The Next Agriculture?
Posted by Prof. Goose on March 7, 2008 - 11:00am
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: agriculture, biofuel, Food Prices, peak oil, relocalization [list all tags]
This is a guest post by John Michael Greer, who blogs at The Archdruid Report. John is the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA) and has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, including "The Druidry Handbook" (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.
Archdruids take breaks from time to time, but the peak oil debate does not, and during my recent vacation a lively discussion sprang up on The Oil Drum about the future of agriculture in a postpetroleum world. The point at issue was whether today’s mechanized agriculture will remain in place, or be replaced by a new rural economy of small farms using human and animal labor, as the world skids down the far side of Hubbert’s peak.
Summarizing a vigorous discussion of a complex topic in a few paragraphs is a risky proposition, so I’ll focus here on the two essays that defined the debate, Stuart Staniford’s The Fallacy of Reversibility and Sharon Astyk’s Is Localization Doomed? Staniford argued that those who expected a nonmechanized, small-farm economy in the wake of peak oil were claiming that the history of agriculture over the last century would simply run in reverse, tracking the decline in fossil fuel availability in the same way it tracked the growth in fossil fuel production.
If this view was correct, he claimed, rising fuel prices would have already begun to push American agriculture in the direction of smaller, less energy-intensive farms, and this would show in currently available statistics about profitability, labor costs, farm size and the like. He then demonstrated that no such changes could be found in the statistics, and on this basis claimed that what he called the “reversalist” position had no merit.
Astyk, responding to Staniford, made two major points. First, she noted that nobody claimed that the transition from today’s agribusiness to tomorrow’s rural landscape of small farms would simply run history in reverse, and Staniford was therefore kicking a straw man. Second, she suggested that the emergence of a nonmechanized, small-farm economy in the postpetroleum future was not an inevitability, but a policy choice that Staniford’s so-called “reversalists” considered the best option in the face of peak oil.
Like many readers of the debate, I found neither of these positions really satisfactory. By the time I finished reading the comments, though, it was getting late, and I decided to round out the evening by pouring myself a glass of scotch and reading a few pages of a Gary Larson Far Side anthology. Somewhere toward the bottom of the glass I dozed off; I must have been reading one of Larson’s dinosaur cartoons in my last waking moments, because I slipped into a dream in which a conference of dinosaurs pondered the approaching end of the Mesozoic era.
Quite a few dinosaurs had already given speeches about the threat of global cooling. Several of them had mentioned that mammals, with their warm blood and furry coats, might be better off in a post-Mesozoic world. At this point in the debate, however, another dinosaur lumbered up to the podium to speak.
“This talk of mammals taking over the world is nonsense,” it said. “It’s true, of course, that the ancestors of mammals – the therapsids – ruled the earth back before dinosaurs came along, in the Permian period, before the earth’s climate shifted to its long Mesozoic warm spell.” This sparked a good deal of discussion among the audience, and the Tyrannosaurus rex who presided over the meeting had to display its foot-long teeth and growl to quiet things down.
“Nonetheless,” the speaker went on, “this claim that evolution will run in reverse can readily be refuted. If that were true, the global cooling we’ve seen already would have made dinosaurs become smaller and furrier, and that hasn’t happened. In fact” – at this point it nodded toward the Tyrannosaurus rex – “it’s clear that we’re getting larger and scalier all the time. There’s every reason to think that as the climate cools, and selection pressures become more extreme, big scaly dinosaurs will have even greater competitive advantages than they do now.”
At this point the buzz of conversation in the audience could not be restrained, even when the Tyrannosaurus rex killed and ate one of the loudest talkers. A few moments later, though, a bright light flashed through the sky. “Did you see that?” said the Triceratops sitting next to me, pointing toward the sky with the horn on his nose. “I’ve never seen a shooting star that big.” A moment later I was jolted awake by what felt like the shockwave from an asteroid impact, but was actually the Gary Larson anthology sliding from my lap and hitting the floor.
The parallels between Staniford’s argument and that of his saurian equivalent, as it happens, go well beyond the obvious. Both, strictly speaking, are quite correct in their core assertions. As the Mesozoic era drew toward its close, dinosaurs did not retrace the process that led up to the monster reptiles of the Cretaceous. In fact, important branches of the dinosaur clan – the carnosaurs that led to Tyrannosaurus rex, the ceratopsians that ended with Triceratops, and others – got progressively larger as the Cretaceous drew on.
These successful evolutionary lineages continued to follow their established trajectory as long as it remained viable. When it stopped being viable, they didn’t shift into reverse and shrink back down to the size of their Permian ancestors; they died out, and other organisms better suited to the new conditions took over. In the same way, Staniford’s assertion that today’s industrial agriculture will not throw the gearshifts of its combines into reverse, and gradually retrace its tracks into the 19th century, is almost certainly correct.
Staniford is also correct to point out that in a world intent on pouring its food supply into its fuel tanks, rising energy prices mean that industrial farming is becoming more profitable, not less. As a member of the Grange, I’ve had the chance to watch this from an angle that may be rare in the peak oil scene. Where the rest of the media bemoans rising grain prices, the Grange News is full of satisfied comments by family farmers who can finally make ends meet, now that their grain sells for more than it cost to grow.
