No-till came from a gentleman named Faulkner,who wrote a book in the 40's called Ploughman's Folly.
He argued that farmers plowed cause they liked to not because it was necessary.(needless to say, at the time, it caused quite a stir ;-) )
No-till is counting on herbicides for weed control. Then no doubt pesticides when the bugs come. And also speaks to an underlying comfort with mono-culture.

This reliance on 'cides' is a problem because many of the broadleaf weeds are becoming resistant to the herbicides. The organic matter does stay higher and it is a superior way to farm from a chemical perspective.

I have had a project in mind. I bought a 'hoe' drill at an auction. (Since the price of no till drills can cause you to clutch your heart)Hoe drills have a metal boot that has some weight to it that the seed falls into and were originally designed to sow seeds in gravelly soil, since regular drills didn't work well as the seed would routinely wind up on the surface. My plan was to put some cultivators and sweeps behind some disks to make raised beds that I could then use the drill for a no-till idea. I don't use herbicides ever! A one time application of a herbicide can kill off all the algea in the soil. This algea is the food supply for many micro-organisms.

Excessive use of the moldbord plow has created a lot of problems. If you plow your fields routinely you will cause the organic matter to be burnt up by the sun and exposure to the elements. You do need to get oxygen, into the ground however. (Jason's use of the broadfork and feeding the worms, in the other thread is a great idea. As is Airdale's sub-soiler)

My strategy is what's called minimum till. Which means that I plow the ground but very infrequently and then follow with an extensive rotation that includes small grain going into hay (legume mix) for several years then pasturing for several years before repeating the cycle. This option is largely unavailable to corporate monoculture.

Figure 3 gallons of ethanol from every bushel of corn. It's close enough for guvment work.

Now, really, I gotta admit, the 5 gal/acre is a little optimistic. That's the number for the notill/lowtill guys. About 40% of corn is still raised the old way which uses about 8 gal/acre. So, really, I should have used something like 6.5 gal/acre; but the difference in the final total is so small I didn't bother breaking out the calculator. Plus, the movement is rapidly to the notill/lowtill direction; just like the movement in the refineries is toward burning the cobs, or other biomass rather than nat gas.

Also, Frank brings up a good point. You need to include about 6,000 btus of nat gas in the fertilizer for every gallon of ethanol.

Edit: Although, 2,400 of those BTU's should be charged off toward the DDGS. Which would leave about 3,600 BTUs/gal.

I'm afraid I don't understand how you can consider Octane, C8H18 (a compound) with BTUs (a unit of energy)?

Hi live4ever, ( sorry for the delay in relying)

Well heres the rub, DEFRA don't actually keep the stats on how many farmers we currently have and their average age, those stats came from the NFU, soil association and the NFO. ( I checked with all 3 to make sure we were correct )
When I phoned DEFRA to ask they hadn't got a clue and just don't hold them. But when I quoted what the other organizations said the press lesson guy said " yeah that sounds about right" .
DEFRA work on actual "farms" as in who they subsidize, which is over 300,000 and when I say "Farms" that can be anything from Tate and Lyle, Cadbury's, Prince Charles (so most of Cornwall) to some dear old granny keeping 3 sheep on an acre.
As for DEFRA worrying about it a big NMFP mate !!!
Or - to quote Prof Tim Lang, government adviser and Head of food policy University of London.
" The corridors of Whitehall still think we have an Empire that will feed us above themselves" The other great quote from Tim Lang about our governments official food policy was " Seems to me our governments official food policy is leave it to Tesco's".
In short they do not have one, it's very similar in many ways to their energy policy, you know the drill " oh don't worry your pretty little heads about it we are big global players and there's plenty of all of this to go around"

Q1: How do you see the size of farm labour force over the next twenty years?
Tricky questions, it really depends on what happens to the supermarkets because while our food is centralized to keep cost down its going to be factory farmed minimal man power.
However I read with interest an article last year from I think it was the retail consortium (I think not certain???) , anyway stating that if oil had hit $200 a barrel, Tescos would have gone bust pretty quick. I also learnt that every penny added to the price at the pumps last year cost ASDA an extra 1/2 millions £ a week!! in UK motor transport of their food alone.
However just with the banking fiasco and credit crunch, only with lobbying from big agribusiness, I can see our government desperately trying no matter how stupid and impracatical it may be to keep the status quo of the centralised food system for as long as possible.
Do remember 80% of us buy our food from supermarkets and of that 80% - 75% is brought from just 4 major names.
Very powerful people that will hold on to the bitter end even when the walls are falling round them before they give up.

