BBO Discussion Forums: The Dividing Line - BBO Discussion Forums

 mikeh, on 2013-May-06, 07:34, said:

It's a pity, yes, but if there is ever a transition to a more sustainable and healthy condition for the planet, the transition period will not be easy.

 mikeh, on 2013-May-06, 07:34, said:

Source, please? This is another myth which is disseminated and promoted by big ag. Rodale Institute has been running a study for 30 years and found that organic production is not only more profitable but also more productive, after the initial 3 years. Aside from that, the price in the stores is artificially low for big ag products. You and I are paying for the cheaper prices of unsustainably grown product in the stores through massive subsidies supporting industrial agriculture. The other thing is that sterilizing the soil with chemicals cannot in the long run be a good thing; any production at ALL then rests on continuing and ever increasing amounts of petrochemicals which is not sustainable by any definition I'm aware off.

Aside from that the runoff of agricultural chemicals from fields ending up in lakes and rivers is leading to massive costs trying to stop the pollution from killing the waterways and lakes. In Canada you can look at Lake Winnipeg as a prime example; the States has been worrying about the amount of agricultural runoff chemicals entering the Gulf of Mexico from runoff for some years, but so far have been largely unable to figure out how to deal with it.

Things do not work in isolation, they are interconnected and ignoring that leads to problems.

I have cited other farmers who are leaders in showing what can be done through permaculture techniques, which once set up will basically run themselves to a large degree, with almost no input at all from the farmer, and produce enormous quantities of food. One person I have mentioned before is Will Allen http://www.jhsph.edu.../willallen.html who is raising an amount of food per acre on three acres of land, without chemicals or GMOs, that commercial ag farmers can only dream of. Admittedly his projects are labour intensive but he has deliberately designed it that way to involve kids who otherwise had nothing to do and nowhere to go, so it is a multipurpose endeavour.

Geoff Lawton has been travelling the world teaching permaculture now for years as well as heading up successful reclamation work on soils too depleted/saline even for chemicals to work profitably as there was no structure left in the soil. Using permaculture techniques he demonstrated how the soil became LESS saline, something some scientists have maintained was impossible aside from using massive quantities of water to wash the salts through the soil, which he didn't do. (Couldn't have even if he had wanted to, not much water around the Dead Sea.)

So has Shep Holtzer and Joel Salatin, all farmers who haven't used chemicals or GMOs on their land ever, and all of them are highly successful farmers by any standard. Between the names I have mentioned they cover all climates (Sepp is from the Austrian Alps, Lawton is from Australia and is best known for his work greening the desert, and Salatin is from the eastern US.)

They all have highly integrated systems which largely run themselves, and which focus on growing soil and avoiding monocropping. Their places are prime examples of the terms sustainable and highly profitable.

BTW as far as starvation is concerned, there are any number of people raising enormous quantities of food even in back yards and the "OH MY GOD WE ARE ALL GOING TO STARVE NEXT YEAR UNLESS WE (xyz)" is a fearmongering myth and a truly big crock of B.S. It's not even a matter of a lot of money. It's a matter of education and paying attention to the bloody science outside the self serving pap being fed to media and governments by big ag. and which belongs if anywhere only in the National Enquirer with stories of people being impregnated by aliens on their saucer.

OMG our sun is going to die... well yes but not in any sense of the word is it foreseeably imminent or even within a few generations. So it's somewhat premature to panic. Same with food production.

OTOH if we do throw all our resources into promoting big ag then that scenario could indeed come true through increasing costs and inaccessibility of chemicals combined with the chemical sterilization/ salination of soils.
And possibly even sooner, through increased reliance on GMO seed which fails for some reason. There have already been instances of crop failures in both the US and Africa of GMO crops, to say nothing of India where the result of changing over to GMO crops led to massive numbers of farmer suicide and a resulting ban on any sort of GMO seed anywhere in one of India's major food producing areas.

 Vampyr, on 2013-May-06, 10:02, said:

I'd find it scary that the righteous moral crusader refers to the death of billions as a necessary pity except of course it's a cliché. The self-righteous are always willing to sacrifice the world for its own good.

