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Farming must be part of fight against climate change

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Published Date: 17 May 2008
MOST of us imagine farming as being very different from other industries. We see farms as pastures green and fields of corn, while we identify manufacturing with clanking production lines and belching chimneys. The truth is that modern, intensive farming has long since become highly industrialised.
Traditional agriculture has given way to new methods that require huge inputs of fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides; and that consume large quantities of fossil fuel. The upside has been a massive increase in agricultural productivity and food pr...



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  • Last Updated: 19 May 2008 12:09 PM
  • Source: The Scotsman
  • Location: Edinburgh
 
1

Unimpressed one,

17/05/2008 10:05:37
"This matter must be addressed directly in the Scottish Government's forthcoming Climate Change Bill."

This piece of green rant should be scrapped forthwith and MSPs ordered to get a bloody good does of reality. We have crime, drug and alcohol abuse out of control, the economy is approaching meltdown and ordinary people are struggling to pay food and energy bills. And with this shameless rant, it's obvious that the Scotsman too supports Alice in Wonderland bills whilst the rest of us live in the real world.
2

eyeswider,

17/05/2008 10:40:55


You guys could solve all the "problems" in one fell swoop.

Investigate the gigantic (massive, huge, colossal, monumental, giant, massive, etc) benefits of cultivating hemp.

But no, it is much easier to let people starve unless they can afford more taxation to "mitigate" the deranged fantasy that CO2 is a danger of some kind.

If that were true then hemp has even more benefits.

Do some research and your farm will make you very rich.
3

GlenB,

Skye 17/05/2008 13:30:07
Reducing the use of herbicides, pesticides and fertiliser will reduce the productivity per hectare of land.
Therfore more land will be required to feed a growing world population.
More land will be acquired by felling more forests.
But they don't want that to be done.
They can't have it both ways.

4

eyeswider,

17/05/2008 17:22:02

Hemp doesn't need pesticides, herbicides, fungicides or fertilizers.

None. At all.

It grows at higher latitudes (and higher up) than any other crop. Even up here you can crop it twice a year and it works better in rotation with anything else better than anything else.

The products are amazing. Even when you have taken out the 35% (by weight) of oil in the seeds (which converts at 95% straight to biofool btw) you are left with a mash that is more nutritious than soy (which is quite nasty to humans) and that animals - especially pigs - would walk over thorns to get to.

It gives up more of itself to the ground (if dried in the field even more) than any crop due, in part, to it possessing a meter long taproot and shedding copious shade leaves as it grows (at a tremendous rate).

The fibre is staggeringly pliant, strong and variously useful. This was its downfall as the emerging newspaper and oil industries realized how utterly superior it was to trees and nylon(mostly at that time) for making ropes and paper. Still is.

Hemp, coconuts and potatoes can save the world ;-)



5

Unimpressed one,

17/05/2008 19:33:13
All of this is true eyeswider. Unfortunately it's cultivation is banned by the all-knowing, purer-than-pure UN.
6

eyeswider,

17/05/2008 20:27:49
#5 Yeah Unimpressed - the twins of hemp and cannabis are so often transmogrified into the one evil weed.

Cannabis does have a slight advantage over hemp in most of it's characteristics, like more oil in the seeds and stalk, but we need to wake up to the reasons they both became the perfect enemy to DuPont and the Hearst newspaper empire.

We can no longer afford to shun a natural diamond whilst claiming that nature herself needs protecting from CO2, its most necessary component.


 

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