Sri Lanka’s Humanitarian Disaster From Forced Organic Farming
Behind the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Sri Lanka is a catastrophic decision to force all the nation’s farmers to go organic. Tom Leonard in MailOnline has more.
From the ethically sourced produce shops of Islington to the chemical-free acres of the Prince of Wales’s Highgrove farm, you could almost hear the cheering three years ago when Sri Lanka’s future president pledged a revolution.
It wouldn’t be on the streets but in the fields – as Gotabaya Rajapaksa vowed in his successful 2019 election campaign to transform the country into the world’s first fully organic farming nation.
Parroting the claims made for years by Prince Charles and fellow advocates of ‘sustainable farming’, the politician cited health and environmental reasons for this drastic move – in particular brandishing unproven claims of a link between chemical fertilisers and Sri Lanka’s high rate of chronic kidney disease.
Rajapaksa’s commitment to producing 100% of Sri Lanka’s food organically within a decade was accompanied by a ban on the use of all chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides.
The consequences have been nothing short of catastrophic. Going organic – the bold, modern vision of the UK’s green lobby – has triggered the devastation of Sri Lanka’s economy, plunging much of its 22 million-strong population into desperate straits.
The chaos that has engulfed the country – including growing poverty, long queues for essentials, lethal street battles and attacks on the homes of government leaders – is a direct result of this one decision.
Rajapaksa’s announcement last April that the country’s two million farmers had to go organic overnight – and the disaster that has followed – is a timely lesson for all those who have been swept up by the hype surrounding organic food and its promise not only to improve our health but also to help save the planet.
Ironically, Sri Lanka had one of the strongest performing economies in Asia. In 2019, the World Bank upgraded its status to that of an upper middle-income country – only to reverse its decision just months after Rajapaksa was elected.
Soon after he ordered the organic transition, agronomists from the Sri Lanka Agricultural Economics Association warned he was making a terrible mistake. For all his concerns about water contamination, soil degradation, kidney disease and biodiversity damage, the cons of going organic far outweighed the pros, they said.
Studies show crop yields drop by an alarming 30% under organic farming. Since the 1960s, Sri Lanka has subsidised farmers to use synthetic fertiliser, the main catalyst for the doubling of yields for many crops.
Outside the echo chamber of sustainable farming advocates, chemical fertilisers, along with pesticides and herbicides, are universally accepted as essential tools for modern agriculture.
Sri Lanka is heavily dependent on rice to feed itself and on tea to export. Forcing the producers of both crops to go entirely organic, warned experts, would drastically lower their yields – by 35% and 50% respectively. Rice is a nitrogen-intensive crop and is therefore tricky and expensive to grow without chemical fertilisers.
But Rajapaksa and his Government wouldn’t listen to the warnings. When his brother, Mahinda, was president a decade ago, he also encouraged organic farming.
They will no doubt have been motivated by Sri Lanka’s growing reputation as a top destination for eco-tourists, who are drawn to luxury hotels that serve organic food, produced on their own farms.
Shunning conventional food production experts, the Rajapaksas have taken guidance from a cranky ‘civil society movement’ called Viyathmaga, which sums up its values as “Spiritual inside, Technocrat outside”.
Worth reading in full.
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The Elites don’t care if the poor starve – in fact isn’t that the plan with the attack on supply chains and the inflation they have deliberately created?
Why is Johnson discouraging farmers from farming in the UK when we should be doing all we can to increase food production in the face of world shortages created by the insane Green Fascist policies of the dangerous Elites themselves?
If it saves just one vegetable
If that vegetable is Bozo it’s not worth saving.
Bunter’s exposure to vegetables (apart from his missus) would seem to be noticeably sparse.
I’ve lost track. Is Zelensky one of the ‘good guys’ or one of the ‘bad guys’ ?
https://www.ladbible.com/news/custommade-zelenskyy-lego-is-raising-money-for-ukraine-20220316
The right arm on my Zelensky Lego model keeps raising in some sort of historical salute
Judging by those hands, he looks like a grasping sort…
I think the point is that fewer vegetables are “born.”
They don’t even like us growing weed in the dirt
We have fewer and fewer serious and thoughtful discussions on policy issues: with regard to food production, the economy, energy, health, foreign affairs, climate, education, free speech – you name it.
These are matters upon which reasonable people can disagree. But they have turned into opportunities for moral posturing by those itching to prove that they are superior to others and those opposed to them are insane or monstrous.
Facts don’t matter: painting a picture and putting on a show is the name of the game.
While all this is going on, people are suffering: starving, freezing, losing their jobs and their lives.
Land receives a 80 pound an acre subsidy from taxpayers.
Pure rent-seeking. The economy is progressive feudalist, not capitalist.
Yes but between the elites and the people their is a thin line of lying deceitful Politicians and their hired Goons in the Police, in Sri Lanka this eventually has proved inneffective.
Maybe they should take heed of this, but I doubt it, the skin of their bubble is a lot thinner than they thought, but they’re so out of touch they don’t get it, I believe the Ceascescu’s still couldn’t believe what was happening until they were tied to the posts.
