Storing rain water which makes so much sense, the IPCC report included it notes Bruce Wills. NZ pasture farming makes us agriculture's leader

So we have two options for adaption.

First of all we can research new crops and pasture varietals in the knowledge that farms will face greater environmental stress. As Dr William Rolleston said last week, this demands an on-going and bipartisan ramp up in both our agricultural research and development spend and science capability.

The second, of course, is the huge opportunity we have to store rain water which makes so much sense, the IPCC’s last report included it.

Is that so Mr Wills?

Playing with water is an idea that has been practiced to mutually assured self destruction for both the North and South American continental grain producers. If it wasn't for the GFC related easy money policies of the United States Federal Reserve agricultural product prices would not support any investment re-directing water. Once the flood of printed QE money dries up so will the incentives to load the public with debt to line another's pocket.

Since 1992, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been developing plans to expand the network of locks and dams along the Mississippi River. The Mississippi is the primary conduit for shipping American soybeans into global commerce-about 35,000 tons a day. The Corps' plan would mean hauling in up to 1.2 million metric tons of concrete to lengthen ten of the locks from 180 meters to 360 meters each, as well as to bolster several major wing dams which narrow the river to keep the soybean barges moving and the sediment from settling. This construction would supplement the existing dredges which are already sucking 85 million cubic meters of sand and mud from the river's bank and bottom each year. Several different levels of "upgrade" for the river have been considered, but the most ambitious of them would purportedly reduce the cost of shipping soybeans by 4 to 8 cents per bushel. Some independent analysts think this is a pipe dream.

 

Around the same time the Mississippi plan was announced, the five governments of South America's La Plata Basin-Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay-announced plans to dredge 13 million cubic meters of sand, mud, and rock from 233 sites along the Paraguay-Paran  River. That would be enough to fill a convoy of dump trucks 10,000 miles long. Here, the plan is to straighten natural river meanders in at least seven places, build dozens of locks, and construct a major port in the heart of the Pantanal-the world's largest wetland. The Paraguay-Paran  flows through the center of Brazil's burgeoning soybean heartland-second only to the United States in production and exports. According to statements from the Brazilian State of Mato Grasso, this "Hidrov¡a" (water highway) will give a further boost to the region's soybean export capacity.

 

Lobbyists for both these projects argue that expanding the barge capacity of these rivers is necessary in order to improve competitiveness, grab world market share, and rescue farmers (either U.S. or Brazilian, depending on whom the lobbyists are addressing) from their worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Chris Brescia, president of the Midwest River Coalition 2000, an alliance of commodity shippers that forms the primary lobbying force for the Mississippi plan, says, "The sooner we provide the waterway infrastructure, the sooner our family farmers will benefit." Some of his fellow lobbyists have even argued that these projects are essential to feeding the world (since the barges can then more easily speed the soybeans to the world's hungry masses) and to saving the environment (since the hungry masses will not have to clear rainforest to scratch out their own subsistence).

 

Probably very few people have had an opportunity to hear both pitches and compare them. But anyone who has may find something amiss with

the argument that U.S. farmers will become more competitive versus their Brazilian counterparts, at the same time that Brazilian farmers will, for the same reasons, become more competitive with their U.S. counterparts. A more likely outcome is that farmers of these two nations will be pitted against each other in a costly race to maximize production, resulting in short-cut practices that essentially strip-mine their soil and throw long-term investments in the land to the wind. Farmers in Iowa will have stronger incentives to plow up land along stream banks, triggering faster erosion of topsoil. Their brethren in Brazil will find themselves needing to cut deeper into the savanna, also accelerating erosion. That will increase the flow of soybeans, all right-both north and south. But it will also further depress prices, so that even as the farmers are shipping more, they're getting less income per ton shipped. And in any case, increasing volume can't help the farmers survive in the long run, because sooner or later they will be swallowed by larger, corporate, farms that can make up for the smaller per-ton margins by producing even larger volumes.



 

So, how can the supporters of these river projects, who profess to be acting in the farmer's best interests, not notice the illogic of this form of competition? One explanation is that from the advocates' (as opposed to the farmers') standpoint, this competition isn't illogical at all-because the lobbyists aren't really representing farmers. They're working for the commodity processing, shipping, and trading firms who want the price of soybeans to fall, because these are the firms that buy the crops from the farmers. In fact, it is the same three agribusiness conglomerates-Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Cargill, and Bunge-that are the top soybean processors and traders along both rivers.

Welcome to the global economy. The more brutally the U.S. and Brazilian farmers can batter each-other's prices (and standards of living) down, the greater the margin of profit these three giants gain. Meanwhile, another handful of companies controls the markets for genetically modified seeds, fertilizers, and herbicides used by the farmers-charging oligopolistically high prices both north and south of the equator.