@onoway, #42

Joel Salatin isn't necessarily a good role model. He uses a great deal of land per unit of food produced, and I suspect he has pretty good land to start with. In addition, he won't sell to customers who live any distance away, which means, if applied globally, a reversion to the diets of 150 years ago, with such things as oranges, mangos and bananas reserved for the rich, and fresh produce of any kind becoming a strictly seasonal treat for those of us who live in temperate zones.

The urban farming (Will Allen) is wonderful, but it is unrealistic to scale that up to replace industrial farming. I actually know a lot about composting, since I have litigated on behalf of farmers wishing to compost, who ran afoul of local government rules. No farm will ever produce sufficient feedstock to replenish the soil: all it has is the waste it creates, and even with 100% recycling, the farm loses the nutrients that are inside the foodstuffs it sells off farm. So all farms that compost as the major or sole source of soil creation or enhancement recruit feedstock from other sources. Various manures are useful and so is yard waste from municipalities that offer drop-off sites. Getting contracts to dispose of supermarket wastes can help. But the reality is that in an urban enviroment, it is not going to be possible to grow sufficient soil to grow sufficient food to become self-sufficient, even excluding seasonal considerations that impact growing seasons and the crops that can be grown.

I agree 100% that we should encourage organic farming. I agree 100% that we should be skeptical about creating mono-cultures of GMO foods. I agree 100% that there are practices that ought to be discouraged: for example, in all cities in Canada one can buy fresh roses 12 months of the year: all grown in Mexico. They have no fragrance, and they don't last long. They are, I understand, flown into Canada, creating huge pollution in the skies, and using valuable land in Mexico for a product that is largely a creation of marketing, and I suspect are subjected to a lot of herbicide/pesticide.

But it is naive to expect that we can feed the world, or give us in the developed world the kinds of choices we demand, by going to just organic farming.

Fortunately, it seems likely that we'll be able to 'grow' various meats without growing animals from which to harvest them, and I suspect that such meats will prove far less costly, from an ecological standpoint, than the traditional methods, whether organic or not.

Since meat production, for the Western palate, is probably the most damaging form of agriculture, this development should be welcomed. I hope they learn to do it for fish as well, to save the oceans.

Btw, this research is being carried out by scientists, not organic farmers

 onoway, on 2013-May-06, 10:18, said:

I admit to not being knowedgable in this area. But this bit seems suspicious to me. If growing organic was cheaper and more productive, wouldn't more farmers be doing it?

onoway referenced several sources for the proposition that organic farming can compete with agri-business, including the 30 year rodale institute study.

I am unable to critique that work, in part because it appears that the only entity to actually publish anything about it is the rodale institute: blindly accepting that it is telling the truth appears to me to be akin to blindly accepting what Monsanto says about its proprietary methods

When an organization sets out to prove that its point of view is true, then one should be careful about accepting that organization's later claim that it's point of view really is true.

I noted that they claim, for example, that going organic, as they did, would 'create more jobs'.

Hmmm, that suggests that they need to spend a lot more labour to produce the same yields as agri-business can produce.

That means that the cost of food will go up. One of the major factors in the relatively low cost of food in Western society is the mechanization of the farming process. Organic farming may require a reversal of that.

As it is, current projections in the US are for increasing difficulty securing farm labour. Most of it comes from areas in rural Mexico, where improving economic conditions in recent years are causing a reduction in the number of Mexicans willing to commit to the problems of trying to work in the US, whether legally or illegally. I listened to a program on NPR recently in which this issue was raised and seemed to be generally accepted as real.

So: are we going to have to return to the classic farming way of life where every family had 10-12 kids so as to have a workforce? Or are we going to find food prices increasing by 50-100% so as to be able to make farming economical without the charitable donations that I assume keep rodale alive?

 Winstonm, on 2013-May-01, 11:29, said:

Funny - The quoted example is full of examples of the differences between facts and opinion.
"They simply wouldn't exist. We won't have an unemployment rate," said Ken Prewitt....

