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The Fallacy of Reversibility
Posted by Stuart Staniford on January 22, 2008 - 11:00am
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: agriculture, biofuel, food prices, peak oil, relocalization [list all tags]
Why Peak Oil Actually Helps Industrial Agriculture
Claas (Caterpillar) Lexion 570 combine harvester in action. Image courtesy: Wikipedia.
This argument has never really made sense to me, but my recent explorations of food prices and biofuels have sharpened up my conviction that the thinking behind this position is mistaken. In this piece, I'm going to first document that some influential peak-oilers do in fact believe this, then try to discuss what I think the reasoning is -- it's not usually made very explicit but it depends on something I'm calling the Fallacy of Reversibility. Finally, I'm going to lay out why I don't think things are going to go the way the proponents of relocalization expect, at least not any time soon.
Relocalization Quotes
The idea that "peak oil" was something that society was going to have to reckon with began amongst scientists with backgrounds in the oil industry - most famously Hubbert himself, and then elaborated by Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrere, Ken Deffeyes, and others.These oil industry scientists - what I will call the first wave of peak oil thinkers and writers - were mainly interested in estimating when peak oil would be, and the likely supply side mitigations (or lack of them). The implications of peak oil for agriculture was not a major focus. However, a second wave of journalists, writers, and non-profits have been doing a lot to spread the word about peak oil - Richard Heinberg, James Kunstler, Julian Darley and the Post Carbon Institute, the staff of the Community Solution, and others have all written books, held conferences, and started non-profits to warn the world about the dangers of peak oil. Given that the world as a whole has been doing its best to stay in denial about peak oil these outreach efforts have been a valuable service -- certainly I have learned a lot from them. At the same time, these writers bought to the table an agenda about society in general, and agriculture in particular, that I believe lacks an empirical foundation.
Let me start with a quote from Jim Kunstler:
We have to produce food differently. The ADM / Monsanto / Cargill model of industrial agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix this. Farming will soon return much closer to the center of American economic life. It will necessarily have to be done more locally, at a smaller-and-finer scale, and will require more human labor. The value-added activities associated with farming -- e.g. making products like cheese, wine, oils -- will also have to be done much more locally. This situation presents excellent business and vocational opportunities for America's young people (if they can unplug their Ipods long enough to pay attention.) It also presents huge problems in land-use reform. Not to mention the fact that the knowledge and skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly retrieved from the dumpster of history.The Community Solution also believes that the current agricultural model cannot be sustained, though they are concerned about the ability to manage the transition:
Reliance on large-scale agribusiness, driven by vast energy consumption, has resulted in an agricultural monoculture that is simply not sustainable. But where are the tens of millions of small farmers who will be necessary if we are to return to locally grown food crops? And what about all the food that is being used for feed, and now, for fuel?The Post Carbon Institute is attempting to build model farms of the kind that they believe will be required post peak:
Using science, proven tools, and evolving methodologies the Energy Farm Initiative seeks to demonstrate systems of agriculture that can sustain both farms and communities in the face of climate change and peak oil. This program weaves threads of the Relocalization vision into a fabric of local currency, local food and biofuel systems, revitalization of local industry, and community cooperation.Another writer who has been very influential in getting the word out about peak oil is Richard Heinberg (including reportedly reaching former President Bill Clinton). I profiled Richard here. In December of last year, he wrote:Our aim is to build flexible systems that reduce dependence on high energy inputs and produce food and reliable renewable energy for local users. The steps in which this transition is manifest is the Local Energy Farm Initiative.
The aim of substantially or entirely removing fossil fuels from agriculture is implicit in organic farming in all its various forms and permutations - including ecological agriculture, Biodynamics, Permaculture, Biointensive farming, and Natural Farming. All also have in common a prescription for the reduction or elimination of tillage, and the reduction or elimination of reliance on mechanized farm equipment. Nearly all of these systems rely on increased amounts of human labor, and on greater application of place-specific knowledge of soils, microorganisms, weather, water, and interactions between plants, animals, and humans...I have to say that I really don't like the sound of "at a forced pace, backed by the full resources of national governments". As JD, of Peak OIl Debunked, noted recently there is a history of attempts to forcibly reallocate land to urbanites: it's mainly been attempted by dictators, and the results have made the countries in question bywords of disaster (Cambodia and Zimbabwe are examples in recent decades).Because ecological organic farming methods are often dramatically more labor- and knowledge-intensive than industrial agriculture, their adoption will require an economic transformation of societies. The transition to a non-fossil-fuel food system will take time. Nearly every aspect of the process by which we feed ourselves must be redesigned. And, given the likelihood that global oil peak will occur soon, this transition must occur at a forced pace, backed by the full resources of national governments.
The most thoughtful advocate of relocalization I know is Jason Bradford, who is quantitative enough to have investigated his own area, the rural Northern California county of Mendocino, and discovered that the county probably could not feed itself:
Out of 2,246,400 acres of land in Mendocino County, 94,039 acres or 4.19 percent is considered prime agricultural soils (NRCS-USDA figures). Of that amount, much is unavailable and covered by roads, highways, cities, parks, and other land uses. While growth is very slow in Mendocino County, settlement patterns have tended to occur in areas dominated by prime soils. Only one third, or approximately 35,000 acres, of prime farmland remain available for agricultural use. Besides the unavailability of prime farmland, changes in hydrology as a result of agricultural and other human uses have affected the quality and use of prime farmland.I think as Jason investigates further, he is going to find more reasons for pessimism about this path.The Caltrans EIR implies that in about a ca. 20 year span, Mendocino County went from 69,000 to 35,000 acres of prime farmland, down from and original endowment of 94,000 acres. This does seem like a remarkably high rate of loss, totaling 34,000 acres or about 1700 acres per year for 20 years. In either case, whether the real figure is closer to 69,000 or 35,000, both are far from the estimated need of ca. 95,000.
The Fallacy of Reversibility
So, the second wave peak oil writers see us as abandoning the combine harvester and returning to this kind of scene:
Raking hay by hand. Image courtesy: University of Minnesota.
Let me try to summarize what I believe the underlying logic of their position is. What is certainly true is that pre-industrial societies generally use a lot less energy, and have a much larger share of their population involved in agriculture than industrialized societies do. Jason Bradford did a nice analysis a few weeks back, and I made this graph based on his analysis:
Clearly, as countries have gone through the process of industrialization and development (roughly moving down the curve to the right), they have come to use more energy in general, and their agriculture has become far more mechanized and involves a smaller fraction of the population.
Another view of the same process can be seen in this World Bank graphic, which shows both the share of agriculture in the labor force and in gross domestic product, but this time plotted against GDP/capita:
This reminds us that countries that have far higher portions of the labor force in agriculture don't just use less energy, they are also far less wealthy. (Note that the scale in this graph is logarithmic and cuts off around Argentina - the full graph on a linear scale would have a sharply curved hyperbolic shape much like the energy versus agricultural population one from Jason's analysis).
So I think the argument of the relocalization advocates essentially is that, since we were using a lot less energy before we were industrialized, and our population was primarily agricultural then, and peak oil implies we will have less energy in the future, or at least less liquid fuel, then it must be the case that the agricultural population will grow again. In other words, having coming come down the curve in the graphs above from the top left to the lower right, our society will now start to retrace its steps back up the curve.
This implies that the process of industrialization and development is a reversible process. We in the developed world have evolved from low-energy high-agriculture societies into a high-energy low-agriculture society. So the thinking goes that we can/should/will reverse that process and go back to something like what we were 200 years ago (at least on these large macro-economic variables).
Now, coming from a background as a scientist, there are many reversible processes familiar in science (and indeed in everyday life), but there are also a lot of irreversible processes. Some examples of reversible processes - if you lift up a weight, you can set it back down again into the same position it was in before. If you blow up a balloon, then, up to a certain point, you can let the air out and get back more or less the uninflated balloon you had before you started. If you pump water from a lower reservoir to a higher reservoir, you can let it down again, and the lower reservoir will be in little different condition than if you hadn't bothered. If you freeze a liquid by cooling it, you can warm it up again and have the same liquid.
Here are some examples of irreversible processes. If you let grape juice ferment into wine, there's no way to get grape juice back. If you bake a cake in the oven, there's no way to turn it back into cake dough. If you ice and decorate the cake, but then accidentally drop it on the floor, there's no way to pick it up and have anything approaching the same cake as if you hadn't dropped it.
So when you industrialize a society, is that a reversible process? Can you take it on a backward path to a deindustrialized society that looks in the important ways like the society you had before the industrialization? As far as I can see, the "second wave" peak oil writers treat it as fairly obvious that this is both possible and desirable. It appears to me that it is neither possible or desirable, but at a minimum, someone arguing for it should seriously address the question. And it is this failure that I am calling the Fallacy of Reversibility. It is most pronounced in Kunstler, who in addition to believing we need a much higher level of involvement in agriculture also wants railways, canals, and sailing ships back, and is a strong proponent of nineteenth century urban forms.
I am going to christen this general faction of the peak oil community reversalists. This encompasses people advocating a return to earlier food growing or distribution practices (the local food movement), folks wanting to bring back the railways and tramcars, people believing that large scale corporations will all collapse, that the Internet will fail and we need to "make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players and playwrights and scenery-makers, and singers."
And before moving on, I stress that I'm not making an argument that our time is in all ways better than earlier times and that nostalgia for the past is entirely misplaced. Nor am I making an argument that peak oil does not pose a massive and important challenge to us. Instead, I'm making an argument that society is unlikely to reverse its trajectory of development, regardless of what we might like. Calls for it to do so are a distraction and get in the way of figuring out what we really need to be doing, and what the real options and dangers are.
Why it Won't Be So
Although the reversalist approach to peak oil covers many dimensions of society, I'm going to confine my attention in this piece to the proposition that agriculture is likely to revert to eighteenth or nineteenth century approaches in the face of a slowly contracting oil supply. My central tool for looking at the question is going to be the factors going into the profitability of industrial agriculture. If it's the case that agriculture is going to revert to a manual low-energy process in the face of peak oil, then that should show up in the profitability data. Here are some natural predictions we might make:- Industrial farming is less profitable at high oil prices than at low oil prices.
- Now that we are at, or close to, peak oil, industrial agriculture is beginning to show signs of strain, indicating it may break down in the future, allowing alternative approaches to take over.
- Industrial farmers use more labor in the face of high oil prices.
- Farms are starting to get smaller now that peak oil is nigh.
- In developing countries, where the farmers never unlocalized in the first place, the dynamics are changing to favor small subsistence farmers over larger mechanized operations.
Agricultural Profitability and Oil Prices
Most of my analysis is based on the data compiled by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) on the average costs of growing various kinds of crops. This data is based on national surveys of farmers and represent an average for all farmers (some will be doing better than the average, some worse). Let's start with corn:
Average cost structure and revenue of US corn farmers, per acre, 1975-2006. Source: USDA. Costs have been adjusted to 2006 dollars via the BLS CPI-U.
Here, the various colored bands are the different costs of producing corn, expressed in 2006 US dollars per acre of land planted in corn. The heavy black line is the revenue per acre of selling the corn. The big picture is that very little money is spent on labor (indeed, agriculture in the US is highly industrialized), that costs have been coming down over time, and that farming in recent decades has been an activity with modest and unpredictable profits (that graph represents a business I would not want to be in). The cost reduction per acre is particularly striking given that yields per acre have been improving steadily over this period - farmers have obviously gotten enormously more productive over time (all that machinery and those fancy chemicals really do work as advertised, it seems).
It's worth quickly noting that most of the spikes of better profitability come at times of high oil prices (1975, 1979, and 2006). We will explore this more systematically in a moment.
Here is the same thing for wheat:
Average cost structure and revenue of US wheat farmers, per acre, 1975-2006. Source: USDA. Costs have been adjusted to 2006 dollars via the BLS CPI-U.
The story is similar, except that both costs and revenues per acre are lower, and profitability is even worse.
To look at the relationship between profitability and oil prices for the sectors as a whole, I took the profit margin (revenues - costs)/revenues, but excluded land and unpaid labor from the costs. The reason for excluding land is that I would expect land prices to mainly reflect the profits being made on the land, so including them in costs is confounding understanding the profitability of the sector (obviously, an individual farm has to worry about the land costs, but the land is only worth anything because people are farming it, so it's a confounding effect at at sector level). I excluded unpaid labor as owner's compensation which I consider more a form of profit than a cost. For that definition of profit margin, for the three main arable field crops, we get this graph:
Average profit margin for US farmers on three main field crops, versus oil prices. Profit margin is computed without the land rent or unpaid labor cost components, 1975-2006. Source: USDA and author's calculations for profit margin, BP for oil prices in 2006 dollars.
There is a very weak upward slope to all three lines (ie in the direction of better profits at higher oil prices). In an effort to reduce the noise, I produced a weighted average according to the planted acreage of the three crops:
Acreage of three main field crops in the United States, 1975-2007. Source: USDA.
and thus got this graph:
Average profit margin for US farmers on acreage weighted average of three main field crops, versus oil prices. Profit margin is computed without the land rent or unpaid labor cost components, 1975-2006. Source: USDA and author's calculations for profit margin, BP for oil prices in 2006 dollars
The relationship is somewhat stronger - profits are a little likelier to be higher when oil is expensive, but oil prices explain only about 12% of the variance in profit margins. The relationship is just barely statistically significant (p = 4.9%), but I wouldn't set too much store in it, given that the regression is not controlled for any other factors that might be explanatory.
But certainly, there is no evidence for the idea that farms are less profitable at high oil prices - that inference is completely unsupported by the data since 1975.
The analysis does not include 2007, since the cost data are not available yet, but it is likely that 2007 had high profit margins (since crop prices were very high), and certainly it had fairly high oil prices. I will argue below that this is a harbinger of the game-changing role of biofuels, which will tend in the future to make industrial farming more profitable as oil prices rise.
Labor Usage in Arable Crop Production
Let's turn for a moment to the use of labor in the farm system. If it was the case that peak oil was promoting a return to a more local, less industrialized, style of agriculture, we might expect to see usage of labor correlated with oil prices - when oil prices are high, farmers are differentially likely to prefer to do things manually and use less expensive fuel to get the job done. So I looked at the total labor input (both paid and unpaid) into the crop versus oil prices:
Average labor expended per acre by US farmers of corn, wheat, and soybeans, versus oil prices 1975-2006. Both are converted to 2006$. Source: USDA.
What we see is that wheat and soybeans show essentially no meaningful relationship between oil prices and the amount of labor per acre that farmers use. They use the same low amount regardless. Corn farmers actually spend less on labor when oil prices are high, for reasons that are unclear - however the relationship is quite strong (r2 of 43%) and very statistically significant (p = 0.005%).
So again, there is no evidence in the data for the reversalist idea that farmers might need more labor when oil prices get high on account of peak oil.
Biofuels and the Future of Industrial Agriculture
A possible objection to my argument thus far is that, although we may be at or near peak oil, nonetheless we haven't seen anything yet in terms of how high oil prices could go - $100/barrel is nothing, and when we see $200/barrel or $300/barrel, then the situation will change, industrial agriculture will fall apart, and the reversalist future (which is really the past) will start to play out.Now, I certainly would not discount the possibility that oil could get to $200/barrel. With an income elasticity near 1, we would expect to see oil usage expand by a few percent a year due to global economic growth if prices were constant. Since supply has not been increasing at all for the last couple of years, higher prices have been required to balance supply and demand. Since elasticity of oil demand is more like 0.05, it takes several tens of percent of price increases each year to balance the missing single percentage point increases in supply that aren't occuring. That's how we got to $100 oil. If supply continues to be flat, it's quite possible oil will get to $200 in a few years time. On the other hand, if the credit-collapse recession in the US turns severe, as it certainly could, oil prices could fall a lot instead. If we do manage to get a boost in supply from the 2008 megaprojects, that will moderate prices also, at least for a time.
But what I would argue is that if oil gets to $200/barrel, industrial agriculture is likely to do very well. I pointed out in Fermenting the Food Supply that corn-ethanol has been profitable even without subsidies at times in the last few years, and that whenever oil prices go up sharply, there is a huge spurt in the growth of the biofuel industry. This creates an arbitrage between food prices and fuel prices, and mean that the former must go up whenever the latter go up (since the biofuel industry can very easily use most of the global food supply without adding more than a modest fraction to the fuel supply). This next graphic summarized the key point:
Bottom panel: capacity of ethanol plants at year end, in production and under construction, as a percentage of total ethanol potential of the entire US corn crop in that year (left scale), together with year on year change in that percentage (right scale). Top panel: oil prices (annual average in $2006). Sources: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service for corn production, National Corn Growers Association for conversion efficiencies, and Renewable Fuels Association for ethanol plant capacities. Oil prices are sourced from BP.
I suggested earlier that the growth rate has a lot to do with oil prices, and I've made that more explicit in the graph above with the green lines. When oil prices spike up, a year or so later we have a new burst of ethanol capacity under construction (which then comes on stream 1-2 years after that).This has had a lot to do with the high crop prices of the last two years. Thus, if we get $200 oil, I confidently expect a new burst of growth in crop prices and for farm revenues to go up a lot. If we look at the average costs over the last thirty years:
Average cost structure and revenue of US corn farmers, per acre, 1975-2006. Source: USDA.
we can see that some costs are of a kind that scale with energy prices. The "fuel" component is certainly that way, but fertilizer is almost entirely made from natural gas and will tend to go up in periods of high energy prices. And, for safety, I've also included chemicals, most of which have petroleum or natural gas as the feedstock (though I imagine most of the value is added in manufacturing, rather than in the raw fossil fuel input). However, the rest of the farm costs don't have a direct relationship to energy costs (the various forms of labor, cost of capital, etc). So with this decomposition, the history of corn farm costs and profits looks as follows:
Revenue of corn farmers, together with cost structure decomposed into hypothesized energy price scaling and energy price independent components . Costs exclude the land rent or unpaid labor cost components, 1975-2006. Source: USDA.
As you can see, the non-energy components have not increased much at all since 2002, but the energy-related portions have been increasing sharply. All costs were high in the 1970s and early 1980s (when not only were energy costs high but interest rates were extremely high too, so that capital costs were very great).
So going forward, I expect to see significant increases in food prices and farm profitability (with a significant caveat for the possibility of a credit-induced severe recession). The following hypothetical scenario for what happens to the corn curve if both energy and corn prices increase by 15%/year in real terms, while other farm costs (eg labor, cost of capital) stay flat in real terms. As you can see - industrial farmers do very well in that case:
Revenue of corn farmers, together with cost structure decomposed into hypothesized energy price scaling and energy price independent components . Costs exclude the land rent or unpaid labor cost components. Actuals for 1975-2006, and scenario (not forecast) for 2007-2013 based on 15% annual increases in energy-scaling costs and corn prices, with flat other costs. Source: USDA.
Clearly, farmers making money like that will not be selling out to hordes of the urban poor trying to go back to the land, nor will they need to employ them. Instead, the farmers will simply outbid the urban poor for the energy required to operate the farms (and in the US, the farm sector only uses 2.2% of all petroleum in the country).
Farm Size Trends
Farms in the US have been getting steadily bigger for a long time. The reasons are very simple: there are substantial economies of scale in industrial farming - it's desirable to keep the expensive machinery and administrative labor working at maximum capacity, which means spreading it out over as much land as possible. That leads to this kind of graph:
Operating profit as a function of farm size in the US, 2003. Source: USDA.
Small farms lose money at a great rate, and only large operations make a profit. This is a recipe for larger farms as the small ones sell out to their wealthier neighbors. As the share of energy in the cost structure grows, this graph may moderate a little (since fertilizer and fuel usage are likely directly proportional to acreage). However, there is nothing in high energy costs that will make it reverse - it will still be beneficial to spread the non-energy costs over more acreage. Thus although the trend of increasing farm size may slow, there is nothing to put it into reverse.