Also the work force will depend on how much machinery we'll use in the future, I guess if you pare it down in an oil depleted world fuel is going to prioritised to the food growers, we already have it now with Farmers red diesel, (although if that happens farms are going to be targeted by the desperate- we have a brief glimpse of this last summer. When many farms around here were broken into at night and the diesel stolen, even had intruders trying our diesel tank lucky that time for us our sheep dogs woke us up , and the dogs went for would-be thieves and scared them away.)

However, with regards to producing your own food, that is what we tried to say in the film, it can't go back to serfs working the land for wealthy landowners, and worrying images of back to the land polpot style.
Thats why we researched into every type of growing system and found permaculture to be the most food for the least work done on a small scale ( if the gardener is really proficient, a huge amount of food) even tiny scale. What was not shown in the film is many permaculturists grow pretty much all their veg in tiny gardens even in rasided beds and plant holders on small patios.
We also didn't have time to feature community garden shares schemes or CSA's and I mentioned Rosie Boycotts system in London well another system well underway is urban veg growing in Middlesborough.
Middlesborough council now have over 2000 growers ( think it's about 2000) growing huge amount of veg within the city limits on waste ground.
Also, looking at London, whenever I drive on the M25 which is not often because I hate it but when I do I look at that green belt, now just unsed or has pony paddocks on it.
Going back to Prof Tim Lang, I remember him saying until WWII that land was used to feed London everyday, I think it was about 30/40% of London food came from the ten mile net area around London, all of this could be modilized but I guess only when we have the national will to do so. ( but obviously we have so many more people to feed now!!!)

Q2: How has the recession changed the trend to break up small farms?

Well we always say farming works in different circles to the rest of the economy, while everyone else in the country was enjoying the boom years farming was struggling, now the country is in recession farming is doing okayish, and we're not sure if that is just in comparison to say car manufacture and housing who are in a downward spiral or if farming has been hammered so badly in the last decade it can't get any worse. Thats not to say farming is high and dry and depends which branch of farming - we still have two dairy farmers a week going out of business and now most of milk comes from places like Holland and Ireland.
So in short farming has faired better then most with this recession, as for break up of farms, well I still see farms for sale with planning approval on the barns it's just nobody is buying them.

Q3: Is there an opportunity here to preserve the small farms and use them to train up a new breed of green farmers?
Well organisations like Soil Association, Schumacher, National trust etc are buying farms and buying more of them these days, to do just this.
But as you can imagine these farms have big waiting lists , just like british allotment lists, and with the recession there has been a tendency for more wishing to return to the land. The Tom and Barbara Good syndrome we call it.

oh and while I'm here talking of corporate interests, didn't take them long to lock onto us.
http://www.scientificblogging.com/beamlines/natural_world_farm_future
Beautifully written I have to say , but two big give aways, one the way it rocked up the google search when you type in " a farm for a future" and two the last line "They called themselves Reds, but as my Ould Da used to say, they were really more like fanatical Greens."
Yes we mustn't rock the status quo must we??? !!!

I see no choice in this. There is simply no way that we can avoid going to natural farming/permaculture (NF/P)(the two have melded, but I suspect many don't know that, so present it this way) when we consider all factors.

1. The actual studies I've posted here at TOD on organic farming (not NF/P) show that even simple organic farming achieves 85% of agribusiness models and NF/P is more productive than organic farming, so far as I can tell.

2. The carbon sequestration is essential. Someone here commented that the amount of carbon sequestered is minimal, but that is obviously false when one considers global scales. As soil builds and more and more material builds layer after layer, you are obviously putting more and more carbon into the soil. Of course some of the carbon gets emitted, but only what would occur naturally. But there must be an overall sink - at least in terms of building up plant and animal matter in the soil - as plant matter is grown then sequestered year after year.

Obviously, this is an issue relating to Anthropogenically-driven Climate Change. Again, there is no choice when you look at what the goals of humanity must be in terms of managing carbon emissions.

2b. NF/P has been used quite successfully to reclaim barren land. This not only increases arable land, thus providing more food (and will rehabilitate depleted soils), but creates a larger carbon sink. More food, less carbon. What's not to like?

3. We are entering an era of high unemployment and, according to an awful lot of news articles these days, problems with food production. We have always had them with food distribution. NF/P helps helps greatly with both. NF/P makes it possible for virtually any community to be self-sufficient in food production. (Caveats for areas where you really cannot grow food, but if such is the case, why live there?)

Even though NF/P can be highly productive, it does still take time. And there are harvest times when extra help is needed. Also, if we can maintain current food production levels with NF/P, we will still have surpluses, thus able to maintain a society that can make use of specialization. (Not to mention that even the farmers, given the lower labor intensity compared to traditional and agribusiness methods, would have time to do other things, learn other skills, or just be active socio-political beings. That is, talk to one's neighbors and keep business and politics in check.)

