Part of what you are saying here makes sense; the tech innovations in modern agribuiness has allowed many folks to do something besides farm. You can't have proffessions such as ad salesman, manicurists, etc. You would not have vast numbers of folks attending university to take up psych, soc, apperal merchandising, etc if tey had to grow enough food to feed themself.
There is simply NO WAY in the world that agriculture is going back in time. NONE.
I read JHK's book, "The Long Emergency" and while I agree with a lot of it, he got agriculture TOTALLY wrong, and here's some reasons his view of ag in the future is WAY off;
1) Using horses to farm takes WAY WAY TOO much land. In the horse ag days, it took one-third of all ag produce to feed the horses that did the production. TALK ABOUT EXPENSIVE fuel! In the horse days, the amount of acres it took to grow that fuel made ethanol look like a garden plot.
2) Modern farms today have 300 hp tractors pulling 60 ft wide airseeders operated with AUTOSTEER. (That's right, our tractors use gps to steer) At 6 mph, by 60 ft wide, wasting not a penny on overlap, it takes VERY LITTLE fuel to farm with.
3) My farm uses 4.23 gallons/acre, while IA State says it takes closer to 9 gallons per acre. COMPARE THAT TO HORSE farming on a EROEI basis.
4) According to IA State, the ave corn yield on IA farmland on a 10 year ave is 173.4 bu/acre. Using all BTUs from fuel, fert, and pesticides, that's a EROEI of about 13:1. That's better than the North Sea in it's hayday. Including equipment expense, labor, deprec, insurance, etc, the EROEI is still around 10:1.
5) There is 395,000 BTU's in a bushel of corn. If you don't like my figures, check them.
6) There will ALWAYS be SOME oil produced. Even 50 years from now the production will be at least 20 mbpd, I'm guessing worst case scenario. Where do you think those barrels will go?
I'm 100% convinced those few barrels will go to the guy who adds the MOST VALUE to them. Whomever can get the most EROEI out of them. It ain't the soccor mom. It ain't Joe Suburb. It ain't the engineer designing the next widget.
The FIRST barrel produced will go to herbicide/pesticide, because it adds SO MUCH value vs the BTU content of the herbicide. (One pint of roundup = 20,000 BTUs. This pint will EASILY add 50 bu/acre. 50 bu corn = almost 20 million BTUs. EROEI of Roundup/herbicide/pesticide = 1,000 to 1.)
Once all the globes pesticide needs are met, the next barrels will go powering tractors.
Nobody out there will be able to OUTBID a farmer for petro, because nobody adds as much value to a unit of petro.
I've spent lots of time looking at Peak Oil, and I'm convinced we are here, but there's a BIG MISSING SUBJECT on the conversation about the outcome of PO. That is;
Where will those precious few barrels of daily production go in 20 years? Who will get them? Who adds the most value to them?
There is simply NO WAY in the world that agriculture is going back in time. NONE.
I think it's possible. What happens if peak oil means we can no longer maintain the technology that currently supports modern agriculture? If, say, we can no longer afford to launch GPS satellites?
I posted an article a few weeks back about a farmer who bought a new half-million dollar combine every year. He had to, because it was worn out after a year's use. Is this really sustainable?
Where will those precious few barrels of daily production go in 20 years? Who will get them? Who adds the most value to them?
I hope it's agriculture, but I have a feeling the lucky winner will be the military.
I would agree with that. But I wonder if we all are still assume too many givens when seeing the future.
Most of what we talked about is the distribution of remaining supply to farmers, Mil. etc.
That assumes a supply chain functioning to a great degree.
If there is no coherent 'Safe" distribution system in the country, many assumptions need to be changed.
Visualize Mexico in 10-15 years. What do you see? A functioning supply chain/distribution system for distributing goods?
Maybe not so stable. Who will get the "Distribution" of the remaining gas there? The Farmers? The Millitary? Banditos?
Oh, factor in the idea that we are already seeing people steal copper phone,powerlines. In 10-15 years (after-during the Greater Depression) Copper lines between towns, cities on those 20 - 100 miles of empty road may be somewhat at risk. Certain things stop working after that happens.
..and not to forget the fact that 'An army runs on its stomach..'
Will the Armed Forces start planting victory gardens around their bases?
Will the exorbitant expenditures to 'Rent-a-G.I., Rent-an-MP and Rent-a-potato peeler' (KBR, Bechtel, Halliburton, Blackwater, et al..) start facing demand-destruction as their poor return-on-investment becomes unsustainable?
The army seems to favor cattle farming, rather than veggies. They tend to lease out grazing rights.
At the bluegrass army depot in Kentucky, the cattle also serve as a warning of nerve gas leakage.
During the Tokugawa period in Japan, Samurai protected the fields and farmers from other armed individuals in exchange for the necessities of life. The farmer and the Samurai existed in a symbiotic relationship. Far different from the exploitative fudalism of Western Europe. The Shogunate through the loyalties of the individual Samurai provided an organization capable of repeling larger threats. When the threat was dealt with, the Samurai returned to the farms they were the protectors for. The Samurai at all times recognized the interdependence between himself and the farmer.
Absolutely, Switzerland is a historical example, though the details of who exactly plowed what field and gathered what % of potatoes or beets is not something I would like to venture into. I guess even the ‘top’ historical studies can’t sort that one out.
Today’s reassuring mantra here - Switzerland has a conscription army - is that division of labor will work: men do the hard stuff, women all the rest. The men are ready to go, in 24 hours. The hard stuff could be anything. Digging ditches, planting, etc. All that dates from ww2, and even before, and is very folksy. By such myths do we live.