And in the developing world, another important factor comes into play. As we discussed last week, over half of all households in rural areas in developing countries are net food importers, even though the vast majority are involved in agriculture somehow. Thus, rising food prices will place tremendous stress on very poor households that grow some food, but not enough to live on. They may be forced to sell their land to larger landholders that produce a surplus. Thus, we may see the exact opposite of what the relocalization movement might predict - farm sizes in developing countries may increase in the face of peak oil.
In Conclusion
I've argued in this piece that industrial agriculture is likely to be stronger and more profitable when oil prices are high, not weaker. So the reversalist future of local food production on smaller farms with higher labor input will not come to pass as a result of peak oil. The industrial agricultural sector owns most of the land, and will be in an excellent position to increase their land holdings as remaining subsistence farmers fail or consolidate in the face of high food prices. Industrial farmers will have no reason to sell out to improverished urban dwellers. Thus the industrialization of the land is not a reversible process any time soon - it is a fallacy to think so. The reversalists are expressing wishful thinking and nostalgia for the past, not a reasoned analysis of how the future is likely to play out. And urbanites worried about their future should not be looking to buy or rent a smallholding as a solution to their problems - industrial farmers are extremely efficient, and there is no way to compete with them except by becoming one.
Selected Food, Agriculture, and Biofuel Articles at The Oil Drum
Stuart Staniford
- Death Rates and Food Prices
- Fermenting the Food Supply
- Food Price Inflation
- Global Land Use
- Will biofuels always be hopeless?
Jason Bradford
Robert Rapier
- A Debate Proposal for the Ethanol Lobby - Let's Get It On
- Mythbusters: Ethanol and Foreign Oil Displacement
The ELP Plan: Economize; Localize & Produce
IMO, we are headed for the never ending boom/crisis in the food and energy sectors. Whether it is a boom or a crisis for a specific person is largely dependent on whether or not you are involved in something related to food and/or energy production.
Regarding the Electrification Of Transportation (EOT) movement, it’s interesting to compare total energy consumption in the EU versus US (the EU uses about half as much energy per person as the US). Of course, this is also related to their high energy consumption taxes. However, I suspect that very few people would now argue that the US system is superior. The other question is whether we can go back to what we once had and what the EU now has, regarding EOT. As Alan Drake has pointed out, we did it before in the US, with minimal fossil fuel input.
Regarding the larger topic of farming, it seems to me that the obvious comparison is the small Amish farm versus industrialized farming. My recollection is that the yield per acre on Amish farms is lower than industrialized farms, but the profit per acre is higher.
http://www.landinstitute.org/vnews/display.v/ART/2000/12/15/3df6412ab088c
An economic comparison of traditional and conventional agricultural systems at a county level
M.H. Bender
Accepted December 15, 2000
Thanks for this lead Jeffrey. One of my concerns has been the reliability of a lot of common statistics gathered by the government. It is very difficult to find comparison data on different scales and methods of production because alternatives to the industrial ag model are relatively scarce in the U.S. and those who pursue them do so in a kind of parallel universe with their own norms of communication. I simply don't know if they are even on the radar screen when looking at USDA census data.
Jason,
One book you might get ahold of is Traditional American Farming Techniques, ISBN 1-58574-412-3, Lynons Press. It's a reprint of a 1919 (IIRC) farm book, 1086 pages. I highly recommend it. It has a lot of good information on "farming" including such things as horse "efficiency." Essentially, there are certain sized farms that use horses more efficiently. If you get up my way, I'd be glad to loan it to you. I'm in the phone book.
Todd
PS The Garden Club is still screwing around in setting up a Terra Preta presentation.
Todd, you recommended the book a week or so ago and I purchased it online from Deepdiscount. It is amazing the breadth of knowledge agriculturalists had at that time, especially in regards to soil management and cover crops such as alfalfa and clover. For someone like me who has a small farmette, it will be very useful. I’ve been browsing through it for the last week.
I too ordered it a few weeks back when Todd recommended it. Its a thick bugger and I've had trouble keeping it out of my fathers mitts. Much of it over my head, but I guess thats the point of ordering it.
I just ordered it also. Thanks for the tip.
Stuart is probably correct about the continuing growth of industrial agriculture. The merging of the energy markets with the food markets means that the price of both shall move upwards in lockstep. Both our engines and our bellies will face progressive starvation.
This is even now being played out in the third world. Their farms are industrializing and growing food, fiber and energy for export, leaving the billions living on less than $5 a day to be priced out, with little chance of gaining access to cultivable land.
There are several questions: will those hundreds of millions quietly starve? At what point will there be revolution? What form will that revolution take; nihilism and suicide vests? retro Maoism?
I suspect that, at least in the first world, massive bankruptcy, combined with massive foreclosures and rising food and energy prices, will force democracies to turn to increased redistributionist policies, protectionism, and possibly fascism.
I could be mistaken but I think that revolutions are started by the middle class with input from guilt ridden or disaffected uppers. The poor pick up the torch a bit later as they are more likely concerned with finding the next meal.
I believe you are right.
Actually, revolutions are often started by first world elements within third world countries (Lenin & Mao, Pol Pot, and Sindero Luminoso in Peru; western educated/influenced leaders leading largely uneducated workers and peasants). But revolutions can also be started by reactionary third world leaders like Ayatollah Khomanei.
As Stuart's analysis sinks in, I realize this is the worst news I've heard in a long time.
Agribusiness -- a product of the "age of oil", -- has been primarily concerned with producing food and fiber. It dominates the best soils in the world, and is still in the process of displacing traditional farmers.
If the food markets hadn't merged with the energy markets, we would expect that we would now be experiencing "peak agriculture" along with "peak food". This (hopefully) gentle decline would give societies time to convert to whatever replaces agribusiness.
Instead, agribusiness is switching to producing motor fuels, so "Peak Agriculture" is now divorced from "peak food."
As agribusiness increasingly grows biofuels for our vehicles, it profits even as it diverts land and energy away from feeding people. Thus, peak agriculture is a long way in the future, while peak food is now, with a vengeance.
Furthermore, as we look at Hubbert's curve as it descends into the Oldavai Gorge, we are right to wonder at what point industrial agriculture no longer functions properly.
Can steel for tractors and combines be smelted using renewable energy? Can fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides compete with ethanol and biodiesel? If they cannot, then it is difficult to see industrial agriculture surviving beyond mid-century. And if it continues to grow up to the end, we may see a spectacular crash.
Meanwhile, of course, we can project that global famine is coming on like a freight train.
I've got serious doubts as to whether we'll see the current corn-based industrial agriculture continue as far as midcentury in much of the US. Many areas depend on nonrenewable aquifers for their irrigation, and have only a 20-25 supply of water remaining. We're going to run out of water long before fossil fuel limitations seriously constrain American agriculture.
Depending on how we use the last few years worth of it, we will either transition to some sort of available-rainfall based agriculture in much of the midwest, or experience another dustbowl.
..or you could charge properly for water, and use some of the many conservation techniques available, such as are common practise in Israel, for example.
Conservation would slow the depletion rate, but not solve the problem that we're trying to irrigate with a nonrenewable source of water. Even if we launch a massive conservation effort next year (which realistically, isn't going to happen) we will likely see exhaustion of several major aquifers within my lifetime.
We can smelt metals with nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal power.
Whether this trend is bad news for you personally depends on your income level. With a high enough income you'll be able to buy more expensive food and put more expensive biodiesel in your gas tank.
But is competition for agricultural product between food and biofuels really the worst possibility here? Seems to me not. What would be far worse is if agriculture has a very low EROEI. Take away the oil and we have a hard time running agriculture if that is the case.
By contrast, with a high EROEI from agriculture while part of the agriculture will get shifted to producing energy at least the remaining part that produces food has energy from its own fields to power it. I find that comforting. I just have to earn enough money to afford to buy the resulting product.
So you and me and 100 million others can afford food on the table. The other 6.4 billion (plus interest) can all go to hell.
I wonder if those "others" will let me enjoy my meals in peace....
Yes, at least on a small scale. CSP arrays can produce a lot of heat, or a large WT array could produce a lot of electricity for an electric furnace; maybe both could be combined. It might be possible (indeed, we DO have to figure out how to MAKE it possible) to set up sufficient capacity to recycle metals from old worn out equipment in order to make new equipment.
If we can't manage this, then sooner or later we will fall all the way back in the neolithic.
Hi Todd,
Just ordered it. Thanks! As a newbie to farming I appreciate good leads.
I don't have any idea what your last name is, but know another farmer around here who wants to talk to you. Would love to go to a Terra Preta presentation so please let it be known in Willits when it is happening.
You do know my first and last name and I am in the book too...or contact the WELL office to get a message to me.
Jason, I think this is a very good point. And we are that particular case in point. We just purchased 13 acres of "black dirt" muck soils 60 miles from New York City. This is soil that is only allowed for farming and not development because of its particular geological formation and lack of suitability for a septic system.
Most farms are large enough, 75 acres and up, to qualify for government support and protection and therefore must "register" with the USDA. Because we are so small, we don't qualify for the government programs and are therefore "unregistered."
I know of several other farms who are in the same category. One is owned by a man from Bangladesh who farms 15 acres planting just two crops of which he saves his own seeds. He sells his produce on the street in Queens. In the winter he farms in Florida and ships his produce to New York. He is definitely not on the USDA radar screen. Another is a couple who grows 3 acres of vegetables and herbs in their backyard and sells via a farm stand by their house and a 25-member CSA -- also "unregistered."
Many of the farms who are traditional "onion" farmers (25% of US onions are grown here in Orange County, NY) are now diversifying into vegetables and selling via Farmer's Markets, farm stands and CSA because they can make more money on fewer acres in a more satisfying way.
This is interesting. I just started a new, very little farm, and know that my little operation is off the radar for USDA and suspected it might be the case for others.
You can register via the ag census, which is due soon:
http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Help/Report_Form_&_Instructions/2007_Report...
Farms that get government assistance or have submitted this in the past automatically receive a form in the mail. Otherwise, you have to know about it. And as you say, small farms might not be eligible for the subsidies and so aren't in the loop.
Hello westexas,
A good friend of mine sells seed in extreme Southeast MN. Lots of Amish there.
This year they are RENTING OUT THERE FARMS.
Higher grain prices mean HIGH cash rent.
The Amish can currently make more money renting out their land to a real farmer than they can by farming it themself.
As profits on the farm rise with Peak Oil, the efficient operators will BID HARDER than ever for land. Inefficient operators (Amish) will increasingly rent their land to them.
The Amish of SE MN switched to making furniture.
Hi there Farmer, I rent out my money so I can do the things I feel are valuable to do, painting, music, gardening. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't make more money using it myself, it just means I value things other than money. Maybe the Amish just prefer to do more cabinetry which as far as I know is not something they just 'switched' to.
It really is sad to see what we have done to this world in the name of efficiency and greed rather than what we could have done in joy.
My apologies for moving upthread...
Stuart, as always, very impressive stuff. If you will remember "The Tragedy of the Commons", in capitalist societies land, over time, usually winds up in the hands a few families and due to our tradition (from English common law) of marriage and inheritance tends to stay there. Hence, property taxes were conceived of as a vehicle to force turnover of unused and unproductive land. Rising food and agricultural prices would certainly benefit those already entrenched in the endeavor. However, if food prices continued to rise in excess of the local GDP and inflation rate the price would eventually reach a point of no return, impossible to afford. Of course, this cannot happen in rational and free markets. If wheat and/or corn rose to $50, $75,$100 per bushel and animal flesh rose to $50 per lbs, the consumer would react. Front lawns and back yards would cease to exist, crop production would occur, co-ops would be formed, and entrepreneurship would flourish, much to the chagrin of the "second wave' folks, Kuntsler, et al.
The "consumer" would also react in other ways. They would be thinner. They would have fewer children. During this time the world would continue to slip further down the backside of bell chart. During the Great Depression we had no shortage of Farmland, oil, or labor, and we had far less than half of today's mouths to feed. Yet food was prohibitively expensive.
The "Second Wavers" for the most part are not only lacking in any economic training, they are colored politically, and seem to see things through the shaded lens of their politics. But I would not count on Industrial Ag to continue to provide incredibly cheap food - and therein lies the rub. To ever more expensive food prices, what will the social, economic, and political reaction be? Political science is not my strong suit, but it would seem that THAT is the devil in THIS detail.
Er, I thought this was exactly what the second wave folks were predicting? A mass movement back toward producing our own food? This is exactly what happened in Cuba, although there situation is different than what is likely to happen in peak oil: Cuba had an instant dropoff in fossil fuels, while the during peak oil we can expect a slow decline.
When we had minimal fossil fuels we had a much smaller population. We need high yield farms to feed a much larger population.
If large scale mechanized agriculture does not have a high EROEI then we are going to get awfully hungry. My hope is that the EROEI of farms is already high enough or will rise fast enough due to technological advances that large scale mechanized agriculture will survive. I think every rational person should hope for this.
Thanks for the in depth research on this topic. Though I agree with the general concept that industrial ag. will not be felled by higher oil prices, and in fact it may flourish...I think you are ignoring the potential for discontinuities, such as shortages of fertilizer and oil for processing and distribution. The shift that new line Peak Oil thinkers are talking about involve this larger scale discontinuity where oil (and nat. gas) is not just expensive, it is potentially scarce.
So though you may be correct in the short term, I wonder about your prognostications after a decade or two of depletion...
I agree that we need to consider the discontinuities.
You only need to look at the current situation in South Africa, where large industrial agriculture is encountering (previously rare) power blackouts. This leads to spoilt fruit and milk that can not be cooled, cows that can not be milked, and tends to bunch up other usage, such as irrigation, into large power-demand spikes taxing an already precarious grid. Farmers are coping in the short term by installing generators. It would be interesting to look at South Africa after another year of this to for trends against big farming or for small farming.
Francois.
I, too agree about the discontinuities. I was, in fact, surprised as I was reading the piece, which otherwise appears thorough and well-argued, because it failed to include this most basic of the assumptions of a world with reducing energy availability: systemic collapse or disequilibrium.
If one is talking about a period of transition from one primary energy source to another which is roughly stable, Stuart's argument may hold. It might be possible to transition and the primary forces might end up being economic ones. But that is ignoring the basic premise of those he is critiquing, that severe disruptions to the economic, financial and social systems will occur if Peak Oil occurs too fast or to abruptly for adaptation.
Further, the idea of "going back" isn't necessarily an accurate reflection of many people's views. I, for one, see the collapse of institutions and social structures as a positive sign not because I love anarchy, but because I believe we can maintain some of the core infrastructure and social fab5ric while transitioning to a holistic lifestyle that uses technology to create synergy with, rather than separation from, nature. In a simplistic example, the Enertia and Earthship homes come to mind.
Cheers
I have a deep respect for Stuart's line of thinking and have been struggling with understanding barriers to reversibility for a few months now. I think Stuart is correct that there are philosophical reasons behind promoting what he terms reversibility, but they involve much more than just the notion that energy decline will force the shift. Even though Stuart may be correct that short-term economic forces may promote further consolidation and industrialization of agriculture I view this as totally disastrous for the following reasons. (I also realize there is a big distinction between what I want to happen and what is likely to happen!)
Other reasons include:
1. Food security and system shocks (as noted above); better to build resilient alternatives ahead of time.
2. Top soil depletion. Soil biology is killed by chemicals fertilizers; for example, ammonia injections cause soil sterilization, followed by a bacterial bloom as highly soluble nitrogen becomes available, which then leads to a consumption of soil organic matter by the bacteria, which causes soils to compact, loose tilth, be more subject to erosion, etc. I suppose it is possible to disentangle industrial production methods from soil-killing methods, but big ag corporations are tending to promote their products, whereas the local and organic crowd has a better grasp on soil biology.
3. The Phosphorus (and other nutrient) cycle. Food and dry matter (e.g., straw) contains mineral wealth mined by the nanotechnology of root systems and incorporated into above ground biomass. Removal of these minerals depletes the soil. Industrial agriculture allows a huge geographic disconnect between production landscapes and consumer populations. Ultimately, the biological waste-stream of the consumer population needs to be returned to the productive soil ecosystems. Anything else is unsustainable and will lead to famine in the long run.
4. Climate change. We should be looking for ways to use soils to store carbon. Agriculture should be a net carbon sink, not a source. Finding the tool sets that are labor efficient and can run on renewable energy only would be a wise policy, and these tools are likely to be of a different scale than the behemoths in current operation. Smaller scale tools may mean more operators, and smaller land-management units.
5. Managing agricultural complexity. Monocroping is a very unnatural way to distribute organisms over a landscape, leading to investments in poisons to prevent disease/pest outbreaks, which end up not working in the long run anyway. With a small labor force compared to the land base, however, it is very difficult NOT to monocrop because humans become overwhelmed by the complexity of managing a diversified production system on a large scale.
6. The long view. Short-term economic incentives may very well play out as presented here, but those who don’t trust the wisdom of this way of thinking and who are considering what are the consequences of these decisions decades from now want to promote a transition that has a chance to work absent reliably available and cheap fossil fuels.
7. Meaningful work. It behooves a society to consider its long-term purpose and to seek ways of connecting labor towards achieving that purpose. As the Amish example points out, doing so leads to social cohesion and stability, which is a good basis for general happiness in the population.
I very much agree with the points made by JB and would add the following (without committing JB):
1. My central tool for looking at the question is going to be the factors going into the profitability of industrial agriculture. I question the relevance of and focus on profitability. Destruction of the planet has been profitable so far. But that doesn't support the argument that it should or can continue. Sustainability of industrial agriculture should be approached in the same way we approach peak oil: estimating the physical resources themselves, not the profitability of continuing their extraction.
Soil depletion, erosion, loss, is a world-wide phenomenon that is worsening. (Lester Brown) Reversing that depletion is crucial. Doing so will be labor-intensive. And it will require intelligent, skillful labor.
Of course industrial large-scale agriculture is more profitable -- it externalizes costs! And the more soil that gets detroyed, the more profitable it will become. That's the whole point.
2. There is also the question of transport. The logic of localization depends on transport. Or rather, the logic of industrialization depends on global markets, both for consumption and supplies. When global transport becomes more and more expensive, there will be a need, more than a need: no choice but to localize. Kunstler's arguments hold up IMO. (Although large cities are superior to subsurbs in many respects, they too will become unsustainable.)
3. There is something between reversibility and irreversibility. I too do not think we can just turn the clock back a hundred or more years. We have to a certain extent burned our bridges -- we have impoverished our natural environment. It will not support our current population without high energy expenditure. We cannot simply return to the agriculture of 100 years ago which was, it is true, much less productive. We will have to both reduce our population AND learn how to do agriculture in a new way. But I haven't heard anyone say that the productivity of modern industrial agriculture can be sustained with declining energy inputs.
There is already a huge mass of people in the world who have moved off (been driven off?) the land into sprawling urban slums surrounding third world cities. The decline of the high energy economy is going to throw hundreds of millions more on this heap. There is but one way: make rural life livable and self-sustaining, reverse this trend. I say rural, but I don't mean just rural: I think here again I agree with JHK -- small dense urban congregations that are surrounded by agricultural areas.
4. Stuart does a great service in stirring up this debate, especially the reversibility issue. How much of modern science and technology will we be able to sustain in the coming decades and century? We cannot go on as we are, and yet we cannot just go back either. We cannot predict the future. But we can at least look at the likely constraints on what the future will be. Stuart isn't guilty of this, but others always drag in future technological progress -- spending an inheritance that may or may not be there. If one takes away that, then maybe it's at least possible to start making some very rough calculations of what the coming generations will have to work with in terms of energy, soil, water, metals. etc. My belief is that the are going to have to move towards a garden earth, i.e. learn how to coax nature/biology into replacing from her (cultivated) skin what we have been forcibly extracting from her bowels. I doubt that it can be as much.
dry matter (e.g., straw) contains mineral wealth mined by the nanotechnology of root systems
Nanotechnology?
