Thank you Michael for the link. I like very much this subject. It would be interesting to read somewhere how many acres of land, how many tons of water, how many tons of fertilizers and how much work would be needed to obtain the equivalent of the daily consumption of a country like the US. Of course fossil fuels are (or have been) a bonus, a lottery prize, and in the future we will probably have to source a little here and a little there. In this sense any alternative source is worth some studying.
In the Cuba article they wrote that they don't eat bulls because, due to the lack of oil, they need them as tractors. I once read a figure of what kind of bonus we have with oil: "if in the US agriculture what is done with machines would be done with horses, there would be a need of twice the entire US cultivable land just to feed them" (Vaclav Smil, History of Energy). Massimo
Earlier I mentioned the dispute about the energy usage of using agriculture to grow industrial projects. Here is a nice discussion of the wide range of estimates, leaning toward the position I proposed http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/06/27/ MNG1VDF6EM1.DTL Pinmentel, quoted at the end, is very reliable. David Morris, quoted in the middle, is far from being an industry hack. One factor neither side mentions is the water usage involved in putting an extra strain on the ag system. Lester Brown, mentioned yesterday, describes the international grain trade as disguised water transfers. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