This letter, PDF, short, to the NY Times in 1915, gives a bit of the very outdated flavor which sorta continues today:
Leanan, in 20 years, or even today, the military are not 'adding the most value' to the FFs they are allocated. Besides, 'a military moves on its stomachs', as we all know, so feeding a military is a priority for it to continue to function. From the perspective of the US citizen/taxpayers the costs of the wars in Afganistan and Iraq have been socialized while any 'profits' have been funneled into corporations that are favored by the current administration...This is not a sustainable business model for an empire or any other form of governmemt that I am familiar with. There have been no real 'profits' if one considers that the ongoing wars are being funded by creating ever larger budget deficits. It is my opinion that these wars, and even more wars, cannot be continued because at some point the US military, industrial, congressional complex will bankrupt the US and cause a collapse of the US economy and government. This isnt the day of Alexander, where empires were created by vast well trained armies...now there is the nuclear weapons factor to consider. After the US economy collapses from mismanagement, incompetence, theft and unprofitable foreign wars I believe that there is a good chance that a significant portion of any FFs that the US still has access to will be used for agriculture and for bootstrapping manufacturing for products needed for US internal consumption; ie, medicines, alternate energy, ag distribution, etc. TPTB will stick with the current model untill it collapses, 'dancing with the one that brung 'em', and then we will see a much different US...sans empire and SUVs and with a reduced population. Unfortunately the 'ship' we are on is too big and has too much momentum to turn before hitting that iceburg ahead.
This isnt the day of Alexander, where empires were created by vast well trained armies...
I suspect that in the days of Alexander and in the Roman Empire, the return on investment of military conquests had to be very real and in a fairly quick time. There was the immediate plunder that the troops could bring home, but more importantly there was the ongoing tax base to support the empire.
Now we have a different story where the waning supply of cheap fossil fuel is supporting war efforts that don't necessarily promise any return at all. In fact the wars the US is involved in promise to be a continuing drain barring the miracle that Iraq is stabilized and vast amounts of oil revenue are siphoned off.
Alexander was at the right place at the right time. Farm production had increased to a level where there was sufficient excess supply in all the regions that Alexander attacked. He swept through the regions, took the excess supply, cut off the leadership and replaced it with his own. The system kept functioning. Basically Alexander scooped up the over production to feed his Army with out too much destruction of the cultivation. Brilliant!
Yes, interesting that the same areas of the world have been in contention by the major players for so much of recorded history.
More recently Hitler achieved one objective (the oil fields around Ploesti) only to have the British bomb them from air fields on Malta and in Egypt. The British had major buildups in those areas primarily to protect the interests of, uhm, BP. Ghawar was first tapped in 1938 by Chevron...
Ironically, it may be argued that BP saved the world from fascism. Hitler decided that the Ploesti oil fields had to be secured by invading Greece before launching Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. This delayed the launch of Barbarossa by some 6 weeks. It had been planned that the Slavs could be subdued before the Russian winter set in but the delay cost them.
The invasion of Greece also caused Rommel in North Africa to go short on supplies and replacements delaying his hoped for grasping of the Egyptian oil fields. When the German advance in Russia stalled in the Fall of 1941, at least partially due to long supply lines, attention was refocused on Rommel briefly. Some 22 U-Boats were diverted out of the Atlantic into the Med, essentially ending the supremacy of the British Navy in that area for nearly a year and enabling a re-supply effort to Rommel.
Rommel once again was able to pretty much push the British back at will, until El Alamein. At that point his supply lines were once again stretched to the limit and he was forced to deploy his vaunted Panzers in ways that conserved fuel, turning his tactical genius with mobile Panzers into stationary, defensive gun emplacements which the British could exploit.
Throughout the war the German machine depended on fuel for mobility and it of course faltered when supplies got tight. The resumption of the advance in Russia Spring 1942
saw a tougher fight put up by the Russians, although they were pushed back to Stalingrad. The stalling of the Russian front also allowed the U.S. time to pump a LOT of supplies into Russia via the Murmansk Run.
Sadly for Hitler, he ignored a primary teaching of Clausewitz, probably the most brilliant military German general of all time. He had already postulated the doctrine of the "diminishing strength of attack". According to this, every attack that does not lead immediately to peace is bound to grow weaker as it proceeds and at a certain point end up by turning into defense. Clausewitz called this moment the "culminating point".
Thank you BP, lol. If it hadn't been for the British forces present in North Africa defending their interests there, they would have been unable to threaten the Ploesti oil fields and Barbarossa would have begun on schedule, possibly knocking Russia out of the war. As it was, at one point Stalin was reported to be so desperate in meetings with Churchill and Roosevelt that it was evident that Russia was on the verge of collapse, Russian winter or no Russian winter.
More recently the ties between Britain and the the U.S. have been strengthened by the U.S. allowing BP to purchase several major U.S. oil companies, first Sohio, then Amoco and finally ARCO. No wonder that Blair has followed the U.S. lead so consistenly.
Sorry to get sidetracked, but just more oil trivia from the past, admittedly simplified. A take-away from all this maybe- Oil was always a primary strategic concern during WWII. To think that things might be different now in the midst of a new kind of war, with all the history from Alexander on, would be simplistic.
Here we are again, battling over the same reaches of real estate. The bridgeheads have been secured, the battle lines being drawn. Sigh...
i think amoco aquired/merged with sohio in '87, that was a remarriage of the former standard oil units. bp merged with amoco in 96 and bought arco in 2000.
It was BP that purchased Sohio. I was with Amoco at the time and thought nothing of it really. The Sohio name began to disappear on gas stations, terminals, refineries, etc.
