When I posted about importing bananas from the Philippines back in April I was hoping for two things. First, that someone would enlighten me as to what Biosecurity Australia meant in practical terms when they said that individual cases of importing bananas would be considered on their merits.
Secondly, I was hoping that this statement might be taken up:
Food security is also going to be an increasing issue as climate change progresses. Gwynne Dyer claims that:
“…the first and most important impact on human civilisation will be an acute and permanent crisis of food supply.”
I got neither.
An article in the current Queensland Country Life provides an insight into the first issue.
Essentially the prospective exporter in the Philippines has to establish a disease free operation and then pay for Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service (AQIS) officers to verify and monitor their operation on the ground. Seems fair enough if we seriously want to keep banana diseases out. The Filipinos are not happy, but are obliged to accept that the matter must be decided on the science.
They will recall the issue of chicken meat, where the science found that the meat had to be cooked at at least 80C for 125 minutes to inactivate the infectious bursal disease (IBD) virus. I gather that with chicken meat, Biosecurity Australia is now willing to accept imports if the exporter can establish a zone free of the nine diseases of concern and have this verified by an AQIS officer. Unless someone can overturn this approach with a successful WTO challenge, I’m sure this strategy will continue to be employed.
What Biosecurity Australia is doing is preserving our food producing industries from possible annihilation or significant decline, as has happened with pork.
I’m interested in Australia maintaining productive capacity both as food security for home use as well as for export in a world where indications are that food production will fail completely this century to keep up with population growth through pressure from climate change.
In April David Spratt told us:
Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute and adviser to the European Union and to the German Chancellor, told the Copenhagen science conference in March that a rise to 5–6 degrees Celsius above preindustrial would reduce “the carrying capacity of the planet (to) below 1 billion people”. (Emphasis added)
5-6C by 2100 has become a more likely prospect as scientists increasingly realise that long-term feedbacks as identified by James Hansen and others are cutting in and concern for possible tipping points such as methane emissions grows.
But to elaborate a little on Gwynne Dyers findings when in early 2008 he interviewed senior scientists and defence policy people, here are a few quotes:
I was in New Delhi, for example, about two years ago and I spoke to someone, the head of a think-tank there, who had just done a contract for the World Bank, who had come to her and asked her if she could figure out what two degrees hotter would do to Indian food production. And she’d done all the due diligence, and divided the country into 186 grid squares and she came back with the aggregate number of a 25 per cent fall in Indian food production, at two degrees hotter. (Emphasis added)
That was from this panel discussion on the ABC which contained additional evidence of prospective food scarcity.
In an ABC interview here’s Dyer on China:
He says China will take an enormous blow.
“There is a study out from the Chinese Academy of Scientists and then swiftly disappeared again, but about two years ago, we predicted the maximum damage that would be done to China under foreseeable climate change in the 21st century was 38 per cent cut in food production,” he said.
“That is only about three-fifths of the food they now eat and there will be a lot more of them.
There is concern about the expansion of the tropics and the consequent expansion subtropical dry zones, plus melting ice caps with reduced summer water supply in places like The Rockies, Pakistan, Turkey, Peru, the Sahel, California, the lower latitude grain belt in the US, Southern Europe and so on.
In addition there is concern about sea level rise and saltwater penetration in delta areas, such as Bangladesh, Vietnam and elsewhere.
The focus in the above is what lies in prospect in the next three decades running up to 2050. We are going to see more reports like this:
Predictions vary greatly, but the International Organization for Migration cites a middle-of the road estimate that, by 2050, the world will have 200 million “environmentally induced migrants.”
Climate policy makers show no signs of doing anything that will make an appreciable difference in that time frame.
So getting back to things like bananas, chooks and pigs, I think we should take action to preserve our maximum food producing capacity, and further, the policies of the WTO should be rejigged to allow us to do so.
Secondly, food exporting countries should not be penalised for food that is consumed elsewhere. The emissions should count at the consumer end. That should include emissions generated during production on the farm and then from paddock to plate. The principle, I think, is clear, the practicalities may present some difficulties.
Vats. Algae grown in vats. Textured vegetable protein. That is our future.
I think your comment about taxing food exported will upset some.
70% of our beef production is for export and these are largely sent to countries which are claiming developing nation status.
As such they are part of the group of countries claiming to be exempt from carbon taxes/ output controls. So no change at all and we could even increase production?That isn’t likely to be acceptable.
Taxing consumption seems the better idea and we could start such a system in Australia.It would be a natural accompanyment to per unit and origin labelling.
Australian investors acting individually are make decisions that when summed together are destroying our food security at a time when the collapse of our agricultural revolution is imminent.
Today Australia imports its seafood from Thailand or South Africa, our dried fruit comes from Chile or Turkey, our orange juice is imported concentrate. I didn’t realise that we import chicken – my housemates have had their health destroyed by eating Coles chicken 6 weeks ago that they didn’t cook properly. One 26 year old will spend the rest of his life on medication – all for imported chicken because there is more profit in it than stocking domestically grown meat that is supervised by Australian health inspectors.
That first sentence should be clarified – taxing food at the point of consumption after it is exported etc etc …
Meat. Meat grown on a sponge. That is our future.
murph, thanks for the clarification. You had me confused.
In the initial stages there may need to be a focus on limiting carbon emissions (and other GHGs) where they are produced. However, in the long run it seems to me that if carbon has to have a price it should be paid at the consumption end. Also there needs to be a bit of rationality as to where certain activities are carried on across the planet. You can’t mine copper in countries where it doesn’t exist, for example, and our ultimate access to masses of renewable energy might mean that more minerals processing and manufacturing generally should be done here.
murph’s comment on the other thread is also relevant here.
This may just be one aspect, but can we stop building suburban developments over our best arable land? please?
Billie at #3. Is it really true they import chickens? I know they grow millions of the things here in Australia that must go somewhere. Australian farmers also grow fruit to be dried as well as oranges. In fact they grow so much of it I’d be very surprised is we really needed to import it at all. The fact is imported product from countries where safety standards are non existant, cheap and toxic chemicals are used routinely and where produce is grown by massively subsidised farmers is cheaper. They dump it on our market for nothing, with no tariffs, and hugely undercut our unsubsidised farmers driving them out of business. Don’t you just love a level playing field?
Every day we flush at least 8 billion litres of urine into the sea around the globe.
Its full of urea and phosphates. Think about that when you think about food production.
We are so stupid.
Huggy
Helen @ 7, this may give you some hope. (My son sent it to me the other day.)
The Brown Wiggle – like you I thought that Steggles had so many sheds that there would be no room for chicken imports but as the initial post said “with chicken meat, Biosecurity Australia is now willing to accept imports”. One housemate is so seriously ill that he has compromised his employability.
