ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

In the 1960s, faced with ideological competition from the USSR and China and the prospect of starving millions, a loose coalition of scientists, government officials and philanthropists launched a “Green Revolution” in India.

Back then, “green” didn’t mean organic – far from it. It meant growing crops the modern, American way. It meant abandoning traditional food crops such as grains, beans and vegetables in favor of cash crops from high-yield hybrid seeds rather than heritage seeds saved from the farmers’ last harvest. It meant abandoning traditional methods and using tractors instead of oxen and chemical fertilizers instead of cow dung. It meant abandoning reliance on rainwater – the new crops were thirsty, and that thirst was satisfied by tapping virgin aquifers with electric irrigation pumps. The “green revolution” was intended to turn farmers’ fields lush green with crops and farmers’ pockets green with cash.

Today, the Green Revolution is collapsing. The water that supports the “modern” system of agriculture is disappearing as the water table is dropping dramatically, as much as three feet each year. Farmers have had to deepen their wells every few years, first from 10 feet to 20 feet, then to 40 feet, now to more than 200 feet — and water table keeps dropping below their reach. G. S. Kalkat, Director of the Punjab State Farmers Commission, warns the heartland of India’s agriculture could be barren in 10 to 15 years.

As the farmers dig deeper to find groundwater, they have to install ever more powerful – and more expensive – pumps. Farmers are often already deeply in debt and can’t get loans for the pumps from banks, so are forced to turn to borrow money from “unofficial” lenders at usurious rates.

The intensive farming methods are also destroying the soil. The high-yield crops suck up nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous, iron and manganese, exhausting the soil. Farmers now must use three times as much fertilizer as before, to produce the same amount of crops.

And then there’s the salt. The irrigation waters leave a salt residue, and the accumulating salt is now poisoning the crops.

The “green revolution” that seemed to work miracles is now proving to lead to financial disaster for area farmers. The old style of farming didn’t need cash. The modern system relies on cash at every stage: cash for seeds, cash for fertilizers, cash for tractors and tractor fuel & maintenance, cash for well drilling & irrigation pumps, cash for the electricity to power the pumps. And cash for all of the material things that have made farmers appear prosperous. A study by the Punjab State Council for Science and Technology calls it a “vicious cycle of debt.”

Kalkat says Punjab’s farmers are committing ecological and economic suicide – suicide that has been prompted through national and international policies that encourage farmers to destroy the environment and trap themselves in debt.

UPDATE: 1,500 FARMERS IN INDIA COMMIT SUICIDE

Over 1,500 farmers in an Indian state committed suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure, it was reported today. The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels. ”The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago,” Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine.

“Most of the farmers here are indebted and only God can save the ones who do not have a bore well.” Mr. Sahu lives in a district that recorded 206 farmer suicides last year. Police records for the district add that many deaths occur due to debt and economic distress.

This is a guest post by John Gear.

A friend recently posed this question:

So maybe using food crops to produce ethanol or biodiesel isn’t such a good idea. What about using grass clippings and other “yard debris” currently trucked to landfills? What about using “crop residue” not used for food? Doesn’t that change the equation?

There’s a seminal article by Alice Friedemann titled Peak Soil: Why cellulosic ethanol, biofuels are unsustainable and a threat to America that answers that question. It is one of the more important articles available on the internet.

Here’s the supercondensed summary:

Just like operating factories need a constant flow of raw material inputs (roughly the same as their productive output + any wastes disposed of externally), soils need constant replenishment in roughly the same mass as is being removed as a crop, plus more because of the time lag for biologic availability (the time needed for materials to break down and be consumed by the microflora and microfauna that form the base of the food web in productive, living soil).

Of course, we should never be trucking clippings and yard debris anywhere – it’s needed where it is, and we’re wasting energy twice by removing the organic matter and then bringing back replacement matter to make up for the removal.

