So, we all know about the problems with the sustainability of farming methods... we've discussed lots of them on this forum before. Insane & unsustainable methods of fossil fuels, monoculture causing pest problems causing overuse of pesticides causing bees to die, synthetic fertilisers, and a farming industry that can't even turn a profit and has to be subsidised by government. Even organic farming using traditional methods faces a lot of problems.

(if this bit is TLDR, just skip to the videos).
Lately, i've been doing practical volunteering in woodland, and learning about how the environment is managed to support biodiversity. I've also planted trees a couple of times on a (relatively new) organic farm. It's really not difficult to notice a massive difference in the soil between woodland and farmland... it's really totally different, despite the fact that the two places aren't very far away from each other.

Another thing is the type of work is very different. With woodland, a lot of the work involves clearing away things to let other other things grow. Say, if you want to create heathland, you need to pull up saplings. And when you have heathland, you can just shove some cows, sheep, or horses on there and they'll basically do the management for you. They aren't in the way, burning fossil fuels, or only there for your milk and beef, they actually serve an important purpose on the landscape.

So, i was looking into various sustainable farming methods, and it seems that if you create a lot of biodiverity, while managing the land to produce a variety of useful crops, you can actually create a woodland-like system for farming. No tilling the land, no use of pesticides, you actually use the wildlife and insects to create a self sustaining system. (well, you still need to manage it, but you get what i mean).

The only problem is, i can't find any scientific studies on this type of thing showing how much can be produced this way. But still, it's some hope!!!

Here's some stuff on it, if you're interested:

* (In Japanese)

福岡正信の「何もしない」自然農法.

* Greening the desert:

Some guy makes stuff grow like this in the deserts of Jordan.

* A farm for the future: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/farm-for-the-future/
-BBC program in English, a bit slow but very good.

* Farming with nature:

If anyone knows any really good scientific studies on this kind of thing, i'd like to hear them!! But, it does sound hopeful... farming, without the huge problems, but also without going back to incredibly hard labour either.

not to start a flamewar or anything, but one of the best things we could all do for the environment is just going vegetarian. It's way more efficient.

what would happen to all the people involved in the meat trade? if everyone became vegetarian overnight it would have a massive effect on the world.

nadiatims Wrote:not to start a flamewar or anything, but one of the best things we could all do for the environment is just going vegetarian. It's way more efficient.

more efficient in what way, though?

Like i said, farm animals actually provide a beneficial purpose on some types of land. They do the jobs much more efficiently than weedkillers do, for example. And if they are farmed in a way that requires no petrol, their efficiency overall is going to come way up.

But yeah, in general, we do need to cut way down on it. If we only had large animals where they were necessary to keep the ecosystem running, we'd still have to eat a lot less than we do now.

The other problem with these methods are that they are still a lot more labour intensive than monoculture in terms of harvesting. So even if the yield is good, and the petrol and water costs low, there is still the human cost to factor back in. I wonder how it weighs up really, though.

nadiatims Wrote:not to start a flamewar or anything, but one of the best things we could all do for the environment is just going vegetarian. It's way more efficient.

That's true, but completely unrealistic. A practical solution to the future food problem must involve realistic systems and goals.

HonyakuJoshua Wrote:what would happen to all the people involved in the meat trade? if everyone became vegetarian overnight it would have a massive effect on the world.

What you say is true, but irrelevant. The world will not become vegetarian overnight, or ever. If there are any significant increases in vegetarianism, they will be gradual, and displaced workers will retrain or the next generation choosing careers will work in other areas. Even if there were a sudden massive rise in vegetarianism, the net benefit of improvements in food yield would outweigh the redundancy of people in the meat trade.

IceCream Wrote:more efficient in what way, though? [...] farm animals actually provide a beneficial purpose on some types of land. They do the jobs much more efficiently than weedkillers do, for example.

More efficient in that a large proportion of the arable land in the world is currently used to grow feedstocks for animals, and another large proportion is used directly for grazing animals. Generally meat production has about a 10% trophic efficiency, meaning that for every 1000kCal of meat, you input about 10,000kCal of plant material, and for every hectare of meat-producing land, another 10 hectares of land are required to produce extra food for those animals. It wont happen, but if the world were vegetarian, we would easily have enough land to feed a population three times the projected maximum that the human population will ever reach. That's a much greater efficiency than could be achieved by any other alteration to our food production that has ever been proposed.

I don't have time to do the literature review now (I'll come back and do it later), but in general IceCream, forest farming is a very niche solution, and not to the problem you are thinking of. Where forest farming will be useful is in that it can make use of non-arable land, such as steep, forested valley walls. Farming at the scale required to feed the world is not efficient with many small farms; economies of scale are what allow the world to be fed the degree it is today. All the serious work (imho) on meeting future food needs is to do with improving the productivity of major crops. There is a deeply ingrained and complex worldwide infrastructure which is close to optimised for deriving excellent human nutrition from a very small proportion of plant species, and that relies at the base on being able to produce those plants at an incredibly large scale, and automatically (or as close as we can get to it). Forest farming is almost the opposite of that - it's always limited to small scale and it removes the ability to automate.

I also think some of the things you've asserted as problems at the start of the post are not necessarily problems (pesticides, fertilizers) or have economic causes unrelated to the productivity of farming (farmers not turning a profit in some countries).

There are major environmental issues to be addressed with large-scale agriculture, but I am increasingly convinced that those will involve supplementary or technological additions to or adaptations of large-scale agriculture, not moving to a different form of agriculture. Whatever the solution, it has to be applicable on a massive scale, managed primarily by machines, and will involve somehow making conditions homogeneous.

