>FARM "SUSTAINABLY"
>But the claim that anything would be "fixed" by dragging
>all of agriculture 

Can you cite any example of any proponent of sustainability wanting 
to "drag" all of agriculture anywhere?  Or are the references 
to "dragging"/force/mandates/Soviet-style communism just unfair attempts to 
make sustainability look sinister?

>There is
>a technical term to describe such agriculture - it is called
>"subsistence farming", 

I would agree that sustainability, properly understood, is very closely 
related to substistence farming, as well as to husbandry and conservation.  

As someone that believes in the goal of sustainability, I've been thinking 
a lot lately about nutrient cycles.  I just bought some farmland that has 
very low phosphorus levels.  My family's farm is committed to uncertified 
organic production, so we had limited options for increasing phosphorus 
levels.  Rock phosphorus is one option, but it's just another mined 
nutrient that's less nutrient-dense and therefore much more expensive (in 
dollars and in fossil fuels for transport) than conventional phosphorus 
fertizilizers besides suffering from very poor economies of scale.  The 
only other sources are the waste by-products (non-recycled nutrients) of 
conventional farms: bonemeal and manure.  We went with manure from a very 
large dairy farm, which will hopefully bring levels up to a minimally 
sufficient level.  Relying on someone else's wastefulness doesn't seem 
especially sustainable, although I hope we made the best of available 
circumstances.  So long as farming continues to be another extractive 
activity, I don't know how else to keep going.

I bring up this example in defense of subsistence farming.  Apart from the 
well publicized destructiveness of fossil fuel consumption (particularly of 
fossil fuel reserves, but also pollution, oil spills, oil wars, etc.), 
there is no efficient way to return nutrients to the soil without consumers 
ceasing to be consumers in consumer communities and instead living close to 
the land, which is to say more or less: subsistence farming.

A good example of the nutrient cycle problem is the soil toxicity resulting 
from all the chicken manure spread on land around me from all the broiler 
houses.  Midwest grain farms are levelling mountains in West Virginia to 
fuel the processing of nutrients from yet other mines while nutrients are 
building up here at the end of the nutrient line (as opposed to nutrient 
cycle) to the point of toxicity.  It seems clear to me that valuable/costly 
(ecologically and monetarily) nutrients shouldn't be turned into 
pollutants, and it seems clear that a relatively more subsistent style of 
agriculture is the only sensible way to deal with the problem.

>and it is massively wasteful of scarce
>resources like water, 

When I think about scarce water resources I think especially about Great 
Plains aquifers and the Colorado River.  Are these waters being depleted or 
are they or were they ever threatened by subsistence farmers?  That seems 
ridiculous.  How on earth do you figure that subsistence farmers 
are "massively wasteful" of water resources?

>and produces, at best, only enough food
>to feed the farmer's family.  

Economics as the study of *scarcity* fits neatly with extractive economies, 
and they evolved hand in hand.  On the other hand, the people I know who 
live most bountifully and generously with their neighbors are the people 
that live nearest the model of subsistence farming.

>We can afford to feed them with ease
>precisely because we abandoned subsistence farming several
>centuries ago.

Clearly the economies of the kinds of places that we send food aid to are 
not healthy.  These same places, however, have only become more dependent 
and suffered more hunger as their involvement in the global economy has 
increased.  I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that the world as a 
whole has made great strides in dealing with famine by means of 
globalization.

You also imply that our ability to produce food "with ease" is an 
indication of the success of our agriculture.  Obviously, modern, 
conventional agriculture does produce food "with ease."  For the proponent 
of globalization that's the whole story; for the proponent of subsistence 
farming, the question is whether our ease is "compromising the ability of 
future generations [or even our neighbors right now] to meet their own 
needs."  If our agriculture is mistaken, it's certainly not by accident; we 
farm unsustainably because some people profit from it (some greatly).  I 
think proponents of sustainability do frequently fail to admit the cost (in 
terms of "ease" and luxury and privilege) of turning to more subsistent 
farming.

>Lucky for us, science ignores the neo-luddites who have
>never missed a meal in their lives, and does things like
>come up with rice that needs less water, and can feed
>more people with less resource consumption:

I think the most common problem with so-called "scientific" solutions to 
problems of agriculture is that the farmer is disempowered and made 
dependent on people that don't have enough knowledge of the land to care 
for it.  (Not all science is like this.  Research by the Swiss Bee Research 
comes to mind first for empowering beekeepers.)  If we give this world over 
to absentee landlords (with elite credentials and big paychecks), we'll 
surely fail to care for it.

Randy's mention of the previously underestimated cost of sourcing our 
queens from a small number of large, "efficient" producers comes to mind.  
Perhaps it wasn't so "efficient" after all, and perhaps we're in a worse 
situation now on account of our short-sightedness then.

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