Options (a) and (b) are both bogus. Neither can keep up with an exponentially breeding human population. The voluntary population control movement of the 1960s failed. (And think what a different world we would be living in now if people worldwide had answered the call of ZPG in 1968, and the population had stabilized at 3 million worldwide and 180 million US!)
So the real issue is how to control the human population:
Option (c) let nature take its course (famine, pestilence, nuclear war)
Option (d) forced sterilizations, genocides
Man, I've spent the last 30 years thinking that I really like industrial modernity -- well, at least modern medicine and cars and Interets and all that -- but that having 7 billion humans on the Earth fighting like cats and dogs over resources would just become a nightmare ... which it has.
I suppose the "optimistic" answer is to build thousands of Arcosantis where we can all live in little cells in the beehive, but this to me is not about what humanity and freedom and dignity are all about.
Since farmland devoted to fuel production globally will increase dramatically each year, I would assume that total acreage devoted to food production has peaked. Therefore I assume total food production globally has peaked or will peak very soon. I cannot foresee the global population increasing continually as total food supply decreases (I would think rather dramatically as the crops for fuel industry explodes).
I'm certainly no expert on food production, but it is my understanding that while organic farming can be more profitable per acre than standard farming (less use of fossil fuels & chemicals), the yield per acre is lower. Therefore, we will need more land, using organic farming, to provide the same amount of food that we do now. This sets up the problem of land used for food versus fuel--both food producers and fuel producers will need more land. Of course, a lot of small "Victory Gardens" will help quite a bit.
It seems to me that we are rapidly approaching a point where most people's primary focus will be on how to pay their food and energy bills. I wonder if the energy riots we have seen on the Indian subcontinent are a sign of things to come worldwide.
In an interview a couple of years ago, Jay Hanson (I checked the link, and it is no longer available), said that most people are getting too hung up on the technical aspects of post-Peak Oil. He said the key problem is how do we control men when there is no economic growth?
I have wondered for some time about Jay's choice of his retreat, the Big Island of Hawaii. I am beginning to wonder if he chose Hawaii because he thinks that the biggest threat we face results from food and energy riots, i.e., the Pacific Ocean is one heck of a big moat. I wonder if the Big Island could technically be food self-sufficient?
One question that doen't seem to get addressed is the gross over consumption of food by the developed economies. Hence we assume that the amount of food demanded is the amount needed. It is well documented that the health of the UK population improved during the rationing in WW2. I am not suggesting anything as drastic but there is certainly room for redistribution and rationalisation in the current food chain. Shock horror - Big Macs Must Go ;-)
While the health of the UK population increased during the rationing period, that had more to do with a more equitable distribution of resources than with less food being consumed. Pre-WWII many many of Britian's poor were unable to aquire reasonable amounts of healthy food. Rationing was combined with the introduction of free school lunches for poor children, OJ rations for all young children, and milk and eggs for pregnant mothers. I think that was what really impacted Britian's health.
I don't go out to eat often, but when I do I notice one thing. At the Buffets, people waste a lot of food.
I cook as a hobby, and I grow food as a hobby, and I study food plants as a hobby. It shocks me that even those that come from low food regions in a few years of the Plenty of the US, adopt the same food habits of the Rest of the Citizens, or more accurately the wasteful folks.
We as Americans waste a lot of Food. We have laws in some cities that state that once its cooked and not eaten by the customer, we have to throw it out. We have "Grand Buffets" where the left over food could feed some families for WEEKS!! It all goes to waste!
So yeah, as the end of our "Easy Eating" Lifestyle comes to and end we will see the end of the Buffets, or at least the end of them as we now know them to be.
Hey I am moving to a small town,, How many buffets are there, I bet not a single one. Gee I wonder why??
It isn't just buffets. Fast food restaurants throw away enormous amounts of unsold food. They usually keep enough food sitting there to fill your order immediately (unless you order something unexpected) so they can call it fast food. Whatever isn't bought in a fairly brief period, gets tossed.
I used to volunteer at a soup kitchen, and they received boxes and boxes of donuts that weren't quite fresh enough to meet Dunkin's standards. I wonder how many donuts Dunkin and KK toss every day
less than 400 acres produces over 1 million pounds of taro, a traditional food of Pacific Islanders
This all sounds very productive to me. With over 60,000 acres of agricultural land being recently released from sugar cane production, farming just this land would require supporting about 3 people per acre to be self-sufficient on the Big Island. Statements from John Jeavons indicate that biointensive farming would support over 10 people per acre sustainably.
