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98 comments on Agriculture Meets Peak Oil: Soil Association Conference
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98 comments on Agriculture Meets Peak Oil: Soil Association Conference
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Just a couple of points.
The bulk of the human diet for the last few thousand years consists of grains. These days wheat, corn and rice are it. They run the world. They are not optional.
Since ancient times grains were often consumed a long way from the fields that produced them. Rome, for instance, imported enormous quantities (for the time) from Egypt. The far east has had centralized rice markets for millenia.
Historically, when times were tough, *more* of the diet consisted of grain as meat became a luxury and imported fruits and vegetables became expensive and scarce. Instead of fattening the pig on corn and oats, we ate the corn and oats.
There was massive transnational trade in grain (and other commodities) in the age of sail, long before coal and steam, before gunpowder and printing presses and the English language.... before oil.
I would love to see somebody savvy in economics build a scenario where the global grain market ceases on account of peak oil. I want to see numbers crunched.
The difference with historical times is the scale of many grain-growing enterprises. Look this up in google earth: 50.8156,5.5292. It is a region historically specialized in growing wheat and oats (population was roughly 3/8 of today). Compare the size and quantity of the settlements with those in, for example, a farming area in on of the corn states of the USA. There is much more need for fossil fuels to just produce the grain.
Additionally, grain trade was conducted largely via water transport. Producing it is one thing, moving it to market is another.
Yes, agriculture is fossil fuel intensive. But it uses only a small fraction of total consumption and it is an absolutely necessary activity. It's hard for me to envision a scenario where peak oil consistently chokes off fuel to the most important uses. Makes no economic sense.
Similarly with bulk transportation of grains and beans. Very oil intensive. But only a tiny tiny fraction of total consumption. And history proves you don't need oil at all.
I sympathize with folks who hate globalization. But world markets for food and other commodities existed for centuries, even millenia, before that buzzword emerged.
Our extravagant automobile cultures are dependent on cheap oil, but I seriously doubt our basic food supply is.
But it's happening already. Agricultural output is down in some poor parts of the world due to high oil and gas prices reducing the amount of fertilizer, pesticide, mechanisation and pumped irrigation that can be afforded. For every dollar a barrel of oil rises, a poor farmer somewhere in the world finds he can afford less of the industrialised inputs his productivity relies on.
Marginal farmers can definitely find themselves in trouble.
The Question is: Why doesn't the price of his crop rise to offset the increasing costs of his inputs?
Here's what you often find:
(1) There is a grain surplus in his home nation. Essentially his services, as a marginal farmer, are not required. Awful, but true.
(2) He is denied access to world markets. Or, at least, denied anything like fair access. Subsidies that other rich countries use to pad their farmers' wallets keep the price too low. This is a biggie. And the developing world complains about it all the time, as they should.
(3) He faces outright price controls for his produce.
That said, my comments in previous posts apply to nations where fossil fuel use in agriculture is only a tiny fraction of total use: the developed world.
If a country uses fossil fuels mainly for agriculture, they could be in real trouble post peak. No argument there. Unless, they have completely unimpeded access to global markets (fat chance!), they would have to begin the wrenching transition to another form of agriculture, a transition that may well be a century distant for developed nations.
Another way of putting it would be: We have seen the end of cheap oil. But the age of cheap food continues (at least for now. But observe Mexico). And that's what's killing the marginal farmer.
It's also happening due to ethanol. In essence, we are diverting oil and other fossil fuels away from food to a substitute for oil. We are clearly making the judgement that our cars are more important than our food or those who would otherwise be importing our food.
"The bulk of the human diet for the last few thousand years consists of grains. These days wheat, corn and rice are it. They run the world. They are not optional."
An excellent point. And why grains? Cheap, easy storage of a calorific food. Economically air dry on the stalk and they are good for the winter, or for transport.
I have great hopes for organic foods, but post peak must address grains. So much of the calories of our diet is grain,whether you agree with the diet or not. Bread, cereal, pasta, noodles, junk food, “pork and beans”-all of three beans, rest corn syrup-, the barrels of soft drinks and beer. Check the products in the 3 or 4 aisles of the grocery store selling food. Primary ingredient is grain.
“Grain, the currency of currencies”
That sums it up wonderfully.
In a post-peak scenario, where production is falling rapidly, I expect it would become an almost sacred obligation to keep the fossil fuels flowing into grain production.