Is that what fungus is now, "nanotech"?
There's a bit of irony there, huh? Intended.
Indeed. There are also several questionable premises and statements within the argument - such as this assumed prediction:
"Industrial farming is less profitable at high oil prices than at low oil prices."
Why would anyone predict this, based purely on production/input costs? Profitability has nothing to do with the cost of producing/delivering a product alone, but everything to do with the ability to charge proportionately more for it than it costs to produce and deliver. It doesn't matter if it costs more to produce food if you are able to sell it for a corresponding increase in price. All SS showed was that food prices can increase. So what? Short term profitability for one sector is not the problem - sustainability of the whole system is.
They don't say it. It's easier for Staniford to argue against something he made up than something someone said.
Industrial farmers will only do well financially if they are able to increase the price of their produce in line with the increasing costs of all their inputs. When oil gets to ~$250+ a barrel and fertilizers become very dear, the masses, increasingly unemployed by then, are not going to be able to afford the sky-high food prices. Result: a mass return to home-garden, backyard cultivation, and sidewalk/public park food growinga la Cuba. Before long, falling sales revenues and heaps of unsold, rotting, expensive produce will drive the mega-farmers to the wall.
Or government-run "work farms," a la Kunstler.
Or government-run "work farms," a la Kunstler.
Leanan--
I never said any such thing, nor is it part of my view-of-things.
--Kunstler
'Reversibility" implies not only direction, but distance. Why would reversibility stop at small family farms making butter and cheese and vegetables for the affluent consumer through farmers' markets? Why not reverse to pre-Industrial medieval estates? Wouldn't the large ag corporations be in a position to become the barons of the New Age?
Or what would prevent even further reversal to tribal society -- hunting and gathering by a very much reduced population?
I think we can't really foresee these things, but only model them. Industrial agriculture as we know it in the post-industrial age relies on a huge, and to some extent, hidden infrastructure that is extremely complex and very much at risk.
Tainter is not wrong. He didn't make any specific predictions, that I am aware of, though. He just observed that in the failure of complexity lies the destruction of complex civilization.
Thanks Mamba for mentioning the elephant in my room.
What the heck happens when the average person can't afford the increases?
Scale works exactly in reverse and destroys your business!!!
In order for this analysis to be viable to me it has to answer that question. We have to be thinking net loss of production of stuff and get our heads our of the dollar measurement paradigm. When you are have invested in producing big volumes you will perish if those volumes shrink.
I realize the question isn't easy to answer, but to me it is a given that the large-scale fails it we scale back far enough.
Now, have far back are we going to scale? :)
After reading Stuart's rather long and extensively documented commentary, I can't help wonder if he has any idea what happens on a farm? Have you any idea how large most farms are? I live in the farm belt, and I can tell you definitively that if you drive out into the countryside, you will see VAST farms and nary a person for maybe hours or even days in those fields. Everything that is done in order to produce our immense agricultural wealth spews from the nozzle of a diesel or gasoline tank or from a natural gas well.
Most of the small farmers (20-1000 acres) I know also work full-time somewhere else. Often their spouses work as well. Why? Because their farms don't pay. Not enough to actually live on. The ones who still subscribe to the old, pour-fossil-fuel-on-the-ground and fire up the sterile sponge method of farming uniformly say that without anhydrous ammonia, diesel, pesticides, and fungicides, their yields will drop by sixty to ninety percent. Many in the short-grass prairie will be unable to farm at all.
While all the graphs and the economic abracadabra mumbo-jumbo may seem to make a convincing case, you seem to lack the actual on-the-ground knowledge or the common sense needed to make a factual and accurate assessment. (If you really want the low-down, call Wes Jackson at the Land Institute.)
Someone here mentioned the Amish. In my area, both the Amish and Mennonite outperform the chemical farmers handily. And that means both in strict dollars-in and dollars-out and in energy-in and energy-out terms, after subtracting ordinarily hidden subsidies in the form of pollution, dollars from the government, erosion, sterilization of land, and destruction of ecological diversity. And sometimes even with all those externalized costs.
Anyone championing the idea that agriculture will not have grave difficulties if fuel prices increase, has not been to the Dakotas where people are finding it difficult to get fuel at all.
What you are not seeing is that the farmer who has no fuel, will not plant. PERIOD.
What will happen, I think, is that people in areas where there has been a fairly recent history of truck gardening, and self-sufficiency, and who still have the land to do so, will plant their own gardens. This will supplant the 1500 mile Caesar salad and all that. Which is fine, but we will need protein. It is that lack of the protein grains which will make life unbearable. It will be a lack of grain feed to the cattle that will prove a problem.
No matter what, higher fuel prices will mean higher food prices. That is a fact. When you see people making a choice between driving and eating, then you will see real economic ruin. 'Cause, you know what, they will eat.
If they don't have the money to buy fuel, they will hardly be out there propelling our salad shooter lifestyle with more BS purchased willy-nilly from local Mal Wart in our BS economy. That means fewer jobs, and the cycle spirals down.
The fact is, you have no idea. You are, at best, a babe in the woods. At worst, you are a clueless technophile who is hanging onto the techno-paradigm for all it's worth. Which, my friend, is not a hell of a lot.
Amish and Mennonite farms are successful largely because their use of family labor to the fullest extent. The younger ones are used for weeding the garden and vegetable crops, the older children are used for the more physical chores such as stacking hay and milking. I have always been impressed by the children's work ethic and ability to take on tasks and responsibilities.
But this requires lots of children. At modern society's consumption rates, that would be obviously unsustainable in a very short time frame, at Amish consumption rates, it is not so obvious whether or not it is sustainable at today's population size. As I understand it, around Lancaster, PA the farms have been divided up into progressively smaller and smaller units for succeeding generations, to the point now that land is expensive and the farm sizes are not feasible for supporting a family.
Just as there is labor utilization and machinery utilization aspects to making farming profitable, there's also horse utilization rates too......
In the medium- to long-term, I believe they will, but in the short-term, I doubt it. ;)
Oil won't get to $250 per barrel unless some can afford to pay it. If they can then biomass energy will be similarly higher in value and hence farm products will be similarly high in value. Hence farmers will be able to buy enough to run their operations.
If large scale farms have an EROEI substantially higher than 1 then mechanized large scale agriculture survives. If they have an EROEI lower than 1 then that form of agriculture does not survive.
Stuart,
As always, a well-argued point. Probably also one of the more controversial essays you have written. I understand what you are saying, and have argued a similar point on some other subjects: While Choice A might be the better choice for society, due to (politics, short-sightedness, greed, etc.) we will almost certainly pursue Choice B.
For me, the issue of growing my own food is one of security. In the long-run, I don't want to rely too heavily on others to produce my food. I want to have an ace in the hole, so to speak. Plus, I really enjoy gardening, and it is something I want to pass on to my kids. Do I think it would be valuable if everyone developed some basic gardening skills? Yes, I think it would moderate price pressure on food, which I see continuing to become more expensive as energy costs spiral higher and biofuel mandates are regarded as the best way to mitigate peak oil and high oil prices.
Not controversial at all IMO except here at TOD. Stuart hits the nail on the head. See my post in Drum Beat. Peak Oilers should recognize other fallacies that I have often pointed out. Peak Oil is not fallacious IMO, but some of the arguments now becoming attached to it are. If these erroneous arguments are not corrected or abandoned as erroneous, it now reflects on the Peak Oil idea itself to those who are just becoming familiar with PO. Peak Oil thinkers should be careful to weed out fallacious arguments.
Practical, I admire your tenacity and respect the fact that you are a farmer, but your continued bias towards the viability of corn ethanol is the most fallacious argument of all. Ethanol is a prime example of the Tragedy of the Energy Commons. Say for example the average energy gain for the whole world is 8:1. Then ANY sub 8:1 energy technology is accelerating the use of high energy gain remaining fuels. Ethanol at a paltry 1.3:1 eats up our natural gas, oil and coal stocks MUCH MUCH faster than if we didnt produce it at all. I call it a Tragedy of the Energy Commons, because indeed (and especially due to subsidies) entrepreneurs and farmers (who own the land) can make money at this while the rest of society is worse off (much worse off). Your land ultimately will make you much more money and have a better overall value to society with something other than corn combined with coal or gas into vehicle fuel. You just don't see it yet. Or maybe you don't care.
This argument does not make sense. If I invest one unit of energy in producing corn ethanol and get 1.3 units of energy in return, then to get another 0.3 units of net energy I do not need to extract any fossil fuel whatsoever (at least under the simple minded assumption of economic equivalance of the various forms of energy). We clearly exploit energy sources with a range of differenct energy balances. As long as the energy balance is positive for a particular source net energy is being produced. Of course other aspects of ethanol production (soil loss, water loss, removal of land from food production, etc) probably make it a bad idea.
It does make sense.
Society is run off of a HUGE energy gain. I'm not sure what it is, but lets call it 8:1. Society is 'growing' (but one could argue 'slowly') at this average energy gain - this large payoff subsidizes our roads, hospitals, insurance, social services, etc. and much of it can be considered an 'externalized cost'. If we take some of our remaining high gain energy and get a 7:1 return on it, then everything else stays constant (if non energy inputs are equal). If instead, we take some of it and generate a .3 return on it, it shrinks the growth in the system as a whole. The specific operation will be fine, as you say, they have paid their energy cost and may even profit. But our infrastructure and systems are built on much higher energy gain, and require high energy gain to maintain. This was discussed in Charlie Hall's paper here.
An easier way to think about it is what if we ran out of oil, but had 86 million barrels a day of ethanol. Would that 'matter' to society? You could look at it 2 ways: 1)of the 86 million barrels of ethanol, 66 were needed to get them (86/1.3). 2)to generate 86 million barrels that could be used for 'roads, infrastructure, investment, repair, etc.', you would need 286 million barrels of ethanol, which would then 'free up' the .3, which would be the 86 million. (Yes, ethanol uses nat gas and coal and diesel, not all 'oil', but the general premise is correct)
And, as you have correctly pointed out, the non-energy inputs for bio-energy are 'not the same' as for fossil energy. More land, more water, more pesticides, etc are needed per unit of energy. (This was discussed here)
Claiming that the relatively low energy return of ethanol makes it economically inferior to fossil fuels and therefore incapable of supporting the same level of economic production as these superior fuels is correct. However, claiming that an energy source with a low but postive energy balance "eats up" the supplies of superior fuels is incorrect arithmetic. I am not trying to support corn ethanol as energy source, but making factually incorrect statements does not help to support your position.
If ethanol was on top of all other fuel sources, then your comment would be correct and I would modify my statement. But ethanol is being used primarily to replace other fuels - so the point of my initial statement is correct. (e.g. its not 86 million barrels of oil per day PLUS ethanol, its 86 million bpd which INCLUDES ethanol... The tiger eating its tail....
Suppose we have 200 units (energy units not volume) of high EROEI fossil fuel available to us each year. If we invest 100 units of this fuel (along with soil, water, labor, etc) in the production of corn and produce 130 units (energy again) of ethanol. This out implies that either we have 30 extra units of energy or that we can extract 30 less units of fossil energy. This process is not speeding up the depletion of fossil fuels, although it may be incredibly foolish because of the consuption of non-energy resources such soil and fresh water.
No.
Firstly, we totally agree on the consumption of non-energy resources, soil, fresh water ,etc. so lets put that aside.
The economy grows because of energy gain. Technology and labor help, but without what Roscoe Bartlett calls 'energy surplus' we can't have growth. We are used to a certain energy surplus - in fact, much of the annual surplus in energy just goes towards maintaining our current trajectory.
Liken it to a trust fund junkie. His fathers advisor invested his $1 million into something that made 20% a year for a long time. The trust fund child got to spend 200k a year and built his life (mortgage pmts, car pmts, trips, gambling money, etc.)on that 200k. The market changed/advisor was fired, etc and now the only option is another advisor that makes 5%. 5% is clearly better than nothing, but $50,000 is not enough to pay for the lifestyle that this guy had become accustomed to. So the guy has to either eat into the 1 million principle, or learn to live on 50k a year.
In your example, we can invest that 200 units and get 1600 back (1400 net), or we can invest it in corn ethanol and get back 260 (60 net). Yes the corn ethanol made money for the guy who did it, and it also created energy. But society needs 1200-1300 in energy gain minimum to maintain itself. So the greater % that is allocated to small energy gain technologies, the more society is going to have to use next years 200, and the year afters 200, etc in order to get their 1200 minimum required. This is why allocating resources to small energy gain ideas is accelerating the usage of our stockpiles.
I have already agreed with the statement above as applied to corn ethanol as an energy source; Corn ethanol is economically inferior to fossil fuels. It cannot support the automobile economy or a growing stock market for decades into the future. Please quit repeating assertions that I have already conceded to be true.
The statement that I was critizing was:
An energy producing process with a positive energy balance does not suck energy out of the economy. It may suck other production resources (such as soil, water etc) at an unacceptable rate per unit of net energy produced. But to claim that it sucks energy out of the economy is failure to understand the very concept of energy balance.
Read back up 3 comments - I stated that if we are developing a 1.3:1 energy gain technology on top of the existing pile of annual energy, then you are correct - it pays for itself. But that is not the case, we are using this 1.3:1 energy gain technology, to replace part of our existing pile of energy. Huge difference. In the former, its extra energy. In the latter, it means the sunk costs in the economy won't be met with the paltry energy gain, and we will have to eat up our existing pile faster. You are aware that the new 'record' of oil production last month included over 1 million barrels of ethanol, without which it would not have been a new record.
So, in conclusion, an energy producing process with a positive energy balance does not suck energy out of an economy that starts from scratch, but it DOES suck energy out if the economy has fixed and growing energy needs AND this energy source is replacing something that had a higher gain. (this happens to be case on corn ethanol but will be the case on any quality adjusted fuel technology below the recent energy gain average - here I don't mean EROI - but energy gain/surplus - which is EROI X Scale).
I feel quite strongly that I am correct and this is a vitally important point that most people miss - I know you are long term poster here and I respect your comments and have learned from you - if this still isn't clear email me offlist so we don't further derail Stuarts mechanized agriculture post.
Nate,
Clearly, you are correct. A shrinking energy supply (in toto) is a shrinking energy supply. If that shrinks, then the economy shrinks.
Pretty easy concept.
Sounds reasonable, Nate. We have 200 barrels of oil equivalent. If we invest all of it in getting more oil, we might get, say, 1600 barrels, of which 1400 is the energy gain and goes towards building our economies. If, instead, we divert 100 barrels to ethanol production, we end up with 800 barrels from more oil production and 130 barrels from ethanol production, giving an energy gain of 730 barrels of oil equivalents. It seems clear that we then need to add 670 extra barrels of stocks, or increased production, to get the same amount of energy as we'd expected to. So existing resources get used more quickly (if that is possible, if not, we use existing supply more quickly and our energy availability declines more rapidly).
Tony
This way of thinking is incorrrect. Energy producing processes with postive energy balances do not compete with each other for energy feedstocks. Considers the sum of all of our above the ground energy reserves (pile of coal, pipelines full of natural gas, stockpiles of refined motor fuel, etc). An energy producing process takes some amount energy out of these stockpiles and a later time return every bit of fuel it borrowed plus some extra (I am assuming a positive energy balance). This process does not prevent any other positive energy balance process from operating in parallel using the same stock piles. When energy is being used to produce energy the concept of a fixed energy budget is meaningless.
Hi Roger,
I hate to jump in because I went round and round with RR on this a while back, but also because I think the costs of ethanol are being externalized, particularly water costs, and I don't like seeing food go to fuel. But I agree with you. The slight-of-hand that Nate is using is that he ignores the oil feedstock when refining oil, but you have to include it when making ethanol (system boundaries have to be drawn that way I have been told), so you get this 8:1 number for oil refining and 1.3:1 for ethanol, and all the "awl bidness" folk say QED.
BUT... for grins, lets suppose all the oil you had in the world was 1800 barrels. When that is gone you are out, kaput, no more. Then you can ask what will I do with this. Well you could pump and refine it into diesel using 200 barrels and ending up with 1600 barrels of diesel. 8:1 OK well and good.
Or you could take take that 1800 barrels less pumping cost (let's say negligent for argument sake) and produce 2340 (1.3 x 1800) barrels of oil equivalent in ethanol.
Now for further grins, let's assume that the usage is 540 barrels per year. Having pumped and refined diesel you will be out, kaput, done, in about 3 years, but when making ethanol, each year, when a new crop is planted you will still have 1800 barrels, and now you have a sustainable energy supply. Woohoo!
Now these "ethanol haters" will rightfully claim that we can't replace our current FF useage with ethanol, ignoring the fact that they have been spouting nonsense about efficiency of oil versus ethanol. But with the right ethanol production from say celulosic sources, we could ease the burden on the oil consumption extending our nonrenewable resources, particularly so, if we also agressively conserve oil and recycle some of the water used in ethanol production. Here you will be told that the "devil is in the details", because there is no viable celulosic process. But hold on now, GE just invested in just such a process, with the idea that they could build many plants and replace about 15% of the FF use in the future. The first plant goes on line this year if everything goes perfectly :). Anyway, you'll go blue in the face arguing with some of these folk as they set system boundaries to ensure that oil refineries appear efficient compared to ethanol, wihtout a thought for extending the present supply of FF.
--Ben
That sounds quite convincing, Ben. There is a story by Robert Rapier about this very question: The Energy Balance of Ethanol versus Gasoline. I'm not sure any consensus was reached (it's another long thread, so it would take a long time to read again), however, a few themes emerge, for me.
One is that the BTUs that go into ethanol production are from already processed resources, as far as I'm aware, it is not crude oil. If I'm right, the comparison of inputs to ethanol, versus inputs to gasoline, is like comparing apples with apples. What I'd like to see is a full appraisal of all energy resources that go into ethanol production versus those that go into gasoline production. What would be the likely result of such a comparison? Well, that would be speculation, wouldn't it?
Another theme is the disputed EROEI of corn ethanol. I've heard some proponents, even scientists, claim that not all BTUs are equal. Well that seems a subjective assessment, to me. Either ethanol is net energy positive or not. Pimentel claims that it is not, but he usually gets derided by those who want the reverse to be true.
Lastly, as fossil fuels deplete, ethanol production may have to start using itself to produce itself. In this situation, I'm not sure it would fare too well. If that kind of situation prevailed now (only oil used to make gasoline, only plants used to make ethanol) then the energy balances would be very different.
There are other factors that may reduce ethanol's balance over time and have deleterious side-effects, but these have to do with environmental damage and top soil depletion and would probably warrant a whole new thread in itself.
The slight-of-hand that Nate is using is that he ignores the oil feedstock when refining oil, but you have to include it when making ethanol
You were wrong the last time, and you are wrong now. You are not making an efficiency argument. The argument "what if there was no more oil..." is not an efficiency argument. You are correct, if there was no more oil, then it's a different argument. But then if there was no more oil, the whole charade would come tumbling down anyway.
The oil feedstock is ancient, captured solar energy. You do not include that when doing the energy balance, any more so than you include the corn BTUS - recently captured solar energy - when doing the ethanol EROEI. (What you do include is the portion of the BTUs that were due to the fertilizer). This is what you, and so many others who are confused on this issue do not see.
What is counted in the ethanol EROEI is the energy it took to grow the corn, turn it into ethanol, and purify it. What is counted in the gasoline EROEI is the energy to extract the oil and to refine the oil. The portion of the feedstock BTUs that amount to captured solar energy are not counted in either case. Ethanol proponents wish to count them in the case of oil but not ethanol, which is why they say nonsensical things like "It is more energy efficient to produce ethanol than to produce gasoline."
QED.
I disagreed with you last time and I do so again. You ignore the crude oil feedstock as though it was not an input to crude refinement. In doing so you come up with this specious argument about efficiency. Moreover oil *is* a finite resource and production *is* constrained, so the main issue really should be about "can ethanol production increase our total energy production without hurting us more in other ways.
