Pablito's Blog

Photos from a rainy saturday

I took a bunch of pictures on Saturday in the light rain we got here, while racing around trying to figure out what we could and couldn't do that day.  They're in the photo section.

Why agricultural research matters

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/business/worldbusiness/18focus.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&hp&adxnnlx=1211053365-D9Uii%20r0jnKgpdzG8fGKIQ

This article just barely touches on the crisis in agricultural research right now.  It also conspicuously avoids mentioning one of the biggest causes of the decline:  genetic engineering.  Companies like Monsanto have bought up most of the private seed companies in the world, stripped out their basic research and focused them entirely on developing expensive GMO crops that do not solve real problems, but rather provide increased sales for their other products like herbicides and pesticides.  Meanwhile, many of the biggest agricultural universities have followed the money in the same direction, abandoning basic plant breeding in favor of genetic modification.  Government funding for plant breeding, as the article mentions, has also been cut drastically.

W gets slammed by India

American politicians and the media seem to be unable to place the blame for food shortages where it really belongs, but at least India got some publicity this week when they slammed President Bush for his comments which appeared to blame China and India for the problem.

Our country uses more than our fair share of everything on the planet, yet seems to believe we are entitled to get it all for dirt cheap.  If politicians had been willing to practice some leadership ten years ago on issues like renewable energy, gas mileage, suburban development, farmland preservation, nutrition and others, our country might have been in a really different place now.

On the flipside, all of us who have been working on these issues on a personal level -- reduce, reuse, recycle -- for years are going to be able to make the transition to the economics of scarcity much more smoothly than the folks who've been pretending that the U.S. is its own planet.

NYT story on fertilizer shortages

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/business/worldbusiness/30fertilizer.html?scp=3&sq=fertilizer&st=nyt

One good thing about the current food shortage: it may increase people's awareness of how their food is grown.  This story offers some good details about artificial nitrogen fertilizer, which is one of the primary ingredients of cheap food.

There is clearly a pro-artificial fertilizer bent to this article, although they interview a few people who point out the damaging effects that it has on water quality and fish.  What is not clearly outlined, though, is this:  a world of scarce fossil fuel will also be a world of scarcer food.

Although the article pooh-poohs (pun) the use of manure as a fertilizer, the truth is that animal waste in the U.S. is a tremendously underutilized resource.  In the last 30 years, farmers have gotten away from using manure as fertilizer because it was far cheaper to use artificial stuff.  The problem is not so much that you need to use alot of manure -- we generate millions of tons of it as a waste product of livestock farming.  It's just that it costs more to haul and spread a ton of manure than it does to haul and spread 100 lbs. of artificial fertilizer.  With the cost of the concentrated material rising, it is improving the economics of using manure.  All in all, that's a good thing, because right now alot of manure is simply dumped into "lagoons" where it ends up polluting ground and surface water, adding to the problems caused by overuse of artificial fertilizer.  Spreading it out over many acres, when done properly, results in far less pollution.

Eventually, the world is going to have to find a way to use every bit of manure produced by every domesticated animal on the planet, as well as the manure of the end users of those animals -- human beings.  In a post-fossil fuel economy, human waste will be an incredibly valuable resource for energy production and fertilizer, and future generations will shake their heads in disbelief that for a hundred years we treated it as a waste product instead.

A nice day to exterminate soil life

We're right in the middle of our strawberry harvest at Terra Firma, picking boxes and boxes of ripe berries from our organic field.  Less than a mile away, there is a specialized machine and a crew of workers in space suits applying the fumigant Methyl Bromide to a future strawberry field.  No, it's not some corporate agribusiness obliberating the life of the soil with this substance, one of the most toxic known to humanity.  It's the University of California, Davis.  Our farm is located right next to their research ranch that is home to, among other things, the strawberry variety breeding program.

You might think that UC would be working hard on breeding strawberry varieties that don't require the use of methyl bromide, right?  After all, it is an ozone destroying gas that is scheduled for prohibition by the EPA and which becoming less and less available for farmers to use.  Shouldn't UC be leading the charge to find ways for growers to farm without it?

Nope.  Instead, UC and USDA are breeding strawberry varieties whose performance and yield is actually dependent on the use of this chemical, which kills pathogens as well as beneficial microbes.  Meanwhile, dozens of promising varieties for a future without methyl bromide are likely discarded every year.  As an organic grower, I resent that my tax dollars as well as the licensing fees I pay to use UC varieties every year, are going to breed only plants that rely on a chemical that I cannot (and would never) use and which I think should be banned completely.  Meanwhile, one of the best tasting berry varieties that we grow, Chandler, is highly susceptible to root diseases when grown in soil like ours that has not been fumigated.

Meanwhile, the world's biggest grower of both organic and conventional stawberrries grower, Driscoll, has full-time plant breeders busy creating proprietary varieties with built in disease resistance.  They're not only doing this to improve their organic berry production, but because they know that MB is going to be banned sooner or later.  When it does, they will be in an even better position to dominate the world's strawberry production.  I don't expect them to do us any favors -- their varieties are only available to farms that sell exclusively to Driscolls.  But I do expect the University of California to be providing me with a better alternative for me and for the planet.