Similarly, there are no “crop residues” that can be safely removed from land intended for steady farming.  Just by taking a crop off the land you are already putting the soil in deficit, which is why you cannot maintain soil vitality without fallow periods and some kind of fertility treatments, such as manures.  The more concentrated and fast-growing the crop, the more the crop consumes the soil, and the more replenishment is needed.

If you remove what you call “residue,” you are simply adding another crop being taken from the same soil at the same time, which means you have to add even more inputs back into it, or exhaust it that much faster.  Mining soil “residues” is simply a way to burn a candle at both ends — it burns brighter, for a much shorter time.

The issue with all agrocrops is not the nature of the feedstock, which is essentially irrelevant. The issue is land, topsoil, water, fertilizers, and energy gain.

High quality land suitable for agriculture is very limited. Agrofuel backers talk about using “marginal land” now that people realize that using cultivated land to grow fuel for cars means that fuel for people has to be grown elsewhere — in other words, you push people into using marginal land or, worse (and this is what actually happens), into converting rainforest to cropland. But you cannot make money trying to crop marginal land, that’s why it’s marginal land. The only way it works is if food and energy prices climb enough to make the expense of cropping marginal land pay off.

This is why all agrofuels end up with a negative effect on climate — the huge amount of greenhouse gases released through land use changes negates any small gains in annual greenhouse emissions (compared to petroleum) from use of agrocrops for decades. We cannot invent a way to make more land, and all techniques for getting more yield from land involve MORE energy inputs, not less. In other words, chasing our tails faster . . .

As for the climate impact, needless to say, we don’t have decades. We have months in which to respond meaningfully — maybe 100 months. Quite possibly less. Releasing massive quantities of greenhouse gases now (that remain in the atmosphere for many decades) for the possibility of a slight annual reductions later is suicide. You cannot both have an uncultivated crop and a cultivated crop.

Agrofuel boosters like to talk about using “weeds” Except that “weeds” is a non-biological label. There are no weeds. There are simply desirable plants and undesirable plants. As soon as you intend to cultivate a weed, you just turned it into a crop. Whether switchgrass or corn (for ethanol) or soy, camelina, palm, or canola (for biodiesel), agricultural use to make motor fuel means intensive cultivation, which means mining the topsoil, removing the nutrients much faster than they can be replaced and destroying the web of microorganisms that make dirt into soil.

Agrofuels are intensive water users. Fresh water is already limited, even in the rainy northwest. We cannot afford to put more fresh water into the service of autos than we already do. As our climate destabilizes further, we are going to see more and more droughts (we already are) intermingled with severe flooding bouts. We cannot afford to use our tiny reserves of fresh water as motor fuel.

Fertilizers and energy gain are really the same issue, since 99% of our fertilizers are derived from natural gas. Many have defined modern agriculture as “the use of land to turn fossil fuels into food” — but at least humans get food from it! If we start cultivating agrofuel crops, then we’ll have modified the saying into “The use of land to turn fossil fuels into fuel for cars, while pushing food crops onto marginal land and starving great numbers of the world’s poorest people through food price hikes (as food prices and energy prices are linked through the gas tanks of our cars).”

As the saying goes, let’s live on the planet as if we intend to stay.  That means taking care of our soil, first and foremost.

This piece by Gristmill’s Tom Philpott, reporting on a presentation by Vandana Shiva at an international “slow food” conference in Terra Madre, Italy, shouldn’t be missed.

Shiva’s message was that the “solutions” to global warming put forth so far are nothing but desperate attempts to rejigger industrial economies, to make them “carbon-free.”

Philpott reports:

“She said climate treaties and discussions take place in the stratosphere – in congressional committees, exclusive global confabs peopled by CEOs of vast business empires, etc. She said these people operate under an industrial paradigm, and the solutions they concoct to climate change – cap-and-trade mechanisms, GMO seeds, etc. – mimic and don’t challenge that paradigm. But in the end, these attempts get nowhere. Real reform, Shiva insisted, will happen when discussions move from the stratosphere to the soil, and when we find new, non-industrial ways of thinking.”