My dried fruit research was done in the dried fruit and flour aisle at my local Coles supermarket. Get a pack of Sunbeam or Angus Park dried fruit and read the packet.
Brian – doesn’t at east one climate change scenario suggest some degrees warmer PLUS more rain?
We might have bananas, rice and cotton from Tasmania.
In the short term only fxh. It won’t affect us or our children too much, but our grandchildren are going to be in real strife. Unfortunately, because things will get a bit warmer and a bit wetter before they get hotter and drier the Climate Change denialists will be able to continue denying until it’s pretty much too late to do anything about it.
Taxing beef exports etc will be a useless exercise as it does not tackle the CO2 emissions from this industry. No I am not talking about only cow farts but the huge fossil fuel energy input to this industry and the deforestation. Livestock husbandry accounts for 18% of Global CO2 emissions.
Taxing stuff to reduce CO2 emissions is the sort of futile exercise beloved of the “market solves every thing” retard school of economics.
The answer to our problems lies in a return to villages (large and small) that are integrated into our landscape and the introduction of very high speed broadband that allows forklift drivers (for example) to work from home. Look to the mines where those huge trucks are now being driven remotely by girls sitting up at a computer in their living room hundreds of miles away.
A properly integrated village network could offer the best of all worlds: a clean environment , local food production, distributed power generation and a wide range of employment without the need to actually travel.
Link them all with an electric highway but above all link them with very high speed internet.
Ok that’s enough.
Huggy
#7 Helen
Yes right on! And while we are at it coal mines as well.
Years ago the average Aussie had a limited understanding of conservation, land & resource use in that it was only the cute & cuddlies that were worth saving. Steve Erwin came along & with enthusiasm the public were educated that the rough & bities had virtue. But all life depends on a healthy carbon/ water cycle, a healthy soil & those many 1 000’s of life forms that live in the soil. In this country we have a limited supply of top arable land, it is our most valuable resource, we need to learn to appreciate it.
S@D#15, I couldn’t agree more while I think Huggy Bunny at 9 is right too. Urea as farmers use is made from oil and Phosphorus is a mined product. Does anyone really think that these will last forever? What happens when they run out? There will be massive amounts of land that are rendered unproductive as the inputs needed to keep them productive will be too expensive. In the last three years we’ve seen the price of Phosphorus fertiliser’s triple and Urea at least double due to increased demand.
As the more marginal land becomes somewhat unproductive, the global food shortage will get worse. Except for this year, for the previous 8 years, despite record yields across the globe, the world has consumed more than it has produced. Things have changed this year with the shortage of cash around and people dry up stockpiles, but you would have to say it is a small reprieve. So in 40 years time when the worlds population has doubled, and people across Asia increase their protein intake, where will the food come from? If all the rainforests in the world were cleared and every arable piece of land surface that could be farmed was, it would only add 12% to the amount of land that is currently farmed. I think in the future, good quality, fertile farmland will be a precious commodity.
Huggy Bunny at #14 I think you’re right and wrong. Decentralisation has to occur so that recycling of nutrients can occur, but you’re dead wrong with your assertions about livestock contributiong to the Greenhouse gas problem. The simple fact is that a cow cannot burp, fart and shit more Carbon than he eats, and after he eats the Carbon, the plants he’s eaten are able to regrow absorbing that very carbon back out of the atmosphere. I know you’re going to say methane is worse than Carbon Dioxide but methane has to break down into it’s elemental Carbon and Hydrogen somewhere along the line otherwise the world would have been ruined by the greenhouse effect centuries ago by those cursed millions of buffalo roaming the US for thousands of years. When will people wake up to the fact that the Carbon cycle from animal production is a closed system?
If you want greenhouse gas levels to stay at 1990 levels, then the only thing that is contributing to that increase is the mining of millions of years of sequestered fossil fuels and the burning of that fuel. The fossil fuel consumption part of farming by all means should be examined but that is all. Time to get real – tax the fossil fuels as they leave the ground, let it filter through the economy, smart people with alternative energy sources will then be more competitive and everyone else can be left alone.
Billie, what on earth was in the chicken?
The Brown Wiggle,
Agree about the animal carbon cycle. It is not the farts it’s the industrialisation of farming that is the problem. The fossil fuel input to feedlots and the processing and the refrigeration and so on is absurd.
I see a return to small communities made possible by vastly improved communications and low carbon transport systems. We have to do it or we are stuffed. The mega-city will be doomed by the sheer concentration of its effluent.
Farming does not need to be fossil fuel intensive, 120 years ago farms were entirely solar powered.
Not saying we should go back to horses and hay but there are solar technologies that would work really well in a farming context.
There must be a “right size” that makes it possible to recycle all nutrients, adopt practices that reduce packaging or even eliminate it. Grow your own veges or buy them from the guy down the road and you don’t need a shrink wrapper or refrigeration or a truck.
Perhaps one good thing from the CO2 problem is that we will be forced into a more intelligent life.
If we get going early enough the whole world will be able to participate. If we don’t get off our arses soon only a few sad survivors will be forced to into a rural lifestyle – without the broad band and the high speed electric transport system.
Life will go back to being mean brutish and short.
Huggy
Huggy at 18 – I sgree with your sentiments and the ONLY thing that should be taxed greenhouse gas wise is fossil fuels. Everyone else should be left alone. This would in itself bring about the desired changes.
I’m not sure about the solar power 120 years ago, except that the sunlight made the grass grow for the horses that pulled the ploughs to eat.
Decentralisation has to occur and policies need to be enacted that encourage this, such as tax breaks for those that set up business in regional areas. Sadly, without large scale, ultra efficient farming your food would be a lot more expensive and there would be a lot more hungry people in the world. Even with efficient, mechanised farming of today we haven’t been able to keep up with demand for the last 7 years. Climate change can only make this scenario worse.
As Warren Buffett said recently – agriculture is the way of the future.
Huggy how about a soon to be released hydrogen cell tractor
TBW.
Factory farms grow grain to feed cattle. This is an energetic and nutritional disaster, add in corn to ethanol and all the other absurdities. The incipient global food crisis is caused by the diversion of traditional food crops in developing cointries to cash crops for the Imperial masters of various stripes. This has been going on for years. I am not so sure that large scale ultra efficient farming is the entire answer. I think it is mostly a question of the most appropriate scale and efficiency.
A farm where nutrients are recycled after the energy has been extracted is very efficient (Bio reactors that produce methane for example) the residue is than spread back on the fields. The the methane is converted into electricity to drive tractors or hydrogen is extracted from the methane for the still@downfall fuel cell.
Thing is this is not at all rocket science. http://www.regbieplus.eu/265.0.html
The link clearly shows that the real difficulties in these schemes reside in the heads of the villagers.