Westexas wrote:
"I'm certainly no expert on food production, but it is my understanding that while organic farming can be more profitable per acre than standard farming (less use of fossil fuels & chemicals), the yield per acre is lower."
I'm no expert either. I mentioned a few days ago that I had the pleasure of hosting Joel Salatin last weekend. He is a truely organic beef and poultry farmer in Virginia, not simply "organic" as a marketing ploy as the word has largely become.
He convincingly explained to me his methods that are low input and high yield. He improves his land each year and keeps a larger number of animals on his land than any of his neighbors. The quality of life for his charges is very good as well--all free range, grass fed and "grass finished"--no feed lot time before slaughter. The chickens follow the cattle sequentially on the same pastures, providing a more complex nutrition to the pasture grasses. In his philosophy, the health of the pasture is what comes first and the health of the animals follows from that naturally.
So there is some hope for greater efficiency in organic methods--though it is definitely more labor intensive.
-Matt DC
"Free range" and "Organic" red meat will not save you from colon cancer. In this study, the lowest risk group of subjects got 0-30 g of red meat per day.
Meat Consumption and Risk of Colorectal Cancer
Ann Chao, PhD; Michael J. Thun, MD, MS; Cari J. Connell, MPH; Marjorie L. McCullough, ScD; Eric J. Jacobs, PhD; W. Dana Flanders, MD, ScD; Carmen Rodriguez, MD, MPH; Rashmi Sinha, PhD; Eugenia E. Calle, PhD
JAMA. 2005;293:172-182.
full paper is free but requires registration. http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/293/2/172
The risks from very modest quantities of red meat can probably be lessened somewhat, but not completely, by a high fiber diet. From PMID 16452248: "In colonic exfoliated cells, the percentage staining positive for the NOC-specific DNA adduct, O(6)-carboxymethyl guanine (O(6)CMG) was significantly (P < 0.001) higher on the high red meat diet. In 13 volunteers, levels were intermediate on the high-fiber, high red meat diet."
It's probably not very healthy for the aquifer, either. Nitrates are usually at unaccpetable levels within several miles of animal farms.
It's not so great for other reasons as well. Land use is greater and irrigation needs are generally greater to much greater than for plant foods.
Locally grown organic legumes are a better bet.
See:
Asia Pac J Clin Nutr. 2004;13(2):217-20.
Legumes: the most important dietary predictor of survival in older people of different ethnicities.
Darmadi-Blackberry I, Wahlqvist ML, Kouris-Blazos A, Steen B, Lukito W, Horie Y, Horie K. http://www.healthyeatingclub.com/info/articles/diets-foods/Darmadi.pdf
It's probably not that legumes are all that. But, they have no heme iron, they are generally anticarcinogenic when cooked, they have lots of dietary fiber, and they are completely devoid of oxidized cholesterol.
Here is the problem I see with a dramatic increase in agricultural lands. Current methods that involve high yields of crops require several things:
First lots of water - essentially irrigation to protect against drought, where the water is pumped from underground aquifers.
Secondly fertilizer - generally made from natural gas. Essentially because monocultures tend to strip the nutrients from the soil (called by some mining the soil), so there is this constant need to replenish these nutrients.
Finally pesticides - generally also petrochemicals of one sort or another.
Of these, we have already talked a lot about limitations involving both oil and natural gas, so let me focus on water instead:
The Ogallala Aquifer, also known as the High Plains Aquifer, is a shallow water table aquifer located beneath the Great Plains in the United States. One of the world's largest aquifers, it lies under about 174,000 mi² (450,000 km²) in portions of the eight states of South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas. It was named in 1899 by N.H. Darton from its type locality near the town of Ogallala, Nebraska.
The regions overlying the Ogallala aquifer are some of the most productive regions for ranching livestock, and growing corn, wheat and soybeans in the United States (often called the "breadbasket of America"). The success of large-scale farming in areas which do not have adequate precipitation and do not always have perennial surface water for diversion, depends heavily on pumping groundwater for irrigation.
The aquifer was first tapped for irrigation in 1911. Large scale use for irrigation began in the 1930s and continued through the 1950s, due to the availability of electric power to rural farming communities and the development of cheap and efficient electric turbine pumps. Because the rate of extraction exceeds the rate of recharge, water level elevations are decreasing. At some places the water table was measured to drop more than five feet (1.5 m) per year at the time of maximum extraction. In extreme cases, the deepening of wells was required to reach the steadily falling water table; and it has even been drained (dewatered) in some places.
