Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire can we farm and still maintain the sustainability of the earth?

some people thinks with enough technology added to the equation we can do about anything.

and i hope they are correct in their thinking. to remain positive is a powerful perspective.

what we've got is a demand for profits above all else. and that's fine too.

as long as the profits remain in a sustainable area of humanity.

given the maximum productivity of the urth, how are profits allocated?

Given good weather, I'd say quite a lot. Everything has it's limits however.

Hehehe....I guess I will go first.


You actually cant have sustainability with out a profit. Well, at least at the production level.

Sustainability and profit are not mutually exclusive at levels above the indentured servitude where the farmers live either.


What had messed everything up was a drive for PRODUCTION.

With the emphasis on production only, productivity has gone down.

exactly! many solutions inside the available matrix.

then the question becomes just how big is the matrix?

no doubt somebody somewhere is doing some thinking?

or not?

It's a problem of distribution. The US could grow a lot more food if the excess water from the east could be transported west of the Rockies where we're always short. We have millions of farmable acres but no water. 8" of rainfall doesn't cut it. Of course there's the problem that much of that farmable land is public land but if people got hungry enough that could change.

yes, pure economics is a powerful driving force.

we're going forward with humans on the earth.

nationalism or globalism who much cares?

people have to eat, no matter what we say.

we've got the gov't, but also the markets.

the markets always rule, don't they?

No, they dont.

i'm glad the us gov't through it's agriculture and epa departments hasn't usurped the farmers rights to farm.

the ruskies under the communistas, and the red chi-coms revamped everything.

for us, we just address production through subsidies of one kind or another.

food stamps need to be defended by all farmers. it's their life-blood.

the 2 percent of farmers in this economy lives on food stamps.

but that's fine. the citizens in the big cities need to eat.

Gus, you are behind the times.


I could give a fuuck less about the food stamp market.

Well maybe if I was growing Fritos and Coca Cola.....



It's a global market for us.


We make more chow than we can eat.

fair enough. i guess we could do without the food stamp piece of the marketplace, and you'd have not probem with that.

me neither. so, we're on the same playing field. as far as food stamps, let the markets rule.

a lot of se usa chickens flow into the carribbean. thank god for markets.

Gus.

Go read the farming thread.

We will do just fine.

maybe, maybe not.

somebody at the top of the hierarchy better start showing some intense ldrshp.

i like nationalism as a concept, but there might be more to it than that?

we're down here on the globe, and maybe a few folks are in denial?

I am leading from the bottom Gus.

carry on, troop. i'm with ya.

humans needing humans, what a concept.

Again Gus you have opened Pandora's Box. No quick easy answers from me. This gentleman spent some time on the issue.

We'll trade you one of the Great Lakes for a mountain range. You include good numbers of elk and mule deer with the mountains and we include fish with the lake. Walleye? You have to keep all of your wolves, as we have too many already. Deal?

Because the Communist 5 year plans worked so well when they killed hundreds of millions of people?

The more you keep goberment out, and the more you leave this to the free and fair markets, the better off our results will be.

absolutely population keeps going up yields keep going up. Not much has changed

I think nationalism is actually the key to the solution, not the problem.

Globalism makes competitors lazy. Instead of inventing something better, they just move a factory to a place with cheaper labor or lax environmental enforcement. Making more money is about cutting costs, not inventing a better mouse trap.

With nationalism, you can't do that. Want to make more money? You have to improve something, because you can't just find some poor humans somewhere to exploit. You have to invent a better mouse trap. Necessity is the mother of invention. If you want to beat the Russians in the space race, you have to have a space race, first......

As far as agriculture goes, sure, there's plenty of room for improvement --- at a cost. Put me up a greenhouse, and I'll grow you a quarter million pounds of tomatoes per acre, per year. But it takes a half million $ to get that show on the road. We just have to have a reason and the money to get there.