Re: 100 Pounds of Food/Year From a 12 Square Foot Plot?

In article <4lqb149h04a2ufuvqu4c7174m9gr4v159b@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
 Rick <no@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> As the referenced articles point out, this is a labor intensive way of
> producing food.  I come from a part of America where that type of
practice was
> still common in my chidhood.  Know, however, 95%+ of the population is
not
> dedicated to sunsistence farming, but rather lives in urban
environments.  One
> real big change is this chamge in demographics, which makes locally
produced
> food (some organically grown) much scarcer in most places here.

I didn't see any reference in the article to organic farming being more 
labor intensive. Perhaps it is with weeding, but then it is a trade-off 
between paying for poison to pour on the ground or having healthy food.

Since I seem to be ripping-off authors today let's take another look at 
"Omnivore's Dilemma".

Corn adapted brilliantly; to the new industrial regime, consuming
prodigious quantities of fossil fuel energy and turning out ever more
prodigious quantities of food energy. More than half of all the synthetic
nitrogen made today is applied to corn, whose hybrid strains can make
better use of it than any other plant. Growing corn, which from a bio-
logical perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to
turn it into food, has in no small measure become a process of convert-
ing fossil fuels into food. This ****ft explains the color of the land: 
The reason Greene County is no longer green for half the year is because 
the farmer who can buy synthetic fertility no longer needs cover crops 
to capture a whole year's worth of sunlight; he has plugged himself into 
a new source of energy. When you add together the natural gas in the 
fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive 
the tractors, and harvest, dry, and trans****t the corn, you find that 
every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a 
quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it--or around fifty 
gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put 
another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to 
produce a'calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer the 
Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every 
calorie of energy invested. From the standpoint of industrial 
efficiency, it's too bad we can't simply drink the petroleum directly.
-------

People moved off the land, peoples can move back. In part, this was due 
to the idea that economies of scale required that a farmer only grow one 
crop and then sell that crop to a middle man. The new (old) paradigm is 
to grow multiple crops and sell directly to the consumer. In this 
manner, the family farmer who lives near an urban center may have a 
chance. Otherwise, we should return to the old system of crop 
guarantees, where the government sup****ted the price of a commodity by 
loaning the value of the crop to the farmer. If he couldn't sell it, he 
kept the money and the government kept the crop, which was used to feed 
the hungry of this country.

As far as the scarcity of organic crops, it is the fastest growing 
segment of food production. As people know more about the food they eat 
and how it is being produced, they are asking for better.
-- 

Billy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KVTfcAyYGg&ref=patrick.net
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=7WBB0svwMdY&feature=related