Brézème in the FT (via Jamie Goode)
- Thread starter Yixin
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Oswaldo Costa
Oswaldo Costa
Bring on the horses.
With 1 horse you can work about 2 ha of vines. 1 horse needs 2 ha of good land for food.
1 ha of colza grown organic = 500 l of oil = what is needed for growing a little more than 2 ha of vines organicaly.
A tractor is twice more efficient than a horse in terms of good arable land management.
What will we need more in the future : nice story telling for rich western natural wines lovers or food for the masses?
Not as simple...
1 ha of colza grown organic = 500 l of oil = what is needed for growing a little more than 2 ha of vines organicaly.
A tractor is twice more efficient than a horse in terms of good arable land management.
What will we need more in the future : nice story telling for rich western natural wines lovers or food for the masses?
Not as simple...
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
I believe Monsanto can offer you disease-resistant scions of many kinds of food plants. You will surely grow more per ha with them than any others.
Not so simple....
Oswaldo Costa
Oswaldo Costa
What about rich eastern natural wines lovers in Japan and Singapore (since there are presumably none in China and Siberia past the Bordeaux stage)? What about middle class western natural wines lovers and middle class eastern natural wines lovers? We and they all want nice stories too, of bucolic horsies pulling the hoes instead of tractors compacting the earth and crushing the charming little ladybugs and other thingies that make the earth teem.
Well I'd say that, except from a very few people that made horse training and working a life style (one would think of O. Cousin or C. Ducroux), most of the "horse" wines won't be affordable enough for the middle classes. If you give a careful look at who is working with horse (I mean working not taking pictures for the newspapers), their wines are quite pricey.
Not sure that resistance to diseases is the real issue here. Self-sufficient, erosion free, alive soils are the main issue I personally see
And the whole post-war agriculture is 100% based on fossil fuel one way or an other.
Monsanto is only producing GMO in order to sell chemicals (mostly herbicides) that they produce from tons of petrol...
Oswaldo Costa
Oswaldo Costa
Michel Augé recently switched to horses, hope his prices remain reasonable.
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
I was responding to your comment "food for the masses". Is there enough arable land to grow enough food using available crops and sustainable techniques? And then to get it to all the places where the distribution of production does not coincide with the distribution of consumption?
Or is it always the case that some will eat and some will not? (which is what I expect is the case)
Jeff,
There's certainly enough arable land to feed the current global population, but our eating habits would have to change (much less meat and dairy, more vegetables and grains). The real issue, which accounts for why a substantial percentage of the global population doesn't get enough to eat under the current system of food production, is the existence of sociopolitical barriers to equitable food distribution.
Mark Lipton
Oswaldo Costa
Oswaldo Costa
There's certainly enough land using industrial techniques, I believe Jeff was asking whether there is enough arable land to grow enough food using available crops and sustainable techniques. i.e., can you feed the masses using only environmentally conscientious techniques?
The short answer I think is no. At least not with all the other current realities of politics, economics, population distribution and climate. Humanity would have to coordinate throughout the planet in a unified cooperative way. Major choices were made between say 1850-1950 that put different population groups on very different paths and trajectories re food production etc. Physically (so to speak) the planet could do it, but the scope of the changes required of us humans to do so couldn't possibly be managed by our current earth population. At least not in the short time span needed to avoid the looming hardships and disruptions.
The same is true of energy production and use. We know a variety of better sustainable and renewable sources and technologies to produce the energy we want and need. We even know what we're doing now is harming our only biosphere, yet we can't manage to really do what is needed to avert more damage and even catastrophic harm.