Can't afford.. not to do it.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/12/5/184641/855/#comment13
One of my favorite topics. How to get rid of chemical oil powered agriculture and replace it with organic farming.
Think hypercar technology. The Amory Lovins concept. He claims only .06% of the energy in the gasoline actually is used to transport the weight of the passengers. Because conventional cars are so heavy.
How about tractors? Massive, because they pull plows and cultivators, huge tanks of chemicals, their weight makes huge tires a necessity too. Adding to the whole bulk.
Imagine a hypercarred tractor. It never plows, instead it drills small holes and injects seeds or seedlings with organic fertilizer that is worked into the hole by the drill. It is unmanned, operated by remote computer by the farmer/technician. It is small, light, solar rechargeable. It can inject water and organic fertilizer in just the right amount for each plant. Going up and down in the field all day.
The farmer would program it, one person operating a few of these machines. They would mulch, plant insect repelling plants here and there. Turn any weeds into mulch on the spot. All the things done by hand labor on the typical organic farm.
This increased productivity would keep food costs down. With this kind of on the spot attention, pesticides, herbicides, and mono GMO crops would be obsolete. The lower costs for energy, no chemicals, no fertilizer, coupled with a new emphasis on quality, only possible with organic farming and very close attention makes this the winner. In the consumer's world. Clean, chem free food, with real taste that's cheaper.
And the farmer/technician makes a better living. As do the people building and servicing the robotic ag equipment.
College ag departments and extension services should start to work with local organic farms to get this up and running. They have been pushing agribizz chem for decades. I bet they could switch to this mode of organic, hi-tech, robotic farming.
This would save enormous amounts of water too, with pinpoint water injection. The GHG prevented would be enourmous, and so too would be the carbon stored in the organic soil as it got deeper and deeper with every year's addition of mulch and soil mass and roots. That's tons of cO2 stored per acre per year.
All farmland turned to a carbon sink would reverse GHG buildup once a renewable power grid and plugin cars take hold. The fertilizer run off saved alone would curtail a huge amount of methane release.
And you know how farmers could afford to do this? With government subsidies diverted from agribizz and fuel farming. But also by turning farms into power stations on the distributed renewable grid. Help farmers invest in wind, solar, and biogas power. The kwh generated can pay for upgrades to organic farming. The biogas digestors providing plenty of organic fertilizer.
Now this would be a farm policy. If a farm bill could be created to promote it.