Philpott contrasts Shiva’s position with that of our most “progressive” thinkers:

“Where Gore dreams of a “low-carbon” or even “carbon-free” world, Shiva pines for a “carbon-rich” future — one in which agriculture systematically builds organic matter into the soil, capturing it from the atmosphere.”

Shiva pointed out that small-scale agriculture is actually more productive than industrial agriculture.

“Shiva forcefully made the point that mixed-crop agriculture that relies on compost is actually many times more productive on a per-acre basis than industrial monoculture. She also noted that locally adapted agriculture is not a fixed, static thing – it evolves and responds to changes in the land and climate.”

Philpott adds that only by blithely ignoring agriculture’s role in climate change can people present abominable ideas like government-mandated ethanol and biodiesel as “solutions” to the climate crisis.

The industrial paradigm is the cause of both our energy and climate problems. More of the same cannot be the solution.

Recall last year that the Court of Appeals threw out an administrative rule [OAR 660-033-0030(5)], which prohibited counties from considering “gross farm income” when identifying agricultural land. The Oregon Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, went one step further, holding that “LCDC may not preclude a local government . . . from considering “profitability” or “gross farm income” in determining whether land is “agricultural land” because it is “suitable for farm use” under Goal 3.” Wetherell v Douglas County, 342 Or 666, 160 P3d 614 (2007).

We feared at the time that the door was now open for people who wanted to develop rather than farm their land to argue “I can’t make a profit, so my land is not farm land and I ought to be able to subdivide it and build houses.” The outcome of a case that’s now before LUBA may tell whether that fear will be realized. Friends of Douglas County’s Shelley Wetherell is mounting a stirring defense. The briefing is finished, and oral arguments await.

Developer Garden Valley Estates LLC is out to subdivide and build houses on 259 acres of farm land – land which as recently as 2005 was part of an historical and still operating 590-acre livestock ranch and which continued to support livestock grazing up until 2007.

Independent Thinning Inc. – a business offering logging and well drilling services – bought the 590-acre property in 2000 and soon initiated plans to divide and develop the property as the Indy Ranch Development Project. The 590-acre property was carved up into three parcels in 2005, including the 259-acre subject property.

The 590 acres sold for $1,678/acre in 1995. Independent Thinning paid $2,250/acre in 2000. In 2006, 259 acres of the original 590 acres were sold to Garden Valley Estates LLC for $10,980 per acre.

This is the perfect recipe for proving that farm land isn’t really farm land under a “suitability” standard that allows for profit or income to be considered: pay far more for the land than the land is worth at farm value, then complain that you can’t make a profit because of the costs of paying off the purchase.

I suppose the good news is that here in Oregon you still have to make a showing that land isn’t farm land before developing it.

Gene Logsdon in an article titled “What’s Organic Farmland Worth? Or Is It A Pearl Without Price?” at OrganicToBe.org reports:

“A cash grain farm in the cornbelt sold recently for an eyebrow-raising price just shy of $9000 an acre. It sold for farmland, not industrial development.”

He asks, how corn and soybeans pay for such high-priced land? His answer? They can’t.

“We could be looking at a possibility of what one farmer I talk to a lot calls ‘instant bankruptcy.’”

He observes that farmers who pay that kind of money for land are betting on betting on high commodity prices. They are speculating on future expectations, the same way the paper money market has been doing.

We have accepted the notion that land is a commodity to be bought and sold like paper on the stock exchange, and a financial asset on which we’re entitled to a satisfactory return on investment. As Logsdon says:

“This has led to at least two bad results in addition to high risk speculation with something more precious than paper -  our food supplies: 1): Poorer people can’t afford to buy farmland so farms slowly become the property of an oligarchy of the rich; 2): To make a “profit” even rich people must farm for quantity not quality and then the land deteriorates.”