Top headline on the BBC NEWS website toady
‘Thousands of photographs from the heart of China’s highly secretive system of mass incarceration in Xinjiang, as well as a shoot-to-kill policy for those who try to escape, are among a huge cache of data hacked from police computer servers in the region.
The Xinjiang Police Files, as they’re being called, were passed to the BBC earlier this year. After a months-long effort to investigate and authenticate them, they can be shown to offer significant new insights into the internment of the region’s Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities.’
Or
The article should read
‘This is the stuff the intelligence services gave us months ago. They told us to keep it on a shelf until it can be used to take the heat off our dictator
Partygate photos relegated to a minor story
The message is clear, you are much better off here under this regime than under the Chinese
Praise the Leader’
The more they try to control us (through rules, regulations, trying to manage things) the worse things work.
The worse things work, the more chaos and angry people we get.
The more chaos and angry people we get, the more they try to control us.
The more they try to control us….
Absolutely true!
‘ Control freakery’ suppresses the spirit. destroys enterprise and initiative and leads to massive bureaucratic inefficiency and rewards crass mediocrity ( see the USSR ).
The kiss of death to a dynamic economy – but then this is exactly want the Globalists want to achieve in their melt down of the West , isn’t it?
If only we had a populist Conservative Party in Goverment and not Schwab’s mates.
When will Johnsos sack the Globalist, Carney Groomed useless Head of the B of E for gross incompetence, dereliction of responsibility and talking cr*p to the Media ?
Is Mervyn still available?
Mervyn was neither use nor ornament, but the rot set in when Carnage was appointed.
Mervyn at least looked the part!
Davos Carney was appointed precisely to start and feed the rot .
We certainly agree on that. The guy is very dangerously bonkers.
King said that he didn’t think the democratic mechanisms we had worked very well beyond national borders. So he got one thing right, even if he didn’t spot that the world’s banks were about to blow up.
The people who did spot this were mostly outside ‘the system’ – contrarians, ‘awkward squad’, etc. The narrative’ seems to have been that we’d abolished ‘boom and bust’. Remember that?
The lunatic that is known as George Monbiot (of the Guardian fame) wants all farming stopped and factory produced muck e.g. Gates Industries, to be the norm. What could possibly go wrong?
These green extremists are insane – monomaniacs, all.
They are not even ‘Green’ – they are just Fascists!
Nazis, as well as being brown-shirted, were green, they were anti-industrial.
Why don’t they just cut to the chase, and start exterminating the population they consider surplus to requirements?
It would at least be more honest.
Are you sure they haven’t started to do this? 😉
A (monkeypox/gorillagonorrhoea /apeAIDS) plague on their houses
Gates will not be satisfied until smallpox is revived!
Mortality rates stealthily creeping up!
But are annual birth rates falling in line with the Great Reset?
They have started. I expect massive increases in mortality, all ages, by 2030, their target date. I also anticipate massive reproductive issues for those that survive the “vaccine” cull.
I was vaguely wondering if Moonbat had pondered where the raw biomass for his Soylent Green factories was going to come from, then I laughed at myself for being so silly.
Of course he hasn’t.
My thoughts exactly.
He wants the result of stopping all farming.
A disaster is precisely what he wants.
Green Leap Forward.
Yes, as promoted by AOC and many other villains.
The guy may be stupid enough to believe that it’s feasible to halt farming globally, turn all of the country side everywhere into outdoor wildlife entertainment resorts for city dwellers and have everyone eat industry (and a high tech industry, mind you) produced ersatzfood, but I don’t really believe this. It’s much more likely that he’s getting paid to help selling these products to urban middle-class consumers in England. I’m meanwhile convinced that all of this vegan and animal rights stuff is really just marketing for certain US product lines supposed to replace more traditonal ones better suited to whatever the task at hand happens to be.
I mean, how does one get fastfood-feeding people to buy into
Same shit. Same price. Cheaper ingredients. We’re loving it!
Answer: Add meta-value to the inferior product, aka Save the planet by buying cheeseburgers! Who wouldn’t want to accomplish a difficult task that easily?
See the film out in the 70’s “Soylent Green”
Ties in with the de-population agenda.
The article above is another propaganda piece
This shows the dependence of modern agricúlture on fossil fuel inputs in the form of fertilizers, and therefore gives an indication of what would happen should those inputs ever be reduced.
It shows a lot of things.
It shows that human existence cannot be managed by a small group of self-proclaimed intelligent people.
This was really shown quite clearly by the abject failure of communism and central planning.
But the losers, those humans that are compelled by their nature to tell others what to do, didn’t accept defeat. They just retreated and regrouped and their coming back now in force with their crazy green agenda and their bio-security and their social re-engineering.
They are having another run at it, based on the same bogus excuse as the first time, namely that if you let humans get on with it things eventually go horribly wrong.
Agree completely. Freedom is not only a better way to live – it works.
Greens are melons.
a rebranded veneer but really red to the pips.