Yet Staniford’s overall argument fails, for the same reason that his imaginary Mesozoic equivalent missed seeing the future in plain sight -- both rely on linear models to predict a nonlinear situation. In his essay, Staniford used the distinction between reversible and irreversible processes as a model for historical change in agriculture. The difference between linear and nonlinear change, however, is at least as relevant.
Watch a frozen lake melt and you have a seasonally timely example of nonlinear change. The transition from ice to liquid water doesn’t happen gradually as temperature rises; it happens at a specific point in the temperature spectrum, 32°F, and only then once the ice has absorbed enough energy to overcome its thermal inertia and provide the heat of fusion. A five-degree warming can be irrelevant to the process, if it’s from 15°F to 20°F, or for that matter from 40°F to 45°F. The same rise between 30°F and 35°F, on the other hand, can cause drastic change.
Nonlinear change happens most often in systems that have negative feedback loops which balance out pressures for change. In the case of the frozen lake, the main sources of negative feedback are the stability of water’s solid state and its capacity as a heat sink. Only when enough heat has entered the situation to overcome these factors does change happen, and when it does, the lake shifts from one relatively stable state to another.
The modern agricultural economy is a classic candidate for nonlinear change. The feedback loops resisting agricultural change in the modern world are at least as potent as the ones that keep a lake from melting at 20°F. The food production and distribution system is oriented toward business as usual, and the psychology of previous investment and the very real costs of retooling to fit a different model both raise obstacles to change. Monopolistic practices and the government subsidies and price supports that make most of today’s “capitalist” agriculture a case study in corporate socialism also give the status quo impressive inertia.
At the same time, if something is unsustainable, it’s a given that sooner or later it won’t be sustained. Today’s industrial agriculture, with its far-flung supply and distribution chains, its dependence on huge inputs of nonrenewable resources, and its severe impact on topsoil, water quality, and environmental health, is a case in point. As transport costs rise, fossil fuel and mineral reserves deplete, and the burden of coping with ecological damage climbs, industrial agriculture will sooner or later reach the point of negative returns – and as Joseph Tainter pointed out in a different context, that’s the point at which collapse becomes the most likely outcome.
Staniford has argued elsewhere that the energy crisis caused by the end of cheap oil will be temporary. He proposes that nuclear power and other technologies will sooner or later make energy cheap and abundant again. If he’s right, it’s possible that new energy sources will come on line soon enough to keep industrial agriculture from hitting the wall. None of the theorists he critiques in his essay agree that the approaching crisis will be temporary, though, and this latter assessment gives their argument compelling force: as energy supplies dwindle and a social fabric predicated on cheap energy comes apart, the pressures on the agricultural status quo will eventually reach a level high enough to force nonlinear change.
This is where the second half of Sharon Astyk’s argument comes in. She points out that many of the writers critiqued in Staniford’s essay see a nonmechanized small-farm agricultural economy not as the inevitable result of economic forces, but as a deliberate policy choice. If our existing agriculture could fold out from under us, they suggest, getting plan B in place is a good idea.
Now this may well be true, but history teaches that when ideology collides with economics, it’s inevitably ideology that comes off worst. The same trap that has blocked most proposals for lifeboat communities so far – how do you make them economically viable in the world we inhabit today? – lies in wait for schemes to relocalize agriculture that don’t take the actual economics of farming in today’s world into account.
Fortunately, there’s reason to think that economic factors will favor the rise of a nonmechanized small-farm economy in the industrial world in the decades to come. The best evidence for this suggestion comes, ironically enough, from Stuart Staniford. In posts about the agricultural side of peak oil – notably Fermenting the Food Supply – Staniford pointed out that the use of grain as a feedstock for ethanol is likely to drive up the price of basic foodstuffs so far that many people will no longer be able to afford to eat.
This is potentially a serious crisis, but it also represents an opportunity. Sharp increases in the price of food mean that food production methods that may not be economical under current conditions could well pass the breakeven point and begin turning a profit. To thrive in the economic climate of the near future, of course, such methods would have to meet certain requirements, but most of these can be anticipated easily enough.
These alternative farming projects would have to use minimal fossil fuel inputs, since fuel costs will likely be very high by past standards for much of the foreseeable future. They would need to focus on local distribution, since those same fuel costs will put long-distance transport out of reach. They would have to focus on intensive production from very small plots, since acreage large enough for industrial farming will likely increase in price. They would also benefit greatly by relying on human labor with hand tools, since the economic consequences of peak oil will likely send unemployment rates soaring while making capital hard to come by.
All of these criteria are met, as it happens, by the small organic farms and truck gardens that many relocalization theorists hold up as models for future agriculture. Already an economic success, especially around West Coast cities, these agricultural alternatives have evolved their own distribution system, relying on farmers markets, co-op groceries, local restauranteurs and community-supported agriculture schemes to carry out an end run around food distribution systems geared toward corporate monopolies.
As more grains and other fermentable bulk commodities get turned into ethanol, and food prices rise in response, such arrangements may well become a significant source of food for a sizeable fraction of Americans – and in the process, of course, the economics of small-scale alternative farms are likely to improve a great deal. The result may well resemble nothing so much as the agricultural system of the former Soviet Union in its last years, featuring vast farms that had become almost irrelevant to the national food supply, while little market gardens in backyards produced most of the food people actually ate.
