Word: nitrogen
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...message from this panel of non-scholars fit perfectly with bi-coastal elite fashion: Our food should be organic, local, and slow. These ideas have no scholarly pedigree. The assertion that food should be grown without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer (“organically”) can be traced back nearly a century to an Austrian mystic named Rudolf Steiner who also believed in cosmic rhythms, human reincarnation, and the lost city of Atlantis. The idea of eating locally comes from the founder of a community-supported kitchen in Berkeley, California. The idea of slow food was first popularized...
...Virtually all food in rural Africa today is de facto organic, because small farmers there cannot afford to purchase any nitrogen fertilizer. Fertilizer use per hectare in Africa is only 1/10 as high as in Europe or North America, causing crop yields per hectare to be only 1/5 as high as their Northern counterparts. Total production level has been declining on a per capita basis for the past three decades...
...expand cropping and grazing onto more erodible lands, cutting more trees and destroying more wildlife habitat. Roughly 70 percent of all deforestation in Africa comes from this expansion of low-yield farming. It would be better if these farmers increased crop yields on land already cleared by applying some nitrogen fertilizer, but that would violate the mystical organic taboo...
...year study led by David Pimentel, a professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell University, that was published in 2005, found that organic farms produced just as much corn and soybeans as conventional farms. While they required more labor, the cost was more than offset by savings in commercial nitrogen, insecticides and herbicides. In Africa, where labor is cheap and capital scarce, the benefits would be magnified. According to Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva, past green revolutions boosted production of wheat and rice at the expense of other food. Using land for cash crops, she argues, actually decreased total food production...
...just as productive, but far more sustainable. At the St. Jude Family project in southern Uganda, double-decker animal pens open onto corn, cabbage, bananas and crawling green beans. The earth is contoured to reduce runoff and erosion. Spring onions serve as natural pest control. Legumes fix nitrogen to the soil. Cow manure produces biogas for the farm's stove. Farm owner Josephine Kizza says her project has introduced organic techniques to 180,000 Ugandan farmers. "In the Western countries, organic farming is expensive. But here in Africa, it is very cheap...