[Terrapreta] eprida char - organic?

[MMBTUPR at aol.com]

               from             Lewis L Smith

I would not say that organic farming is all sustainable or, without subsidy, 
never sustainable. It seems to me that that is going to depend on quite a few 
factors, in addition to the increase in yield from using terra preta.

In particular, there is a factor which has not come up in any of the Terra 
preta threads, and that is economies of scale, which can vary widely from crop 
to crop, and which make a lot of difference to commercial success. Two 
examples.

Cattle

My parents ran a pioneer, unsubsidized, commercial, organic beef operation 
for 30 years. They had a fairly steady 40% gross margin and made money often 
enough to stay in the good graces of the IRS. But they did not have a positive 
cash flow over every consecutive five-year period. This was because as inflation 
increased, they did not increase the size of the herd fast enough. 

They started with five head in the early 1950's and reached a winter 
carryover of 325 in 1975, when my father died. I did some numbers and told my mother 
that if she increased the carryover to 400, she would have a positive cash flow 
every year, even in a year when she had to put a new roof on her biggest 
barn, which in those days was a $10,000 job. 

Last year, the present operator told me that with a carryover of 400, he 
would just break even on a cash basis, so he had cut back to providing summer 
pasture for 250 head belonging to another operation. Even at that, the farm is 
only profitable because of multiple operations, such as very successful summer 
campsites on the shore.

Another thing which has hurt is that the farm used to get [ free at the 
supplier's gate ] a lot of hen dressing and dairy manure, mix them together and put 
them on the fields, in lieu of commercial fertilizers. But now the chickens 
are gone, and the dairy industry is going down hill. So the farm's yield of hay 
has gone from five dry tons per acre to three and a half or maybe less.

Laying hens   [ not candidates for terra preta but relevant to the point ]

When I was a teenager, a neighbor with 2,000 birds and 20 dairy cows on a 
quarter section [ 160 acres ] , offered to sell me his farm and teach me the 
business. At that time, 2,000 birds was a small-scale [ but profitable ] 
operation, while 20,000 birds was a large operation. I declined, but many years later 
in graduate school, I "designed" a poultry industry for Puerto Rico, for a 
planning course. At that time, in the States, a "small" operation had increased to 
200,000 birds and a large one, to one million !   And that was before Frank 
Perdue !   [ Fortunately the range in PR was still a lot smaller. ]

I saw similar things happen with sugar cane, pineapple and tomatoes in Puerto 
Rico,
although in each case the magnitudes varied from activity to activity. In 
fact, there can be a big difference with a single crop, depending on the 
management system. For examaple, cane managed for energy and cane managed for sugar. 
In the first case, one has to have on hand some giant Klass harvesters, each of 
which can take on a double row of cane with say 67 dry tons of millable cane 
per acre in each row. The sugar operation can use a smaller machine or hand 
harvesting.

When we get to the economics of the different kinds of operations which might 
use terra preta, we are going to have to take this kind of thing into 
consideration.   

One more example of how with bioenergy, one has to "do one's homework" 
project by project. There are not many "currently useful generalizations", except 
perhaps that any attempt to replace US gasoline consumption with corn-based 
ethanol, will drive up the price of tortillas in Mexico and the price of pizza in 
the USA !

Cordially. ### 






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