If Staniford is correct and the postpeak energy crisis turns out to be a passing phase, that bimodal system might endure for quite some time, as it did in the Soviet Union. If more pessimistic assessments of our energy future are closer to the mark, as I suspect they are, the industrial half of the system can be counted on to collapse at some point down the road once energy and resource availability drop to levels insufficient to sustain a continental economy. If this turns out to be the case, the small intensive farms around the urban fringes – mammals amid agribusiness dinosaurs – may well become the nucleus of the next agriculture.
Astyk, responding to Staniford, made two major points. First, she noted that nobody claimed that the transition from today’s agribusiness to tomorrow’s rural landscape of small farms would simply run history in reverse, and Staniford was therefore kicking a straw man. Second, she suggested that the emergence of a nonmechanized, small-farm economy in the postpetroleum future was not an inevitability, but a policy choice that Staniford’s so-called “reversalists” considered the best option in the face of peak oil.
Like many readers of the debate, I found neither of these positions really satisfactory. By the time I finished reading the comments, though, it was getting late, and I decided to round out the evening by pouring myself a glass of scotch and reading a few pages of a Gary Larson Far Side anthology. Somewhere toward the bottom of the glass I dozed off; I must have been reading one of Larson’s dinosaur cartoons in my last waking moments, because I slipped into a dream in which a conference of dinosaurs pondered the approaching end of the Mesozoic era.
Quite a few dinosaurs had already given speeches about the threat of global cooling. Several of them had mentioned that mammals, with their warm blood and furry coats, might be better off in a post-Mesozoic world. At this point in the debate, however, another dinosaur lumbered up to the podium to speak.
“This talk of mammals taking over the world is nonsense,” it said. “It’s true, of course, that the ancestors of mammals – the therapsids – ruled the earth back before dinosaurs came along, in the Permian period, before the earth’s climate shifted to its long Mesozoic warm spell.” This sparked a good deal of discussion among the audience, and the Tyrannosaurus rex who presided over the meeting had to display its foot-long teeth and growl to quiet things down.
“Nonetheless,” the speaker went on, “this claim that evolution will run in reverse can readily be refuted. If that were true, the global cooling we’ve seen already would have made dinosaurs become smaller and furrier, and that hasn’t happened. In fact” – at this point it nodded toward the Tyrannosaurus rex – “it’s clear that we’re getting larger and scalier all the time. There’s every reason to think that as the climate cools, and selection pressures become more extreme, big scaly dinosaurs will have even greater competitive advantages than they do now.”
At this point the buzz of conversation in the audience could not be restrained, even when the Tyrannosaurus rex killed and ate one of the loudest talkers. A few moments later, though, a bright light flashed through the sky. “Did you see that?” said the Triceratops sitting next to me, pointing toward the sky with the horn on his nose. “I’ve never seen a shooting star that big.” A moment later I was jolted awake by what felt like the shockwave from an asteroid impact, but was actually the Gary Larson anthology sliding from my lap and hitting the floor.
The parallels between Staniford’s argument and that of his saurian equivalent, as it happens, go well beyond the obvious. Both, strictly speaking, are quite correct in their core assertions. As the Mesozoic era drew toward its close, dinosaurs did not retrace the process that led up to the monster reptiles of the Cretaceous. In fact, important branches of the dinosaur clan – the carnosaurs that led to Tyrannosaurus rex, the ceratopsians that ended with Triceratops, and others – got progressively larger as the Cretaceous drew on.
These successful evolutionary lineages continued to follow their established trajectory as long as it remained viable. When it stopped being viable, they didn’t shift into reverse and shrink back down to the size of their Permian ancestors; they died out, and other organisms better suited to the new conditions took over. In the same way, Staniford’s assertion that today’s industrial agriculture will not throw the gearshifts of its combines into reverse, and gradually retrace its tracks into the 19th century, is almost certainly correct.
Staniford is also correct to point out that in a world intent on pouring its food supply into its fuel tanks, rising energy prices mean that industrial farming is becoming more profitable, not less. As a member of the Grange, I’ve had the chance to watch this from an angle that may be rare in the peak oil scene. Where the rest of the media bemoans rising grain prices, the Grange News is full of satisfied comments by family farmers who can finally make ends meet, now that their grain sells for more than it cost to grow.
Yet Staniford’s overall argument fails, for the same reason that his imaginary Mesozoic equivalent missed seeing the future in plain sight -- both rely on linear models to predict a nonlinear situation. In his essay, Staniford used the distinction between reversible and irreversible processes as a model for historical change in agriculture. The difference between linear and nonlinear change, however, is at least as relevant.
Watch a frozen lake melt and you have a seasonally timely example of nonlinear change. The transition from ice to liquid water doesn’t happen gradually as temperature rises; it happens at a specific point in the temperature spectrum, 32°F, and only then once the ice has absorbed enough energy to overcome its thermal inertia and provide the heat of fusion. A five-degree warming can be irrelevant to the process, if it’s from 15°F to 20°F, or for that matter from 40°F to 45°F. The same rise between 30°F and 35°F, on the other hand, can cause drastic change.
