Re: Corn
Dave Tahija
location: Butte, Montana, en route from San Francisco to Juneau
listening to: Train - Save me, San Francisco
registered: 1999.12.27
posts: 261
[view all posts]
[view all posts]
I haven't read the book but I listened to a long interview with the author and a lot of his points make good sense.As a somewhat related observation, I drove across the Midwest on back roads three years ago and found that, even driving all day in July surrounded by corn and soybean fields, I didn't have to clean bugs from my windshield. I infer that the farming practices in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and western South Dakota have pretty much wiped out insect life there. That can't be a good thing.I found his tale of the little farm using elaborate multi-cropping to be charming but not a very good model for the rest of the country. That sort of thing takes a lot of labor. If you've got a peasant class that'll work for, say, $2 an hour, it might work. If you want to pay farmers enough to live decent, modern lives, it's practical only in very special circumstances, as a sort of boutique agriculture with markets where final price is not an object.Still, I agree with his conclusions that we should aim for a policy of more diverse crops and grass-fed meat.
D
Dave Tahija
(view)
I haven't read the book but I listened to a long interview with the author and a lot of his points make good sense.As a somewhat related observation, I drove across the Midwest on back roads three years ago and found that, even driving all day in July surrounded by corn and soybean fields, I didn't have to clean bugs from my windshield. I infer that the farming practices in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and western South Dakota have pretty much wiped out insect life there. That can't be a good thing.I found his tale of the little farm using elaborate multi-cropping to be charming but not a very good model for the rest of the country. That sort of thing takes a lot of labor. If you've got a peasant class that'll work for, say, $2 an hour, it might work. If you want to pay farmers enough to live decent, modern lives, it's practical only in very special circumstances, as a sort of boutique agriculture with markets where final price is not an object.Still, I agree with his conclusions that we should aim for a policy of more diverse crops and grass-fed meat.