As the old gardeners question time guy used to say ‘the answer lies in the soil’, if you are going to look at agricultural production? you need a true ‘son of the soil’ to stand any chance of getting it right. Many of the world’s soils are in a poor state and are only producing crops by the use of chemical fertilisers, effectively they are dirt farming amd even with the application of chemical fertilisers they will eventually fail. What is needed is regenerative farming by people who know and understand the soil, never mind organic or not organic, we need intelligent agronomy with an integrated approach that will bring the world’s soils back into good heart and remain productive.
We need animal farming and animal manures going back into the soil, we need crop rotation practices that will enhance not deplete the soil. Anyway enough of my ranting; time to get back to my veg patch, which if you are interested is probably about 70% organic 30% growmore fertiliser and is run on a strict 4 year rotation cycle.
So… a return to organic farming as determined by a select group of those who know.
Did you read the article?
All the part time gardeners tut tutting and telling everyone how virtuous they are.
Until they have 100 acres to farm for a living and the first purchase required is a £100,000 tractor.
make a aerated compost tea brewer and go chem free you won’t look back. I’ve been chem free for>10yrs
see my other post
If there’s no selenium in the soil, you won’t be getting any of that no matter how big your turnips are:
“Selenium plays an important role in the health of your immune system. This antioxidant helps lower oxidative stress in your body, which reduces inflammation and enhances immunity. Studies have demonstrated that increased blood levels of selenium are associated with enhanced immune response.”
Not only a child education expert, now a nutrition expert.
Blowhard.
which is why soil analysis is very important, this would highlight any deficiencies you ccan correct, you can add selenium via volcanic rock dust into the compost cycle, which is then taken up by micro organisms that get applied via extract at ~2lb compost per acre
Sadly not on an industrial scale.
Absoloutely it can be done on an industrial scale, it is being done on an industrial scale already >10yrs.
The best garden fertiliser I know of is Blood, Fish and Bonemeal. Magic stuff.
How do you get that on a commercial scale?
Make an AACT brewer, add thermophillic wood compost, feed fish hydrolysate to the microbes, spray it onto the crops.
Even easier (but longer) make a Johnson Su bioreactor, add the correct ratio of woodchip & herbiver muck, water daily, wait until the thermophillic cycle is over, add worms, wait a year or so, add 2lb per acre to clean water with some humic acid, spray it on the crop or add it to irrigation.
This is low input farming?
it’s lower than drilling gas in Russia, converting it to amonia, shipping it round the world to apply to fields.
CT takes waste streams and turns it into microbial food for plants.
Read again “garden fertiliser.”
This used to be understood by all – until he current generation of total ‘reality detached’ morons took over!
You don’t rely on your cabbage patch for an income.
The only problem with animal manures is how much you’d actually need to be able to fertilise the crop in the UK as George Eustice recently suggested. There’s a screen shot of an article in I believe farmers weekly in this video at the 13:10 mark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6ws7GKb6ss that says to have enough manure produced in the UK to replace all the chemical fertilisers currently used would take 2.5 Billion laying hens or 10 Million dairy cows.
As the article says taking a hybrid of both figures that would mean every man woman and child in the UK could have an 18 egg omelette washed down with 5 pints of whole milk, every day of the year.
Well we are living that now as we have courageously cut ourselves off from cereal supplies and the fertilisers we need to grow our own and other foods by supporting Plucky™️ Ukraine which if it were to succumb to Russian ‘agression’ would be the end of Blighty, or the World, apparently, something…
The Ukraine policy of the West is totally self- destructive and insane – and it looks deliberately so!
Europe needs to wake up to the massive self- harm being caused by its Leaders directed by the Biden Gang and the CIA /US Deep State for no sensible or even possible outcome.
Germany is now in the hands of the Extremist Red/Green Loons led by WEF stooges- however did this happen?
UVDL: now obviously a totally unmitigated disaster – who could possibly have guessed?
No, it is obvious that you have t take time to progressively return to a more balanced organic based system of agriculture and that costs will inevitably rise, but quality – especially of beef cattle of gras fed but also pork and lamb, will improve without the “supplement” intensive diets .
The hysteria that dominates the current agenda of the Global Elites projected by their media allies makes calm and rational decision making impossible.
The fact is that it is really ‘people’ – their ‘useless mouths’ – they want to get rid of, not chemicals in farming.
There are too many humans on the planet. Just look at the state of the Halifax to Bradford ‘Express’:
Blue skies in Yorkshire? You’re ‘avin’ a laugh ain’t cha?
Obviously, that sky was Photoshopped in.
You would get a fraction of the yield from cattle (beef or dairy) were feedstock not produced with fertilisers. Beasts are also affected by parasites, particularly intestinal worms which seriously affects weight gain. Strangely enough, just what Ivermectin is used for on a commercial scale. Quality and quantity of meats are affected by beasts with heavy parasitic loads so, no, you wouldn’t get better food from organically fed or chemical free animals. It’s a complete fantasy, which is why all but specialist farmers don’t do it. And if you want to price up organic beef online you will get one hell of a fright. The only people able to afford it are, unsurprisingly, wealthy virtue signallers. The real question is, how did we improve life expectancy into the 80’s whilst using fertilisers and chemicals in farming when only 100 years ago people were more likely to die in their 60’s. We certainly see more diseases in people, particularly the elderly, but in the past they wouldn’t have lived long enough to contracts them. Similarly, child mortality has fallen off a cliff and we now have children who would have died at birth living a full life. Along the way they… Read more »
The idea that people living say, 300 years ago, never lived long enough to suffer from the diseases that the elderly in 2022 suffer from, isn’t born out by the grave stones scattered around my Church. The average lifespan may have been lower, but that is very much the result of higher rates of infant mortality. And I am seeing dementia in more and more not so elderly people. I suspect the cause, or at least one of the causes is diet related though I am not claiming that it is without more evidence.
