To replace the fossil fuel food economy, we need a sunshine food economy. A sunshine economy represents a unique revolution in human consciousness and practice. In contrast to civilization’s previous revolutions””the agricultural, iron, industrial, green and now global revolutions””the sunshine revolution restores rather than burns up carbon. Each of the previous revolutionary advances depended on the exploitation of previously untapped forms of carbon””they used the soil, burned forests, consumed coal or burned oil and natural gas. A sunshine economy would cultivate diverse forests and return green cover to the bulk of the earth’s landscapes. Keeping carbon in the ground rather than burning it up is a vital step in the effort to halt, if not reverse, the worst effects of climate change.
Over the past several months a number of this nation’s leading agrarians, including Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, David Orr, Herman Daly and Fred Kirschenmann, have been meeting to work out the conceptual and practical details necessary to move beyond today’s fossil fuel addictions. They are devising a 50-Year Land Use Bill that will nurture soil fertility, conserve forests and watersheds, rebuild rural communities and bring food production into harmonious alignment with ecological systems.
Intended as legislation, this bill would supplant the dismal farm bills adopted by Congress every five years that keep the nation mired in policies that exhaust and degrade waters, lands and bodies and that prevent good forestry and agricultural practices. Sunshine-powered, natural-systems agriculture must replace many of the current agriculture policies and practices if we hope to eat healthy food in the long term in a world of growing populations and declining habitats. It will not be enough simply to tweak today’s food economy and expect healthy, sustainable food production.
“Intended as legislation, …”
Oh, goody. Let the rejoicing begin. I suggest a potluck/barbecue, perhaps with the Delta Smelt as the main course.
I farm for a living — specifically, neither of us have off-farm jobs, we don’t take a nickel of government subsidy, and we’re not constantly running after this, that, or the other grant to ‘demonstrate’ or ‘study’ how good sustainable, or organic, or local, or urban agriculture is.
Oh, and we haven’t sprayed a chemical insecticide in over seven years, and along the way (back in the ’90s) the two of us inspected nearly a million acres for organic certification in nine different countries.
Current farm subsidies are an idiotic disaster, disconnecting planting decisions from market feedback. Far worse are the water subsidies to California vegetable and alfalfa farmers that allow them to grow those crops at a profit because they can compete unfairly with others, elsewhere.
All that said, there’s only so much to be done by way of “solar” agriculture. The most effective path is the elimination of feedlots and concentrated grain-fed cattle. This does not apply to mono-gastrics such as poultry and swine.
Much of the world’s food energy and protein are commoditised in two crops: maize (corn) and soya beans. These will continue to be grown and harvested using fossil energy, increasingly supplemented with farm-produced bio-diesel, especially from canola in the northern regions.
More to the point, there is absolutely nothing — repeat Nothing — in a natural production system that will guarantee “healthy” foods. Local foods unsupplemented by carefully constituted fertilisers have a long-proven track record of producing nutrient [i]deficiencies[/i] not improvements.
The mineral nutrient content of foods have been declining steadily since about 1914. Current conventional agriculture gained currency in the 1950s. What happened is that people’s transportation moved away from HORSES, and the vegetables stopped being grown with lots of horse manure, which had concentrated nutrients from countless hay fields.
We can’t really return to that era … or at least I would not wish to do. Of course the Democrat Congress’s current proposals for “carbon cap and trade” envision returning to America’s level of CO2 production in [b]1875[/b]. What’s that like? On a per capita basis, we’re talking about Haiti, where I have worked as an agronomist.
Personally, I would turn to violence before I allowed anyone to return America or its agriculture to Haitian conditions. I suspect I would not be alone.
This “sunshine” utopia seems long on popular nostrums, short on proof of concept. My memory is understandably fuzzy, but I recall a number of discussions that were not unlike this on Saturday night after more than a few bong hits. So we’re going to stop massive farm subsidies (yea!!) only to give the money to these guys, plus a few more billion? (booo!)
Sorry, but can I see this in a medium-scale demonstration project first (privately funded, of course), or do we just put our faith in you?
“….we need a sunshine food economy.”
There is no other kind.
Don
Unfortunately, the FDA will have complete control over ordering what farmers — large scale and private — can grow and cannot grow and how they can grow it. How can they do this? By declaring that all produce MAY be used, sold, or traded across state lines, thus falling under the ‘interstate commerce’ clause. This is the way the Federal Government has operated in the past, so they have precedents.
If this bill would pass- welcome to famine and terrible food.
Goodby to corn, rice, wheat, sorghum, soybeans, barley, oats, rye… as a replacement we get “hay and forage”! Oh, and some as yet non-existant “perennial grains”. Madness.
Part of the problem with the corn crop (and I heard this from a farmer on NPR a few years ago) is that the corn seed is genetically engineered to be non-reproducing once the plants come to maturity.
IOW, it will yield a ONE YEAR crop, and then go dormant, so the farmers have to buy fresh seed from the company the next year.
It used to be the farmer would set aside some of his crop for seed from one year to the next and only buy what they needed to increase their planting from the seed companies. Well, they found a way to cut that off.
I heard a commercial on the radio this week that “non-hybrid seed” is the ‘gold of the future’, and many countries are lying in stores of this seed for the coming economic collapse, to use as a base for trade and currency. True or not, it’s something to think about.
JE
The 50 year plan lacks true vision. For it to truly be sucessful we must decrease the demand for the annual crops that are to be replaced by the perennials. Any attempts to make this voluntary would be unsuccessful I think. The answer then is a system of crop and food rationing. Families could be issued an allotment of grain products on a monthly basis. (weekly store trips just encourage fuel waste) . The author also mentions that this new ag
vision would be labor intensive. No problem, serving on farms must become part of the mandatory volunteer labor incentive. Those who are not able to work on farms because of medical condition would of course have their food ration reduced accordingly. Since obviously they do not need as many calories as those engaging in harvesting the soy cake of tommorow.
Paula I like that.
Paula, it would seem that Pol Pot was just a man ahead of his time, no?
Heck, Bro Michael if we pushed it with the guise of being a alternative lifestyle choice and trendy diet and exercise program we would have Hollowweird trendies lining up to enlist. Throw in the socialist imprateur and they will be get Ron Howard to direct a wonderful academy award movie on the glory of it all.
#7 libraryjim — I could be wrong, and if I am I hope that one of the working farmers here will correct me, but my understanding was that almost all commercial seed sold to farmers is tinkered with in that way. It’s how the seed companies keep themselves in business.
I’d say, Paula, that Opie would be excited to head up Mayberry’s new Ministry of Fear.
Paula, another brilliant idea. We should add age. If you are to old to work you are to old to eat. This would have the advange of solving the food problem and social security/medicare at the same time.
Br Michael, “It’s for the children.”
Back in the ’80s I was at Disney Florida with a friend experienced in preparing exhibits for the National Museums of Canada. At the ‘Tomorrowland’ section my friend offered an analysis that sticks with me to this day — “Fantastic. This is a museum of the future as envisioned by our parents’ generation.”
The proposal discussed in this article is equally fantastic, in the true sense of that word. It is a museum to the agricultural future as envisioned old Baby Boomers. As proffered, it is also nonsense.