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The USDA reports tend to disagree with your FACTS.

Focusing on Kansas (since you brought it up):

Total number of farms in Kansas: 65,000
Total number of land in farms, in acres: 47,500,000
Average farm size, in acres: 731 acres
Source: Kansas Farm Facts 1999

Average selling price of irrigated land: $1,020/acre
Average selling price for non-irrigated land: $623/acre
Average selling price for all land: $659/acre
Source: Kansas Farm Facts, 1999
Where did you ever come up with your numbers?

It's the same kind of thing where you get goods labeled "Organic". Well, of course it's organic. It has carbon in it doesn't it? All part of the dumbing down of society I'm afraid

Im sure you are joking - but in case you aren't.. when you see "Organic" at the grocer it means that the product was grown/raised without the chemical soup that is unnecessarily dumped on EVERYTHING other than the items labeled as "organic" at your grocer.
This is a Good Thing(TM)

Please see this link for some information regarding Organic Food Products. And try and support responsible food products - buy Organic!

If the earth could support 12 billion people in 1900 why did it only support 1 billion? You may say it was 'social and political' reasons, but I ask for you to outline how we can change our society or politics.

Population has been on a slow rise for many centuries (since the 'discovery' of agriculture). The (relatively) recent rise in the rate of increase is due to better water/ sanitation/ medicine and some other products of the industrial revolution - particularly transportation of goods to cities and mechanization of agricultural labour. As for how to change our society or politics ....

I hope you guys don't think I'm moralizing. I haven't quite decided whether North America is 'better' or worse with 300 million people or 10. Or the earth, with 6 billion now and 10 billion people in 50 (or is it 100) years.

... as you say, we will soon have 10 or 12 billion people on this planet, with far less clean water or soil available than we have now. There will be no choice but to change so we should do it the best way we can whilst we have free choice in the matter.

You can find a lot of how we might do this in this link (which i've already posted). But you might also like to consider this.
- Derwen

The root of the problem is that farming is a system of producing commodities for the international markets, not of producing food for communities.

Fortunately, at least some Americans have a very good idea of what needs to be done, and we're not talking "idealistic Amish community" here.
- Derwen

I'm sick of your strawman arguments. You assume I don't understand the causes behind people going hungry, when there is no evidence whatsoever in any of my posts that I don't.

Food "insecure"? What does that mean?

Ask the US Department of Agriculture, buddy. Wait, don't tell me you're talking about something you don't know about?

You've said that geeks should be doing something other than SETI. Since you apparently have the answer of what people should do, and it doesn't require anyone giving up any food or money, I would be most interested in hearing it.

Where did I claim I had an answer?

How does the fact that I argue that SETI is a waste of time necessarily imply that I know the exact details of what everybody should be doing?

Where did I go into specifics at all about what should be done, as opposed to what is certainly a waste of time and people?

You've already posted some, er, theory that saving energy will feed third world people.

The birth of another strawman argument. The comment that you try to pass off as a "theory", so as to be able to attack me (due to your lack of justifications), is obviously hyperbolic. Any reasonable person can see that.

Of course, the necessary conclusion from the last is that you are not a reasonable persons.

That second page is pretty screwed up (broken tags and formatting); there's a PDF available too.

The USW morons had their NIU (Network Interface Unit) set for AMI/SF when the rest of the circuit was B8ZS/ESF.

I was curious to find out what these terms meant, so I hopped over to Google:

• Object-Fax Support Technotes - Ordering a T1 Line
• USDA - Digital Transmission Fundamentals

80% of farmland is feeding farm animals? Where did that come from?

Have you ever been on a farm? 80% is way, way , way off. Just consider giant gran farms in Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska. These areas consist of about 1/2 the land in those states and almost none of it is used to feed farm aminals. The grain ratio along the mississippi river can be 100x more than other areas in the US. Maybe some of the scrapland thats useless for growing gran (like parts of Oklahoma) are 80% used to feed cattle but that land wouldn't provide much nutrition for humans unless the cow was involved.

Why aren't fish meat? Because they aren't cute? Our salt water fisheries are the first thing thats going to disapprear. Were killing the egg laying grounds in the reef in the Red Sea and off of Australia.

Check out the US goverment farm grants. They are money to NOT make any more food. The US has so much of some grains that they just rot.

You can get all the stats you can ever twist around at the USDA website.

This doesn't directly answer your question, but it's a similar theme.

This link (then page down) is an official USDA page for inspection of grain. For example, a sample of oats is considered contaminated if it contains "10 or more rodent pellets, bird droppings, or an equal quantity of other animal filth" or "2 or more pieces of glass". Anything less is apparantly Part of a Nutritious Breakfast(tm).

A lot of people have posted comments to the effect of `Will I have to pay royalties if they`ve patented the gene for blue eyes?`. That`s not what the patents are for. The patents prevent other researchers from working on the same gene. This means that a company can hold onto a gene that could be a useful target for gene therapy, and no other company would be allowed to research it, even if the company who filed the patent thought it not worth their while to look into it. This is an indisputably Bad Thing.

If you actually look at a gene patent, you`ll see that what`s patented is the isolated form of the gene, not the gene in the context of the genome - along with methods for purifying and assaying the resulting protein. What is not covered in this patent is the gene in situ. So people with blue eyes, or whatever, needn`t get worried. The gene in your body isn`t patented. What`s worrying is the idea that because a company is patenting so much, it`ll be years before they get round to looking at some of the genes, some of which could be useful either in terms of finding out more about the way humans work, or in terms of finding cures for inherited disorders. The company can sit on the gene, safe in the knowledge that, because it`s patented, no-one else is going to research it until they`re ready.

The thing is, this gene patenting idea is fairly recent. But these days, academics, too, are having to patent their research just in order to prevent their work from being stolen out from under them. This goes completely against the information-sharing ethic that has always been a part of academic science.

So, not quite as scary as the idea of paying royalties to some corporation for your brown hair or strawberry birthmark, but scary nonetheless. Mass patenting of genes is already stifling research. Mass patenting of human genes can only make the problem worse.