patrick.net

Astrid

I am not meaning to unfairly attack organics and sustainability. I see the logic in it and think it has its place. But I draw the line at mysticism, voodoo and superstition. If people believe in that, and derive value from it, so be it. But when those premiums are hoisted upon me in any way as unavoidable costs then I object and call bullshit. I've argued previously that there is no practical mechanism, given scale, to feed the world over the next century without hyper efficient scale farming (so called factory farms) and hyper efficient GMO crops. But the sustainable crowd won't come out and say that their solution also means a magical reduction in population. I don't believe in magic. In my universe human populations are only reduced materially over short time frames through two methods, neither of which are particularly attractive.

By the way, I level the exact same set of criticisms at the homeopathic/naturopathic crowd when it comes to health. There's value in those practices, but when they try to discourage immunization programs or run around Africa trying to get people to not see the Doctors-without-Borders for their 4 year old's infection, instead engaging in some ritualistic hot rocks and massage therapy, I call bullshit. Perhaps they and their kids should go through a round of exposure to 1800s infectious diseases for a bit to educate them about the role science has played in allowing them to run around healthy and happy while thinking it was the gods and incense sticks that enabled their good fortunes.

And while we're clearing the record, I'll address the requisite "you only got rich by exploiting others" reactionary tripe.

a) It is economically untrue because economics are not zero-sum (as already pointed out).

b) Even if you don't buy (a), life isn't fair. You can make the same straw man argument about *everything*. In the 80s in undergrad I heard this over and over about gender disparity, racial disparity, geographic disparity, height disparity, beauty disparity...

c) Therefore the only truly fair thing to do is not try to be subjectively fair. Trying to be fair means picking winners & losers, which means picking losers, which cannot be fair to the losers. The honest thing to do is set a baseline, ignore subjectivity, and then allow people and the markets people create to organize themselves around those baselines, thereby having a say in whether they are winners or losers.

The problem with DS' argument is that I only was able to establish wealth because my planet happens to be close enough to the sun that its oceans didn't evaporate or dissolve, thereby enabling a species of sapient beings to arise. So my being rich is only because of the unfairness of my pre-determined advantages I had over the Martians.

In my universe human populations are only reduced materially over short time frames through two methods, neither of which are particularly attractive.

Are these what you had in mind?:
1) war/genocide
2) natural catastrophe (famine, plague, asteroid strike, etc.)

In my utopian fantasy of the world there would be some kind of flat tax with one and only one huge personal deduction. I don't think any kind of income, either passive investment income, capital gains, or salary, should be exempt from it. This would put a ton of accountants out of work, and eliminate the need for 90% of all tax lawyers, politicians, tax collectors, etc.

I think we should tax inheritances as well, or at the very least, disallow the current practice of people being able to "step-up" the basis upon inheritance. Right now, people can just totally avoid taxes on gains this way. It is not clear to me how this benefits society in any way whatsoever. There probably needs to be some kind of large exemption here, to avoid people having to break up the family farm or whatever.

There also needs to be some kind of way to charge people for externalities that they impose on others. This is where it gets tricky though, and opens the tax code to all kinds of social and political and economic issues.

But the truth is, I don't think we can implement any kind of radical change overnight, because it would cause all kinds of strange economic shocks. The current tax code is far, far too complex though. It is a huge drag on small businesses.

Randy,

I agree that some people take organics too far, into the realm of superstition. However, many organic techniques are a great thing. With those techniques, the Chinese in the Pearl River and Yangtze deltas intensively farmed for centuries without deterioration in their environment. Things like crop rotation, eating less meat, diverse agriculture, and not force feeding corn to cows (and the antibiotics that entails) are help everybody involved except Big Agra.

You can argue that the market should sort itself out...but are we as a society really willing to let nature sort itself out? Can this society really practice pure survival of the fittest AKA social Darwinism? Should society deny people who are genetically disposed to obesity die AND not support any children they leave? Should we let industrial agriculture run amuck and lay waste to our farm lands while the market sort itself out? (A similar policy didn't work out so well for Butte, MT).

