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I've got a call here for Thomas Malthus ...
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2115773,00.html
has the content-free (given that it's from the Observer) title "Organic food under threat".
As far as I can see, they've just discovered that food grows on farms, that there are only finitely many farms, that each farm has only finite yield, and that the reason that farmers moved away from organic food in the first place is that a given amount of land produces a whole lot more food when sown with aggressively-bred grain, fertilised with carefully-bound phosphorus, and freed of pests with targeted insecticides. The demand for organic food in England has just reached equality with the supply, at which point it has to grow at a rate in which new farms can be brought into production, rather than at the rate by which a consumer whim can inflame.
England can't feed England even with the utmost available refinements of agricultural technology. England hasn't been able to feed England with the greatest available refinements of agricultural technology since about 1900 - ask any U-Boat commander. So I'm surprised that people are now surprised to find that England can't feed England if its inhabitants request it to do so with one fertiliser factory tied behind its back.
has the content-free (given that it's from the Observer) title "Organic food under threat".
As far as I can see, they've just discovered that food grows on farms, that there are only finitely many farms, that each farm has only finite yield, and that the reason that farmers moved away from organic food in the first place is that a given amount of land produces a whole lot more food when sown with aggressively-bred grain, fertilised with carefully-bound phosphorus, and freed of pests with targeted insecticides. The demand for organic food in England has just reached equality with the supply, at which point it has to grow at a rate in which new farms can be brought into production, rather than at the rate by which a consumer whim can inflame.
England can't feed England even with the utmost available refinements of agricultural technology. England hasn't been able to feed England with the greatest available refinements of agricultural technology since about 1900 - ask any U-Boat commander. So I'm surprised that people are now surprised to find that England can't feed England if its inhabitants request it to do so with one fertiliser factory tied behind its back.
no subject
Ignoring the gastropods and the aphids, though it is clearly the height of folly to ignore either the gastropods or the aphids, I've a couple of weeks of broccoli, maybe as much as a month of potatoes, maybe as much as a week of broad beans, maybe a week of carrots or maybe much less - I think I need some kind of widget to plant carrot-seed uniformly, it's too fine to pour out of the packet at a controlled rate of one seed per five centimetres along a furrow, so I suspect I'll have a conglobulated orgy of intertwined carrots by the time things have grown - a couple of weeks of apples from the neighbour's tree, and a couple of crumbles of blackberries.
I'm not being efficient - masses of garden space left for grass, the crops are not fertilised or pesticided, and I remove the weeds between thumb and forefinger rather than with N-(phosphonomethyl) glycine. I'm not vegetarian, so I know I can't remotely hope to feed myself from the garden, and so scarcely bother to try.
no subject
And yeah, I wouldn't be bothering if it were only because food is expensive, although if it got expensive enough I suppose I would. I do get better value for money out of my organic strawberry patch than I ever would from supermarket organic strawberries, though.