No, professor. We would still have an unemployment rate. What we would not have is an official government measurement of it.

If you counted a tail as a leg, how many legs would a cow have? (Most people will answer "4", but in fact, the cow would still be standing on the only 4 legs that it had.)

 billw55, on 2013-May-06, 13:07, said:

I don't know really, but I would guess that it is more labour-intensive, and requires rotating crops and having livestock along with crops. Also harvesting is probably more difficult if your crops are grown in a natural, wildlife friendly environment rather than in an orderly monoculture.

The problem is that we are not paying the "real" cost of the food we buy. If we started doing that, more farms would consider switching to organic.

EDIT: Crossed several posts while cooking, including...

Quote

See above; the answer is "yes" -- or at least I hope so. And the sooner the better.

 billw55, on 2013-May-06, 13:07, said:

Or the corollary, if growing organic food were cheaper and more productive, wouldn't we be paying less for it - given that the "informed" farmers were doing so.

 FM75, on 2013-May-06, 15:28, said:

FWIW, I'm a member of a CSA here in Massachusetts.

It costs $625 for 20 weeks worth of veggies. From what I can tell, it works out to be a pretty good deal.
Each week I get a box of picked veggies, plus I get to supplement things by collecting my own out in the fields.
(Come tomato season, I'll be making a lot of sauce)

However, in order to take full advantage of the food, it does require some changes in eating patterns.
Dinner gets dictated by what's available rather than what I want.
I've also end up pickling a lot of stuff
(This weekend I made a pick batch of dill carrots. Last weekend it was sauerkraut)

Finally, I ended up buying a vitaxis so I could make smoothies out of whatever I don't feel like dealing with immediately

 mikeh, on 2013-May-06, 12:15, said:

I find it a bit bizarre to leap from the idea of millions of people dying of starvation to complain that changing things might mean that only rich people could buy mangos.

I would like to know upon what evidence you base your comments about Salatin. He has less than two quarters of land and likely produces a whole lot more on that land in terms of edible food calories than probably any grain farmer working a township or more. He most decidedly produces a multiple of what his neighbors produce on farms with presumably the same environmental conditions and comparable size. He has made a business choice not to ship food further than 100 miles away. It doesn't mean he couldn't, it means he doesn't have to, so he chooses not to because he believes food is better and healthier if it doesn't spend hours or days in transit. What does that have to do with anything?

You may have litigated on behalf of farmers but you don't know about building soil. How do you suppose the prairies supported untold numbers of buffalo and other game and the topsoil still grew to be meters deep, as it was before modern farming practices blew most of it away in dust storms and or washed out erosion gullies? Nobody was coming around every few years to top it up with nutrients.

Compost is certainly helpful and it is clearly a better option than landfills but it is not and never has been the only way to increase land fertility without resorting to chemicals. You especially don't know about building soils if you have the idea that animals are bad for it. For some years Greg Judy has been tracking and measuring the health of the soil on farms he acquired after they had been abandoned as "worn out". Without any inputs other than moving the cattle over it in carefully managed ways/times it is getting healthier and more productive and deeper every year. Grasses and forbs and herbs volunteered and creeks came back into flow. Wildlife returned. It's a scenario which has been replicated over and over. Scientists like things which can be replicated, right? He is moving a lot of cattle, too, not just a few animals here and there.

Managing animals badly is certainly extremely destructive to the land but handling them properly has in many cases been the answer to regenerating land. It's what we do with the animals that makes the difference and feedlots are a prime example of what not to do on a whole lot of levels. Allan Savory established that when he challenged the idea that groups of large herbivores were causing desertification. He had animals move the way they naturally would feed and travel across the land instead of how we move them according to how we see fit. That's ALL he did. The trees and vegetation came back. (he's a scientist as well as a farmer, btw, and his ideas were scorned until the evidence could no longer be denied.)

These practices are now finding their way into mainstream ag, I noticed in the Western Producer not long ago a story about a young couple who were successfully using these techniques and the Cattleman's Association was sponsoring classes.

