[Loki]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'I')f Japan or whomever has the bucks to buy corn you can bet ADM or Cargill is gonna ship it right down the Mississippi no matter how many empty stomachs it passes.

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kublikhan', 'I') really don't see how it benefits the people in charge of America to starve the masses to death.

[kublikhan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'I') think you are making the same mistake that people make who say "they" will think of something to mitigate oil depletion.

Ireland was set up to grow and export food, that was the government priority, they didn't "plan" to starve anyone - not officially anyway.

The US government is not going to purposely starve people either, any more than during the Hoover administration the government purposely starved people or in the '90s basically ignored people that didn't "just say no" to AIDS.

The US government is in the business of promoting business, that should be fairly obvious, they certainly aren't in the business of growing and distributing food. Don't you remember they were pretty well at the center of allowing bankers to run wild and then bailing them out with taxpayer money just a year ago, while overlooking the vanished retirement of millions of citizens – the same government now talking about "privatizing" just about everything including money owed to retirees on SS. They fueled the housing bubble by backing loans a child could tell were never going to be paid, and must take at least some blame for ruining millions of people financially and adding to child hunger.

[Arthur75]

Yes, not gonna be pretty most probably ...

Watched some bbc documentaries lately "filthy cities" about Medieval London and Paris before the revolution. Maybe it goes a bit on the spectacular, but really gives you a feeling of how things were, and the huge changes in hygiene that infrastructures and cheap energy brought.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00z8r9l

(dwnloaded them from http://forums.mvgroup.org/ )

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kublikhan', 'P')laces where some of the country's poorest could obtain food,

[sparky]

.
The way I see this thread is the old duality
catastrophic crop failure versus the increasing difficulty to produce enough food worldwide
for the second case ,
it's a slow process measured in the decrease of " ending stocks" ,
IE the rolling surplus before the next harvest come in

For the first case , we are in the hands of the gods ,
it could be a disease , a climatic event or a physical phenomena
It is random , no mitigation can take place
as in all famine the poor suffer with severe malnutrition ,
leading to very fragile health and eventually death

It is the prime agent of population control , any population
it works , it is the absolute measure of carrying capacity
there is as much breeding individual as there is food
if the food decrease the population decrease

Of the four horsemen , it is the least democratic ,
plague is the most egalitarian


the last European natural famine was in Sweden Finland in 1866 ,with loses in the 15% of the population
a wave of emigration to America took place the Mormon in particular invited a number of Swedish women to populate Salt lake city

human caused famine in Europe are
the Russian civil war of 1919 ,
the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3
and the Dutch famine of 1944

[kublikhan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'A')gain, I'm thinking we are a long way from mass starvation simply because we feed so much food to our food and we are hyper-efficient - just like we are a long way from gasoline armageddon because very few people have moved to carpooling or mass transit.

[EOTWAWKI]

"How do you know he's the King?"

"He's not covered in s***."

[sparky]

As always the charming U.S. centric vision believe it or not but 19 out of 20 people are not in the U.S.A. there is not going to be any famine in America , not for a very very long time
the rest of the world is an other matter. the crisis point are the greater middle East , sub Sahara and South Asia ,

[Cog]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sparky', 'A')s always the charming U.S. centric vision believe it or not but 19 out of 20 people are not in the U.S.A. , there is not going to be any famine in America , not for a very very long time
the rest of the world is an other matter. the crisis point are the greater middle East , sub Sahara and South Asia ,

[Pretorian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sparky', '.')
As always the charming U.S. centric vision
believe it or not but 19 out of 20 people are not in the U.S.A.
there is not going to be any famine in America , not for a very very long time
the rest of the world is an other matter
the crisis point are the greater middle East , sub Sahara and South Asia ,

[Cog]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pretorian', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sparky', '.')
As always the charming U.S. centric vision
believe it or not but 19 out of 20 people are not in the U.S.A.
there is not going to be any famine in America , not for a very very long time
the rest of the world is an other matter
the crisis point are the greater middle East , sub Sahara and South Asia ,

[kublikhan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', 'A')s long as we don't run into oil availability problems.

Do you have any idea how fossil fuel intensive modern agriculture is? Unless you are envisioning some sort of return to using animals and people working from dawn to dusk doing stoop labor to survive. Even then, how does a cube dweller go from running a computer to managing a team of oxen?