I think the framing of this issue is all wrong and I do believe enlightenment lies elsewhere. Right now, we as a society think growth is desirable and inevitable...I don't think either is true. To grow further on this already crowded Earth means either depleting our resources at an ever faster pace until we all starve (much like natural animal populations boom and crash), or hoping and praying that miraculous technology advances will bail us out.

Why must it be this way? Can't humanity simply learn to live within its means? A few past communities have managed this before they overreached and its too late to turn back. However, as I mentioned before here, I'm not optimistic about humanity's chances.

Astrid

Who's being the Utopian? How, precisely and practically, are you going to bring such a revolution of sustainability about? I mean, not to sound like I'm baiting political ideologies (because I'm not), but wasn't that experiment tried by the Khmer Rouge?

Technology is inevitable. It is what defines homo sapiens as a species. We evolved as tool users. Our survival, quite to the contrary of your premise, depends exclusively upon our ability to create social organizations enabled by extrasomatic tools and learning.

No society exists or has ever existed on Earth which was both progressive and "sustainable" as per your definition. Sustainability only occurs with stagnation. And the fate of those societies should serve as evidence of they types of animals humans are. We are what we are. Ironically we only progress though overcoming the adversities we create for ourselves. In your suggested world view everything will become static, and eventually we'll be simply gone. This way we may also be simply gone, but when that big asteroid comes our way, we'll at least (a) know about it and (b) have a fighting chance to try to stop it.

I do not buy into the hidden assumption that a sustainable, localized, fair-trade, ultimately "fair" world will cause us to somehow stop competing yet still all sit around like gilded artisans expanding our higher sensibilities. It just don't happen that way.

The real answer to all these terrible problems we face, like overpopulation, environmental decay, global warming, big scary asteroids, is to continue to develop our social, technical and scientific systems to overcome them. I could take your same arguments and roll them back to the middle ages and say that agriculture and dynasties caused non sustainability via cities and caused plagues. I'm partial to antibiotics and science solving plagues rather than killing off half the serfs and returning everyone to berry picking.

As to China, I'm not the expert as so many here, but I do know enough history to know that you're just hand picking isolated, tiny examples. China has the distinction of the longest running intergenerational period of warfare by a multiple.

Finally, you know me better than to level the market-fundamentalist charge at me. I certainly don't advocate a "social darwinism". No one except jackasses and AM radio freaks says we shouldn't care for children, the truly unfortunate and usually even self-inflicted unfortunate like drug addicts and alcoholic vagrants. I never said no taxes or no social systems. To the contrary, I want a national health care system. The responsibility for such should not lie with private companies. But why is it most of the crowd who wants social healthcare also wants to force me to pay for snake oil instead of just giving those poor kids immunizations? It's not hard, do the math. What will save more suffering? Giving welfare children education, antibiotics, and healthy diets or making sure they get yak horn blessed aromatheraputic smoky incense? But every time I talk to someone about national healthcare they start right off saying we need to eliminate immunizations or something equally as insufferable.

Randy,

I know you well enough to know you're not a market fundamentalist. Sorry if I left the impression. We both agree that a government is necessary but messy. However, once you let the government get involved, it's always going to be a scary balancing act. I'm actually willing to debate the wisdom Social Darwinism, not enough to support it (yet), but if neutrally applied, it does offer some clarity.

Or maybe I just like Solarians. I don't know...

I'm a natural gloom and doomer. I've been that way since I scaring myself half to death about typhoons at five years of age. My feeling is that this planet will a lot more sustainable with a zero population 1 billion people consuming only as much as they need, than 10 billion people all eager for more and more and more. Technology has been our savior so far. But past civilizations had advanced far on technology, only to be destroyed when their population/ecological pressure caught up with them.

If we rely on technology and markets to to continue to allow us humans to exceed the earth's carrying capacity, we may soon find that the quality of life is unacceptably low. The end of living and the beginning of survival, as they say.