There is an old joke which often has more than a grain of truth: those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach teachers. Replace teachers with scientists and it is likely still true of way too many of them. I suspect scientists are too often caught up by the constraints of what they grew up taking for granted as truth and possibly unconsciously working from there. That's possibly why over and over we see scientists sneering and making life very difficult for people who buck the system and dare to challenge their core beliefs. Often the mockers have to reverse themselves later.

Think of the ridicule that met the idea that washing your hands between patients might make a difference in the number of deaths from infection, especially when going from perhaps doing an autopsy to delivering a baby. More recently, Linus Pauling was a Nobel Prize winner but when he came out with his ideas about vitamin C as a possibly useful cancer treatment he was sorrowfully designated as an old man who had lost his marbles and dismissed. Now the Mayo clinic has found that using his exact protocols does indeed show promise.

All of the people I mentioned have had scientists trailing after them like puppies trying to find out how they do what they do to get the results they get. Holtzer is growing citrus trees (which flower and fruit) outside without a greenhouse in the Austrian Alps. Lawton had fig trees producing fruit after only a few months although the scientists had decreed nothing would grow in those areas, and certainly not productive fig trees. As I mentioned above, the scientists were astounded that he was apparently able to desalinate soils with his techniques, something that is becoming more and more urgently needed in areas which use irrigation heavilly and for which presently scientists can only suggest planting more salt tolerant species.

Please explain to me just how/why it is ünrealistic to have other people doing what Will Allen is doing? Other than the reasons why it was unrealistic for him to expect to make a living on 3 acres of land in the first place, that is?

Here's another link you might want to check out, again something you would likely have us believe believe is unrealistic. But it's being done and highly successfully.
http://www.ted.com/t...outh_bronx.html

As far as farming is concerned, permaculture techniques are different than simply choosing to use only organic fertilizers and such and I can only suggest ..depending on how deeply you want to get into it - you can read Bill Mollison's A Designer's Manual (btw he was a scientist as well as being a cofounder of what is now known as Permaculture, Lawton is his "heir to the throne" so to speak)) or you look at some of the videos put out by Holtzer or Lawton or Salatin to get a feel of what it's all about, or you could check out a website call Permies.com which is a huge site. Permaculture farms are designed to work with natural systems rather than trying to bludgeon them into submission. It is HIGHLY productive and entirely sustainable.

It seems to me to be far far more unrealistic to think that unsustainable agriculture will feed the world in the coming decades and centuries. It may not be only mangos that only the rich can afford but food at all if the system collapses. I for one will stick to food that I know its genetic heritage. I'm not convinced that anyone who wanders along with a Doctorate in Science can do a better job of designing food than the food my body has evolved to handle.

 onoway, on 2013-May-06, 15:55, said:

An honest question.

To do it the way Will Allen does it, what percent of the population would have to be doing what Will Allen is doing.

in high schoo; I took some stupid test that supposedly would indicate a suitable profession gor me. It came up with aviator and farmer. I am not sure one way or the other about aviator, but I was sure then as I am now that I don't want to be a farmer. I am not dissing farmers, I just don't want to be one. A farmer probably doesn't want to be a mathematician.
So this has to work with someone else growing it, me buying it.
Not that I am following the argument all that closely.

 onoway, on 2013-May-06, 15:55, said:

Back to the "dividing line" between facts and beliefs.

Your body has not evolved to handle food. Evolution (of a species) has only to do with its success at reproducing. - reaching the age of fertility. That is a function of environments long passed.Current evolution is now governed by the fact that modern medicine actually allows a higher percentage of any population to reproduce - even in less developed parts of the world - we have wiped out certain diseases, for example.

As to knowing the "genetic heritage" of what you eat? Seriously?! Realistically, you know (or could know) more about the genetically modified food, because the modifications are known exactly and can be read in the patent office or online.

 mikeh, on 2013-May-06, 15:07, said:

Nobody, least of all me, is suggesting that we go back to the farming techniques of the 1800's and I don't know why you would make so many totally uncalled for comments apparently rising from some personal fantasy, including Rodale getting charitable donations to keep them alive. For someone who is unhappy that some research doesn't instantly jump to his fingertips you are remarkably quick to make totally unsupported statements.