Huggy
Brian
Late last year the world was hit by an economic crisis, among the many wrongs that caused this event is the invention of financial products that are unhinged from the reality of tangible, “real” commodities. Australia’s agriculture productive capacity has been reduced by a change in seasonal conditions. On this patch of earth I belong to, my father hadn’t seen two consequent years of drought until 1988. Since 1988 I have not seen two consequent good years. That is bad enough but please consider this, food security will be impacted not only by any climate change but also by an economic system that has become far removed from the reality of tangible, “real”, systems governed by the laws of nature. The world’s economic system is delivering market mechanisms that don’t take in any consideration for the lands long term sustainable, productivity.
The result will be in the effort to maintain productivity in the face of poorer seasons there will be a spiral into the collapse of the ability to deliver food security. But fear ye not, if thou shallt remove the yoke of burden of artificial systems of man & heed the long term need of the soil to bear fruit, all is not lost. About 10 years ago there was talk of the triple bottom line: financial, sustainability & community. What has happen to this ideal, or is it another imagined utopia?
Never, the emissions from livestock production would have destroyed humanity long before that. Trees go down, gas goes up. World gets hotter. Soy or corn go in, methane goes up, world gets hotter. World gets hotter, arctic ice sheet melts, water is warmer, more ice melts, artice ice sheet reflective albedo gone, sun directly over unprotected artic waters half a year all year, climate totally freaks out.
Livestock production uses 30% of the ice free land (UN/FAO) and 70% of all agricultural land.
18% culpability for livestock production is a severe underestimate as methane is not propperly accounted for in climate models which is why climate scientists are freaking out as more is revealed about what’s happening to the planet.
I’m afraid the MLA PR rep might not be your best source for info on livestock and climate change.
billie, the point I was trying to make about importing chickens was that while Biosecurity Australia has said it can be done the conditions make it impractical. Cook the stuff for 125 minutes at 80C makes it pretty much inedible. If there are imported chickens they would need to be from disease free areas where the exporter is willing to pay for AQIS officers to inspect the facilities in the other country. I’d be surprised if that is happening, but I could be wrong.
Huggy @ 9, I understand we are approaching peak phosphorus and we may well have to mine our effluent. In fact I recall hearing about such schemes already in operation – Sweden? It was a couple of years ago.
Brown Wiggle (and huggy) – I believe we’re either at or past peak posphorus.
Basically, we’re fucked coming and going.
Huggy @ 14, what I had in mind was not a simple tax on exports. We need to get around the problem of countries exporting emissions by exporting their manufacturing industries. There was a study that showed that Britain’s reduction in emissions since 1990 evaporated when you took into account exporting manufacturing and increases in air travel, which weren’t being counted.
I posted about this last August.
One way around this would be Monbiot’s idea that everyone on the planet gets a budget of allowable emissions, beyond which they would need to buy permits from other people who weren’t going to use them all.
I thought that impractical, but it might be feasible eventually.
Then it wouldn’t matter where the production occurred, but the most competitive place would be where emissions were least.
It’s just an idea.
Perhaps if importing good and tested products does not affect the production of the same within the importing country, it’s a good thing. If it helps generate a good margin and the growth and movement of money within the economy, it surely isn’t bad
Alistair @23 – I don’t know any MLA reps, and I’m not a cattle farmer either, but a net increase in Carbon in the atmosphere makes absolutley no sense. It’s just not possible aside from the fossil fuel input for transport etc. Yes methane goes up, but the fact that the cow has eaten the grass in the first place means that more grass can grow and absorb the very Carbon the cow has emitted. It’s a little while since I was at school but we were taught that matter cannot be created nor destroyed – cows cannot possibly create Carbon. Further than that the methane has to break down in the atmoshere into Hydrogen and Carbon otherwise the Earths atmosphere would be full of the stuff now with ruminants roaming the earth for millions of years.
Soy and Corn going in has absolutely nothing to do with methane except that corn is sometimes fed to cattle. I don’t think you’d find very many cases of Soy being fed to any ruminants. But the case is still the same with corn. Cow eats corn, cow emits methane (C and H), farmer grows more corn, corn absorbs Carbon (CO2), emits O, O joins with H, turns into rain, corn uses rain, absorbs more C. Again, apart from the fossil fuel input, this system cannot emit more Carbon emissions than it uses.
When are people going to wake up – the only way there can be a net Carbon increase in the atmosphere is through the mining of ancient Carbon sources and bringing them to the Earths surface. Me thinks some people just hate farmers.
On methane, Geoff Hudson explained recently how the maths work. Basically you take CO2 out of the air and put methane back that is 72 times more potent as a GHG over the short term, but it is all broken down within 20 years.
We had a look at the wider issue of the current methane spike here.
Quiggin recently did some calculations on methane and ruminants, but his server seems to be down right now. I’ll try again later.
JM Eaves @ 27, in the post I was indicating the unwisdom of importing diseases that threaten the domestic industry.
But I was also indicating that there was a more general problem of food scarcity coming up with climate change and the need to preserve food productive capacity. Wiping out a domestic industry in favour of cheaper imports might not be a smart thing to do in the longer term.
fxh @ 12 and mindy @ 13, predictions for particular spots on the globe are a bit difficult. I understand these models are coarse-grained, as it were. But there seems to be a fair bit of consensus about the broad trends.
There is a new US report out that I just heard about this morning. This Washington Post story says:
The Science Daily article has a very stark map showing what is expected to happen further down the track in the US. This is part of what was behind all the bad news I was talking about in the post. The map shows a pattern that is expected to be replicated around the globe in both hemispheres.
The effect on Mexico is quite extreme. The effect on the US grain belt is obvious and it is moot as to whether the losses there can be compensated for by increases in Canada. The greater variability of seasons is also an issue. In our hemisphere we have ocean where the increased rain will fall.
The other part is the melting of ice caps and the consequent effect on irrigation, especially in places like California and Pakistan.
The Brown Wiggle @ 26:
The range for methane in the last 650,000 years, as read from ice core records is 320-790ppb, a range that fluctuates cyclicly together with carbon and temperature. Since 1750 the amount of methane has multiplied 2.5 times to 1732ppb. the time since 1750 has not only seen industrial developments but also huge increases in population and huge increases in the amount of animal products eaten. There are a billion head of cattle in the world. Australia has as many cattle as people. Soy is grown for these cattle and often replaces old forest such as amazon.
Methane is extremely active as a greenhouse gas for about 10 years, much more powerful than carbon. I think we should be more worried about it and reexamine the issue from ground up, whatever the truth maybe.
Alistair,
That’s why we should burn as much methane as we can. Coal Seam Methane eventually leaks out of the coal seam so we should intercept it and oxidise it to CO2.