Organic/biodynamic/Legba-blessed produce is, to me, an indication that someone tried to care for the land and the plants growing there, rather than depleting the soil and throwing down a lot of fertilizer and Monsanto hybrid seeds each year. An indication that someone is running a valid experiment on how to make agriculture viable in the future. Maybe they are managing to hold onto a few heirloom lines of seeds--which typically represent hundreds if not thousands of years of patient human effort, and which are being bought up by large seed concerns and not released. Seeds are good for a year, perhaps two. When they are gone they are gone. And an organic/spaghetti-monster-blessed farm may be trying to solve interesting and relevant farming problems, like how do we continue to keep land fertile as we run short of the petroleum needed to produce the fertilizer we have relied on since the 1940's? How can we get more nutrients from each acre of land? Permaculture methods wrest more nutrition from each acre than factory farming does--at the cost of more human labor, so if you are just looking at dollars per calorie, it might cost more. But if you are looking at calories per acre, farming with intensive human input comes out pretty far ahead.

Again, I have no specific problems with organic efforts. I see them as part of the self-correcting process. Fertilization and pesticides clearly were overused heavily in the past, and still are in most parts of the world outside of the US & Western Europe.

There are some popular misconceptions, though, in Eliza's statement. I attended a seminar on global agriculture in London a couple years ago. I was surprised to learn the actual metrics on agricultural productivity. The US & Canada are significantly more productive than Europe, and an order of magnitude more productive than the rest of the world. The reason is we have extremely low human labor input requirements and we deploy significant capital assets towards the business of ag. The reason the WTO died in the last round was because the world wanted the US to open to open wide to importing ag while all US exports of ag would continue to be heavily tariffed. The reason is fair. If the US exported ag at market price we'd destroy most of the world's markets because our marginal costs are so much lower and our yield is so much higher.

There is always room for sustainability improvements, and we probably still overuse petrochemicals in the process. But, it is not fair to say such techniques hurt our yield, productivity or costs. They do the opposite, which is precisely why we use them. So don't make the case that we *need* bio dynamics to save agriculture for reasons that aren't supported by the facts. Perhaps there are other reasons.

As to technology and carrying capacity. The notion of carrying capacity is not static, it is a reflective system affected directly by technology. We are only constrained by the resources on the planet, and even that is not a fixed constraint since we can import resources from off planet given technology. The system is only as closed as our current ambitions and needs.

But don't believe me, jump in a time machine and go back to any arbitrary point in the past when the earth was "sustainable" in terms of population or production. Don't choose some fabled isolated indigenous tribe living off the fish in the river, but choose at place you'd statistically be likely to be actually have been born. Then tell me how much higher quality your life was in that alternate reality. The truth is that aside from the tremendous suffering of the impoverished crush of humanity stuck in the same old parts of the world, humanity has experienced explosive improvements in the quality of life. The fact we can argue about this on the internet instead of worrying about selling our youngest daughter into indentured servitude just to eat is testament to that fact.

But I guess people only find the time for the deepest self criticism when times are treating them the best. Another irony.

Randy,

No need to put humanity's egg's in one basket. Progress is inevitable, and there is plenty of historical examples of short term positive innovations that ended up destroying a culture.

There's more to agriculture than today's productivity. Industrial agriculture contaminate ground water, cause soil erosion, decrease soil fertility, etc. Comparing Americans to Europeans doesn't really sway the argument one way or the other, Europeans have smaller farms, but most do not practice sustainable agriculture.

How sustainable is "sustainable?" I admit that today's "sustainable still runs on fossil fuel and they don't solve the demand concerns. However, with crop rotation, integrated pest management (not voodoo, I don't spray and the ladybugs take care of the aphids nicely), low drip irrigation, and shallow tilling, such farms will actually improve fertility/reduce contamination.

There's nothing wrong with finding the contemporary world troubling. America itself is on the brink of "something" -- will it blow off like an inconsequential vapor while we move on to bigger and better things? I hope so, but there are many troubling signs.

As for "times are treating them the best." Misery is relative. Happiness is relative. A large plurality takes joy in the misery of others. We had a bite at the apple of knowledge (though I won't vouch for the quality of the knowledge), we are thus burdened.

Any attempt to make everyone equally rich will make everyone equally poor. Moreover, some people will always be more equal than others in any "perfectly" equitable society.