Additionally, with the means of food production in the hands of the people, a great deal of power and wealth shifts to the people making them more independent and more able to resist political pressures from TPTB.

4. Redundancy. The more people that farm, the less likely a major societal hit comes from any given emergency.

5. I think the anecdotal examples from people posting here (Todd, Wyoming, Airdale, Sharon, Jason, et al.) make it pretty clear it can be highly rewarding in many ways. To me, the most important is the sense of living life that it seems to create, the connectedness to natural systems and rhythms. I believe it is essential to do this on a global scale, for just as it is easier to dehumanize those we do not know, it is easier to dismiss the impacts of good ecology if we never experience them.

Etc.

Or is it a no-brainer that everyone should go that way?

To put it simply, yes.

Cheers

But you can get most of your fruit, all of your vegies, a small amount of meat and decent amount of dairy from backyard gardens - you'll still need someone's big farm for your grains (wheat, rice, corn).

My Wife's grandmother grows @ 3.5 kg. of rice per pyoeng. 100 kg (220 lbs.) can be grown on 0.023 acres, or 111 sq yds. Some yards can handle that, though many can't.

I can imagine a future where the roads in neighborhoods are pulled up and replaced with gardens. Do that and you're getting closer. Of course, the local parks and some school fields can become forest gardens. If people are willing to go public transport, then the driveways and parking lots alone might provide all the space urban populations need to supplement their small yards.

We gotta think outside the box.

Cheers

[blockquote]If the oil and gas supply were to become quite short, then a lot of fruit and vegies would become very expensive. For most people, when tomatoes are $2/kg it doesn't seem worth the trouble to grow them, if they were $20/kg it would be. The limited cash available would go to the grains, and people would supply their own fruit, vegies, and a bit of meat and dairy.[/blockquote]


Kiashu What many don't see is how subsidies both financial and regulatory are going to lead to (in the west anyway) mass starvation. I don't think that it will be a question of price but of availability. Yes supply going down does increase price but for how long? In other words prices sky-rocket for the first month and then the supply just runs out.


Many don't understand or seem to refuse to understand the role of subsidies and how they are used to favor large agribusiness that can access them.


Regulatory & Financial Subsidies


-jump through these expensive and usually arbitrary rules designed to weed you out by forcing on you huge financial costs for compliance that you can't justify and thereby recover the cost because of the scale of your production. For example if you want to sell eggs. Here in Canada we have a quota system. last I heard it was a $1,000. per laying bird. A sustainable small farm model is essentially for all intents and purposes illegal. (What every small farmer learns through repeated beatings is that his/her government is out to stomp him/her out)


Should your production and management skills be up to snuff and you could always have an egg / day from that allotment this means 365/12= 32(approx) dozen eggs / year at $2.00 per dozen (farm gate) that gives you a $64 / year income (bear in mind that if you purchase feed at about $15 / month or $180 per year for a family size flock of 7 (6 hens and a rooster) (365x6)/12=183 x 2=$360-$180 =$180. Working 365 days this equals a pay of about .50cents per day. That's of course is too optimistic as the coons and the rats and the foxes and the hawks and the neighbourhood dogs all get their share. But you get the point. So now food triples in price eggs are selling for $6.00 / dozen, but feed cost has also tripled in price.


So in 16 years that bird allotment would have paid for it's quota. Of course I'm not counting taxes the 8 birds living to 2 years the hydro and feed costs (purchased grain could run you ($180 per year x 16 =$2880), housing. Meat birds we currently are only allowed to have 300/year without quota. Rule: eggs must be graded and washed! So as Joel Salatin points out in his book "Everything I want to do is illegal" (which is a book that drives this point home) the egg washing machine forces food problems on the public (because the protective layer that keeps out bacteria is now washed off the egg by water that is contaminated with chicken shit. The purpose of the rule was to eliminate competition, under the specious rubric of health and safety. This of course weeds the producers out as the cost of compliance pushes the return on that chicken back another 15 years. There are so many examples of this that you wonder how any of us actually get any food. And it becomes clear that we are on the back side of the food production peak. The 'externalities' created by large agri-business haven't really led to major fatalities but given their predominance this is a function of time. Clearly monoculture leads to huge vulnerabilities. Your diversified garden helps to subsidize their bad behavior. But may keep you alive for a few months. At this point I think all should realize that a if you can provide 2 months of food then you haven't solved the problem of the other 10 months.


Think about this, these food nazis have told us that we can't grow and have a chicken every day! It is against the law for me to raise a chicken and share it with you if you are my guest. It is against the law for a dairy producer to drink his/her own milk!


Inspectors are sent to all the small stores to make sure that only pasty yolk magnesium deficient and old eggs are available! Stores can face huge fines if they sell fresh eggs.


