* Rice, Wheat and Corn have been the dominant agricultural crops for over 10,000 years.
* Rice, Wheat, and Corn convert solar energy into a dense carbohydrate bundles which can easily be stored or transported for future use.
* Rice, Wheat, and Corn therefore represent an accumulation of wealth and are more than just “food”.
* Historically, there were two forms of sustainable farming.
* One form of sustainable farming was practiced around rivers where annual “floods” would scour the land and leave behind nutrient rich flood planes where wheat, corn and rice can thrive. This can be a sustainable practice however, many flood planes are now covered with cities and are no longer available for growing food.
* Another form of sustainable agriculture involved a rotation of crops and could be used everywhere. Some years wheat or corn would be grown. Other years crops which add nitrogen to the soil would be grown while in other years specific crops would be planted and plowed back into the ground to maintain the fertility of the soil.
* Today, we plant the same crops in the same fields each year and we use about 5.5 gallons of fossil energy to “restore” fertility to an acre land. This means that every year we are using about 400 to 500 years worth of “solar energy” in the form of hydrocarbons to maintain our “unsustainable society” also termed “catastrophic agriculture” by some scientists and historians.
* It is true that sustainable agriculture requires more labor and is not as “productive” per acre but if we considered a more “balanced” diet containing 75% less meat, we could sustain ourselves and our society.
* We must eat more foods in their natural “unprocessed” form in order to maintain our health and to ensure that we can feed future generations.
* Our modern farming practices have eliminated our “arable land”. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974, the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue, that ratio was 1:1 and it understates the problem.
* The problem of finding and recovering oil is an ever increasing problem as well. In the 1940s we would use the energy from one barrel of oil to gather 100 barrels. Today, we must spend the energy of one barrel of oil to recover only ten barrels of oil, and this number is constantly being reduced.
* We currently devote about 82% of farm land to corn and grain which is “manufactured” into foods which creates huge profits for the “manufacturers” but not for farmers.
* In addition to the direct social and environmental costs, scientist have proven that “manufactured” foods are unhealthy because of the high levels of salt, fat and preservatives which they contain and are therefore fueling our health care crisis and epidemic levels of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease and contribute to our “overweight” society.
* Corn, wheat and rice are themselves not evil. Our society has allowed corporations to use these grains plus inexpensive oil to create an unsustainable “false economy” which is polluting our environment, destroying biodiversity, and damaging the health of individuals.
* Omachron’s scientific team is working on developing sustainable farming methods which operate entirely within the solar energy available in a year because the time for action is NOW while we have some oil reserves that we can use to build a sustainable infrastructure before it is too late.