Equally, digesting stuff (say cow-shit) to make methane and then oxidising it to CO2 is a closed cycle way to capture, store and extract solar energy. We can do all these things if we can
get the scale of our food production right.
The real problem with cattle, is growing grain to feed them in vast shit filled pens. Firstly grain fed beef lacks many of the nutrients you get from grass fed, secondly the unnatural diet requires the factory farmer to dose the beasts with all sorts of stuff, thirdly the fossil fuel energy input to grain is huge compared with grass that the beast harvests for itself. And as you point out the clearing of forest for beef growing proceeds unabated. Oh and then the owners of these shit filled pens scrape the stuff up an put it in landfill!
Huggy
Alistair at 32. We definitely should re-examine this issue. As I said the only way there can be a net increase of Carbon into the atmosphere is by burning fossil fuels. If there are extra ruminants in the world now than there were in 1750, then these animals have to eat something made out of Carbon which had to be extracted from the atmosphere in the first place and around and around it goes. It’s fossil fuels not cattle!
Even if grain is fed to cattle, huggy bunny, then this too the source of Carbon for the cattle to excrete which came out of the atmosphere in the first place. Agriculture has a role to play in that it’s highly mechanised and as such needs to look for alternative fuels the same way as everyone else does.
As for feedlots, well if there was no demand for meat, there would be no demand for lot fed beef. As a matter of fact, the shit from feedlots is a highly sought after fertiliser for farmers and absolutely none of it gets into landfill. The nutrients in that shit are invaluable to farmers and it is indeed a shame that so much of it gates flushed into the ocean as you said in an earlier post.
Er TBW
Obout feedlot shit : http://www.consumersunion.org/pub/core_food_safety/002281.html
http://www.wspafarmwelfare.org/hhenvhealth.html
Sought after? I don’t think so. It is left to rot in some stinking hole where it makes lots of ammonia, methane and pathogens.
BTW I know that grain itself is not a CO2 emitter (Closed cycle here too) it is the energy intensive methods used to grow it in mega farms that are the problem.
Just Google this.
factory farming manure disposal
Huggy.
Huggy, you display great knowledge in your field of expertise but sorry you have got the wrong handle on the current state of play of feedlot manure here in Australia. The links you offered were based largely on the American situation by groups I would suggest have an agenda. I don’t operate a feedlot, nor do I wish to, but they are becoming an established part of the beef industry & I do know people involved. Feedlots in Australia are licensed; they are heavily regulated, have to meet requirements of a few different regulatory authorities, operate under quality assurance regiments & are regularly inspected. No waste is allowed to escape into any creek or river system, if it does there is a clean up bill. How the manure is cleaned out of the pens & is disposed of has to be specified under the licence agreement. Huggy, TBW is right in that manure now days is composted into a fertiliser product & is being sought after. I offer you a couple of links of my own. Take a look & you can see by the research & analysis of this feedlot by product & the specific machinery built to handle it, that it is now an established practice to return the nutrient back to the soil.
http://www.horizonrural.com.au/Free%20reports/Feedlot%20manure.pdf
http://www.composting.com.au/compost_turning/feedlot.html
You have been right in your previous comments in the importance of returning what nutrient we can back to the soil. Feedlots may be imperfect but if you take the time to look at the current Oz situation it is not as bad as you feared.
still@downfall
Agreed, Australia seems to be leading the world in this field. At least we excel in cows-hit disposal
Shame parts of he US are not as good. I think they have a problem with regulations. But then Americans are the dumbest inhabitants of the planet.
Ah that feels better.
Huggy
Huggy @ 14 you suggested that the answer lay in a return to villages, big and small, and @ 21 you linked to Jühnde in Germany. This is great for Jühnde, population 1072, but in practical terms where does that get us.
When we were in Germany last year we flew from Nuremberg to Frankfurt. There seemed to be a Jühnde-sized village over every hill. But Germany is full of cities, like Heidelberg (140,000), Mainz (200,000), Koblenz (105,000), Erlangen (104,000) and Ulm (120,000) to mention just a few we visited. That’s before you get to the big cities.
Those centres could never be dispersed into small settlements, leaving aside the Mexico City and Mumbai-type centres of the world.
So convince me that the solutions found at Jühnde have more than novelty value.
Brian,
Germany has the highest percentage of its population living in small towns and villages of all Europe. About 61 percent of the population lives in towns with 2,000 to 100,000 inhabitants; 30 percent, in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants; and the remainder, in villages with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. It has a really superb road and rail system. (Even though the trains I travelled in seemed to have been fitted out in the 60′s).
Jühnde is but the begnning. http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,476465,00.html
My assertion is that if we are to survive the coming climate change crisis we will have to disperse our global population in such a way that we can increase food production and at the same time reduce the specific fossil based energy required to produce, process and transport it. For example I am informed that it now takes at least 1kWh to “manufacture” 1 litre of milk, for example and get it to the consumer.
The ” market” that you love so much, has milk being produced in Gippsland pasteurised and packaged then put in a refrigerated truck and shipped to Brisbane. This is totally insane.
When I was a kid we put sixpence in a billy hanging on the fence and a guy came and filled it with milk.
The evidence from other threads is that the denizens of this site expect to sit out the crisis in their gated (and domed?) communities with the little green nuke humming away while they hold open air post modern seminars in the supermarket carpark. Boy have I got news for you, that will not work; the starving barbarians will kill you all.
If we are to feed ourselves in the coming crisis there is no other way, we have to grow our own tucker preferably in our village/town gardens. We will also have to produce it with the minimum amout of external energy.
Huggy
Sorry haven’t got time to read the whole psot so not sure if this has been addressed already, but brown wiggle your science is faulty. Methane is from memory 22 times as potent a heat trapping gas as CO2, while N2O is 295 times as potent. The global warming potential of gases can be very different. Ruminant bacteria are converting carbon stored in grass starches not into the CO2 which can be resequestered as part of the plant cycle, but methane which is out there heating the atmosphere. Nitrous oxides are of course applied as fertilisers to make grass grow for the cows to eat.
When I was young we used to twist the cow’s teat and direct the stream directly at the mouth of a passing sibling. That was when the engine was busted and we all had to pitch and milk by hand.
Me loving the market? I haven’t been accused of that before!
But you still haven’t convinced me. Is the German village model how we are going to adapt when civilisation as we know it is swept away and there are a billion of us left living near the poles?
Or is it adaptable to Munich, Hamburg and Berlin? Or do you really think the populations of those cities can be dispersed into the countryside when Germany is already a net importer of food? Is there a sustainable vision that includes 9 billion people and most of the existing other species on the planet?
On your own count, the village solution is being promulgated within only 9% of the German population.
