Crest

A view from the west

Featuring food, fuel and the future in Jersey

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American agriculture and the barrier of scale.
Crest
[info]st_ouennais
"America will not pass a cap-and-trade law in time for the global climate-change summit in Copenhagen next month. To understand why, it helps to ask a farmer. Take Bruce Wright, for example, who grows wheat and other crops on a couple of thousand acres near Bozeman, Montana. His family has tilled these fields for four generations." "He loves his job and the rural way of life. But he fears that higher energy prices will endanger both. But he cannot see how he could run his farm without cheap fossil fuels. He has no full-time employees, but owns about 20 vehicles."

http://www.enn.com/agriculture/article/40704


The knub of the problem is that of scale. Clearly there is no way to run a farm of a couple of thousand acres on one's own without a massive dependence on machinery and the fuel that drives that machinery. But it is a vicous cycle - as the famers have mechanised the rural jobs and population have dwindled, and without the labour force there is no choice but to further mechanise. The huge capital costs of the machinery can only be covered by cropping vast areas with it, and that drives a monoculture approach. These mega scale diversity deserts have no hope of relocalising and rescaling agriculture. It is why I keep emphasing to those that would listen that we in Jersey with our necessarily very small scale farming have an opportunity to get it right where others simply cannot follow. Small is beautiful.

Carbon Credits.

(Anonymous)

2009-11-24 01:07 (UTC)

All people who are simply adding to Global warming has to be at least punished so that they know what they are doing.

There are some who contribute to global warming out of neccessity and they can offset it by buying carbon credits.

Carbon offsets aim to neutralize the amount of Co2 emissions contribution by funding projects which should cause an equal reduction of emissions somewhere else, such as tree planting. Under the premise, first reduce what you can, then offset the remainder, offsetting can be done by supporting a responsible carbon project, or by buying carbon credits.


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