Food & agriculture – Jan 17

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Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage

Monster Bunnies For North Korea
David Crossland, Der Spiegel
An east German pensioner who breeds rabbits the size of dogs has been asked by North Korea to help set up a big bunny farm to alleviate food shortages in the communist country. Now journalists and rabbit gourmets from around the world are thumping at his door.

It all started when Karl Szmolinsky won a prize for breeding Germany’s largest rabbit, a friendly-looking 10.5 kilogram “German Gray Giant” called Robert, in February 2006.

Images of the chubby monster went around the world and reached the reclusive communist state of North Korea, a country of 23 million which according to the United Nations Food Programme suffers widespread food shortages and where many people “struggle to feed themselves on a diet critically deficient in protein, fats and micronutrients.”
(10 Jan 2007)
Raising rabbits for meat has been common among European smallholders. They fit into the recycling that accompanies gardens. -BA

Agricultural efficiency?
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
…We like to think that industrial agriculture is more efficient – with all those big tractors bustling about, it must be, right? And that’s true, if you are talking about extracting the maximum amount of food from a place with a minimum of human labor – that is, if you want to use 1 person to feed 1000 people. But if you talk about what the land is capable of producing, the land can produce much, much more food when farmed in smaller, even much smaller units. This is a really important thing. If land efficiency is calculated as “the most food/fiber/fertility I can generate with the fewest human inputs” then tractors make a lot sense. But if land efficiency is calculated as “the most food/fiber/fertility I can generate *per piece of land*” then tractor farming is much, much, much less efficient. The per acre output of a 10000 acre farm is 2000 times lower than the per acre output of a 1 acre farm.
(14 Jan 2007)
From a longer post by Sharon called “A Little Weasel In It:” How our Language Tells Us What We Think, which questions how our language might influence our interaction with the land. -AF

[Audio] Can Orgnanic Farming Save Us From Climate Change?
Craig Sams, The Two Degrees Show
Soil Association Chair, Craig Sams tells us how a global transition to organic farming could cut global greenhouses gases by over half the amount we need to stabilise the climate.

Soil Association Chair, Craig Sams, has been making some extraordinary claims. He calculates that a worldwide transition to organic farming could help us reduce carbon in the atmosphere by half the amount that we need to in order to stabilise climate change. Sams – who is also the founder of Whole Earth Foods and Green & Blacks Chocolate – sees carbon pricing as a way of making this transition possible. Next week we hope to get a couple of independent experts to examine these claims and their implications.

Craig Sams’ Martin Radcliffe Lecture 2005
www.craigsams.com/pages/martinradcliffe.html
Soil Association
www.soilassociation.org
(15 Jan 2007)
Try this direct link to the mp3 file (27MB) if the site is running slowly. -AF