In '89 Amoco told the employees that they had been working with consultants to try and get a glimpse of what the future held for the oil industry. The conclusion of several years study was that by the end of the century there would be only 4 or 5 big super majors after a wave of consolidation. The main reason- they would all have to bulk up in order to get big enough to afford to go deep-water and fight for the remaining oil. Amoco began looking...
In June 1999 the uhm, merger with BP was announced, they had been in talks for about a year. We were told there would be no changes in North American operations. I was in the Lubricants Business Unit at the time. It had just been sold to Chevron. BP turned out to not be happy about that, they wanted it.
We discovered later that top Amoco executives had been given, er, employment guarantees. Within a year it was announced that headquarters would be moved to London and that the 96 story Amoco building, affectionately known as 'Big Johns' erection' after CEO of the 70s John Swearingen, would be sold. AIG purchased it, wouldn't be surprised if they have been looking for a buyer lately, hehe.
I was lucky for a bit. A position was found for me back in headquarters once again in the wake of the sale of Lubes. But in Spring 2001 our entire group was severed. Hard to find seats for 5000 people in an office park in the burbs, lol.
It was also announced that most U.S. refineries were on the block. Mandan, ND was purchased by Tesoro, never heard what happened to Salt Lake and Yorktown,VA. Whiting and Texas City remained, the two largest. Amoco, er, BP Chemicals up for sale also. The Amoco name began to disappear on gas stations, terminals, refineries, etc.
Yea, it was called a merger. BP Amoco was supposed to be the name, for a time. Then a contest was announced to rename the company. Beyond Petroleum was the eventual winning candidate and consultants were hired to come up with a new logo, the ecological sunburst getting the nod eventually. The BP initials of course remain.
Funny how that worked out, hehe.
There was some resistance among the motoring public. Gasoline sales dipped. Amoco premium gasoline had garnered a reputation as being a very high quality gasoline. To this day BP stations now sell premium with the Amoco or BP Amoco name still on the pump, but normally only on premium.
ARCO was purchased late in 2000. By this time many high ex-Amoco execs had taken 20 and 30 million dollar buyouts.
If it looks like a buyout and smells like a buyout, well you decide. But yes, nice to see former Standard splinters re-united, will they get the rest also? One might even go the other way.
thank you for the insights. i remember in the '70's arco was at the top of their game, sometime in the 80's i think they lost their mojo. around the time they acquired the anaconda co and i think things went downhill from there.
in the '80's majors and notsomajors were buying businesses they probably had no business in. they called it diversification. mobil bought wards, i dont think that was a real wise move.
About Rommel. Romel was brilliant when he was reading the US army attache's daily reports on exactly where the British were, where they were going, and what they were going to do when they got there.
When we found out, Romel stopped being brilliant because he stopped getting reports.
WRT gps a farmer or group of farmers could set up low power synchronized transmitters to provide a more than adequate low cost substitute for sattelite based navigation. Aviation used such a system for over 50 before gps and these transmitters are still being used in the US and Europe. If as you suspect the military gets first dibs on whatever oil is left then they will certainly use a tiny fraction of their share to put up replacements as needed.
No other industry has the ability to be as self powered as agriculture. Using soybeans as part of a regular crop rotation plan means plenty of biodiesel will be available. Electric tractors using wind and solar are also possibilities.
What we do is modulate the carrier digitally with a pseudo-random number sequencer ( also known as a linear feedback shift register ). What this does is code the carrier with a mathematical "song", and like a song, you hear a few notes of it, and you know where you are in the song. Thats the beauty of the LFSR - if its a "N" bit, then by the time you get N bits, you know exactly where in the sequence you are, and can predict the next bit.
Now, being the carrier is digitally modulated, you can lock onto the "song" ( phaselock ), and look at the carrier.
The wave length of, say, a 900MHz carrier is around 13 inches. That is for every 13 inches you approach or retreat from the transmitter, you go through a complete cycle of carrier.
Ever sat in front of a TV with rabbit ears and noted you could shift in the couch the tiniest bit and cause the TV to misbehave? Its acting as a phase detector comparing the signal coming directly to its antenna, and the signal bouncing off of you. VHF Channel 3 is aroung 60 MHz.
Say you have four transmitters locked to each other and THEY are stationary. Each are sending a different "song", but all are locked on the same "beat".
On the tractor's receiver, it receives all the signals simultaneously. Each carrier is identified by the LFSR "music" encoded on it. At that point, one does phase analysis of the carriers, mixing them against each other adding known phase delay techniques to null them out.
By doing this, one can resolve one degree of phase shift, which is 0.036 inches.
This would use the same technology as cellphone towers use now. 900MHz is the cellphone band.
Although this does not tell you your ABSOLUTE position, you will have a fine RELATIVE position to the transmitters. If you know where the transmitters are, then you know where YOU are.
We have microprocessor capabilities to do this analysis on the fly using milliwatts of power.
Burning ammonia is idiotic. NOx is a greenhouse gas and leads to the formation of ozone in the troposphere which is a serious pollutant and a greenhouse gas to boot. At least with CH4 you get more energy per molecule than with NH3. Fuel cells based on ammonia are another matter if they manage to cycle the nitrogen back into N2.
Your statement is completely and utterly ignorant. Ammonia burns cleaner than gasoline in terms of NOx output and what there is can be cleaned up with an off the shelf catalytic converter, just as is done for a gasoline engine. Or at least that is what I've been told. I am, however, far more inclined to take the word of a man standing next to an ammonia based engine mounted in a dynamometer undergoing durability testing, which doesn't start until emissions testing is complete, than the assertions of some random guy from the internet.