This 8:1 ratio is misleading. You don't get 8 BTUs out from 1 BTU in. That is called perpetual motion and violates the first law of thermodynamics. What really happens is you input 8 BTUs of crude plus 1 BTU (also from crude in steady state) to refine it, and get 8 BTUs out. 9 BTUs in, 8 BTUs out, so your efficiency in refining is 8/9 or less than one. In ethanol production, the sun's energy is captured in the growth of the feed stock for the ethanol production so that with 1 BTU of oil plus sunlight you get 1.3 BTUs out, so with respect to the BTUs of oil consumed, your efficiency for ethanol production is 4/3 or greater than one.
So here is where you will claim that I haven't drawn the system correctly, but as before, I think your argument is sophistry.
I am going to tackle this one. I think it is only a misunderstanding from describing different parameters as to why this discrepancy of opinion has occurred.
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I will rephrase this. I am not looking at how much energy is in the feedstock as it is going into the refinery.
You take the ethanol feedstock from the field and load it into the ethanol refinery machine, and add 1 BTU of outside energy from somewhere, and put this into the operation, and take out 1.3 BTU of energy.
After subtracting your input, you are left with .3 BTU of extra energy to use where ever you wish.
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Now, I also need to know how much energy I put into the tractors to seed, till, harvest, and transfer the feedstock to the ethanol refinery machine. I am not sure if this 1 BTU used in the process includes this energy above, so please tell me.
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Now I will tackle the crude issue. This is what Robert is saying.
In this case, Robert is not counting the BTU of the crude going into the refinery.
You take the crude feedstock from some well and load this into a big refinery and add 1 BTU of energy and VOILA, that is just enough energy to extract and take out 9 BTU of refined oil product out the refinery. If it was 9 BTU , then after I subtract the 1 BTU I used, I have 8 BTU to take away.
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Now, as above, I also need to know how much energy I used to pump that volume of oil out of the well, then move it to the refinery. I would expect that generally that would be only a fraction of a BTU and not that significant.
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But I also have to add the total amount of energy it took to dig the well, and add the total amount of energy it took to dig all the dry wildcats before I found this well that produced. This is what is now starting to make oil less and less attractive to drill for, because the well has to put out enough energy for drilling an equal amount of new wells to find at least as much oil and enough more to use in society.
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I disagreed with you last time and I do so again.
And as I said, you were wrong last time, and you are wrong again.
You ignore the crude oil feedstock as though it was not an input to crude refinement.
As you ignore the corn feedstock. You are treating the BTUs from corn differently than the BTUs from oil, and this is why you come up with the wrong answer. Look carefully at your second paragraph. The error is glaring. Here's a hint: In oil production, the sun's energy is captured in the growth of the feed stock. Just as soon as that sinks in, you will understand why you are wrong on the efficiency issue. The efficiency greatly favors oil. We can argue about other aspects, but the efficiency issue is settled.
Once more, with corn: You spend BTUs to fertilize and grow the corn, to harvest the corn, and to produce the ethanol (which is soluble in water, and energy intensive to distill). Those are the BTUs charged against your process. What is not being charged is the captured solar energy, which is how you can input a BTU and get more than a BTU out.
With oil: You spent no BTUs fertilizing or growing the ancient biomass. The earth has processed it into crude oil (which is insoluble in water, and not as energy intensive to distill). Where you do have to spend energy is getting it out of the ground and refining it. Those are the BTUs charged to the process. Just as in the case of corn, what you are not charging against the process is the captured solar energy. The excess BTUs that you got out are simply due to the ancient, captured solar energy.
So here is where you will claim that I haven't drawn the system correctly, but as before, I think your argument is sophistry.
Pointing out that your argument is comparing apples to oranges is not sophistry. And this is not rocket science. This is straightforward.
Here's a test. You and I each get one barrel of oil to invest as we please: Into oil production, or into ethanol production. Who will return the most BTUs from their investment?
As far as this test goes, if I deny you the crude inputs that you rapaciously squander as though they are nothing, I will win every time. And if my needs are modest, I will continue to have energy from that renewable resource long after you have pissed away your pitiful fuel allottment.
If you were a despicable sort you could always murder others and take their allotments as well. But if you don't want to be seen as the rogue that you are then you better hide your actions under another piece of sophistry and call them a "war on Terror", instead of the murder and theft that it is. But I've gotten sidetracked. No one would really do that.
I take it with this diversion off into murder and terror, you recognize that the efficiency argument is lost. If people understand that both ethanol and oil represent captured sunshine, but a lot more inputs were required to get it out of the ethanol, they understand why it is far more efficient to produce gasoline than ethanol. That is the efficiency argument. When you start making arguments along the lines of "but we will run out of oil", understand that you are no longer making an efficiency or energy return argument. But when you try to defend ethanol with the efficiency argument, and then accuse others of spouting nonsense for correcting it, know that you are actually the one guilty of that charge.
On the test, I still don't think you understand. You will use your allotment to produce exactly the same allotment of ethanol. If I give you 1 BTU of fossil fuel, you will produce (plus or minus) 1 BTU of ethanol. (It would really sink in if I gave you 1 BTU of ethanol, and said "Go produce more ethanol.") You will also produce some by-product, which you may be able to use. However, in the process you will have other negative externalities that are not captured in the BTU process, such as pesticide runoff and soil erosion. I will have negative externalities as well, but since you need fossil fuels to make your ethanol, you absorb some additional negative externalties.
Nate's main point is correct: Society is being run off of a very high EROEI. People don't understand what it means to move to a lower EROEI. You clearly don't, as you don't understand the level of fossil fuel "subsidy", so to speak, that underlies certain of our "renewable" fuels.
I guess it depends on how you look at the problem. Using some of that available energy to produce more conventional oil and more natural gas, for example, is much more energy efficient than using it to produce ethanol. So diverting that proportion, results in a smaller net gain that it otherwise would have. I guess that if there is now no more conventional oil or natural gas to be produced, using what is left in the system to produce any positive gain fuel is fine.
Nate, I've read and reread this thread and I just don't understand your argument. Maybe I'm just being thick.
You mention the 8:1 energy gain that society runs on as far as extraction of new energy resources is concerned, and the 1.3:1 from ethanol is obviously far less than that. But to say that this means it's using up our energy faster than we otherwise would seems flawed. I think the reason that it's flawed is that it assumes that the energy that's being invested to create ethanol could be invested elsewhere to yield a 8:1 energy return. I don't think this is true, and this is the key point. I think pretty much all energy that can possibly be invested at that rate of return given the present infrastructure and energy resources is already being invested. I think the energy that's getting sunk into ethanol production is energy that would have been spent in some other way (say, making food) or simply stored. What you've really lost is the opportunity to put that energy into some other beneficial use for a year, in addition to depleting some of the various other resources necessary to produce ethanol (water, topsoil, etc), in exchange for a rather paltry energy return.
To return to your trust fund analogy, I'd put it this way. "Son, we got a 20% return on your million dollar principal, just like last year. I couldn't invest any more at that rate of return even if you had it; I'm all out of opportunities. Anyway, here's your check for 200K. Feel free to go ahead and spend the entire amount or leave some in the vault for next year, just like you normally do. I do have a new opportunity for you, however. If you want to take some of that 200K and invest it, I can get you a 5% return (not as good as our usual 20%, but hey, it's something). There's only one catch: you'll have to give away a 2 foot strip of land on the eastern edge of the estate. Your call."
Am I missing something? Are you saying that there are other readily available ways to invest the energy currently being devoted to ethanol production that would result in much higher energy yields? If that's the case, then I finally understand what you're trying to argue here.
Yes thats part of what Im saying. We can only get so much stocks and flows per year out. So to invest the diesel, coal, natural gas, etc. into corn ethanol, or any other low energy gain system, means we are using some of our pile to return a smaller amount of energy than the rest of the energy is producing. Obviously, if an ethanol producer could instead drill a hole in Iowa and produce 8:1 crude oil, he would do so in a second, but those opportunities have largely disappeared. I recommend reading Joseph Tainters Resource Transitions and Energy Gain to get a better sense of what I'm talking about.
And the reason that replacing the 8:1 energy with a 1.3:1 energy uses our resources up faster is because we have a fixed amount of consumption predicated on the 8:1 total gain (8 x the scale). Look at it this way - the EIA already has included ethanol in their 'oil' numbers. What if in 10 years we have 43 million barrels of ethanol and 43 million barrels of oil instead of 85 mbpd of oil and 1 mbpd of ethanol we have today? Will society have used more or less natural gas and coal in that situation, everything else held constant?
Modern civilization is built on some minimum, but quite high, energy gain system
I will be writing a post on this next week - so read that Tainter piece and bring some questions...;-)
(p.s. I'm sorry I can't do more than a theoretical example here but the data just doesn't exist. But to do the example in dollars as opposed to energy would be pretty much worthless, as we can always just print more dollars)
I just don't buy this whole line of reasoning. We have potentially very large amounts of very acceptable EROEI wind, solar, and nuclear energy available to society. Our problem is to figure out how to run our society off them, but the challenges associated with that (intermittency, storage etc) are not really EROEI problems.
What if we can't run our growing society on them? Isn't the real problem that we just can't imagine running our societies sustainably and so will probably force a collapse as we try, increasingly desperately, to do so?
If we could accept a non-growth, sustainable, society, then we could start to get our heads around trying to get there. The longer we don't try to get there, the more likely it will become impossible (without huge pain and probable collapse).
You can't use large amounts of acceptable EROEI wind, solar and nuclear to drill for oil and run our transportation system in anything less than a decade. And it is unclear to me that the EROEI of nuclear is high and/or increasing. We are primarily concerned with liquid fuels, and the amount of energy coming out of the natural gas usage and crude oil usage going back into energy production has increased and will continue to increase faster, the more that the EROEI of oil declines. None of the above would matter as much if society were able to conserve or use less. But I am skeptical on that front - call it the Fallacy of Actual Conservation. Conservation in modern society will equate to less growth or negative growth, which will have other implications via all the discussions above.
You can't use large amounts of acceptable EROEI wind, solar and nuclear to drill for oil and run our transportation system in anything less than a decade
In seven years a major fraction could be done IF THE SAME LEVEL OF EFFORT USED TO DEVELOP CANADIAN TAR SANDS was applied. Electrify all 33,000 miles (or at least 30K) of the railroad lines deemed "strategic" by the DoD. And finish out Phase I of Urban Rail and have small parts of Phase II open and more within months of opening. Transportation bicycling has the largest potential adaptation curve, and MUCH could be done in 7 years. And enough wind turbines etc. to power them.
Note that existing hydroelectric power plants could be retrofitted and expanded and simply maintained better to generate 5% more power than they do in 7 years. Add some small hydro, geothermal and who knows how much solar PV in 7 years.
The job would not be finished in 7 years, but more can be done than you imagine.
Best Hopes,
Alan
I personally do not think that EROEI is ever the right metric for determing the economics of energy production. The cost per net unit of usable energy delivered is the correct metric. Energy balance plays a signifcant role, but it must be energy balance calculated in context of the whole system required to deliver energy in a useful form. Even for fossil fuels, merely calcuating the efficiency of coal or gas burning power plants cannot tell you what net usable energy is going to be delivered from a given quantity of coal or gas unless the effects of turning plants up and down to keept the grid voltage within required tolerances is also calculated.
I agree that the effects of intermittancy on net energy delivery are ignored by many enthusiastic supporters of solar and wind energy.
We have had relatively stable monetary growth and stability for decades. What if monetary growth, via a protracted depression contracts immensely, or alternatively, what if we have Weimar Germany type hyperinflation by central banks (who can print fiat currency at the cost of paper and ink) pay for real stuff with paper dollars? Then does the 'cost per unit of usable energy' accurately give you your metric? Would it even be in the same ballpark?
I am well aware of the problems of ERoEI. But I am also aware that net energy analysis won't become 'important' and 'accepted' until its too late - far too easy to rely on the market.
I agree absolutely. Instead of saying "the correct metric" I should have said "a better metric within the context of a reasonably healthy system of private finance capitalism". I do not believe in purely technocratic solutions to the problems we are facing. We need to abandon the competitive pursuit of ever increasing levels of private wealth in favor of the cooperative creation and maintenance of stable community wealth.
We already have alternatives that are a half or third the price per million BTUs and yet people insist on using oil. Why is that? Convenient storable form.
Sure, we can get power from electricity. But we are still waiting for A123Systems, EnerDel, and other battery companies to make electricity more suitable for transportation.
Even if the EROEI for corn ethanol was 1 then we'd still end up using corn ethanol as a way to convert other energy sources into liquid fuels.
Even if the EROEI for corn ethanol was 1 then we'd still end up using corn ethanol as a way to convert other energy sources into liquid fuels.
Within the margin of error, it is 1. Plus some animal feed that gets accounted as a fraction of a BTU.
If the subsidies weren't there, what we wouldn't be doing is converting natural gas into ethanol. We might do so with coal, but look at Brazil. They don't waste their natural gas inefficiently converting it to ethanol. They have a large CNG fleet (much larger than ours in the U.S.) That's what we would do if the subsidies weren't in place - burn the natural gas directly in CNG vehicles.
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This is my entire point! You say that the energy being devoted to ethanol production is replacing energy that would have been devoted to producing more energy by some other means (and at a higher rate of efficiency), and that's the assumption I haven't seen properly clarified.
Let's say the world gets 8 units of energy per year. 1 unit is used to create next year's energy, at a return rate of 8 to 1. The other 7 units are used for other stuff, i.e. powering society. The question comes down to whether the energy being employed to produce ethanol is being carved out of the 1 unit previously assigned to energy production, or snatched from the other 7, at some cost to society (less food, for instance). If it's being taken out of the 1 unit assigned to future energy production, it's clearly a terrible deal, i.e. if every bit of energy being devoted to ethanol production is being directly taken away from other perfectly feasible and available alternative methods of production that produce much higher returns, it's clearly stupid.
But if the decision is being made that our energy hungry society is starting to require more than our previous allotment of 1 unit of energy be devoted to energy production, and if additional high efficiency means of producing energy are not readily available, spending some new energy on a lower efficiency production method is, well, less stupid. Still maybe a bad idea, but not necessarily idiotic.
Anyway, I'll read that Tainter piece when I have time and maybe all will become clear to me :)
I have been having an offline discussion with Nate about energy balance, and as a result I have come up with an idea which I think clarifies the issue of 'competition' for energy reserves from different energy prooducing processes. This idea is the working reserve of energy. When we need energy on an day to day basis we do not go out and dig up coal or drill a gas well; We take fuel of a working reserve of energy (e.g stock piles of coal, pipeline networs of natural gas, tanks of refined transportation fuel, etc). The size of this reserve is not fixed but is chosen based on practical considerations.
Low energy balance processes require larger working reserves than high energy balance processes. There will of course be excess costs associated with maintaining these larger reserves, and there may also be short term economic hardship (e.g. forgone economic production) associated with expanding our reserves by the necessary amount. But once reserves of an appropriate size are established then energy producing processes with different energy balances can operate in parallel with each other without competing for reserves. Energy is taken out of the reserves by energy producers, and at a later date all of this energy is returned plus some extra. The extra energy is utilized by economic processes other than producing energy.
Works for me :)
Hi Nate, and I admire your tenacity in fighting the good fight by continuing to argue with neoLudites about corn ethanol. Sort of interesting to think that the New view of how the world would be best served has reversed from a mechanistic one back to an organic view. Ned Lud would be proud, if slightly dizzy:)
Robert,
Self reliance is unachievable. You need police, doctors, dentists, people to make clothes, etc.
If we are going to lose a huge amount of the existing specialization of labor you need something even more than a farm: Weapons and a group of very loyal allies who will join you in defense of some small territory.
Really, think it thru. No trading system for food? Cheaper to grow your own food than to buy it from specialists? At that point you are living in such a primitive society that you'd better have infrared goggles, hunting rifles, claymore mines, and a lot more to set up your own local area of law and order.
Wishing for something doesn't make it happen. Equally, wishing that something won't happen will not avoid its happening.
if the energy, chemical dependent modern industrial farming practice has made the soil more fertile, water table higher, water ways healthier, aquifer fuller then, yes, high fuel price alone may not be able to reverse the trend. otherwise, "irregardless" the fuel price, the trend has to change. maximizing short term profitability regardless the long term consequences is the trend unlikely to change any time soon, though.
Exactly. If fossil fuels were the only resource needed for agriculture that we were using at an unsustainable rate, then things might be different. And the economics cease to matter once you run out of topsoil or water.
The fact that you can fall ninety-nine feet from the top of a hundred foot building and still be accelerating does not necessarily mean that you'll still be accelerating after falling the hundredth foot.
Thanks Stuart, for your effort and thoughtful analysis.
I wonder how you would integrate into your thinking on agriculture the issue that is often brought up with reference to oil prices, that is, externalities and politics (the so-called "above-ground" factors, but the agricultural ortholog in this instance)? If so few individuals will be directly involved in agriculture, the converse is that they will have little numerical voting power. Significant lobbying influence, maybe, but the voters are eventually heard in a democracy. Unless that changes in the future too.
I am not taking a position either way, but I can imagine that if things get bad enough for the masses, especially the land-poor and those in urban areas, then they will vote for relief programs that could get paid for by taxing those who have the money/capital (perhaps such as the large-scale farmers, if your study is accurate). There will certainly be a visceral response, if more people are paying very high food prices, to blame the producers. Isn’t this what happens when people pay high gas prices…they blame the producers and scream for their politicians to do something about it?
How do you see these factors coming into play?
Maybe it will. Britain didn't get universal enfranchisement until 1928. Property only entirely ceased to be a voting qualification for men (but not for newly-enfranchised women) in 1918. For much of the 19th century, the amount of property needed to qualify for a vote excluded nearly all Britons apart from wealthy landowners and farmers from elections.
It strikes me that disproportionate influence at the hustings may prove to be an aspect of agriculture that returns strongly during the long emergency, as hunger persuades landless and shell-shocked masses to part with their rights - 'temporarily', of course - in return for food.
I believe that industrial agriculture - with preferential access to oil and gas products - will be essential to attempts to mitigate the effects of dwindling fossil energy production. On depleted soils, it's our only chance. Maybe later, when people adjust to a new paradigm of contraction and dispersal, the smaller population (it will be harder to stave off epidemics, post Peak, than to prevent starvation) will have the time and inclination to build sustainable localised farming.
But what's the betting that some Big-Ag cartel (APEC?) will prevent them.
HE
"Make sure the voters are really hungry before you tell them to give up their cars"
I think the prices of agricultural products will also depend upon how globally produce is traded in the future, and whether protective tariffs insulate western countries from the increasing relative wealth of east-asian economies. If these goods are traded globally as they are now I imagine Stuart is right, but I think there will be massive pressure on western politicians to reduce global trade, to provide for local populations, even as far as price fixing. Where production of price controlled goods becomes unprofitable. Just thoughts though - good article Stuart.
Though I disagree with your premise Stuart, I think it is interesting to explore assumptions made on the part of many Peak Oilers. One of the main tenets has been that the small family farm will re-emerge as the large industrial conglomerates fail.
I think this is highly unlikely. In the event of a long economic recession, small farmers will have an increasingly difficult time making ends meet. The trend has been towards larger scale operations and I think that trend will continue. Larger scale operations allow for efficiency that maximizes profit, even if it comes at the cost of worker rights.
At the same time, I think we will see an eventual movement towards human and animal labor when oil and fertilizer become more scarce.
So I agree with you that large scale farming is far from being over. But I would disagree with you that industrial ag. can survive in perpetuity.
If the large industrial farms fail, then just how the hell will you get your Wheaties®?
If the large scale farm cannot use fossil fuel to do its farming, there will not be an industrial farm. PERIOD.