Water problems aren't just a problem for agriculture. There was a comment here at TOD about a place in Oklahoma where oil drilling had been suspended - the local town no longer had sufficient quantities of water required to support the drilling.
Depletion of the Ogallala aquifer is one reason I'm sceptical that present ethanol policies are sustainable. Parts of the aquifer in Oklahoma and Kansas are projected to be dewatered, as in dry, by 2020. A recent study of water supply for the Texas panhandle shows several counties without groundwater by 2050. Water use allocation will be on a lot more people's minds long before that. Ethanol costs will rise just due to the cost of water.
Thank you for bringing up the Peak Aquifer article.
The USA is surrounded on 3 sides by gazillions of gallons of water and yet we threaten to run dry. Needed is a Manhaten Project level desalinazation effort, not just for the sake of US citizens, but for citizens all around the world who are running short of fresh water. Its amazing that MSM has not picked up on any of the Chicken Little warning signs. It will be too late when the sky does fall.
Desalinization via reverse osmosis is very energy intensive. It costs 2-5x as much as aquifer withdrawal. The memberanes for ro are also very expensive. And what do you do with the waste product?
As much as I can be convinced that farmers will find ethanol crops to become a tempting investment to put on their fields, I also suspect that more of them will be mounting or at least leasing spots for wind-generators at the corners of those fields, and the numbers may well show where the best energy/cash returns will come from in the long-term. I'm sure a mixed 'energy crop' will make an appealing hedge.
You might see more electric vehicles getting used in agriculture, making a more direct use of that wind.. either that, or that farmers would commit a portion of their cropland for biofuel that would be grown to assist in their own energy needs. If anybody can find a way to improve eroei, I'll bet a farmer can.. the original scientists.
Some combination of engines powered by crop waste and zinc-air batteries recharged by wind might make farmers independent of motor fuel. What they'd need after that is some source of fixed nitrogen. I took a look at making a small Haber-process reactor using medical oxygen-concentrator tech to produce nitrogen, electrolysis to make hydrogen, SCUBA compressor to get it to the necessary pressure, and off-the-shelf stuff for reaction vessels and whatnot. It looks expensive.
The other side of the coin is that P and K can get washed out or removed with products, but they aren't easily liberated to the atmosphere as nitrogen is.
"I assume total food production globally has peaked or will peak very soon."
This is the most perceptive, and most alarming, observation I have read in some time. It condenses and encapsulates most of the biodiesel discussion we've been having, as well as many other threads.
Think about this: roughly half of the nitrogen in human biomass comes directly from the natural gas based fertilizers. As we hit peak gas, we probably hit peak food.
In addition, half of cropland use prior to the invention of the internal combustion engine went to feeding horses and oxen for primary power and transportation. The conversion of this cropland to direct human consumption helped feed the green revolution.
Now it looks like we'll be drifting back to having half our cropland go for transportation; but via biofuels and ethanol.
Thus, we should expect the decline after "peak food" to be quite steep. Very sobering.
Another downside is that 19th century cities had large crews sweeping up horse manure, to be transferred to farmers in surrounding farms, which produced food for the cities. There don't appear to be such manure production possibilities from vehicular transportation.
Jim - I happen to agree. Where did you get that stat about nitrogen in human biomass? That doesnt quite make sense - how long have they been using nat gas to make fertilizer? what about people that were born and grew up before this? their nitrogen came from existing soil? perhaps you mean the 'marginal nitrogen in human biomass' comes from NG....
I believe the nitrogen in your bodily proteins are replaced with some frequency, which is why you need a constant supply in your diet, and why you constantly excrete it in your urine.
The figure that sticks in my head is 40% of total nitrogen comes from Nat. Gas; it was in some science mag some time back.
To make it available to plants, the nitrogen in commercial fertilizers is in the form of ammonia, for which the nitrogen is pulled from the air and the hydrogen usually comes from natural gas. Fertilizers made from sewage sludge (I know of at least a couple) would be the most obvious exception.
I am trying to get some theoretical numbers behind this concept.
Let's say natural gas peaks in 2010, and declines 2% per year. Let's also assume a 1:1 ratio in food production losses (natural gas provides most of the feedstock for fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides).
That would mean an 18.3% loss by 2020.
Let us then factor in losses from the decline of irrigated fields, orchards and pasturelands, due to the skyrocketing cost of pumping water from declining aquifers. Let us assume 5% off the top.
