There has been much work on soil science done that is changing the way we think about the dependence we have on additives, 80% of which, organic OR inorganic, ends up in the water table. Microbes hold the key, the nutrients in their bodies is very plant accessible so knowledge of the soil food web is imperative:

http://www.soilfoodweb.com/03_about_us/approach.html

All nutrients, NPK and more, are in their itsey bitsey bodies going thru their itsey bitsey life/death/life cycles. The plants take it right in. This is a huge understanding. Feed those microbes! Totally scaleable.

Eh mischaracterizes what had been said by giving the impression that Malthusian denial and dead zones had been promoted, when in fact neither had.

The Times article addresses only nitrogen fertilizer, which is not subject to the usual kind of mineral scarcity, and even they explicitly mention its fossil fuel dependence and the creation of dead zones.

The post explicitly mentions Malthusian concerns (though not by name) and the “… nasty effects on the oceans.”, i.e. dead zones.

None of the comments above eh’s deny either issue, although neither do they all explicitly affirm both.

It’s all part of a cycle – which we break when we bury people in coffins, and throw sewage into our water supplies.

Rotting corpses and piles of shit can be useless and poisonous – or they useful and create food. It’s all about location, location, location.

Permaculture could feed the planet.

I meant “on the ground views”.

Asuk

I’d say to h2odragon that mad cow disease didn’t come from feeding them with grass, but with powdered bones and the sort.

In my town, in the very south of Europe, cows eat grass but we are running out of cows, because it’s illegal selling raw milk and milk companies pay a third of the supermarket price. Only very big farms, with hundred of heads are able to deal with the new “productivity” model required to be in the business, but those big farms don’t use grass anymore, they just spread urine to the river and the aquifers.

In the city nobody knows that chickens in chicken farms never saw natural light, and the fluorescent lights they are used to have are turned on and off every six hours, to get two eggs in one day. The chickens are so silly! And in one year the chicken is too old, so to chicken company. I could swear that those chickens haven’t any idea of what corn is, in its natural form.

Sorry for the rant, Yves, I read, “enjoy”, and learn quite a lot reading your blog every day. I know you like scientist views of things, but on the grand views give you interesting points of view.

This article is very long and radical (imperial capitalist exterminism) but quite interesting in those times, it touches and links lots of things:

The Politics of Food is Politics

http://www.counterpunch.org/goff04242008.html

Best wishes,

Asuk

How soon until the scenario where animal and human waste is the invaluable on a mass scale for producing methane and fertilizer?

He should be sent for two years to one of these third world farms and see how productive he gets.