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Quotes about Crop Production from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"Australia suffered through a drought that affected 60 percent of its 67,000 farms. crop production fell by 31 percent. Even irrigated farms growing cotton and rice suffered from water shortages. Wind erosion blasted the dry grain fields and pastures. A dust storm in February 1983 carried at least 150,000 metric tons of soil from farms in Victoria into Melbourne and far offshore. Bush fires in southeast South Australia and Victoria consumed 500,000 hectares, killing 72 people and more than 300,000 animals." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.)

"Emerging inrerest in supporting an agrarian land ethic is embodied in the slow food and ear-local movements that try to shorten the distance between crop production and consumption. Yet energy efficiency in the delivery of food to the table is not some radical new idea. Romans shipped grain around the Mediterranean because the wind provided the energy needed to transport food long distances. That's why Notth Africa, Egypt, and Syria fed Rome—it was too inefficient (and difficult) to drag western European produce over the mountains into central Italy." - David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Get the book.)

"Indeed, the global pattern will see a generalised shift in crop production away from the tropics and towards the more temperate higher-latitude regions, where cooler, wetter climes still prevail. There may still be enough food in these more northerly areas, but this tropical temperature crunch spells disaster for hundreds of millions of people. As always, drought will play a key role. Agriculture in Africa's semi-arid tropics is largely rain-fed rather than based on irrigation, so is highly vulnerable to climatic shifts." - Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Get the book.) "Even in Canada increases in cereal crop production in the Prairies will be limited by water availability. Where water is plentiful, however, Canadian corn and soybeans could see big jumps in yields. Potatoes and winter wheat would also benefit. According to a study looking at the US and Canada: 'The range over which major crops are planted could eventually shift hundreds of kilometres to the north." - Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Get the book.) "In addition, none of the continent of Australia - except perhaps the extreme north and Tasmania - will be able to support significant crop production in the four-degree world because of heatwaves and declining rainfall. In India, precipitation is projected to increase in most areas because of a more intense summer monsoon, but with land temperatures soaring to 5°C or more above current levels, it will simply be too hot for most crops to survive. Moreover, faster evaporation in the hotter climate may actually make soils drier in many areas." - Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Get the book.)

"The contemporaneous development of crop production and animal husbandry reinforced each other; both allowed more food to be produced. Sheep and cattle turn parts of plants we can't eat into milk and meat. Domesticated livestock not only added their labor to increase harvests, their manure helped replenish soil nutrients taken up by crops. The additional crops then fed more animals that produced more manure and led in turn to greater harvests that fed more people. Employing ox power, a single farmer could grow far more food than needed to feed a family." - David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Get the book.) "To sustain crop production, technologically driven increases in crop yields will have to double just to stay even. European teseatchets also report that organic farms are more efficient and less detrimental to soil fertility. A twenty-one-year comparison of crop yields and soil fertility showed that organic plots yielded about 20 percent less than plots cultivated using pesticide-and-fertilizer-intensive methods. However, the organic plots used a third to half the input of fertilizer and enetgy and virtually no pesticides." - David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Get the book.)

"With more plentiful rains, crop production can potentially increase, offsetting declines elsewhere - assuming, that is, that temperatures are not so high that people who once died from famine now die from heatstroke. However, computer modellers based in Princeton, New Jersey, have come up with a rather different long-range forecast. Their model accurately simulates the terrible 1970s and 1980s drought - but after a short interlude of higher rainfall, it projects even fiercer drought conditions for the Sahel region in the second half of the twenty-first century." - Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Get the book.)

"In his 1970 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Norman Borlaug, pioneering developer of the green revolution's high-yield rice, credited synthetic fertilizet production for the dramatic increases in crop production. "If the high-yielding dwarf wheat and rice varieties are the catalysts that have ignited the Gteen Revolution, then chemical fertilizer is the fuel that has powered its forward thrust." - David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Get the book.)

"In Mexico, chemicals banned in the United States are used for crop production, and I detailed the extensive contamination of Mexican produce with chemicals banned in the United States in Diet for a Poisoned Planet. Maria Cone reports in the Los Angeles Times most of these women were exposed to DDT through recent applications of the compound, noting that DDT was used on farms until 1995 and for mosquito control until 2000. DDT continues to be used worldwide today as protection against malaria." - David Steinman, Safe Trip to Eden: Ten Steps to Save Planet Earth from the Global Warming Meltdown (Get the book.)