Before the 20th century, macular degeneration was unknown, but thanks to the use of industrial seed oils (aka vegetable oils) in most processed foods, it’s now a problem. So the non-production of sunflower oil in the Ukraine is much appreciated.
People 300 years ago were far more likely to die of an infected cut than cancer. Child mortality rates were higher, but like any poor society, the solution was to have more kids.
What we now recognise as dementia was just considered madness even in the 80’s and 90’s. Up until the 80’s people were locked away in asylums, never to be seen in the community. And there were lot’s of them.
We have broadly similar views about vegetable oils.
I doubt if the elites even care if he police win the punch ups or not
The elites can jump on a plane and relocate leaving the eco slaves to it
‘ — and the disaster that has followed — is a timely lesson for all those who have been swept up by the hype surrounding organic food and its promise not only to improve our health but also to help save the planet.’
And a timely lesson for the Net Zero freaks who by odd coincidence are the same as the organic, vegan freaks.
Rajapaksas – add the name to Mao, Ceaușescu, Pol Pot, Lysenko/Stalin. All w/o enforced disaster and death on their citizens by that fatal conceit – central economic planning and control.
When will he appear in Court in The Hague? What’s that when other World ‘leaders’ appear there for their crimes against Humanity, these last two years, and Net Zero?
Next it will be ‘Net Zero Population’ – that will solve the food crisis the energy crisis and reduce Carbon levels.
But then we have this in place already – shhh…don’t tell anyone!
How does “Replacement Migration” grab you.
Give yourself the willies and see how the UN approaches that thorny little issue.
https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/ageing/replacement-migration.asp
As enjoyable as reading the eco warriors’ getting their comeuppance may be, the roots lie elsewhere. Sri Lanka has been in crisis since the 2009 civil war, exacerbated by the government going on a massive borrowing spree that it has been struggling to repay. There is plenty of evidence that the real motivation of banning Fertilisers, practically all imported, was to reduce the haemorrhage of capital abroad. Now the country’s effectively bankrupt and can afford neither the fuel nor the fertilisers to prepare the fields. Pictures of starving Sri Lankans coming to your TV screen and Kent beaches soon .. . .
Haemorrhaging of capital abroad… that only occurs if a Country has a positive balance of trade. Sri Lanka doesn’t.
But by capital I take it you mean foreign currency earned from exports. That’s why a Country exports to earn foreign currency to buy in stuff they do not/cannot produce themselves, and thereby get wealthier.
In this case it was being used to buy fertiliser so Sri Lankans could eat and earn a living and so get wealthier. If not used to buy fertiliser, what should this ‘capital’ be used for?
They could’ve had this experiment in one section of the country, and see the result. It was a very underrated place to visit. I was there in 2015.
‘… there’s no shortage of British customers willing to pay a premium for that all-important organic label.’
Direct correlation between these fools (the Waitrose-set) with more money than sense, and persistant, superstitious mask-wearing jab-junkies, plastic-phobia, recycling, and anything labelled ‘green’.
“Green” and “Organic” already terms debased by scammers.
I don’t shop in Waitrose nor do I wear a mask; neither have I been vaxed and I don’t have an aversion to plastics of any kind, and yet I prefer to buy ‘organic’ food. So, there’s no correlation is there? As for having more money than sense, if a state retirement pension coupled with a small occupational pension is your idea of what it means to be filthy rich, then you’re living in a dream world.
Hopefully, the sheep here will take to the streets and start lynching politicians when the lights go out and people are starving. Bastards.
Sadly we won’t be able to find out where they live or even remember their names without Google.
The problem isn’t “organic farming” the problem is top down dictats from government without education and technical backup from people with the skills to make it work. Broadscale regenerative agriculture works, if it’s done properly. It’s not easy to transition, there’s a huge learning curve. Almost every soil type contains enough minerals to grow healthy crops without “chemical” mineral salt additions. If the full range of fungi & soil micro organisms are present in the soil they form a symbiotic relationship with the plants, mining the minerals from the soil to make tham available to plants, in return for carbohydrate exudates from the plant roots. Consider an old growth forest, the most productive biosphere on the planet, nobody adds fertilsers, fungicides, or pesticides; yet it produces more growth than any other biosphere. Switching is not easy, it starts with hydrology, releasing constrainsts like compaction, without turning over the topsoil, using keyline or subsoil ploughing. Next comes microscopic and chemical assessment of the soil and soil biology, nutrient cycling, working out whats missing and the best solution for adding it back in. Good woody based aerobic compost (all composts are not equal) can be added via extract at ~2lbs per acre.… Read more »
“oF CoUrSe REAL LaRgE ScAlE OrGaNiC FaRmInG HaS NeVeR BeEn tRiEd.”
