tetlom. "As fossil fuels get more expensive and regulation increases - Will the cleverness of Permaculture,(which is no till) and the Wisdom of Joe Salatin, PA Yoeman ect play a greater role in farms of the future?"
We will agree to disagree about this.
The only way that permaculture is no till, is if you physically pull weeds by hand, or chip em out with a hoe, or smoother weeds with mulch and paper and plastic, or best of all, use compost where the weeds have been roasted from the long composting process. [which by the way, also halves carbon and N content to the atmosphere in the process]. All these methods are very highly labour intensive, and with the last 2 methods really involve importing nutrients from elsewhere, nutrients that have generally originated on a conventional industrial grain farm via animal manure if you followed everything back to the start.
So once again we get back to the point I keep making. Where do we find millions of people who will move back to rural areas to do all this backbreaking manual work, when everyone wants to live in the city and work in services?
In the real world that I know about, on organic farms that are big enough to be commercial farms, rather than vege garden plots like nearly all permaculture is, the land is ploughed up. And the process of ploughing is very bad for soid structure and worms and reduces yields dramatically compared to farmers who use todays modern zero-till farm methods.
If oil prices rise, food prices rise, simple as that. Organic food prices will rise as much as conventional, or probably much more. Organic farms [real organic farms, not permacuture vege gardens] depend on the highly diesel dependant use of tractors and ploughs to kill weeds. Plus, as oil prices rise, so too does fertilizer prices, and this means that manure prices will rise in uniform with chemical fert. Organic farms depend on the straw and manure that conventional oil based, industrial grain growing spews out from all the grain fed to animals in the world.
Organic farming will always exist alongside conventional. The only way it could exist independantly, is if someone works out how to get rid of 5 billion people. Any ideas on that one?