Let us also assume a 5% off the top loss from the associated effects of peak oil (marginal farmers are driven out of business by skyrocketing costs for transport, fuel for tractors, plastic hoses and drip irrigation lines, etc.)
Now we are running at about 72% (rounded up).
Let us then assume that 10% of the remaining croplands are converted to energy sources (vegetable oils for biodiesel, carbon crops for ethanol, wood for fuel, etc.).
In this model we are down to 62% of present food production by the year 2020.
youre not 'wrong' per se, but several of those assumptions will have quite wide dispersions.
a)natural gas decline will be greater than 2% -it depletes faster than oil
b)there are other ways to generate fertilizer - compost, manure etc - not as good as NG, but can supplement
c) the main thing is that we could grow MORE food if everyone grew a bit of their own (20-30%) that way less fuel would be used to transport food and people could use their own gardens compost to replenish the soil. one acre of permaculture can grow food for alot of people - a different and better model than current large scale ag.
My brother is working for the German company Uhde, and they are building large urea plants everywhere where there is cheap natural gas. Currently, they are building the largest urea plant of the world in Saudi-Arabia.
So Lastsasquatch, what is your take on how far NG depletion will have progressed by 2020?
as for b) and c), my wife and I are setting up a permaculture orchard/garden which should sustain us once it's completed, but it is astounding how much work it requires, how much high energy inputs for fencing, irrigation lines, etc. Also, in our town of 6,500, I don't know of anyone else who is trying it.
I've been trying without success to get people to start gardening (most people don't have any idea how to grow veggies -- even WITH rototillers and NG based fertilizers).
So let's say we'll ADD 5% for people growing victory gardens (the same we've subtracted for reduced irrigation farming); how much additional do you think we should subtract for NG depletion?
As the people with the money have a surplus of food and are facing a shortage of liquid fuel, I would estimate that possibly the 10% of farmland for fuel production is low. Were it to go to 25% then we would be down to 47% available for food production by 2020. Also, many foods for the middle class and wealthy are transported from the third world.Kunstler and others have theorized that these foods will no longer be available with a liquid fuel shortage-which makes it likely the 25% figure might be low. The people with the money will need liquid fuel not only for their cars, but also to transport the food from the third world.The equilibrium point would be when the cost savings from increased fuel are offset by increased food costs (for the middle class and wealthy). Barring a major shift towards the left led by Chavez-like leaders, this seems to be the most likely scenario (in my opinion).
Ammonia is made from hydrogen and nitrogen. We can get hydrogen from gas, or oil, or coal, or tar sands. Coal in China is the second cheapest, after natural gas in gas surplus countries like Quatar.
We are usually adding hydrogen to hydrocarbons in order to lighten them up and make them more useful. Natural gas is the hydrogen champion, once NG depletes, then hydrogen will be much harder to come by.
Getting hydrogen from coal really means replacing some of the hydrogen in water with carbon. This takes energy and also gives you loads of carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide.
So the real issue is how to control the human population:
Option (c) let nature take its course (famine, pestilence, nuclear war)
Option (d) forced sterilizations, genocides
And I wish I had the kind of money it takes to decamp for Kiwiland myself!
Man, I've spent the last 30 years thinking that I really like industrial modernity -- well, at least modern medicine and cars and Interets and all that -- but that having 7 billion humans on the Earth fighting like cats and dogs over resources would just become a nightmare ... which it has.
I suppose the "optimistic" answer is to build thousands of Arcosantis where we can all live in little cells in the beehive, but this to me is not about what humanity and freedom and dignity are all about.
I'm certainly no expert on food production, but it is my understanding that while organic farming can be more profitable per acre than standard farming (less use of fossil fuels & chemicals), the yield per acre is lower. Therefore, we will need more land, using organic farming, to provide the same amount of food that we do now. This sets up the problem of land used for food versus fuel--both food producers and fuel producers will need more land. Of course, a lot of small "Victory Gardens" will help quite a bit.
It seems to me that we are rapidly approaching a point where most people's primary focus will be on how to pay their food and energy bills. I wonder if the energy riots we have seen on the Indian subcontinent are a sign of things to come worldwide.
In an interview a couple of years ago, Jay Hanson (I checked the link, and it is no longer available), said that most people are getting too hung up on the technical aspects of post-Peak Oil. He said the key problem is how do we control men when there is no economic growth?
