Stanford experiments use black plastic sheeting for mulch, which is thin, transportable, and reusable.

since embarking on my horti/agro journey, I've come to see things the same way.
It's not doable, it's broken.
Can you imagine mulching 3,000 acres with black plastic?

The yields from my market garden are off the charts, my fuel usage per acre is off the charts squared.

I think what’s being discussed here is greater than a debate about whether or not it makes sense to sheet mulch 3000 acres. The coming agricultural transition will require flexibility. Rather than limiting ourselves to a handful of tools and techniques we should be stocking out toolboxes with all manners and methods of growing food. Sheet mulching, black plastic, fabric mulch, green mulch, till, no-till, cats and dogs living together…

I think what we find, when we get down and dirty about the business of growing more of our own food, is that the diversity of situation calls for as many useful tools and techniques as we can possibly share with each other.

Aaron

"Mulching will work well for your garden or mine but to feed large numbers of people we must engage in field agriculture and mulching on a scale of multiple acres has a lot of problems."

If it will work well in your garden or mine, then we can feed large numbers of people. If your garden feeds some people, and my garden feeds some people, why can't billions of gardens feed many billions of people?

I think it is hard for many westerners to imagine that they might not have much choice but to rely on organic methods, but that's an ongoing problem in much of the world. The idea that we might be poor enough or have enough unemployment to think a job weeding crops was better than the alternative is very hard to wrap our minds around from the perspective of energy insulation that we're working on.

I agree that field scale mulching is problematic - I find it more useful to use undercropping as a natural mulch - white clover is one possibility, but others work better in other places and climates. I've been using squash an understory crop to corn, for example, and find that the two together shade out most of the weeds with greater net productivity. It is traditional to add beans to this mix, which I've also done.

I think it is hard to imagine that we might have a food crisis that made it worth doing this hard work, or figuring these problems out from where we are. I wish I thought the depths of difficulty we have imagining it were equal to the unlikelihood of it happening.

Sharon

"--You can eat your way through the crash with minimal dollars spent"
And just what do you expect on the other side of this crash? Just what do you think is crashing?

No, I don't think I'm merely nit-picking his sources - a large part of his central argument relies on studies that don't exist, that were falsified. That's not a nit, that's a giant wart - and it undermines his basic argument. I don't know the gentleman - he may be smart, but he's not making a particularly smart argument here.

I'm not really sure what yours is - I'm fascinated, of course, to learn who you think is smart, but since you don't come up with any analysis or rationale for it, I'm not sure how useful that is to any discussion. For the record, while I cite the Rodale Institute here, I don't think anything I've ever written relies on Robert Rodale personally, or Steiner (who I don't think particularly highly of either). I do think that the Rodale Institute, which has an agenda (so does everyone) but has also been doing studies no one else could bother to undertake in the rush to industrialize has value - although I do think that it is helpful that much of their research is backed up elsewhere, as noted in the article.

That said, we agree on your latter points - the primary argument in favor of organic agriculture is simply that it doesn't rely heavily on expensive fossil fuels, and provides equivalent total food in a society facing a crisis. The premise of our analysis is simply that all things are not equal - that we have to produce the most food with the fewest inputs where people need food to avoid maximum human death and suffering.

Sharon

Building the soil is probably the key fundamental principle of organic farming that was advocated by the activists who dwere influened by Franklin King who wrote "Farmers of Forty Centuries" and Sir Albert Howard. The Rodale's are not scientists, but that did popularize organic agiculture in the US. Steiner, the founder of homeopathic medicine and biodynamic farming is in a class by himself.

See Heckman, J. 2006. A history of organic farming: Transitions from Sir Albert Howard's War in the soil to USDA National Organic Program. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 21:143-150.

"The organic farming concept developed in the period prior to 1940 and was pioneered by Sir Albert Howard (1873–1947). Howard, born and educated in England, directed agricultural research centers in India (1905–1931) before permanently returning to England. His years of agricultural research experiences and observations gradually evolved into a philosophy and concept of organic farming that he espoused in several books. Howard’s thinking on soil fertility and the need to effectively recycle waste materials, including sewage sludge, onto farmland was reinforced by F.H. King’s book, Farmers of Forty Centuries. Howard developed a system of composting that became widely adopted. Howard’s concept of soil fertility centered on building soil humus with an emphasis on how soil life was connected to the health of crops, livestock, and mankind. Howard argued that crop and animal health was a birthright and that the correct method of dealing with a pathogen was not to destroy the pathogen but to see what could be learned from it or to ‘make use of it for tuning up agricultural practice’. The system of agriculture advocated by Howard was coined ‘organic’ by Walter Northbourne to refer to a system ‘having a complex but necessary interrelationship of parts, similar to that in living things’. Lady Eve Balfour compared organic and non-organic farming and helped to popularize organic farming with the publication of The Living Soil. Jerome Rodale, a publisher and an early convert to organic farming, was instrumental in the diffusion and popularization of organic concepts in the US. Both Howard and Rodale saw organic and non-organic agriculture as a conflict between two different visions of what agriculture should become as they engaged in a war of words with the agricultural establishment. A productive dialogue failed to occur between the organic community and traditionalagricultural scientists for several decades. Organic agriculture gained significant recognition and attention in 1980, marked by the USDA publication Report and Recommendations on Organic Farming. The passage of the Federal Organic Foods Production Act in 1990 began the era of accommodation for organic farming in the USA, followed by another milestone with official labeling as USDA Certified Organic in 2002. Organic agriculture will likely continue to evolve in response to ongoing social, environmental, and philosophical concerns of the organic movement."