Why Should China Go Green? – Gary Hirshberg
category: Going Green
Complete video at: fora.tv Gary Hirshberg, CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farm, discusses agricultural conditions in China. He considers the country to be a leading candidate for organic farm production. —– Organic foods currently make up less than one percent of the food consumed in China. Meanwhile, China’s environmental challenges are growing — as carbon levels in the atmosphere increase, droughts threaten, food prices rise and international pressure to find an answer to global climate change grows. But organic agriculture offers a solution, a way to conserve water and capture carbon from the atmosphere, while increasing yields and lowering prices. Gary Hirshberg (CEO, Stonyfield Farm), Beth Keck (Sr. Director, International Sustainability, Wal-Mart) and Orville Schell (Director, Asia Society Center on US-China Relations) discuss if China is ready for a change in the way it produces its food. What effect would an organic China have on world markets and the world’s climate? – Asia Society Gary Hirshberg is the president and CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farm, the world’s largest manufacturer of organic yogurt. Hirshberg has overseen the company’s growth from infancy as a 7-cow organic farming school in 1983 to its current $200 million in annual sales. This growth has been built with innovative marketing techniques that often combine the social, environmental, and financial missions of the company.
Both permaculture and hydroponics need a lot of preparation, but very little labor compared for the amount of food they produce. They both are highly productive closed cycle systems. While permacuture needs soil hydroponics doesn’t.
Maybe we need to consider both methods of food production to feed growing human population.
True.
That is why I mentioned modern western agriculture as a method of soil mining, hydroponics as replenish all nutrients method and peramculture as an low tech alternative to both methods that relays on circulating nutrients back to the fields.
agreed AxiomofDiscord! The terms of the debate are too shallow!
American Empire or Republic gone wrong…. US predominance was certainly MUCH nicer for the average world citizen then what we could experience from China. Thank goodness micro cameras were invented before China comes to power. At least it will be harder for the Politburo to hush up or ignore its abuses. Never the less the Communist party of China has never been shy about killing huge numbers of people to maintain political office.
No China will seem to be doing well with a command structure and then one day… unexpectedly out of the blue, China’s governmental structure will collapse. The United States is now run for the benefit of elites, despite its vestiges of a market driven economy. The differences are in which elites drive things and how durable their rule is? The United States could rebound if it returns to Constitutional principals, while China has no traditions of true republican government. Advantage < USA
Anytime a nation has to walk around with surgical masks on infers that your arse should have been green…and China should have been the trend setting reason as to why the rest of the world is jumping on this bandwagon.
@spikesmth It is tough for America to change rapidly with the institutional barriers. Especially when you have these Dow Jone companies (ie. Exxon), who will lobby their ways. Chinese government local and national level is corrupt, even more than the United States.
Forests don’t need fertilizer because they don’t have any nutrients removed from the closed cycle. Start removing the leaves that are falling, and you will need to add a source of nutrients back into the system. Take this example and apply it to agriculture. You are carting away huge amounts of nutrients as you take crops off to feed the masses. You cannot grow a crop from nothing.
“Authoritarianism- Get’s shit done”
I don’t eat much of what grows in the forest … and there are many humans and domestic animals to feed and we use up a lot of food… I do not see how we can grow enough food that way to satisfy the need.
Aberran
Fora TV – the world is farting.
China needs to pick itself up and be great again.
@AxiomofDiscord
Forests make their own fertilizer. All that fallen leaves and branches are no waste, they will rot and become fertilizer.
Permaculture exploits nature to create food producing living systems, using the same processes that occur in nature ( fertilizing the soil and pest control ).
Hydroponics is essentially soil-less agriculture that uses water to supply nutrients to the plat roots. All fertilizers used are synthetic. Pest control is done by quarantining the plants.
what kinda natural fertilizers are there ?
@AxiomofDiscord
There is no need for artificial fertilizers in food production. Think about forests, they are the most productive systems on the planet yet they do not use artificial fertilizers.
Traditional western, agriculture is fertilize, seed, grow, harvest; essentially a soil mining for the nutrients that are not replenished by fertilizer.
Novel methods of food growing are Permaculture, and hydroponics. The first method is low-tech biotechnology, and the other one is hi-tech chemistry.
not everything spike, we still got Hollywood, FUCK YEAH.
I’m honestly excited about it. It will be nice to see the US fall behind for its political corruption.
It seems like China is both ahead and behind the US at the same time. At least their command structure allows directed efficient action to solve this problem, we have the political barrier where ‘some people’ drag their feet the whole way on everything. China will overtake the US in almost everything within our lifetime.
Organic is a stupid term the way they use it … a catch to say healthier but there are some artificial fertilizers that are much better than the more “natural” ones at least in my mind. And I rather consume some non-organic foods that I feel are “safer” for me to consume.
Aberran
Is there such a thing as inorganic food? As far as I know all food contains carbon, hence makes it organic…