There is a factor that hasn’t been mentioned yet. There are calculations that about half the food produced is wasted between paddock and plate. Presumably the village model would reduce this.
Wilful #40, yes methane is much more potent but it breaks down much quicker as well & returns to the cycle, there is I believe little new methane being produced by burping livestock. Another factor is that by decreasing the amount of methane livestock burp, and then this can be converted into better growth of the animal. There are 3 avenues of research being undertaken to achieve this, genetic improvement, introducing new bugs into the gut to convert methane & studies to look at improvements through different feed types & supplements.
Australia wide it would be a very small percentage of grasslands where any type of fertiliser is applied. It is done but in the scheme of things I don’t believe it would be all that great. Fertiliser is more widely applied within cropping, grain growing enterprises. To save a lost into the atmosphere would be a saving to farmer & any improvement a win all around.
In both cases it should not be a case of shouting blame & applying the big stick or taxes. This can be a win/win all round.
Brian @41
The sixpence in the billy was when our cow dried up and we had to buy in some milk.
Later I milked 4 cows by hand; made cheese butter and all that. Grew and ground my own wheat and about an acre of veges, plus fruit trees and olives. I won’t be out peasanted by any-one.
My model is a return to the commons with each family required to keep a garden. Livestock etc on the common.
There is really no shortage of land, its all a matter of planning and control
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46724
Much of the land that is grabbed by multinational food firms is for biofuels. Then they ship food halfway around the world. No wonder the greens bang on about food miles.
We won’t be forced into the polar regions (if that happens its all over) we will reduce our emissions, and we will do some heroic engineering like increasing the desert albedo- thats my choice at the moment, at least its easily reversible.
Huggy
Wilful @40, Please read the whole post, I’m sick of repeating myself. The cropping and livestock Carbon cycles are closed, no more greenhouse gases of any description or potency are emitted than are absorbed in the cycle.
I was waiting for someone to bring up the nitrous oxide issue. Nitrous oxide is formed during the process of denitrification when bacteria in a waterlogged soil of certain characteristics consumes N and emits N2O. Denitrification ONLY happens to the Nitrate form of Nitrogen, which as it happens is by far the most accessible form of N to a plant (they can also take up a little Ammonia). So, if a plant is to grow and produce food, it MUST have access to Nitrate. Now the question is how do farmers put the Nitrate there. Some use feedlot manure solely for their N needs, OK lets tax them for producing Nitrate and potentially N2O. Others grow legumes to supply all their Nitrate, good-o tax them too. You see the simple fact is these two methods are also closed loop systems, any N2O that goes into the atmosphere is returned as O and N (through lightning, rain, etc). What’s the point in taxing a closed loop system? Can someone being taxed then claim all that tax back because it will inevitably end up back in the ground?
Then there are those dastardly farmers who use fossil fuel based N fertilisers. Same thing happens as with legumes and other organic fertilisers except this results in a net increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, therefore tax fossil fuels, make this form of fertiliser more expensive, and the closed loop alternatives more appealing. I think if you or HB went out to the Australian farms of today you would see huge amounts of legumes in the ground as a result of recent price rises in Nitrogenous fertilisers.
Luckily for all those out there, vast amount of research have been done on N2O emissions from farms and it has been shown that under modern farming methods very little, if any is lost to the atmosphere, and it depends on a huge array of factors such a soil characteristics, moisture and temperature.
As S@D said, farmers want to see their N investment go up into the atmosphere even less than anyone concerned about climate change, as that N2O would have cost them a lot of money.
HB on a side note, you are continually going on about the energy usage in producing crops. Are you advocating we go back to the teams of draught horses? Work has to be done to produce food, I go back to my original point, if there is to be alternative energy sources, tax fossil fuels and let the alternatives be more competitive.
Brian
That is an incredible figure, in the western world waste rules supreme. If this climate change debate can achieve one thing & that is to focus our minds the better use of our resources, reduce the ridiculous amount of waste that occurs & appreciating what makes our daily lives so convenient & comfortable. I could never understand why people feel that it is fashionable to leave food untouched on their plate especially at a buffet/ smorgasbord. As a child growing up in an income-deprived household during the 70’s beef depression waste of such a precious commodity would not be tolerated. Do we need famine for people to count food as a blessing & rid society of the current practice of good fruit & vegs unable to be marketed because of minor blemishes? Reduce the percentage of food wasted & it would certainly make a difference towards the concern of food security.
still@downfall, I remembered the figure from Bush Telegraph, I think. Just for fun I googled. The first thing I got was this thread, which didn’t help at all!
Then this:
If you download the report you don’t get anything further, except it tells you what reference 26 is, which turns out to be a Swedish document (pdf) which quotes various studies of waste from around the world, from “field to fork” as they say.
It seems that there are significant losses also on the farm as well as from the plate itself.
Plenty of slack in the system.
I promised a link from Quiggin on the beef/methane issue. Here it is. See comments 2 and 18 especially. Prof Brook sees the ‘supercharging’ effect of methane as important and has written about it in various places.
I think Quiggin misunderstood what Brad Teys was saying (see comment 32) but that’s by the by. They did also talk at the Senate hearings about the possibility of capturing methane in feed lots and abattoirs.
My original point in all this debate was that it is essential that we find a way to reduce our impact upon the planet, in particular our CO2 emissions. It seems bleeding obvious that once we decouple ourselves from the things that support us we begin to abuse the very processes that are essential to us.
I worked in the “food industry” for years – you want embodied energy try “Condensed milk” for example.
Factory processing of food is energy intensive and ‘waste’ products are difficult to dispose of. Disperse the population and most of this process is bypassed and unnecessary.
Huggy
OT – but I got several virus alerts following the link to JQ’s site @47.
Just how do you get the population to disperse in any reasonable time to make a difference?
Chris,
Just do it ,
Build 1000′s of new towns string them together like pearls with a high speed light rail, a dc power system and broadband. All up you would only have to build 4000 towns with a population of 5000 each. Oh and little two way tracks for electric and lycra powered bikes and small vehicles. Split the cities with farming corridors. Keep part of the CBD’s for the wankers. Bulldoze most of the Eucalyptus weeds (Save the Mountain Ash – Eucalyptus Regnans) and replace them with trees that are actually useful.
All it needs is the vision and the will, the money is the easy part,
I can just see Kevin and Julia embracing this program. No I can’t.
Huggy
Brian, we really do neeed to stop waste, but we also need to stop wasting the nutrients that allow the plants to grow and produce food if the long term sustainability of food production is to be assured. Basically, if the nutrients farmers use are mined or come from fossil fuels they will run out, maybe not for a hundred years or more, but I’d hate to be around if alternative Phosphorus and Potassium sources aren’t found by then. If the story about peak Phosphorus is true, then that really is a worry since P as a fertiliser source has only really been used since the 50′s and vast areas of land in the former soviet as well as many other parts of the world are only starting to use it now. If it does run out then we will need to recycle what farmers grow through feedlot manure, food waste, maybe even human waste. If farmers don’t return to the soil what the crops take out, then they are mining the land themselves and will eventually see yields decline rapidly as soil reserves dry up.
