Plagued by the plow: Wild forest buffets beat farm fields as food sources

[marmar]

from NOW Toronto:




By Wayne Roberts


Imitation is the highest form of flattery. But when it comes to mirroring Mother Nature, agriculture shows no respect.

Not so the indigenous food production patterns of Asia and Latin America. There, traditional agro-ecology, modelling many aspects of what we now call biomimicry, may show us the way to our oil-starved future.

What local cultures have learned in the mountainous and forested regions of Mexico, the Andes and Asia is that the process of getting food has as much to do with gathering and carrying as with cultivating.

The difference between North and South can be most easily understood from the number of F words describing what food procurers tend to. Here, farmers mostly cultivate in huge fields.

In the South, by contrast, peasant families make some of their living by cultivating small patches of land for rice and other food crops as well as fabrics such as cotton. But they supplement food crops by heading to the forest to forage for livestock fodder and fuel for the home fires, to fish in the marshes and collect other materials to increase the fertility of their ancient soils.

What this system doesn’t have much of is soil-disturbing annual ploughing or the earth-depleting planting of a small number of cereal grains that accounts in the North for most of the food consumed by humans and favoured livestock species. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=176379

[shraby]

1. That's all well and good, but our big farms feed millions

who live in the cities as well as the farmer. Not only in our cities, but in cities across the globe. That's something the small plots can't do, and if the city people started foraging fuel for home fires there would soon be nothing to forage. It's a nice thought, but totally unrealistic in today's world.

[txlibdem]

2. For everyone to have that lifestyle

We'd need at least 10 or 12 planet Earths.

So tell the scientists to get crackin' and find us some more planets to live on.

[Nihil]

3. Alternatively ...

> For everyone to have that lifestyle
> We'd need at least 10 or 12 planet Earths.
> So tell the scientists to get crackin' and find us some more planets to live on.

Everyone who wants to live that way has to kill 10-12 other people first!

:think:

(Hmmm ... wonder if you can get funding for that as a new "Reality Show"?)


Just a little Modest Proposal ... :hide:

[joshcryer]

8. That calculation is meaningless, as it completely ignores the energy budget of the planet.

We certainly have enough energy to have a western standard of living across the whole planet.

[AlecBGreen]

5. nonsense

China feeds over a billion people with diversified, small-scale agriculture. We could as well.

[diane in sf]

6. thank you

[Kaleva]

4. Might work if the human population suffered a huge contraction.

[happyslug]

7. As late as the 1960s, small farms were more productive then large farms

I do NOT have any more recent data, thus the reference to the 1960s, but if you look at production per acre, small farmers out produce large corporate on a per acre basis but that is based on having multiple crops on the same acreage. Each area/culture does this but the one I am most familiar is the Native American/Traditional American method, growing what the Native American call the "Three Sisters", Corn, Pumpkins and pole beans. The Beans "fix" Nitrogen into the ground for the use of the Corn and then Pumpkins along the ground.

The downs side is that the harvesting of the three crops must be by hand, can NOT be done by Machine. Now if you want to look at each crop per acre, then the production of these three crops are less (with the exceptions of beans)on these small farms then on larger farms. Corn, for example can be feed a lot of fertilizer by machine. This is true also of Beans, but large farms use "Bush Beans" that can be picked by machine (The crop is harvested like wheat and corn and the bean is saved in the process). Small Farmers use "Pole Beans" that grow on poles or Corn Stocks. These Pole Beans provide beans for many weeks but these have to be harvested by hand. Thus more beans per acre for Pole Beans, but at the cost of hand harvesting.

Thus the increased production of recent years applies to both small farms and large farms, the issue is on large farms you have increased income do to reduction in labor costs per crop do to mechanization of farms since WWII.

Thus if we need increase production of food, it can be done through the use of increase amount of labor.