I think we've got it pretty good here. Yes there is x small percent (pick a number between 5-15% whatever floats your boat) of people in the USA who have it rough, but man by historical standards pretty much everyone here could be considered rich. Just look at the benchmarks for being poor, no color TV OMG! What no car? What kind of loser doesn't own a car in America?

Something seems to be working, and yes there might be some class stratification but even the most pessimistic numbers thrown around on this thread sound pretty good. How many societys in history have at least 1/3 of the wealthy having moved up from lower income groups?

And I'm not even convinced of the low figures presented but San Diego, California could have a much different demographic than the old money groups that seem to be more an East Coast thing. Seems to me most people in California who have it, weren't born into it.

I guess the keyword is equally rich in your premise, verses my view of a measurable cutoff between wealth and poverty.

societies ~

This is a depressing conversation. Why do people seem to assume that wealth came at the expense of somebody else? Is anyone holding a gun to your head, forcing you to buy that iPod? No? Then don't complain that Steve Jobs is a rich guy. He isn't holding a gun to anyone's head, either.

And why is everything framed so rigidly from an individual viewpoint? There is nothing wrong with accumulating value and then giving it to your offspring. Why shouldn't they have comfortable lives? Is the line of reasoning so simpleminded as to say "Because most people don't get to start with a comfortable life."? Hey, welcome to reality! Here's a thought--if you work hard from humble beginnings, eventually you might be able to create dynastic wealth for your offspring, too.

Envy of another's possessions is foolish. A wealthy person was obviously exceptional enough to create wealth from a humble beginning. If you don't have wealth but lust after it, then you're by definition not exceptional, right? Otherwise you'd be wealthy, too. Regarding the offspring of wealthy people, you're really just envying the exceptional nature of whoever amassed that wealth in the first place. You're also being jealous because you didn't "win the sperm lottery" and become their lucky descendant. Ultimately, even if your envy is negative, you're mentally hefting the exceptional onto your shoulders by badly wanting to have their talents and the eventual result of wealth.

I'm going to stick with a different idea: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor thy neighbor's goods.

If you waste time being jealous because someone got a better start in life than you, you're going to be permanently bitter, because someone always had it better. Maybe Bill Gates had a headstart on me, but since I'm not Bill Gates, that's pretty irrelevant to my life. It only matters what I do with my life--in the eyes of God, in my own eyes and nobody else's. If I enjoy my life and die above the cutline, then I've pretty much had a good run of it. I'm guessing that starting with a McMansion or a free Ivy League scholarship wouldn't have helped my cause in the least.

Brand, I totally agree with everything you say here, but if (as I hope) taxes are merely collected to pay the bills of the government isn't it more fair to tax inheritance at a high level inline with what Jimbo was saying (high exemption but then a pretty stiff rate) than the current rates for low and middle class workers?

To reiterate I do believe wealth is private and should be passed down, I don't believe it originates from the state and goes back to the state upon death.

I also agree that wealth should be considered private property and be transferable to anyone one sees fit, while alive or after death. A reasonable, flat, percentage set above the current definition of poverty level is fine to tax away upon transfer. Call it a transaction fee. Society needs something back for processing the external costs of the transfer. But beyond that wealth should be distributable on demand.

The other side of that equation assumes there exists a true, functional free market system. Such egalitarian, merit driven economy will itself tax away the wealth of lottery-winning offspring naturally if they are not also exceptional themselves. Not perfectly. There will always be clubs and favoritism. But, a merit-driven market will force businesses to hire the most qualified over the most-pedigreed or they themselves will lose their corporate wealth.

When we start picking winners and losers we create a system that can and is gamed, which perpetuates the very thing people find objectionable about "the rich".

This is already the case in America to a large degree. Except for the hyper-wealthy, many top 10% wealthy families see their family wealth massively eroded after 2 generations post originator. Usually through divorce, drugs and old fashioned laziness.

Astrid, I've been following a particular development in sustainable agriculture which, if you've already seen it, then fine, but if not pretty interesting. Thought our very accomplished gardener might be intrigued...