I have already said that Permaculture is a system based on several principles, designed by scientists (does that make you happy?) and not just örganic farming. Organic is a suspiciously slippery term now anyway since several of the people in the US Department of Agriculture now overseeing what can be given the designation are ex Monsanto employees. "Organic" is an extremely fast growing market, (because people are getting more and more uneasy about the food being offered by big ag) so there have been active efforts to both dilute the meaning of the term and/or to legislate against the term being used on labels at all. Big ag is determined to get a piece of the action. Anyway that's beside the point.

Labour is or can be a problem especially for mega farms which are mindnumbingly boring to work on. How many people do you know who would like to sit alone in a tractor going around fields day after day hour after hour whose only distraction would be for meals or when something breaks? Or bent over in a field cutting lettuce or picking stawberries hour after hour after hour?

Have you seen the documentaries about how the people are or have been treated on many farms? All they will call them will be...deportee. People who were given hovels to live in and worked until the harvest was in and then turned over to the authorities to be deported without the wages promised. Is it any wonder farm work isn't seen as desirable?

As far as I can tell, the people who are running internships on permaculture farms don't seem to have much trouble finding people who want to come. The internships don't even pay "real" wages any more than internships in city companies do, although the farm ones generally include room and board and a small stipend at least.

There's at least one I know of where interns have consistently gone to work and learn and didn't want to leave. It certainly wasn't because of the money, in fact now I think of it they actually charge interns for the privilege of working there, though that is not usually the case. Perhaps the labour problem is not so acute because it isn't so soul destroying (or dangerous because of the absence of the toxic chemicals used on a big ag farm). Perhaps because they found out that successful farmers are not heehawing straw chewing yokels who can barely read or write, but intelligent and thoughtful individuals who care about what they are doing and how they do it. ( well, I've known one or two chew a straw on occassion but I've never met one who was a yokel )

To reiterate though, permaculture is designed to need less labor than conventional farming, organic or not. It is designed to use a bare minimum of equipment, so the pressures of massive bank payments are less.

A few years ago the AVERAGE farmer who had to declare bankruptcy in Ontario was said to owe around 6 million dollars. Understandable when ONE piece of machinery can cost upwards of a quarter million, not counting the tractor needed to use it. Tell me please, how many people could have productive jobs paying a living wage for a quarter of a million dollars? Or even just the interest on that at 6% or more? Or would you rather have them on welfare/food stamps so the banks can continue to rake in billions of dollars in interest?

 FM75, on 2013-May-06, 17:24, said:

Wow

I mean, I have seen clueless statements about science before, but never one that is proceeded by such an ironic declaration.

Edit: I suppose I should state something of why that is a clueless statement. How do you propose anything gets to the age of fertility without handling food?

Hey, onoway: let's not have a flame war, especially since we are on the same side, at least generally.

I think sustainable farming, with reduced dependence and perhaps elimination, of chemically manufactured herbicides and pesticides is a tremendous idea, which deserves to have more attention and money spent on it.

I merely pointed out that some of the examples to which you made reference may not be quite the incredible poster-children for the approach and/or that their approaches contain some problems. That isn't the same as saying that they are crooks, or charlatans nor that they don't have a lot of important, valid, information for us to absorb.

Look at the urban farming: I endorsed it, while pointing out the obvious: no way are we ever feeding our city populations doing urban farming, for any number of reasons. So, yes, it's great and it should be expanded, but it will never contribute a huge amount to any urban food economy for many, many reasons.

Look at Rodale: they admit, tho they do so in the disingenuous guise of claiming to 'create jobs', that their method of agriculture is relatively labour-intensive.

If you add to that the idea that one should not use expensive machinery, this means that their idea of job creation is largely going to be lowpaid manual labour.