Nonlinear change happens most often in systems that have negative feedback loops which balance out pressures for change. In the case of the frozen lake, the main sources of negative feedback are the stability of water’s solid state and its capacity as a heat sink. Only when enough heat has entered the situation to overcome these factors does change happen, and when it does, the lake shifts from one relatively stable state to another.
The modern agricultural economy is a classic candidate for nonlinear change. The feedback loops resisting agricultural change in the modern world are at least as potent as the ones that keep a lake from melting at 20°F. The food production and distribution system is oriented toward business as usual, and the psychology of previous investment and the very real costs of retooling to fit a different model both raise obstacles to change. Monopolistic practices and the government subsidies and price supports that make most of today’s “capitalist” agriculture a case study in corporate socialism also give the status quo impressive inertia.
At the same time, if something is unsustainable, it’s a given that sooner or later it won’t be sustained. Today’s industrial agriculture, with its far-flung supply and distribution chains, its dependence on huge inputs of nonrenewable resources, and its severe impact on topsoil, water quality, and environmental health, is a case in point. As transport costs rise, fossil fuel and mineral reserves deplete, and the burden of coping with ecological damage climbs, industrial agriculture will sooner or later reach the point of negative returns – and as Joseph Tainter pointed out in a different context, that’s the point at which collapse becomes the most likely outcome.
Staniford has argued elsewhere that the energy crisis caused by the end of cheap oil will be temporary. He proposes that nuclear power and other technologies will sooner or later make energy cheap and abundant again. If he’s right, it’s possible that new energy sources will come on line soon enough to keep industrial agriculture from hitting the wall. None of the theorists he critiques in his essay agree that the approaching crisis will be temporary, though, and this latter assessment gives their argument compelling force: as energy supplies dwindle and a social fabric predicated on cheap energy comes apart, the pressures on the agricultural status quo will eventually reach a level high enough to force nonlinear change.
This is where the second half of Sharon Astyk’s argument comes in. She points out that many of the writers critiqued in Staniford’s essay see a nonmechanized small-farm agricultural economy not as the inevitable result of economic forces, but as a deliberate policy choice. If our existing agriculture could fold out from under us, they suggest, getting plan B in place is a good idea.
Now this may well be true, but history teaches that when ideology collides with economics, it’s inevitably ideology that comes off worst. The same trap that has blocked most proposals for lifeboat communities so far – how do you make them economically viable in the world we inhabit today? – lies in wait for schemes to relocalize agriculture that don’t take the actual economics of farming in today’s world into account.
Fortunately, there’s reason to think that economic factors will favor the rise of a nonmechanized small-farm economy in the industrial world in the decades to come. The best evidence for this suggestion comes, ironically enough, from Stuart Staniford. In posts about the agricultural side of peak oil – notably Fermenting the Food Supply – Staniford pointed out that the use of grain as a feedstock for ethanol is likely to drive up the price of basic foodstuffs so far that many people will no longer be able to afford to eat.
This is potentially a serious crisis, but it also represents an opportunity. Sharp increases in the price of food mean that food production methods that may not be economical under current conditions could well pass the breakeven point and begin turning a profit. To thrive in the economic climate of the near future, of course, such methods would have to meet certain requirements, but most of these can be anticipated easily enough.
These alternative farming projects would have to use minimal fossil fuel inputs, since fuel costs will likely be very high by past standards for much of the foreseeable future. They would need to focus on local distribution, since those same fuel costs will put long-distance transport out of reach. They would have to focus on intensive production from very small plots, since acreage large enough for industrial farming will likely increase in price. They would also benefit greatly by relying on human labor with hand tools, since the economic consequences of peak oil will likely send unemployment rates soaring while making capital hard to come by.
All of these criteria are met, as it happens, by the small organic farms and truck gardens that many relocalization theorists hold up as models for future agriculture. Already an economic success, especially around West Coast cities, these agricultural alternatives have evolved their own distribution system, relying on farmers markets, co-op groceries, local restauranteurs and community-supported agriculture schemes to carry out an end run around food distribution systems geared toward corporate monopolies.
As more grains and other fermentable bulk commodities get turned into ethanol, and food prices rise in response, such arrangements may well become a significant source of food for a sizeable fraction of Americans – and in the process, of course, the economics of small-scale alternative farms are likely to improve a great deal. The result may well resemble nothing so much as the agricultural system of the former Soviet Union in its last years, featuring vast farms that had become almost irrelevant to the national food supply, while little market gardens in backyards produced most of the food people actually ate.
If Staniford is correct and the postpeak energy crisis turns out to be a passing phase, that bimodal system might endure for quite some time, as it did in the Soviet Union. If more pessimistic assessments of our energy future are closer to the mark, as I suspect they are, the industrial half of the system can be counted on to collapse at some point down the road once energy and resource availability drop to levels insufficient to sustain a continental economy. If this turns out to be the case, the small intensive farms around the urban fringes – mammals amid agribusiness dinosaurs – may well become the nucleus of the next agriculture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig's_Law_of_the_Minimum
It also seems to me industrial agriculture is more exposed to the Liebig's Law of the Minimum problem than are small farms close to urban areas.