It was the only method prior to the 19th century, so it has been tried, and it must have worked for you to be alive and able to post a comment.
and the population prior to the 19th century was?
There’s no problem. You’re not addressing an actual problem.
that’s not what the farmers I speak to are saying
There certainly is a problem and it has parallels with the covid/vaccine hoo-haa. Fertiliser and pesticide firms have pushed their wares as a total solution to modern farming but soils are dying and production requires more and more inputs , it is a dirt farming vicious circle. It cannot be sustained it is leading to pollution and even so some soils can no longer cope with this approach. Farming and the soils it depends on need, as per some comments below, an intelligent regenerative farming system based on good agronomic practices implemented by true sons of the soil.
Excellent and informative contribution!
We really do need an intelligent and well informed approach and should be working with the farmers to move this initiative forward, rather than trading in Red/Green, Globalist hysterics and a “crisis” created entirely by those with dark, overtly political agendas!
Most of those whose crazy policies are wrecking the world have never even set foot on a farm.
We now produce more food per acre from less land and feed more people. So exactly what ‘initiative’ needs to be moved forward?
The greatest cause of people not getting enough food in poorer Countries, has nothing to do with farming methods, it is inefficient distribution. India produces a surplus of cereals, enough to export it, yet many people in India don’t get enough to eat.
reliant on imported chemical fertilisers, with the highest input costs, to produce an inferior product with lower BRIX and trace minerals.
What’s “inefficient” about selling to the highest bidder? Should farmers be forced to toil for the benefit of their neighbours, even if those neighbours don’t produce anything that they value?
I assure you that whenever and wherever that system has been tried, it results in the exact opposite of efficiency.
‘Broadscale regenerative agriculture works, if it’s done properly. It’s not easy to transition, there’s a huge learning curve..’
Yes and perfected by our ancestors after thousands of years – so I wonder why they gave it up for modern, industrial farming?
Not really perfected since they all used ploughs that destroy the soil food web, hence why fallow fields were a thing, fallowing didn’t restore the fertility, it restored the soil food web where the fertility comes from. Then chemical company salesmen come in and show an increased yeild without fallowing, but only if you keep adding their wares every year, like a drug addict.
Rince and repeat and your soil washed or blows away, hence why soil errosion is the biggest ecological problem in the world.
You can wrap it up in as many pseudo-science woo-words as you like, but the only thing keeping nearly 8 billion people people alive is modern farming methods, not “soil food webs”.
Not without expensive chemical inputs it’s not.
try any of the links I supplied, I dare you.
Regenerative Agriculture is the modernest farming method, first tool you need is a microscope, access to a lab with a mass spectrometer and chemical analysis services. It’s more profitable than traditional chemical fertiliser farming.
https://agfundernews.com/making-the-investment-case-for-regenerative-agriculture
https://agfundernews.com/regenerative-agriculture-is-getting-more-mainstream-but-how-scalable-is-it
having studied earth and soil mechanics, leaving fields fallow is still one of the best methods of restoring the soil – naturally. Intensive farming and mono cropping is destroying soils, it leaches the nutrients, desertification is the upshot.
It’s the ploughing and bare soil that destroys the microbiology, if the soil has a constant crop on it there’s no need to fallow, a cover crop is harnessing the sun to put the energy back into the soil via root exudates into the soil fauna where it’s stored. Without plants in it to feed them you kill the base of the soil food web food cycle. Most crops (except brassicas) need (prefer) a soil fungi:bacteria ratio ~50:50, ploughing kills all the fungi, so you’re killing half the food web that brings nutrients to the plants via their Mycorrhizal networks far away from the roots. Chemical ferts have the same effect on the soil biology as pouring salt onto a slug, without the bacteria there’s no ‘glue’ to hold the soil together, and you lose long term stored nutrients as you lose soil biology. Mono cropping is a diviersity issue (pests), not so much a nutrient leaching issue, I’ve seen 10 yr organic trial plots with no rotation, again if the soil is not disturbed so much, the biodiversity in the microbiology “mines” the minerals and makes them available to plants, it’s a delicate balance where ploughing has the same… Read more »
If fields are not fed they cannot produce crops year after year. Simple as that.
it’s far from as simple as that without defining “fed”
cover crops are feeding the soil
Dunno, maybe for the same reason they gave up relying on their natural immune systems, preferring pharmaceuticals instead.
They could also watch videos by Gabe Brown (N Dakota), Joel Salatin (Virginia), Richard Perkins (Sweden) and many other excellent regen. farmers. They’re all fascinating.
Thanks John, I was trying to find working examples of broadscale Arable farms that have trasitioned to RegenAg, which is the hardest to transition IMO, this is also where I’ve seen the most advancement in techniques I was unfamiliar with ~10yrs ago.
There’s no excuse not to transition pastoral farms IMO, practioners have found they can increase animal density 5 fold in a relatively short time, mixed farms are also easier to transition than soley arable farms, but arable is quickly catching up in the knowledge base.
