A cheap and reliable food supply

Sorry, you have been paying for it now since 2004.
Not really as I PAY medicare close to 96 bucks a month out of my SS check and another 75 dollars a month for the secondary insurance coverage.
So No You Really Are NOT paying for me at all now or in the future either.

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How'd you manage to retire so early?

You should see the reports of GMO crops failing after farmers spend hundreds on seeds.

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I addressed that in post #98
[QUOTE=oneokie;4514399]
How about addressing my questions stated above?

You would have to read the actual published study not just what they quote from it. The study was published in 1999 in Nature magazine. I haven't found it on the web, sorry. I will look again when I get the chance.

""I do hope she is not feeding nothing but cheap junk to her kids and grandkids if she has any. That is not snark it is concern.""

Sorry Patt, it's snark, if you think it is or not. It's not YOUR business what ANYONE feeds their children or grandchildren. Who do you think you are to make such a comment?? Maybe I should be concerned about what you may be doing to YOUR children, grandchildren, or yourself? Ever smoke in your life? Ever drink, even a beer or glass of wine? Do any drugs, maybe smoked a little dope when you were a teenager? Drive too fast? Pass people on the right? Oh, I'm not being snarky, I"m just expressing concern for you and your family!!! I personally don't think anyone should drive too fast, or pass on the right. But hey, I know it's not my business if you ever drive too fast or have done any of those other things, but I do think doing those things is crap. I sure hope you don't ever do any of that crap!

Sorry, but I'm not the one self righteously ranting about what 'crap' people feed themselves or their chilren and then trying to backpedal by calling it 'concern'.

Here's another gem, the phrase about paying for people's heathcare....

Well, gee, I get sick of paying for the healthcare of obese diabetics, but I know I also pay for oherwise healthy people who suddenly, out of the blue develop leukemia, or suddenly develop uterine cancer or colon cancer, or suddenly have an aneurism, or get hit by a drunk driver, or have a baby out of wedlock, or fall down a cliff when they are hiking, or get mauled by a pit bull, or or, or, or, or, or or ad nauseum.

This phrase about how people are getting tired of paying for the healtcare of the obese and diabetic... what about children born with type 1 diabetes? Or congenital heart defects? Or or or or or or or.....

It would be nice if we could parcel up our taxes and say "OK, I want .0110% of my income to go toward the healthcare of people who suddenly, for no apparent reason develop leukemia, and for children born with congential birth defects, but not for those obese diabetics' People would jump on that like ducks on a june bug. But folks, it don't work that way. Here in the good old U.S., you're in for a penny, in for a pound, and you don't have any say so on where your tax dollars are spent. I think it's time to get a new phrase, because that one has been worn out.

This is a list of all the scholarly articles their study was mentioned in: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=...=1&oi=scholart

Again if it was "junk science" I just don't see it being quoted so much.

Hope you feel better getting all that off your chest. Not sure why you quoted me twice saying the same thing.....

Food may be cheap in the US but in Canada it sure isn't! The further North and inaccessible communities are the more expensive food is. We know some one in the North West Territories where everything has to be flown in to remote communities. Their food brought in is so high many families can't afford things like milk, butter or cheese.

In Yarmouth County Nova Scotia where I live 4 liters of milk which is 160 ounces is $7.62 for a jug. A loaf of bread can cost anywhere from $2.29 to $3.69 depending on the kind. Oranges are up to $5 a dozen, apples can very from $4.99 to $6 a five pound bag.Flour on sale $4.99 for ten pounds up to$7.99 not on sale. Butter anywhere from $4-$5 a pound. Sugar costs $5-$6 a five pound bag. All fruits and vegeatbles are expensive. I saw blueberries packaged in one cup amounts for $5 this past winter. To buy a flat of fresh blueberries or ten pounds is up to $16. We could have never fed five kids without the gardens and animals.

Right now there is no ferry between Yarmouth and Maine so food from the US must get here by truck or across by ferry from New Brunswick to Digby 60 miles away. Since our ferry was discontinued food is trucked further and it costs more to reach us.

There is a movement towards growing more local food but not many people are interested in farming when no one can count on the weather to be normal.People here are no different than anywhere else. The majority got used to having food without putting labor in to produce it themselves. They want to keep it that way but it isn't going to happen. Prices will eventually be so high here more people will be forced to garden if they want to eat.

One thing for sure is if there were more gardeners the obesity problem would soon go away!

Maybe just a few molecules of petroleum. Did your rooster eat any grain? Petrol there. Did your Roma tomato seeds come in a paper envelope with ink on it? Petrol, petrol. Where'd that sour cream come from? Even if you'd cultured it from your own cow, the cow likely ate grain as part of her development and/or current diet.
I'm glad for you that you are close with your food. That is a great thing. But, please, let's not pretend that it is that easy to disconnect from modern ag. A low amount of petroleum molecules is a lofty goal, total disconnect, darn near impossible.

