In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophically Wrong - Slashdot
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In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophically Wrong
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The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20 percent in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450 million worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50 percent. The ban also devastated the nation's tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.
By November 2021, with tea production falling, the government partially lifted its fertilizer ban on key export crops, including tea, rubber, and coconut. Faced with angry protests, soaring inflation, and the collapse of Sri Lanka's currency, the government finally suspended the policy for several key crops -- including tea, rubber, and coconut -- last month, although it continues for some others. The government is also offering $200 million to farmers as direct compensation and an additional $149 million in price subsidies to rice farmers who incurred losses. That hardly made up for the damage and suffering the ban produced. Farmers have widely criticized the payments for being massively insufficient and excluding many farmers, most notably tea producers, who offer one of the main sources of employment in rural Sri Lanka. The drop in tea production alone is estimated to result in economic losses of $425 million.
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Modern pesticides we're developed by first starting with natural defenses that plants have, then carefully extracting just exactly the part you want, in order to protect from the relevant insects. The next steps over the last 50 years or so was to carefully tune the molecules to be toxic ONLY to the pest insects, not to humans or fish or whatever else.
"Organic" means they have to just use the Deadly Nightshade,. tobacco, and other naturally toxic plants directly. No tuning them to be safer for humans.
Organic -
Adjective. Describes farming practices that fail to take advantage of the last 120 years of advances in food safety.-
I should have said "nicotine" rather than "tobacco".
Organic farmers can and do spray nicotine extracted from tobacco onto your produce. What they can't do is use a safer substance that has the protective benefits of nicotine without being toxic to humans. They have to use the natural toxins.-
Organic farmers can and do spray nicotine extracted from tobacco onto your produce.
Only if the laws allow it, and in Europe e.g. they don't. -
I'm pretty sure nicotine isn't on EU organic herbicide list.
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a mass shooting at some random gathering or shopping activity!
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Or, as is the case relevant to this article, being torn apart by angry mobs
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Nicotine is actually quite toxic, having a lethal dose in the range of 50-60mg.
Products meant for direct human consumptions contain only a few mg, but that's not the case for other kinds of product which might be very dangerous to the unwary, e.g. if you purchase nicotine to brew your own energy drink and mess up the quantities, or mishandle liquid nicotine used for e-cigarets.
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that really depends on your definitely of not very toxic. try ingesting a gram of nicotine and come back and tell us how non toxic it is.
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The bigger problem is not abandoning pesticides but nitrate fertilizer.
When the Haber Process was developed a century ago, it was described as "pulling bread from the air." Crop yields soared.
It is absurd to think it could be tossed out with no detrimental effects. Organic methods don't scale. They require more land and WAY more labor in a country with no spare land and farmers already working as hard as they can. There is nowhere near enough buffalo manure for everyone to switch to poop-based agriculture.
This reminds me of when my CEO read an article about Oracle ERP in an inflight magazine and ordered us to implement it by the end of the week. At least he wasn't responsible for a nation's food supply like this idiot politician.
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Well, the reaction to the crisis was severe enough that both the President and Prime Minister have resigned.
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Yup, the artificial fertilizers changed agriculture. Pack crops tighter, produce more on less land, and with less effort. The earth's population probably could not be this large without the Haber process.
Now it's good to get better pesticides too, some of those can be harmful to humans. Artificial fertilizer though is relatively safe, possibly safer than manure which can get you salmonella.
Organic is fine, but when it turns into a type of faith based method that believes all human created products are bad, it can fail. Organic is fine as a high end product for rich people in the first world who have more money than sense.
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Organic methods don't scale. They require more land and WAY more labor in a country with no spare land
That is wrong, as Europe shows.and farmers already working as hard as they can.
Depends on country. Often you have weeks or months of leisure...Organic means: you need to know more about - oh, how to do organic. Ordering a country to g organic and even punishing usage of industrial methods obviously does not work. As the farmers do not know what to do.
For organic farming you need a reasonable crop rotation
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Organic farming is allowed to use manure from non organic farms, that's mostly what Sri Lanka missed. Fertilizer input in organic farming is fossil by proxy, as is regenerative farming.
Only closed cycle humanure farming can be done intensively without fossil fertilizer inputs, but that's not really possible in an exporting country. Even in countries with mostly internal consumption, it's pretty much impossible with the existing sewer system. Sewage is too fucking polluted, for humanity to survive peak ferti
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Human waste is used quite a bit actually. 50 percent of 'biosolids' from sewage are used as fertilizer in America. Indeed, other countries do import processed sewage to use as fertilizer. Sometimes they incinerate it, terming it char, which makes it much less odorous.