Also, as I have repeatedly stated, the key problem regarding energy supplies, IMO, is net export capacity, especially net oil exports. The Saudis continue to assure the world that they can supply oil to the market for decades to come--while the volume of oil that they are actually delivering to the market has shown an accelerating annual decline rate from 2006 to 2007.
It occurs to me that there is a parallel between refineries and industrial food producers.
I have suggested a geometric progression in crude oil prices (per barrel) as importers bid for declining net oil exports:
$50, $100, $200, $400. . .
This results in a geometric progression in product prices (gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, etc., per gallon):
$2, $4, $8, $16 . . .
At each product price doubling, what happens to demand, i.e., the volume of product that consumers can and will buy?
As demand falls, it stands to reason that refinery operators, especially in importing countries, will curtail their refinery runs, in order to match their product output against declining demand.
As noted in the article, this is also the problem with the industrial agricultural model, where they have to match higher fuel and fertilizer costs against the demand for food products, i.e., what consumers can and will buy.
However, unlike petroleum products, consumers can, to some degree, do something about becoming closer to a net food producer.
My long time recommendations:
ELP Plan (April, 2007)
http://graphoilogy.blogspot.com/2007/04/elp-plan-economize-localize-prod...
A real life case history:
http://www.energybulletin.net/5673.html
Published on 22 Jul 2004 by San Francisco Chronicle. Archived on 25 Apr 2005.
Berkeley: Urban farmers produce nearly all their food with a sustainable garden in their backyard
My opinion as to why I agree that a geometric progression in crude oil prices or fuel will occur, is that it would take a similar percentage rise to cause a similar percentage demand destruction.
.
For example, if it takes a 20 % rise in production to cause a 20 % demand destruction,
at $50 dollars/barrel the price would have to rise to $60., a $10 dollar rise.
.
If the price was $200/B , a $10 dollar rise to $210/B would just not be significant enough to cause a 20 % demand destruction.
.
If the price was $200/B , For those people that can afford $200/B, the price would have to rise to $240 to drive another 20% out of the market.
.
What this means in the markets, is that the higher the price of oil rises, the faster the price of oil will rise. So if the price of oil can rise 40% from $50 to $70 in one month, it can rise 40% from $200 to $280 just as easily in one month.
.
DocScience
http://www.angelfire.com/in/Gilbert1/tt.html
Kunstler is right never underestimate the power of mases. If you would had lived in Romania you would knew how easy is for the people to go from working their workplaces to looting their workplaces(regular employees with the bag and managers with the truck), you don't need people to be starved, you just need the overall sentiment and mass agreement that something will surely go wrong. They serve the system because they trust it when they will not have sleep because the fear or uncertainty, it is needed just a guy to say loud and clear "Dudes, lets take what is ours, our work!".
It seems to me what Stuart leaves out in his linear model -- and what is central to a nonlinear outcome in the case of agriculture -- is that the discontinuity itself will take the form of disorder in the system. Possibly very bad disorder. Let's also remember that political revolutions almost always grow out of food-and-starvation issues, and very quickly lead to the seizure of land (as wealth is seen to reside in productive land). I can easily see political mischief in the US coming to focus on property issues, as a former middle class grows restive and angry. Stuart seems to imagine economic forces playing out without an sociopolitical overlay.
--Jim Kunstler
The Long Emergency and World Made By Hand
'political revolutions almost always grow out of food-and-starvation issues, and very quickly lead to the seizure of land (as wealth is seen to reside in productive land). I can easily see political mischief in the US coming to focus on property issues, as a former middle class grows restive and angry.'
in reading stuart's post assuming plateau of oil & much higher oil prices with some shortages the main way that i saw the US following current ag practices is thru centralized governmental policies supporting such. in fact if depletion or FF shocks are serious i would see centralized policy/structure as needed to avoid a food crisis. initially that might be about what we want/expect rather than hunger; possibly a couple of waves of food problems.
current industrial farming in highly dependent on having the FF there when you need them [& the parts for equip, etc.].
rationing is always unfair to some & will go against our sensibility.i found stuart's post depressing & scary as i agree the system carries a massive inertia & will not likely be amenable to change other than serious discontinuities.
I agree that human responses to The Bottleneck will very much affect the outcomes, even as related to how people get food.
I guess that there will be a big variety of outcomes in different places over the next decade. Eventually people will attempt to move and concentrate population in places where they perceive that they can get food and water and basic needs met.
I suspect that the ecological blowback from human activity will become more manifest over time as well, and will complicate food growing more than most people yet admit.
It is difficult to predict what will happen because "it's complicated."
I do expect that home gardening and local food growing will see a resurgence in many places, as long as it is safe and as long as the basic inputs are available --water, labor, seed, tools, and so forth.
Other issues which complicate the energy issue will have as much to do with the shapes agriculture takes as energy itself.
We could be growing food in vats in basements and caves, if things get really crazy.
"We could be growing food in vats in basements and caves, if things get really crazy."
- using what energy?
Remember that agriculture is basically a solar collector.
An also remember that almost every 'fuel' for man is via photons being processed in some way. (fission/fusion on earth is not a photonic dominated process)
I meant that to be a bit humorous, vtpeaknik.