I think Gabe Brown’s still mostly arable. He keeps some livestock, but AFAIK he only changed from arable to mixed farming when he adopted regenerative methods. All his neighbours are probably still 100% arable.
cheers, as you say most seem to go mixed as soon as they realise the benefits. One of my favorite clips is an early Joel Salitin piece where he’s leaning on the fense between his neighbour and him, where his neighbours soil is about a ft lower than his, that and his “one arm to move 1000 cows” thing, inspiring stuff.
Sustainable farming was the way forward not too many years ago, but it’s largely died a death. Sadly, RegenAg is being hijacked by the climate change loonies who are all a flutter about its ability to naturally sequester CO2. It may well do but, frankly, the amount of CO2 saved will likely be immeasurable to all but creative accountants. I’m all for the concept of, if we don’t ask we don’t get so finding better ways to produce stuff is admirable. The problem the RegenAg industry is going to face is displacing the entire infrastructure, built up over the past 70 years or so, behind getting a cabbage from a seed to your plate. There are also myriad other challenges it must compete with e.g. “Japan’s Massive Indoor Farm Produces 10,000 Heads of Fresh Lettuce Every Day” https://tinyurl.com/mtu43kyt This is also turning heads. Then there’s GMO foods, which at least in part solve many of the problems RegenAg foods do by producing crops which are more selective and less demanding of the soil, but which can also be adjusted to resist pests with little or no chemical intervention. GMO is roundly condemned and yet golden rice can be, and now… Read more »
The learning curve is the biggest hurdle IME, you mention microscope and they get that rabbit in the headlights look, 10yrs ago it was all about AACT wich is a bit complicated, >24hr brew with ~4hr monitoring, now AACT is only about spraying to minimise pesticides/fungicides, or specialist brews to correct niche deficiencies, things have moved on with vortex tanks and Johnson Su style feedstock to make extracts much eaiser to apply at ~2lbs per acre. It’s about much more than the ferts side of things tho, logistics of crop/field management with minimal investment in new machinery takes time to work out best practice for a given situation, there’s no one size fit all solution. A lot of the impliments can be modified, bigger spray nozzels, adding discs and longer legs to subsoilers instead of investing in expensive keyline ploughs from Aus. but most farms have big pump and tanks etc. anyway. WMI/PMI (weed/Pest) has a fair bit of research since I last looked at it, crops with the right microbiology are more pest resisitant, numbers don’t differ much between RegenAg farms (with minimal spraying) and conventional farms, weeds are oppertunists, germinating mostly in poor soils that lack the full… Read more »
You mite [sic] want to look at Golden Rice again, widely regarded as a complete failure thesedays, lower yeild was the big blocker to take up IIRC he’s an example from a quick search… I’m not one to shoot the messenger but, the author of the article is Crispin C. Maslog, described as an environmental activist and former science professor at Silliman University and University of the Philippines Los Banos, Philippines. Greenpeace flunky? Universities are infested with them as Greenpeace fund a lot of research with these places. There was, of course, a concerted campaign in Asia against golden rice, we just didn’t see much of it in the west. His article dated 22/05/21 seems to nicely coincide with this: “23 July 2021, Los Baños, PHILIPPINES – Filipino farmers will become the first in the world to be able to cultivate a variety of rice enriched with nutrients to help reduce childhood malnutrition, after receiving the green light…….” https://tinyurl.com/2c4dyx6p I’m about as keen on GMO crops as I am about GMO jabs tbh, not in principle I guess, but there’s too many unknown unknowns mixing plants with bugs IMO. GMO is not about mixing bugs with plants. Golden rice was… Read more »
the Bt in Bt corn stands for Bacillus thuringiensis, they take genes from bacteria and splice them into the corn genome to make it produce a pesticide protein.
There is no silver bullet but GM foods and farming is not far removed from the dodgy MRNa “vaccine” technology. In other words it’s pho#king dangerous.
golden rice i read does not work at all, you would have to eat 20 pounds a day of it, was all about monsanto profts , as usual. have you read seeds of destruction very good
All food is organic.
The idea of only some food being “organic” came from the cowsh*t merchant Rudolf Steiner. And when I say “cowsh*t”, I’m referring to the stuff that comes out of cows’ rear ends that “biodynamic farmers” bury in cows’ horns before they did it up a long while later and stir it into water in a figure of eight to make “biodynamic” fertiliser, in accordance with the tenets of what they call “spiritual science”.
In Britain, see the Betteshanger Conference.
In an earlier thread people were discussing the meaning of “far right”. The Greens should certainly be classified under that heading. Richard Walther Darré says “hello”.
I’ll have to read up on the Viyath Maga cult.
Is that the New Delhi branch of ‘Make America Great Again’?
Shades of China’s Four Pests campaign, although I accept that Sri Lanka’s real motivation was their currency collapsing due to money printer going brrrr, and being unable to afford fertiliser.