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technically it's called biochar
~ https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
please, try keeping the terminology correct
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Organic methods don't scale. They require more land and WAY more labor in a country with no spare land
This is frankly completely false. Organic methods weren't used. As defined by their creators, they include returning human feces to fields.
You can get far more food per acre by interplanting in guilds. The plants literally feed one another. But this isn't compatible with machine cultivation, so we plant monocultures that not only require special treatment (like being hosed down with synthetic pesticides) but which also literally create plagues — the massive monocultures attract massive flocks or swarms of pests, and feed them, producing even more massive flocks and swarms, repeat as necessary. Interplanting means that bugs and birds literally cannot find the plants as easily to predate them. Integrated Pest Management (IPM) also includes use of trap crops which attract pests more strongly than the food crops themselves, and plants which attract beneficial birds and insects which prey upon your pests.
Organic farming is not a drop-in component for so-called green revolution mechanized production. It takes much more manpower. But it can also produce much more food per acre, and we have a lot of spare manpower in most populous nations. Mechanized farming does NOT achieve maximum crop density, because it doesn't take advantage of crops which can support one another and share the same space, like the three sisters.
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I realize how destructive machines are. They create hardpan, which in turn traps water and creates anaerobic conditions which destroy soil diversity, meaning they actually destroy topsoil (which is up to 80% organic material, and can literally be over 50% living organisms by mass.)
"Green revolution" mechanized production is an extremely efficient way to destroy topsoil, and turn it into an inert medium for hydroponic farming, making us utterly dependent on synthetic fertilizer.
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No, I don't think that's actually necessary, although the proportion will have to be much higher than what it is now if we do it with current technology. I think we need to progress through some deliberate phases in order to reach something sustainable which decreases labor. I think the ultimate goal has to be something like Masanobu Fukuoka [motherearthnews.com]'s style of farming, which is literally limited to broadcasting seed, and harvesting. But in my utopian fantasies the labor is eventually done by robots, of course.
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Circular farming practices are also a problem. Manure has en-mass over time a detrimental effect on the biology of soil as well to say nothing of the NOx and methane emissions from its production which are higher per unit than synthetic fertilizer (which is absurd when you think about it since methane is literally a feedstock for the latter).
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my CEO read an article about Oracle ERP in an inflight magazine and ordered us to implement it by the end of the week
Did your team actually try to implement it, or shut the CEO down? If the former, that'd be a story to tell over some pints.
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The last time I looked, the world records for yields per hectare for both rice & potatoes were essentially organic methods. It really isn't surprising that switching "cold turkey" from one farming method to another pretty much overnight resulted in lower yields. Farmers & farm workers need time to train up on modern organic farming methods & practice at implementing them.
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This exactly. Organic farming *can* be as productive as traditional farming (in a bushel/acre sense), for some crops, in some areas, and with more labor and expense. All that makes it not scale well, which is why it isn't already dominant. A huge push of the field of agronomy (with which I am tangentially associated) is figuring out how to get more organic yield with less investment - typically focusing on maximizing nutrient use and maintaining sustainably healthy soils.
This was a massive policy blunder, t
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Nitrogen fertilizers are made from methane. The methane does not have to come from fossil fuel.
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Nitrogen fertilizers are made from methane. The methane does not have to come from fossil fuel. But the energy used usually does.
And his point is not "waht we could do better", but "what is the status quo". And with countries that have an 50% CO2 producing energy mix, obviously 50% of the energy to make those fertilizers comes from fossil fuels.
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You can't catch it all, because we eat them and our shit doesn't generally go to the field.
Regenerative farming has fossil fertilizer by proxy, same as organic farming. They just lie about it more.
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The correct place for catching it is not at the cow's but, but at the end of the chain that starts with our buts. [valmec.com.au]
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Thank you. Well said.
There occasionally are pesticides produced directly from organic sources, but often these end up failing basic toxicological testing that all registered pesticides in North America must go through.
As to your definition of "organic" I understand what you mean, but in industry "organic" means something a bit different. It's essentially a marketing brand more than anything else.
The new popular buzzword in farming these days is not organic farming, but "regenerative ag" which although nearly as nebulous has real scientific principles underlying it, and is focused on sustainability. Organic farming as often practiced in North America, and as the Sri Lankan government tried, is not sustainable in any way. At best it's soil mining. On the other hand, the "green revolution" with intensive monoculture isn't sustainable either. Somewhere in the middle is where the future of ag and sustainable food production will be found. I could go into detail here but suffice it to say if Governments are serious about making food production sustainable, reducing greenhouse gas emissions coming from fertilizer production, whole societies need to be willing to pour money, time, and effort into research and development of sustainable food farming. Not just banning everything and expecting everything will magically work like the Sri Lankan government seemed to believe.
