High food prices bringing fertile farmland back online - at last
The Russian example is just one amongst many. Decades of catastrophically low food prices and a general disinterest in agriculture amongst investors have led to the abandonment of hundreds of millions of hectares of good farmland around the world. Around 1 billion more hectares of low value, marginal land lie dormant, waiting for farmers to take it back into production.
Richard Willows, a former commodities trader, and Colin Hinchley, a farmer in his own right, came to Russia and bought up land in the Penza region that no-one was farming. They set up Heartlands Farm and did something very simple: they applied modern farming techniques with hi-tech equipment. As was to be expected, the results have been astounding. The farm achieved twice the yield of that of the Russian farms in the region. This year they expect yields three times as high as the average - around six tonnes per hectare. Check the video, here.
The socio-economic situation in this region - known to be home to some of the world's most productive soils - is dramatic: entire villages have been abandoned, people have migrated en masse to the cities, investments in farming have dried up entirely. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismantlement of collective farms, individual farmers were exposed to the dynamics of the world market. And what they saw - extremely low food prices - prompted them to give up the profession. The result is tens of millions of hectares of prime land that are just waiting to be cultivated.
The Russian example can be replicated all over the world - but especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, the enormous agricultural potential of which has not even begun to be touched. In Africa too, villages are being abandoned on a massive scale. This has put the farming sector under pressure. But the high food prices could be curbing this trend, because even small farmers can profit today. This is so because with relatively simple inputs - quality seed, fertilizer, basic knowledge and equipment -, average crop yields on the continent can be tripled to quintupled with ease, even by the continent's millions of smallholders, 95% of who use no modern inputs whatsoever (previous post).
We can only hope that food prices retain their current highs, because this is the only way for investors to become interested in agriculture once again. The unpleasant decades of dirt-cheap food are over. This problematic past kept the world's poorest - 75% of whom are farmers - in obscene poverty. Today, there is hope for them to keep farming and make a decent living.
One more word about Russia: the country is beginning to understand its potential as a green giant. President Putin recently called on the country's farmers to look into biofuels in order to revive the farming sector. Russia's Ministry of Agriculture for its part announced that the vast country would begin to produce 1 billion tons of biomass for exports, grown on a 'small' area of abandoned farm land in the immense temperate steppes of South-Central Russia. This is the equivalent of around 400 million tons of oil, or 2.8 billion barrels per year/7.7 million barrels per day. The land is immediately available, and does not refer to the much larger (future) biomass resource available in the country.
Picture: traditional Russian farmers dominate the landscape in Penza, but modern agriculture can triple yields.
energy :: sustainability :: biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: food :: agriculture :: Russia ::
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