Cornell is working to determine the composition of soils developed in the Amazon basin in pre-Conquistador times. In place of the slash and burn practices of recent times, Amazon indigenous cultures used pyrolysis (low oxygen burning) and plowed the resulting charcoal into their soils. Although the precise methods and processes are still imperfectly understood, the resulting soils have multiple properties of current interest:

They require little or no additional fertilization.
They release no nutrients into surface water.
They generate yields superior to current methods.
They are strongly hydrophylic.
The process of generating and using them is carbon negative.

The local term for the enriched soil is terra preta negra. There is a working group, the Eprida Institute, which has developed a scalable plant using pyrolysis to produce heat, fuel, carbon sequestration and an enriched charcoal agricultural product from biomass.

What interested me particularly is that this method appears to have been employed in several ancient cultures; is capable of improving the worst of soils, clays or sands; it reduces demand for irrigation, reduces or eliminates the need for commercial fertilizers and it returns carbon to the soil in beneficial form. Treated soils release almost no NOX into the atmosphere.

In view of earlier discussion, it is disruptive technologies of this kind which can change our most basic assumptions. We tend to believe we'll never step away from fossil fuels, or feed the planet, or have enough fresh water, or reduce carbon dioxide emissions. As we sort out what we want and get better at determining what we must do, developments sometimes come along which offer solutions.

Things are pretty equal in the Nordic states. Apparently the CEO of Nokia only paid himself about $400K out of the business. If he was in America, presumably he would be angling for $40M p.a.

Social democracies have worked well in northern Europe.

Jimbo Says:
You had me there DS, until this line:
the ’self made’ millionaire was able to manipulate others and their economic relations in a way that disproportionately benefitted him or herself at everybody else’s expense.

This is where we part ways. You think that economics is a zero-sum game, where one person’s success inevitably comes at another’s expense.

More or less it does, doesn't it? Tell me where the money comes from, if it isn't from the exchange of labour for a roughly constant reward for most of us. My pay is rock solid, only creeps up at 3% a year with the odd bonus. So you tell me where the money comes from, given that most people's wages are roughly constant? It comes in tiny slices with every new invention -- the DSL connection, the mobile phone, etc, are actually reducing your income relative to the period before their invention... Money doesn't grow on trees, you know...

That is simply not the way the world works, not even in Late Capitalism. Does Google add value to the world? Should the people who created that value share in the gains?

google is free for me to use, and the money they make is from more tiny slices of advertising revenue -- which sometimes goes 'round into te goods and services I purchase elsewhere. And why should google workers be paid disproportionately from everyone else? Doesn't the garbage collector also serve a useful function? There are other ways of rewarding people in society for their efforts other than with huge sums of money.

The guy who actually wrote DOS (Q-DOS, MS-DOS, etc) still works for Bill Gates as a programmer on a wage.

If you really think the Aborigines are the way to go, go move in with them, no one is stopping you from adopting the lifestyle of a hunter-gatherer. Personally, I think that Penicillin, hot showers and the Internet are great inventions, not ones that I would voluntarily do without. What was the life span of your Noble Savage?

Isn't that what I said about invention and technological advances in the following paragraph? You should read my posts more carefully... This is the sort of attempted argument (which is actually in agreement with what I said) which shows pure illogic and non sequiturs. It is possible however to have inventions without gross inequalities and the mixture of extreme affluence and poverty you see particularly in the US. ref Sweden and the social democracies again.

But I guess people only find the time for the deepest self criticism when times are treating them the best. Another irony.

Not really. In some ways, people are more stressed than ever before. Stressed by time pressures, by their jobs, their bosses, by their commutes, by their expectations. This is the downside of modernity. Fragmented families and groups. Depression rates are actually higher now than in the last 100 years -- why should that be? What's the missing ingredient? Belonging? Living near your loved ones? Having an unpressured life? Are the expectations of doing huge amounts of work that lower our quality of life increasing our quality of life? Have we mistaken the means for the end?

Not to mention pathologies such as speculation in the housing market causing misery for many, the subject matter of this site...

The Australian Aboriginals had a pretty laid-back life, and only had to work 3 hours a day to meet their material needs, as per the work of Sahlins -- he called them 'the original affluent society'. They also had a sense of belonging and community that you now only see in southern Mediterranean and African families and similar...