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Not just banning everything and expecting everything will magically work like the Sri Lankan government seemed to believe.
But it sure is easy to say "We must do SOMETHING" and ban stuff. That seems to be a favorite tool of politicians.
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And let's not forget the "organic" chemicals like copper sulfate that they use:
https://www.bellchem.com/news/... [bellchem.com]
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I can't believe I have to say this. That's what the glossy label says, but it's not reality.
That may have been the intention, but just look at how many and how diverse unintended consequences in biology are: side and/or adverse effects in medication, vaccines that don't work at all or don't work as advertised, test that are supposed to work highly specific against a certain infection but have false-positive or false-negative rates ranging from few percent to double-digit percents.
You had a really good chanc
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Smells like flamebait. I'll bite.
Humans can't have a natural immunity to something toxic cooked up in a lab by humans. There are countless examples of "safe man-made chemicals" given enough decades turning into cancer-causing, environment killing, poison machines.
Careful tuning? How did they test all these miracle drugs for a century to make sure they weren't harmful? -> They can't. All we know is that in small doses in a very short period of time, there is not enough evidence to get our government to ou
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what a bunch of BS, that's not what organic farming is all about, just typical bias and mischaracterization
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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> Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his 2019 election campaign to transition the country's farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years.
10 years time to transition, teach farmers new techniques while slowly reducing synthetic and fertilizer usage.
> Last April, Rajapaksa's government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country's 2 million farmers to go organic.
So the opposite, he didn't make good on his promised, and set the country into a downward spiral.
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I think you mean "use more fertilizer ".
You have to use at least 10X as much manure as you would pure sodium nitrate. That's because manure is mostly bacteria, fecal coliform bacteria to be exact. Only a small percentage is the actual nutrients.-
And there really isn't a good large scale composting method that can scale up. Good for back yard composts from your home's food waste, or greenhouses from a local restaurant's waste, but trying to scale that up higher will take major effort.
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Simple manned machine turned piles can do composting on large scale and is economic, there's opportunities to develop something more efficient, but it does for now.
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I'm going to pretend that you don't know a single farmer or rancher.
Something like this takes YEARS to setup for every farm. You don't just go out one day, in most places, and say, "I'm NEVER using non-organic fertilizer again!" Well, I guess you could if you're rich or don't mind going out of business, but I digress. No you take time to start figuring out your needs on a per field / per crop basis. This can easily take a few years, unless you have someone in the area with similar fields/crops that you can crib off of to get a baseline.
Then you have to ensure you have a supply of ( composted / fermented ) manure to use as fertilizer. Handling the manure properly, which takes a fair chunk of time to learn, kills bacteria... well more appropriately consumes the bacteria. Not only does it consume the microorganisms it RAISES the nitrogen content. This has actually been known for decades, even science fiction writers have used it, e.g. Larry Niven in Lucifer's Hammer where the Stronghold uses animal and human wastes to heat the city hall and hospital. The line goes that they would have high nitrogen fertilizer in the spring... at the cost of some ripe smells. You don't have to believe me or the science fiction writers, however:
https://iopscience.iop.org/art... [iop.org]
https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Inte... [usda.gov]
https://www.ndsu.edu/agricultu... [ndsu.edu]
Please note that all of this takes time. A big part of that is time to develop the process(es) that can easily be replicated by farmers with various tools and automation levels. Just shouting loudly, "I DECLARE... NO MORE SYNTHETIC FERTLIZER!" is a sure way to fail. You WILL end up with improperly composted fertilizer leading to bacterial issues. You will not have enough fertilizer at first, it's a cycle that takes time. You probably will be adding food wastes. In fact you'd probably be better off doing smaller regional composting facilities to create the fertilizer for all the farmers as part of a co-op.
Source: Other than the articles/papers listed above I know a few farmers who went organic in the area. Most started out using synthetic fertilizer, and changed over time to meet market demand. Same thing with the ranchers selling organic grass fed beef / lamb / hogs. You don't just wake up one day and do that without learning how or you'll go bankrupt.
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Typo?
But yeah, 3 years is not 10. What, did his patience run out a third of the way through, or did he think he wouldn't be around much longer? Which is now almost guaranteed.
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I hear you just said we can introduce new efficiencies on top of the efficiency we already have thanks to fertiliser! Great idea.