- and to a third result which Logsdon doesn’t mention: rich people (or people who aspire to being rich) must develop the land rather than farm it, without regard to our food supplies.

Logsdon tells a story about asking a “contrary farmer” why he didn’t sell out and live at ease for the rest of his life, which he could have done especially since he was happy to live modestly. The farmer paused a little and then answered.

“My farm is not for sale at any price. It is my life. And what would I do with all that money, stick it in my ear?”

Resources like oil and farmland are limited. When real resources start to run out, the fake wealth generated by our financial system won’t feed us.

Once we shake out the speculative element in farm land pricing, what’s farm land worth? Here’s Langsdon’s appraisal methodology:

“a farm will be priced by how much health and happiness it produces.”

Michael Pollen writes at the New York Times that, after cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19%. While experts may quibble about the exact amount, it’s unarguable that the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — perhaps as much as 37%.

“The 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food.

“Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.”

And meanwhile, soils are being depleted, water tables are dropping and shifts in climate are resulting in more droughts and more floods. Things are not looking good.

Tony Davenport reiterates what should be obvious but is ignored in our economy of infinite growth: there is no sustainability with increasing population consuming finite resources. Something has to give. There will have to be zero population growth and the system will necessarily have to become “sustainable”. The challenge is whether we get there by design or by default.

The most massive collective and global effort ever imagined is needed just to keep things as they are. This is not likely to happen quickly – if ever – but immediate action is essential if we are to avoid energy collapse and climate catastrophe. Davenport asks:

“Where are the leaders with wisdom and perspective? There is no shortage of human capital. There is a dearth of collective wisdom.”

Davenport concludes our survival requires that we reassess who we all are and what we truly need.

“We need to understand where we have come from and where we are going to and create a collective vision that negates the self in favour of community.”

James Gustave Speth, co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council and long-time environmental insider, laments in an article at The Nation:

“Sadly, while environmentalists have been winning many battles, we are losing the planet.”

He sees that mainstream environmentalism, working within the system, has proved largely incapable of coping with the forces of capitalism. He warns:

“Working only within the system will, in the end, not succeed. Transformative change in the system itself is needed.”

We must transform economic activity into something benign and restorative. The most important of these prescriptions range far beyond the traditional environmental agenda.

Economic growth – and the consumerism it depends on – are at the root of our environmental crisis. Solving our environmental and social problems requires that we focus instead on satisfying environmental and social needs directly rather than as a hoped-for byproduct of economic growth. Reality is starkly discrediting the assumption that economic growth automatically results in better quality of life.

“Affluent countries must become postgrowth societies where jobs and work life, the environment, communities and the public sector are no longer sacrificed to push up GDP.”

Speth chides environmentalists for shying away from demanding serious personal changes and calls the reluctance to challenge consumption a “big mistake.”

“Psychological studies show that materialism is toxic to happiness and that more income and more possessions do not lead to a lasting sense of well-being or satisfaction with life. What make people happy are warm personal relationships and giving rather than getting. Many people are trying to fight back against consumerism and commercialization. They say, Confront consumption. Practice sufficiency. Create social environments where overconsumption is viewed as silly, wasteful, ostentatious. Create commercial-free zones. Buy local. Eat slow food. Simplify your life. Downshift.”

We need a new politics and new social movement powerful enough to drive change. Speth calls for environmentalists to join social progressives to address the crisis of inequality unraveling our social fabric and undermining democracy.

“Our best hope for change is a fusion of those concerned about environmental sustainability, social justice and political democracy into one progressive force.”

John McGrath at Gristmill I think rightly points out that the argument for addressing climate change must be on moral grounds. The solution is, in essence, simple – yet our politics refuses to act:

“The outlines of the solution are clear: decrease CO2 emissions to zero using renewable energy, and then start pulling out the stuff we’ve already dumped in our sky-sewer. And yet the solution, clear as day, has eluded our politics.”