I have no doubt but that there are always going to be some idealistic young adults who will 'intern' on these projects for little more than room and board. However, I doubt that that sort of approach can be scaled to a size where the approach generates a significant fraction of the national food demand.

Indeed, surely you see the inconsistency between maintaining that these approaches are economically competitive while also bragging that they use a low of barely-paid manual labour? You can only count on a small part of the population being willing to put their lives on indefinite hold just to feel as if they are contributing to the salvation of humanity. Most earnest interns will eventually move back to more conventional lives.

As for rodale getting donations to help it survive, well I may be mistaken but when an organization seeks and obtains tax status in the US permitting donors to write off the money they donate, it suggests that they are seeking and getting tax-deductible donations and it took only 30 seconds on google to discover that the institute is a 501©(3) organization.

I apologize if the inference I drew was mistaken, but what I read into the situation is that they get donations, and virtually free labour from some workers and on that basis they can compete economically. While I applaud their work, and hope that some aspects of it can be commercialized on a large scale, those particular aspects seem unscalable to me.

As for mindnumbing labour: would you rather operate a climate controlled combine, with a padded seat, gps navigation, and a stereo system or be stooping in a field, harvesting by hand? I've witnessed subsistence farming. I've watched people work rice paddies by hand, when their ancient rice planting machine broke down and the owner couldn't afford to replace it (our guide in Bali took us to the family rice paddies where we saw his father at work...maybe he was lying to us, but we certainly believed him).

Eliminate machinery and you get stoop (or other forms of manual) labour, and it is incredibly naive to suggest otherwise. Stoop labour on 3 acres or 30 acres or 3000 acres is still stoop labour, and I doubt that it gets less boring or more pleasant merely because you're on or off a sustainable farm...at least not after the idealism wears off.

So: my position:

Encourage sustainable farming (I previously used the term organic but I appreciate that other terms may be more appropriate as commercial interests distort the term 'organic').

Be careful about GMO's but not out of ignorance or a desire for 'the good old days'

Encourage urban farming: heck I always brag to friends about the sheer good taste of produce you pick from your yard. I love growing a modest crop of vegetables and fruits and I don't use any herbicides or persticides...we had an organic farmer come by and give us guidance on how to do it.

But also recognize that until and unless there are significant advances, it seems implausible to feed the world without chemicals, at least in the short term, hopefully measured in decades not centuries.

Oh, and don't be quite so quick to brand what I say as being based on a fantasy world. When one of your exemplars admits that they create more jobs than does conventional farming, and we see you state that such models use less labourm than conventional farming, a red flag goes up. I raised an inference from a publication on the rodale website. You respond by accusing me of basing my comment on my personal fantasy world. Where did that come from?

 dwar0123, on 2013-May-06, 17:49, said:

Because you did not understand the difference between a body and a species, you did not understand the statement at all. A body does not evolve to eat certain kinds of food. A body's genetic content is fixed. It matures from an embryonic state to a fertile state with luck and good environmental conditions. That has nothing to do with evolution. Evolution is what takes place over tens (at a minimum) to hundreds of generations in the population of a species as the genetic content of the population changes.

 Winstonm, on 2013-May-05, 08:25, said:

Plus one


Winston you of all...of all makes a key point.


by definition

but one does wonder can theory be reality if only an opinion \? One hopes back up with facts.

--


others in this thread make imp. points.

but I don't think those who advocate only organic/anti genetics make their case.
otoh anti crony big/huge farming......do make the case.

 mikeh, on 2013-May-06, 18:28, said:

I don't want a flame war either but I have said several times that permaculture is NOT the same as organic farming and yet I keep reading these comments based on what organic farming does. It gets a bit frustrating: I'll try once more.

Permaculture is fairly labour intensive to get the system going, and for sure machinery is often used for that stage to create swales and planting trees and such. But the system is designed not to need machinery to plow and harrow and disc and spray five times a year so none of that machinery is needed. It isn't labour which is going to have to be done by hand, it isn't going to be needing done at all.

