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    21st Century Ideas: The Decline of Oil-Based Farming

    A discussion forum for the superstruct of the same name

    Started by: Empiricus Raves:4

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    How can we start to move away from farming based on massive oil inputs?

    The superstruct for this forum is located at : http://www.superstructgame.org/SuperstructView/391

    A hundred mile diet would be a HUGE part of this. Permaculture farming is so dense there isn't room for big farm equipment - lots of walking tractor use instead. Moving from grain fed to grass fed meat production. Those of us in the west really need to get used to a more natural diet. My God...we eat so much, we eat so much animal based protein, we demand year round access to seasonal fruits, vegetables, fish, shellfish....

    Plant your own food. Enjoy the simplicity of seeds, dirt, and water to fend off starvation. Don't mow a lawn, harvest a garden.

    Plant your own food. Enjoy the simplicity of seeds, dirt, and water to fend off starvation. Don't mow a lawn, harvest a garden.

    ParaMerc, I think growing food is a really viable option for some people. I think in the suburbs, sure. For people living in cities community gardens are a good way to grow things seasonally and the more expensive things but but they are never going to be self sufficient on their own - we are not going to see staple carbohydrates growing on rooftops. Farming is going to be necessary given our population on the planet. I do think there needs to be a huge change in regulation of farms, farm subsidies have to change to promote sustainability. On my local level you see militantism amongst farmers with big signs on their property and vehicles that read FARMS FEED CITIES. We have to stop suburban creep into agricultural land and stop the transfer of values. You don't like the berry guns waking you up? DON'T MOVE TO ORCHARD COUNTRY!!!

    Oh, boy. I'm actually waiting to post a huge thing in response to someone else, but they haven't posted the first part yet that I can find. The big thing is, on a large or a small garden, we need to close the loop on nutrient use. Every nutrient that comes out of the ground as food needs to go back in. Co-planting, local eating, everything takes a back seat to a composting revolution. WE can do this on a small scale, with composting toilets and private compost piles, or we can do this on a large scale, with municipalities changing sewage treatment systems to produce fertalizer and fuel, and having people separate out compostable trash the way they do recyclables. One advantage of the large scale versions is that they can be composted in such a way as to produce methane as well, which gives us a fuel and a fertalize, from stuff we throw away.

    Spin of superstruct Farm Golf : http://superstructgame.net/SuperstructView/398

    Go google farmer's golf Phil - we played it back in 2008!

    WHAT??? Your municipalities are just NOW discovering composting????? Holy crap - back in 2008 my family of 6 put out two grocery bags "garbage" every two weeks. One medium blue bag of recyclables and a huge wheeled green composter that we filled with ALL our kitchen waste, fats, bones, soiled paper, yard waste...the only thing we weren't allowed to compost was ashes and kitty litter. The municipality provided free compost back. This was province wide.

    YES YES YES on the composting revolution. It is vital!

    I suggest a ban on flush toilets. Bring back the thundermug/chamber pot, and have a humanure composting facility in every basement or bathroom. NOT an outhouse in the old sense...but a modern, composting toilet. Then use the abundant supplies as fertilizer. Vermiculture and solar composting should also be mandatory for apartment buildings (all that basement space is just going to waste anyway.) We didn't use oil based fertilizers in the old days, many civilizations got by without them...although there were famines and natural disasters. We do know a lot more about this now than they used to. I agree with platonicjensen that the methane byproduct from humanure conservation would be an excellent substitute for oil heat and natural gas.

    There isn't any single answer to oil free farming. It's great if people can grow gardens in their back yards, or in vacant urban lots (very few of those around these days). But although they will get a better appreciation of life, they will also learn how labor-intensive farming is. We all have jobs in society, and those jobs are important (at least most of them are). We can't all put in the time it takes to grow a garden that would be required to feed ourselves. We need to stop sprawling into our high-value farmlands. Farmers do a great job and have been learning how to minimize inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers by better understanding crop rotation, plant biology, and insect behavior. There are also successful market models employed largely by urban-edge farmers, who sell locally at farmers markets and at their own shops, as well as major supermarket chains.

    I am proud that in 2020 I put in my required year of community service, (which was a condition of bring eligible to draw my pension), in urban reclamation for food production. Vacant buildings in inner cities were being reclaimed as urban farming sites. I worked in the Old Post Office in downtown Chicago. It now uses sustainable indoor farming technologies to feed 30, 000 Chicagoans a year. Fresh fruits and vegetables are available in the inner city for those of limited means. Once hunger got to be such a problem that folks got over their fears of GMOs, urban farming has become a true life saver.

    Looks like you've got some powerful cohorts...such as President Obama, who comments on Michael Pollan here: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/10/27/62034/896 "I was just reading an article in The New York Times by Michael Pollen [sic] about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That's just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board."

    You should read some of the works of Bill McKibben some time. He was promoting and actually living the life of oil free agriculture for some time B.P. (Before Pollan). A good recent read is Deep Economy http://www.billmckibben.com/books.html




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