However some folks believe that farming will not be adequate or viable in the future for supplying food for most people.
Some of us could develop and grow various kinds of fungus.
Welcome to mycoprotein. Welcome to Quorn. As they say on the website: "help yourself" and "it just might surprize you."
http://www.quorn.com/
And then there is meat grown in labs and edible algae, and herbal viagra. ;)
Seriously, the stuff that's out there like quorn is energy intensive, but not land intensive. Fire up the alternative energy, the nuclear power....yikes!
The more basic version of this would be cultivating mushrooms. If one could come up with a hardy mycoprotien that could be cultivated on a low energy basis, then we might have something.
Myself, I suspect that the human responses to the Bottleneck apart from technology will determine the fate of most or all of us, and right now it looks like our main focus is war.
Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes just published "The Three Trillion Dollar War" about the USA's supposed Cakewalk in Afghanistan and Iraq.
One could chalk this up to the folly of Neocons and the Bush administration, but the Democrats have strongly supported these war crimes, and note that the leading candidates all do in spite of some vacuous rhetoric about getting the USA out of Iraq. (We'll pull back to Kuwait and Afghanistan and 14 permanent bases within Iraq: "Mission Accomplished!" Hah!)
The plan is war, not food. Guns, not butter. Kill off, not Die off.
Bruce Cockburn, "Indian Wars" 1990
Out in the desert where the wind never stops
A few simple people try to grow a few crops
Trying to maintain a life and a home
On land that was theirs before the Romans thought of Rome
A few dozen survivors, ragged but proud
With a few woolly sheep, under gathering cloud
It's never been easy, or free from strife
But the pulse of the land is the pulse of their life
You thought it was over but it's just like before
Will there never be an end to the Indian wars?
It's not breech-loading rifles and wholesale slaughter
It's kickbacks and thugs and diverted water
Treaties get signed and the papers change hands
But they might as well draft these agreements in sand
Noble Savage on the cinema screen
An Indian's good when he cannot be seen
And the so-called white so-called race
Digs for itself a pit of disgrace
You thought it was over but it's just like before
Will there never be an end to the Indian wars?
While that might have been partially in jest, it brings up an idea which which I've been wrestling for past few days. Marginal and absolute returns to society as a whole for its operations/economy as a whole. If we've reached a point in the past few decades where growth no long improves people's lives but arguably makes those lives worse, then what would be the result of a huge economic effort to rebuild infrastructure?
Wouldn't that amount to speeding up the Titanic? If we were to grow food in vats - and society is beyond the point of diminishing returns - wouldn't that make matters worse?
The only way to get back to a good return on investment is to cut back on scale.
cfm in Gray, ME
beggar
agreed
'human responses to The Bottleneck'
;probably the most neglected [& difficult to project factor] by tod. nate of course is the exception. there is so much difference in an attitude of plenty & one of serious scarcity. i guess history or our current $ expenditures are our best measures.
'ecological blowbacks' re irrigation & soil depletion will i agree be serious factors plus more immediately for many i think climate is the other huge issue for industrial ag as not only do the fuels have to be available, but a tractor's weight creates a very narrow window of when it can get into the field 'when needed'. local ag will gain an advantage here if we continue with such powerfully variable weather.
when times get tough we'll grow food as u say any way we can; but it is quite difficult & hard work. i don't want to grow my wheat for instance. very , very labor intensive w/o mechanization.
It seems to me that there is an even bigger elephant in the room and that is the assumption that people have the "money" to buy food, regardless of its source. Given an economy that is consumer driven, it is rather likely that people will lose their jobs as the economy contracts.
Forgetting about high population density cities, I believe it is far more likely that people will produce most of their own food with the exception of grains. Further, I believe that people will not use "organic" methods but rather hydroponics. And, hydroponics can be done using organic nutrients but I think it is more probable that straight chemical nutrient formulas will be used. One interesting hydroponic unit is sold by http://www.hydrostacker.com
One book that people interested in home food production (and home energy efficiency) should find is The Integral Urban House by the Farallones Institute, 1979, ISBN 0-87156-213-8
My own view of the future as someone who lives in the boondocks and who was once a certified organic farmer is that flexibility is the key. It is far too easy to become trapped by a philosophical belief. In my case, I use quasi-organic methods with Terra Preta thrown in for good measure. I spend a lot of time and effort building the soil but have no problem fertigating using a standard 20-20-20 soluble with trace minerals.
Todd
Jim,
David Holmgren of Permaculture fame was asked whether he thought the Suburbs where doomed. He made the comparison that the suburbs are no more densely populated than some places in Asia that are able to sustain the occupiers with water diversion -the suburbs are huge water courses, as long as the water supply and the energy (Gas, LNG, Coal, Nuclear)to power pumps is still OK he thinks we can retrofit the suburbs [maybe with Aquaponics/Hydroponics systems] and they effectively become one huge land mass of efficient agricultural productivity at a local scale. When I heard this I thought sure its possible.
Whether this will be done or not is the key question but most likely it would take the form of a new wave of Greentech Victory Gardens, the concept spreading/being copied as people see the benefits.