Do I sound snippy? Sorry, but after the tenth time I fielded this question in a Drum Beat thread I would have thought everyone would have internalized this particular bit of information.
How can any solutions to the problems that beset us increasingly, how can we solve them if we think we are great? If we think we are wonderful, how can we fix our disgusting habits, our nauseating pus-dripping, diseased body that smells like a corpse? How do we find a cure when we keep saying we are hale and healthy?
Impossible! Words matter! And if we keep yelling,'I'm OK! I'm a marathon man!' as we stagger to the ground and throw up in the gutter. We sound like a stupid drunk! Always, the first step towards sobriety and health is to first admit that something is very wrong and then to correctly see what it is. If one is a drunk, one can't claim the wife or boss drove one to drink, for example. So it is with a nation: until we understand that we cannot consume much more of world resources than we produce, we will continue to fall into debt."
The general equities market must be calmed. Should the Dow crater, another major domino falls. Let's see how the PPT (Price Protection Team) brings the Dow in Tuesday morning in pre U.S. trading and then how Tuesday closes. The DOW better be higher each day than the indices are before U.S. trading or as the last two days demonstrated, the PPT has lost its tight control of the equities markets. Watch the pre-open indices and closing Dow very closely.
# The markets for general equities would all have to institute total trading halts every 100 points on the downside for 30 minutes each.
# All commercial call loans would be called.
# All debtors one day late on any payment, lacking grace period, would be liquidated. All debtors over one day of the grace period would be liquidated.
# It is clearly visible to anyone with eyes or a mind to think that the PPT has lost all semblance of control in the equity markets and will soon in all remaining markets.
# The commercial paper credit market which is almost dead will die totally
"If, say, we can no longer afford to launch GPS satellites?" Well, since the Europeans and Russians are both continuing to have trouble affording Galileo and Glonass, their versions of GPS, even now, maybe this is worth asking. However, do keep in mind that the trouble is purely political, the fraction of GDP involved is almost too small to measure. And even some of the most dirt-poor countries on Earth keep hugely expensive projects going for reasons of sheer vanity, so if GPS is truly valuable...
Nonetheless, if there is value in steering tractors automatically, one can always pound a few tall stakes into the ground, bolt pseudo-satellites onto them, and steer that way. The kind of electronics needed was already available by around 1990. It's still made in large quantities all over the world, mainly in rather less-developed places, as hardly anyone in the OECD can be bothered to touch it any more. You'll find it everywhere in all sorts of less-sophisticated electronic gadgets. Electric toothbrushes. Thermostats. Battery chargers. Plug-in air fresheners.
GPS is a very complicated, large-system way of steering tractors, which we use because (1) we can, (2) it's fashionable even though it's 25 year old technology, (3) it's standardized, so (4) it's less trouble to set up than alternatives. But it's not the only possible way.
Now, in the domain "anything's possible", civilization could fall so low that 1990-level electronics can be made absolutely nowhere on Earth. That, too, would be political, as there is plenty of sand in the world, and people have been fabricating small high-value objects since ages before oil. It need not happen. But if it does, these discussions simply will not matter, our crystal balls will have gone utterly dark - because most of us doing the discussing will not be alive or remembered anyway.
If we can still remember how to make diode lasers, or scavenge them out of old consumer electronics, they could provide a super accurate local positioning system. Think of current day surveying tools.
Does not change your point, but Russian system is expected to be world-wide functioning again by the end of this year. Many launches within last year made it functional again across Russia. Initial batch of the first consumer GPS+Glonass navigation gizmo was sold out: http://www.insidegnss.com/node/482 http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS9350234859.html
You said,
"I posted an article a few weeks back about a farmer who bought a new half-million dollar combine every year. He had to, because it was worn out after a year's use. Is this really sustainable?"
Could you please provide a source for that? I know that here in KY we have combines that are 30 years old and are still working the fields every summer. Perhaps folks buying that half million dollar one should consider changing brands! (or are they Chinese combines :-), sorry couldn't resist....
I did. I just can't remember what day I posted it. :)
However, it definitely was not in Kentucky. I can't remember where it was, but probably some place like South Dakota. The article said that it was the sheer amount of land farmed/wheat produced that wore out the combine and forced the farmer to buy a new one every year.
Only as a contract harvestor. Starting in south Texas in early June and ending at the Canadian border in Sept. A combine lasts longer than twenty days, the length of any local harvest season.
I could see the contractor harversters trading in on a new model each year, because that's their livelihood. No way is the old one ready for the scrap heap, though. Some frugal farmer somewhere will pick up a bargain and keep it running for years.
Part of what you are saying here makes sense; the tech innovations in modern agribuiness has allowed many folks to do something besides farm. You can't have proffessions such as ad salesman, manicurists, etc. You would not have vast numbers of folks attending university to take up psych, soc, apperal merchandising, etc if tey had to grow enough food to feed themself.
There is simply NO WAY in the world that agriculture is going back in time. NONE.
I read JHK's book, "The Long Emergency" and while I agree with a lot of it, he got agriculture TOTALLY wrong, and here's some reasons his view of ag in the future is WAY off;
1) Using horses to farm takes WAY WAY TOO much land. In the horse ag days, it took one-third of all ag produce to feed the horses that did the production. TALK ABOUT EXPENSIVE fuel! In the horse days, the amount of acres it took to grow that fuel made ethanol look like a garden plot.
