Re: The myth of nitrogen fertilization for soil carbon sequestration
Thomas Goreau
"Organic farming is Not Sustainable
A study by the Institute for Water Research at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, published last year in the journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, found that "intensive organic agriculture relying on solid organic matter, such as composted manure that is implemented in the soil prior to planting as the sole fertilizer, resulted in significant down-leaching of nitrate" into groundwater. With many of the world's most fertile farming regions in the throes of drought, increased nitrate in groundwater is hardly a hallmark of sustainability.
Moreover, as agricultural scientist Steve Savage has documented on the Sustainablog website, wide-scale composting generates significant amounts of greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. Compost may also deposit pathogenic bacteria on or in food crops, which has led to more frequent occurrences of food poisoning in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Organic farming is a fraud"
President, Global Coral Reef Alliance
President, Biorock Technology Inc.
This comment was posted on the WSJ site. I thought it was quite good on multiple levels.
- George C Kalogridis wrote:
First off carbon sequestration is not a physical action of the soil, sequestration is a biological function of soil microbes. The use of Ag chemicals and synthetic fertilizers such as Anhydrous, kills soil microbes.
Reference: J Environ Qual. 2007 Oct 24;36(6):1821-32. Print 2007 Nov-Dec.
The myth of nitrogen fertilization for soil carbon sequestration.
Khan SA1, Mulvaney RL, Ellsworth TR, Boast CW.Secondly yield-per-acres is not a sustainable economic system, it requires Federal subsidies to be successful. All other business ventures, with the exception of conventional Ag, rely on return-on-investment as a measure of success. An exclusive focus on yield sells more chemicals, meaning most of the taxpayer subsidies end up in the pockets of the seed, fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide companies.
However the most important aspect of the failure of chemical Ag is that they treat down-stream pollution as an economic free good. For example the excess N that flows from conventional fields along with raw manure waste from industrial animal feed lots; pollute ground water, streams, rivers, estuaries and bays that create the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico. The estimated cost (the federal government is researching the actual cost for the first time in history) to mitigate this down stream pollution will run into the trillions of dollars. if this estimate is correct then the true cost of chemically grown food and feed is actually more expensive than organic.
Now that direct support payments are no longer part of the Farm Bill, we will see if planting fence row to fence row and applying high rates of soluble fertilizer are truly economical or just a false economy propped by direct crop subsidies.- Seth
--Seth J. Itzkanhttps://twitter.com/sethitzkan
www.hutwithaview.com - Soil Restoration in Africa
www.planet-tech.com - Trends Innovations Opportunities
Seth Itzkan
Thomas Goreau
President, Global Coral Reef Alliance
President, Biorock Technology Inc.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "soil-age" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to soil-age+u...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to soil...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/soil-age.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.