 

In assessing what this proposed digging-up and reconfiguring of two of the world's great river basins really means, keep in mind that these projects will not be the activities of private businesses operating inside their own private property. These are proposed public works, to be undertaken at huge public expense. The motive is neither the plight of the family farmer nor any moral obligation to feed the world, but the opportunity to exploit poorly informed public sentiments about farmers' plights or hungry masses as a means of usurping public policies to benefit private interests. What gets thoroughly Big Muddied, in this usurping process, is that in addition to subjecting farmers to a gladiator-like attrition, these projects will likely bring a cascade of damaging economic, social, and ecological impacts to the very river basins being so expensively remodeled. Read more

"There are some things which keep me awake at night."...."....but there is a third which increasingly gnaws at me. That is a perfect storm of food production not keeping pace with a world population expected to hit 9.3 billion stomachs in the year 2050; an amazing 2.3 billion more than today."

Rest easy. You may have it back to front. I would have thought that human population will move with food availability. Not somehow drastically overshoot it.

And anyway, there's plenty of capacity (i.e. food wastage) still to tap into and optimise.

so we should store rainwater even if its uneconomic.  

 Why not just increase prices, you know the old fashioned way, pay me more and i will produce more, not the, pay me the same while I bust my gut going no where story, we have had for the last 30 years.

 Organistaions like the WTO are hopeless and need bunking, why are we paying for a lot of ex sheep farmers to represent us in Geneva?  

as for this

 That is a perfect storm of food production not keeping pace with a world population expected to hit 9.3 billion stomachs in the year 2050; an amazing 2.3 billion more than today. 

Bruce, if we ain't got the food I can assure, you they will not be born.

When I read articles like this I lose hope.

So we'll trot out the IPCC on "building resilience" in agriculture but not on reducing agricultural emissions.

Yep, that works.

And does anyone know what the opening line implies;

"Not to give you the wrong impression, but I am writing this column from Geneva..."

We should be putting our best energies into seeing to it the planet's human population does not reach 9 billion and actually begins to reduce slowly from here, there is no other real answer if we want to continue to have a healthy place to live in

Oh and Andrew J there are plenty of places who haven't got the food but people are still being born in too high numbers

"That is a perfect storm of food production not keeping pace with a world population expected to hit 9.3 billion stomachs in the year 2050; an amazing 2.3 billion more than today. "



Which means just feeding more of them is just kicking the can futher down the road where the problem won't just be food.



The problem is easiest to solve now.   No matter how big and nasty it looks it is just going to get worse.          You don't cover a septic wound and hope it goes away.

Any solution which is going to work in 2050, is going to be needing to start before then.  Any solution started in 2020 is going to be easier to start now.

Some of us have started - when the flip are you "experts" and "meeting" people going to catch up rather than get rich on procrastination and hoping everyone elses work will be enough (as usual).



Perhaps we just ignore it until the starving peasants demand their cake?  (France was the worlds greatest superpower at that time....)

"That is a perfect storm of food production not keeping pace with a world population expected to hit 9.3 billion stomachs in the year 2050; an amazing 2.3 billion more than today. "



Which means just feeding more of them is just kicking the can futher down the road where the problem won't just be food.



The problem is easiest to solve now.   No matter how big and nasty it looks it is just going to get worse.          You don't cover a septic wound and hope it goes away.

Any solution which is going to work in 2050, is going to be needing to start before then.  Any solution started in 2020 is going to be easier to start now.

Some of us have started - when the flip are you "experts" and "meeting" people going to catch up rather than get rich on procrastination and hoping everyone elses work will be enough (as usual).



Perhaps we just ignore it until the starving peasants demand their cake?  (France was the worlds greatest superpower at that time....)

Why the gloom? Satellite-based analyses of net terrestrial primary productivity (NPP) reveal an increase of around 6-13% since the 1980s.

Palm oil is awesome with about tentime the oil yield of any other crop. Imagine in Indonesia alone decided to graze cattle and intercop under their 7.8m ha of palm oil. Or decided to feed PKE to their own cattle. It is criminal to plant any other crop with a 1/10th the yield requiring at least annual cultivation. Support you local oil palm farmer go and give the rape seed and peanut farmer some grief.

A simple alternative to current industrial agriculture which encourages nature to work naturally, store and use water more efficiently.  Really only requires a shift in mindsets.  "the illiterate of the future are not those who can't read or write, they are those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." - Alvin Toffler

http://sustainableman.org/infobox/permaculture               

Colin Riden  The cost of the Opuha water seems cheaper when comparing cents per cube of water but doesnt take into account that farmers own the Opuha dam so therefore the capital cost is not included in the price.  The Ruataniwha price used in your link is the highest in the estimated range remembering that the price hasnt been set yet and farmers wont own the scheme.