Volcanic fertilization of Balinese rice paddies

Conceptualizing Sustainably Produced Food for Promotional Purposes: A Sustainable Marketing Approach

“…An agro-industrial production system, monocrop based, focusing mainly on selling on the global market and depending on hybrid rice varieties and large chemical inputs in the form of fertilizers and pesticides. The intensive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides is characteristic of the cultivation of "high-yielding" hybrid rice introduced during the Green Revolution in the 1970s [65,108]. "High yielding" is in fact an inaccurate descriptor; the main characteristic of hybrid rice varieties is that they are highly responsive to fertilizer and water inputs, so the correct descriptor would be "high-responsive" rice varieties [65].…”

“…The great expansion of the farmed salmon industry has had negative consequences as inadequate protection of workers, low wages, no employment contracts, no insurance schemes and no trade union schemes [151]. Water scarcity and degradation through contamination of water and overuse of water [88,108,110,157].…”

“…Large-scale industrial farming, largely dependent on chemical fertilizers and pesticides, influences water quality through chemical contamination and the quantity of available water through irrigation and decreased soil moisture [88,98,99,108,110,111,157]. The water scarcity associated with highly-responsive varieties of industrial seeds in monoculture agriculture has two facets [129,132].…”

Rice, fish, and the planet

“…Consequently, most of the phosphate COMMENTARY fertilizer added to the paddies is unnecessary. Direct measurements of PO 4 in irrigation waters showed that nearly all of the phosphate fertilizer washes out of the paddies and into the rivers, accumulating to very high levels before reaching the coast (13). In Europe and North America, soils are routinely monitored, and fertilizer application rates are adjusted to local conditions.…”

The Domain of the Replicators

“…They urged the farmers to apply higher doses of pesticides while continuing to compete to grow as much rice per year as possible. This actually intensified both the pest problem (Machbub, Ludwig, and Gunaratnam 1988;Lansing et al 2001) and water shortages (Horst 1998). It was only when farmers spontaneously returned to synchronized planting schemes that harvests began to recover-a point subsequently acknowledged by the evaluation team from the Asian Development Bank (Lansing 2007:124-125 Here we have described cases in which Darwinian models offer some insights into a range of cultural phenomena.…”