Modern agricultural methods wouldn’t even be economically feasible let alone sustainable without generous grants from US and European governments to large transnational agricultural corporations. The energy i

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html

Such high yields aren’t even necessary, considering the US department of agriculture estimates that Americans waste one quarter of all food produced. Food is too cheap for people to really appreciate it. At least for people who can afford to purchase it. Did you know during the Ethopian famine in the 1980s, the country was a net food EXPORTER. There is no problem with food production, just food distribution.

“The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that one-quarter of all food produced in the United States is wasted.”

http://wrrc.p2pays.org/p2rx/subsection_text.cfm?hub=448&subsec=3&nav=3

The time frame for New Zealand would be longer than Australia. Australia has exceptionally poor soils. You can read a good account of this in Tim Flannery’s book, “The Future Eaters” (which has a section devoted to New Zealand as well).

bjchip: European farming of Australia has never been sustainable. The Aborigines were not farmers, but it took them tens of thousands of years to develop a sustainable hunting and gathering society (and in the process, most of the megafauna became extinct).

Aside from soil issues, modern agriculture is heavily dependent on imported fertlisers, fuel etc. More than twenty years ago, I went on a high school chemistry field trip to the super-phosphate factory in Christchurch. This was the first time I realised how modern agriculture is so unsustainable. Super-phosphate is manufactured from rock phosphate, which is dug up from several islands in the Pacific Ocean, and the United States, amongst other places. In the factory, there was a big shed containing rock phosphate mined in various places. The highest quality phosphate came (from memory) from Christmas Island, but because of its limited supply, only a certain proportion of this raw material was allowed to be used in the manufacture of the super-phosphate. In a matter of decades, New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom (followed by the Nauru government) removed almost all the centre of Nauru in phosphate mining operations. Clearly this does not lead to sustainable agriculture.

Additionally, modern agriculture is dependent on fossil fuels … this is not sustainable either.

Measured usually in decades, not centuries. Australian salinification took about 4-6 decades IIRC once the farmers abandoned the older methods.

If agriculture is done “sustainably” meaning grass fed livestock and a reasonable process of grass and crop rotation it simply doesn’t happen unless/untill the climate rug is yanked from under the farmer. Such farming is more robust with respect to drought and other calamity so it does tend to persist.

Note that I am not discussing pesticides here, just sustainability. The grass-fed nature of our livestock has some built in advantages that are showing up already in the price of milk, which in every other country I know of, is rising because the corn meal fed to the livestock is being set aside to power SUVs and the price is going up parabolic.

How long exactly I can’t say, would depend on the intensity of the farming and the nature of the land to start with.

respectfully
BJ

Sapient

Eventually resources get used up, but what time frame are we talking about? If it is thousands of years, then so what?

Even organics are not sustainable, as long as it’s dependent on fossil-fuel tractors, trucks etc… However, when faced with price shocks on petrochemicals and fossil fuels, organics will have a competitive advantage, because in general it is more labour-intensive and less machine-intensive. There is no doubt that going organic is the best preparation for that sustainable future, as long as it’s accompanied by energy independence too.

Perhaps one of you clever numbers people could post a graph relating to pasture productivity before and after the exhaustion of cheap fossil phosphate ? That is an important example of the sort of shock that non-sustainable agriculture will face in the coming years.

A lot of “imported” Green thinking simply does apply here.

BJ

In fact, sustainable agriculture and organic agriculture need not mean the same thing, but it is likely that organic agriculture is sustainable. On the other hand, in the last fifty years, modern agriculture has become dependent on unsustainable practices, such as synthetic pesticides, and fertilisers derived from non-renewable (or only slowly renewing) resources. Furthermore, soil degradation is a major issue in many places. Soil is a bit like oil, it takes a long time to create fertile soil, and it can be “used up” (by erosion, becoming too salty etc) very quickly.

While organic agriculture may have lower productivity than modern “non-organic” methods, this may be the price we have to pay to ensure we have sustainable food production into the future (not just the next few years while oil is cheap and there is still enough fertile soil left).