Quote:
Originally Posted by sendler
This is the only method that has allowed the world population to explode to 7.5 Billion and have enough food. The same statements are made regarding fossil fuel use. "We need to just stop burning fossil fuel". Again, we can't. Fossil fuel props up all of that super agriculture, and everything else we need, to sustain the population that we have. It's not a matter of choice. The only hope for 9 Billion people in 2050 is that we could somehow replace all liquid fuel with electric before the oil becomes too remote to make sense economically. But we will fall well short. And there will be a Great Simplification.
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I think we don't know that - fossil fuels have let us reduce the number of farmers - but since we can grow enough food on the land we have, I think we can grow enough in smaller farms. The Amish farm sustainably, and they are MORE efficient in terms of productivity.
My main point is - what we are doing now WILL FAIL. We are RUINING the soil, and it is eroding away rapidly. AND we are using deep aquifers - this is also unsustainable.
We CANNOT continue to use factory farming methods - for several reasons. The system is GOING to fail - we just don't know what will be the first thing to fail.
There is a group called the Land Institute in Kansas that has written a
50 Year plan for food. It involves a lot of changes - perennials for most things. They have come up with a perennial wheat, called Kernza. Look up their plan if you are curious.
I like the quote from Wendell Berry:
"Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm - which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems."