If you rely on mined phosphorus there can be problems eventually with availability, but compost or any organic matter can supply adequate levels of any of the nutrients a garden would need if it is applied to the soil. The levels of P, K, Ca, and Mg in my soil has increased over the years and the only thing I have added to the soil is compost and shredded leaves as mulch.

I can't answer your question about a peer reviewed study. I have read quite a bit about peak oil and most of it makes sense. If there is a peak phosphorous problem then it would certainly cause problems for non-organic farmers. Hopefully there are some solutions.

I haven't read the book, but i have to wonder how analogous to oil it would truly be. Petroleum is a mix of hydrocarbons formed by organic matter being subjected to heat and pressure over millenia. Phosphorous is an element that isn't so easily created or destroyed, it just changes its molecular composition. Oil can be used up by P just becomes more or less usable somewhere along the P cycle.

The ocean sediments seem to have quite a bit of P in them, if it ever became financially viable to mine them, I'm sure someone would.

ALL resources are limited. We live on a finite planet. There is no need for a peer-reviewed study to apprehend this most basic of facts.

Nonetheless, this or this is as close as you are going to get to peer-reviewed literature on this topic today.

Dan

If we run out of places to get P from, y'all can come to Wisconsin and get some. Out soils and lakes/rivers are chock full of it. If we had as much oil as we do phosphorus we would be Texas.

Part of the NPDES issues many communities have with their wastewater treatment plants is that they are discharging too much P into receiving waters (human waste). Plenty of P available if we care to spend the money to get to it, if the EROEI works. If not, we won't be able to feed 9B people using the current system and paradigm.

Dan

Isn't this a web site on gardening. Stop pissing in the toilet and collect it. You could clear American water in 5 years.

Thank you for your responses. Let me answer in reverse order:
georgeiii, yes it is a gardening forum. I posted here because I thought I would be likely to find people who were sympathetic to an issue that will undobtedly affect the food supply of 6 plus billion people.

dan staley, as georgiii says diversion of urine would go a long way to recycling more urine inexpensively. This is fine for gardeners, but getting my urine to the corn fields in Iowa presents a big problem. I wonder if crystalisation is feasible.

justaguy, the excess P in your fields comes from dairy operations' slurry or P mined around Tampa. The latter will run out soon. The only answer I can see to the former is an end to confined dairy and beef operations and reurn to the future with mixed farming in which animal wastes are recycled much more widely. This is what happened before guano and superphosphates beacame popular. But they didn't have over 6 billion people to feed. When I was born the global population was 2 billion, although I can't say I was conscious of that at the time.

dan staley, some more extensive writing has been done by people at Sydney University (not peer-reviewed so far as I can tell). You might want to google who has been researchoing the topic.

dicot, you're right, the ocean is where it all ends up. obvoiusly very expensive to recover it; recovery from the waste stream could be less expensive, but still very.

kimmsr, leaves work in my back garden too. But I can't see it working in the corn fields of Iowa or the wheat fields of the Punjab. Even if it could, it would create an huge ecological inbalance -- the trees need their leaves back you know.

Regards, Peter.

I'm not sure about Iowa as I have never farmed there in Mn and as justaguy states we don't lay down p in corn as we are high in that already
I have no idea what that has to do with peeing in the toilet though(: I lot of sludge is ground applied and I imagine that is high in p also

Peter,

I reckon these problems of peak in supply and subsequent decline of energy and various plant nutrients are what permaculture is all about solving.

The corn-fields in Iowa, the wheat-fields in the Punjab and Kansas, the sugar cane fields in south florida, luisiana, and costa rica, the banana-plantations and coffee in tropical regions, and on and on, all need to be stacked and converted to permaculture. It could all be switched over within ten years and be mature and heavily-producing within twenty years. It could be done easily and with less energy every year which perfectly matches the reality of energy-descent. There would be an increase in easily-trained jobs that ordinary people can do. Degraded lands all over the planet can be returned to partial productivity and eventually to full health. It's much more feasible than any and all 'alternatives' and any techno-fixes.

The only problem is that it involves a collapse in profit and tax revenues, and a loss of power for a bunch of power-addicted people.

Pnbrown: I recall some people trying to get plants like wheat converted to be perennials rather than annuals. Is that what you are referring to?

Living in the heart of wheat country, I can assure you there are many wheat farmers that would be more than happy to not have to cultivate, spray and plant every year if they could do so and not go broke rapidly (or slowly)in the process. For them it is not a matter of greed but economic survival. Show us a way to do as you say that will not kill the grain belt and you may find some converts.

Michael

Michael, the deal is that there would be no 'wheat-country' with permaculture. Growers and sites would grow every tree, shrub, perennial and annual crop that is adapted to the climate.

Obviously it's a massive change in mindset as well as structure. Growers will have to know a lot more about a lot more crops, but they won't have to struggle with pests and poisons and they won't have to spend their lives driving machines. Also obviously it is something that will primarily serve a more local market. Now the wheat-farmer's wheat can easily end up half-way round the globe. In a permaculture world, wheat thousands of miles from where it can be grown will be only a luxury. Wheat would be a small part of the vastly-diversified output of a permaculture in a climate that is appropriate for wheat.

If I found myself the owner of one of those little wheat-fields in Kansas ( say 2-300 acres?), the first thing I'd do is forget about planting wheat. I'd buy walnuts and start several hundred plants and 3 or 4 years later I'd plant rows of walnut trees and maybe pecans and hazelnuts in rows a couple hundred feet apart. Meanwhile I'd diversify to at least 4 or 5 annual crops that I could sell in the nearest city and if I couldn't sell it I'd turn it under and let weeds grow if I couldn't afford to buy seed. Then alongside those nut trees I'd plant the standard fruit trees I had also started from seed. Apples, pears, peaches, plums. Let them be sports mostly, graft a few in the field for fruit to sell local, use the sport fruit for juice. Cost nothing but time that way. Alongside the fruit trees go soft-fruit shrubs and berries. The strips left open stay in annual crops, heavily legume, permanent mulch, no-till. The mulch I cut out from the orchard until the trees shade out the under-growth. By this time (5 yrs on) the fertility cycle due to not tilling and deep-rooted trees has built to the point where I no longer buy fertilizer. If I have found some local markets then I can afford to hire some local labor and around then I sell the tractors and tillage and seeding equipment.

This does not seem too far-fetched given that lots of farmers work second jobs and/or their wives work off-farm so that they can afford to keep buying fertilizer and fuel. That is an absurdity.

If I found myself the owner of one of those little wheat-fields in Kansas ( say 2-300 acres?), the first thing I'd do is forget about planting wheat. I'd buy walnuts and start several hundred plants and

You'll want to wait for a completely new social and economic system then, and hope there is no note on the land.

Norman Borlaug's passing reminds us of how far we have to go in our agriculture.

Dan

Hi pn: there are a number of ways I can respond to your post but I'll just start with this, perhaps later I'll get to some others.

Economically, there is no way to do what you are saying in my county alone. I expect there are thousands of other counties in the same situation... very low income, shrinking populations and tax bases, 60 miles or more just to get to a town of 20,000 people. The markets you suggest for what would be produced for local consumption even within a 60 mile radius just aren't there. I know this because I live in one of those areas and have gone back and forth in my head on how to do what you are suggesting. I have no problem growing more vegetable and fruit produce than I can use but can't hardly even give the excess away. People here grow there own gardens and have very little desire to eat anything other than the limited variety of produce they grow .

In the process of moving here and starting my gardening al over 10 years ago I find this to be an excellent area for growing many things if one has access to water which I do and you don't get hailed out (all too often). But your notion of not having insect and disease problems is misguided.

Most of my vegetables do very well with no insecticides but when the insects do move in the crop is history, thankfully that is not often.

The fruit trees are another story, to plant as you suggested would result in every apple tree dying from Cedar Apple Rust within 2 - 3 years. On the other hand, there are new(er) varieties that resist CAR very well, I have 2 of them and they require no fungicide sprays so far. My peach crop was reduced by about 75% this year due to Green Fruit Rot. If I do no fungicide treatments by next spring I can expect to potentially lose the entire tree to the causal organism.

One primary reason I think my plantings have had very little pest pressure is the lack of suitable pest hosts. for instance, there are no vegetables being grown within 1000' of my gardens and fruit trees within 600'. If all of my neighbors started growing fruits and vegetables I have no doubt the pests would come, nature abhors a vacuum. I know where the CAR comes from every year, the thousands of Eastern Red Cedars within 2 miles of my trees.

