Blimey James – Sorry to continue the correspondence and please end it if you feel so, but this is important. Life is variable as the quality and quantity of the dust which revives it. The mineralsation of complex proteins into the simple elements required for plant growth is a function of a complexity of life. The whole art of husbandry is regulation of the speed of that process. Return too much fertility to a field and we increase crop yield by diminishing that of a neighbouring field.
The sophistry of desert agriculture falls at the same hurdle as hydroponics and vertical agriculture. To grow crops in a desert we must import nutrients (& water) from a life-cycle somewhere – so diminishing that cycle. Moreover, we will never replicate the complexity and ecological success of that evolved living process. In diminishing a succesful ecology for the increase of a temporal one, we diminish the optimum bio mass yield of the two.
Entropy is a physicists delusion – To suggest that the small yield of ashes from combustion can be equated to the much greater mineralisation of fungi and bacteria is ridiculous. You are stuck in the carbon cycle. Carbon cannot cycle. Life does.