Actually he did, the fact it didn't work and he undid his policy afterwards has no bearing on the initial promise.
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* Decades of political corruption
* 2019 Easter bombings of tourists killed tourist business.
* Banning artificial fertilizers *without* *any* warning.
* Taking out huge loans from the IMF *and* China.
* China not delivering the promised extra business to cover their loans
* A *huge* population surge (no idea why that's happened)
* Income hit really hard by the pandemic.-
Sadly we did the same to Haiti. Provided a loan, then convinced them to focus on cash crops, then when they couldn't feed themselves, we provided cheap rice and peanuts, killing the source of income of the Haitian farmers.
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From what I've read, the real problem is that
1) The government was spending beyond its means in roughly the ways you describe
2) The country could no longer afford to import fertilizer
3) In order to deal with the crisis of 2), the government said "Who needs fertilizer? Let's go organic!"So the proximate cause of famine was the switch to organic farming, the reason for the switch was rooted in Sri Lanka's other problems.
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I don't know if it was in this case but it is very common for governments to offer subsidies, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was happening for fertilizer in Sri Lanka in order to keep the cost of food down. As with lots of subsidies offering them can often incentivise ineffective behaviour.
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because there is an agenda at the moment to make China seem Evil and any involvement with them leads to disaster. Pointing out Japan and India undermines that rhetoric.
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From the BBC
"Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has announced he will step down after protesters stormed his official residence and set the prime minister's house on fire."
Oh look, a real insurrection.
By the way, 2022 - 2019 = 10? Socialist math or what? Shouldn't he have waited until 2029 to turn off the imported fertilizer?
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Trudeau is looking to implement similar policies in Canada.
If rising food prices results in Canadians storming his estate and throwing a BBQ while he flees the country... then I'm actually inclined to go ahead.https://torontosun.com/opinion... [torontosun.com]
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Seems like we could skip the starving part and go straight to revolution.
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Canada wants farmers to catch more of the methane from manure, not cut out fossil fertilizer.
If gas prices stay elevated, it might even make business sense.
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He should have phased it out over 10 years, perhaps by a flat 10% per year to give farmers time to adjust. He could have achieved the quota with a fertilizer fee and dividend [wikipedia.org] in order to keep the people happy and fed.
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You're working under the assumption that this was a planned out strategy to sustain the environment or whatever, it wasn't "Prior to the ban, successive governments had encouraged an overdependence on chemical fertilisers by the country’s farmers, who, thanks to subsidies, would receive hundreds of kilos of fertiliser." https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
The government had been giving away fertilizer, farmers were not surprisingly using shitloads, the government was running out of cash so cut off the-
So what you're saying is that the whole thing was a lie to cover up a fiscal crisis? A sane leader might have simply started reducing the subsidy instead of suddenly banning the subsidized product.
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As opposed to? I just looked up the definition, it doesn't say you need to burn down the building you storm.
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The reason they started the stupid experiment in the first place wasn't because they were trying to be green.
It's because the government had used up massive amounts of cash reserves, and didn't want to have to spend money buying actual fertilizer. They were trying to kick the can down the road.
But in a nation as small as Sri Lanka, they had almost no road to kick the can down. Thus, collapse all over that we are seeing now. The fertilizer experiment just made it all so much worse by having massive crop shortages or failures.
P.S. This also serves up a dire warning to the rest of humanity what happens if we let investment in oil production fall too drastically to the point not everyone can get fertilizer.
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Pedantic nitpick: Fertilizer is made from gas, not oil.
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And oil is used to power the power plants, and transport the fertilizer.
What exactly was your point?-
Really, there is no substitute for oil to power the plants or power vehicles to transport fertilizer, eh?/s
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There is a place for subsidies*
However can someone explain why so many countries use them for other goals? I don't understand subsidizing food for or housing for the poor, why not give the money to the poor and let them decide? Subsidizing fuel and fertilizer is even worse. You are subsidizing the rich to do something that might not even be economically viable. In the West, there is no way to even know if ethanol in gas makes sense and subsidized higher education is only good for people rich enough to-
1. Starving people tend to overthrow the government. If you're in the government, that usually ends badly for you.
2. Just handing people money, they might just spend it on imported food*.
You're just giving the money to other peoples farmers. Subsidizing the things in your economy keeps that money in your economy, at least for a little bit. *or something other than food, increasing prices for those things, causing inflation for no real benefit.3. In those places farms = jobs = votes. If you support farmi
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Giving people money is communism.
Giving money to industrial farms and landlords and cool and good.
