The Oil Drum

By contrast, the demographics of young, small-scale farmers includes many women. Around here small farmers are about 50:50 female:male I'd guess.

Monbiot points out that the consumption of the wealthy -- and he also chooses excessive meat-eating as an example -- is a greater threat to the world in many ways than the burgeoning population, which is also a very real problem.

It is precisely this which makes me say, once again, that it does little good to talk about the future of agriculture in with exclusive regard to peak oil, without also carrying on an extensive conversation about environmental ethics, consumption and population ethics, and geopolitics and resource war.

I wrote this on another site regarding a different topic (I think the numbers are correct... at least, I hope they are.):

A typical American uses the energy equivalent of almost 16 times that of, say, an African. Extrapolate that out with some simple math:

310,00,000 Americans x 16 (third world equivalents) = 4,960,000,000 people.

That's right. 4,960,000,000 Africans could live on what America lives on. Add in Europe? Japan? Korea? You're looking at another 8 or 9 billion.

Africa is not the problem. Developed nations are the problem. That, and that others, quite naturally, want to live how we live. This is impossible. Let us do the numbers.

6.6 billion divided by 310 million = 21.29. 20,000,000 (US daily consumption of oil) x 21.29 = 425,806,000 mb/d.

So, all in all, I see grains produced via centralized Ag and much of everything else on a decentralized basis.

I tend to agree. I also think we will see the resurrection of rail freight for grain rather than trucks as is done now. Canola may only be grown for the purpose of producing bio-diesel for Ag related production.

Further down the food chain, we will see local small scale flour mills come back, alongside locally scaled commercial bakeries. It is much more efficent to truck grain or even flour than it is to transport very light but bulky bread.

This also raises the prospect of local breweries coming back. Ditto for milk and cheese production.

Meat may be a little harder to work through as transport costs actuallty become more efficient when meat is killed and packed in boxes close to where it is grown. Rail freight of livestock may return and butchers may even resort to slaughtering out the back of the shop, a practice which is still pretty common in the third world. (Ox liver anyone?). Of course decentralizing meat processing, limits the collection of tallow for bio-diesel industry.

Chicken, duck and foul will become more common in urban areas both for eggs and meat. This will have some effect on the large scale poultry producers who won't be able to compete on transport costs( you can't herd chooks like you can cattle).

The really interesting tipping point, and IMHO, the first canary to croak, will be the vegetable industry. The cost of production on farm or in garden is only separated by a small margin with labour and mostly FF inputs on farm, virtually eliminated in the home garden.

A loosely organised suburban co-op of home gardeners could produce a very large percentage of that localites vegetable needs, given a reasonable climate and moderatley good soil conditions. Ditto for fruit. The cost of vegies in the supermarket is very sensitive to the cost of transport and vegies are the easiest things to replace. There is much more to explore here in realtion to urban community gardens but I'll save that for another post.

Meat grain and dairy are harder but again there can be a form of relocalization of processing these commodites where the savings in transport outweighs the efficiency of large scale processing plants.

Good luck with growing your own grain Todd. If you ever grow enough I have a wicked scone recipe which you could blow your whole crop on! :)

"Putting aside for the moment that not all crops can be grown in all places, my guess is that centeralized vs decentralized will revolve around yields. For example, I doubt that many people will grow wheat in their back yards or even on a mini-farm given a yield of far less than a pound per square foot. FWIW, I've been developing my own strain of winter wheat for a number of years because I find it interesting but I doubt I would try to grow my own if it could still be purchased.

On the other hand, I can see people growing potatoes in barrels since they yield is extremely high per SF. I can also see mini-farms providing some crops where transportation is an issue."

Exactly the prelude to the Irish Famine.

Even at the Famine's paek, wheat was being exported to England's
Cattle Industry.

The World Food Outlook for November 2007 from the FAO tells us,

In 2006/7, there were produced 2,009.4 million tonnes of grains of all types.

Of those, 735.9 million tonnes were feed for livestock. In 2007, this gave us 278.3 million tonnes of meat of all kinds. And so we find that it took 735.9/278.3 = 2.64kg grain to produce 1kg of meat, worldwide.

So if there are people like you putting 0.33kg of grain into 1kg of meat, there is probably someone putting 4.95kg grain into 1kg of meat.

And of course, much livestock feed goes to animals which aren't bred for their meat, like dairy cattle and wool sheep. So we get more than just meat from them. Milk products were 678.2 million tonnes in 2007.

It's also the case that developing countries use little or no grain for their livestock, while developed countries use rather a lot. So the ratio might be 1:1 in Ghana, but 13:1 in the US, I don't know.

You can't generalise from your personal experience, unfortunately. You just have to look at the figures, while bearing in mind that they're the truth, but not the whole truth - like I said, we should remember that the West feeds more grain to livestock than the Third World, that we get dairy products as well as meat from livestock, and so on.

Your steer did not get to 150 kg. on 50 kg. of feed. Most of that weight came off grass. You should have weighed your steer before adding feed to his diet, then the difference between that weight and his final weight could be ascribed to the feed.

In the U.S., most cattle are born on what we call cow-calf ranching operations. The calves get to about 300 to 350 kg. on grass and are sold to feed lots which fatten them to their slaughter weight of roughly 500 to 600 kg. The breeding cows are not sold and are fed over winter to produce another calf crop the next year. Cattle are born in one area and they die far away from home.

Feeding cattle grain marbles their meat, that is, it adds fat and makes it more tender. It takes 10 to 13 pounds of grain to add a pound of meat. We could go to grass-finished cattle that never eat grain and still meet at least half of the U.S. beef demand with the present quantity of cow-calf operations. With better range management, doing a better job of teaching ranchers how to be botanists, we could increase beef production without increasing acreage. As Gene Goven of Turtle Lake, North Dakota, said when he got the rancher of the year award, "My crop is grass. I use cows to harvest it."

They do, and it makes them sick and the meat more susceptible to e coli.