Sort of related, I see that the lunatic conspiracy theory of individual carbon social credits is now a great idea whose time has come.
https://twitter.com/AndrewLawton/status/1529045188764921856
Yep – China’s Four Pests campaign or the evacuation of Phnom Penh.
Whoops, too bad for the urban working class who make up the majority of the population in many countries – and who consume the majority of agricultural produce. Sorry, lads and lasses, you weren’t organic enough, you breathed out too much carbon dioxide, and, well, there was an emergency and you were neither spiritual or scientific.
PS Please please can critics of this stuff stop using the word “organic” the way the Greens do. ALL FOOD IS ORGANIC. If you mean compost farming, say compost farming.
No. We all know what is meant by organic when referring to farming methods and the food produced as a result. Compost may be correct, but these days it conjures up images of allotments and The Good Life.
If things go tits up in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) then at least we can still get tea from ‘Oop North’.
Yorkshire Tea isn’t grown in Yorkshire. You did say on a previous thread that you were unable to teach your children Geography – I see what you mean.
Sri Lanka’s miniature version of the Great Leap Forward is unfolding.
Great Reset next? We live in hope!
It’s no more stupid than the decisions our politicians make. It is just that advanced countries have a greater reserve to fall back on.
Extremism rarely does anything good. Some modern methods of farming aren’t necessarily bad while some of the old ways just don’t work now. Our own king in waiting appears to think that populations can be fed the same way he feeds himself and a few others.
Familiar theme. Minority opinion worries about unproven link to kidney disease, gets its way and law of (un)intended consequences kicks in.
Thank you for highlighting this story – the type of important story that rarely gets published, at least by a mainstream press organizations.
This article once again confirms the Law of Opposite Effects … i.e. Some big proposal sold as improving “health” actually makes the health of the country much worse ... the opposite of the alleged benefit actually happens. It is also a rare example where a journalist actually performs follow-up reporting and produced real data to compare the “before and after” results.
Robert F. Kennedy’s book “The Real Fauci” makes a similar contrarian point when he points out that, according to numerous “public health metrics,” “public health” has gotten worse since Fauci became the director of his health agency in 1984. This is particularly true for children.
By every measure, “public health” in America has gotten worse since 2020 – the main “measure” being mortality figures among the population under the age of 65 … which has spiked to record highs.
I can cite many other (contrarian) examples supporting the “Law of Opposite Effects.” One might be the banning of DDT. It seems clear this chemical was at one time applied far too much and in far larger volumes than was required for its main purpose – killing the mosquitos that can cause malaria, one of the great killers in poor countries. Some contrarian scientists and authors believe that this ban might have resulted in millions of preventable malaria deaths in the decades that followed this ban (as the replacements for DDT apparently were not as effective). I think I’m one of the few people who seriously considers how “safety” reforms might have contributed to fatalities in two unforgettable tragic events in America. I have read one or two reports by contrarian experts who hypothesize that the removal of asbestos from the World Trade Center towers contributed to the collapse of the towers earlier than they might have otherwise happened. Asbestos is insulation that is also a strong fire retardant. At least in one of the towers, much of the asbestos had been removed. If it had not been removed, the towers might still have collapsed, but this collapse would have… Read more »
The above posts really speak to the fact that no real “risk-benefit” analysis occurs when new mandates are imposed for “public health” reasons. What’s unknown is what might have occurred if tax-payer money spent to minimize a microscopic health risk had instead been invested in measures that are KNOWN and proven to save many lives. American contrarian journalist John Stossell once aired a TV special that illustrates this important if rarely-considered point. In this special, Stossell highlighted an effort to remove “contaminated” lead from some industrial site. The project to remove allegedly contaminated dirt took years and costs tens of millions of dollars. Stossell interviewed a contrarian expert who said the lead might be dangerous decades in the future … if some person ate a bucket of this dirt every day for decades. Asked Stossell: If the goal is to save future lives, why not spend that $20 million installing guardrails on dangerous stretches of highways? We all know that many people die each year because their car or truck ran off the shoulder of a road, flipped and/or hit a tree. Or: motorists cross a median and have a head-on collision with people driving in the lanes going the… Read more »
DDT was the cause of polio, amongst other toxins, when DDT was phased out polio magically disappeared, it had chuff all to do with a vaccine.
I hadn’t heard this – that DDT caused polio, but I’m not saying this is untrue. I do think that when DDT was phased out, malaria deaths in some countries went up significantly.
DDT is still the pesticide of choice in many countries. It’s a fallacy it’s been outlawed.
It was banned in many countries and, I’m pretty sure, continues to be banned in many countries especially in central and South America. Maybe some countries have re-revisited the ban and now allow its use again. I hope so because it seems clear it kills mosquitoes that can cause malaria and doesn’t have any serious health effects for humans if not over used.
I’m pretty sure malaria was/is one of the great killers on the planet.
Here’s one TV segment on the topic – from John Stossel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHwqandRTSQ
Organic farming is hardly a novelty. Artificial fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides are the new kids on the block, not organic farming methods. The problem in Sri Lanka is the overnight abandonment of modern farming methods.
I find it odd that people who are rightly sceptical about Big Pharma, embrace the Agrochemical and Food Industries like a infant clinging to its mother.
