The merits of natural versus chemical fertilisers

[emordnilap]

Muck = night soil.

No, shit Sherlock.

I prefer humanure - we should spread it around.

[featherstick]

But to get back to the original question, How many tea bags will it take to produce the 110,000,000 tons of nitrogen fertiliser needed to feed the planets human population?

Quit asking reductionist questions. My point isn't teabags, it's waste, and rethinking how we do things.

[vtsnowedin]

But to get back to the original question, How many tea bags will it take to produce the 110,000,000 tons of nitrogen fertiliser needed to feed the planets human population?

Quit asking reductionist questions. My point isn't teabags, it's waste, and rethinking how we do things.

I am reducing the question to facts and figures as that is where the answer lies. All the rethinking in the world will not feed us all if the physical nutrients are not available and provided to the plants in combination with sufficient sunlight and water at the correct time. My initial assertion was that organic farming methods cannot replace agriculture done with chemically derived fertilizers. This was immediately scoffed at with "I can get great yields in my organic garden by adding enough organic material to my soil"(paraphrased) which I countered with the assertion that there was not sufficient organic material available worldwide to replace the millions of tons of commercial fertilizers. To refute that assertion one would have to find or make an estimate of the organic material available for agriculture that is not already being used alongside chemical fertilizers and determine it's potential nutrient content. No one has bothered to attempt that or failing to find a source that supports their argument they have remained silent rather then report what they have found.
So my original assertion remains unchallenged by anything resembling facts.

[featherstick]

But to get back to the original question, How many tea bags will it take to produce the 110,000,000 tons of nitrogen fertiliser needed to feed the planets human population?

Quit asking reductionist questions. My point isn't teabags, it's waste, and rethinking how we do things.

I am reducing the question to facts and figures as that is where the answer lies. All the rethinking in the world will not feed us all if the physical nutrients are not available and provided to the plants in combination with sufficient sunlight and water at the correct time. My initial assertion was that organic farming methods cannot replace agriculture done with chemically derived fertilizers. This was immediately scoffed at with "I can get great yields in my organic garden by adding enough organic material to my soil"(paraphrased) which I countered with the assertion that there was not sufficient organic material available worldwide to replace the millions of tons of commercial fertilizers. To refute that assertion one would have to find or make an estimate of the organic material available for agriculture that is not already being used alongside chemical fertilizers and determine it's potential nutrient content. No one has bothered to attempt that or failing to find a source that supports their argument they have remained silent rather then report what they have found.
So my original assertion remains unchallenged by anything resembling facts.

http://transitionculture.org/wp-content ... ritain.pdf

Sorry, fingers faster than brain. This is a very interesting and well-researched article on Britain's ability to feed itself with a permaculture system. We have many other options available too - demand destruction, especially for the FF-intensive and harmful "food" that is produced, using more of the 50% of food that is wasted between farm and plate, making better use of urban and peri-urban spaces to grow food intensively at a human scale, recapturing much of the fertility that ends up in landfill or in the sea, using remaining FF better and so on. We couldn't do a like-for-like overnight organic-for-conventional fertiliser swap and expect to feed the world. We could be more clever and more flexible about what we eat and how we procure it, and we'll probably have to be, soon.

Now, back to my seed catalogue!

[vtsnowedin]

[http://transitionculture.org/wp-content ... ritain.pdf

Sorry, fingers faster than brain. This is a very interesting and well-researched article on Britain's ability to feed itself with a permaculture system. We have many other options available too - demand destruction, especially for the FF-intensive and harmful "food" that is produced, using more of the 50% of food that is wasted between farm and plate, making better use of urban and peri-urban spaces to grow food intensively at a human scale, recapturing much of the fertility that ends up in landfill or in the sea, using remaining FF better and so on. We couldn't do a like-for-like overnight organic-for-conventional fertiliser swap and expect to feed the world. We could be more clever and more flexible about what we eat and how we procure it, and we'll probably have to be, soon.

Now, back to my seed catalogue!