2) Modern farms today have 300 hp tractors pulling 60 ft wide airseeders operated with AUTOSTEER. (That's right, our tractors use gps to steer) At 6 mph, by 60 ft wide, wasting not a penny on overlap, it takes VERY LITTLE fuel to farm with.
3) My farm uses 4.23 gallons/acre, while IA State says it takes closer to 9 gallons per acre. COMPARE THAT TO HORSE farming on a EROEI basis.
4) According to IA State, the ave corn yield on IA farmland on a 10 year ave is 173.4 bu/acre. Using all BTUs from fuel, fert, and pesticides, that's a EROEI of about 13:1. That's better than the North Sea in it's hayday. Including equipment expense, labor, deprec, insurance, etc, the EROEI is still around 10:1.
5) There is 395,000 BTU's in a bushel of corn. If you don't like my figures, check them.
6) There will ALWAYS be SOME oil produced. Even 50 years from now the production will be at least 20 mbpd, I'm guessing worst case scenario. Where do you think those barrels will go?
I'm 100% convinced those few barrels will go to the guy who adds the MOST VALUE to them. Whomever can get the most EROEI out of them. It ain't the soccor mom. It ain't Joe Suburb. It ain't the engineer designing the next widget.
The FIRST barrel produced will go to herbicide/pesticide, because it adds SO MUCH value vs the BTU content of the herbicide. (One pint of roundup = 20,000 BTUs. This pint will EASILY add 50 bu/acre. 50 bu corn = almost 20 million BTUs. EROEI of Roundup/herbicide/pesticide = 1,000 to 1.)
Once all the globes pesticide needs are met, the next barrels will go powering tractors.
Nobody out there will be able to OUTBID a farmer for petro, because nobody adds as much value to a unit of petro.
I've spent lots of time looking at Peak Oil, and I'm convinced we are here, but there's a BIG MISSING SUBJECT on the conversation about the outcome of PO. That is;
Where will those precious few barrels of daily production go in 20 years? Who will get them? Who adds the most value to them?
I say its the highest bidder. That person is me.
I think it's possible. What happens if peak oil means we can no longer maintain the technology that currently supports modern agriculture? If, say, we can no longer afford to launch GPS satellites?
I posted an article a few weeks back about a farmer who bought a new half-million dollar combine every year. He had to, because it was worn out after a year's use. Is this really sustainable?
I hope it's agriculture, but I have a feeling the lucky winner will be the military.
I agree, though the farmer I think will be a close second.
It seems to me in history some nation-state used soldiers to farm fields at a certain point ?
I would agree with that. But I wonder if we all are still assume too many givens when seeing the future.
Most of what we talked about is the distribution of remaining supply to farmers, Mil. etc.
That assumes a supply chain functioning to a great degree.
If there is no coherent 'Safe" distribution system in the country, many assumptions need to be changed.
Visualize Mexico in 10-15 years. What do you see? A functioning supply chain/distribution system for distributing goods?
Maybe not so stable. Who will get the "Distribution" of the remaining gas there? The Farmers? The Millitary? Banditos?
Oh, factor in the idea that we are already seeing people steal copper phone,powerlines. In 10-15 years (after-during the Greater Depression) Copper lines between towns, cities on those 20 - 100 miles of empty road may be somewhat at risk. Certain things stop working after that happens.
Who will get the "Distribution" of the remaining gas there? The Farmers? The Millitary? Banditos?
In 20 years it may be hard to distinguish between those last 2 categories ;)
..and not to forget the fact that 'An army runs on its stomach..'
Will the Armed Forces start planting victory gardens around their bases?
Will the exorbitant expenditures to 'Rent-a-G.I., Rent-an-MP and Rent-a-potato peeler' (KBR, Bechtel, Halliburton, Blackwater, et al..) start facing demand-destruction as their poor return-on-investment becomes unsustainable?
Bob
(edited for word-choice..)
The army seems to favor cattle farming, rather than veggies. They tend to lease out grazing rights.
At the bluegrass army depot in Kentucky, the cattle also serve as a warning of nerve gas leakage.
During the Tokugawa period in Japan, Samurai protected the fields and farmers from other armed individuals in exchange for the necessities of life. The farmer and the Samurai existed in a symbiotic relationship. Far different from the exploitative fudalism of Western Europe. The Shogunate through the loyalties of the individual Samurai provided an organization capable of repeling larger threats. When the threat was dealt with, the Samurai returned to the farms they were the protectors for. The Samurai at all times recognized the interdependence between himself and the farmer.
Absolutely, Switzerland is a historical example, though the details of who exactly plowed what field and gathered what % of potatoes or beets is not something I would like to venture into. I guess even the ‘top’ historical studies can’t sort that one out.
Today’s reassuring mantra here - Switzerland has a conscription army - is that division of labor will work: men do the hard stuff, women all the rest. The men are ready to go, in 24 hours. The hard stuff could be anything. Digging ditches, planting, etc. All that dates from ww2, and even before, and is very folksy. By such myths do we live.
