is now beginning to rapidly lose that fertility since
the introduction of western farming techniques after WWII.  The modern
techniques do give a short term payoff - high productivity (but not
necessarily higher) with much less hand labor.  But as we are beginning to
discover, the price is also very high: loss of topsoil and fertility,
contamination of the water table and loss of genetic diversity in the crops
(hybrids now rule).
-- 
Allyn Weaks
[email-masked]