McGrath compares global warming to the issue of slavery . . .

“We’re faced with a similarly stark choice today. We can either keep emitting GHGs and all die, or we can stop.

. . . and realistically points out that just because something must happen to save us does not mean that it will happen. McGrath points to an example from Canada:  the left-wing party quickly disavowed comments from a rookie candidate who said that the tar sands would have to be shut down. Of course, he was correct, but we mustn’t say such things in public. Even on the left.

As even David Letterman says, we are so screwed.

The Working Group on Development and Environment in the Americas has published a report that finds agricultural policies pushing exports for local markets have been devastating to local rural communities.

The project assessed Mexico’s performance under NAFTA; the South American soybean boom in Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia; and the impacts of rising imports on small-scale farmers in El Salvador, Bolivia, and Brazil.

The authors’ suggestion that public policy should refocus on smallholder agriculture and poverty reduction is based on six overarching conclusions:

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Public support for biofuels is costly and has little impact in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Biofuels also cause high environmental risks, particularly in Latin America and large parts of Africa, and are causing food prices to skyrocket around the world.

So says the EU’s Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Governments are are increasingly doubtful about whether biofuels were as “green” as they claim to be when taking account of the total energy needed to  produce them and the environmental impact of intensive farming and increased land use.  Governments would do better promoting lower energy consumption to fight climate change.

Ron Steenblick at Gristmill writes that converting crop residues into cellulosic ethanol isn’t such a good idea, either. According to respected USDA soil scientist Ann Kennedy, the stems and leaves left over after crops are harvested may have more value if they are left on the ground – especially in areas receiving less than 25 inches of rainfall per year.

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A recent post talked about how high gas prices could lead to the draining of population from small towns in rural areas as people moved closer to jobs and amenities in urban areas. But there is another possibility: the rebuilding of local, rural, agriculture-based economies that rely on human labor rather than fossil fuels.

That’s the objective of the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project, which aims at the transformation of agriculture in Lane, Linn, Benton, and Lincoln counties at the south end of Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

This bioregion contains roughly 700,000 acres of farmland, approximately 400,000 acres of which is used for cropland. It once produced a wide array of grains, fruits, and vegetables. At times wheat represented almost a third of what was harvested. The region had the agricultural capacity and food system infrastructure to feed itself.

Now, the region is dominated by farms growing fescue and rye grass for the global grass seed market. Less than 20% of its cropland acreage is utilized for food.

The Bean and Grain Project seeks to convert grass seed acreage into plots for organic beans, grains, and edible seeds as a critical first step to reinvigorating the regional food system. Harry MacCormack, co-founder of Oregon Tilth and owner of Sunbow Farm in Corvallis, Oregon, provides the vision and inspiration.

The project aims to rebuild a complete regional food system, growing food first for local markets and then for global markets only if surpluses are available.

The project sees peak oil as a force driving the relocalization of agriculture:

“It is often overlooked, but nearly every aspect of our current food system is based on petroleum and other carbon-based inputs. Soil nitrogen levels are maintained by fertilizers made from hydrocarbon gases. Pests are fought with petroleum-based pesticides. Weeds are eliminated by petroleum-based herbicides. Fields are cultivated and harvested by machinery powered by petroleum-based fuels. Food products are transported by trucks or trains or airplanes powered by petroleum-based fuels. Foods are processed with machines run by electricity generated by fossil fuels. Foods are packages in plastics made from petrochemical products. We cook with fossil fuel derivatives. From field to distributor to store to kitchen cabinet to stove, our entire food system flows upon a stream of petroleum. This system has evolved and grown through a period when petroleum and natural gas were irrationally cheap. That era appears to be over. The cost of a barrel of petroleum has increased ten fold in the last ten years. Oil production has or will soon peak. Hydrocarbon-based agriculture and its global food system is a literal and figurative dinosaur. Freight costs alone ensure that our food systems must change.