This letter, PDF, short, to the NY Times in 1915, gives a bit of the very outdated flavor which sorta continues today:
link
Leanan, in 20 years, or even today, the military are not 'adding the most value' to the FFs they are allocated. Besides, 'a military moves on its stomachs', as we all know, so feeding a military is a priority for it to continue to function. From the perspective of the US citizen/taxpayers the costs of the wars in Afganistan and Iraq have been socialized while any 'profits' have been funneled into corporations that are favored by the current administration...This is not a sustainable business model for an empire or any other form of governmemt that I am familiar with. There have been no real 'profits' if one considers that the ongoing wars are being funded by creating ever larger budget deficits. It is my opinion that these wars, and even more wars, cannot be continued because at some point the US military, industrial, congressional complex will bankrupt the US and cause a collapse of the US economy and government. This isnt the day of Alexander, where empires were created by vast well trained armies...now there is the nuclear weapons factor to consider. After the US economy collapses from mismanagement, incompetence, theft and unprofitable foreign wars I believe that there is a good chance that a significant portion of any FFs that the US still has access to will be used for agriculture and for bootstrapping manufacturing for products needed for US internal consumption; ie, medicines, alternate energy, ag distribution, etc. TPTB will stick with the current model untill it collapses, 'dancing with the one that brung 'em', and then we will see a much different US...sans empire and SUVs and with a reduced population. Unfortunately the 'ship' we are on is too big and has too much momentum to turn before hitting that iceburg ahead.
I suspect that in the days of Alexander and in the Roman Empire, the return on investment of military conquests had to be very real and in a fairly quick time. There was the immediate plunder that the troops could bring home, but more importantly there was the ongoing tax base to support the empire.
Now we have a different story where the waning supply of cheap fossil fuel is supporting war efforts that don't necessarily promise any return at all. In fact the wars the US is involved in promise to be a continuing drain barring the miracle that Iraq is stabilized and vast amounts of oil revenue are siphoned off.
Sigh.... oh for the good olde days :-(
Alexander was at the right place at the right time. Farm production had increased to a level where there was sufficient excess supply in all the regions that Alexander attacked. He swept through the regions, took the excess supply, cut off the leadership and replaced it with his own. The system kept functioning. Basically Alexander scooped up the over production to feed his Army with out too much destruction of the cultivation. Brilliant!
Yes, interesting that the same areas of the world have been in contention by the major players for so much of recorded history.
More recently Hitler achieved one objective (the oil fields around Ploesti) only to have the British bomb them from air fields on Malta and in Egypt. The British had major buildups in those areas primarily to protect the interests of, uhm, BP. Ghawar was first tapped in 1938 by Chevron...
Ironically, it may be argued that BP saved the world from fascism. Hitler decided that the Ploesti oil fields had to be secured by invading Greece before launching Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. This delayed the launch of Barbarossa by some 6 weeks. It had been planned that the Slavs could be subdued before the Russian winter set in but the delay cost them.
The invasion of Greece also caused Rommel in North Africa to go short on supplies and replacements delaying his hoped for grasping of the Egyptian oil fields. When the German advance in Russia stalled in the Fall of 1941, at least partially due to long supply lines, attention was refocused on Rommel briefly. Some 22 U-Boats were diverted out of the Atlantic into the Med, essentially ending the supremacy of the British Navy in that area for nearly a year and enabling a re-supply effort to Rommel.
Rommel once again was able to pretty much push the British back at will, until El Alamein. At that point his supply lines were once again stretched to the limit and he was forced to deploy his vaunted Panzers in ways that conserved fuel, turning his tactical genius with mobile Panzers into stationary, defensive gun emplacements which the British could exploit.
Throughout the war the German machine depended on fuel for mobility and it of course faltered when supplies got tight. The resumption of the advance in Russia Spring 1942
saw a tougher fight put up by the Russians, although they were pushed back to Stalingrad. The stalling of the Russian front also allowed the U.S. time to pump a LOT of supplies into Russia via the Murmansk Run.
Sadly for Hitler, he ignored a primary teaching of Clausewitz, probably the most brilliant military German general of all time. He had already postulated the doctrine of the "diminishing strength of attack". According to this, every attack that does not lead immediately to peace is bound to grow weaker as it proceeds and at a certain point end up by turning into defense. Clausewitz called this moment the "culminating point".
Thank you BP, lol. If it hadn't been for the British forces present in North Africa defending their interests there, they would have been unable to threaten the Ploesti oil fields and Barbarossa would have begun on schedule, possibly knocking Russia out of the war. As it was, at one point Stalin was reported to be so desperate in meetings with Churchill and Roosevelt that it was evident that Russia was on the verge of collapse, Russian winter or no Russian winter.
More recently the ties between Britain and the the U.S. have been strengthened by the U.S. allowing BP to purchase several major U.S. oil companies, first Sohio, then Amoco and finally ARCO. No wonder that Blair has followed the U.S. lead so consistenly.
Sorry to get sidetracked, but just more oil trivia from the past, admittedly simplified. A take-away from all this maybe- Oil was always a primary strategic concern during WWII. To think that things might be different now in the midst of a new kind of war, with all the history from Alexander on, would be simplistic.
Here we are again, battling over the same reaches of real estate. The bridgeheads have been secured, the battle lines being drawn. Sigh...
i think amoco aquired/merged with sohio in '87, that was a remarriage of the former standard oil units. bp merged with amoco in 96 and bought arco in 2000.
It was BP that purchased Sohio. I was with Amoco at the time and thought nothing of it really. The Sohio name began to disappear on gas stations, terminals, refineries, etc.
In '89 Amoco told the employees that they had been working with consultants to try and get a glimpse of what the future held for the oil industry. The conclusion of several years study was that by the end of the century there would be only 4 or 5 big super majors after a wave of consolidation. The main reason- they would all have to bulk up in order to get big enough to afford to go deep-water and fight for the remaining oil. Amoco began looking...
In June 1999 the uhm, merger with BP was announced, they had been in talks for about a year. We were told there would be no changes in North American operations. I was in the Lubricants Business Unit at the time. It had just been sold to Chevron. BP turned out to not be happy about that, they wanted it.