An interesting piece that I have read before. It makes some assumptions that show the author has little hands on experience at farm life and farm practices. For one he assumes that grazing land can be converted to arable land at will which is often not the case do to terrain and soil type. A cow or sheep can go many places a tractor fears to tread. The second is that he assumes that the calves of high yield dairy cows can be raised to finished beef where in fact most high yield cows are the Holstein- Friesian breed which end up in hot dogs and baloney but not in feed lots.
But given all that (and he claims no lock on precision ) the first paragraph of his conclusion is plausible.
"The main conclusion to be drawn from this exercise is that organic
livestock-based agriculture, practised by orthodox methods
and without supplementary measures, has the most difficulty
sustaining the full UK population on the land available,
while other management systems can do so with a more or less
comfortable margin."
And that is for the UK which has a temperate climate , good soil, and adequate rainfall. You could not expand his analysis to the whole world.

[RenewableCandy]

I countered with the assertion that there was not sufficient organic material available worldwide to replace the millions of tons of commercial fertilizers.

But, we eat it all, so it must reappear somewhere! It's just a matter of getting it to the right place.

And that is for the UK which has a temperate climate , good soil, and adequate rainfall.

but an awful lot of people per unit volume, and not quite the ideal amount of sunlight. We'd have difficulties, but they'd be different to everybody else's.

[vtsnowedin]

I countered with the assertion that there was not sufficient organic material available worldwide to replace the millions of tons of commercial fertilizers.

But, we eat it all, so it must reappear somewhere! It's just a matter of getting it to the right place.

And that is for the UK which has a temperate climate , good soil, and adequate rainfall.

but an awful lot of people per unit volume, and not quite the ideal amount of sunlight. We'd have difficulties, but they'd be different to everybody else's.

A lot of nutrients are burned or otherwise oxidized away removing them from the loop and we have been artificially adding to the quantity available by chemical means. What happens when we stop adding the chemical fertilizer is the question.
England has it's challenges but it is a far cry from sub saharan Africa.

[kenneal - lagger]

What he is saying is that we will all have to eat less meat which means that we would need considerably less land for cereal, protein crop and grass production leaving more land for human food. Even a pig in a modern system eats three times more food than it produces and that food could all the fed direct to humans.

A pig kept in a traditional system on scraps and poor land would be viable in a future of high fossil fuel and hence high animal feed prices but there just wouldn't be the numbers to satisfy current demand. With demand destruction due (not do) to high prices, that demand could be satisfied with the traditional system.

Another study of agricultural production, thje Zero Carbon Britain Report is available here.

Nutrients are added to the loop by legumes and by rainfall which also contains disolved nitrogen. Dust in the air is also a nutrient; the Sahara, for instance, fertilises the DODGY TAX AVOIDERS basin with wind blown dust from dried lake beds and we also get regular doses in the UK. (we may get another in about two weeks time if the jet stream forecast is correct - see second map) There is a huge dust build up on soils; you only have to watch an archaeological program on the TV to see how much soil is built up over the years.

I've been treating my soils with volcanic rock dust while it is available and with charcoal dust which I make from brash and hard prunings and waste from the garden. This will rebuild soil fertility while the charcoal will hold the nutrients in the soil.

[peaceful_life]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvVlzUv8D5U

Comprehensive overview of Darren Doherty's take on "permaculture" 2.0, ecological agriculture and farming for the future.




http://vimeo.com/22330819

Mark Shepard's 106 acre permaculture farm.


http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/artic ... m-itself-2

Five years on and Can Britain Feed Itself.


Also research Mr Eugenio Gras for microbial fertilisers.

[vtsnowedin]

http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/artic ... m-itself-2

Five years on and Can Britain Feed Itself.


.

I think if you take a clear eyed look at the differences between present practices shown in his table A and compare them to His proposed table D you will see that the reduced yields per hectare he admits to support my argument. Interesting that he totally removes ten million pigs from your diet as well as the meat and eggs from close to a billion chickens and other poultry. No eggs and sausage for breakfast? no Christmas turkey, No roast duck?
He laments the drop in farm jobs after 1947 and blames it on government policy but it was inevitable when a tractor that could do the work of ten teams of heavy horses came on the field you not only no longer needed the twenty horses and their hay and pasture land but you no longer needed nine of the teamsters that walked or rode all day behind the horses driving them.

[peaceful_life]

http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/artic ... m-itself-2

Five years on and Can Britain Feed Itself.