So, hardly 'Necrotic Suburbs' as you might say, in fact they might become quite nice places with local communities of people who trade, etc.
(I've lost the link to the Holmgren YouTube video but search on Permaculture.)
Regards, Nick.
The current agricultural system we employ is dependent not only on the standard critical infrastructure , but on a web of specialized services and goods to work (i.e., parts for tractors/combines and their attachments, non-heirloom seeds, fertilizers, baling wire, etc). The provision of these specialized goods and services also have their own web of dependencies; the complexity of 2nd and 3rd order house-of-card dependencies (not to mention 4th, 5th, ...) are normally not considered, which makes a problem seem simpler than it really is. Hence non-linear disorder extends to the logistical aspect of 'modern' agriculture, imparting a supply fragility that lies out of sight, but but is crucial nonetheless.
There are alternative suppliers of parts. Lots of engineers can redesign products to use different components. Agriculture won't fail for lack of parts. Either we will develop energy substitutes or industrial agriculture will fail.
> There are alternative suppliers of parts.
Perhaps in some limited instances, but I don't think you appreciate the uniqueness of most agricultural equipment. Parts for Allison-Chambers won't automatically fit on a John Deer, Ford, even with an engineer on the farm to redesign and machinist to mill and drill. That's simply handwaving.
> Either we will develop energy substitutes or industrial agriculture will fail.
You are forgetting about fertilizers (nitrogen, potash, potassium), herbicides, pesticides, etc.
Will Stewart,
Some of the harder to replicate pieces are the computers. But Allison-Chalmers and John Deere probably buy their ECUs from basic ECU suppliers that the auto industry uses.
I do not see the need to put engineers on each farm. We aren't going to fall apart so far that we'll cease to use a division of labor.
Look at the US in the late 19th century. We had a national market for many types of manufactured equipment even though we used a small fraction of a current per capita energy consumption.
> Some of the harder to replicate pieces are the computers. But Allison-Chalmers and John Deere probably buy their ECUs from basic ECU suppliers that the auto industry uses.
1. You believe the auto industry will remain robust post-peak? Your example alone highlights a major dependency risk.
2. You seem to believe parts from any number of manufacturers can be substituted easily back and forth. As one who has their B.S. in electro-mechanical engineering, I can assure you that rarely will one manufacturer's parts easily swap out for another, even on a piston/rod/crankshaft/lifter/oil pump/water pump/... and extrapolate that to the specialized farm implements; I think you get the message
>I do not see the need to put engineers on each farm.
So if a farmer has a combine part break down post-PO, and the manufacturer is struggling because of issues with 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th order dependencies with their suppliers, which engineers are going to come to his rescue, as you mentioned above? Are all parts for all existing farm machinery going to be redesigned and re-manufactured? Such a scenario fails the test of the problems the manufacturer was experiencing in the first place.
Your reference to the 19th century was interesting; in a booming economy, many things are possible; in a crisis economy (or even a collapse), the situation is quite different. Of course, we may see a return to agriculture not unlike that of the 19th century.
Will,
Let me give you a message: I work in engineering. I watch guys who maintain old products do parts substitution (I tend to work on new designs myself). I'm in the computing end of things. Parts go obsolete. An electronic controller design gets shifted to a newer process of the same instruction set architecture. We keep on going. An analog part goes end-of-life. We work around this and our repair department can still replace parts.
Mechanical designs: The designs exist. I know that Mercedes Benz, for example, can build a piston or valve of a 30+ year old car from original drawings. Porsche routinely provides parts replacements for 30+ year old cars since Porsche owners keep their cars running longer than owners of more common cars (an engineer in Germany I work with heard this directly from Porsche engineers). If there's a market with buying power there'll be suppliers.
If you project an extremely severe collapse then, yes, there won't be parts. But you've got to come with an extremely severe collapse for that to happen. If the farmers are all operating and have money to pay for parts then parts suppliers will supply the parts.
My reference to the 19th century: We'd have to cave in really really far to get back to 19th century living standards. We'd have to fall by an order of magnitude or more to get back to the 19th century. That's not going to happen because we have enough energy coming from non-oil sources to keep our energy consumption at probably about half our current level. So we fall back to maybe 1940 or 1950. Well, we had an industrial economy with lots of valves and pistons and other gadgets back then.
Pundit,
Let's just say you have your opinion and I have mine; no one has a crystal ball, obviously.
Future Pundit, US agriculture of the late 19th century was not sustainable long term. They used iron plows, harrows, combines, etc produced with metallurgic grade coal. They shipped centuries' accumaltions of guano from Pacific islands to the US for the nitrogen. They sluaghtered buffalo for their bones (phosphorous) and burned off New England forrests for the ash (potassium). They hunted the Passenger Pigeon to extinction. Iron plows started the loss of topsoil to erosion that continues to this day.
Again, late 19th century US agriculture was NOT sustainable.
PLAN, PLANt, PLANet
Errol in Miami
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Jim, did you know your "Long emergency" article inspired a videogame (Frontlines: Fuel of War)?
In the intro video (go to "Multimedia" -> "Trailers", it's the fifth video, top to bottom) the narrator even says this:
It's the first Peak Oil Videogame!