Fencing for cattle and so forth is often best if it's flexible in plan so no post pounder is needed, except perhaps for the perimeter fencing.Electric fencing, either stranded or woven can be used as permanent fence or very easilly moved. It is labour intensive in that someone needs to go out to the field and walk along picking up slim fiberglass posts and moving them over from time to time. Greg Judy doesn't even put up much hay any more as he doesn't need it although he gets lots of winter and snow but the cattle find good feed under it. It's only really bad days he feeds, and his cattle are in excellent shape come spring. So that's a whole lot less haying equipment/buildings needed. Do you see what I mean?

You are trying to fit what you know of farming into what I have touched on, and not understood that I am talking about a system of farming that you are likely (clearly) not familiar with. That's sort of what I was talking about when I said that scientists have bias they likely aren't even aware of. I'd guess almost everyone assumes the world basically works how they are familiar with it working so they try to make things fit and it leads to complications, misunderstandings and really really slows down progress.

Will Allen supposedly raises about a million pounds of food on his 3 acres per year. That doesn't seem insignificant to me. That's one 3 acre parcel.Most of what he does could be done in abandoned factories or other such places, and there supposedly is a glut of those around with companies moving to offshore or shutting down. Not only that, but perhaps more important, he is making people, in particular kids, understand that their access to food need not be entirely out of their control. Also, look at the numbers and obvious enthusiasm of those kids and young adults. Those kids would likely not only jump at the chance to work on a farm for the season but be a real asset, which is not always the case with interns. BUT, not an agribusiness farm, not one they would be treated like a necessary evil rather than given some respect, and not one where they couldn't learn anything.

Also I didn't mean to suggest that permaculture farmers don't ever pay people who work for them. I was pointing out that those who get interns for little or no money seem to have no trouble finding them, so I would guess that those who pay a wage wouldn't have too many problems either. I don't know.

As far as rice production and stoop labour, there's a little book called the One Straw Revolution about (by?) Masanobu Fukuoka and I think you would find it interesting. He died in 2008. Although his system didn't include stock of any kind, he is also regarded as an excellent example of a permaculture farmer (and he was also a trained scientist). It isn't full of science, it's a very gentle book talking about his philosophy and not so incidentally how he farmed and why and how it worked out for him. It would give you a MUCH better idea of what permaculture is all about and why/how it doesn't revolve around the biggest tractor or the most acres. His productivity without all of that rivalled or surpassed the average in Japan (if you don't like Rodale you can try Fukuoka ) I wish I had thought of him earlier but until you mentioned rice paddies he hadn't crossed my mind. It's a small and very readable book.

Again as far as seasonal work is concerned (which farming mostly is in terms of intensity) I think that a lot of people simply aren't familiar enough with it and what they do think they know they don't find appealing.A combination of bad press and being outside the comfort zone is going to make it hard to appeal to people. That;s why I think programs such as Will Allen and the Bronx teacher run are so important aside from the food they produce, they are bringing back a sense of connection to food that we have been losing. When kids in school can't identify a beet or green bean when it is held out to them, (Jamie Oliver video) and think that milk comes from the store, full stop, it is not a good situation.

As well as all that, it seems ironic to me that people will shriek in disbelieving horror at the idea of carrying a pail of mash to a pig but will be proud of belonging to a gym so they can work out with weights.

Anyway, sorry but I don't accept that agribiz as it is now IS needed to feed the world for the next hundred years. I think the sooner we change tactics to a more sustainable form of agriculture the better. Chemicals damage the soil and the soil is the basis of the food which sustains us. Healthy soil, healthy food. Way simplified but that's the basis of it all. I'm realistic enough to know that isn't going to happen anytime soon anyway, unless there is some sort of major disaster so it's an academic question.

Someone once told me that Lincoln said that any man could make something of his life no matter what else if he had 5 acres of land and an axe, (or some such, I can't find the reference, maybe it was a cow or chicken or a shovel ) I tend to think that if we could take the best of what the small farm had to offer, with the best that we now know and take for granted (Central heating, running water, computers are hard to deny) we might end up with the best of both instead of thinking there has to be a choice.