General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: How many people here want a country of low energy, low tech farms? [View all]MadHound
(34,179 posts)"Industrial agriculture is an inefficient and wasteful system which is chemical intensive, fossil fuel intensive and capital intensive. It destroys nature's capital on the one hand and societys capital on the other, by displacing small farms and destroying health. According to David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agricultural sciences at Cornell University, it uses 10 units of energy as input to produce one unit of energy as food.
This waste is amplified by another factor of 10 when animals are put in factory farms and fed grain, instead of grass in free range ecological systems. Rob Johnston celebrates these animal prisons as efficient, ignoring the fact that it takes 7kg of grain to produce one kg of beef, 4kg of grain to produce 1kg of pork and 2.4kg of grain to produce 1kg of chicken.
The diversion of food grains to feed is a major contributor to world hunger. And the shadow acres to produce this grain are never counted. Europe uses 7 times the area outside Europe to produce feed for its factory farms."
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/09/23-4
I'm not giddy about gridcrash, but I see it happening relatively soon, within the next thirty years. The American empire is collapsing, and much like Rome, it is going to take much of the rest of the world with it.