India's rice revolution

[the_lyniezian]

Increased yields without GM or other intensive methods? Just by better methods of husbandry?

Apparently works for some farmers in India, and might help as a possible solution in an increasingly resource scarce world... maybe.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-develo ... revolution

[woodburner]

Increased yields without GM .........

Has GM ever given increased yields then?

[PS_RalphW]

What works in one field in India probably won't work so well in another field. It needs intelligence and experience to find the best solution for each micro-climate. There are no global solutions, just local minima and maxima, and these are constantly changing with climate, falling water tables etc. Also, can we be sure that these increased yields are sustainable? Have all the inputs and outputs been measured - water, soil nutrients, local ecosystem stability etc.? How resilient is the system to shocks from the weather and disease? The only long term to solution to adequate food for all is for there to be less people.

Not that we shouldn't try to grow our food more in tune with the ecosystems.

[UndercoverElephant]

It is a bit odd this method has not been discovered until now, given the amount of people on this planet who grow rice, and the length of time people have been growing it. Rice was always intensively managed. It is a non-aquatic species which is placed in water to fool the plant into thinking it is about to drown and therefore produce lots of seed while it has the chance, instead of completing its normal growth sequence. If there is a better way to manage this process, it is surprising that it has taken this long for it to become well known about.

[ceti331]

yes my response is disbeleif at any claims that organic / new farming techniques can save us.

people have been experimenting with agri techniques for thousands of years, with long term 'GM' programs in effect i.e. selective breeding

and plants+animals evolved with some symbioses for a lot longer

i cannot beleive there is any low-hanging fruit

[ceti331]

"Regardless of the particulars, the underlying theory is the same: To reduce the tax burden for people who take on the costs of creating new taxpayers (otherwise known as children)"



God these people are f***ing stupid.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[UndercoverElephant]

"Regardless of the particulars, the underlying theory is the same: To reduce the tax burden for people who take on the costs of creating new taxpayers (otherwise known as children)"



God these people are ******* stupid.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Wrong thread

[kenneal - lagger]

yes my response is disbeleif at any claims that organic / new farming techniques can save us.

There are new techniques of growing staple food items being developed throughout the world using companion cropping systems, permaculture and selective breeding.

people have been experimenting with agri techniques for thousands of years, with long term 'GM' programs in effect i.e. selective breeding

No they are not GM programs. Selective breeding is the technique of taking the best plants from a batch of similar plants of the same breed and cross pollinating those plants in a closed system so that the best genes and those that give the required traits are "hopefully" carried onto the next generation. It is a natural process speeded up.

GM is a process of introducing foreign genes, probably from a different species, into another organism often by the use of a virus as a vector. The target plant is "infected" with a new gene in a process that wouldn't happen naturally.

There is, as you can see above, a huge difference in the two techniques and anyone trying to deceive people about that difference is doing mankind a huge disservice.

and plants+animals evolved with some symbioses for a lot longer

i cannot beleive there is any low-hanging fruit

Mankind and his farming has evolved as a monocultural system in most areas and the big advances in yields are coming from improved varieties and companion planting. There is also a lot of new knowledge about the chemistry of soil and plants. This is helping in areas where there are problems with loss of fertility due to the same plants being grown over decades and a selective depletion of soil nutrients taking place. The replacement of selected micronutrients can make a big difference to overall soil fertility.

Our new technical knowledge is one of the reasons why we will not go back to the Stone Age when TSHTF.

[RenewableCandy]

I think the main news here is not so much that the good method has been developed, as that somebody from "outside" actually found out and reported it. I bet a lot of that kind of experimentation is going on for different types of crops all over the place. The trick is to share the knowledge while we can.

[the_lyniezian]

Increased yields without GM .........

Has GM ever given increased yields then?

Good question.

[the_lyniezian]

Our new technical knowledge is one of the reasons why we will not go back to the Stone Age when TSHTF.

It always bugs me why anyone talks about us possibly going "back to the Stone Age" after some possible collapse. Presumably the only knowledge we need for that not to happen is the ability to work metals into usable tools, something we have known about for several thousand years in one form or another. This is surely basic enough not to be lost (presuming there are enough people with some knowledge of metallurgy and smithery).

(Presumably we either need decent enough supplies of ore or workable scrap metal, too, which might be a concern once the former are depleted beyond easy extraction, and the other corrodes).

[RenewableCandy]

This is true but it's not just knowledge that you need if you want metals. You need wood, ores and spare people who aren't busy living from hand-to-mouth getting enough food, so that they have the time and energy to do the metalwork.

[kenneal - lagger]

This is true but it's not just knowledge that you need if you want metals. You need wood, ores and spare people who aren't busy living from hand-to-mouth getting enough food, so that they have the time and energy to do the metalwork.

I.e. you need surplus energy in the system.

We are approaching the point where we do not have surplus energy, hence the worry and panic. There would need to be a large human die-off to leave us with enough surplus energy to carry out large scale metal working once the systems which we rely on to give us metals at the moment fail.

We can't just go out and cut tonnes of timber to make charcoal without deforesting our country. We can't just go out and pick up coal from the land surface like we could when the last lot of timber started to run out. We can't scoop oil off the surface or drill an oil well 100 feet deep with primitive equipment like we did at the start of the oil age. We can't find rich surface outcrops of minerals like we did at the start of the bronze and iron ages.

We have scoured the earth clean of surface outcrops of anything worth having and now have to dig mines thousands of feet deep to get to 1% ores that require huge amounts of surplus energy to turn into anything usable. In short once we run out of surplus energy in a few decades time the human race is stuffed for millions of years until the earth regenerates it's surface once again.

[biffvernon]

Increased yields without GM .........

Has GM ever given increased yields then?

Good question.

Monsanto share yield, for sure.

[PS_RalphW]

It always bugs me why anyone talks about us possibly going "back to the Stone Age" after some possible collapse. Presumably the only knowledge we need for that not to happen is the ability to work metals into usable tools, something we have known about for several thousand years in one form or another. This is surely basic enough not to be lost (presuming there are enough people with some knowledge of metallurgy and smithery).

I think it depends how far into the future you look. A lot of knowledge and technology gets lost in only a few generations when civilisations collapse. You only have to look at the UK in the 4th century. Romans had writing, advanced machinery, grand architecture, literature, mass production, highly structured society. In little more than a century we were back to living in wattle and daub houses and crude pottery, illiterate and subsistence farming and very little even by the way or iron tools. They were one technology away from the stone age.

Given how much more fragile our current level of technology is, I think you will be shocked how fast and how much is lost once the energy and food shortfall starts to bite. I strongly suspect that most of the world will go through massive depopulation and return to subsistence farming in little more than a century. It only takes a generation to go from high technology to illiteracy if the schools shut down.