while I support sustainable farming on a small scale its beyond me what you all think we can do to replace industrial farming.

in my state we have a huge organic veggie farm which supplies many stores.

the produce is expensive and a considerable amount of hand labor is required. this is not food that lower income people can afford.

i also interact with a large organic corn and bean farmer. most often his crop is compromised by a big weed infestation during wet humid summers and he has large yield losses . i just don't see where you all think this could go in a different direction.

so lets take conventional soybeans as an example. what exactly is the sustainable version that you all think is better then a no till roundup ready version?  no till and roundup cuts down on diesel fuel regardless of the much spouted myth that roundup ready means more inputs.

i see a lot of finger waving here but I don't hear any credible ideas of how we are going to replace conventional as we know it today with what? and please don't tell me organic is going to replace conventional the yields are just not there, nor are the economics of producing affordable food.

I've read about a number of studies that say yields are better per acre with small-scale organic agriculture. I can believe that a large organic grower, especially if it's a monoculture, has bug and disease problems. The way small-scale organic agriculture works is indeed with much more labor. Thre is another word for this: jobs. As oil passes its peak and the price climbs, we'll come to the day when modern energy-intensive, aotomated, low-labor ag just isn't feasible anymore. Nor will it be possible to truck the produce thousands of miles. So we will return to the high labor input, low energy input, healthy produce locally traded that our grandparents knew.

I have farmed all my life using both highly conventional methods (chemicals, hormones etc) and now organic production. Personally, I like the organic system much better and so do my customers.

I am always puzzled as to why farmers are expected to produce cheap food for the poor. Wouldn't it make more sense if jobs paid fair wages? Wouldn't it make more sense if manual labor paid a fair wage so we didn't have to depend on fossil fuels to replace workers?  Everyone deserves a fair wage farmers.laborers, teachers whomever. People paid a fair wage can afford to pay a fair price for food, housing, education or whatever, provided those items are priced fairly as well.

As to the problems inherent on the large organic farms you mention, well that may be the problem, perhaps they are too large? Why must we assume everything must get bigger to get more efficient?

The final report of The International Assessment of Agricultural Science  and Technology for Development, the work of over 400 scientists, concluded that "small-scale farmers in diverse ecosystems should be the focus of efforts to get better quality food in the right places". Feeding people does not necessarily mean high tech farming. The Ecologist magazine in an article "Small is Bountiful" notes that total output of a farm is almost always higher on small vs. large farms, a fact even World Bank economists have come to accept.

The Soybean growers used to boast that over 90% of the US crop was fed directly to animals, so how necessary is it that we continue this practice? Some soy protein for poultry and pigs, but why ruminants? I haven't fed my dairy cows soy for years and I see no reason to start again. Shouldn't  we be looking at ways to get more animals off grain feeding instead of using them to dispose of the excessive amounts of grain grown world wide?

The fact is that we eat a diet high in processed foods that are high calories and low in nutrition. Foods with a high GM content. We have made a food system to fit the crops that are highly profitable to industry, with little thought given to what people should be eating.

If industrially produced GM food is all that people can afford to buy, we really need to re-assess our national priorities on diet, health care, fair wages and the fact that manual labor is not evil.
 

Re: Mr. Goodman. It's nice to read someone who knows what he's talking about, as opposed to people who have bought the Monsanto and ADM BS. I live in St. Louis, home of Monsanto, and there has never, and I mean NEVER, been an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch regarding Monsanto which wasn't a sound-alike to a corporate press realease. Probitive questions about the "science" behind the Roundup line? Non-existent. Rebuttal from an idependent scientist with regards to the validity of Monsanto's claims? Bupkiss. Monsantos science is a joke. As for Denise O'Brien, it's fairly obvious that Vilsack threw her a bone while stabbing her in the back with the knife he used to carve the flesh from which came the bone. Now Obama is doing the same to progressives and others with most of his picks. Stop wearing your Obama-tinted glasses and smell the betrayal.

The mellotron is your friend.