One slightly frustrating aspect of trying to find out more about this kind of thing is that it is completely ignored by agricultural scientists who dismiss it out of hand. It would be great to be able to find good studies. Most information is coming from environmentalist groups who are terrible sources of information, and is based on faulty theorising and wishful thinking. My sense is that the drive for solutions like this is coming from groups with what they think is an a priori dislike of large scale farming - an attitude which pales into irrelevance in the face of global hunger.

Blahah Wrote:

IceCream Wrote:more efficient in what way, though? [...] farm animals actually provide a beneficial purpose on some types of land. They do the jobs much more efficiently than weedkillers do, for example.

More efficient in that a large proportion of the arable land in the world is currently used to grow feedstocks for animals, and another large proportion is used directly for grazing animals. Generally meat production has about a 10% trophic efficiency, meaning that for every 1000kCal of meat, you input about 10,000kCal of plant material, and for every hectare of meat-producing land, another 10 hectares of land are required to produce extra food for those animals. It wont happen, but if the world were vegetarian, we would easily have enough land to feed a population three times the projected maximum that the human population will ever reach. That's a much greater efficiency than could be achieved by any other alteration to our food production that has ever been proposed.

But what about if you compare the efficiency of entirely non oil produced meat of various types to crops produced with oil? What are the numbers like then? I'm imagining that even with crops, producing with fertilisers and machines, there's going to be a loss of more than 10% with current methods. Is that right?

Of course, if you can produce crops without oil, that's even better. But the harvesting of those crops, like you said, is difficult or labour intensive without machinary, whereas you potentially can farm animals more easily without machinary.

Then you also have the added benefits animals can provide in maintaining certain types of land and their ecosystems to factor in, and the health of the countryside in general. Because, if they were providing a useful function by keeping weeds down on the type of land that we want to preserve for other reasons to start with, the trophic inefficiency is relatively unimportant. In fact, this is already going on... farmers and national parks co-operate to do this, and no money changes hands because they both benefit.

Blahah Wrote:I don't have time to do the literature review now (I'll come back and do it later), but in general IceCream, forest farming is a very niche solution, and not to the problem you are thinking of.

Right, but one of the interesting things, i thought, was that it doesn't have to be forest farming. You can apply similar ideas in other areas of farming, in order to produce better, less oil consuming results. One of the examples in the BBC documentary, was that just by preserving biodiversity of grass in fields and not tilling the soil, you can produce strong hardy grass, meaning that cattle don't have to be brought inside in winter, and you can cut out a bunch of fuel costs. Another example was the double cropping and spreading the straw in the 福岡正信 video, which meant that they didn't have to keep the rice under water all summer, and didn't have to fertilise or spray pesticides, and still came out with better yields than their next door neighbour. (that bit was in the english video linked from the japanese version).

Blahah Wrote:I also think some of the things you've asserted as problems at the start of the post are not necessarily problems (pesticides, fertilizers) or have economic causes unrelated to the productivity of farming (farmers not turning a profit in some countries).

Well, it depends. Pesticides will always cost money, even if they do eliminate the dangers to helpful species like bees. I watched another Japanese program where they introduced frogs to paddy fields rather than using pesticides (they even built little walkways for them, it was cute ), so wherever a more natural way of keeping down pests is possible, it would be more cost efficient, wouldn't it?

Fertiliser is only a problem in so far as it requires oil, as far as i know. But it seems like there are problems with tilling the land, which makes it require fertiliser in the first place. I thought the footage from the 80s of the "bird feast" after tilling compared with the dead emptiness of today after so many years of heavy machinary tilling (in the BBC documentary) was quite striking. And it obviously reduces work and money if you don't need to do that. Perhaps there would be an automated way to mulch instead, for example...?

Of course, engineering also has a huge role to play in producing hardier and higher yielding plants as well though. Incorporating both could possibly give even stronger results. I'm not against large scale farming per se, but i just find the idea that you could incorporate methods from other forms of environmental management and potentially eliminate fuel costs quite interesting!! But yeah, some of the people doing this are just hippies spouting nonsense about "the balance of nature", and against scientific evidence for stuff which makes me wanna roll my eyes and puke a little.

I'm interested to hear your response about this kind of thing, since you know a hell of a lot more about this subject than i do...

HonyakuJoshua Wrote:what would happen to all the people involved in the meat trade? if everyone became vegetarian overnight it would have a massive effect on the world.

if we all stopped shooting heroin, what would happen to all the poppy farmers?

Icecream Wrote:Like i said, farm animals actually provide a beneficial purpose on some types of land. They do the jobs much more efficiently than weedkillers do, for example. And if they are farmed in a way that requires no petrol, their efficiency overall is going to come way up.

Yeah but you don't have to kill and eat them. That just means they'll require more resources to replace themselves, as their death rate will increase. In theory you could eat them after they die, but I think that would just be robbing the soil of nutrients.

Eating animals makes sense if you live in the sahara or Tibet or the arctic circle or something, or if your harvests fail.

Hasn't anyone here ever heard of the man who saved a billion lives?

stehr Wrote:Hasn't anyone here ever heard of the man who saved a billion lives?

Norman Borlaug?

wow, he's great!!!

ok, i've read more, watched more videos, asked more questions when i was volunteering today, and i think while looking at the whole system is still important, yeah, it's not really going to be enough.

These ideas are probably more helpful for small scale things, not feeding the world, though of course there's still stuff to take from it.

Also, i was wrong about the soil. Just cos it's nice to dig doesn't make it nice to grow lol... apparently it's quite acidic, which is good for growing some stuff but not others.

soooo, i should learn more ^_^

oh, i was watching this this though:

a little bit unrelated, but interesting. I wonder if they'll eventually be able to sort of engineer better, more disease resistant soil for crops using different microbes and stuff then?? That would be a nice complement to engineering better crops, wouldn't it? (or do they do that too already??)

You might be interested in these articles:
http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/