Further to my recent article on how rising food prices will be good news for rural communities all over the world, The Land newspaper has carried an interesting report on how rising energy and fertiliser costs (Nitrogen is now $1000/tonne) have restored and reinforced the economics of growing nitrogen fixing cover crops in fallow rotation.
Cotton farmers routinely add 200kg of nitrogen/ hectare but the growing and ploughing-in of Vetch in rotation has been found to add 140kg in a more balanced application that is safer for the following cotton crop in dry times. It substantially reduces cash outflows, leaving the synthetic form of this fertiliser as an 'opportunity outlay' to boost production in a good year. It seems the humble Fava Bean is almost as good for this purpose, with the advantage of producing a cash crop as well.
The implications of this, not just for farmers in less developed nations, is that they have the means to boost production in response to higher world food prices without placing additional demands on world oil/fertiliser supplies. In poorer countries the input cost is no more than the price of seeds and the farm family's own labour.
Regards
Ian Mott
Interesting case Motty. I bet all the officials involved have deleted the whole exercise from their CVs by now.
A few years back there was a fairly costly, publicly subsidised, failure of a sugar processors co-generation project. The plan was to use sugar cane waste and wood waste as feed stock to a power plant. A large part of that failure was due to the scale of the waste disposal problem presented by huge volumes of ash.
This was compounded by supply chain surges and resulting storage issues presented by wood supplied from governement approved development sites which delivered very large volumes of feedstock over short periods.
The greens had been instrumental in ensuring that thinnings and harvest waste from private and public native forests were excluded from the project even though this source offered a stable supply of feedstock on a low cost, just-in-time basis.
And this proved to be the critical flaw in the whole exercise. For farmers and forest owners have another name for ash. They call it potassium. They also recognise potassium as one of the key fertiliser elements in NPK.
And if they had been seriously consulted at any time in the planning process they could have advised that potassium, in the form of ash beds, has been recorded to boost tree growth by up to six times that of trees outside the ash beds.
They could also have been advised that improvements in soil nutrient levels flows directly into the nutrient levels of the trees leaves, buds, bark and sap and thereby boosts the carrying capacity of dependent wildlife.
And if they had been consulted at any time of the planning process they could have advised that this costly pile of ash also had a value. They could have been advised that a just-in-time delivery of forest thinnings would enable the economical back-loading (or pre-loading) of this ash to the same forest where it could be spread under the retained trees to boost their growth and to increase their rate of carbon sequestration.
But they didn't consult with forest owners at any stage of the project. They accepted green bull$hit as the full extent of knowledge relating to such a project. And both the government and the now barely viable sugar mill got the dismal $20 million plus failure they so richly deserved.
What the, aptly named, patients on the hospital waiting lists might have done with the $20 million is another story. But some of them are probably dead by now anyway.
But thats life (and death) and governance in the brave new green utopia.