I completely agree with you of course, just give the money you'd spend on subsidies to the poorest x%. This will help them more than a cheaper Big Mac and will actually use market mechanisms to incentivize e.g. public transport and and energy efficiency. Buut people love their subsidies and politicians don't want to touch them, you can see what happened in places that removed e.g. fuel subsidies.
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why not give the money to the poor and let them decide?
Simple answer: because it does not work?
Complex answer: that would not affect the prices of the subsidized products to go down, all prices would stay up.
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It doesn't matter if it could be done in other ways if it won't be, because it's not profitable. Nobody practical cares what's theoretically possible, only what's actually– you guessed it — practical. Stop ignoring the dominant paradigm, capitalism. Only in times of world war do we pretend to transcend it, and when you take a closer look at that you determine that even then decisions are made on a profit basis.
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So we can make the biosphere unlivable [apnews.com] by continuing to use fossil fuels, turning the Anthropocene extinction into a mass extinction event and choosing to kill billions of people and most genera, or
to vote to tackle by far the biggest [guim.co.uk] and root cause by reducing our unsustainable [unfccc.int] fertility down to 0.01 per person for several decades.
I'm guessing the vast majority of people will keep voting to make the biosphere uninhabitable.-
So you're saying it's total societal collapse either way.
Which way is more beneficial for me in the short term?
That's your answer.-
An unlivable biosphere will definitely cause society to collapse, whereas a sustainable way of living have in the past and can definitely in the future lead to having a continuing society. We could choose to replace our omnicidal ponzi-scheme economy with a sustainable system - just like we got rid of economies based on human slavery.
I agree tho that most voters are incapable of thinking long term and/or are sociopaths incapable of empathy.
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A society yes.
Not our current society though. So that's why people will react how you predicted
I agree tho that most voters are incapable of thinking long term and/or are sociopaths incapable of empathy.In some places. For some definitions of slavery.
Yea, it's not looking good.
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Looks like it. It seems the human race is lacking essential skills for long-term survival.
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But... but... we outsourced oil production to Russia and the middle east, and this week we are supposed to hate Russia! So how's that supposed to work???
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What I find unforgivable is that instead of simply reducing the fertilizer subsidy, they banned the fertilizers in a dramatic act of utter incompetence.
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There has never been a need to bifurcate the food production, outside of one for profit. Organic farming provides no foreseeable benefit over conventional in delivering calories to the masses. The sole benefit that organic has proven is less overall energy input versus conventional, and solely in the energy costs of the importing of nitrogen, which is a problem nobody had or is having.
The whole cleaner/safer food, less pollution, have long been debunked. And the reduced calories delivered per acre of land that organic gives us comes at the absolute worse time where climate change has required us to more intelligent with the arable land we still have left.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa's Vistas of Prosperity and Splendour [treasury.gov.lk] reads like a manifesto of ecological utopia, but it fails in all the ways that sky high dreaming fails. It aims high with no clear cut path to achieve those goals. Smarter farming not a wholesale swap to organic is what the planet requires to feed the soon to be eight billion people on this planet. We do need to reduce fertilizer use, become smarter about nitrogen economy in soil, and be better stewards of the clean fresh water we have left on this planet. But that does not require us to condemn our future to starvation and economic collapse, it requires us to stop seeing solutions as solely conventional or organic, but instead see the technicolor of advancements that we have available to us today to make crop more drought resistant, able to accept high salinity content water, and hardier in warmer areas.
What this failure shows us is that there's not an easy path forward in this ever changing world's climate. There is no one solution solves it all. We have to stop fighting each other and create artificial black and white situations. Or we will all eventually find ourselves in the exact situation as Sri Lanka.
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The whole cleaner/safer food, less pollution, have long been debunked.
To be certain I understand, you are saying that there are no risks to human health from any synthetic herbicides, insecticides, or pesticides that are commonly used in agriculture? Further, would you also state that there are no negative environmental consequences from the usage of any synthetic insecticides, pesticides, or herbicides?
it requires us to stop seeing solutions as solely conventional or organic
Tilting at windmills. The only people who believe that are the tiny fringe. Industry is far past where you are. Have you ever met or visited a large organic farm? In my experience, they are far more "conventional" and technologically minded than you are representing. For that matter, many conventional farmers have adopted some "organic" practices.
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by Talchas ( 954795 ) on Tuesday July 12, 2022 @12:27AM (#62695310)
To be certain I understand, you are saying that there are no risks to human health from any synthetic herbicides, insecticides, or pesticides that are commonly used in agriculture? Further, would you also state that there are no negative environmental consequences from the usage of any synthetic insecticides, pesticides, or herbicides?