The other alternative is to accept poor yields and let the current food shortage get worse and have more people around the world starve.
Brown Wiggle.
I agree the loss of nutrients has to stop as has the manufacture of nutrients from fossil fuels.
The only way to stop the loss of nutrients is as you say, to re-cycle them.
A return to the so-called organic farming methods will do this. The only way I can see is to entirely re-couple the production of food and our lives. I once met this American lady who had never seen a raw potatoe and was amazed when she saw us washing and peeling them. Oh but they are dirty she said. Like I keep saying – the dumbest people on the face of the planet.
Decentralising ourselves will do this .
Huggy
Huggy, I’m emotionally and ideologically in sympathy with everyone being closer to the land and for years I’ve followed Vandana Shiva’s advocacy for small-holder farmers in India. She reckons that 40 farms of 2.5 acres will produce more, with greater efficiency, greater diversity of output and sustainability, than one big (in the Indian context) industrial farm of 100 acres.
But does the small farm produce enough to send the kids to college and support a lifestyle that much of the world aspires to?
So what sort of scale of farm are you talking about?
On phosphorus here’s the excellent site of the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative (GPRI). It’s a joint initiative between the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), and the Department of Water and Environmental Studies at Linköping University, Sweden. Onya, UTS.
It seems that phosphorus can be used over and over again. There’s a great message coming straight from the toilet. We need to treasure the contents of our toilets, obviously.
Brian,
I have a different model, I see every able bodied person devoting some of their time in the village/town to agriculture of various types. A number of agricultural commons with some paid people and lots of part time volunteers who work for produce should work.
Once you remove the need to pay for food with hard cash and you have a roof over your head then the kids can go to the free universities that many of our leaders enjoyed.
In my vision, highly automated manufacturing enterprises are located within easy commuting distance. Many people will not have to go to workplaces at all, that’s what the broadband is for. Maybe litle work centres would be located in each town/village so that there would be considerable social interaction based upon work, people would walk to these.
It is no longer true that manufacturing enterprises need be huge in scale employing thousands of workers in a single large factory. This is a 19th century model.
Ther is no reason that any given region should not be self sufficient in basic foodstuffs and fruits etc.
Admittedly this utopia does require a social revolution, but hey, its this or the brutal dystopia that comes with global warming.
Huggy
TBW #52
These days’ spreading composted feedlot manure is a variation of the European manuring the fields in the summer by the waste from the winter barns. In an open range grazing situation there is less loss of nutrients from the soil than in the grain growing situation. Here the plant uses nutrient to grow & deposits goodness into its seed head. The grains of seed in the head are harvested & are transported off farm by truck. Fertiliser is trucked back onto farm to go into the soil because of the loss of nutrient lost in the production of the previous grain crop.
The grain is made into products such as bread, fed to humans & the nutrient the body doesn’t use goes down the john into the sewage system. Those long in the tooth will remember how the night soil cart would come around, remove the human waste, take it out of town to be buried into the soil. But to our great folly in these modern times we pipe it into the oceans to feed algae to the detriment to the environment. The nutrient cycle is busted right open as well. We need to get over the huk factor. Here is a story of a trail of composting human waste in Sydney (transcript with video link on right hand side of page) & another news story from Melbourne
As a fan of Vandana Shiva’s (nice mention, Brian) I think we need to remember one of her pearls of wisdom here…
‘Everything comes from somewhere and everything goes somewhere’
A lesson that every preschooler could learn, and that so few of us in Australia seem to understand. Should be chiselled in stone on every front step…
S@D, #57, Thanks for the explanation, I was trying to think of a way of putting it into words. I would say also that dairy farms will be extremely hard hit by fertiliser shortages, and if Phosphorus were to run out it would severly limit the beef production in Northern Australia where soil P reserves are inherently very low.
Huggy, I think alternative fuels do need to be found, even if not from the climate change aspect, then from the fact that they will run out eventually anyway and we might as well get on with renewables now. I also think that in itself is a good reason not to fund CCS, as billions are going to be spent on something that in a couple of hundred years time (maybe less) will run out anyway. But I do think that using fossil fuels to make fertiliser is critical until recycling of nutrients from cities is more widespread. It is a shame the waste water pipeline from Brisbane to the Lockyer Valley was never built – it could have sent nutrients with it. If climate change destroys farm land and fertiliser shortages occur it is going to be disasterous for food production and let’s face it, peace in the world. If a country can’t feed itself, and can’t buy food because there’s none around or it’s too expensive, do you really think they’re going to watch their neighbours with plenty of arable country feed themselves for too long?
BBC NEWS: World hunger ‘hits one billion’
The World bank is the one.
http://www.bicusa.org/en/Article.10978.aspx
Its structural adjustment loans have been directed towards destroying food production in developing countries.
See also http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=aSueX0nYxMrg&refer=japan
Extract:
“Inside, the silo, which once held thousands of tons of beans and cereals, is now empty. It was abandoned in 1991, after the bank told Salvadoran leaders to privatize grain storage, import staples such as corn and rice, and export crops including cocoa, coffee and palm oil.”
Huggy
Huggy, it’s the IMF and the WTO also.
I also the story still@downfall links to on Deutsche Welle via NewsRadio. The FAO guy said this:
So it’s money more than food that they lack. So far anyway.
But if the World Bank etc was not stuffing them around many wouldn’t need so much money to buy food. In 2005 half the world’s population lived on less than $2.50 per day.
The Food Crisis Continues – in the Form of a Global Scramble for Lucrative Farmlands
Everyone’s doing it. Chinese and Middle East countries especially for food security. Companies for biofuels and other purposes. Shysters just to make a profit. For example:
Tribals, people using common land and the poor generally will be shunted or shafted. Make sure you scroll down and read the last section – I’d Like to spend some time in Mozambique …
Very depressing.
Brian that is just too dam depressing, even for you.
Huggy, your link @ 61; another case of ideology with the blinkers on. @ 53 you wrote of the need to “re-couple the production of food and our lives.” I also believe we need to re-couple economic & the market back to natural systems. The ‘free market’ has evolved a long way from the village square market place that was subject to the variability’s of the land & it’s seasons. I brought this up before in my comment @ 22. The current market place doesn’t recognise the need for sustainability. There is no political or economic will for a re-coupling of a nutritional cycle or for the consumer with the producer.
