Bagmuck
I'm going to put this here, for now and maybe develop it further.
As a student I worked on a market garden which also had a small line in agricultural supplies. Every so often we had the job of loading bags of inorganic fertiliser onto lorries or trailers. The word used for it was bagmuck.
I think bagmuck captures rather well what this is. It's a substitute for muck, dung, manure, that comes in a bag. From ICI in those days.
Bagmuck /contd.
Bagmuck / contd
It's produced by the Haber process, which fixes atmospheric nitrogen. In so doing, it relies on large quantities of fossil fuels, and as we see with the current restriction at the Gulf of Hormuz, the global supply of bagmuck is critically constrained by the availability of affordable and plentiful energy.
Bagmuck / contd.
Haber isn't the only way of fixing atmospheric nitrogen - at least 2 classes of bacteria do it, free living azobacter and rhizobium in the nodules of some plants, notably legumes but also alder and others.
But bagmuck gives a quick return, a quick boost and is relied on for much food production.
But it has other consequences, including run-off into watercourses, nitrite pollution of foodstuffs, and, I think, the degradation of soil biota.
Bagmuck / contd
The alternative is to close the #MetabolicRift by ensuring human and animal waste goes onto the land, in a moderate way (not causing runoff into rivers like the Wye).
The other way is the use of nitrogen-fixing crops, as green manures, in alley cropping, or as foodstuffs (beans etc).
Bagmuck / contd
Here's the rub.
We won't be able to keep relying on bagmuck for ever. There will have to be a return to agroecological, organic methods.
But that takes time. It will mean a revolution in cultivation, in land use, in land ownership, in human settlement.
But Hormuz is our alarm signal. it should be heeded.
End of Bagmuck!
I think the revolution is substantially on the way. Agroforestry and permaculture methodologies are becoming more widely known.
Particularly in the nations of Southeast Asia, which have suffered greatly because of the war on Ukraine, and their acute sensitivity to food security.
India is another nation that worries about this. They have realize that the green revolution is on sustainable and that is crashing out for them.
All good we think to ourselves, but what about yields?
Mark Burton
GhostOnTheHalfShell
Eliza MB