Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
well I think that for the future agriculture we need to look at not only
making it more resilient on the landscape more diversity but we also have tp look at the
energy
systems because
our agriculture today if you look at it anywhere across the US you can see
it's highly depend upon cheap fossil fuels
not only for the tractors and combines but for um the fertilizers are a bigger
a bigger demand on fossil fuels so we're going to have to look at
systems that are more resilient and and need less fossil fuels but also we're
going to have to build in the system
some ways of creating our own energy sources
and so for example
if you look at what we're doing in in the midwest for energy we're making
a lot of ethanol for cars that go down the highway
and frankly the cars that take that ethanol get really poor mileage so we're
in a sense we're not using it very efficiently we're kinda wasting it
I've calculated that for every gallon of ethanol made from corn
we lose two gallons of soil to erosion
so it's not a sustainable system here
but now what if we could instead
use perennial crops
like prairie plants and make
a fuel
out of that make it at the local scale at the farm scale to power the farm
um there is technology one uh...thermal thermal uh...
systems one's called pyrolysis
and it can be done on the small scale
so let's imagine if we could make fuel from a perennial crop whether it's a woodland
woodlot or a praire lot
make fuel on the farm to to power the machinery of the farm and we don't need
as much
fuel to grow that crop like corn and soybeans and we don't need much energy grow it
because much more self-sufficient
so we're using less energy and we're creating our energy on the farm
so we need to look at those kind of things and also a solar and wind
a combination like bill mckibben said don't look for one silver bullet like ethanol
uh... look for a silver buckshot a lot of things altogether will take
care of the problem
The farms
could be self powered
and not only self powered but but use much less energy because they're using um for
example animals harvesting their own feed instead of tractors harvesting feed
because you look at that most dairy farms for example the cows are confined by
the milking facility and then that all the feed is harvested at a distance brought
to the animals
fed to them daily
and the manure is then collected and then take it out to the field
whereas if you can design it right uh... based on the ecological model
all you have to do after each milking
is open the next pasture gate the cows go in the pasture you close the gate they harvest their
feed
they spread their own manure where it needs to be
they enjoy their work
and and so you save all that energy cost
there was an editor magazine column
I forget his name right now who said
it's the nature of grass to stand in one place and for cows to move about
but we've made the cows stand in one place and have the grass move to the cows
and that's only because of cheap
fuel that we can do that and so now we need to to look at how we can uh...
utilize uh... the energy and organizing power of nature's
ecology to do that for us