Newfie wrote:I think it was Baha who, on another thread said we need roughly 4 acres of arable land per person and used that to calculate Earths sustainable population limit at about 850 millions. If that ratio is correct we are waaay last peak soil.
Fortunately it is not accurate. I have pointed out on this website a dozen or so times that world population before the fossil fuel industrial revolution was about 850 million, and at that time Australia, central Africa and half of both South America and North America were not being exploited for agriculture. Just exploiting those regions which were not yet in production in 1800 (most of the USA and Canada, a chunk of Mexico and half of South America) would easily bring that number up to 1,500 Million aka 1.5 Billion. That also presumes your best farm equipment is an iron spike edge wooden plow drawn by an ox! Now add in modern grains that are substantially higher yield through thousands of generations of selective breeding in the last 200 years. Then add in steel plows ala John Deere (who owned the patent for the first steel plow in North America) and McCormick style reapers drawn by oxen or draft horses. Take a look at a Mennonite/Amish farm some time, the machines they use are animal powered and require a lot of effort to handle, but they get the job done in a reasonable fashion.
Look I am a historian by training and grew up on a small farm raising poultry and beef with an occasional hog or sheep. Farmers tend to be dour folk at times because it is a labor intensive trade where you need good insurance because nature can be a real b____ about droughts, deluges, hailstorms, blights and weeds and unexpected events you might never see coming until they slam you to the ground. But they are in no wise stupid. Farmers have managed to eke out not only a personal living but provide sustenance to city folks going all the way back at least 8,000 years. If some of the theories about river delta farms that were lost when the last ice age ended are accurate then farming actually goes back a few thousand more years than that. there is some archeological evidence that farming was going on quite successfully on the continental shelves that were rapidly flooded when the ice dams broke and the huge glacial meltwater lakes flooded out the Columbia gorge into the Pacific and the Saint Lawrence Seaway into the Atlantic around 13,000 ybp. Bits and pieces that indicate settled agricultural communities exists on those continental verges off the Indian Subcontinent and around the Black Sea have been pulled up in drag nets by fishermen scores of times, and the investigations of those relics have lead to some interesting possibilities.
Baha's four acre concept is based on pure row crop agriculture, which is actually a pretty lousy way to farm and highly dependent on modern fossil fuel inputs like the huge agribusinesses shrunk down to a small scale. On four acres of poor quality land you can raise 320 healthy chickens in a relatively free range system where you have eight flocks of 40 that you rotate through the land instead of letting them pick and choose at random. If you are smart enough to do that you are smart enough to cull out all but 16 of the roosters, two per flock. With the rest being hens that gives you 300 eggs per day. You might be deathly sick of eggs on an all egg diet, but one to two dozen eggs a day will sustain a healthy adult human indefinitely providing all the necessary fats and essential proteins you need to be physically healthy. Say you love eggs and eat four dozen a day. 300-48=252 eggs to sell or trade with other folks for other things ranging from cash to a wider variety of foods DAILY. You can also pickle eggs pretty easily, or cook them and freeze the cooked eggs for later consumption, and best of all with such a large flock you will need to let a select number of hens reproduce with the aid of those roosters you saved each year to replace the hens that are slowing down in their production through the effects of time. A good laying hen has a useful existence of 3-5 years depending on how slow a production rate you find acceptable. Commercial egg operations often slaughter layers at age 2 because they are aiming for max production rates, but that is an economic decision, not a hard fast rule of nature. A ten year old hen will still lay eggs, just at a vastly lower rate rather than a new egg every day. Those hens you breed replacements for become your chicken soup for those cold winter days and the roosters you slaughter at maturity in excess of the breeding stock you keep are your Sunday Dinner.
Point being, an animal based agriculture approach can not only exploit great big chunks of land useless for row crops, it can provide you a lot more energy dense food from those acres of land. the old time farms where they grew a mixture of crops plus livestock plus poultry all on one mixed farm has some pretty nice advantages in terms of healthy sustainable practices that limit erosion and build rather than deplete the soil. just because the idiot corporation run farms deplete the soil and do a lot of stupid things does not mean all topsoil everywhere is "disappearing". A lot of the places those big farms are located use a lot of irrigation to get much growth at all, and once they finish off depleting the fossil water aquifers they will become yesterdays news.