And, as a percentage of total consumption, they don't use much at all.
Grain is the foundation of civilization.
The quote is from Dan Morgan's "The Merchants of Grain". It's an older work on Cargill, Bunge, Dreyfus, and the history of grain and trading. He uses it as a chapter title, and attributes it to Lenin, if I recall correctly.
Indeed, let us compare Rome with our current society. I shall go for a zeroth order estimation of energy available per capita and what that meant to agricultural production, since it fits into the discussion.
The Roman empire had, at its height, probably some 65 million people. I quote
http://www.unrv.com/empire/roman-population.php
here... I can not guarantee that the source is any good, but the author who does not claim to be a professional scholar seems to have done a good job summerizing the data. And from what I remember about Roman history, the numbers are probably in the right ballpark. You can slap me for being too lazy to find professional sources, if you like.
The author elaborates:
"10 to 30% or 6 million to 19 million people lived in the cities, leaving the vast majority of some 46 to 59 million people to live in the country as independent and mostly tenant farmers"
Assuming that there was little farming done in the cities (they did have vegetable and herb gardens, of course), the Romans had managed to achieve a ratio of three to four famers per city-dweller, a remarkable achievement that would not be replicated for many centuries, essentially not until the the industrial revolution.
I will be conservative and assume a ratio of 4:1 between people who produce agricultural goods and consumers.
We know that besides manpower the Romans used horses, mules and oxen to pull carts, the plow etc.. So that probably multiplies the total manpower available to the agricultural part of the society by a considerable amount. Shall we say, fivefold? In other words, the effective manpower (and by that I mean raw mechanical power generation capcity) per Roman city dweller (the people most of us resemble most) was roughly 20:1.
Now, in other posts we did discuss that a single human being is not capable of producing more than 100W continuous for eight hours and probably no more than one third of that averaged over 24 hours. Effectively, this is hardly more than 20W on average over the population because children, old people and most women will fall far short of the peak power output of a well fed and thoroughly whipped slave or a farmer who ows taxes and rent and wants to keep his family happy. Also keep in mind that the Romans were kind of short people... :-)
Given all of these constraints, we can probably say that the average Roman city dweller had access to no more than 20*20W = 400W of average power generation capacity. And even that might be an overestimate, by far.
It follows that if we wanted to recreate a Roman citizen's lifestyle (which was quite good, actually), we need no more 400W per capita. That was before the invention of pesticides, high yield grain species and fertilizer, mind you. Obviously, we can do much better than they can!
So, now let me come to the cost end of the equation. If all I need is 400W for myself, how much will it cost me? Well, if I bought solar panels, it would be around 6 times $5/W or $12,000 amortized over 25 years. That is $480/year at current cost. Wind power probably comes in a little bit cheaper. Does anybody doubt that solar and wind will be cheaper by at least another factor of two or three by the time we actually ramp them up to the 400W/capita level? If not, we are now talking less than $250 per year in generation investment cost for ALL renewables.
What about driving, you will ask? Well, the Roman citizen usually either lived in the same house where he worked or could walk there. I don't remember Fiat being around at the time to produce cars.
And what about transportation? I believe our civil engineering skills are a lot better than those of the Romans and we could easily engineer a system of canals and railroads that can compete with their transportation cost. Can you imagine the increase of towing capacity for an oxen that pulls a railway car in comparison with with a Roman cart running on a road like this?
http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/a/a5/250px-PompeiiSt...
Just kidding. But I guess you know what I am getting at...
"Given all of these constraints, we can probably say that the average Roman city dweller had access to no more than 20*20W = 400W of average power generation capacity. And even that might be an overestimate, by far."
O.K. taken as given...
"So, now let me come to the cost end of the equation. If all I need is 400W for myself, how much will it cost me? Well, if I bought solar panels, it would be around 6 times $5/W or $12,000 amortized over 25 years. That is $480/year at current cost. Wind power probably comes in a little bit cheaper. Does anybody doubt that solar and wind will be cheaper by at least another factor of two or three by the time we actually ramp them up to the 400W/capita level? If not, we are now talking less than $250 per year in generation investment cost for ALL renewables."