There is nothing sillier than watching people who have never worked, owned, or perhaps even driven by a farm make such specious comments about farming.
Stuart - thanks for your continued hard work on delving into this topic.
As I have written you offline, I have several problems with this analysis:
First, it follows the general line of economic reasoning, which I might call 'The Fallacy of Economics' - that correlation and "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" (after this, therefore because of this) reasoning is circuitous and therefore has pretty much zero explanatory value. It seems to explain things at the time, but then changes 3 years later. Your 'very strong R^2 of .43 could have of in reality been explained by a variety of other factors.
Second, I view Peak Oil (and the unfolding Credit Crisis) from a probabilistic standpoint. There are TOO many variables in play and therefore the best one can do is create a 'mental distribution' of the possible outcomes and continually update it with weightings based on how events unfold. Your view that industrial agriculture will thrive borrowing oil and gas from the rest of the economy because of the importance of food is possible. But also possible is short-fall risk - that modern complexity disrupts a system heavily dependent not only on oil and gas, but on fertilizers, pesticides, tractor parts made overseas, etc.
Third, Thomas Homer Dixon and others on this site have suggested that in an expensive energy world, redundancy and resilience may replace the ubiquitous economic objective of 'efficiency'. Certainly thousands of food centers around North America are more resilient than several concentrated ones. You are correct in stating I don't have the data to support this. Thats part of the problem with Peak Oil - we can't PROVE anything until it's happening. But to assume the same rules that held in the 70s,80s and 90s will hold going forward is naive. We had very cheap oil then and the first derivative of efficiency in farming was still increasing.
Fourth, this analysis overlooks a rather important fact that oil is finite and dollars are not. While Saudi Arabia seemingly would ultimately trade us oil for food, the greater world at large may not always send real resources in exchange for abstract ones. If there are hiccups in supply at any point, that disrupts the highly sensitive just-in-time food system we have set up. Local agriculture, or at least more than we have now, would act as a buffer to this. Also, if this credit crisis continues and does prove to be the 'greatest bubble in history', the lessons of farming from the 1930s may have bearing -many farmers lost their farms and sold them for pennies on the dollar because they were broke.
Fifth, the standard deviation of weather events, especially over 1-2 decade periods is high, and one could argue with GCC might be getting higher still. If we ever were to experience a 'Dust-Bowl' condition or something of similar scale, the concentration of food production under large scale mechanized ag for everyone would be at risk, whereas if there is more localized food infrastructure, there chance that this crisis becomes systemwide would be diminished. Again, shortfall risk.
Finally, in your scenario IF the US continues to specialize in large scale agriculture in an expensive oil world ($200-$400 oil), then this oil and natural gas will be borrowed from other productive parts of society, thus accelerating an already large disparity between the haves and the have nots. Already the top 1% in the US make 50% of the income. If industrial agriculture continues to scale, that would seem to make wealth inequality even greater, especially if there isn't enough food to export (the last time we didn't export wheat was 1973, and I am told we are considering it again in 2008). If we have much more inequality in US and globally, the social seams may unravel. Local agriculture, or at least more of it, seems a natural equalizer.
You may be right. Heinberg/Quinn et al. may be right. What does the precautionary principle suggest?
To expand a bit on this thought Nate, localized food production...generally utilizing a much wider range of plant varieties and substrains...is also a great buffer against catastrophic crop failure due to virus/fungi/etc infestations (i.e. "plantdemics") which are always a nonzero risk to huge monocultures.
Stuart assumes that there is a market for his product even as "the poor" are priced out of that market. Further, Stuart's position continues to assume a growing market for agricultural products even if population begins to reverse. Also, Stuart's position assumes no discontinuities in fertilizer, pesticide, or other resource availability. Finally, Stuart's position is spoken in complete isolation from other ongoing trends, not only in peak oil but also in regards to climate change, loss of arable land, water table depletion, etc. I find this to be one of the weakest papers I have ever seen Stuart do at TOD.
While there is a chance that Stuart is right in the short term, I would not bet at all that he is right in the medium or longer term.
Well, the replies of Stuart's detractors have significant weaknesses, too.
Just compare BAD and DAD. BAD: Big Agricultural Demon, DAD: Daddy Family Farmer. BAD has 10 million acres under cultivation in Alberta, Ontario, Iowa, Kansas and Georgia. DAD has 200 acres in Kansas.
Now imagine what happens to BAD if a drought wipes out Kansas agriculture one year, and three years later Kansas has rains and Georgia does not. Who will be alive and well after five years?
What happens if fertilizer gets so expensive that you have to squeeze out the last bit of efficiency to make a profit, including using the latest expensive technology?
Both cases, DAD goes bankrupt, BAD survives. BAD has the resources to react to change, DAD does not.
You forgot about the massive US Government subsidies to keep BAD in business. There's only one mention of this in this whole thread, and nothing in the charts. The only thing that keeps BAD in business is that the taxpayers pay twice: once in taxes, and once at the supermarket.
Check this out: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/interactives/farmaid/day1/
"Farming operations that **once** produced major crops such as corn, rice, wheat and cotton are paid a fixed stipend each year, along with extra payments when prices for those crops are low." - for a total of $9.4 billion/year.
Suppose the subsidies cease - then BAD dies soon after. When will subsidies cease? When government can no longer afford it... that day may come sooner than people think, since our national debt is now $9.1 trillion. If ever the days of 15% prime come back, interest payments alone will be $1.5 trillion/year - which means instant default - and no more farm subsidy. Do the math and figure it out.
Stuart really screwed up this time, but it's true, it's not peak oil which will do Big Agribiz in, it's debt service, both in terms of "land rents" and national debt.
Hi stream,
Thanks for bringing this up.
re: "...for a total of $9.4 billion/year."
I, too, was wondering about how subsidies come into an analysis, as well as the role of corporate farming v. non, what the relative percentages are of each one, and where the subsidies go as a function of either 1) legal status or 2) size of farm.
Is it even possible to analyze "Agbiz"? Are the books open enough? Does "Agbiz" "own" across the board? Or, like some small farmers, rent? What are the tax penalties/breaks - in addition to subsidies? And how do these work out as factors helping to propel the trends of the last 50 years of so?
What have been (until now) the driving factors for increased consolidation and/or decreasing of the "small family farm"?
Will these factors continue to be the ones in play?
What is the most desirable farm policy, given the oil/NG numbers we see here at TOD?
I'm reminded of an interview I heard w. the author of "Free Lunch", David Cay Johnson. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591841917/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
Sometimes the "corporate private" is really "corporate public tax utilization" masquerading as "private" in the traditional sense.
Wow, I think I have yet to see such specious reasoning as I see in "biologist's" report (if that really is your name.)
<< I find this to be one of the weakest papers I have ever seen Stuart do at TOD.
I agree, to write about industrial agriculture without discussing things like top soil depletion, rapidly lowering water tables, and just basic water shortages in general, which are all very easy to see as real world events if you've paid any attention at all to industrial farming practices, seems slightly odd, especially in the context of the oildrum, which seems to be doing a much better job than most other sources of information when it comes to creating a more holistic view of events.
Topsoil degradation is so utterly visible if you have ever seen a modern industrial farm field that it's actually somewhat frightening, this is basically dead soil currently, at least it is where I've looked.
Also, failing to connect in the entire web of oil based supply that feeds into that industrial farmer seems to be a fairly major failing in this analysis.
It will be interesting to see how this all unravels, but I seriously doubt it will look as nice as this analysis would have us believe. To be even slightly convincing, you have to look at least at water and topsoil issues along with the other economic matters. What's most odd is that for years I would read the economists say that with oil prices high, we'll just find more oil, and here we have the same exact argument re crop production....
I was writing about the effects of peak oil on agriculture specifically, not about all the ills of industrial agriculture. Soil erosion is a long-standing and gradual issue that has nothing to do with peak oil, per se. I suggest checking the soil conservation service maps of wind erosion loss estimates, and water erosion loss estimates. Water erosion is the main one (except locally in dry areas of the west), and the average is 2.5 tons/acre/year, which is around 0.6 kg/m^2. At a soil density of, say 1.5 g/cc, that's about 400cc of loss spread over 10000cm^2 each year. So we lose 0.4mm/year in soil height, or an inch every fifty years in round numbers - worse in some places, better in others. Will this ultimately be fatal if not addressed? Yes. Does it have any macro-level implications at all in the next few decades? No.
Sigh. It's incredible the number of myths that can persist for years, despite the fact that it is possibly to falsify them with 10 minutes work on Google looking for the actual data.
But even in this restricted area, you didn't really do that at all, all you wrote about was a micro case view of the farmer alone, not the system around him. What's the point of that? He doesn't work in a vacuum, the moment he enters into industrial production he becomes part of a much larger industrial system, not an autonomous entity farming away happily, he depends on all the elements, all of which require energy and resources to produce. So even in that more limited way, the article was fairly pointless, and really does not clarify any real issue at all from what I can see.
I for one have no way to predict what will happen to that larger industrial web that he sits suspended in, and neither do you I suspect, nor anyone else here. But that's what the real question is.
Eroding and degrading are not the same thing, as you know, dead soil is just not... healthy or alive, but might be persuaded to stay in place more or less, or at least to vanish more slowly over time. For some reason whenever someone starts doing an economic analysis, they seem doomed to start to ignore real resources, don't ask me why that is, it just almost seems built in, has been for at least 150 years in economics. Marx did it, and it seems that tradition lives on....
Its a bit long, but an EXCELLENT title for a post!
Speaking of which, I feel like beating my head against a wall when ever I read somebody saying "farmers won't be able to get fuel".
If agriculture only uses 2% of the fuel, and everyone has to eat, and people are protesting in the street about the prices of food, and politicians are still politicians, then surely we can rely on the government, out of populist, rable-rousing self interest, to make sure farmers have priority access to fuel supplies.
The logical place for the last million barrels per day of production, 50 years from now, will be in farmer's tractors, even if everyone has to walk.
Don't tell me people won't give up their SUVs. They will when they get hungry enough.
As an example, Australia, right now, subsidises diesel for farmers. That subsidy is likely to continue and increase in the future, in order to keep the price of bread affordable.
Because if people can't afford bread, they start burning their leaders in effigy in the streets, which makes politicians nervous.
By the way - if people can't afford to buy food from farmers, they are not likely to be spending much money on fuel either. Demand destruction (for oil) can come through high food prices as well as high oil prices.
Well done Stuart.
The U.S. subsidizes fuel for agricultural purposes as well. That's why they put the red dye in it, so that we'll know which fuel goes in the pick-up and which goes in the tractor. The red stuff isn't taxed, ala subsidy.
Once people get pissed about a lack of fuel and/or bread, the transportation system that gets fuel to the farms isn't going to hold up very well. At that point, all the subsidies in the world won't make a lick of difference.
Its more like 10%, when you consider that getting food from the farms to the people uses fuel. Much of what is produced on farms today is also processed and packaged, which requires additional fuel. Considering US domestic production is only about 5 mbpd (and bound to decline in the future), and feeding the population will take about 2.5 mbpd, that not a lot of leg room. While I don't expect exports to go to zero, I expect fall significantly since at some point exporters will begin to hord their remaining reserves. The US also imports all of its NPK fertializers and a significant amount of pesticides, since production of these resources have been relocated near low cost natural gas resources (in the case of Nitrogen fertializers and pesticides).
Other factors include maintaining and replacing worn out equipment. Virtually no manufacturing plant takes raw material at one end, and ships final products at the the other end. Every manufacturer depends on materials and parts that are made by some one else. When the economy goes into a depression, going to drive a lot of these material and parts suppliers out of business. And lets not forget about the energy inputs for building and maintaining equipment.
While I agree that we can not go back to 18th Century Agraculture, we also cannot expect to maintain existing agraculture production. Even if Western contries are some how able to maintain food production, poor countries will not.
The poorer countries which have very large populations will begin to destablize (as the already have done so in Africa and Pakastan) Systems that maintain sanitation, clean water, and bring in food will begin to fail as the mininum resources required to maintain them become unobtainable. This will inevetually lead to violence, mal-nutrition, and disease. People from these regions will leave their home as refugees, to neighboring regions. Not only will these mass migrations destablized other regions, they will spread diseases. Sooner or later, diseases and destablizing forces will reach western nations. The logical outcome of our future is a global dieoff, that will eventually reach all regions of the world. Whether this process takes years or decades, no one can be certain. However I suspect that if a panademic evolves out of the chaos, it won't take long for it reach all around the globe.
I think that in industrialized nations, the populations will begin to cut back on healthcare, and they will consume food that is high in calories but low in nutrition (because its cheaper). The degration of nutrition will weaken peoples immune systems, and the lack of proper medical care will speed up the development of super-bugs or drug resistant strains. The common diseases that killed millions in pre-20th century will rise again as antibiotics lose their effectiveness. Lack of capital to fund research in new antibiotics will fall as consumers cut back on healthcare. We already have a few untreatable strains of staph and Toburculosis. It probably won't take much to create many more untreatable strains.
TechGuy said:
'While I agree that we can not go back to 18th Century Agraculture, we also cannot expect to maintain existing agraculture production. Even if Western contries are some how able to maintain food production, poor countries will not.'
After this point, it seems to me that you assume that this is obvious, rather than try to substantiate it.
It is not too clear why this should be the case.
If it is mechanised agriculture which is held to cause the problem, there is far less of it in Africa and Pakistan than in the West, so presumably they should be less affected.
Energy inputs are also far lower, although in Asia at least there are substantial inputs of fertiliser.
I remember in the 60's, it was commonly thought that famine in Africa and more particularly in South Asia was inevitable, and that shortly, with many feeling doomed because of high rates of population increase.
The green revolution falsified that expectation.Of course it is always possible to say 'just you wait, it's coming!' but perhaps it is unwise to wholly discount the possibility it not happening.
For example, although in my view for the foreseeable future it seems completely daft to me for Germany to go for PV power, as in the winter they get around 3% of rated capacity, that investment does mean that prices are being driven down for the much more favourable environment of the tropics, where you don't need to wildly over-specify to obtain a reasonable amount of power, and you also don't need to build a grid if you haven't got one.
This on it's own should help agriculture a lot in those regions, as you can pump water and so on much more easily, so maybe not everyone there is so inevitably doomed as you seem to assume!
It appears you completely miss my point. Before reading. forget about agraculture for the moment. Assume the below content has nothing to do with agraculture::
Lots of Poor countries are destablizing because lack of energy resources. These resources are essential to maintain the economy, as poor people lose there source of income, and cannot purchase food and other essentials, they riot, steal, do what ever it takes.
Second, as energy resource decline, basic services such as will santitation fail. Waste begins to collect on the streets, increasing the risks to disease. Lack of energy and cash for individuals means less or no access to medical care. Instead of seeking treatment, they remain infected, and spread the disease to others.
If basic services cannot be restored, people will migrate to other regions (refugees), bring violence and disease with them to where ever they travel too. This spreads destabilization and disease. Eventually these issues will reach western nations.
As examples I recommend reading the new reports from Zimbabwe and Kenya. Some of the violence has spread to Kenya which is now destablized. Eventually destablization will travel north into Egypt and from there into the Middle East and Europe.
Aquifers are depleting around the world. When this is no water left, there is nothing to pump. On the way down of course, the wells need to be re-drilled ever and ever deeper. You cannot drill a well using PV, nor can you use PV to make pvc and steel piping. PV also fails when the wells become very deep as it takes a lot of energy to pump water from very deep wells.
In addition farming will be very difficult in regions lacking security. People from urban regions will travel to farms, steal produce, grain, livestock, equipment (including PV panels) and machinery. They will take that stuff either to consume for themselves or sell on the blackmarket for cash.
Virtually all of the poor Asia regions rely on fertial valleys constantly renewed from rivers. Unfortunatly in China and other nations, the populations are converting the fertial river valleys into urban development (must as the west has already done) or the are building hydro dams which are permenately flooding the river valleys. Farmers in China are being forced to farm much less fertial land as they are displaced. (Google for the "Three Gorges Dam" and farming). You will discover these Asian nation are being forced to purchase chemical fertializers as they are forced to farm less fertial land that is not self renewable.
In the areas you specify, Zimbabwe and Kenya, it is by no means clear that their main problem had anything much to do with energy resources.
Tribalism might be a much more proximate cause, although the extreme misgovernment consequent upon the politics has resulted in energy shortages along with shortages of just about everything else.
Aquifers are indeed being depleted, although precisely because the resources to drill wells and so on has been a lot more limited in much of the third world the problem is perhaps more acute in areas such as the US than in much of the Third World.
The conversion of farmland to urban areas in China and elsewhere is also a real problem, but has largely been predicated on the fact that farmland is presently relatively valueless.
An increase of need could lead to fairly simple measures being taken - green roof technology and cut and cover mean that it is not really essential to loose any green for urbanisation to take place.
Whilst many of the issues that you draw attention to are real enough, your inference that they are insurmountable obstacles appears to me unwarranted.
I was a lot more pessimistic in the sixties, when it seemed population growth would never cease and that areas like India and China would be lands of perpetual famine, rather than the rapidly industrialising powers we currently see.
That is not to say that everything in the garden is rosy, and their are plenty of grounds for genuine concern, especially in Africa and disfunctional states such as you reference.
Anecdotal evidence from certain regions, especially when it is clear that their problems go far beyond just energy, is not really a solid case for total universal collapse though.
Yes, and the nonsense that industrial agriculture 'wrecks' the soil is another.
Using glyphosate ("roundupTM")to kill weeds and "no till" direct drilling of seeds, organic matter in cereal-lands slowly builds up.
There may be issues of soil compaction, but these can be remediated.
Remember, an acre of land is an acre of land because that is what could be ploughed at oxen pace in a day, allowing for rest and feed.
Big machinery can 'walk faster' than oxen, and the swathe of land dealt to is vastly larger than what could be done by the best and biggest team.
Remember, these are annual cyclic plant crops - there is only ONE growing season, one window of time to plant the seed, one window of time to harvest. If you don't have big machinery, even if you have a thousand acres, you don't have the time to prepare it all before you are into your growing period afr enough the last planted won't mature.
What a multiplier fossil oil is! Thats why we can have civilisation.
Set aside an area for oilseed canola, soy, hemp, whatever. Use it to power agricultural machines. Thats one 'solution' for large scale agriculture production.
Ration oil is another. When oil is increasingly hard to come by, the ration cards will be in farmers hands. Obviously. Some industrial corn ( for corn syrup for crap 'food', for example) will not be authorised for ration card. Some corn to 'marble' yankee beef in feedlots will not be authorised.
But wheat and legumes for mass consumption WILL be provided, and the most effcient providor, without a doubt, in big ag, big machinery, big intellectual application of science.
Yes, veg and fruit can and will small-scale. Hell, they're 90% water! Expensive to oil-ship nationwide (except by rail, canal and coastwise).
Grain is dry calorie store, soy, even more energy dense. Dried properly and stored properly, it won't spoil, needs no refrigeration has years shelf life.
Gas for drying may be expensive, and thus food expensive, but, days end, govt will 'take' the gas one way or other, in the common good.
There may be all sorts of difficulties in lines of supply of infrastructure, but at days end, farming trumps all (even the military) for access to whatever it takes to keep the enterprise going.
Lorenzo
¨Using glyphosate ("roundupTM")to kill weeds and "no till" direct drilling of seeds, organic matter in cereal-lands slowly builds up.¨
I wonder if the organic matter is building up because the soil organisms that break it down are sensitive to the roundup?
Speaking of falsifying....
Yes, cherry-picking your quotes is fun, isn't it?
Because of the growth of population on an exponential scale, the increased use of non-sustainable agricultural techniques, and the expansion of infrastructure, the rise in the amount of eroding soil also increases apace. That means that the doubling time for soil loss is significantly less than it was at the beginning of our raping of the continent. In other words, your implying that soil loss is not that much and presumably won't increase belies your ordinarily careful examination of quite simple physical ideas.