In recent times ideology has made this situation worst. Howard deregulating the dairy industry and again Howard allowing the importation of pork. Bill O’ Chee in the midst of loosing his Senate seat left the cat out of the bag the next election night after this decision was made saying something along the line of – I’m surprised of the backlash leaving in pig meat, there aren’t too many pig farmers we didn’t think their vote would make a difference. Even as a political conservative, you need at times to be an economic socialist. Now who said that, perhaps someone unpopular with this blog site?
@ 51, ideology will prevent KRudd from entertaining any vision of dispersing the population. During the reign of Wayne Goss, our current PM was the hatchet man who wrecked carnage on regional Qld. Over recent decades in Qld the interstate migration has been packed into the SE corner. No consideration to what limitation a resource base will have on a greater population size, hence the recent water restrictions. No thought of the sacrilege of building over the top of arable land. We get cheap food from a big supermarket & they truck it in from somewhere…who cares?
still@downfall
I think we are basically in agreement. The “market” as we understand it today is totally de-coupled from all sorts of externalities such as environmental degradation and so on.
The ETS is for example an attempt to use the market to reduce a serious environmental risk. It will fail because it has the solution arse about. Fix the underlying problems, re-couple the generation and utilisation of energy to our needs and we have a chance of sorting the issues.
KRudd and all his cohorts are entirely incapable of the vision required to decentralise and restructure our world. The libretads are a magnitude worse and the Greens can only bleat solarr solarr. The most empty and banal mantra of our age.
Huggy
Hey Huggy, or anyone: what do you make of what’s been reported of Anna’s attempt at pretending she’s got a green bone in her body, via the announcement of the (Warning: Qld gov’t PR glossy brochure alert, exposure can be hazardous to mental and moral health) Queensland Renewable Energy Plan :
WTF? Solar thermal to be precluded from renewables funding, but PV is ok? Surely the journo has it wrong, but damned if I can find any detail about what Mar’n Fer’s'n, who has carriage of it, is gonna do with Renewables Australia.
A key note speaker at the recent National Farmers Federation congress was Professor Julian Cribb who spoke on a key focus of this thread ie. food security. Here are links to two different accounts of this address, firstly from The Land which takes up one of Cribb’s points; a massive decline in agricultural research is one of the main drivers of food insecurity.
This second link is the account given by The Age which concentrates on the future challenges of feeding the world.
So S@D, what do you make of the the plan to spend $220 million on a soybean (imported) processing facility in Pt Kembla designed to produce 800,000 tonnes of soybean meal and 288 million litres of biodiesel?
Apparently the driver of the project, (as opposed to the biodiesel PR aspect), is the fact that we import “650,000 metric tons of Soybean Meal (SBM) from Argentina and Brazil each year. SBM is an essential ingredient to the human food chain, providing the majority of the protein required in human diets. It is often described as the backbone of the human food chain and results in the milk, cheese, eggs, chicken, pork, fish and beef we eat everyday.”…. I’m obviously out of touch, thinking we have herds of bovines wandering turning paddock into tucker. This “SBM provides the majority of protein in human diets?” line, can that be right? This is the feed lot phenomenon I’m guessing, what proportion of killed cattle weight is put on in that final feed? Sheep still do it the old fashioned way?
Does this have much potential for distorting the farm sector, everyone who can putting in soy beans? “The majority of human diet protein” sure makes it sound like a massive commodity industry, plenty of slices to go round.
I’d kinda been hoping we were gonna get our green diesel by turning the waste brackish water (from the coal seam gas projects being foisted on us?), CO2 and sunlight into algae oil. Oh well, not in this girtbysea it seems.
Danny, none of this is straight forward. My personal opion is that we shouldn’t be using food to manufacture fuel for the internal combustion motor. However if there is a biomass or a waste product that is being dumped, then why not. Have to be careful with the definition of waste, for example, after wheat is harvest the residue straw is left in the paddock. Is this a waste biomass? I say not, return it to the soil & it has very valuable properties.
With the soy, it would be pressed & the oil extracted. The oil would be what is being used to make bio-diesel, the soy with the oil extracted out is what is used in foodstuffs. Could this oil be better used elsewhere, would need to research that one. How much soy is used in our grocery items? Probably less than what you indicated but the more someone moves towards a vegan type diet the more important it would be. This a bit out of my field, you would need a nutritionist to give a difinitive answer. Soy is an option in animal feed depending on the cost per % of protein amongst it’s competitors such as canola meal, cotton seed meal & copra meal. These meals are used in feedlots to create a balanced nutritional diet. Most feedlots are regularely in touch with animal nutritionists. Bovines wandering the paddock are only fed these meals (soy, copra etc,) as a supplement in times of drought or as a base for the delivery of trace elements & vitamins. Natural stuff, I’ll add, not chemicals or hormones.
How many cattle are in feedlots in Australia? Because of the very narrow margins feedlot space is not always filled if one or more input costs go too high. Generally most meat in the big supermarkets is feedlot, the butcher shop especially MSA labelled, grass fed.I would think the majority of meat is still grass fed. @34,35 & 36 the emotive ‘factory farm’ feedlots was brought up. Found something more that I was surprised about at the Beef CRC site.
Like I said at the beginning none of this is straightforward. That is why it is annoying to be subjected to simplistic, you’re the blame, its all bad type of comments. If food security is going to be the problem down the track, then shouldn’t we be more careful of how we use the food & what wastage there is in delivering food & how much food is thrown out into the garbage from the average household.
Can you tell me how much research monies have been committed to the likes of your algae generated green diesel on the problematic coal seam gas water? How well are we spending our research dollar? Has it become too much focused on short term results or on what the commercial partners are after or on the agenda of the Government of the day?
Off line for next couple of days. Cheers
Danny, I think Marn’s view is that coal is a form of renewable energy, ‘coz we’ve still got heaps of it left in the ground.
Brad Teys of Teys Bros (abattoir operators) said at the Senate Committee hearings that 25% of Australian beef comes through feedlots. I think there is a further distinction there, however, in that many of these feedlots are used to ‘finish’ the animals. I’m under the impression that this is usually a matter of a month or not much more. But I simply don’t have authoritative figures.
For Teys the problems of the CPRS were twofold. First, in order to escape the CPRS scheme your operation had to be less than 25 kilotonnes pa. This meant that only the efficient abattoirs would be included. All of the Teys sites did more than 25 kt.
In all this meant that the 30% most efficient portion of the industry would be included.
Secondly, Treasury modelling which found minimal adverse impacts across a range of sectors assumed that major developing country emitters would be shortly included in emissions capping regimes and carbon trading. This was unrealistic because there was little chance that competitors like Brazil and Argentina would be included before 2020. A pity because the Australian industry produced less GHG per tonne of beef produced than most.
