<The Impact of the Credit Crunch on Energy Markets The Oil Drum DrumBeat: October 5, 2008>

58 comments on Energy Quality and Economic Value

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airdale on October 4, 2008 - 9:47am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

Without having read the main text of the key post I would make this salient point based on the economics of food.

It is of great importance the type of soil you reside on and produce food on. Again...the ability to grow means you MUST have good soil.

Much of the US is very poor soil. Also sufficient rainfall is next.

So for those who are sitting in cities? Adios......amigo!

Yes light rail and all that..bicycles and so forth ..yet we are starting to see how bad it will get as 'service' companies go under and therefore take down the big corporations. So much is outsourced. So much is contracted. Without the small companies how do the large ones continue?

We would have zero chances of getting this harvest in here in my area if we had no infrastructure of other assests to rely on. Machinery breaks. Each day a piece of equipment falters. The combine has done this three times since we started. A belt blew, a chain broke, and now some bearings are going out. A very small circuit breaker causes the lights to fail and we need those at night...days are getting shorter you see. All the trucks are constantly under repair.

Without maintenance all this equipment would stop very very fast. Good soil or not.

Yet with handtools one can grow a garden. One can run pigs over it in the winter to enrich the soil or put chickens in it to eat the insects.

Yet without the basic good soil you are fighting a losing battle.\At my son's house in N.Carolina the soil was a total loss. Rocks and clay. Good thing he sold and got out.

Airdale

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sendoilplease on October 4, 2008 - 11:51am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Dmitry Orlov makes the point that post-collapse, most large farms become relatively useless, and that small ( ~< 10 acre) farms that rely mostly on human labor will be the most productive...

Because our industrialized Mega farms require, as you explain, high maintenance, energy-intensive equipment/infrastructure, their land becomes a "stranded asset" ...

And, as you note, the cities will be full of "stranded assets" - human labor with nothing to do ... and very little to eat.

Rural areas will suffer too, but I think you are correct when you say, " So for those who are sitting in cities? Adios......amigo!"

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memmel on October 5, 2008 - 2:28am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I've actually though a lot about this. It seems that automating farming on the small scale can have a really positive effect. In fact we might be able to automate to the point that the amount of human labor used in farming is reduced to the one of task and ones you enjoy.

I posted in the past about the idea of a small robot with sensors managing a small intensive plot. I think its readily doable with modern technology and using say solar wind energy to power a multitasking robot for food production seems to be a pretty good investment.

Its high on my todo list to explore these ideas further.

http://www.primidi.com/2004/07/07.html

The point is that by reducing the amount of human labor needed on the farm and using intensive methods with robots we can achieve a nice food surplus to allow other activities.

I think this is better than going all the way back to pure manual labor or even using small tractors.

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phil harris on October 5, 2008 - 6:32am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Memmel
I have been likewise thinking (and trying small-scale cultivation) in spare time for 25 or more years in northern England.
Is it worth, however, now backing up a bit, and looking at possible different scenarios? I wonder about North America where there is vastly more land.
Having previously regarded growing biofuels as useless for substituting for current total transport fuel usage (biofuels are a really ludicrous idea in the UK as soon as one checks the numbers), I wonder nevertheless about farms in mostly rural communities growing fuel mostly just for the farm. (The trend round here has been to use ever larger more efficient machines - economies of scale.) If a large farm needs 2 guys (which is normal where I live), how much home-grown fuel could they need to service the farm? The fuel growing would not export soil nutrients away from the farm. (edit. Not 'draining' the soil fertility from farms is critical if NPK imports are limited. There are historical analogies with large estates served by vast human labor having a small per capita food surplus for 'export' or 'tax', or similarly with present 2000 year old Chinese villages served by a high density of persons who are sustained by and renew their high-yielding presently 12t/ha/yr grain systems using these days some supplementary synthetic N input.)
In an alternative 'post-modern' scenario, non-farming populations local to large farms could grow their own vegetables and fruit of very high nutritional value very efficiently in gardens that were sustainably manured by compost toilets, collecting particularly the high NK urine fraction. Their main calories needs, however, would be served by the mechanized big farms. The big farms would need to retrieve (with machinery) a proportional fraction of the composted humanure to balance the farm's soil nutrients budget.
One problem is to figure out what total non-farming population might be carried by a region supported in this way. It is hard to imagine the region supporting large urban populations.
[ So far I (we), in our very large garden have been able to maintain or enhance easily cultivated soil and maintain (just) soil fertility for garden produce, but we still need to 'parasitise' the local large scale farm. (He does not need up to now too many 'symbionts'). So far though, on prime garden soil, I cannot improve on moving swiftly with timely cultivations using a large '3rd-world' hoe, coupled with straw mulches ex my large farm neighbour!]

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memmel on October 5, 2008 - 1:40pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Well first you probably should rethink how you farm. For example plowing do you need a mechanical plow or can you use a different method. And idea I got from the oil drum is to use hydrostatic pressure to break up soil. In this case you simply need to be able to drill a hole or cut a narrow trench to insert a high pressure balloon deep in the soil then fill it with water or air.
The pressure will lift up the overburden breaking up the soil better than plowing.
This idea comes from the hydrfracturing of NG wells :)

Next for energy on the farm a return to the lowly steam engine makes a lot of sense if your using biofuels. External combustion beats internal in this case since the fuel need not be processed.
Another possibility thats higher tech is solid oxide fuel cells. And one I'm interested in is liquid nitrogen powered equipment. Thus on the farm there seems to be no intrinsic reason to use internal combustion.

Fluidics also represent a wonderful opportunity to build simple logic circuits that are robust and can handle a lot of the control needs for a automated farm.

Finally and surprisingly it seems no one is looking at smell on the farm. By smell I mean identifying the situation by using volatiles. Weeds smell diferrently from crop plants ripe fruit is obvious by its smell. I laugh when I see these picking machines developed using advanced vision algorithms when a simple visual algo coupled with a good nose can pick the perfect fruit any day of the week.

So much is possible its astounding all you have to do is think outside the box just a bit and focus on the problems that need to be solved in farming. For whatever reason it seems farming has been neglected it seems we have chosen to assume that every farm problem is best solved with a tractor. I actually don't see the need for tractors at all with a bit of thought. Various hydraulic methods using water or air seem to be capable of solving most farming problems.

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OMGlikeWTF on October 5, 2008 - 10:00am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Hi memmel, I like the idea of robot assisted farming. A unit similar to the roomba robot vacuum cleaner
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roomba
could happily wander a small area, destroy weeds and pests.

Perhaps a robotic worm/snake made up of many rotating sections which could help break up the soil and deliver fertilizers/biochar directly into the ground rather than the surface.

Possibly some type of light electric assisted exoskeleton powered from an overhead PV panel to provide shade to the operator would allow a single human to do the work of many labourers or fossil fuel powered tractors.

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memmel on October 5, 2008 - 1:43pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I think the snake is a fantastic idea seem my above post about hydraulics a snake powered by hydraulic pressure with a lot of fluidic controls with electronic isolated to the sensors makes a ton of sense. Depending on the design the hydraulic pressure can be done internally or externally or both depending on the need.

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58 comments on Energy Quality and Economic Value

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