P.S. I don't want to swap places with the rich, I actually want more equal distribution -- the rich don't need much more to live than the rest of us, the rest of it is just show -- meeting their esteem needs. We all know plenty of undeserving upper and middle managers, a la Dilbert's pointy-haired manager... let alone the undeserved hereditary wealth of the squabbling, narcissistic European aristocracy...

Fortune magazine described it as "the most successful product ever marketed in America." Xerography (Greek for "dry writing") was invented by Chester Carlson, a shy, soft-spoken patent attorney, who grew up in almost unspeakable poverty and worked his way through junior college and the California Institute of Technology. He offered his 1937 discovery to more than 20 major corporations, including IBM, General Electric, Eastman Kodak and RCA. Only the tiny Haloid Corporation in Rochester, NY, took a chance. Although early versions were flops, the photocopier eventually changed business forever and earned Carlson over $200 million in royalties. A modest man, he gave away most of his fortune anonymously. He lived simply, never owned a second home or even a second car. Casual acquaintances seldom suspected he was rich; when Carlson told an acquaintance he worked at Xerox, the man assumed he was a factory worker. "His real wealth seemed to be composed of the number of things he could easily do without," his second wife said. When he died in 1968, his eulogizers included the secretary-general of the United Nations. In the nearly seven decades since Carlson dreamed up xerography, no one has come up with a better way of making copies on plain paper -- an almost inconceivable achievement, given the pace of technology innovation.

we only believe in free markets until China and India become successful and start pulling ahead and taking jobs away from us -- then it's protectionism all the way, making up a few discourses and pretexts like 'they're keeping inflation down artifically, that's what doing it' -- it's not free markets, it's keeping us No. 1 that's the main game...

mull this little lot over then:

The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age - New York Times

(or, How the Richest of the Rich Got That Way With No Help From Anyone)

Bruce,

American organic farmers are indeed leading the way. Without government help (since most are too small or don't grow the right crops)! Randy might think that we shouldn't lighten our wallets for dubious health claims, but we as a nation are already paying farmers to grow more than they would otherwise, flood the world with cheap grain, and further erode those environments. What's more gullible? Gee, I don't know...

I am aware that slash and burn agriculture works on a very limited scale. But only with extremely low population pressures and only in places like Amazonia, where soil fertility is low and regrowth rate is high. Charcoal is often used to improve soil quality in houseplant planting soil, though my impression is that it would be too expensive to do on a massive scale.

Rice paddies have a much better record of supporting intense population pressures while avoiding erosion and preserving soil fertility. They are very water dependent (a major problem now that much of China's fresh water supply is highly polluted) and requires intense toil in humid 100 degree weather, but it was a system that gave generation upon generations sustenance.

Top 7 Ways To Get Rich

If you can't inherit wealth, can't marry it, can't work for it, can't win it, can't steal or deal it or can't gamble for it then maybe you can invest and get rich. There are 2 good ways to invest and get rich; the real estate market and the stock market.

There's one traditional way of dealing with hereditary wealth. Social revolution, anyone?

Randy, Brand, et al,

Just remember that property rights are a function of the government. It is not absolute and immutable. There's delicate middle road between too much confiscation and absolute claim to ownership. When people (collectively) lose sight of this balance, reality will eventually slap them in the face.

rage against the machine...

Even if Bill Gates Jr. had never inherited one thin dime from Bill gates Sr., he would *still* have had huge competitive advantages, connections and opportunities that simply do not exist for the rest of us common rabble.

and he signed that deal with IBM that said he licensed DOS to them rather than sold it outright... I think he bought Q-DOS with Dad's money, tho...

Jimbo Says:
DS, per capita GDP doesn’t work for me because I am more interested in what the median worker makes in different political and economic systems, not what the overall society makes. It is the old “five guys in a bar and in walks Bill Gates” problem with talking about average wealth.

yes, that's what i said in my comments... maybe the LIS then...

@Randy--
No misconceptions here--I think we are misunderstanding one another on agricultural metrics.