Certainly not significantly more risk than any of the "organic" ones. (Or the problems with not having them, and/or the different axis of land efficiency that skipping them entirely completely fails at)
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Certainly not significantly more risk than any of the "organic" ones. (Or the problems with not having them, and/or the different axis of land efficiency that skipping them entirely completely fails at)
Interesting. I would say the evidence is strongly against you. Just a few off the top of my head:
glyphosate -- highly controversial, but some organizations claim it to be a human carcinogen. I'm not convinced, but there are huge legal fights going on right now.
glyphosate + surfactants -- what is NOT controversial, is that many surfactants are known to have deleterious impacts on human, amphibian, insect, bird, etc. biology.
neo-nicitinoids -- strongly linked to collapse in bee populations, at at least one of the major factors, and also linked to bird health and population declines.
paraquat -- causes Parkinsons. Banned in the EU, still in widespread usage in the US.
chlorpyrifos is a chemical that has just, after 50 years in usage, been banned in the US.I do not know of any organic pesticides (see below) with a risk profile that even approaches paraquat or chlorpyrifos or Monsanto surfactants.
The bottom line is that there are literally hundreds of conventional synthetic pesticides in every day usage. Some have been well studied. Some have not. Some have been in usage for decades and we only recently have clear evidence that they are strongly deleterious.
Comparatively, there are what--10-20 certified organic pesticides? All studied and analyzed at this point.
Also, to be clear, I am aware of no evidence that organic foods are overall more efficient to grow, are healthier nutrient-wise to eat, or taste better. All of those things MAY be true, but they're largely a side effect of consumers who buy organic overlapping with consumers who buy from small and local farmers, who today often us organic methods.
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Allow me to add to the list...
Lemons and Oranges are sprayed with with Enilconazole (imazalil), Pyrimethanil and Prochloraz.
Sodium orthophenyl phenol is also used as a preservative for above-mentioned fruits.
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The whole cleaner/safer food, less pollution, have long been debunked.
Care to share a link about that. That would interest the German, Swizz and French farmers greatly!
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A country facing a Balance of Payments crisis needs to stop importing fertilizers as they simply dont have the foreign exchange. Organic farming was just a cover story to stop fertilizer imports. They could have setup fertilizer plants to make fertilizer at home to achieve the same result with the added benefit of generating employment.
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They don't have the natural gas either.
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indirectly, we make people out of fossil fuel.
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That sounds about right. Although there's other ways to get fertilizer without natural gas. The hard part is making fertilizers as cheap as the kind made from natural gas.
There's been efforts in using high temperature electrolysis of water to get the hydrogen, and there is no one such process with each variation having some pros and cons. Then comes the nitrogen production, and there's a few variations on that theme too. This is going to take a lot of energy. If it is not powered by fossil fuels then i
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Great idea. Sri Lanka doesn't have enough money to buy fertilizer, so they should build a nuclear plant to make fertilizer instead...
That sounds much cheaper and in no way takes a long long time.
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I recall a story about a new potato, or some vegetable, that was bred to be naturally insect repellent. This was great, or so it seemed, a plant rich in starch and nutrients to feed people without need for insecticides. A plant well suited to "organic" farming. The problem was the potato repelled insects because it was high in natural pesticides. The plant was not genetically modified, or not like as some interpret the term, but bred by selection of plants that did best in keeping away insects. It turns out that potatoes that are poisonous to insects aren't so healthy for people either. Maybe if cooked hot enough and long enough the poisons would break down, but that process also breaks down some of the nutritional value. I guess the potatoes didn't taste all that great either.
I don't know how much poison was in the potato, and how that might affect the health of children that might eat these regularly. I don't recall how the story ended on the potato, except that if it went anywhere it was kept within some small numbers that were willing to eat some nasty tasting potatoes that could poison them.
We can feed the world because of our industrial capacity to produce herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers. On top of that comes careful breeding of crops to be herbicide resistant, and can grow large fruit and seeds for us to eat and plant.
There's no doubt we have room for improvement on modern farming techniques. Removing fertilizers is not an improvement. Maybe we could use basalt based minerals to restore nutrients instead of limestone.
Limestone is a sedimentary rock that is something like 50% calcium carbonate, which is mined and heated to release CO2 and produce agricultural grade lime. The lime is used to restore calcium in the soil, and other minerals, and control for pH levels. This is an energy intensive process to heat the stone, usually heated with fossil fuels, and the heat releases CO2 from the rock. So a two fold CO2 emission after the energy in diesel powered machines to mine it.