We discovered later that top Amoco executives had been given, er, employment guarantees. Within a year it was announced that headquarters would be moved to London and that the 96 story Amoco building, affectionately known as 'Big Johns' erection' after CEO of the 70s John Swearingen, would be sold. AIG purchased it, wouldn't be surprised if they have been looking for a buyer lately, hehe.
I was lucky for a bit. A position was found for me back in headquarters once again in the wake of the sale of Lubes. But in Spring 2001 our entire group was severed. Hard to find seats for 5000 people in an office park in the burbs, lol.
It was also announced that most U.S. refineries were on the block. Mandan, ND was purchased by Tesoro, never heard what happened to Salt Lake and Yorktown,VA. Whiting and Texas City remained, the two largest. Amoco, er, BP Chemicals up for sale also. The Amoco name began to disappear on gas stations, terminals, refineries, etc.
Yea, it was called a merger. BP Amoco was supposed to be the name, for a time. Then a contest was announced to rename the company. Beyond Petroleum was the eventual winning candidate and consultants were hired to come up with a new logo, the ecological sunburst getting the nod eventually. The BP initials of course remain.
Funny how that worked out, hehe.
There was some resistance among the motoring public. Gasoline sales dipped. Amoco premium gasoline had garnered a reputation as being a very high quality gasoline. To this day BP stations now sell premium with the Amoco or BP Amoco name still on the pump, but normally only on premium.
ARCO was purchased late in 2000. By this time many high ex-Amoco execs had taken 20 and 30 million dollar buyouts.
If it looks like a buyout and smells like a buyout, well you decide. But yes, nice to see former Standard splinters re-united, will they get the rest also? One might even go the other way.
thank you for the insights. i remember in the '70's arco was at the top of their game, sometime in the 80's i think they lost their mojo. around the time they acquired the anaconda co and i think things went downhill from there.
in the '80's majors and notsomajors were buying businesses they probably had no business in. they called it diversification. mobil bought wards, i dont think that was a real wise move.
About Rommel. Romel was brilliant when he was reading the US army attache's daily reports on exactly where the British were, where they were going, and what they were going to do when they got there.
When we found out, Romel stopped being brilliant because he stopped getting reports.
WRT gps a farmer or group of farmers could set up low power synchronized transmitters to provide a more than adequate low cost substitute for sattelite based navigation. Aviation used such a system for over 50 before gps and these transmitters are still being used in the US and Europe. If as you suspect the military gets first dibs on whatever oil is left then they will certainly use a tiny fraction of their share to put up replacements as needed.
No other industry has the ability to be as self powered as agriculture. Using soybeans as part of a regular crop rotation plan means plenty of biodiesel will be available. Electric tractors using wind and solar are also possibilities.
RDF - radio direction finder
I had one on my kettenburg for sailing up and down the coast many moons ago.
Simple but effective.
not as pinpoint as gps even with several fixes.
Now a days I have heard of sending boats down the westcoast unmaned. just plot into gps, sinc with auto-pilot and drive down to intersept.
Oh yes, we can be that accurate.
What we do is modulate the carrier digitally with a pseudo-random number sequencer ( also known as a linear feedback shift register ). What this does is code the carrier with a mathematical "song", and like a song, you hear a few notes of it, and you know where you are in the song. Thats the beauty of the LFSR - if its a "N" bit, then by the time you get N bits, you know exactly where in the sequence you are, and can predict the next bit.
Now, being the carrier is digitally modulated, you can lock onto the "song" ( phaselock ), and look at the carrier.
The wave length of, say, a 900MHz carrier is around 13 inches. That is for every 13 inches you approach or retreat from the transmitter, you go through a complete cycle of carrier.
Ever sat in front of a TV with rabbit ears and noted you could shift in the couch the tiniest bit and cause the TV to misbehave? Its acting as a phase detector comparing the signal coming directly to its antenna, and the signal bouncing off of you. VHF Channel 3 is aroung 60 MHz.
Say you have four transmitters locked to each other and THEY are stationary. Each are sending a different "song", but all are locked on the same "beat".
On the tractor's receiver, it receives all the signals simultaneously. Each carrier is identified by the LFSR "music" encoded on it. At that point, one does phase analysis of the carriers, mixing them against each other adding known phase delay techniques to null them out.
By doing this, one can resolve one degree of phase shift, which is 0.036 inches.
This would use the same technology as cellphone towers use now. 900MHz is the cellphone band.
Although this does not tell you your ABSOLUTE position, you will have a fine RELATIVE position to the transmitters. If you know where the transmitters are, then you know where YOU are.
We have microprocessor capabilities to do this analysis on the fly using milliwatts of power.
I challenge the assertion that farmers will even use oil in their tractors in 20 years, or any significant amount of oil.
So what will farmers be using instead of oil? This should be interesting.
conservation
hybrid tractors
electric tractors
*sigh*
Wind driven ammonia for both fertilizer and fuel? The fuel use is already proven.
http://strandedwind.org/node/22
Burning ammonia is idiotic. NOx is a greenhouse gas and leads to the formation of ozone in the troposphere which is a serious pollutant and a greenhouse gas to boot. At least with CH4 you get more energy per molecule than with NH3. Fuel cells based on ammonia are another matter if they manage to cycle the nitrogen back into N2.
Your statement is completely and utterly ignorant. Ammonia burns cleaner than gasoline in terms of NOx output and what there is can be cleaned up with an off the shelf catalytic converter, just as is done for a gasoline engine. Or at least that is what I've been told. I am, however, far more inclined to take the word of a man standing next to an ammonia based engine mounted in a dynamometer undergoing durability testing, which doesn't start until emissions testing is complete, than the assertions of some random guy from the internet.