Oh, P.S. It takes 500 years, on average, to recover one inch of topsoil.
Not to mention the Roundup resistant weeds! I saw entire wheat fields taken over by superweeds this summer, fields that had Roundup Ready soybeans the year before. This particular farmer had virtually no crop, a lot of good $9 wheat did him, he can't pay his land rent, so much for modern agriculture.
RE: btu,
You did NOT see a wheat field growing "Roundup resistant" weeds.
One can not apply Roundup over a growing wheat field, because no wheat is currently roundup ready.
If the farmer's weeds were of the dicotyledon broadleaf type, he could have applied, Bronate, Ally, Widematch, 2,4-D,or about 50 other herbicides with a mode of action COMPLETELY unlike glyphosate.
If the weeds were grassy, He could have applied, Puma or Olympus, again totally unlike glyphosate.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
10,000milemargin and 72MYZ have it CORRECT.
Soil loss comes from excessive tillage. There are 2 ways to kill weeds.
1) Tillage, which destroys old plant residue, kills earthworms, destroys soil structure, AND LEADS TO EROSION.
2) Herbicides, which leave the old dead plants on the surface, making a MULCH. Mulch cover and a NONdisturbance of soil leads to LESS erosion.
The "Dirty Thirties" or "Dustbowl" occured not due to lack of rain. There were many drought in the last 6 years worse than many of the years in the 30s.
The reason for the dust storms back in the day was LACK OF HERBICIDES.
If you want MASSIVE soil loss, and low yields, just take away herbicides.
I know what I saw and that was a wheat field full of chemical resistant weeds that was in Roundup Ready soybeans the year before. There was also wheat fields in the region that did not germinate on last year's RR soybean ground. Roundup is not the friendly chemical you think it is, your failure as a farmer will be due in part to your blind faith in toxic rescue chemistry.
Smaller scale gardeners and farmers have a third option: mulch. Mulch has the advantage of not only suffocating weeds, but also retaining soil moisture (a huge advantage, that) and (if organic materials are used) building up the soil.
Mulch is not practical on a 1000 acre field. It is practical on some crops up to a few acres.
It may not have to do with peak oil per se, but it does have to do with mechanized row crop monoculture which is essential to industrial agriculture.
Why should we only worry about the next few decades? Hubbert predicted in the mid fifties that global oil production would peak near the end of the century and the general attitude was: "Heck, that's more than four decades away and maybe longer. What moron would worry about events that far off? Let's build more toys and destroy and pollute until cold, hard, grim necessity forces us to do otherwise." And by the way, what is that you expect to happen in the long term? Are you anticpating that fusion will make us so energy rich that we will be able to grind up bedrock to make soil?
Sigh. Is it too much to expect that intelligent, knowledgeable people who have some understanding the long term implications of our economic activity should encourage people to think about something other than their own personal comfort for the next several decades?
Finally, in your scenario IF the US continues to specialize in large scale agriculture in an expensive oil world ($200-$400 oil), then this oil and natural gas will be borrowed from other productive parts of society, thus accelerating an already large disparity between the haves and the have nots.
Fossil fuels get outrageously expensive, domestic industrially produced food gets more expensive, does this create a bigger market for imports of non-industrially produced food? I don't know enough about this to say, but if there is still enough food produced worldwide in a manner less dependent on fossil fuel, maybe the difference in price would offset the expense of transportation.
In thinking this through, it is one more piece in favor of the notion that the growing and distribution of food would likely become more fragmented. Hundreds of localized arbitrages would begin to be felt. If industrial ag. gets way profitable, this means high prices likely in the face of low employment and increasing poverty. I will buy or barter local food that I can afford before buying more expensive industrial food from 1500 miles away.
Here's another short term prediction: There is enough 'fat' in the American consumption of food that a deep recession will actually cut the profits of big ag. companies sharply because people will have to cut back on the more expensive foods and learn how to cook rice and beans again instead of using hamburger helper.
That seems way way off the mark.
I'm pressured for time at the moment, but wikipedia says the top 6.37% households earn roughly 1/3.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
I meant wealth, but income is very high as well. I too am in a hurry and can't find the link to a recent arcticle discussing the $billion+ paydays for hedge fund managers, etc that skew the 2006 and 2007 results (which are not included in this paper)
"Recent Trends in Household Wealth in the United States: Rising Debt and the Middle-Class Squeeze (pdf warning) Ed Wolff continually does analyses such as these - the numbers are difficult to come by and require heroic assumptions - the link is to his latest paper of 2007 which includes statistics through 2004. I believe the concentration of wealth is now as high as anytime in the last 100 years except 1929.
Another thing to factor in is that these megafarms are becoming corporate assets, i.e. ADM and with the high price of oil and a credit crunch the time could come that a sovereign fund or another foreign investor starts to buy those corporations and/or the ownership of our farms and they end up in foreign hands.
Instead of the Saudi's trading us oil for food, they could become the actual or beneficial owner of our croplands. As they are in the energy business the farms could be bought up by Aramco, or a SABIC (Saudi Basic Industries Corporation) type entity could buy them (like they did GE plastics). In order to use them for biofuels, or to feed their own growing population, as they would have access to fertilizers from SABIC and fuel from ARAMCO they could operate the farms at less costs than a US operator. Petro dollars could pick these farms up one by one through quietly buying the assets of distinct and various companies and farms (as they are now grabbing up pieces of our financial markets) and we could wake up one day be beholden to a foreign power for our food security.
What would happen if we exported grain in the midst of a food shortage? The poor would suffer but when this starts to hit former and current members of the middle class then TSW really HTF. The haves will be far fewer than the have not's.
Whoof, darn good comments Nate; covers all I had to say and then some.
Farms getting larger and more industrialized seems mostly a case of continuing to choose efficiency over resilience in the short term under the tacit assumption that evolved systems don't collapse, which involves the confluence of so many fallacies it's daunting to list them. Still, in the short term that will be continued.
I love the "Fallacy of Reversibility" and was hoping it would be better used. It's a great fallacy! You can't run evolved systems in reverse! So I endorse the general concept of this fallacy as my favorite part of this article. Others have noted that "discontinuity" isn't explicitly considered by SS here, which I was glad to see mentioned since to my mind discontinuities are a large PART of a "fallacy of reversibility" as I might frame one.
I don't think that those I know who are planting gardens believe they are reversing time or evolution. Rather, they don't wish to starve and realize that there are a lot of things which have to happen just right to get grain from a field in Iowa to their mouths. So there will be the trappings of earlier times in some ways, but different. There will be forward evolution from the remains of untenably complex and non-resilient systems which collapse, and that evolution will be constrained - as evolution always is - by the thermodynamic choices foreclosed by prior events.
Anyhow, thanks SS for a well-laid-out argument; it's delightful to have a site to visit where even the stuff I can't agree with is of such high quality.
and just because I can, I'm going to highlight this pull-quote from Nate's comment:
This is well put and deserves a post of its own; it encapsulates a large portion of my own view and I recommend it as a conceptual frame. As always, YMMV.
(disclaimer: on codeine)
I think that the idea of "reversibility" is sophistic when used in this context.
There will not a be reversal of the film whereby we see:
No, I think that the better term would be "spectacular failure" followed by an eventual return to that pre-industrial model.
Cherenkov,
The situation you describe is certainly absurd, but technically it can happen. The Fallacy of Reversibility that you and Stuart Staniford describe is not actually a fallacy it is just improbable, very improbable. All processes are reversible, the smoke flowing back into the chimney, the cake jumping off the floor and reforming and even unbaking into dough. I know it hurts everyone's head to hear this but technically it is true, humor me for a second.
In intro to thermodynamics one will come across the following two pictures:
The professor will tell you that in the first picture there is a gas in the box on the left and a vacuum in the box on the right. Someone removed the divider for a moment and the gas distributed itself equally over the available volume until equilibrium was reached, a higher entropy state than the initial state. Teach will say that entropy is always increasing.
Teach will probably say that entropy is often called the arrow of time; since all processes are reversible the student cannot tell which image was first and which was second unless the student calculates the entropy of each, the one with the lower entropy happened first.
Then much later in the semester the professor will ask the students to calculate the probability that an evenly distributed gas in a box will all be in the left half of the box at some later time. If there is one gas particle in the box the odds are 1 in 2. If there are two particles in the box the odds are 1 in 4, 3 particles gives 1 in 8, etc. The same principle holds for all other processes. The odds of a broken glass recombining and leaping off the floor and back onto the counter is 1 in several times the life time of the universe measured in nanoseconds. Unlikely, but it is possible.
Which brings me to the actual point. Agriculture is not going back to the 18th century and it isn't going forward in the FF intensive, monocropping, unsustainable, modern agrobusiness mode either. While both are possible the odds against each one are staggering, something akin to 1 in several times the life time of the universe measured in nanoseconds. Both scenarios are myopic and highly improbable, what we are headed for is something else.
The framing of this debate is misleading. This is not a question of Luddites and reversalists vs. agrobusiness and industry. The real question is what is the best way forward.
Most of the people on this site posting about their progress toward becoming sustainable farmers are doing so because it is the best safety net for them as individuals in these uncertain times, not because they believe that the world is going to convert to Hobbiton when the oil taps out. If there were a global discussion about PO and GW mitigation then we wouldn't be hearing dissident posts of people heading for the hills. It is the expanded modern agrobusiness and endless Business As Usual exponential growth nonsense that drives the back to the land crowd.
Whenever you encounter a paradox, damned if you do, damned if you don't, you have to take a step back, realize that it is a trick question and figure out the trick before proceeding. In essence the system isn't working the way the invisible hand promised us it would. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell that the question between full steam ahead and full stop is a trick question. So the appropriate question to ask, the correct framing of the debate, is how to redesign the invisible hand that brought us to this point in the first place.
*Incidentally, I like the Luddites, just because they lost doesn't mean they were wrong. If skilled artisans and craftsmen had won out over the dark satanic mills would we be facing civic apathy, PO, GW and a financial collapse?
-Tim
Peak oil, global warming, and economic collapse are not the problem, they are the symptoms of the problem. The problem is a collective action problem and an inability to make good long term plans.
...1 in several times the life time of the universe measured in nanoseconds.
Those of us who do not have several universe-lifetimes in which to perform the experiment, shall continue to employ the term "irreversible".
Ah, but if the glass is something important to me, I can pick up the pieces and reassemble them myself. In which case the probability has just jumped to 1:1.
We are actors within the system, and that changes things. We are intelligent and willful and can make choices. The future is not cast in stone but can be influenced greatly by our choices.
Most of the debate here centers around what kind of choices we are making and what kind of futures might flow from them.
We certainly COULD make choices that would result (intentionally or unintentionally) in something that looked more or less like a reversion to an earlier era. Whether we should or will make such choices is an open question. While some individuals are making choices consistent with a reversal strategy, at least up to now that does not appear to be the preferred pathway for the vast majority of society. Whether or not we'll end up with a reversal anyway as an unintended consequence of our collective decisions is uncertain and debatable, but quite possible.
A brilliant, data-driven, thoughtful analysis, as is often the case with Stuart's work.
However, I'm going to ignore the substance of this essay (which I'm still thinking over) to make one minor rhetorical point. As you know, the difference between the reversible and irreversible processes you describe is that the latter involve big increases in entropy (cake falling and floor and scattering all over), and the former do not.
It is therefore very ironic that an archetypal reversalist like Kunstler also frequently claims that our society is greatly increasing in entropy. If he were using the word in about the same way that the rest of the world understands it, this would guarantee the irreversability of our society.
There is, however, exactly one way that entropy can be decreased locally-- with a big increase in energy from an external source. But I'm guessing Kunstler doesn't expect that to happen.
Perhaps if entropy is maximised under our 'free-market' capitalist system, in reponse to the obvious economic and other crises that are upon us, governments might impose laws and regulations to allow us to begin the very painful rebuilding of our thermodynamic/societal potential. This would probably involve trade protectionism for example, and the reintroduction of banking, and energy saving legislation. Probably not until we're in desperate state though.
There is another way to decrease entropy for a society : global catastrophe and subsequent indenting of demography.
This has been proved over and over again with a lot of variables like the age of first parturition. As society evolves in peace, the age of first preganancy scatters a lot which increases the entropy for this variable (by definition). Then a global catastrophe occurs resetting the variable. The age of first birth giving becomes homogenous again (around 20 years).
In the case of agriculture I would indeed agree that we won't revert. We don't have the tools, the knowledge, the skill to go back. Gardening is nice but still relies on available seeds, fertilizer, tools and so on, si it is no option in a disrupted world. So, in the case of a huge discontinuity, increased competition for resources (like war ...), which society will fare better ?
Staniford has overstated his case; even if it were true that a few writings of a few peak-oil-aware people are too sanguine about our chances for relocalization of agriculture, most of us don't think such processes will in any sense be a 'reversal' of time, or a simple retrofit of 19th-century methods onto our current situation. The idea of 'victory gardens' and the like are an advocacy for a means to address worse-case disruptions that might occur in our food supply.
The example of Cuba in the early 1990s was a 'real-world' experiment in dealing with an immediate oil crisis when the former Soviet Union collapsed. The creative use of small-scale farming prevented famine. That is a well-documented case study that Staniford declined to consider. That the Cuban people rediscovered the advantages of oxen over horses was worth noting--not that anyone has any romantic attachment to oxen, plowing fields, or growing food by hand!
As someone who does garden by hand, the relative advantages of both rototillers (petroleum and solar) and oxen come to mind, particularly when I have to use a pick or an ax to clear out tree roots.
I have learned that some crops, like collard greens, can survive the winter in Ohio. If suddenly there were a complete disruption of the food supply, I might be reduced to eating (and defending?) wilted collard greens in some worse-case scenario, but I'd be thankful I had planted them?
The precautionary principle should be guiding us in our advocacy. In general, Staniford has relied on economic analysis to make his argument and without laying out his numerous assumptions. It is essentially an argument that 'economies of scale' prevail. Ho hum. Mr. Staniford, I have a degree in economics to sell you!
"Conventional energy economics is a value system masquerading as mathematics. At its heart is one key assumption: the future is worthless and the environment doesn't matter." -- James Udall
It's funny you brought up Cuba. They were not the only one forced to Kick the Oil habit.
North Korea had the same event hit them for at the same time, for the same reason.
However they chose the Centralized Mechanical route, not unlike what Stuart talks about.
Not a Good Out come.
Drawing Lessons from Experience;
The Agricultural Crises in North Korea
and Cuba
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/111703_korea_cuba_1.html
BRAVO!!!
Cuba and N. Korea.
Perfect examples.
Good job gentlemen. Economic hoo-haa debunked in posts that are one one-hundredth the size of the original.
Excellent.
I looked at the referred article.
It in no way falsifies the analysis - large scale, machinery-based and science-based farming of vast, flat, deep pararie soils in North America is likely to be
a) profitable (social 'subsidies' of various shifting levels a given, as subsidising the profitability of food production is subsidising your own ability to exist)
b) priority for existing USA and imported oil use
To hold up a dictatorship with inefficient market signals, no dispassionate advice, hopelessly compromised planners and scientists (everything the 'great leader suggests is "brilliant"), no significant deep soil pararie lands, no private eneterprise or capital etc - as a proxy for the situation obtaining and likely to obtain in future in North America is - if you compare and contrast the geography, history, climate, and governance of the two for a moment - perhaps a little ill-advised.
Cheers,
Lorenzo
Pigs are good at cleaning out tree roots. Put some corn down a hole near the stump and let them do the work.
cfm in Gray, ME
Anyone want to trade a couple of pigs for my degree in economics? I will have the name changed and frame it for you. It comes from a first-tier university.
Ahh...that really made me laugh. Craigslist ad for the '10s!
Excellent post. Since you have a degree in economics perhaps you could answer this: Is there anything of substance in conventional economics besides the worship of 'economies of scale' to the exclusion of all else?
I have been trying to figure this out for some time.
Please Google for United States food exports to Cuba, and you'll find that Cuba is far from a success story, North Korea is even worse, since millions of N.Koreans are starving. I believe that China, S.Korea and other nations also provide food aid to N. Korea, and yet there still is famine.
There is no way for the globe or the US, or any major power to go back to 18th century farming without a massive dieoff. That said, Those that can secure their own food production will likely fair better than those dependant on industrialized farming. A dieoff is going to happen no matter what actions are taking because we are in deep population overshoot.
Of course if you truely believe that N. Korea and Cuba are paradise, I recommend you relocate to one of those countries.
My family visited Cuba about 3 years ago. We saw lots of small-scale agriculture, some with oxen. We also saw lots of large-scale agriculture - which I assumed was mechanized due to lack of people around. We did not see any urban agriculture in Havana, which is often talked about.
The latter is consistent with google earth, though I don't know what the age of satellite data is. It's hard to look at the large scale farms due to poor resolution.
Let's look closely at the preceding post from "TechGuy". First, let's throw away North Korea but keep Cuba in the discussion. North Korea's leadership is based on a total lie and cares not at all for its peoples' well-being. Castro's Cuba, while heavily controlled, is a more nuanced situation where the government does work to provide good health care services and a stable life to the inhabitants. I am not a Castro lover or hater, so do not go crazy.
Now, what appears to have happened in Cuba is an important opportunity to learn what might be done successfully as oil (and natural gas) become extremely expensive or not available in other parts of the world. They adopted recycling of farm waste, maintenance of used cars rather than discarding them prematurely, and organic farming methods.
It seems to me also that there is likely to be a die-off, but how large I believe can be influenced by our actions. If we successfully maximize farming output with sustainable methods, and learn what works and does not work from early experiences such as that in Cuba, what is wrong with that? We need to avoid turning everything into a political argument... we need to learn from each other where possible.
The previous post's final statement "Of course if you truely believe that N. Korea and Cuba are paradise, I recommend you relocate to one of those countries" reveals an impulse that lowers some of the thoughtfulness earlier in that post. I don't know if anyone says Cuba is paradise - is there a paradise or anything close to it anywhere on the earth? Doubtful, although maybe in som households here and there. The sarcastic invitation to relocate into North Korea or Cuba shows a desire to fragment rather than join together. I think we all know that life in Cuba is very limited in resources. However, for those who are short of oil and some other supplies, it is a worthwhile case study of how to manage in such an economy. Again, this is not political. As one Shakespeare character (in "Romeo and Juliet") said, "A plague on both your houses". In other words, if we could only stop seeing everything in terms of winner and loser, and two sides against each other, it would be much easier to solve our problems.
If you read my first post in this drumbeat, you can see my view on the effects of global destablization and the spread of disease that will almost certainly prevent a "limited" die off.
Unbelieveably, many drumbeat contributers do believe Cuba is a paradise. Like Fossil fuels, my patience isn't infinite. We have covered that Cuba example is not a solution to declining energy resources more than a dozen times in drumbeats. The Cuban example in fact increases support for dieoff, because Cuba is dependant on US grain exports to meet is food requirements, and Cuba still used fossil fuels for it domestic agraculture production.
My primary objective is to simply convince more people to take measures in their own hands rather than wait for some systematic gov't supplied solution thats never going to happen. The choice is simple; either make your own preprations for your future survival or suffer the consequences of your inaction.
Look around today, there are no massive projects to mitigate declining resources. In fact just the opposite is happening, All over the world, countries are becoming ever more dependant on fossil fuels. We aren't building mass transit, we aren't building water canals to bring new sources of water to replace depleting aquifiers. Our gov't is still more focused on trivial issues, such as birth control, the housing bubble, illegal immgration, socalized healthcare, and a dozen of other issues that are virtually meaningless considering the magnitude real challenges coming up fast.
I'll jump onto a 'Reversability' subthread, here.
I did appreciate the clarification of those things which are and are not Reversible, like 'UNBaking a cake', as opposed to UNinflating a balloon, etc.. But I think the argument needs to extend into some more pertinent details relevant to the Scale of various types of AG.