Basalt is a naturally occurring lime but it has more like 25% lime and the rest mostly sand. The sand is hard on mining equipment, so it makes it a bit more expensive to mine.. After it is mined then comes the process of separating the sand from the lime, or hauling the sand and lime to the fields. There's energy in the separation which saves on hauling costs, or skip the separation and pay in more fuel and effort to haul it all out to the field.
I've see many people propose basalt as a way to lower our need for cooking down limestone to get lime for agriculture and cement. It would save us a lot of fossil fuel burning. What would also save us fossil fuel burning is using nuclear power to drive the process of mining and refining the lime, and to synthesize nitrogen based fertilizers. Fertilizers that currently use natural gas for the fuel and raw material for these fertilizers.
But the "organic" farmers are the kind of people that don't like nuclear power. They are going to have to choose. Fossil fuels, food scarcity, or nuclear power.
Some nations rich in hydro, geothermal, and onshore wind might be able to get the food and energy they need with out nuclear fission. The number of such nations are quite few. For the rest of the world the choices are fossil fuels, scarcity, or nuclear fission.
These people live in a fantasy to like "organic farming" is going to feed us. This is related to the fantasy that we can get the energy we need from wind, water, and sun. Those fantasies lead to very real shortages, the kind of shortages that will lead people to starve or freeze to death.
If these people want lower CO2 emissions, plenty of food and energy, and still get a cleaner environment then they need to embrace nuclear power.
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in sufficient numbers, it would be a good way to save the planet!
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Potatoes started very toxic from the Americas, and were bred to be safe in Europe.
I think you are thinking of celery. They bred it (conventionally) to produce lots of natural insecticides. Great, until it was slightly crushed in handling and produced 1000 times the amount. I think it killed a few people.
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Both fertilizer and pesticides exist for good reasons. Are they overused? Often. Do they need careful regulation? Certainly. But: doing without them will drop crop yields, and will open crops to occasional complete devastation by pests.
Of course, given, time, GMO crops can incorporate many pesticides into the plants themselves. Some GMO apples, for example, have higher levels of pesticides than they would if sprayed. There are two key differences. Positive: the pesticide is exactly where it needs to be, as opposed to being sprayed over the entire environment. Negative: The pesticide doesn't wash off, so you get to eat it.
But Sri Lanka didn't take any time for that. They just stopped. Much of their tea crop got eaten by bugs.
Since they also prohibited weed killer, the farmers weeded manually, leading to soil and nutrient loss [economynext.com].
Organic farming is possible, but it isn't easy. It requires different techniques (for example, for weed control), it requires different crops (if not GMO, then carefully selected and often mixed varieties). It requires a lot more than "let's just stop using chemicals" - and you will *still* have substantially reduced yields.
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Not defending heavy handed government mandates, but 20% yield drop in the first year after switching to a new method doesn't say much about the potential of the method itself. Maybe it requires training to practice properly, supply chain of good organic fertilizers and natural pest repellents, different cultivars of rice to optimize yield... Perhaps using 20% more land to grow same amount of rice is a worthwhile tradeoff, given better long term health of soil and ecosystem that lives on it. Or perhaps conve
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No learning curve doesnt help, the yield is just going to get worse and worse until your field is a desert with yield of big fat zero. That's what happens when you keep pulling crops rich in nitrogen compounds out of the soil, without putting any nitrogen compounds in the soil to begin with. A field is a giant test-tube and mass conversion laws are unviolable for the farmer.
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Depending on region and climate/weather, rice is extremely difficult to fertilize.
If the fields are flooded to high, the fertilizer is drained awayOn the other hand if the fields are flooded high enough at the right time, you do not need pesticides/herbicides: the rice survices +14 days under water, most weeds don't.
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There are a few things that can be grown organically without significant loss of yields, Brazil nuts and some mushrooms are the only ones I can think of. For the rest there is a yield loss. While some people will pay a premium that offsets this, it cannot currently replace the staple foods for the whole population.
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Hemlocks and viper venom is organic, you would not want to inject that would you?
Organic is the dumbest idea ever. -
There are many articles from various sources which state that agricultural scientists have been sacked or told to shut up when they warned that the ban will not work. This has been going on since last year itself.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world... [bbc.com]
Stupidity of the President (military background), who probably thought that if he asked for something, it will be done. Science be damned.
Maybe he should ban the sun from rising. It will be just as effective, except his stupidity would have been revealed within a day and not have so many people affected.