“Add the detrimental environmental impacts of industrial farming techniques–aquifer depletion, topsoil loss, petrochemical contamination of the watershed and other biota, toxic residues on or in crops themselves, and it is becoming increasingly clear that changing the way we farm is both sensible and necessary. Creating sustainable regional food systems based as much as possible on organic inputs and as independent as possible of petroleum fuels, should be one of humanity’s highest priorities. That is the exact purpose of the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project, rebuilding a regional food system in the Willamette Valley.

The Capital Press reports that Umatilla County wheat farmer Robert Klein “is at the front lines of a land-use dispute that will shape the future of the area outside Milton-Freewater.” He and two other local property owners are appealing a county land use decision allowing the hillside owner, Seven Hills Properties, to subdivide its 1,681 acres into 40-acre parcels.

Umatilla County’ EFU zone has a 160-acre minimum lot or parcel size. The smaller 40-acre size would be allowed as a LCDC-approved “go-below.” State law allows counties to establish smaller minimum lot or parcel sizes – “go-belows” – in EFU land if they can be shown to be consistent with existing commercial agriculture in the area.

Klein argues that forty-acre  parcels for wine grapes and 160-acre wheat parcels are not compatible. The developer’s plan is to build “estates” on each of the 40-acre parcels. The homeowners would then lease the vineyard land back to the vineyard operator.

The challenge now is before the Oregon Court of Appeals. A hearing is scheduled for mid-July. As there are no statutory deadlines for a case that gets to the Court of Appeals other than via   LUBA, it’s difficult to predict when the court’s decision may be forthcoming.

In the meantime, the economic forces pushing for the conversion of the land from wheat farming to prestige homesites have weakened. The market for homesites far from urban areas has collapsed as a result of the mortgage meltdown and high gas prices. And the price of wheat keeps rising, as is the value of the land for wheat farming.

Goal One Coalition helped prepare the case and Goal One associate director and staff attorney Jan Wilson is representing appellants.

The Eugene Register-Guard has also published the same article about the go-below.

At a time when food prices and shortages are already leading to unrest and riots around the world, further disaster is threatening.

With supplies of most of the key commodities at their lowest levels in decades, there is little room for error this year. Yet American corn and soybean farmers are suffering from too much rain, while Australian wheat farmers have been plagued by drought. China also faces trouble: the agriculture ministry issued an urgent notice to wheat and rice farmers in southern China on Sunday, telling them to harvest as much of their crop as possible immediately in the face of unseasonable torrential rains expected to rake the region for the next 10 days.

And the U.S. has no remaining grain reserves, nothing in our emergency food pantry. No cheese, no butter, no dry milk powder, no grains or anything else left in reserve. All that’s left in the CCC larder is 2.7 million bushels of wheat – about enough wheat to make ½ of a loaf of bread for each of the 300 million people in America.

The USDA Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) was created to stabilize, support, and protect farm income and prices, to maintain balanced and adequate supplies of agricultural commodities, and to aid in their orderly distribution. The 1996 farm bill eliminated the government’s grain reserves as well as the Farmer Owned Reserve (FOR).

George Monbiot at The Guardian reports that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Large scale, industrial agriculture isn’t the most efficient way to grow food.

“Though the rich world’s governments won’t hear it, the issue of whether or not the world will be fed is partly a function of ownership. This reflects an unexpected discovery. It was first made in 1962 by the Nobel economist Amartya Sen, and has since been confirmed by dozens of studies. There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield.”

We have come to associate efficiency with scale. These findings about farming seem counterintuitive, because small producers are less likely to own machinery, less likely to have capital or access to credit, and less likely to know about the latest techniques.

The most plausible explanation is that small farmers use more labor per hectare than big farmers. Their workforce largely consists of members of their own families, which means that labor costs are lower than on large farms (they don’t have to spend money recruiting or supervising workers), while the quality of the work is higher. With more labor, farmers can cultivate their land more intensively: they spend more time terracing and building irrigation systems; they sow again immediately after the harvest; and they might grow several crops in the same field.