Of course what the developers did was just use it as an excuse for another first person shooter, but this is a first for a mass market videogame. I bet they were in some sense, touched by it, they took a lot of trouble to paint what could be a possible future
Some quotes I read while browsing for the intro video at gametrailers:
Also, go to Frontlines website and check "About the game" -> "Worldview" and you'll see that the background story for the game is a "worst case peak oil die off scenario", It even has a timeline! ("About the game" -> "Timeline"), is worth quoting:
The rest is super ultra doomer porn that goes beyond peak oil (avian influenza, the world splits into two blocks, the west and China plus Rusia, etc!). After all, is just a game.
Edit: uh, somehow I didn' t realise this wasn't a drumbeat, sorry for the off topic...
JK-
Just finished "World" two nights ago. Very much enjoyed it. Probably more than most would, given how well I know that geography of (not quite) nowhere, having been born in and raised probably about as far from GF hospital as 'Union Grove' is. My only critique is that red wolves are a southern species - found here in NC where I now live. And like the New Faithers, my bug out northward is already planned, probably within 6 mos., as I concur with your vision that the SE ain't gonna be no place to be during the LE.
Clifman
Southern species migrate north in a warmer world...also part of the book's scenario.
Farmers operating near metropolitan areas will have it very tough. For a prime example of street thug behavior during crisis/power outages, look no further than New Orleans during Katrina.
Example; thugs shooting at RESCUE helicopters with guns stolen from Wal-mart. Massive sport-killing of total strangers to no end. The areas within a few hundred miles of any city large enough to support an NFL team will become a war zone. Rolling blackouts in -10 below Chicago in Jan, will cause more human carnage and sport-killing will spill over to paranoid wholesale slaughtering. What will start with inner city gangs will spread like a prairie fire to pretty much everyone.
The entire concept of packs of folks living in a small area will no longer work given full-on PO. Humans, like all mammels, need spread out.
On the other hand, the Dakotas, and western NE, KS, OK, etc will be ideal. We are the worldwide, hands down, low-cost-producer of wheat. Period. We can profitably produce wheat at current prices even with ZERO subsidies and $20 diesel, and not one knowledgable person can deny that. If you take diesel to $30, wheat will march north in tandom and we'll keep on smiling. The only thing that whacks us is $3 wheat that comes with $1 diesel. That scenario requires subsidies, because fixed cost expenses eats us up.
Our farm has gun turrets on bins, as a detterant, and pray every day that we never need them.
The sad fact is that our remoteness from the death traps that the cities will become might be our salvation. Gangs of roving mobs will meet strong resistance as they head west from Minneapolis at every farm they encounter. By the time the elevation tops 2,500 feet, the rioting will be far more manageable.
Cities have no future. Suburbs have no future. Ag is where its at.
The commodity boom will last until human population corrects, then raw materials will again become cheap. How cheap depends on the level of human population contraction.
Now let's see: how many millions of you did you say there were?
And how many million of them?
Mind you, you might have history on your side, look at Russia, when food got scarce in the cities it was still plentiful in agricultural areas like the Ukraine, and the city dwellers didn't bother them.
Oh, hang on.....
You aren't going to dwell in peace in some agrarian paradise, nasty men in large forces will come and see to that.
I read somewhere that this was debunked as an urban legend. Be careful what you report as fact.
Katrina New Orleans was a very good example of a collapse situation. Everyone cooperated and was helpfull to others. Except when prevented by the government.
When we have superchinnook snowmelt floods every ten years after Global Warming melts the Arctic Ice Cap, we will expect the same helpfull neighbors syndrome as was demonstrated in New Orleans. Because a superchinnook is going to overwhelm the government. When the Mississippi is sixty miles wide and one thousand miles long, the government might as well give up and go home.
They were firing to get attention.
That's what you do when you need to be rescued, you do what you can to get attention - including firing in the air. Just because you're firing as an aircraft passes overhead doesn't mean you're firing at the aircraft. Just ask those Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan who got shot up by the USAF...
Nor was there any "sport-killing" at all in New Orleans. It didn't happen.
Cannibal hordes spilling forth from cities is just something made up by people who like to fantasise about having an excuse to shoot lots of people.
Beyond a simple hatred of 'city people', it makes no sense outside an Omega Man fantasy.
Why would farmers want to kill their customers?
You also forget that there are more city people than farmers and the farmers-turned-soldiers would be overwelmed by superior numbers.
An example of the fate of farmers happened in the USSR in 1928. There was a food shortage in the cities and the fast-track collectivization policy of Stalin was opposed by independent farmers, who destroyed food stocks in protest. At that point Stalin announced a change of policy from limiting the influence of 'kulaks' to
forcibly transporting them to Central Asia under the supervision of the NKVD. You know what happened--food was collected and there was a famine in the country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
All I can say is if there were a food famine in US cities and US farmers refused to help, I would expect the US military to harvest those crops, expropriate property, etc.
Bravo
As a "small" grower, I'm seeing this bear out. It's a lot of work but I see myself being able to make it financially in 2 years. Produce distributors can not compete with me at $4.50/ gal. diesel. This years market focus is on hospitals and retirement homes, we ain't gonna run out of old and sick folks any time soon.