“Organic” foods are also more expensive, which requires more disposable income to purchase. That is, buyers of mandated organic foodstuffs have less money to spend on other important necessities (like baby formula or diapers or health insurance.) Less money in the family budget also increases stress, which is itself a known killer.
I’m on a fixed income and I buy organic food so it can be done.
But you’d have more disposable income if you were not buying only organic food. Because you choose to buy organic, you can’t buy as much other stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I’m “pro choice” on whether someone buys “organic” or non-organic.
Or the reverse … how can people who eat healthy food and know about exercise be so gullible that they queue up for these GM injections?
That is a question that requires much thought.
I trust you’re not under the illusion that organic food isn’t sprayed with things like pesticide?
Indeed, organic fertilisers and pesticides are often more harmful to humans than commercial items. The difference is, because they are ‘natural’ there’s no requirement to announce what’s being used.
There is a mental condition that has been commented upon many times in literature, of a ruler or ruling class that cannot help but overstep the mark. Of course we are moving along that pathway but our job is to limit damage. They don’t care about damage, the more the better. By limiting damage you strike at their heart.
Is it really just organic farming, or has the Sri Lankan government been engaging in the “money printer go brrrr”
quantitative easingwholesale theft that is so in vogue with governments and central banks the world over.It’s probably a given that millions of world citizens consider themselves “more virtuous than thou” because they “buy organic.”
It’s also a given that these people never consider the fact the virtuous reforms they want everyone to adapt are actually leading to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions (over time).
This non-self knowledge probably falls into the category of truths people can’t handle.
I’d tie this into the “debates” dealing with all the authorized Covid narratives. It never occurs to most people on the planet that the mandates they passionately support are leading to the deaths of millions of people. Indeed, ’tis much better to NOT consider such thoughts, which would be mind-blowers for most. If some of these people did reach the conclusion they’d been swallowing bogus narratives, they might also wonder what else they believed was incontrovertible “truths” might also be lies.
Nope. Better to not go down this intellectual path. This “ignorance is bliss” philosophy protects one’s mental health and ego.
I can’t overstate the importance of eating organic food. But for a governmant to make such an insane move. We see this the world over. There are no adults in the room anymore. You can take charge but you will be taking charge of babies and degenerates. How much patience do you really have.
Why is eating organic food important?
Organic farmers use fertilisers and pesticides which are largely unregulated because they are considered ‘natural’ however they frequently pose more risks to humans than their commercial counterparts.
They just don’t tell you any of this.
Why is eating organic food important? Cancer.
Roundup Maker to Pay $10 Billion to Settle Cancer Suitshttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/business/roundup-settlement-lawsuits.html
Ye gods, not that old chestnut being wheeled out yet again!
“Judge Puts Cloud Over Settlement of Roundup Cancer Claims
An agreement for the weedkiller’s maker to pay more than $10 billion to end litigation may not get court approval.” (NYT, 2020).
You are surely aware that many ‘organic’ fertilisers and herbicides carry at least the toxicity and risk conventional ones do, are you not?
UK life expectancy has increased every year, without fail, from 68.69 years in 1950 to 81.65 years in 2022.
We can of course attribute some of that to advances in medical science, improved child mortality etc. but the single biggest influence has been better nutrition, available at cheaper prices than ever in history.
All this while artificial fertilisers and pesticides have supposedly been killing us all for all that time.
even with all the plastic processed food, “ready meals”, and McShite? We may have hit peak life expectancy LOL
It’s sure taking a long tome to kill us all as processed foods and ready meals have been around for at least 50 years of my life.
Are we all going to have a mass die off on the anniversary of the first TV dinner?
Whilst past performance is not an indicator of future profits, there’s no reason to suppose we have reached peak life expectancy. I have no doubt people were saying the same thing 20 years ago.
The same as climate change, all catastrophes are in the future.
if you want to argue processed food and McShite is better nutirition I’ll leave you to it.
How can it possibly be known that the life expectancy of children born in the UK this year is 81.65 years?
I didn’t say it could be known.
What is known is that life expectance has improved every year, without fail, since 1950.
There is no reason to suspect that won’t continue, covid notwithstanding.
There is no escape for politicans or plutocrats. They are like junkies who will eviscerate themselves and their compatriots in the search for more. We are moving into difficult times and we need to learn how to look after each other.
It takes time to shift from toxic conventionalfarming to organic or at least less toxic. It can’t be rushed .
Nor does it make any sense whatsoever , except to woolly vegetables.
Organic farming will starve the world no matter the transition period.
‘Organic’ fertilisers and pesticides are as toxic, if not more so to humans and other plants, not to mention wildlife.
Similar results are coming to a country near you; very soon.
That’s one way of wrecking your country’s agricultural industry and making people go hungry. Another method is to pay your farmers not to produce food and instead to rely on imports from unreliable foreign sources.
And do much the same with energy policy…
Where might that be Tom?
So we should continue importing synthetic fertilisers and dousing the land in toxic chemicals? Supporting Big Ag is just as stupid as supporting Big Pharma.
I couldn’t agree more.