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The Rodale Institute did a 30 year side-by-side study.

It's possibly relevant that the Rodale Institute is an advocacy group for organic farming, though. Also, as far as I can tell, that report:

• Hasn't been peer-reviewed anywhere,
• Doesn't include any details of things like the size of the plots,
• Doesn't include any kind of error bars (and their reported effect size is only 1.5%)
• Doesn't include any kind of methodology section e.g. they report that organic crops release less CO2, but don't say how they measured CO2 release
• Doesn't actually state which varieties of corn they tested (e.g. saying that organic crops have better yield than GM ones doesn't tell you very much unless you also specify which GM crop you're talking about)

So I'm going to say that the Nature meta-analysis is probably more reliable here.

The Rodale Institute did a 30 year side-by-side study. They found that,

- initially, organic farms created less, as fertilizers and pesticide initially gave a conventional farms a boost. This disappeared over time, as conventional farming damages and degrades the soil, reducing yeilds.

- organic outperforms conventional in years of drought.

- organic farming systems build rather than deplete soil organic matter, making it a more sustainable system.

- organic farming uses 45% less energy and is more efficient.

- conventional systems produce 40% more greenhouse gases.

- organic farming systems are more profitable than conventional.

I am not sure where that last one came from (I haven't read the final report)

The Rodale Institute did a 30 year side-by-side study. They found that,

- initially, organic farms created less, as fertilizers and pesticide initially gave a conventional farms a boost. This disappeared over time, as conventional farming damages and degrades the soil, reducing yeilds.

- organic outperforms conventional in years of drought.

- organic farming systems build rather than deplete soil organic matter, making it a more sustainable system.

- organic farming uses 45% less energy and is more efficient.

- conventional systems produce 40% more greenhouse gases.

- organic farming systems are more profitable than conventional.

I am not sure where that last one came from (I haven't read the final report)

Cmon....New Zealand goes just fine without agricultural subsidies, our farmers were proud of "doing it on their own merit",

http://newfarm.rodaleinstitute.org/features/0303/newzealand_subsidies.shtml

As a Vegan, I wish we *WEREN'T* so invested in Animal Agriculture, which remains very profitable without subsidy.

This story is of a spoilt USA crying after being beaten at its own crooked game. My parents have this image of China as rural agriculture, of living off five grains of rice a day. I'm 22, and my generation probably see things differently :

http://macenstein.com/default/2010/07/exclusive-pics-of-the-shanghai-china-apple-store/

Bend Over, Here It Comes Again

Independent farming (aka "family" farming) is one of the hardest ways to make money, and thank goodness there are still people willing to do it. Far from being in a position of power regarding their transactions with "speculators" farmers are pretty much at their mercy.

Farmers are only at the mercy of the markets if they allow it. Instead of selling to speculators, who can themselves lose money, farmers can start a Community-supported agriculture, CSA, program. Local people can buy a share of produce where during harvesting a boxed share is delivered to or picked up by the consumer. Slowly but surely CSA is growing as are organic farms, many are part of CSA programs.

As you correctly point out, those speculators are the futures markets that provide the farmers with some stability.

It's the same with CSA, the buyers are speculating what the farmer can harvest and the farmer gets operating capital up front.

I don't know about you, but I'm not yet willing to completely cede our food supply to the Duponts and ADMs of the world.

I don't know about DuPont, substitute Cargill though and I'm with you. If government is going to subsidize food at all instead of giving billions of dollars to these large corporations, give the money to those in need. Expand Food Stamps, where those in need get help instead of enriching the already wealthy.

Falcon

These can be used in soy fields (or corn or...), after you do an over winter cover crop.

  http://www.attra.ncat.org/calendar/question.php/2006/05/08/p2221

  http://newfarm.rodaleinstitute.org/depts/notill/roller_gallery/index.shtml

It smashes and crimps the stems of the cover crop/ green manure whatever you want, then packs it down on the surface where it is a slow die off, acting as a mulch and eventually a slow release fertilizer. You plant right through it. I don't have one, we aren't big grain farmers here, we are poultry and cattle, but it sure looks interesting. No till + reduce or eliminate sprays. Seems a decent alternative.

Hi!

Regardless of whether the amateur Egyptologists are correct or not, this is a significant piece of work for reasons only alluded to at the bottom of the DailyNews article: using kites affords low-tech (or no-tech) societies the means to achieve substantial power. They demonstrated substantial lift capacity in the Mojave Desert--but think about applying that lift to a lever, or using blocks (systems of pulleys) to lift, pry, or drag.

That's substantially more important than most /. readers might think. While we're living in a high-tech world that seems to only be getting that much more sophisticated, there are vast parts of the world that are still farming, building, and lifting with oxen. The Rodale Institute International Program has worked to get international food organizations away from a North American mindset that focuses on capital-intensive (and diesel-fuel-intensive) methods with big tractors and combines. Instead, they've applied a lot of what's been learned about farm implements to traditional means of propulsion (oxen). They're making a lot of headway--showing that a lot can be accomplished using low-tech methods.

This nice and neatly fits into the same scheme. Nobody's hoisting obelisks these days--but if you're building a road in Senegal, or upstream from the Three Gorges Dam, you may have a multi-ton rock to move. Instead of tackling the problem of finding earth movers big enough to solve your problem, you can drag it out of the way with kites. A vastly simpler, less expensive, more feasible solution.

up until the 1900s all civilizations used the same form of waste disposal: dump it in the nearest river. that goes for the British in the 18th and 19th centuries as much as for the Romans in the 1st and 2nd centuries.

In East Asia, they used human waste as fertilizer for farms. The "night soil" (as it was called) was even brought in from the cities -- I believe there was commercial trade in it. There's an account of this practice in Farmers of Forty Centuries, a book written in ~1912 by a US Agriculture official travelling in China. This partly explains why Chinese agriculture has been productive for so long.