Maybe this will help a bit:

Reducing emissions while vitalizing yield potential and eliminating chemical run-off
Beyond the benefit of carbon sequestration, regenerative practices bring dramatic reductions in energy use and carbon dioxide emissions. An energy analysis of the FST shows a 33-percent reduction in fossil-fuel use for organic corn/soybean farming systems that use cover crops or compost instead of chemical fertilizer. This translates to less greenhouse gas emissions as farmers adopt more regenerative production methods. Moreover, Rodale Institute’s organic rotational no-till system can reduce the fossil fuel needed to produce each no-till crop in the rotation by up to 75 percent compared to standard-tilled organic crops. Research beginning this year at Rodale Institute will compare organic and petroleum-based no-till and tilled systems for the first time within the ongoing FST regime.
Research findings have shown that the biggest energetic input, by far, in a conventional, modern corn and soybean sys2
tem is nitrogen fertilizer for corn, followed by herbicides for both corn and soybean production. The ability of regenerative agriculture to be both a significant carbon sink and to be less dependent on fossil fuel inputs has long-term implications for global agriculture and its role in air-quality policies and programs.
There are economic benefits beyond the reduced input costs to growers. Our FST showed that in all systems, corn and soybean yields from the regenerative systems matched the yields from conventional systems, except in drought years, when regenerative systems yielded about 30 per cent more corn than the petroleum-based system. This yield advantage in drought years is due to the fact that soils higher in carbon can capture more water and keep it available to crop plants. Further, economic analysis by Dr. James Hanson of the University of Maryland has shown that organic systems in Rodale Institute’s FST are competitive in returns with conventional corn and soybean farming—even without market-based organic premiums. These have been consistent for more than a decade, with certified-organic crop prices ranging from 40 to 150 percent higher than standard crop prices.
Farming for carbon capture is also compatible with other environmental and social goals, such as reducing erosion and minimizing impact on native ecosystems. This approach utilizes the natural carbon cycle to reduce the use of purchased synthetic inputs. Because chemical fertilizers and pesticides are not used, nutrient and chemical pollution in waterways is significantly reduced. Not only does this translate into long-term cleaner waterways, but it will also save in environmental cleanup costs at the state and federal level.

http://www.ifoam.org/growing_organic...griculture.pdf

I'm confused.

published in BioScience in 2005.

published in 1999 in Nature magazine.

Was the 2005 BioScience article a republication of the 1999 Nature magazine article?

Don't know where your starting the thread, but the OP's thread is:

A cheap and reliable food supply
It seems like in all our discussions about a wide range of farming topics we always come back around to this one point, well here in America we have a cheap and reliable food supply and that is a good and necessary thing.

So 2 questions: is it really a good thing and is it a necessity in order to keep people from starving? Please if you can show some statistics to back up your opinions.

Now, it's been 30 years since I got my degrees, but I read the OP Title as "A cheap and reliable food supply"... to me, that sorta implies that the thread will be about cheap and reliable food... and it quickly went to 'cheap and reliable = bad for the planet, bad for the body, bad for farmers, bad bad bad'.

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I think that struggling farmers would have jumped ship to organic a long time ago, if you could make more money with less labor. I know quite a few farmers with backward notions, but pretty much to a T, they catch up with the crowd quick, if it's easier and they can make more money.
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to answer your 2 questions...
In the 20th century, millions starved, under enlightened rulers... Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim Jung Il. Historically people have starved, but those were unenlightened times... and pretty much everyone was organic back then (since there was only animal power, and animal fertilizers). When was the last time you read about "famine"... outside of a handful of countries, where Western do-gooders have seen fit to destroy any local farming interest, by giving away free food... some places on earth aren't meant for human occupation...

I'll not go on a google fu quest to back up my facts (sorry, they are not opinions). If you think, for a moment, that if LA, NYC, or any large metro area were shut off from all food sources, except what's grown inside the city limits, & be organic, that the cities wouldn't go up in flames...... I have a mountain chalet in my back pasture, that I'll sell cheap.

