[Review] Local food for sustainable communities

[Michaelangelica]

Bringing food production much closer to home makes sense. As our population becomes more urbanised, the environmental and financial impacts of transporting produce to our suburbs have risen.. Meanwhile, traditional agricultural belts are facing the challenges of water shortages, climate extremes and declining land productivity, while once productive land on the urban fringe is being increasingly developed for housing and other infrastructure. This all coincides with concerns about the health and environmental impacts of large-scale commercial agriculture.

 

Until the Second World War, when advances were made in synthesising fertiliser, most people grew at least some of their own food. They kept a few hens, had fruit trees and large veggie patches. Scraps were fed to the chickens, or composted and mixed with animal manure then returned to the soil. Backyard food production was labour-intensive but highly productive, and supplemented by produce from market gardens and smallholdings on the urban fringe.

 

After the war, advances in machinery and synthetic fertilisers pushed production away from towns and cities into more marginal farmland. For the next 40 years, broadacre productivity in developed countries skyrocketed thanks to artificial pesticides and fertilisers and monoculture specialisation. Recently, however, growth slowed due to a combination of changing climate, existing crop varieties reaching their maximum yield potentials and progressive soil depletion. Waste products – water, manure and vegetable waste – that were once composted and returned to the soil as an integral part of a closed production system, became a by-product liability.

Local food for sustainable communities (Science Alert)

[Eclipse Now]

I'm thinking that as we approach peak phosphorus this is going to be a HUGE issue!

 

Going local is not just about saving fuel and Co2, as we could ultimately develop continent-wide fast train networks that were run on nuclear or renewables.

 

Local food seems more about developing closed nutrient cycles!

 

We must stop the the one-way nutrient journey down the toilets and out to sea — otherwise known as “mining the soil”. The cycle must be closed! Phosphorus cannot be replaced! It must be recycled (see wiki on capturing phosphorus from sewerage). We need to limit the application of NPK both because we might just not have enough energy with which to manufacture and mine this stuff in the vast quantities we use today, and because industrial farming kills the soil. The soil can be brought back to life, but it’s difficult, especially given we hardly understand the soil in the first place.

 

One lecture I listened to discussed the fact that this is going to involve our sewerage waste management departments getting in touch with our city planning and agricultural departments, and we need to have the conversation NOW to be ready for when peak phosphorus hits in about 15 to 20 years.

MP3

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/current/audioonly/bth_20081114.mp3

Real audio

http://www.abc.net.au/rural/telegraph/audio/bth_14112008_2856.ram

Winmedia

Friday 14 November 2008

 

This guy is a very smart cookie, and sees the hole way we deploy our selves in the landscape, our very city design, changing to adapt to peak phosphorus.

Folke Günther on ecological design,thermodynamics of living systems,ecological engineering, nutrient recycling and oil depletion

[Michaelangelica]

Doesn't a lot of phosporus go to making the vast tonnage of RoundUp we use every year?

 

Does China own the phosporus mines as well as the rare earth mines?

 

Eclipse you might enjoy some of the discussions at

PRI's Permaculture Forum

It would be nice if you posted the above there, as well as here.

[Eclipse Now]

Ahhh, so many forums and so little time. Nice to see you in the Permaculture Forum! I was amazed to find that an Aussie helped coin the term Permaculture!

 

Sadly, my brain must eventually scale back on my blogging and head into study mode... mid-life career change calls! (Boring, boring, accounting.... but hey? Better than death threats from doing Child Protection work!)

 

Feel free to post my thoughts on phosphorus to that forum, some of whom I probably know personally... but even better, the EXPERT's thoughts with those 2 links. The talk on Peak Phosphorus is especially good!

[maikeru]

We should have a "hug your local farmer" day. I've been watching phosphate fertilizer prices a bit and they seem volatile right now. On an upward climb. Doesn't bode well.

[Eclipse Now]

Yes, but remember price alone doesn't mean it has peaked. There can be speculation. I thought, according to the podcast from the University of Technology, Sydney, that phosphorus was to peak in about 20 to 25 years?

 

And the opposite can be true. Just because prices crash doesn't mean the geology of peak oil isn't occurring about now over the next 5 years, and then we'll see the decline set in after that. The geology may have peaked out, but demand crashed after the Global Financial Crisis.

 

So I guess just looking at price can be misleading, as economics and geology can interact in weird ways.

[maikeru]

Yes, but remember price alone doesn't mean it has peaked. There can be speculation. I thought, according to the podcast from the University of Technology, Sydney, that phosphorus was to peak in about 20 to 25 years?

 

And the opposite can be true. Just because prices crash doesn't mean the geology of peak oil isn't occurring about now over the next 5 years, and then we'll see the decline set in after that. The geology may have peaked out, but demand crashed after the Global Financial Crisis.

 

So I guess just looking at price can be misleading, as economics and geology can interact in weird ways.

 

Yes, exactly. Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that prices rising are correlated with Peak Phosphorus, but rather that volatile and higher prices will place additional burden on farmers and consumers. When Peak Phosphorus arrives in a few decades, it could be as devastating or more so than Peak Oil, IMO. Like you, I've become disturbed by the thought that we flush so many nutrients down the toilet, far out to sea... And that there are few viable replacements for them. So many cycles broken.

[Eclipse Now]

Cool. Hey, download this lecture, it is a fairly concise summary of the problems and gives me hope with leading sustainability figures discussing it.

 

One lecture I listened to discussed the fact that this is going to involve our sewerage waste management departments getting in touch with our city planning and agricultural departments, and we need to have the conversation NOW to be ready for when peak phosphorus hits in about 15 to 20 years.

MP3

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/current/audioonly/bth_20081114.mp3

Real audio

http://www.abc.net.au/rural/telegraph/audio/bth_14112008_2856.ram

Winmedia

Friday 14 November 2008

 

This guy is a very smart cookie, and sees the hole way we deploy our selves in the landscape, our very city design, changing to adapt to peak phosphorus.

Folke Günther on ecological design,thermodynamics of living systems,ecological engineering, nutrient recycling and oil depletion

[maikeru]

Hey Eclipse Now, the files aren't working for me. They bring up errors when I try to dl. :/ Checking out Gunther's site as well.

[Eclipse Now]

Sorry about that... I hope they've still got them online at the right places?