To stay general for a moment, I was reminded of the 'Reversability' (NOT!) demonstrated by Ferris Bueller, as he tried to 'unwind' the miles on the Sportscar by running it in reverse.. and of course ultimately DEConstructing the car itself by crashing it down into the woods.. two fine examples of UNSuccessful Reversability. Despite his best attempts, the story was still moving forward.
In my workshop, when I need to drill a big hole through a 2-by, I can use the Hole-saw, and I've had some success with a New and Sharp Spade-Bit in the 1990's Drill-press in some cases, but depending on the type of wood I'm cutting into, I will often be glad I still have my grandfather's Bit and Brace, which has been extremely successful at such things, and operates quietly enough to let me hear the MP3's of my favorite 70's Fusion Rock band (Gentle Giant) playing on a Laptop. (If the laptop dies, I'm hoping my daughter takes up the Banjo, so I can finally build that Hammer Dulcimer and learn to play some Joplin and Monk on it..) Am I a 'Reversalist', a 'Fogey', a 'Hippie'.. I also use Pandora.com, so you may say I'm a streamer, (but I'm not the only one). I am a big believer in keeping useful tools available in my toolkit, while trying to learn what NEW tools are out there, and getting rid of the 'Backwards' tools, habits and assumptions that keep us from 'getting there. And so to deride the love of some older things because they evoke a Nostalgic feeling, does little to address whether that wheel they dream of reinventing wasn't also highly functional, resilient, durable, etc.. and which may well have contributed to the fond memories of a life that included such implements and processes.
People who advocate for a '4-in-hand' team and a bit of bluegrass might be seen as hopelessly backwards, but is the same standard applied to someone who advocates for "Peace through High-altitude Bombing Campaigns and will only listen to Kenny G and Air Supply"? Which is to say, some of our assumptions are absolutely ANCIENT, others relatively recent but so quickly outdated.. and while they have an EFFECT and make a lot of NOISE, as with Massive Bombardment Strategies and certain 80's hair-bands, we still seem capable of overlooking the fact that they ~may~ have been basically INEFFECTIVE or objectionable.
Is this 'Reversalism', or rediscovering something that 'worked, but we fixed it anyway.' ? We still use the wheel, it's old but it keeps coming around, squeaky or not. That hovercraft was a neat idea, but who can fill the tank these days?
I don't know that BIG AG is going to be 'the Brontosaur that doesn't have enough Acacia forests left to feed it' and die from it's unsustainable scale. I would expect that businesses will try to adjust their risks and resiliency as the writing on the wall gets more attention.. I also think that individuals and families who feel increasing food-insecurity and financial stress will look towards actions that offer some relief, which means some will find gardening, others will support local farms and CSA's and farmers markets.
I guess I really just wanted to weigh in on the uncareful characterization of 'Reversalists', which I see as an obsolete label right out of the gate. "What do you mean you're Hungry again?! You're grandfather was Hungry all the time.. he'd eat one meal, get hungry again and just eat another one! What good did it do him? He died! Eating is so old-fashioned.."
The increase in energy locally will be from human labor. Right now there is a huge untapped potential of human energy in the US society. I sit here typing on a keypad with my metabolism on idle when I could be out trellising my grape vines and burning some unused energy.
Another point about those of us who might be considered 'reversalists.' Many, like myself (and Robert Rapier -- see earlier post) are 'hedgers.' I enjoy the rural lifestyle and growing my own food and foraging, etc. This is also a great hedge for future unemployment, high food prices, food unavailability, etc. regardless of beliefs about reversibility.
I don't know Kunstler reasoning, but shouldn't he say that our society is reducing in entropy? We are getting more organized, not the other way around.
Anyway, that arguments based on society's entropy are always bad. All our organization is so minimal that we could displace its entropy to a gallon of burning oil.
I think you've got the right direction. As civilization becomes more advanced, entropy decreases. As it falls, it increases.
All that being said, I think that Stuart's article is excellent within the context of what he's describing. Based on the data that's available, it appears that large scale agriculture becomes more profitable as oil prices go up. He is not trying to hypothesize how potential dicontinuities will effect industrial level agriculture, but what could be expected if things continue as they have been without serious changes.
I do not believe that we're going to be able to avoid discontinuities. Instead, I think that the ADMs and Mesantos of the world will ramp up production to fill a perceived need for their product, make enormous profits for a short while and then run into a brick wall. There are a couple of possiblities for the proverbial "wall." There could be acute climate changes that affect large portions of the world; oil prices could go up to the point where the large businesses charge too much for the majority of their customers and they go bankrupt; or some other event could come up that disrupts the ability of any large, multi-national organization to operate profitably.
In the long term, we cannot continue to expand without limits. Even if we were able to temporarily overcome our energy limitations, there are material limitations. They exist at the planetary level, and even at the stellar level (if we somehow made space travel economical.) We, as intelligent beings, need to stop and think about what we're doing and how our actions will effect the lives of our descendants 1,000 generations down the line.
Scott
"We must strive to become good ancestors." - Ralph Nader
"As civilization becomes more advanced, entropy decreases. As it falls, it increases."
Actually, no. Entropy decreases only within the civilization, but in order to get there, overall entropy increases within the larger system, in this case the biosphere. In Erwin Schrodinger's "What is Life?", he explained that "a living system exports entropy in order to maintain its own entropy at a low level ". Likewise a civilization.
Going further, "When we measure the area around complex organisms and ecosystems, we find that they are keeping themselves cool, pushing heat away from them, in such a way as to accelerate the natural production of entropy. Ironically or paradoxically from one point of view, but quite naturally from a more “holistic” standpoint, the complex system is more effective at accomplishing the natural goal of entropy production than a simpler, less organized system." From Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life, by Eric D. Schneider and Dorian Sagan.
Thanks, r,
Interesting reference.
I suspect that he means the dissipation of a one time resource. Since that one time resource also enabled the current population, without that support, we, our bodies, will also fall prey to entropy as our organized energy is dissipated.
You guys really put a lot of effort into your essays. I don't have time this morning to try and absorb all this, but I will comment anyway. Yours seems to be a type of Soylent Green argument in a way.
Forgetting about peak oil for a moment, at least what I observe around my local area is quite the opposite. Local farmers markets are thriving. I have started getting my dairy products delivered from a local creamery - people take their kids there to talk with the cows they are getting the milk and butter from, its all organic yada yada yada... Also, finally (being in Virginia this took too long) a few pig famers from downstate have started selling in our local farmers market. Now it is true that I don't know of any local grain being sold or local flour mills, but local bakeries are springing up everywhere.
OK, so around here this phenomena is driven by a few factors. 1) people are sick and tired of tasteless vegetables and want stuff like exotic garlics and heirloom tomoatoes 2) people are worried about hormones in their dairy and meat 3) crunchy people like the idea of "organic" 3) the whole McDonalds - "every place and everything is like everywhere else and everything else" trend has run its course 4) people around here have more money than your average place and spend it on stuff like this
The last point might support your thesis. Although I wonder, because in recent months with the price of store-bought factory-bread and factory-meat and factory-dairy rising, the cost of the farmer's market foods have not risen nearly as much. The prices are much more comparable now (and the farmer's market quality is still that much better). I wonder if that is because for the factory-farmed food, the cost of the raw materials is the largest percentage of cost while labor is small and for the small organic farm the opposite is true ? Anyway, that is what is happening in my local area.
"The last point might support your thesis."
Well, exactly, that's where we'll have to stay tuned. In harder times, folks might not have so much time in which to wallow in yuppie angst over "hormones" (or cell phones or coffee or some other soap-opera crisis du jour), nor so much money with which to indulge those irrational emotions. They might simply go for price.
The big farmers' market in my area used to be the place to go for both price and quality. With respect to price those days are largely gone - the vendors have long since wised up and yuppified. And although a huge crowd shows up, it's still a fairly small minority. The vast preponderance of the food economy follows the normal industrial pattern.
So I'm wondering whether you live within commute range of the District. If so, the same pricing phenomenon may come to you. After all, beltway bandits and Federal officials are good marks. They tend to be highly affluent, and to have long commutes affording abundant time in which to scare themselves witless over the latest "study" proclaiming half a standard deviation of statistically insignificant snake oil as ultimate truth.
Commute range ? You mean like walking distance ? Yes, I can (and have) walked into the district, although bike is a little more expediant.
The point of what I was saying is that a local economy is on the upswing where I am, and its not only food but that is the most mature. The cause of development of this economy was not price originally but quality of product and quality of life. And, I found it interesting that the difference in price of local and non-local foodstuffs was becoming less.
Hi all! Just to confirm the trend of "regional grown products" it's a very big trend in Europe, even Supermarkets are playing this card big time now !
...and one disturbing thought: in the US, the are more firearms than people in circulation, did anyone evaluate the "disruption factor" of armed civil unrest in his predictions ?
I gues there are fundamentally different types of agriculture and that's why you guys don't agree:
- grain farming is difficult to do in your backyard and profits most from industrialization. Produce can be transported by ships.
- vegetable farming can be done in every garden and the produce is perishable. Indurstial production needs trucks (high diesel consumpion) or even airplanes for transport.
- milk production is in-between: difficult to do in your backyard but milk is perishable
The answer on the industrial/local production question will be different for each one of these. Local veggy production is already doing well.
I think that's right. I would add that it seems that grain/flour quality is less affected by industrialization as well although at too large a scale you start to lose variety of product.
What about meats ? The addition of locally farmed pork and lamb is relatively new to our farmer's market but it also seems to be a big hit. I don't eat much meat but people tell me it is much more tasty. No chicken yet - which reminds me of a friend who is here on a work visa from poland. She says she will not eat chicken in this country because it has no flavor. I asked what chicken is supposed to taste like. She said it tastes like chicken! True story.
There is another issue. Overwhelmingly, people don't trust big businesses. I'm not like that, myself. For the most part I trust them to do everything they can to deceive and cheat. Certainly to destroy. Even to poison.
Shop on!
cfm in Gray, ME
A very interesting piece.
It seems to me that one of the most likely consequences of peak oil is economic upheaval, including large unemployment from conventional industries. I had assumed that more people would be employed in agriculture since unemployed folks will be a cheap exploitible resource, and agriculture will always be. You make a fair case that farms wont be the employment sink for the masses. I struggle to believe that factories will be a viable employment sink. So to for construction.
What is the post peak employment sink?
Stuart,
Let me make a few observations;
Yesterdays DB or possibly the day before, as totally chock full of a whole lot of conjecture and out right assertions by many many on TOD as to the subject of agriculture. MOST if not just about all of it was totally nonsense. Why? Because it was penned by those here with no experience in real agriculture of todays variety.
There were a very very few who actually work in this area. You could easiy tell by the various scenarios they spoke of and so the whole DB was a waste of time and energy.
Granted there were a few, like Doug Fir and Impractical who really do farm,but just how big is their operations? Over 1,000 acres? Less? A family farm? I don't really know but I am not buying that HighPlainsFarmer is a 'real' farmer. His area seems to be judging from his website mostly hype and he has yet to show any real credentials. Mosty just what he states and that background is very very short, especially in any prior foot print here on TOD.
So you are once more going to receive a large amount of psuedo-farmer nonsense and the whole topic will degrade. They simply google and cut and paste...and worse lots of it is WIKI based, which IMO is almost worthless.
What is needed is input from REAL hardcore people who actually work in big ag operations.
Specifically: Their methods of contracting in commodities
Who and when they use on-site storage
What equipment they use and what does it cost.
Their actual 'inputs', fuel,herbicides,insecticides,NPK
and very very much more.
Its easy to go to a farmers forum like 'newagtalk' and learn some of their attitudes and problems and some of the above, but I must add that a whole lot of nonsense is spread even there but of far more value that what passes on TOD.
Consider the statement yesterday that a brand new half million dollar combine was worn out in just one season!!!!!
First they don't cost that much. Second they are built exceedingly tough and very very easy to repair. I know cause I do some of that repair, electronic and otherwise(replacing feeder plates on the header,etc.
Ag is the weakest topic on TOD.
I applaud you for bring it to the fore but one must be careful to remove the chaff from the berry. Nonsense and tripe is dangerous as it gets a big boost just by being placed on TOD and then must be refuted but can't be easily refuted becuase the real , down in the dirt, knowledge is just not here in sufficient numbers.
Granted your post may not be germane to some of the points I bring up.
For instance its not just the farmer and his land that is germane. Its more the huge huge infrastructure that is required to support him. This means small town and farther out facalities that he can bring to bear on his operations. Tires, fuel, repair parts, expertise, hired help, nearby grain bins, tractor traiiler rigs to get the harvest to the bin, spray coupe by ag/chem businesses to spray his crops,and the list can go on and on. Most farmers now are tied totally to their cellphones. At rush time the cellphone is of supreme importance. As is a very good set of 4 wd drive vehicles as well as 1 ton service trucks and many backup parts and facalities such as welding equipment, compressed air and so forth.
To think of the 'farm' in yesterday sense is way out of line.
My friend who I work for as needed needs service right now on some bin blowers and is waiting on me to repair a few. I might have to replace some start and run capacitors. Without a viable supply all the corn in his bins can start to go bad. Its happening right now due to extreme weather changes. Lose a bin blower and you might lose a whole grain bin of corn. This can spell going negative on your profile line for the year.
Ag is not that easy to get a nandle on. I doubt more than maybe 6 people here have a good feel for the REAL agriculure opearations that are currently used all over this country .....
...and I speak only of grain operations and primarily in the MidWest and Upper South but much of what I speak of extends to all grain farmers.
They can't turn on a dime. They are extremely heavy in debt and the on going current financial crisis is not pleasant to consider since they are so heavily into the needs for a viable ,easy to tap , fluid currenty market. Just the commodity grain bin owners taking a big hit can possibly destroy all grain farming, IMO of course but thats the way it is. Barge operations ditto. Fuel to run 18 wheelers that most now own..ditto. and the list is very very long.
airdale--who won't be active in the future due to fighting for his life due to juset diagnosed renal cancer..so I am giving up on the fight for sustainity and just getting the hell out of Dodge and going to enjoy what is left of life as I once knew it. Flying aircraft, deep sea fishing, riding my Harley and in general sucking up as much fun and happiness as I can. My farm will be sold shortly and I will be traveling and not posting..but will be 'reading the mail' on ocassion.
All my divorce proceedings have been shredded as my wife just survived open heart surgery two days ago. I need to go help her recuperate and well as do so myself. If my cancer has metastasized I will have one year left. If not then perhaps 10. If so I expect to see the 'end game' starting but will not live to see it go down. In two weeks I intend to be laying on the beachs on the Outer Banks and stuffing myself with BBQ and seafood. Maybe a line in the water but no bait on the hook.
Farewell my friends and cohorts. Plan well for your futures. Get a good CAT scan and Bone Scan while the equpiment is still functional. I have had 5 in the last two weeks. I recommend them. As well as a good blood workup.
Airdale,
Very sorry to hear of your troubles. Go out and enjoy life, and let's hope for the best. Don't be a complete stranger.
Second Robert's post.
Please keep in touch.
I often used to think your situation (at your place) might lend itself to someone(s) wishing to learn from you firsthand. (Somehow I still hope this might become possible.)
airdale - I will greatly miss your well-rooted contributions. Good luck with your fight...and I don't blame you a bit for focusing on enjoying the time you have left.
Five scans in two weeks? Last I've read you take about 2 centigray per scan, though that's maybe just the cat scans. The linear no threshold model of radiation induced cancer maybe nonsense, but I'm still no sure it's a wise thing to do.
Sorry about the cancer dude. When I questioned your scans I skipped over that part of your post and thought you were healthy. I put my foot in it big time. Still, scans for staging cancer and scans in healthy people to check if maybe there's cancer are two differant deals.
One thing I like least about the peak oil movement is the assumption, by some, that after peak we can rely on herbal medicine and Reiki and be just as healthy. One guy said that his ten year old daughter was his family herbologist. While conventional medicine is far from perfect and, in fact, as a human enterprise, suffers from constantly corruption and incompetence of vairous sorts, alternative medicine has the same problems with fast buck artists and mistaken beliefs. I'd want to educate myself about any ailment I have by reading many sources and checking to see if what those sources say squares with my general knowledge of the world.
Specifically: Their methods of contracting in commodities:
Sell for seed. COOP sells x amt monthly to get yearly avg.
Who and when they use on-site storage:
Two 5000 bu elevators/dryers.
What equipment they use and what does it cost.
JD tractors, seeders, pickers, combines, sprayers.
Off brand, disks, cultivators.
Their actual 'inputs', fuel,herbicides,insecticides,NPK
and very very much more.
Too much of all, which is why I'm the black sheep in the op.
Consider the statement yesterday that a brand new half million dollar combine was worn out in just one season!!!!!
First they don't cost that much.
Item 2007 Caterpillar Lexion 595
Price $319,500 used.
http://www.usfarmer.com/equipment/showlisting.htm?id=188465
Second they are built exceedingly tough and very very easy to repair. I know cause I do some of that repair, electronic and otherwise(replacing feeder plates on the header,etc.
Yes, they are easy to repair, but that costs.
Ag is the weakest topic on TOD.
That's right.
And so sorry about your cancer. Way too much in my family, which brings
up hazards in the "workplace", if we ever get there, as a "fixed
cost" of today's farming methods. Thanx Monsanto/Bayer.
Wow ! Yes, enjoy what time you have left and maybe it will be 10 instead of 1 year left.
I am almost 4 years post colorectal surgery.
And yes, get as much time in the wind as possible.
Sorry to hear that airdale, may peace be upon you.
Airdale:
Thanks for all the info you have given us, I hope that you get the better news, and that you can enjoy your time in the sun.
I was very sorry to read the news, and can only wish you the best.
Heading Out
"I need to go help her recuperate and well as do so myself."
That's the way. I think helping her will be the best medicine for you.
Best wishes and good luck.
airdale, thanks for sharing the perspectives. there must be reasons for the dramatic change since your last posting about the illness. best wishes and be sure to bring yourself a version or two of LaoZi and ZhuangZi.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/laozi.htm
http://www.iep.utm.edu/z/zhuangzi.htm
RE: Airdale,
I take great exception with your assumption that I'm not a "real" farmer.
Come out to Gann Valley, SD friend. My family's operation grows Spring wheat, winter weat, corn, soybeans, and sunflowers. We also run beef cattle, selling calvesto feedlots.
Its not a large operation, just roughly 4,000 acres. I also have a farm in ND separate from most of my family.
I'm also an agronomist, working with over 300 farms in SD, NE, and ND. My largest grower is 63,000 acres. They are a nice family.
I know crop insurance, ag loans, crop inputs, and yes I do operate farm equipment.
I you utter my name in Central SD, I guarantee you'll find out a lot about me from nearly anyone.
I think its UNBELIEVABLE to read all the talk about ag that this board by folks who actually know NOT the first thing about modern ag.
Ask me any question related to growing wheat, corn, soybeans or beef cattle.
I can off-hand explain anything you want relating to crop production ranging from use of inputs, obtaining financing, (I was an ag banker for awhile) pesticide application, seeding rates, irrigation, rotations, breakevens, marginal returns, and what its like to work 16 hours per day.
I can rattle off the make,and model of every sprayer, combine, planter and tractor on the market.
I know a considerable amount about hedging grain, basis contracts, futures and options, and the farm program.
I've forgotten more about modern production ag than you will ever know IN YOUR WILDEST DREAMS.
I post here because I read so much that is SO FAR from reality on this board.
This post by Stuart is the first sensible thing I've seen yet on TOD.
If you can a farmer operating more than 10,000 acres in central SD that's never heard of me, I'd be surprised.
