This
is an excellent reminder that agricultural productivity is mostly a
function of the boots on the ground. A machine can optimize
productivity for large field crops with little human input, but the
actual output per acre is a fraction of what a single human being can
produce on that same acre. Industrial farming blinds us to this but
it is also core to the reforming of the human life way.
Machines
find it difficult to provide care to the most productive plants that
often need ongoing local intervention. Something simple that all can
understand. A cherry tree is highly productive. Yet it is
vulnerable to a nasty black rot. It not treated by simple removal,
it will seriously damage the tree over several years. The same holds
true for damaged branches and the like. My point of course is that
the tree has to be inspected often enough and immediately treated to
maintain health. This is all very easy on a small plot but never
could be easily mechanized, nor should it.
My
point is that a human can optimize with some access to machinery, a
modest plot of land, beyond which it becomes burdensome. In the same
way he can optimize animal husbandry with a few animals and integrate
it with the plot. Beyond that we are making trade offs that are less
than optimal.
No
wonder Putin is angry about bees and pesticides.
When it's suggested
that our food system be comprised of millions of small, organic
gardens, there's almost always someone who says that it isn't
realistic. And they'll quip something along the lines of, "There's
no way you could feed the world's growing population with just
gardens, let alone organically." Really? Has anybody told Russia
this?
On a total of
approximately 8 million hectares (20 million acres) of land, 16.5
million Russian families grow food in small-scale, organic gardens on
their Dachas (a secondary home, often in the extra urban areas).
Because growing your own food happens to be a long-lived tradition in
Russia, even among the wealthy.
Based on the 1999
"Private Household Farming in Russia" Gosmkostat(State
Committee for Statistics) statistics, these Dacha families produced:
- 38% of Russia's total agricultural output
- 41% of the livestock
- 82% of the honey
- 79% of the sold cattle
- 65% of the sold sheep and goats
- 59% of the milk
- 31% of the sold poultry
- 28% of the eggs
- 91% of the potatoes
- 76% of the vegetables
- 79% of the fruits
If Russian families
can manage such production in their region's very short growing
season (approx. 110 days), imagine the output most parts of the world
could manage by comparison. Unfortunately in just the US alone, lawns
take up more than twice the amount of land Russia's gardens do (est.
40-45 million acres).
No comments:
Post a Comment