The conference you attended probably told you that the dollar cost per acre using the prevalent factory farming methods is less than in, say, Europe. This is true. If you have one main farmer and some employees farming 2,000,000 acres with machines, petroleum-based fertilizers, and pesticides, the dollar cost to farm each acre is pretty low. The land is not so good, and it will need more fertilizer next year in order to grow anything much at all, and who knows how long the aquifers that make water cheap will hold out, but the cost per acre is low, and the number of acres in production is high, and you end up with a lot of Round-up-ready soybeans. So you are right, if you only want to look at dollars per acre, factory farming wins. I think this may be what you were trying to say.

And what I was trying to say was that the newer alternative farming methods that people have been trying have a tendency to produce more calories per acre, albeit at a higher dollar per acre cost. If your measure is the methodology that gets more calories out of the land, usually the newer alternative methods will win. The food costs more, but I consider some of that extra cost to cover research and development. I don't really care if they also are burying cow horns full of quartz on their land or dancing around their grapevines or whatever, I care that they are using new, clever, logical methods of farming, that they are paying attention, and that the soil is rich and the food tastes good. Bonus if they are local and can get my food to me while it is fresh and at its most nutritious.

So there is a difference between dollar/acre efficiency and calorie/acre efficiency. Again, no misconceptions here. If I have time today I can start citing source material.

Outside of the numbers, human-centered farming offers a substantial difference in quality. My relatively poor family lived off a giant garden when I was young, and my grandparents did the same--and the fact that everything at the Safeway tastes like cardboard by comparison kind of bothers me. Have you ever picked up a basket of strawberries at a farmer's market in France? They are just about the best thing you will ever taste--assuming you like strawberries--and, anyway, you have to eat them fast because they will start melting by late afternoon. I'd rather have one basket of those than 10 baskets of those hard white shippable strawberries at the local Safeway. Quality matters, and I don't believe we have to give it up in order to keep people fed. We just have to think about farming in a new way--which does not have to entail a return to medieval methods.

Randy,

The US & Canada are significantly more productive than Europe, and an order of magnitude more productive than the rest of the World.

On what measure? Output per person, I suspect.

(In which case I very much doubt whether you're an order of magnitude more productive than here in Oz. But I digress...)

There can be other measures. I have a book of agricultural Scientific American articles from the 60's and 70's. Several of the articles deal with how to increase World food production, and one made the point that in terms of output per acre North American productivity was quite low. "Medium intensity" was the phrase they used.

On this measure the "High intensity" areas are peasant-agriculture places like Java and Bangladesh. Bangladesh has half the population of the USA in a country the size of Georgia, and feeds that population on their own agricultural production (not to a very high standard, but well enough to keep the population increasing for the time being).

Astrid,

Well, I'm not really thrilled with the idea of industrial farming producing ever greater gluts of crops for export.

But I do like the idea of reducing agriculture's consumption of water. If the imperial Valley were consuming 30-45% less water, I believe coastal California would breathe a little easier about potable water sources. Same is true of Florida everywhere south of Orlando. And we'd have an easier time of restoring normal flows to the old Everglades lands. In fact, the results Cornell is generating show the runoff nitrogen and phosphate which is destroying estuaries around the globe and feeding red tide blooms could be greatly reduced or even stopped.

Eprida's site doesn't devote much space to the ramifications of what they're doing, but the process adds value in many ways - chaff and crop waste returned to the soil in stable form, carbon capture, reduced need for petrochemical fertilizers. It's too good, really. There must be a catch.

http://www.eprida.com/home/index,php4

Cuba has also been doing pretty well in terms of output per acre--they pretty much lost access to machine parts and fuels and pesticides and fertilizers when the Soviet Union stopped backing them in the early 1990's, and everyone lost weight for awhile, but now they have tons of little farms--even in cities on empty lots--and the output per acre is quite high. Mostly without pesticides, mostly without fertilizers, mostly with compost and with friendly insects and with complementary placements of plants and animals. Plus people are employed on the little farms--apparently it's a pretty good job--and you have entrepreneurs running the little farms, and the neighborhood has fresh produce every day. There are other ways to work this thing. Don't get me wrong--my impression is that there are a number of things Cubans might choose to change about their current situation--but the agricultural side of things is going pretty well.