HighPlains - I was raised in South Dakota in the 40" & 50's. Thanks for your input and keep it coming. I enjoyed your posts the other day, and I was trying to post Stuart to make sure that he read them, but this article by him was not taking posts early this morning, which I inquired about over on the daily oil drum. It was obvious from your posts that we finally have someone on this sight who is an "intelligent" farmer. The compost crowd wants everyone to compost. Me? I am with my ancestors. I will use my god given talents in a way that maximizes my contributions and I will pay "you" to get my food. Logically, it can be no other way. And, if I have to ride a bike in order that you can run your combine, I will gladly do that.
Airdale: I wish you well and hope that you win your fight.
RE: Airdale,
On top of the statement I made in a post below, my father-in-law is also a farmer who lives 2 miles away from me. I do not work on that operation.
I do handle most of its business decisions however. The in-laws only own 2,500 acres, but they rent 10,368 more.
I'm of 4th generation farmer in SD.
I'm not an expert on global ag, but I follow closely the news on it. I read every farming publication, and made the front cover of more than one farming mag for some of the new ideas I've implemented.
Farming is not just my livlihood, its my life and my passion.
I started posting here to correct the GROSS mistakes you folks make while discussing it.
Most farmers disagree with me when I predict farms will get a little smaller in the future.
Stuart's post makes sense.
You people who predict a return to the 19th century in ag do so ONLY because that's what you want to see.
Bad news for you. It ain't gonna happen.
High plains,
According to the charts posted by Stuart corn and wheat farmers only make a profit once per decade and that single year's profit ain't that much. With costs so consistently higher than revenue it is amazing that anyone in America bothers with growing corn or wheat. This leads me to believe that those cost and revenue charts simply don't reflect the reality of farm economics. You claim to be the farming expert so could you explain how farmers stay in business by losing money 9 out of every ten years???
Farmers lose money on every bushel but make it up in volume.
Er, if you are loosing money on one bushel and sell more, you multiply the loss, not reduce it!
I think it was a joke.
I hope so! - but I've heard some dafter comments that were serious! - especially where economics are concerned. - check out the history of most socialist parties.
It is a joke/observation of a failed dot com in the petcare space. Sold dog food at close to or less than store costs and had free shipping.
Thus, every time a 50 lbs bag shipped, they lost money.
And, the history of the dot com has a tale where there was a meeting where the money loosing shipping policy was brought up and someone up the chain uttered the bit about 'making a profit in volume'
Thomas,
It will take about 30 minutes to explain it properly. I promise to lay it out completely in the next couple days.
It IS VERY true that most cropping years were money losers during the cheap oil era.
That's where LDPs (Loan Defficiency Payments) kick in.
The only way to explain it is to dig deep into the farm program, (subsidies) wich I will do another time.
The subsidies that allow grain to get produced below market levels ONLY kick in when grains are cheap.
Basically, grain production TODAY is currently VERY close to free market, although not entirely.
Lots of farmers currently think that grain prices will head back south any day now. The last year was WILDLY profitable, and most farmers are waiting for the other shoe to drop.
IMO, the key to farming profitably from now on is;
1) Paying attention to developements in oil markets. Watch oil/gas fundamentals.
2) As long as oil is in a long-term uptrend, don't hedge grain. Buy grain back on the board after making cash sales.
3) LOCK IN INPUTS!!! Take physical delivery of fertilizer, seed and chemicals a year in advance, for they too are in an uptrend.
The days of cheap grain ended with cheap oil.
In July of 2004, corn got cheaper than crude for THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY on a BTU basis.
How was this possible? Farmers were able to ignore market signals (market signals told him to stop producing) due to LDP and countercyclical payments from Uncle Sam, THAT KICK IN WHEN grain falls below target price. Bankers provided operating loans due to LDPs.
I feel that the inversion of corn and crude on a BTU basis is temporary.
The inversion that happened in 2004 made ethanol look viable.
Its sad that so many got sucked into buying ethanol shares.
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The breakeven on an ethanol plant work like this, an ethanol plant can pay twice the price of corn that they recieve from ethanol. If ethanol is $2/gal then an ethanol plant can only afford to pay $4 for corn. This rule of thumb factors in sales of DDGS.
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An EXCELLANT article for TOD would be the stories of all the ethanol plants currently GOING BROKE, shutting down, or stalling construction, and not paying farmers for corn. -------- BECAUSE THEY CAN'T. There are 5 ethanol plants in Neb alone halting corn bids. Its getting UGLY for ethanol plant profitability.
Remember, these outfits are HEAVILY leveraged, they can't keep running the way that an oil refinery can when margins go south.
Biodiesel economics and plant shutdowns are even worse.
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Ethanol is like any biz; it can't pay unlimited amounts for inputs.
The loss of ethanol from supplies is a BIG story for TOD I'd think.
airdale
What will happen when your soybeans are at the proper moisture content and you need to harvest immediately or risk crop loss and you realize that you are unable to fill your tanks because of gas shortages. Now multiply that scenario to 30% or more of the farms. Some large scale farms will continue, some will not. Crop prices will continue to rise and this will be necessary to guarantee a profit to conventional large scale farmers. However large scale agriculture will quickly price themselves out of most peoples ability to pay, and this model will fail completely when large numbers of farmers start to convert to draft animals and undercut gas powered farmers prices while still remaining profitable.
Nathan
airdale,
I was thinking of starting a comment "If airdale was here...", suspecting you might have an opinion. (of course I had no idea what exactly you'd say) I recall some remarks about the rapacious short sightedness of the current crop of agribiz practitioners, and how they won't have any topsoil left in 10 years for example.
Hey, sorry to hear the bad news. I have always valued your insights.
Now that I think about it, I need to spend less time online and more time living
Thanks to all who penned their wishes regarding my ordeal with the Big C. If its has metastasized to my lymph nodes I told them no chemo and no radiation. I'll play the cards I was dealt.
It is making a huge sea change in my life and lifestyle. I know now thatI will not have the ability to pull off this complete sustainable life style I hoped to.
HighPlains? As a real farmer, then please stay and contribute as much information as possible to this very needy subject on TOD.
To Doug Fir,Bruce from Chicago,Jason Bradford, and the rest of the real farmers here. You have a heavy load and a task to perform in telling it 'like it is' to help many prepare and deal with what big ag may morph into.
I won't be hauling grains anymore for the harvest or sitting in those big Ford 8790 tractor seats. Oddly enough it was my CDL(commercial drivers license) physical that led to my eventual diagnosis.
Tomorrow I have to repair my last bin blower and turn in my spare radios to my buddy farmer who is one of several I helped with the electronics ,etc.
Cats scans: I had 3 in two weeks plus a bone scan and a pulmonary test and some more local xrays for something on my lung. They wanted another set of xrays which I oked but the rest I demurred on.
I hope I can post in the future once again but right now...I will be recovering and then heading south to N. Carolina to grab what I can of what my future holds. I hope to move back to St. Louis with my son and wife later and am looking at a country house in West County with 3 acres. At least I can still garden and continue as before but on a far far lower scale and far far nearer to the 'maddening' crowds of St. Louis.
Cheers,
airdale-this is the best website which I have ever been involved with in all my years and years of working in Information Technology both within and without IBM. Prof Goose and all the rest can be proud. I salute you for your outstanding work.
I will miss you here.
Airdale, I have had a hard time responding to your posts since you disclosed you had cancer as I did not know what to say. What could you say to someone that has to face their own mortality so suddenly? I do believe your choice is one that makes sense, to enjoy the time you have left. As Warren Zevon said cancer makes you enjoy every sandwich you have left. I really enjoyed your posts here and on the WTDWSHTF forum, especially when you go off on a tangent and ruminate about country life and values. You’ve given me some good advice that I’m going to use, such as shepherding in my clover with winter wheat. Have a good time, and hopefully the cancer has not metastasized.
I will miss your posts Airdale. We may not always agreed, but I knew where you were coming from and your message was usually from heart felt knowing..
Take off, and drink in every cup you can.
As Warren Zevon said.
Enjoy Every Sandwich
Fare Thee Well Friend.
We'll meet again in the by and by
Good luck to you airdale. We'll say some prayers for you tonight. So sorry.
I just want to say good luck to you Airdale and may your wife and you do the best to make yourselves some mutual support and enjoyment.
ciao,
Bruce
airdale:
Sorry the news isn't better for you. Hope it will play out for you as good as it possibly can.
I hope that you can find a few young men that will actually pay attention that you can talk to and impart some of your lifetime of accumulated wisdom while we still have you.
Airdale - Go in peace my friend. Todd
Airdale said
You make a very good case for the unsustainability of this complex system in a world with shrinking energy resources. In fact, you make "reversibility" seem inevitable.
Airdale,
I am truly sorry.
Take care.
SolarHouse
OMG.
I pondered the other day whether to respond to HighPlainsFarmer
when he stated that his State of the Art farm in SD
would get the oil, first and last.
Thank you for the Article.
Pray that it's not accurate.
First-
"The implications of peak oil for agriculture was not a major focus."
I've known since 1978 that there was a limit to Growth.
I didn't find the limit until I discovered PO and the Olduvai Gorge
in 02.
Second-
Ag is the worst mistake humans have ever made.
Only the elite ever profit from Ag.
Third-
Ag only exists as long as feed thru enregy surplus exists.
Think of it as a way to grow wealth in terms of humans.
Fourth-"their agriculture has become far more mechanized and involves a smaller fraction of the population."
Exactly. But only if you focus on one small chain of the energy
hierarchy flow thru.
Farming is the only industry that buys retail and sells wholesale.
Ex. I'm sure it takes more energy to build a six row cotton picker than that picker will ever use.
Five-"the evidence doesn't provide any support for any of these propositions"
You listed the propositions. You might as well describe Empire
that hasn't started collapsing.
The rest of the article shows charts. Starting with 1975.
No accident that.
These charts should start at 1971, because that's when the trauma of VietNam failure, gold decoupling, US Oil Peak, and the US worker's
wages never better.
I was in the field in 1975. Our neighbor had just bought three top of the line JD Combines. Just as expensive then in 75 dollars
as they are today.
Our farm was at the top. We believed everything you wrote above:
"So going forward, I expect to see significant increases in food prices and farm profitability (with a significant caveat for the possibility of a credit-induced severe recession)."
"Instead, the farmers will simply outbid the urban poor for the energy required to operate the farms (and in the US, the farm sector only uses 2.2% of all petroleum in the country)."
The chart the above quote references will never happen.
Finally:
We, or I should say my Dad, followed your advice, or Secretary Butz',
to be precise, thinking that prices would rise or stay flat at the
top from 1975 on.
That everything you posited would happen in our favor.
But they didn't. And the drag was unremitting until Volker's
crushing of inflation in 1980 caused bankruptcy.
There is a difference between sickle and combine with mules.
Mules will be the next step. That's why I've advocated a Mule Breeding Program (MBP) to compliment the multi fuel use electric
train system.
Thanks for the article. Very nicely done.
James
I pondered the other day whether to respond to HighPlainsFarmer
when he stated that his State of the Art farm in SD
would get the oil, first and last.
Pray that it's not accurate.
Like it or not, farmers (the big ones that bring in the big grains), the military, various 'public service' (snowplow, police, ambulance et la), and the 'upper level' members of the 'political leadership' will be on that short list.
So long as the government is in power - the people who align themselves with that power will do OK - aka the big farmers who get handouts to stay in business.
Ag is the worst mistake humans have ever made.
Only the elite ever profit from Ag.
And yet ag is why you are here. Both the person and the tools that bring us the Internet.
Our farm was at the top. We believed everything you wrote above:
.... 1980 caused bankruptcy.
Sorry to hear that your family lost it all - rather than thinking mules will save things - look towards the the other issues that killed your farm.
That's why I've advocated a Mule Breeding Program (MBP)
And it has been pointed out how animal power is a poor plan. Photons -> foodstuff -> Animals -> power is a poor conversion method.
Stuart
Your essay is very interesting but I do not accept all of your arguments about this low proftability of small scale farming. I am an employee of a 60 acre farm that employs 14 to 18 people year around. Beyond calculating success on the basis of profit there is living wage and support for extended families. By citing USDA statistics you are also including small scale farming that exist only as a tax shelter. Like the 'safe' driver that gets speeding tickets you need to look closer at your population of individual cases to decide if the individual driver is an insurance risk or if there is a niche for profitable farming in small scale agriculture. There are small scale farmers operating at a profit and I have witnessed this trend in urbanized areas.
Could I not argue that there is profit at both ends for market segments that are currently entirely captured by industrial agriculture, ie that which is dependent on air transportation and pumped water versus bulk commodities that can use ambient climate and easily store and shipped via rail or barge?
The discussion leaves open the possibility that 'go local' will become an initiative of industrial agriculture concerns.
They are best positioned to go local because they already have highly efficient systems and all they have to do to take advantage of the 'local' proximity advantage is to obtain land near mid-sized urban centers (often held by real-estate entities as land banks), install a portable infrastructure (i.e. offices, storage, dormitories for their workforce, etc. that are mobile and can be relocated inexpensively), and voila - instant local agriculture.
The farm will then plug into the local distribution network and command high margins if they choose to produce / market 'organic' foods from these operations.
Stuart,
Thank-you for this well researched bit of common sense. Agriculture was the first, and easiest sector of the economy to be automated, so will also be the first and easiest to convert to solar/wind power.
I am more skeptical about the 2500 mile box of corn flakes than the corn, and can envision boutique food processing, with the collapse of big food processing companies, breweries, and chain restaurants. That could only be an improvement, IMO.
EXCELLANT WORK STUART!!!
You are dead on correct.
Cheap energy is the ENEMY of rural countryside, and farms especially.
Poster - Mcgowanc claims above that the 1970s were good for ag (which they were due to enegy shortages.) Then he goes on to discuss the collapse of ag in the early 1980's.
Of COURSE ag collapsed in 1983!! Crude oil collapsed in 1982 -1983, inflation dried up, and cheap oil did to ag what it always does, it killed it.
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Farmers will make more money off of high priced oil than oil companies.
Farmers will outbid anyone else for any fuel that does get produced, because they add the most value to that fuel.
Mules and horses eat one-third of all production they produce. This means throwing 1/3 of arable land away.
Since the introduction of cheap energy around 1915, the only times when ag shined was WWI, WWII, and THE 1970s!!
The 1970's were GREAT for ag.
We are moving into a PERMANENT 1970s.
The cheapest farmland is in eastern ND relative to production. BUY IT! Rent it out to a large commercial operator and smile forever!!
I remember the day that farmers got crushed.
Anyone remember Carter's grain embargo?
http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=39346&mid=280368
That was as much to crush the American farmer as it was to punish the Soviets.
On January 4, 1980, using his most potentially effective response to Soviet military action in Afghanistan, President Carter cancelled contracts for the sale of 17 million metric tons mmt) of U.S. corn, wheat and soybeans to the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, he undermined the effectiveness of the embargo by allowing the delivery of another 8 mmt of U.S. grain which he felt were obligated to the Soviets under the 1975 U.S.-Soviet Grain Agreement. The objectives of such a policy were ambiguous from the outset.
Farmers are about to be crushed again.
You can bank on it.
The cheapest farmland is in eastern ND relative to production. BUY IT! Rent it out to a large commercial operator and smile forever!!
You live in the land of Lakota.
Better to start running Bison.
And get the Great Plains National Park.
You have how many inches of topsoil left.
And how deep do you have to go to get the Ogallala these days.
mcg-
You are viewing things from a non linear biological point of view. Almost all the other posters are viewing it from a economic point of view, linear and fixed. You are one level removed from the discussion, and viewing it from above. It would be a anomaly if the economic view survived, even in the short term.
Just my opinion.
Thank you. It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it. ;}
I always did hate economics.
Until I discovered articles like this:
STEADY-STATE ECONOMICS
By Herman Daly
"The first question asked of any critic of the status quo is: What would you put in place? In place of the growth economy we would put a steady-state economy. But such a theoretical alternative is not of great interest unless there is dissatisfaction with the business-as-usual growth economy. If you have eaten poison, it is not enough to simply resume eating healthful foods. You must get rid of the specific substances that are making you ill. Let us, then, apply the stomach pump to the doctrines of economic growth that we have been force-fed for the past four decades. Perhaps the best way to do that is to jump right into the growth debate and consider critically some fifteen to twenty general pro growth arguments that recur in various guises and either expose their errors or accommodate their valid criticisms."
http://dieoff.org/page88.htm
The main developer of this site is Brian Czech, but he does work with Herman Daly:
www.steadystate.org
Ha. My high school has just Websense filtered dieoff.org as a "Political Organization," thereby denying access.
The Ogallala Aquifer does not extend into North Dakota.
There is no Ogallala aquifer in N.D. and only in 5% of S.D. and there it only exsists in the bad lands region where no AG is present.
Perhaps this all makes more sense if you substitute regression for reversability: i.e., Post-Peak will knock us backwards to some yet unknown technological niveau between the Stone Age and 1950 (however it plays out) and we'll take it from there. But Stuart's right, we can't exactly retrace our steps.
Stuart writes:
I've argued in this piece that industrial agriculture is likely to be stronger and more profitable when oil prices are high, not weaker. So the reversalist future of local food production on smaller farms with higher labor input will not come to pass as a result of peak oil.
To me, Stuart's essay demonstrates some of the limits of statistical analysis.
I don't see where Stuart has considered the social and political ramifications of the multi-faceted discontinuity that Peak Oil represents. My own notion of what's coming down is that there will be a great many angry economic losers clamoring for "relief," or "reform," or "revolution," and the one place this always leads to historically in a political convulsion is the seizure and redistribution of property. But that is only one consideration in the picture. Food production (and distribution!) is but one part of a larger complex system, off of which the wheels will be coming -- quite literally! In short, I think our society will become disorganized to the degree that Stuart's formulas will be more-or-less irrelevant. After all, you could have posed the same proposition to the Soviet politburo in 1933 -- but they were too busy preparing to kill all the kulaks and destroy their farm production for decades-to-come.
--Jim Kunstler
Forthcoming: "World Made By Hand" (a novel in which folks are farming locally and labor-intensively.)
Jim,
I wonder if Soviet agriculture might actually serve as a pretty good model for post-peak agriculture.
First, the chaotic and inefficient central planning that the Soviets imposed on their agricultural system might be similar to the problems that industrialized farmers might be facing post-peak in getting all of their fuel and supplies at the right time and then in getting the food distributed at the right time.
Second, it is my understanding that about half of Soviet food production came from tiny private gardens.
I've read that in the FSU, grains were (and are) produced on the large collectives and whatever has replaced them. Truck garden type vegies were produced in the private gardens. Yeah, that might give us a sense of where we're headed. Is there anyone like high plains on the board who farms potatoes? In my short growing season area, we can get excellent crops of potatoes in our gardens, but nobody does it commercially. It is hard to imagine machines doing a good job planting them (sections of potato) or harvesting them. I would see potatoes as a crop that could potentially be relocalized in some areas.
Hi Jim, Glad to see that both of us Gorillas are still around this year and despite odds prospering, best in this one:)
Jim points out one of the weaknesses of TOD (The Oil Drum, not Transit Oriented Development). And, that is the left-brain bias of its very intelligent writers. Being an engineer myself, I am supposed to be left-brain, but somewhere around the age of 34-35 my outlook began to shift. I became a little soft on my ability to crank through the drudgery of specialized thought in decomposing and analyzing parts etc, but in the process picked up an appreciation of the holistic, synthesizing way of looking at the whole. It's a process that continues.
Hi Stuart, looks like interesting reading for this evening, I would like to say on a quick run through that a similar case might be made for any area concerning oil where it involves making an income or profit that involves muscle, the leverage of oil is great. I do think though that there is one fly in the ointment, of continuing industrial agriculture despite price increase, in that if at some point we experience a general economic collapse (due most likely to the instability of a system through lack of fulsome energy)all bets would be off. Sort of like the end of the cod fishery on the Eastern seaboard, a sudden and dramatic dieoff.
BTW the world markets seem a bit dyspepsic this morning.