Re:Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security
by hinkley on Monday May 02, 2022 @01:45PM
(#31238347)
I'm not the one oversimplifying, it's 'modern' agronomists that are oversimplifying.
Nitrogen is 70% of our atmosphere. When you remove all other plant life in order to get the last 20% of theoretical yield from your land, you end up having to manually provide all of the services that were provided by the plants you killed. The Green Revolution is a petrochemical revolution. Cooking allows us to use lignin calories to recover more calories from our existing food supply. Livestock do the same, either by converting grasses (ungulates) or recycling unpalatable foods (pigs).
When the petrochemicals become expensive we will have to go forward and/or backward to some other solution (most likely old solutions with new twists). The sibling comment with the huge bibliography points to some of the more coherent voices in the world of polyculture agriculture, although Gabe Brown exists in a sort of grey area between aggressive crop rotation and polyculture.
Nitrogen is 70% of our atmosphere. When you remove all other plant life in order to get the last 20% of theoretical yield from your land, you end up having to manually provide all of the services that were provided by the plants you killed. The Green Revolution is a petrochemical revolution. Cooking allows us to use lignin calories to recover more calories from our existing food supply. Livestock do the same, either by converting grasses (ungulates) or recycling unpalatable foods (pigs).
When the petrochemicals become expensive we will have to go forward and/or backward to some other solution (most likely old solutions with new twists). The sibling comment with the huge bibliography points to some of the more coherent voices in the world of polyculture agriculture, although Gabe Brown exists in a sort of grey area between aggressive crop rotation and polyculture.