If you believe I'm wrong, and the lack of food would be a good thing, please give me some historical examples. (I believe, from my extensive history background, that mankind since he stopped dragging his arms, has longed for a day when food was cheap and plentiful)

Do away with cheap basic foods, or let their be a shortage, and processed foods will also rise (BK, McD's, Taco Bell, etc.) Patt mentioned something about 25% waste, and if we lost 25% in production, there'd be no consequences, as we waste 25% already... bad assumption... a lot of that waste is because a portion of the produce is deteriorating. I know they throw tons of food out at the grocery stores (I feed my chickens truckloads of the stuff!). However, that is the cost of having fresh food in a market. Without this system, there'd only be one box of apples, that'd last forever, on the shelves, instead of a dozen varieties, and all of those perfect without any blemishes. No more apples would be bought by the grocer till those old scraggly ones were sold......... not what Americans are use to~

I think we all know where we are and where we'd like to be........... it's just that transition period that's downplayed... in that period there'll be gnashing of teeth, and other un-nice activities going on. I think I'm set up to survive such a transition period better than your average Joe Six Pack. I like organic gardening as much as the next guy... yet I keep at least a quarter ton of chemical fertilizer in the barn, for emergencies... if the shtf, I don't want to starve... if I survive the first year of worldwide famine, the next year or two after that, I'd go back to organic, in that there'd be nothing available but scroungable organics (compost mainly).

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No more apples would be bought by the grocer till those old scraggly ones were sold.........

Oh, yeah, that's what the local Brookshire's has started doing. Dont know if it's under new management or what, but they leave their produce there until it literally starts to shrivel and get white, fuzzy spots on it. Then they put it in a cart marked down to a dollar and even then no one wants it. Tried buying it all for a lump sum for my chickens, and the young manager said he couldn't do it. So, I don't buy produce at Brookshires anymore. The store never had that problem until recently. Anywho, it's definite proof that there is a certain amount of waste inherint in the cheap, plentiful, on-demand food supply system.

"""or any large metro area were shut off from all food sources, except what's grown inside the city limits, & be organic, that the cities wouldn't go up in flames""". If y'all remember Katrina, Rita, and Ike (why do those names together make me laugh so hard I spray coffee out my nose?) the national guard had to helicopter in troops and use humvees to escort tractor trailer loads of food, i.e. bottled water and m.r.e's, to the 'starving' civilians who had not prepped. It happened not three miles from where my parents live in the metroplex, saw it with my own eyes as dh and I were driving home from checking on them after Ike. Traffic jam from hell trying to get past where the tractor trailers were 'staged'. We couldn't figure out where all those big helicopters were going, the big ones with propellers on both ends (don't know what they're called). Driving home, we discovered what was going on. Was spread all over the news, for those who had prepped enough to be able to watch a little tv. Stores emptied, no incoming food for at least a few days, hungry grasshoppers literally near rioting because, as one young man said when interviewed "I got no water, I got no power, I got no food'. Of course he never explained *why* he had no water or food. Was just furious that he didn't, two days after a major hurricane. So yeah, I've seen firsthand just how tenuous cities and even suburbs will become in a situation where there is no food. One more day without mre's and bottled water, and there is absolutely NO doubt in my mind what would have ensued.

Patt--- I realize you were hovering and I guess you read my post before I went back and corrected the cut and paste.

Still pie in the sky.
How large of a tract did they use for this study? What were the previous cropping practices, and for how long before this study was undertaken? What were the inputs, and their source? Was it replicated in more than one location? All the above tells is the results of what seems to be a limited study, done by parties that have a vested interest in the testing.

Let's see some hard facts and numbers.

Thread drift-what do the organic food producers do with their blemished products? Feed themselves, their animals, or compost it?

I did see a vendor at one farmers market selling sweet corn that had a sign that stated he had organic corn and it had the worms to prove the fact.

Most stores won't any more due to liability issues. For that matter, store headquarters of most chains forbids it, so that the individual stores don't even have a choice.

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No they are 2 different studies. The still ongoing Farming Systems Trial study started in 1981 and it's results so far were published in Nature in 1999. That data has been used in a ton of other research papers since then like the one in Bioscience in 2005. Look at the Google link I gave you, it lists all the scholarly papers the base data from the farming system trials was used in.

I should have found an article at first that only talked about the Farming Systems Trial study it would have been less confusing. My apologies.

The OP was 2 questions asking if the assumptions about cheap and reliable food were actually true. The only way I could have made that clearer would have been to make the title longer than would fit in the box.

Oh no. no. no! You aren't going to bother to post any links or statistics because yours are all facts and not opinions but you expect us to do so? Yours are opinions until you get something to back them up. I have posted reams of statistics now to back up my facts. Fair is fair.


If we said everyone must be organic tomorrow yeah there would be a transition that would be very ugly. Like I posted it takes chemically abused land about 10 years of intensive organic therapy to get back to equal production with conventional. But nobody is proposing that we do it overnight. Hopefully we won't wait until the current system crashes to make the change, although Americans do tend to wait for the trainwreck before they do anything.

Look just because you don't like their results doesn't mean they are impossible! Their results were published in a peer reviewed journal that means several somebodies went through the study and deemed it OK. I can't find the actual study and honestly it would have to be huge to cover 20 years. All I can do is quote from what they have released or what others have released from it.