Oh just look at that comma. This may work...

http://www.eprida.com/home/index.php4

Eliza,

The land is not so good, and it will need more fertilizer next year in order to grow anything much at all

Reference please. The data was the opposite. Tonnes of active-ingredient fertilizer per sq unit has decreased by approximately 8x, not increased in the US over the past 20 years. What has increased is total tonnage, but that's because more square acres are now in production, not because they're using more per acre.

Have you ever picked up a basket of strawberries at a farmer’s market in France?

I lived in Mougins for a while. The best food in the world. I also happen to know that provincial French farms are anything but what you're describing. I'd love to see you explaining your notions to one of these old farmers in Provence. The food there is better for a number of reasons, the main one being the manner in which it is prepared.

anyway, you have to eat them fast because they will start melting by late afternoon.

You mentioned you grew up poor. So did I. My grandparents in rural, agricultural Ohio also tended a multi-acre "garden" which they'd had since the depression & war. The food produced from this garden was seldom a delight. The tiny portion they were willing to serve fresh, including strawberries that rival anything you'll ever eat in France I might add, were delicious. But they canned, pickled, jarred and dried 95% of what came out of that garden. Using all kinds of things we'd call "organics" today, as well as lots of nasty preservatives. Why? Because they were poor, and they learned how to use their land for sustainability during a period of time when many waited in line for food. From my late grandfather's perspective, he'd most certainly view your vision of "sustainability" as purely decedent frivolity. He'd tell you calories per acre isn't what matters, what matters is calories actually consumed from the land.

My grandmother used to tell us when we complained we didn't like the taste of something that taste was something we could enjoy when we were rich, for now we should worry about filling our bellies.

Like I pointed out to DS, discrimination on higher points of quality is a luxury afforded by luxury. I am a food-bigot. I hate bad food. Probably because I grew up eating bad food. But I also have no delusion that all this quality-of-life stuff is mostly the domain of those who are already well off.

Cuba has also been doing pretty well in terms of output per acre–they pretty much lost access to machine parts and fuels and pesticides and

I have that DVD. Very interesting. My take was that Cuba imports enough staple ag (imports have grown something like 5x over the past 10 years) from South America on lucrative terms (for political reasons vis a vis changes in S American governments because of US blunders), that now they are able to enjoy the luxury of little "farmers markets". Lots of things are easy when they're effectively free. What exists in Cuba currently may be a temporary geo-political subsidy program. It could last for a while, but eventually their chums in South America will go the way all state-run economies go. I give it about 6-8 years. Sooner if their trade with the EU forces them to open their markets.

ozajh

Output per acre in terms of yield, tonnes, return on capital, return on assets, efficiency per labor, the list goes on. I don't have calories per acre, but I'll eat my hat if that figure isn't also similarly high at scale.

Anyone can be more efficient on a micro-farm or in a garden. Oz has very small agricultural operations compared to the US or EU. Very very small, in fact. The US operates massive scale ag, which is somewhat essential to the entire chain unless we're all ready to see a whole lotta suffering. Here's an idea of the scale. Even if you buy into the "80% of US grain production is merely an input into meat production" argument, and you eliminate all that, the remaining 1/5 is still larger than the net output of Europe, not to mention the fact this is flawed because Europe also raises livestock, and people actually eat that livestock so eliminating it requires replacement with other sources of foods, probably grown somewhere. (I'll ignore the fact this externalizes the whole overfishing problem; after all, people need to eat 'something').

Your book from the 60s and 70s? You're kidding right? That was 50 years ago, not long after WWII. Of course that was true then. This is the very story. The US didn't sit idle during that period. We modernized our ag production business, which is why my wife's family is on it's last elderly generation of family farmers, all of the kids having long abandoned the family farm for jobs in suburbs and cities.

In fact, the WTO Doha round is very interested to read many of the speeches. There were actually dozens of countries arguing that the US should have "productivity growth caps" placed on our Agriculture because we're *still improving* productivity year-to-year, even today, and at an "alarming" rate. They argued things like the US should stop improving and investing in ag for 10 years, 20 years, longer, in order to allow the developing world to effectively catch up. Ironic, that these countries also have a terrible time feeding their people.