Bargasse, the fibre remnants of sugar cane after it has been crushed to extract the juice is also of interest because it can be used for fuel, mulch, animal feed and paper production.
Speaking of bagasse, I happened to be down Rocky Point bagasse-fueled electricity co-generation ( the bagasee produces energy for the sugar mill its attached to, and more besides thus it can export to grid ) power-plant today picking up a trailer load of mulch. it produces 160,000MWh annually – enough to supply around 18,000 homes. I never realised how much sugar was being grown so close the city. Driving through the miles of cane I was thinking, well surely other more foodlike crops can be grown here.
I’d been recommended the supplier by Northey Street city farm, and my wonderings were answered as i drove up to the place: one of the cane cockies fields was covered in what looked to me a big clover type leaf. It turns out he rotates his fields with soy beans, doesn’t need fertilizer ( which explains why Northey street does business with him). The nitrogen fixing nodules in the soy plant roots were impressive.
I wonder how much of all that land we devote to sugarcane is down to that monument to unconscienable capitalism, Coca Cola, and its ilk? Taking those sorts of profligate libertine economic distortions out of the equation, (and I put displacing food crop resources for feeding internal combustion engines in that category), is a food security scenario I’d like to see modelled.
Re: coal seam process water for growing algae oil – the closest I’ve got so far is a “Sustainable Living with Sustainable Energy” blog by a New Guinea man who’s doing Biofuel Research, especially with the use of microbes for biodiesel/biogas, in China (Biosystems & Bioprocess Engineering,Sch. of Biotechnology, Jiangnan University). His blog notes “An eight planned liquified natural gas projects worth $50 billion in investment in south eastern Queensland have prompted environmental concerns over massive quantities of toxic, salty water. Recycled water from the early stage of the project is feeding a trial biofuels crop”. CSIRO, has concluded that the cost of saltwater algae production is now, based on current science, lower than the cost of diesel from fossil crude oil. Acres of photobioreactors fixing sunlight, waste mine water, and CO2 as green diesel anyone? I’m glad China is moving on it. Mind you, they are also buying up Africa by the tens of milions of acres for jatropha and palm oil operations, which is not so good.
Not strictly on topic, but …
I chased up that mine water/ biofuels reference:
So some(!!?) of the coal seam fossil fixed carbon released energy is spent on reverse-osmosing the brine (what’s Bob Carr call de-sal plant water, bottled electricity?) to irrigate land that would otherwise have been food-productive, to squeeze out some ‘biofuel’? I’d like to see the carbon/energy/acres/food equation at work here.
But that doesn’t matter, what matters is John Campbell, Origin and ConocoPhillips are making money, the qld goverment is getting taxes, and we all have energy on tap to burn as our lifestyle choices see fit.
What’s the atmos CO2 concentration going to be when we’ve finally succeeded in oxidizing and releasing all the global known fossil fuel reserves, which is what seems to be capital’s main project? I’m assuming there’s plenty of oxygen out there for 2 atoms of it to get bound to each of those fossil C atoms’s, and enough left behind to breathe.
danny said:
Excuse me, but I and millions of other *like* Coke. So you can fuck-off with that.
Danny at 72.
Sugar cane is not a crop that is prominent in NSW – the area cropped is close to the Q’ld border but usually grown on low lying and often water inundated areas.
While the case you mention involved rotation cropping this is perhaps not the major practice in all areas as few other crops would tolerate the water logged soils.
An alternative for cane growers which is being trialled in northern NSW is rice cultivation.
It is the dry style of planting and relies on the areas being very wet for long periods of the year. So far the outcome is unclear but last I read about the project it was contemplated that the rice produced would be used as stock feed.This was due to the quality of the grain produced by the rice varieties that would grow in the chosen areas.
Brian – feedlots have a couple of feeding plans – long feed or short feed to obtain various carcass specifications .
The real puzzle in all this is that some consumers appear to prefer fatty meat. There are however other consumers who like lean meat – this is ofetn referred to as the Jap Ox market. This is a slight misnomer as the meat is preferred in the non japanese asian markets where rapid cook , stir frying is employed. I can grow steers to this specification on pasture but the price per kg based on hot carcass weight is lower .
If consumers change their preference and start buying this meat suppliers will soon change their production. While this may allow better use of land for crop production the grass fed beef may produce more methane.
One other point about grain feeding is that the resulting fat deposition allows better carcass storage when blast chilled. A certain amount of fat helps preserve the meat quality- usually 6-12 mm (P8 – tail base area )of cover attracting the premium price.
Danny, where the heck is Rocky Point? From your description of sugar grown close to the city I’m thinking you mean the area east of Beenleigh towards Jacob’s Well on the coast. (For people unfamiliar, Beenleigh is just south of Brisbane on the way to the Gold Coast.) During the 1990s I had to go to Jacob’s Well quite a bit and drove through the lush fields of cane.
The big issue with cane is that you need a sugar mill nearby. Because of that if you have a sugar-growing area you can’t subdivide any of the farms or the mill becomes unviable.
Back in the 90s I understand that area was to be the site of the ill-fated Multifunction Polis, which you can read about here, here and here.
The MFP was a futuristic high tech city project, to be a joint venture between Japan and Australia. The idea was that the Japanese would land at Brisbane airport, head down the proposed ‘koala road’ to the MFP which was to be situated minutes away from the Gold Coast.
The story I heard was that Qld lost out to Adelaide because Goss, on a trip to China, refused to take a phone call in the early hours of the morning from John Button. When Goss got up in the morning he’d lost the project.
Adelaide’s bright idea was to put the MFP on toxic wasteland at Port Adelaide. Somehow that didn’t turn the Japanese on and the rest is history. Goss lost four seats because of the ill-conceived koala road and sugar is still grown in the area east of Beenleigh, as far as I know.
Not particularly on topic, but maybe interesting.
Brian, I did some work for the Adelaide Uni Geography Dept around the MFP in the late 90s. I was a gopher for an academic who’d got a grant to study the social and economic effects it would have on Adelaide’s northern suburbs, and I collected a bunch of spatialy-referenced data for him and built a couple of databases. At that stage, it still looked like someone might remediate the toxic land-filled swamps of Gillman, but it ended up transmogrifying into the Mawson Lakes housing development. Joy.
Correction. Mid 90s.
David, I had the impression it was an idea that started in Japan, but when it came to doing something they’d forgotten about it. We were probably lucky you guys got the project.
But given the requirement of preserving the catchment of a sugar mill the area here where it was going to go was like a time warp amongst all the other surrounding development in SEQ last time I saw it. I’m not sure how many people even knew (know?) it’s there.
Maybe you were, Brian.
Still, Mawson Lakes is a lovely development. It would do the Qld white shoe brigade proud, I’m sure …