I have wondered for some time about Jay's choice of his retreat, the Big Island of Hawaii. I am beginning to wonder if he chose Hawaii because he thinks that the biggest threat we face results from food and energy riots, i.e., the Pacific Ocean is one heck of a big moat. I wonder if the Big Island could technically be food self-sufficient?
Not with its current population.
I cook as a hobby, and I grow food as a hobby, and I study food plants as a hobby. It shocks me that even those that come from low food regions in a few years of the Plenty of the US, adopt the same food habits of the Rest of the Citizens, or more accurately the wasteful folks.
We as Americans waste a lot of Food. We have laws in some cities that state that once its cooked and not eaten by the customer, we have to throw it out. We have "Grand Buffets" where the left over food could feed some families for WEEKS!! It all goes to waste!
So yeah, as the end of our "Easy Eating" Lifestyle comes to and end we will see the end of the Buffets, or at least the end of them as we now know them to be.
Hey I am moving to a small town,, How many buffets are there, I bet not a single one. Gee I wonder why??
I used to volunteer at a soup kitchen, and they received boxes and boxes of donuts that weren't quite fresh enough to meet Dunkin's standards. I wonder how many donuts Dunkin and KK toss every day
- 500 acres produces 7 million pounds of guava
- 2,700 acres produces 36 million pounds of papaya
- less than 400 acres produces over 1 million pounds of taro, a traditional food of Pacific Islanders
This all sounds very productive to me. With over 60,000 acres of agricultural land being recently released from sugar cane production, farming just this land would require supporting about 3 people per acre to be self-sufficient on the Big Island. Statements from John Jeavons indicate that biointensive farming would support over 10 people per acre sustainably."I'm certainly no expert on food production, but it is my understanding that while organic farming can be more profitable per acre than standard farming (less use of fossil fuels & chemicals), the yield per acre is lower."
I'm no expert either. I mentioned a few days ago that I had the pleasure of hosting Joel Salatin last weekend. He is a truely organic beef and poultry farmer in Virginia, not simply "organic" as a marketing ploy as the word has largely become.
He convincingly explained to me his methods that are low input and high yield. He improves his land each year and keeps a larger number of animals on his land than any of his neighbors. The quality of life for his charges is very good as well--all free range, grass fed and "grass finished"--no feed lot time before slaughter. The chickens follow the cattle sequentially on the same pastures, providing a more complex nutrition to the pasture grasses. In his philosophy, the health of the pasture is what comes first and the health of the animals follows from that naturally.
So there is some hope for greater efficiency in organic methods--though it is definitely more labor intensive.
-Matt DC
Meat Consumption and Risk of Colorectal Cancer
Ann Chao, PhD; Michael J. Thun, MD, MS; Cari J. Connell, MPH; Marjorie L. McCullough, ScD; Eric J. Jacobs, PhD; W. Dana Flanders, MD, ScD; Carmen Rodriguez, MD, MPH; Rashmi Sinha, PhD; Eugenia E. Calle, PhD
JAMA. 2005;293:172-182.
full paper is free but requires registration.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/293/2/172
The risks from very modest quantities of red meat can probably be lessened somewhat, but not completely, by a high fiber diet. From PMID 16452248: "In colonic exfoliated cells, the percentage staining positive for the NOC-specific DNA adduct, O(6)-carboxymethyl guanine (O(6)CMG) was significantly (P < 0.001) higher on the high red meat diet. In 13 volunteers, levels were intermediate on the high-fiber, high red meat diet."
It's probably not very healthy for the aquifer, either. Nitrates are usually at unaccpetable levels within several miles of animal farms.
It's not so great for other reasons as well. Land use is greater and irrigation needs are generally greater to much greater than for plant foods.
Locally grown organic legumes are a better bet.
See:
Asia Pac J Clin Nutr. 2004;13(2):217-20.
Legumes: the most important dietary predictor of survival in older people of different ethnicities.
Darmadi-Blackberry I, Wahlqvist ML, Kouris-Blazos A, Steen B, Lukito W, Horie Y, Horie K.
http://www.healthyeatingclub.com/info/articles/diets-foods/Darmadi.pdf
It's probably not that legumes are all that. But, they have no heme iron, they are generally anticarcinogenic when cooked, they have lots of dietary fiber, and they are completely devoid of oxidized cholesterol.
First lots of water - essentially irrigation to protect against drought, where the water is pumped from underground aquifers.
