Comments on: A Stormy Forecast for U.S. Agriculture

By: Edward Greisch

Edward Greisch — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 05:48:27 +0000

Famine is one of the original 4 horsemen of the apocalypse. A few more horsemen have been added, such as giant meteor impact, but it is famine, war, disease and pestilence that we will be facing soon and for sure. We in North America could add a lot of land area to food agriculture by growing food instead of cotton and tobacco, and by cutting down forests. The question is: when do we have to and will it actually do any good. It isn’t happening because it isn’t profitable or maybe even possible. Farmers are sticking to the land that they have always farmed. They probably know something, like that corn won’t grow in a lot of places where it isn’t growing now.
Can we genetically engineer corn to grow on thawed out tundra? Maybe, but the research has to be done years in advance. Since climate can change a lot quicker than we had previously led ourselves to believe, there is a lag time between when climate changes and when people begin planting a newly engineered crop in a newly thawed out place. That lag time is a term of years with no food.
How do you know in advance when you should go plow the tundra? Civilizations in the past have vanished when the rain moved 900 miles in 1 year. Climate does that. If the rain moved 1 mile each year for 900 years, no problem. It doesn’t. We just don’t have the science yet that can tell us what plan to make. We can’t forecast the weather years ahead. We can’t forecast the climate 2 or 3 years ahead either. We can make many years ahead climate forecasts and 2 week weather forecasts, but the 2 do not meet in the middle.
The only reasonable thing to do is to work very hard to keep the climate as was. The folly of using food for fuel will soon be seen in grocery store prices.

By: David B. Benson

David B. Benson — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 22:00:10 +0000

Check the price runup for phosphorus, an absolutely required plant nutrient.

By: Gail

Gail — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 21:56:55 +0000

Cliimate change will impact agriculture in frighteningly unpredictable ways. Not just the impacts of extreme weather, but an excess amount of CO2 concentration in itself is detrimental to plants. It seems a no-brainer that if plants evolved to survive in one type of atmosphere, then if the composition is altered, they aren’t going to be adapted to it!

http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vFGU6qvkmTI&feature=channel_page

By: Leland Palmer

Leland Palmer — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:41:32 +0000

Hi K.L. Reddington-

Selling crop residues for ethanol production is stupid. It is ignorant, It enhances erosion and requires more topsoil runoff and topsoil going down the rive. Minimuym tillage practices have cut down dust, wind erosion and improved subsoil loisture retention.

Leland selling biomass in the form of crop residue is ignorant and every farmer knows it. This is why city folks and government involved with legislating farming practices is very destructive to the conservation habbits on farms.

Let me give an example of how selling residue is raping the soil. I have raced sialboats inland for over 30 years. We have algae blooms that of course effect drinking water quality and flavor for municipal water palnats. By encouraging farmers to change 2 things, leaving residu on top instead of plowing it uneer and injectiong fertilizer instead of top application, we have reduced Nitrogen run off and algae is gone. Now people want to buy the corn and sorghum stalks for ethanol?
ethanol has another problem. it uses more BTU’s in total to produce than it creates.

Well, I’m not advocating ethanol right now, but if I was I would point out that while ethanol from corn returns maybe 1.6 times energy invested, ethanol from cellulose could be closer to a return of 10 times as much energy returned as invested.

If you investigate some of the investigators in this area, you will find out that Pimentel recieves money from Sarah Scaife May, a radical negative population growth source of funding, through her Laurel Foundation.

You will find that he makes many questionable assumptions in his “research” and that his numbers are radical outliers from other studies.

Another source of outlier net energy figures is Patzek, of Berkeley, who also runs an institute funded by oil companies, and investigates things like deep injection of CO2 to increase secondary oil recovery.

Regarding soil depletion of carbon, most crop waste left on the ground is degraded by microbes, and most of the carbon from it goes into the air, rather than the soil. More net carbon could be injected into the soil by carbonizing the biomass into charcoal, selling part of it, and using the rest as biochar.

Finally, we have to do these things to turn the corner on global warming. Carbon depletion of soils won’t matter if they are baked into a sterile mass by runaway global warming.

I think it’s possible to harvest a lot of “waste” biomass, reduce the amount of carbon that soil microbes put into the air, and increase soil carbon content all at the same time – by applying our knowledge of soil science to the problem.

More later, back to work.

By: K L Reddington

K L Reddington — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:57:03 +0000

“More intense drought and floods could devastate farm income.”

This means higher crop prices. Yield goes down and prices go up. Our biggest input cost variance last year was the price per ton of fertilizer.

Gov intervention all the way to food export embargoes really has cost the government a lot. With the new energy bill, the EPA wants to elbow the USDA out of the way.

Selling crop residues for ethanol production is stupid. It is ignorant, It enhances erosion and requires more topsoil runoff and topsoil going down the rive. Minimuym tillage practices have cut down dust, wind erosion and improved subsoil loisture retention.

Leland selling biomass in the form of crop residue is ignorant and every farmer knows it. This is why city folks and government involved with legislating farming practices is very destructive to the conservation habbits on farms.

Let me give an example of how selling residue is raping the soil. I have raced sialboats inland for over 30 years. We have algae blooms that of course effect drinking water quality and flavor for municipal water palnats. By encouraging farmers to change 2 things, leaving residu on top instead of plowing it uneer and injectiong fertilizer instead of top application, we have reduced Nitrogen run off and algae is gone. Now people want to buy the corn and sorghum stalks for ethanol?
ethanol has another problem. it uses more BTU’s in total to produce than it creates.

Keep the MBA’s in the city appartment buildings and out of farming. Russia has a lot of land and imports food because their governemtn seems to claim how to farm and their farmers are dictated what to do.

Ethanol plants are shuttered and going chapter 11.
there are 4 big reasons.

They should go broke except POET.

By: Leland Palmer

Leland Palmer — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:29:00 +0000

Farmers could also make additional money selling their biomass crop waste – so long as the climate remains stable enough for agriculture.

The rivers that coal fired power plants are cited on provide a natural transport network for biomass co-firing or biocarbon replacement firing – so long as the rivers continue to run.

We have huge resources of biomass available in this country:

From Oak Ridge National Labs:

II. Resource and Usage Statistics

1. How much biomass exists right now?

Worldwide, total “standing crop” biomass (99% on land, and 80% in trees) is a huge resource, equivalent to about 60 years of world energy use in the year 2000 (1250 billion metric tonnes of dry plant matter, containing 560 billion tonnes of carbon). For the U.S. alone, standing vegetation has been variously estimated at between 65 and 90 billion tonnes of dry matter (30-40 billion tonnes of carbon), equivalent to 14-19 years of current U.S. primary energy use. However, the Earth actually grows every year about 130 billion tonnes of biomass on land (60 billion tonnes of carbon) and a further 100 billion tonnes in the rivers, lakes and oceans (46 billion tonnes carbon). The energy content of this annual biomass production is estimated to be more than 6 times world energy use or 2,640 exajoules (2500 Quads) on land, with an additional 2024 exajoules (1920 Quads) in the waters.

We have huge biomass resources in this country – unless global warming ignites huge firestorms and sends billions of tons of carbon from this biomass resource into the atmosphere.

We are a huge country, rich in biomass, rich in rail transport, rich in rivers for biomass collection and transport, rich in technology, and rich in education.

We have everything we need to fix this problem – except a flexible financial elite that will adapt to and accept the reality of our changed situation.

Yes, the farmers can profit immensely from the new green economy, by selling their crop residues to be used for biomass co-firing or biocarbon production, by growing biomass crops on marginal agricultural land, and so on.

So long as the climate is stable.