Allyuh See!!! WE KNOW EH! WE KNOW! SO WHEN IT FALLS APART WHO TO BLAME?

www.activistpost.com/2013/03/study-biodi...rom-polyculture.html


With the increasing population recently breaching the 7 billion mark, and no sign of slowing, you may have heard some UN-supported scientists claim that certain foods will need to double production to keep up with rising demand.

This - along with massive support from Big Agri for GMOs and factory farming - seem to indicate that further industrialization of the food industry is all that can save the world from starvation. Not exactly.

While major food production and research companies are pouring millions into advancing their biotech methods, resistance in the forms of support for biodiversity, permaculture and other sustainable methods is growing.

Do we really need industrial agriculture to feed the world?

A study by the University of California, Berkeley, presented exhaustive alternatives to current practices. One section of the paper cited research pointing to the positive effects of biodiversity on the numbers of herbivore pests, finding that polycultural planting led to reduction of pest populations by up to 64%. Later, combined results of hundreds of comparisons also favored biologically diverse farms with a 54% increase in pest mortality and damage to crops dropping by almost 25%. The introduction of more diverse insects also promoted increased pollination and healthier crops.(source ecology and society)

Does that practice seem familiar? Maybe it's how nature was meant to be. Managed but not manipulated or modified. And only by returning to the concepts provided to us by nature, will we manage to recreate the same sustainable environs that we were responsible for destroying in the first place.

Marsden researchers said in their groundbreaking paper, that "there has been an interest in reintegrating crop and livestock systems as a strategy for reducing reliance on fossil fuels, minimizing the use of increasingly expensive fertilizers, and limiting water pollution by nutrients, pathogens, and antibiotics."

Karen Perry Stillerman of the Union of Concerned Scientists put it perfectly:
It's important to remember who has that interest....and who doesn't.
Other sources for this article include:
blog.ecoagriculture.org/2013/02/25/dfs_berkeley/