The raspberry beds have been in for 5 years and are being reduced to the point where borers will wipe them out within 2 years, never been sprayed for borers.

My point is there is no panacea, with or without "chemicals" and to reflect on what I believe what Dan may have been partially alluding to, there is an extremely steep learning curve that any individual had better have deep pockets to survive. Both my wife and I work full time jobs and aren't commercial farmers paying for, "fertilizer and fuel" as you stated. The learning curve isn't so bad for me because of my formal education in horticulture (6 years), 8 years working in the vegetable crop nutrition field and years as a vegetable crop consultant along with being a gardener since I was in my 20s (won't say how long ago that was:) ).

I'm not saying what you propose is impossible, just that it would cause extreme dislocations of tens of thousands of people in the heartland of this country with no guarantee of success. The greatest likelihood IMO is the area would be nearly depopulated and would revert back to open prairie. Some would argue that a good thing some against it. A great number of people on this planet might not fare well if suddenly there was no more wheat from the wheat belt here in the US. Lousy a system as you my think it is, it is very efficient at getting the grain to millions of people around the world at a price they can afford. The situation stinks in many ways but I don't see your ideas as the solution currently, lets talk more.

Michael

Thanks for the reply, Michael. At least there are some people thinking about these matters.

I agree with you and Dan that society must change. Permaculture is in fact about that. Clustering of people into dense pockets is highly efficient in some ways but is also unsustainable and for at least some of those people invariably leads to undesirable living conditions in various ways.

The output of permaculture systems will be high in areas of high and even precipitation. Those are the areas that can support dense populations. The US east of the miss, for example. The north of that region is very dense presently, and could also sustainably produce an enormous amount of food, fiber and energy through permaculture, for as long as the rain falls. Climate change predictions are for that region to get even wetter, so there is a bright spot.

Perhaps it is different in arid regions, I have no experience there, but here I find that a very diverse system balances and ceases to have serious pest problems and continuously requires less fertilizer and other inputs. I'm confident that eventually (20-30) years they require no inputs other than some management. So clearly the northeast is the natural place for permaculture to prove itself as the main requirements exist. Small-scale farming and local marketing is working well here, though the current production scheme is non-sustainable for the most part as it is heavily fossil-fuel dependent.

Pn, you're welcome:

As for your 1st paragraph, quite a quandry isn't it?

And the 2nd - do you think a p-culture system would perform well given extremes of wether over the years as currently and for a very long time has happened occsionally in the midwest. I can see circumstances where an area with many crops might lose crop #7 in one year but 100 miles away #7 is fine but there #3 bombed for a different reason. If the 2 areas wanted to trade they could but now we are back to the transportation issue. Maybe the transport would be significantly less in that isolated circumstance than in the current system.

I think the wasy we got to where we now is by people in isolated areas that basically started merging production to economies of scale up to the scale where things are now. We lost a lot along the way but it allowed our nation to grow and prosper largely driven by agricultural productivity and specialization starting back in the early 1800s if not sooner. An example would be a grain mill somebody built on a creek and was paid to mill grain. The mills got bigger and more efficient and the grain was hauled further as transportation became cheaper I.E. via canals to rivers.

On the inputs side of things, the one contradicting argument I have with organic is the cost of transport when it comes to nutrients and other things. It takes a lot of fuel to ship 100 lbs of N in the form of bloodmeal compared to 100 lb of urea. Yes, it takes energy to make both so, in net energy which is more efficient? I have yet to see an analysis but would like to (this is just one example). I sometimes wonder about farmers markets when I see 50 cars parked and think, "is this efficient?" Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have a diverse ag economy around here. When I lived in Gainesville FL and helped a friend with his truck farm it was amazing to see how much produce was hauled in and out of there each morning. All produce sold had to come from within the county.

Well, I'm pooped and need to hit the shower,

Michael

dan_staley wrote:
Norman Borlaug's passing reminds us of how far we have to go in our agriculture.

Heck of a legacy...

"The Man Who Saved More Human Lives Than Any Other Has Died"
Norman Borlaug

Indeed. What I meant was his "innovations" are not sustainable and we have a long way to go if we want to even maintain human population numbers, let alone feed 2B more.

Dan