The rich nations support this process by demanding access for their companies. Their agricultural subsidies still help their own large farmers to compete unfairly with the small producers of the poor world. But big business is killing small farming. By extending intellectual property rights over every aspect of production and by developing plants that either won’t breed true or don’t reproduce at all, big business ensures that only those with access to capital can farm. As agribusiness captures both the wholesale and retail markets, it seeks to reduce its transaction costs by engaging only with major sellers. The rich nations support this process by demanding access for their companies. Their agricultural subsidies still help their own large farmers to compete unfairly with the small producers of the poor world.

What are the policy implications?

“If governments are serious about feeding the world, they should be breaking up large landholdings, redistributing them to the poor and concentrating their research and their funding on supporting small farms.”

Mexico, like much of the poor world, is facing a food crisis. Last year tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations to protest a 60% increase in the price of tortillas, caused in large part by American farmers devoting their acreage to biofuels rather than food.

Walden Bello at The Nation asks a probing question: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?

He finds the answer in so-called “free market” economic policies:

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While humanity’s disruption of the carbon cycle has been getting lots of publicity in the climate change arena, scientists warn that reactive forms of nitrogen are also building up in the environment.

Two new studies published in the journal Science find we are accumulating reactive nitrogen in the environment at alarming rates. Scientists warn this may prove to be as serious as putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

While nitrogen alone is inert, harmless and makes up 78 percent of Earth’s atmosphere, reactive nitrogen compounds — such as ammonia — have been released by its use in nitrogen-based fertilizers and the large-scale burning of fossil fuels. Various forms of nitrogen contribute to greenhouse warming, smog, haze, acid rain dead zones with little or no life along the coasts, and depletion of the ozone layer in the stratosphere, the researchers concluded.

A unique and troublesome aspect of nitrogen is that a single atom released to the environment can cause a cascading sequence of events, resulting ultimately in harm to the natural balance of our ecosystems and to our very health.

Nitrogen is needed to grow food, but because of the inefficiencies of nitrogen uptake by plants and animals, only about 10 to 15 percent of reactive nitrogen ends up in the food we eat. The rest is lost to the environment and injected into the atmosphere by combustion.

At a time of record high and ever-rising fuel prices, record high grain and food prices, food shortages developing around the world, and record high rates of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, the Linn County Board of Commissioners is spending taxpayer money to develop an 196-space RV park to serve RVers traveling up and down the I-5 corridor.

Linn County has already spent $1.25 million, “borrowed” from the county’s road funds, to purchase 175 acres of farmland. The property, located just east of I-5 at the Highway 34 exit, has been in grass seed. At over $7,000 per acre, the county paid a premium price. Similar land nearby recently sold for ~$5,500 per acre.

Like the war in Iraq, the county’s rationale for the purchase keeps shifting. First the park was to house a Renaissance festival – until the promoters backed out. County commissioners are now suggesting a “large park” with a variety of uses – a BMX course, multi-use “paths,” sports fields – and an RV park. Who’s going to pay for the development and operation of this wish-list?

And like oil and Iraq, the real reason is the commissioner’s desire to stockpile land for some undefined, hypothetical future “economic development” purpose.

This despite the fact that there are many existing RV facilities available nearby and along the I-5 corridor, including the Blue Ox RV Park in Albany, the Mallard Creek Golf Course, Foster Lake RV Park & Campground, Sweet Home Foster Lane KOA, KOA Albany-Corvallis, and Knox Butte RV Park. Emerald Valley RV Park LLC is currently developing an RV park along I-5 at the Jefferson exit.

And the economic climate is not especially promising. Not only are we facing a recession unmatched in severity and length since the Great Depression, high oil prices are putting an especial crimp in the RV culture. These behemoths get only 7-10 miles per gallon, and it already costs north of $300 to fill their tanks.

