Is “conventional” agriculture feasible?
In response to Is Organic Farming Feasible?? found in this Forum (sorry, I can’t post links yet) WARNING This post will undoubtedly contain suppositions, unsupported theories, personally held beliefs, and an assortment of blasphemous claims. I think it is very important to ask the correct questions. The “modern” agriculture experiment began with the invention of the tractor, and rose to new heights with the discovery that a few relatively easy to synthesize chemical compounds can have an extremely beneficial impact on plant growth. During the industrial revolution, farmers in the western world were encouraged to adopt the industrial model and apply it to food production. Machines vastly increased productivity by reducing the labor required to produce a given amount of food, and synthetic fertilizers simultaneously reduced labor costs and increased production. Sounds great right? With those findings in mind, wealthy nations are rapidly encouraging third-world nations to do the same, and