Farmers markets have inspectors too! At present the propoganda machine has been ramped up to sell the specious notion that when avian influenza shows up (H5Nwhatever) that it will be the result of the small producer whose outdoor flock getting fresh air and exercise has been exposed to wild birds that are 'carrying the pathogens' and no reflection of the fact that 60,000 birds in a box having received antibiotics is in fact stressful and disrespectful to the chickens!)


We have been rewarded in so many ways by our plastic 'want's' being satisfied by cheap imports (that also mask usually massive energy subsidies) that we think that when demand rises say because of crop failures that local producers will fill in the slack. If you now attend a farmers market watch to see how many 'new' farmers are still there after years 4,5 when the money that was used under the rubric that you need to 'invest' in your business proves false. Hence the adage 'We farmed till the money ran out'. Rebecca and Tim beware of the head patting self serving rhetoric of those who don't really care if you can pay the bills. The farmers market puts a ceiling on the number of customers that you can serve and hence your income. Which for most of us is in fact negative.


In North America most people believe that the price that they pay for food is reflective of the cost of production. Hence why they reason that should they drive to your farm that you don't have the cost of shipping therefore you can reduce your price by that amount. So should prices sky-rocket they would anticipate that this price signal would trigger great increases in production. The current subsidy model which supports the agri-business model and discriminates against the small farm is such that as you say Kiashu it would be of great advantage to grow more of your own food. The price signal won't lead to increased food coming from small farmers but instead will force more small farmers out of business (they are usually too busy to grow their own food or prefer the subsidized stuff as you find out that growing your own food is in fact work)


A good example right now is that a large shopping retailer in Ontario called 'Loblaws' has recorded a 65% increase in profits something like 650 million this past year. Meanwhile the number of small farmers going bankrupt continues it's steadfast rate.


And don't forget that these nazi's never sleep. They are busy at the w.t.o. trying to pass rules and enforce laws to prevent farmers from keeping seeds. If this happens the tipping point will have been reached and then the discovery that g.m.o.'s are so weak that they are vulnerable to pathogens and then well... rough sledding ahead.

How about wind powered electric tractors?

Short term intermittency is far better handled with Demand Side Management than with central storage, especially as the number of plug-ins and EV's grows. DSM is almost free to utilities, and has both effectively instant response times and enormous capacity.

First, covering demand from storage for any significant time would be very, very expensive. Better to handle the first increment (1/3, or whatever it can handle) with DSM, and use storage as a secondary resource.

2nd, plug-in/EV charging can be scheduled when it's needed. If your problem is too much wind in the middle of the night, charging can go there, and easily be 1/2 of demand. Heck, for short periods it could be as much as you wanted: visualize 150M plug-in's pulling 6KW each, for a total of 900GW!

3rd, plug-in/EV's could also provide V2G, and provide additional supply in similar numbers.
Does it seem hard to imagine that many plug-in/EV's, or hard to imagine them ramping up quickly enough? Well, the thing to keep in mind is that they can grow as quickly as wind and solar: we could easily produce 10M plug-in/EV's per year in 10 years.

4th, it's easy to exaggerate the intermittency we need to handle, but it wouldn't take much interconnectedness to take advantage of geographical dispersion of negatively correlated wind and solar sources (your reference on this topic had sites that were all pretty close together), and

5th, we also have the option of backup by (hopefully) largely obsolete FF generation plants, so DSM (or storage) wouldn't have to handle very long (but rare) events.

We should note that DSM for PHEV/EV's is more important than V2G. It sidesteps battery cost issues, as well as other complexities that come from using wires in two directions. OTOH, it's highly likely that the 2nd generation Li-ion batteries now being put into production will last longer than the vehicles they power, rendering the cost per cycle question unimportant for V2G.

It's important to maintain clarity about the timeframe and context of our discussion. If we're really talking about a grid that has a very large % of renewables, we're either talking about decades in the future, or a world in which our society makes a much, much larger commitment to dealing with energy issues than it has so far. In such a world, a very large number of PHEV/EV's with relatively large batteries is extremely likely.

In that case, it's reasonable to assume that we're talking about over 100 million PHEV/EV's, with batteries that can effectively hold 25KHW or more. Such batteries could power vehicles for days between charges, and provide enormous flexibility for DSM (much more than a 8 hour scenario one might consider).

There is enormous potential from creative use of PHEV/EV's, potential that we are far from understanding. I would note just one: the motors in PHEV's are extremely efficient, on the order of diesels. A fleet of PHEV's would provide backup capacity on the order of 500GW that could be sustained for days, using engines that would be as efficient and far cleaner than most diesel generators. Would we want to use such a capability often? Of course not, but it's availability would be enormously valuable.