.

I think if you take a clear eyed look at the differences between present practices shown in his table A and compare them to His proposed table D you will see that the reduced yields per hectare he admits to support my argument. Interesting that he totally removes ten million pigs from your diet as well as the meat and eggs from close to a billion chickens and other poultry. No eggs and sausage for breakfast? no Christmas turkey, No roast duck?
He laments the drop in farm jobs after 1947 and blames it on government policy but it was inevitable when a tractor that could do the work of ten teams of heavy horses came on the field you not only no longer needed the twenty horses and their hay and pasture land but you no longer needed nine of the teamsters that walked or rode all day behind the horses driving them.

I don't think he's supporting your argument at all, and he's talking about feeding people.....not excess on wants.

He laments back further to Tull also, but more in the context of aknowledging we've been doing it wrong for so long, rather than an acceptance of the inevitability of the thinking of tha day.

[Little John]

Taking up vtsnowedin's arguments here, I think a good rule of thumb with regards to calculating much biomass can be sustainably grown on a given section of land, one merely needs to take a look at how much biomass was being produced by the natural ecosystem prior to farming. Give that such an eco system will have evolved over millions of years to sustainably use the available resources to the very best effect (because any unsustainable eco system will have gone long extinct), any human biomass production that attempts to exceed that natural level of production will be almost certainly unsustainable.

So, that'll be pretty much all industrial farming and quite a lot of pre-industrial farming then. However, even those aspects of pre-industrial farming that were sustainable, were only sustainable for a human population far lower than is currently the case. 7 billion humans only works with hydrocarbons. Sure, consumption can be cut back. but, that's just spreading out the slope of decline in the absence of hydrocarbons.

vtsnowedin is right.

[kenneal - lagger]

The paper quoted in this thread shows us that what we will be forced to do rather than what we want to do.

Artificial fertilizers are all well and good if you can get them at an affordable price. How long that will continue to be the case no one knows but wouldn't it be safer to work on the principle that cheap fertilizer will soon be a thing of the past and that we need to find a way of reducing and eventually eliminating its use?

We already have a very good and well researched system of organic agriculture that can produce sustainable yields not far below those of chemical agriculture so why not work to improve that? We also need to research how we can maintain those yields with a lower fossil fuel input.

[Little John]

The paper quoted in this thread shows us that what we will be forced to do rather than what we want to do.

Artificial fertilizers are all well and good if you can get them at an affordable price. How long that will continue to be the case no one knows but wouldn't it be safer to work on the principle that cheap fertilizer will soon be a thing of the past and that we need to find a way of reducing and eventually eliminating its use?

We already have a very good and well researched system of organic agriculture that can produce sustainable yields not far below those of chemical agriculture so why not work to improve that? We also need to research how we can maintain those yields with a lower fossil fuel input.

Oh, I certainly wouldn't argue that we are not going to be forced to do without fossil fuels. I am also fully in favour of research to make the best use of renewable sources of nutrients. My point is that no matter how clever we get with organic farming, we are not going to feed 7 billion people. If it were possible to do that, we would have had 7 billion long before the industrial revolution.

Energy in - Energy out. It's that simple, in the end.

[the_lyniezian]

Taking up vtsnowedin's arguments here, I think a good rule of thumb with regards to calculating much biomass can be sustainably grown on a given section of land, one merely needs to take a look at how much biomass was being produced by the natural ecosystem prior to farming. Give that such an eco system will have evolved over millions of years to sustainably use the available resources to the very best effect (because any unsustainable eco system will have gone long extinct), any human biomass production that attempts to exceed that natural level of production will be almost certainly unsustainable.

So, that'll be pretty much all industrial farming and quite a lot of pre-industrial farming then. However, even those aspects of pre-industrial farming that were sustainable, were only sustainable for a human population far lower than is currently the case. 7 billion humans only works with hydrocarbons. Sure, consumption can be cut back. but, that's just spreading out the slope of decline in the absence of hydrocarbons.

vtsnowedin is right.

I wonder. These "natural" systems are constrained by the existing nature of the soil, and whatever seeds and wildlife happen to find their way to that area by circumstances. Are we sure there is no way that with human understanding, we cannot improve on that?