Sorry, you loose me here; PV panels or windmills, and their associated bits and pieces (Insulated copper wire, storage batteries, solid state inverters and charge controllers, etc etc) as well as the equipment they are capable of powering (electric motors, and other electrical devices) are the products of our culture, not that of ancient rome
For instance a PV factory needs ultra-pure chemicals, in quantity to do mass PV, clean rooms, exotic solvents, energy intensive metals like aluminium in quantity, skilled engineers and workers etc etc in other words it sits close to the top of our cultures "technology pyramid" the rest of which is all supported by energy intensive activity.
I'm not saying that 400W per capita is not do-able, or that it's not "enough" for a decent life, but i think you will be doing it with Roman level technology (i.e. wind water draft animals and human sweat), and getting Roman level products from it i.e. don't be expecting a gas turbine, telephone, or PV panel
"Sorry, you loose me here; PV panels or windmills, and their associated bits and pieces (Insulated copper wire, storage batteries, solid state inverters and charge controllers, etc etc) as well as the equipment they are capable of powering (electric motors, and other electrical devices) are the products of our culture, not that of ancient rome"
Both (thinfilm) solar panels and wind tubines have EROEIs on the order of 10:1 or better. They can easily replicate themselves in terms of energy cost. That includes the raw materials, which are not nearly as expensive as you seem to think they are. And none of the elements used in the production of these things are rare, either. We will most likely be running out of catalytic converters for our cars soon but we will never run out of silicon and glass substrates for PV.
"For instance a PV factory needs ultra-pure chemicals, in quantity to do mass PV, clean rooms, exotic solvents, energy intensive metals like aluminium in quantity, skilled engineers and workers etc etc in other words it sits close to the top of our cultures "technology pyramid" the rest of which is all supported by energy intensive activity."
And yet, none of these material need anything else for their production than energy from solar cells... and the correct recipe, of course. What seperates us from the Romans is that we have the recipes.
"I'm not saying that 400W per capita is not do-able, or that it's not "enough" for a decent life, but i think you will be doing it with Roman level technology (i.e. wind water draft animals and human sweat), and getting Roman level products from it i.e. don't be expecting a gas turbine, telephone, or PV panel"
I did not say 400W were enough to support our lifestyle. That's why I pointed out that the Romans did not live far from work and that their transportation networks were based on stone covered roads which require enormous amounts of energy to transport heavy loads in comparison with paved roads and especially rails. That is why rails were invented: they save energy! Trust me, OUR efficiency to get things done beats the crapp out of anything the Romans have ever been able to do. Yet, they lived and conquered the known world. We usually just bitch.
What I am saying is that the Romans can give us proof that one can live very well for 400W. Actually, if you do my analysis right, you will probably find that they had less than 200W because I might have overestimated the horses and oxen power by far.
The point is this: one slave equals 20W of power generation capacity. That is the same as one square meter of solar panels. If you really want to be serious about comparing Roman economy with ours on an energetic level, that is what you get. 1 slave = 1 medium size solar panel. I could have the equivalent of 25 Roman slaves work for me on my own roof and another 50 could be slaving away on my employer's roof for each and every one of our employees. A 5MW wind turbine equals 250,000 slaves peak. Six of them would equal the manpower of ALL of the slaves in Rome (the city) on average.
One can only imagine what the Romans would have done with this much power! One thing is for sure: they wouldn't have bitched about how little it is.
And I hope you realize that I am not the one who makes this comparison for real. I had six years of Latin in school, that is plenty to know that Roman society worked nothing like ours on any level. But many people on TOD like to bring up the past to convince themselves that mankind is on its way out because the black gold is running out. They like to compare us with the middle ages or antiquity, not realizing how ridiculous that comparison is. What I am trying to show is how ridiculous that comparison really turns out once you dress up the naked thought with numbers.
Great line, Infinite!
Your analysis might be aggressively reductionistic but your main point is very secure, in my view.
Unless we start think quantitatively, we risk getting the order of magnitudes all wrong and getting stuck in our fantasies and nightmares.
There are enough real things to worry about without those bugaboos.
I like your reasoning, IP, but there's one hitch...
Your analysis sort of assumes that the Roman citizen's way of life and standard of living was sustainable.
It wasn't. It's been demonstrated that the fall of the empire can be explained in terms of ecological degradation and running out of cheap energy (deforestation = lack of firewood...)
Its been asserted, but in no way demonstrated.