"This study, however, is based on standard agriculture, which includes the raising of animals for food—making this type of agriculture up to 30 percent less efficient than plant-based crop production. The latter is still a strain on resources, but a considerably smaller one. Each time a plant-based so that there is not always net energy gain. Some alternatives that have been experimented with Food production, processing, and delivery are the greatest threats to environmental health. meal is eaten instead of a meat-containing one, fewer resources are being consumed." - Brendan Brazier, The Thrive Diet: The Whole Food Way to Lose Weight, Reduce Stress, and Stay Healthy for Life (Get the book.)

"Fertilizer is (be lands of crop production, and mai pared to (be prices of the crops they befp to produce, fertilizers were sera so cheap as they are today. more crops will be raised ia America this year than erer before, stake erery acre injMd sad pries of crops will ssore thaa pay si/the fertilizerexpense?ii will enable yon to farm wkh profit. Don't spend yoor line wrrtisi woe* oh bunk Ms** ft pay—Fsrtilire with Haosers Orsmlc PertMW. Mauser Packing Company • lb and M*tw St*. ,m£h?-mmoo !-?Aagefc*. Cat This Hctuser fertilizer ad was one of the earliest uses of the farming-as-war message." - Will Allen, The War on Bugs (Get the book.)

"The leaf is obtained as a by-product from the root crop production and is imported from eastern European countries. Constituents: 6—10% mucilage (swelling index, according to Ph. Eur., not less than 12) consisting of different polysaccharides, mainly galacturono-rhamnans with arabinogalactans and glucans [1—3]. Leaves with the highest Wording of the package insert German Standard License (St. Zul. 10th Suppl, Published July 1994) 6." - Josef A. Brinckmann and Michael P. Lindenmaier, Herbal Drugs and Phytopharmaceuticals: A Handbook for Practice on a Scientific Basis (Get the book.)

"Although there seems to be a downward trend in biotech crop production and FDA approvals, it is still a significant concern. Most soy, cotton, and canola are genetically modified, in addition to half of the corn produced. GMO seeds and crops do not focus on nutrition, and even if added to the seed, may not be delivered properly into our bodies. A very real health concern related to eating these foods is whether or not the genetic manipulation of the seed will lead to increased risk of diseases, such as cancer or even disabling deformities." - KC Craichy, Super Health 7 Golden Keys to Unlock Lifelong Vitality (Get the book.)

"Big domestic mammals also interacted with domestic plants in two ways to increase crop production. First, as any modern gardener or farmer still knows by experience, crop yields can be greatly increased by manure applied as fertilizer. Even with the modern availability of synthetic fertilizers produced by chemical factories, the major source of crop fertilizer today in most societies is still animal manure—especially of cows, but also of yaks and sheep. Manure has been valuable, too, as a source of fuel for fires in traditional societies." - Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Get the book.) "Of all the food-acquiring methods of Aboriginal Australians, millet harvesting is perhaps the one most likely to have evolved eventually into crop production. Along with intensified food gathering in the last 5,000 years came new types of tools. Small stone blades and points provided more length of sharp edge per pound of tool than the large stone tools they replaced. Hatchets with ground stone edges, once present only locally in Australia, became widespread. Shell fishhooks appeared within the last thousand years." - Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Get the book.) "In Chapter 9 we encountered Eurasia's 13 species, which became its chief source of animal protein (meat and milk), wool, and hides, its main mode of land transport of people and goods, its indispensable vehicles of warfare, and (by drawing plows and providing manure) a big enhancer of crop production. Until waterwheels and windmills began to replace Eurasia's mammals in medieval times, they were also the major source of its "industrial" power beyond human muscle power—for example, for turning grindstones and operating water lifts." - Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Get the book.)

"However, these same energy problems will surely reduce crop production, which would lead to reduced food aid to desperate populations in poor nations, which would then lead to compromised immune systems and the migration of poor, hungry, and probably unhealthy people —and by "migration" I do not mean the orderly entry of people through airport lines, but rather the uncontrolled rush of desperate mobs, tribes, and whole ethnic groups from failing habitats into lands already occupied because they can better support human life. This is an obvious recipe for conflict and woe." - James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Get the book.)

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