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249 comments on DrumBeat: May 30, 2006

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Todd on May 30, 2006 - 12:20pm

Jondoh,

Ultimately aquafir depletion will do in high productivity corn growing. Without irrigation, yields in the midwest will drop to around 30-40 bushels/Ac. Further, some semi-desert areas would have to stop growing corn altogether.

(Additionally, corn also needs P and K. From what I have read, we are approaching peak P in 30 or so years.)

New Farm (Rodale), http://www.newfarm.org has done a lot of work on organically grown corn at their PA research farm. They have obtained excellent yields. But I do not believe similar yields would be obtained throughout all corn growing areas without irrigation.

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alan on May 30, 2006 - 5:17pm

Ultimately aquafir depletion will do in high productivity corn growing. Without irrigation, yields in the midwest will drop to around 30-40 bushels/Ac. Further, some semi-desert areas would have to stop growing corn altogether.
Most corn in the midwest is not irrigated now.
For example, 90% of Iowa corn is unirrigated, yet average yields are 170-180 bushels/acre. Even during the 1983 drought the state average yield was 80 bushel/acre.

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frenk26 on October 24, 2006 - 4:55pm

This strikes a chord with me too. With an HBSc in Comp Sci I did hard-core telecom high tech from 1983 to 2001 when the tech wreck blew me out. Up till then I was a total skeptic about GW, figured we were so smart that new technology would be there when we needed it, the market would take care of the rest our problems and I'd never heard of PO at all, other than in the general sense of having read "Limits To Growth" back in the '70s.
Something happened to me about two years ago (a new partner with deep roots in the environmental community might have had something to do with it) and it was like suddenly waking up. There was this flash of realization that the world is nothing like we're being told it is. The more I read, the more I realized that this veil of misdirection was being spread over all the important aspects of modern life - politics (especially the theft of two American Presidential elections), the environment and Global Warming, economics and what is really driving the markets, American domestic and foreign policy (even though I'm Canadian, since such policies influence the entire world), and then finally Peak Oil.

The feeling I am left with is that there is a deliberate attempt underway to conceal the real state of affairs from the average man, to misdirect his attnetion and outrage, and to keep solutions that might hamstring the corporatocracy from even being discussed, much less

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frenk26 on November 10, 2006 - 1:40pm

I k i v o S V G
free blog only best

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