Secondly fertilizer - generally made from natural gas. Essentially because monocultures tend to strip the nutrients from the soil (called by some mining the soil), so there is this constant need to replenish these nutrients.
Finally pesticides - generally also petrochemicals of one sort or another.
Of these, we have already talked a lot about limitations involving both oil and natural gas, so let me focus on water instead:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer
Water problems aren't just a problem for agriculture. There was a comment here at TOD about a place in Oklahoma where oil drilling had been suspended - the local town no longer had sufficient quantities of water required to support the drilling.
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/2/22/122330/042#2
Thank you for bringing up the Peak Aquifer article.
The USA is surrounded on 3 sides by gazillions of gallons of water and yet we threaten to run dry. Needed is a Manhaten Project level desalinazation effort, not just for the sake of US citizens, but for citizens all around the world who are running short of fresh water. Its amazing that MSM has not picked up on any of the Chicken Little warning signs. It will be too late when the sky does fall.
You might see more electric vehicles getting used in agriculture, making a more direct use of that wind.. either that, or that farmers would commit a portion of their cropland for biofuel that would be grown to assist in their own energy needs. If anybody can find a way to improve eroei, I'll bet a farmer can.. the original scientists.
There is an easier way to fix nitrogen in the soil. Some plants do it for you. Soybeans are a noted example.
Actually its the symbotic bacteria 'in the roots' that fix the nitrogen.
If you could convince the bacteria to do this via genetic re-engineering w/o effecting other plant 'features'....
"I assume total food production globally has peaked or will peak very soon."
This is the most perceptive, and most alarming, observation I have read in some time. It condenses and encapsulates most of the biodiesel discussion we've been having, as well as many other threads.
Think about this: roughly half of the nitrogen in human biomass comes directly from the natural gas based fertilizers. As we hit peak gas, we probably hit peak food.
In addition, half of cropland use prior to the invention of the internal combustion engine went to feeding horses and oxen for primary power and transportation. The conversion of this cropland to direct human consumption helped feed the green revolution.
Now it looks like we'll be drifting back to having half our cropland go for transportation; but via biofuels and ethanol.
Thus, we should expect the decline after "peak food" to be quite steep. Very sobering.
Another downside is that 19th century cities had large crews sweeping up horse manure, to be transferred to farmers in surrounding farms, which produced food for the cities. There don't appear to be such manure production possibilities from vehicular transportation.
The figure that sticks in my head is 40% of total nitrogen comes from Nat. Gas; it was in some science mag some time back.
jim
I am trying to get some theoretical numbers behind this concept.
Let's say natural gas peaks in 2010, and declines 2% per year. Let's also assume a 1:1 ratio in food production losses (natural gas provides most of the feedstock for fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides).
That would mean an 18.3% loss by 2020.
Let us then factor in losses from the decline of irrigated fields, orchards and pasturelands, due to the skyrocketing cost of pumping water from declining aquifers. Let us assume 5% off the top.
Let us also assume a 5% off the top loss from the associated effects of peak oil (marginal farmers are driven out of business by skyrocketing costs for transport, fuel for tractors, plastic hoses and drip irrigation lines, etc.)
Now we are running at about 72% (rounded up).
Let us then assume that 10% of the remaining croplands are converted to energy sources (vegetable oils for biodiesel, carbon crops for ethanol, wood for fuel, etc.).
In this model we are down to 62% of present food production by the year 2020.
Please show me how this model is wrong.
-- jim burke
a)natural gas decline will be greater than 2% -it depletes faster than oil
b)there are other ways to generate fertilizer - compost, manure etc - not as good as NG, but can supplement
c) the main thing is that we could grow MORE food if everyone grew a bit of their own (20-30%) that way less fuel would be used to transport food and people could use their own gardens compost to replenish the soil. one acre of permaculture can grow food for alot of people - a different and better model than current large scale ag.
as for b) and c), my wife and I are setting up a permaculture orchard/garden which should sustain us once it's completed, but it is astounding how much work it requires, how much high energy inputs for fencing, irrigation lines, etc. Also, in our town of 6,500, I don't know of anyone else who is trying it.
I've been trying without success to get people to start gardening (most people don't have any idea how to grow veggies -- even WITH rototillers and NG based fertilizers).
So let's say we'll ADD 5% for people growing victory gardens (the same we've subtracted for reduced irrigation farming); how much additional do you think we should subtract for NG depletion?
Rick
Getting hydrogen from coal really means replacing some of the hydrogen in water with carbon. This takes energy and also gives you loads of carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide.