The Model Farm

Soya - Feed, Food or Byproduct? When one considers Soya and other grains fed to animals that become human food, it is necessary to consider the degree to which animal feed is actually a byproduct or whether it is grown specifically to feed animals.  These graphs from the international grains council clearly show that of total grains grown worldwide the vast majority goes directly to animal feed, almost 50%. The situation varies between countries.  In the US just as much goes to industrial use as to animal feed with grain for food a fraction of these tonnages, while in India the bulk goes to food with very little being fed to animals or used industrially. Soya presents a more complex picture.  Very little soya is used directly as food or feed.  Soya milk is made directly from soya beans but almost all soya goes to be crushed, a process that separates oil from high protein expeller or meal (46.5% protein).  The crushing process yields about 18% oil and 80% meal.  The latter goes to anima

  Two papers demonstrate the benefits of "ley farming" as commonly used in temperate climate organic farming and the negative effects of continuous cropping and synthetic nitrogen on both soil nitrogen and soil organic carbon. This also serves as a reminder about how slow the process of building up soil carbon is, in this case, the ley system took 35 years to increase the SOC from 1.6% to 2.1%. That is 0.5 percentage points over 35 years, or 0.014 of a percentage point per year, which is an annual increase of about 0.9% per year on the original 1.6%. The Paris COP21 initiative, 4 per mille, seeks to increase soil carbon stocks by 0.4% per year  https://www.4p1000.org /. Other points to consider are the methane emissions of livestock needed to produce human food from the 3 years of ley and the external environmental costs of fertilisers. Mulvaney, R. L., S. A. Khan, and T. R. Ellsworth. ‘Synthetic Nitrogen Fertilizers Deplete Soil Nitrogen: A Global Dilemma for Sustainable Cer

  Roser, Max, Hannah Ritchie, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina. ‘World Population Growth’. Our World in Data , 9 May 2013. https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth .

This figure is taken from the PNAS study (Sanderman et al, 2017).  It is yet another hockey stick graph that shows the exponential impact of human activity over the last 300 years.  According to this study, since the period before Land USe Change (NoLU), the world's soils have lost 133 Petagrams (133 billion tons) of soil organic carbon (SOC) from the top 2 m and 37 Petagrams from the top 30 cm.  The total SOC stocks in the top 2m and 30cm before land-use change were 3144 and 899 Petagrams respectively so that losses are of the order of 4% of total carbon for both strata.  It seems reasonable that these losses place upper limits on the sequestration potential of soils. An average silt loam has a density of 1.33 g/cm3, 1.33 tons/m3.  One ha of soil has 3000 m3 in the top 30 cm, so 3990 tons of soil.  A soil with 5% SOC would have had 199.5 tons of SOC/ha.  After land use change it would have had 199.5 tons - (199.5 X 37/899) = 191.3 tons of SOC = 4.7%. At COP21 in 2015 a global proj

  Red line = dry conditions, Blue line = wet With all the problems facing food production, it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees.  It may help to focus on the really obvious ones.  This is one of them. Keller, Thomas, Maria Sandin, Tino Colombi, Rainer Horn, and Dani Or. ‘Historical Increase in Agricultural Machinery Weights Enhanced Soil Stress Levels and Adversely Affected Soil Functioning’. Soil and Tillage Research 194 (1 November 2019): 104293. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.still.2019.104293 .

  Is it time to dust off Rennaisance economics, "The Other Cannon", which sees creative production of good things as an almost sacred economic activity rather than consumption of anything produced as a sound economic activity? In this model, capital is required to support the production of needed goods and services (good goods model). In the current model inherited from the Family Tree of neo-liberal economists, capital is required to mobilise a consumptive workforce who must surely spend more than they earn to return a profit to capital (the greed is good model). A current example of Rennaisance economics might be the Social Enterprise movement. In this example the relationship between capital and labour is inverted. People with the knowledge and skills to produce good things employ those with capital who lack the knowledge and skills. Those with capital work for those who produce because they recognise that they need the goods or services. Leadership comes from the producti