Do I sound snippy? Sorry, but after the tenth time I fielded this question in a Drum Beat thread I would have thought everyone would have internalized this particular bit of information.
Slaves.
Slaves, meet your new masters.
How can any solutions to the problems that beset us increasingly, how can we solve them if we think we are great? If we think we are wonderful, how can we fix our disgusting habits, our nauseating pus-dripping, diseased body that smells like a corpse? How do we find a cure when we keep saying we are hale and healthy?
Impossible! Words matter! And if we keep yelling,'I'm OK! I'm a marathon man!' as we stagger to the ground and throw up in the gutter. We sound like a stupid drunk! Always, the first step towards sobriety and health is to first admit that something is very wrong and then to correctly see what it is. If one is a drunk, one can't claim the wife or boss drove one to drink, for example. So it is with a nation: until we understand that we cannot consume much more of world resources than we produce, we will continue to fall into debt."
http://elainemeinelsupkis.typepad.com/money_matters/
The general equities market must be calmed. Should the Dow crater, another major domino falls. Let's see how the PPT (Price Protection Team) brings the Dow in Tuesday morning in pre U.S. trading and then how Tuesday closes. The DOW better be higher each day than the indices are before U.S. trading or as the last two days demonstrated, the PPT has lost its tight control of the equities markets. Watch the pre-open indices and closing Dow very closely.
If the equity markets cannot be calmed then:
Here he has a nice long list.
I recommend reading it.
http://jsmineset.com/ARhome.asp?VAfg=1&RQ=EDL,1&AR_T=1&GID=&linkid=5669&...
A sample:
# The markets for general equities would all have to institute total trading halts every 100 points on the downside for 30 minutes each.
# All commercial call loans would be called.
# All debtors one day late on any payment, lacking grace period, would be liquidated. All debtors over one day of the grace period would be liquidated.
# It is clearly visible to anyone with eyes or a mind to think that the PPT has lost all semblance of control in the equity markets and will soon in all remaining markets.
# The commercial paper credit market which is almost dead will die totally
until we understand that we cannot consume much more of world resources than we produce, we will continue to fall into debt.
But it's not debt, it's theft. We have never intended to pay.
Mother Nature is going to foreclose on homo sapiens.
Go to the head of the class.
Once this meme gets out, it's EndGame time.
I read this article on Aegon, Scottish Widows and noted some
bizarre statements.
The comments section caught them as well
Panic selling shuts £2bn fund
http://2cents.dailyreckoning.com/viewtopic.php?p=284787&sid=7b99e67035f8...
... because you figure they will do ... what instead?
"If, say, we can no longer afford to launch GPS satellites?" Well, since the Europeans and Russians are both continuing to have trouble affording Galileo and Glonass, their versions of GPS, even now, maybe this is worth asking. However, do keep in mind that the trouble is purely political, the fraction of GDP involved is almost too small to measure. And even some of the most dirt-poor countries on Earth keep hugely expensive projects going for reasons of sheer vanity, so if GPS is truly valuable...
Nonetheless, if there is value in steering tractors automatically, one can always pound a few tall stakes into the ground, bolt pseudo-satellites onto them, and steer that way. The kind of electronics needed was already available by around 1990. It's still made in large quantities all over the world, mainly in rather less-developed places, as hardly anyone in the OECD can be bothered to touch it any more. You'll find it everywhere in all sorts of less-sophisticated electronic gadgets. Electric toothbrushes. Thermostats. Battery chargers. Plug-in air fresheners.
GPS is a very complicated, large-system way of steering tractors, which we use because (1) we can, (2) it's fashionable even though it's 25 year old technology, (3) it's standardized, so (4) it's less trouble to set up than alternatives. But it's not the only possible way.
Now, in the domain "anything's possible", civilization could fall so low that 1990-level electronics can be made absolutely nowhere on Earth. That, too, would be political, as there is plenty of sand in the world, and people have been fabricating small high-value objects since ages before oil. It need not happen. But if it does, these discussions simply will not matter, our crystal balls will have gone utterly dark - because most of us doing the discussing will not be alive or remembered anyway.
If we can still remember how to make diode lasers, or scavenge them out of old consumer electronics, they could provide a super accurate local positioning system. Think of current day surveying tools.
Does not change your point, but Russian system is expected to be world-wide functioning again by the end of this year. Many launches within last year made it functional again across Russia. Initial batch of the first consumer GPS+Glonass navigation gizmo was sold out:
http://www.insidegnss.com/node/482
http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS9350234859.html
Leanan
You said,
"I posted an article a few weeks back about a farmer who bought a new half-million dollar combine every year. He had to, because it was worn out after a year's use. Is this really sustainable?"
Could you please provide a source for that? I know that here in KY we have combines that are 30 years old and are still working the fields every summer. Perhaps folks buying that half million dollar one should consider changing brands! (or are they Chinese combines :-), sorry couldn't resist....
RC
I did. I just can't remember what day I posted it. :)
However, it definitely was not in Kentucky. I can't remember where it was, but probably some place like South Dakota. The article said that it was the sheer amount of land farmed/wheat produced that wore out the combine and forced the farmer to buy a new one every year.
Only as a contract harvestor. Starting in south Texas in early June and ending at the Canadian border in Sept. A combine lasts longer than twenty days, the length of any local harvest season.
I could see the contractor harversters trading in on a new model each year, because that's their livelihood. No way is the old one ready for the scrap heap, though. Some frugal farmer somewhere will pick up a bargain and keep it running for years.