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xssve -> RE: Organic can feed the world (12/26/2011 1:41:59 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: TheGorenSociety
Couple of points: family farms do not provide their own labor.At least that is the case here in the Us. Most family members within a family farm organic or otherwise spend most of their time working outside jobs from the farm to pay for th high price of land to keep the family farm. Additionally most family farmers do not have large families, most have the same average number of kids as any other house hold. Their are exceptions to this, but it is not the norm.Their has been a steady drop in family size over the past 50years, ever since the great depression forced many homestead farmers off their land and the massive erosion issues from bad farming practices. Amish families have larger families offspring wise.Most have never had to spread organic fertilizer or taken the time to rebuild soil manually, if they had, they would understand it is a daunting task and takes years for soil to be rejuvenated if let to nature. Most commercial nitrogen is derived from natural gas and a few other methods which are energy intensive.
It takes hundreds of years for a area to recover and replenish the soils to the point where it can sustain a ecosystem.
I'm talking historically, it has changed significantly over the last couple of decades, the changes began with mechanization right after the civil war, started before that, but after the war, large scale industrial farming accelerated significantly, the sharecroppers were the first to go, congress paid off the war debt quickly, essentially financing industrial farming which rapidly knocked the bottom out of the commodities market and wiped out the sharecroppers, who were freed slaves maintaining small truck farms. Regulating the Poor is an excellent history of the changes that took plce after the Civil War, it's the same process, still going on, they bulldozed the houses as obstacles to machinery.
It is capitalism, competition, albeit, there are fairly distinct advantages to large scale financing, which has been the case as, you see, for some time, it requires a relatively large initial capital investment to leverage any manufacturing process into an economy of scale.
And with mass production in general, you're talking quantity over quality, mechanization has allowed us to add value to the artifacts we produce in an exponential ratio for all practical purposes, from balloons to a moon landing in almost a single generation, computers, etc, the list goes on, but there is a limit even to that, and we're talking about the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat - we could live without the technology, we'd just start over, it's what we do: we create, reproduce, and improve artifacts and the ideas they're born of - but we can't live without air water and food, and you can't just hit rewind, it takes time, as you note, some things can't be easily undone, that mechanization ultimately led to the dust bowl, as these farms planted every square foot of land, all the time.
The second thing is, to respond to your point about family labor, agricultural labor is seasonal: it's labor intensive but it's not 9 to 5, it follows the seasonal cycle and the cycle of plantings and harvestings of a particular cultivar in a particular climate, etc., so "labor intensive" doesn't necessarily mean a lot of work all the time, it means bursts of intense activity followed by periods of relative inactivity - winter for instance, which means you can farm and do something else too, and when harvest rolls around, even all the family might not be enough, people get together help each other to do it, even in modern mechanized farming - but that might be matter of weeks, or even days, after which, you can go back to doing something else.
Biointensive farming you can basically do in your spare time, though it does require a large initial investment of labor, digging the beds, but once they are dug, they're called "lazy beds", because they require very little effort to maintain: you can pull the biggest weed out with Two fingers.
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