[pedalling_faster]

now tell me, if the people had resorted to eating earthworms, would they have been better nourished ?

personally i think earthworms and similar animals that can convert food and human waste into protein, are a great food solution for a planet with too little arable land and too many people.

of course, that does mean eating maggots and earthworms, but, as protein and vitamin sources go, they are first-rate.

weren't there any vermiculture practitioners back then, perhaps under a different name, e.g. farmer. ?

i guess i can see how people could starve in cities, but not in the country.

[sparky]

.
Going to a sustainable agriculture cost a lot

crop rotation on a three field system ,
production decreased by two third without phosphates and Nitrogen
losses of 10% average without pesticide and fungicide on a good year
on a bad one that's half or plus of the harvest gone

so that's 90% of one third of one third or ten percent
forget food export

[kublikhan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sparky', 'G')oing to a sustainable agriculture cost a lot

crop rotation on a three field system ,production decreased by two third without phosphates and Nitrogen losses of 10% average without pesticide and fungicide on a good year on a bad one that's half or plus of the harvest gone. so that's 90% of one third of one third or ten percent forget food export

[ktblaloc]

"Do you have any idea how fossil fuel intensive modern agriculture is? Unless you are envisioning some sort of return to using animals and people working from dawn to dusk doing stoop labor to survive. Even then, how does a cube dweller go from running a computer to managing a team of oxen?"

I live and go to ASU during the school year and in a rural mountain town called Taylor in northern Arizona during the summer break. Imagining the majority of the people in Taylor growing food makes me laugh, even though many people who live in Taylor are LDS and are pretty good about keeping a food supply and gardening. When I think about people from Phoenix trying to live off the land I want to cry, especially when I think of the majority of the students I go to school with who I can see starving very quickly. Most people have no connection to the Earth and would not have a clue about what it means to live off the land.

Comparing the crisis we face in the near future to that of the 1316 English famine is silly. Sure, they are related by the shortage of food, dislocation, and I'm sure many other examples, but our problem today encompasses the world in it's entirety. Our problem is the thousands of heavily congested cities, countries without land for agriculture, nuclear weapons in desperate hands, the many inevitable revolutions against governments by their people, failing communication and technology, fear and anger, unfathomable chaos, the list is endless.

There is no solution to our energy crisis. Sure, wind, solar, and ethanol are alternatives energy sources, but they all rely on oil for production in one way or another. None of them are oil replacements. Civilization as we know it has been built on oil, runs on oil, needs oil to continue. These other types of energy will only dampen and slow the harsh realities we face in a "post-oil" world.

It's a matter of going back to our roots as human beings by learning to live off the land in a more humble way. It's a matter of reversing industrial society. Most people won't be able to handle this. Most people will die. Nothing is meant to last forever so we need to start thinking about how we are going to transition into a more Spartan lifestyle. Man, I feel like that sounds so much like something a crazy alarmist would say, but I feel like it is pretty realistic.

[sparky]

.@ Kubilai

a sustainable agriculture ipso facto imply no external inputs of energy or fertilizers

no Nitrogen , no Sulfur , no Potassium and no Phosphate

phosphorus deficiency
http://www.summitfertz.com.au/agronomy_phosphorus.html

potassium deficiency
http://www.summitfertz.com.au/agronomy_potassium.html

labor is human or draft animals

one of the field is used for legumes and Nitrogen replenishment , one is used as straight grazing
the third for raising a grain crop
the draft animals provide labor , fertilizer , meat and leather
the absence of potassium and Phosphorus means the crops have to be used locally
any export is exporting non replaceable nutrients , it's like spending the farming capital

the most rust resistant races of grains have a poor grain per ears ratio ,
instead of 40 the primitive races had 12 to 20 ,
of those grains 2 on average have to be kept for seed
the modern cultivars also give much less straw ,
they usually are dwarf , it's OK in cash farming since straw is rather useless

some land has to be used for wood as raw material or fuel

So ,for a continuous occupancy over generations, I maintain a decrease in yield of about 90%

This was farming in Europe over centuries , it is factual

[DomusAlbion]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ktblaloc', '&')quot;Do you have any idea how fossil fuel intensive modern agriculture is? Unless you are envisioning some sort of return to using animals and people working from dawn to dusk doing stoop labor to survive. Even then, how does a cube dweller go from running a computer to managing a team of oxen?"

[kublikhan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sparky', 'a') sustainable agriculture ipso facto imply no external inputs of energy or fertilizers

no Nitrogen , no Sulfur , no Potassium and no Phosphate

This was farming in Europe over centuries , it is factual