Farmer In Chief Response

* One idea that I really want to put an emphasis on is, like i said during discussion, that everything we do would take different resources and different ways and amounts of resources we use. No matter what we decide to do we would need to find the money, the time, the energy, the information, the materials, etc. to do what we need to do. Several times in the article he makes the point that "cheap energy" is a resource we are running out of and should not depend too much on. We all know that oil is getting more expensive and we are running out of fossil fuels, some of the ways we use energy isn't healthy for the environment. One way farmers are doing something about this is using more sustainable methods of producing food. Even then you still need cetain resources to use these methods, for ex. you need sunlight for solar energy, and things like that cost money, which is another resource that is important. Everything falls upon money, does the government have enough money to do this and that? Does the population have enough money to buy it, which is more efficeint, more convienent? A lot of questions pop up in my head when thinking about these type of things.

*Another thing to think about is how certain things will effect the environment and the population of the world not just certain areas. On page one it says " you will not be able to make a signigicant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change." What exactly does that mean? He mentions that " after cars, the food systems uses more fossil fuels than any other sector of the economy," I'm pretty sure thats not neccesaraly a good thing. If we are blowing through all these resources that we might not have later on in the future then what will it come to when we actually reach that limit. I have a feeling that we will just find another resources that we can rely on DURING THAT TIME. Theres a pattern with the world, we always try to solve things with certain things that will cause a different problem in the future, for ex. the green revolution reading, yeah it fixed the problem at the time but entirelly caused a new problem of disease caused by the chemicals used to enhance the growth of the crops. When will this pattern stop? I honestly don't think it will anytime soon.

*During the discussion I heard a large number of the students say that people "just don't care," i dont think thats exactly right. I think people don't have the resources to actually do something. People don't have the TIME to do certain things that are healthy for the environment and themselves, they dont have the MONEY to do all these things like buy more expensive organic foods, they arent AWARE that the food production has a dark side and it's causing a problem that most likley they will have to deal with later. And he government and media play a big part in that situation. Maybe if the media put out that there is a problem then people would start to relize whats going on. Maybe if the government started to monitor certain things like, say compost in homes or recycling, etc., then maybe the people will start to do these certain things. And it always goes back to the resources. Does the government have the money to do all that, how will media portray these problems, is it actually a problem. There are so many different situations that come up on this subject.

*On page 7 the author talks about how alternative agriculture is taking into place in different places and what kind of positive impact it will have on the environment but he also mentions that if these projects are being done it will become more of a long procees and a "long term project" it will be. And lets face it, do we really have the time to do this things, theres a food crisis going on and if we spend alot of time doing something that might work will it be worth it? maybe it will and maybe it wont, we just dont know. And we dont neccesaraly have the time and money to be playing trial and error. We have to deal with this problem right now. Who knows what'll happen if we don't.