Other leaders, be aware. Ignore science at your own peril (or your people's peril anyway since most "leaders" seem to get away with shit).
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... cue all the voices that they just didn't do it "right".
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Naturally. No one has tried real organic farming(tm) the right way(tm). I am sure the Dutch will want to give it a go.
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Politicians that focus too much on a popular idea that when implemented measured amounts is good, but when forced on everything at once is bad. They should have incrementally increased the amount of organic farming and then when production sagged more than the politicians expected (but as predicted by the experts,) then they wouldn't be in such a bind.
Similar to how the German Government shut down all of the German Nuclear Power Plants right after Fukushima, which made them more dependent on fossil fuels f
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It is actually stupider than that. Many of the nuclear plants are still operating, and they are planning on shutting them down just before winter this year, even though they will also have to shut down their natural gas fueled power plants to provide heating. They see this problem coming, know it exists, but are planning on doing it anyway when they could just operate the plants for a few more months until spring.
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Lots of comments here that think this is all about pesticides, only a few that mention the true fundamental fallacy of organic farming - it is dependent on synthetic nitrogen.
The maximum natural nitrogen fixation capacity available to agriculture is sufficient only to support about 2 billion people, one quarter of the current world population.
Nearly every nitrogen atom in the body of nearly every human on Earth today was once in an ammonia molecule fixed by the Haber Process, invented around 1910. It became available to produce fertilizer just after WWI (it was producing explosives during the war) which saved the world from mass starvation in the 1920s, which is when the world population hit the 2 billion person limit. At that time natural fixation was being still supplemented by "fossil" nitrogen supplies - guano accumulated over tens of thousands of years - which were rapidly approaching exhaustion.
Organic farming is dependent on manure from feedlots where cattle are fed synthetic nitrogen, it is just one remove from the Haber Process plant,
One wonders about the scientific advice being provided to the Sri Lankan government, or perhaps it is just that politicians there were seduced by charlatans to ignore it, Well, in fairness, why should they be immune to the same problem seen in many Western countries recently.
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Sri Lanka's "Great Leap Forward" performs as expected.
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Well, as I posed bellow, their prime minister boasted back in 2018 wanting to turn Sri Lanka into a nerd paradise, a knowledge-based economy. So totally appropriate topic in my book. https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
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I grew up on a working farm. I have watched my whole life as people who have never set foot on a farm, nor can even keep a house plant alive tell farmers how to grow food. This isn't the first time a country will starve due to believing this type of propaganda. It has happened in Africa several times over the last 40 years. And everytime the response is the classic "no true Scotsman". They must have done it wrong...they must not being doing it enough...etc
Also, the "green"/old techniques have destroyed several large agricultural regions around the world already (highlands of Borneo, middle east). Each time something like this hapens, it is the poor folks in that remote country who suffer. I think we should round up people like 2TecTom and sent them to Sri Lanka in exchange for an equivalent number of their citizens. See how they appreciate starving. Truly, people like you are monsters.
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It's like the saying about herbal medicine: if there's evidence that something works, it's investigated, and if it actually does, there's no reason to call it "herbal medicine" any more because the active ingredients are isolated and it's then simply called "medicine".
The same is true with agriculture (I'm finishing up a hort sci degree right now, and even started on the organic branch, until I ditched it due to all of the woo). The notion of "organic agriculture" (which is a really stupid name, as all ag is "organic") has been shoved down everyone's throat since Steiner - with various degrees of scientific backing or kookery. And indeed, the things from it that turned out to be grounded do get incorporated into conventional agriculture. For example, predatory microorganisms have displaced a lot of pesticide use in greenhouse cultivation (not much in field cultivation, however). And while early 20th century agriculture paid little attention to maintenance of soil carbon, as it's not a "nutrient", modern agriculture pays a lot more attention to it due to its water retention capacity, cation exchange capacity, and importance in maintaining a healthy rhizosphere.
The stuff that doesn't work in a cost effective manner, however, does not get adopted. For obvious reasons. It's not like farmers hate money or anything. Fertilizer, for example: the very concept of a harvest means taking minerals out of the field. A big harvest means taking lots of minerals out of the field. Yes, a healthy rhizosphere increases the rate in which e.g. mycorrhizal associations can extract nonsoluble nutrients from mineral grains. But the rate is not limitless, and nor is it efficient. If you want high yields, you have to replace what you take out. And organic sources are expensive relative to their nutrient supply (to the point that there's a big problem in organic farming with unscrupulous vendors adulterating (or making entirely fake organic fertilizers) that are "boosted" with synthetic fertilizer).
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