The reality here is that the county commissioners are risking taxpayer money on a speculative real estate investment. Rather than promoting and protecting agriculture, Linn County’s largest and most important industry, the commissioners are using taxpayer money to undermine agriculture and Linn County’s food security, for a pig in a poke.

What a weird concept – that livestock can actually graze in the fields rather than be confined and fed grain:

“Bob and Karen Breneman found it difficult to accomplish all that had to be done around their southern Wisconsin dairy farm, but they didn’t want to hire more help. So they joined the growing number of farmers in America’s Dairyland who broke with tradition by turning to grazing — saving them money and freeing up time. . . .

Most milking operations in the state during the latter half of the 20th century used the so-called confinement approach: Animals that were milked twice a day mostly were kept inside, feed was brought to them, and manure was carted away.

“Farmers had been taught that was the way to go for a long time,” Breneman said.

“But after careful consideration, the couple switched to an updated version of the grazing approach that had previously predominated, and they haven’t looked back.

“That’s allowed them to reduce the labor involved in growing crops to feed their animals, and they can let the manure remain in the field.”

What will they think of next?

The world’s farms are straining to meet world food and fuel demand, pushing prices for potash and sulfur to record highs.

Sinofert Holdings Ltd., the largest distributor of fertilizer products in China, last week agreed to pay $576 U.S. per tonne FOB Vancouver for Saskatchewan potash this year, $400 more per tonne of than in 2007. Distributors in India will pay $625 US per delivered tonne this year, an increase of $355 US per tonne over 2007. Still, due to demand from other world markets, China will get less potash from Canadian suppliers this year than last.

In March 2007, a tonne of pure sulfur shipped from Vancouver was less than $50 US. Now, it’s about $650 – a 13-fold increase in just 13 months.

Both potash and sulfur are principally used in the making of fertilizer. Most sulfur around the world is derived from oil and gas sources that are experiencing only nominal growth- if any.

Potash (or carbonate of potash) is an impure form of potassium carbonate (K₂CO₃). Found in the water soluble part of wood ash, it has long been used
in the manufacture of glass and soap as well as a fertilizer. The term has become somewhat ambiguous due to the substitution in fertilizers of cheaper potassium salts such as potassium chloride (KCl) or potassium oxide (K₂O), to which the same common name is sometimes also applied.

Natural potash deposits can also be mined. The Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan is the world’s largest potash producer.

Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, concludes a new University of Kansas study.

The study finds that GM soya produces about 10% less food than its conventional equivalent. The GM crop – engineered to resist Monsanto’s weedkiller Roundup – recovered only extra manganese was added, suggesting that the modification hindered the crop’s take-up of the essential element from the soil. Even with the addition GM soya’s yield only managed to equal that of conventional soya.

The new study confirms earlier research at the University of Nebraska, which found that another Monsanto GM soya produced 6% less than its closest conventional relative, and 11% less than the best non-GM soya available.

Results with GM cotton have been similar.  The total US crop has declined as GM technology has taken over.

A new study titled “Turning Up the Heat” (pdf) warns continued logging of Canada’s boreal forests could trigger a massive release of greenhouse gases.

The Greenpeace report says cutting down trees in the boreal forest is exacerbating climate change by releasing stores of greenhouse gases trapped in soil and vegetation. It also finds that logging makes the forest more susceptible to global warming impacts like wildfires and insect outbreaks, which in turn release more greenhouse gases.

The Executive Summary says:

“Canada’s Boreal Forest is dense with life. Richly populated with plants, birds, animals, and trees; home to hundreds of communities; and a wellspring of fresh water and oxygen, the Boreal has long been recognized as a critically important ecosystem. But as rising temperatures threaten to destabilize the planet, the potential of the Boreal’s carbon-rich expanses to mitigate global warming continues to be underestimated. Read the rest of this entry »