[p2p-research] debate on open agriculture

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:22:01PM -0500, Kevin Carson wrote:

> > I would like to publish some of your contributions on the p2p blog
> 
> This was the general subject in contention in this blog post by Cato's
> Will Wilkinson and the ensuing comments, of which I wrote many:
> 
> http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/07/08/urban-farming/

There's no doubt that industrial-scale food production can crank
the largest amount of food Joules with the least amount of people.

However, it takes 10 Joules of fossil energy to generate one Joule
of food, destroys the soil, biodiversity, depletes nonrenewable 
resources (soil minerals and phosphate), pollutes and depletes
the water table, increases erosion, and has a pretty low 
productivity/surface.

We're faced with an ageing demographics with people out of work.

A retired couple could occupy themselves quite well with a quarter acre,
or around 0.10 ha (50 x 50 m). In principle they could derive 100% of 
their calories from that space, using high-intensity organic gardening 
methods with no to very little mineral/synthetic fertilizer input.

This strikes me as a win/win situation.

Of course closed-loop life support ecosystems based around single-cell
algae photobioreactors could use even less space. 

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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