Peak Oil And World Food Supplies
Posted by Gail the Actuary on July 27, 2009 - 9:14am
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: food supply, peak oil, peter goodchild [list all tags]
This is a guest post by Peter Goodchild, author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is odonatus@live.com. This piece was previously published at countercurrents.org.
Only about 10 percent of the world’s land surface is arable, whereas the other 90 percent is just rock, sand, or swamp, which can never be made to produce crops, whether we use “high” or “low” technology or something in the middle. In an age with diminishing supplies of oil and other fossil fuels, this 10:90 ratio may be creating two gigantic problems that have been largely ignored.
The first is that humans are not living only on that 10 percent of arable land, they are living everywhere, while trucks, trains, ships, and airplanes bring the food to where those people are living. What will happen when the vehicles are no longer operating? Will everyone move into those “10 percent” lands where the crops can be grown?
The other problem with the 10:90 ratio is that with “low technology,” i.e. technology that does not use petroleum or other fossil fuels, crop yields diminish considerably. As David Pimentel showed in 1984 in his “Food and Energy Resources,” with non-mechanized agriculture, corn (maize) production is only about 2,000 kilograms per hectare, about a third of the yield that a farmer would get with modern machinery and chemical fertilizer. If that is the case, then not only will 100 percent of the people be living on 10 percent of the land, but there will be less food available for that 100 percent.
Incidentally, my use of Pimentel’s study of corn is mainly due to the fact that, although his analysis is only a small and limited one, it provides a handy baseline for other studies of population and food supply. In general, a vegetarian diet requires far less of the world’s resources than a carnivorous one, although I have my doubts about the dietary wisdom of avoiding meat entirely. More specifically, corn is one of the most useful grains for supporting human life; the native people of the Americas lived on it for thousands of years. Corn is high-yielding and needs little in the way of equipment, and the more ancient varieties are largely trouble-free in terms of diseases, pests, and soil depletion. If it can’t be done with corn, it can’t be done with anything.
Actually, of course, there is a third problem that arises from the first two. This is the fact that if 100 percent of the people are living on 10 percent of the land, then the land may have so many people, roads, and buildings on it that a good deal of that land will be unavailable for farming. This problem of disappearing farmland is certainly not a new one; for centuries it seemed only common sense to build our cities in the midst of our paradises.
Let us play with some of these numbers and see what happens. These are only rough figures, admittedly, but greater accuracy is impossible because of the question of how one defines one’s terms, and even more by the fact that everything on this poor planet is rapidly changing. The present population of the Earth is about 7 billion, but there is no point in being more specific, since the number is increasing daily. Nevertheless, 7 billion should be a large enough number to make us seriously consider the consequences. (What other large mammal can be found in such numbers?) When I was born, in 1949, there were less than 3 billion, and it amazes me that this jump is rarely regarded as significant. These 7 billion people in turn live on only about 29 percent of the surface of the Earth, i.e. on dry land, which is about 148 million square kilometers.
Of that 148 million square kilometers, the arable portion, as I said, is only about 10 percent, or 15 million square kilometers. If we divide that 15 million square kilometers into the present figure for human population, we arrive at a ratio of about 470 people per square kilometer of arable land.
Is that last ratio a matter for concern? I would think so. A hard-working (i.e. farming) adult burns about 2 million kilocalories (“calories”) per year. The food energy from Pimentel’s hectare of corn is about 7 million kilocalories. Under primitive conditions, then, 1 hectare of corn would support only 3 or 4 people — or, in other words, 1 square kilometer would support 300 or 400 people. And all of these are ideal numbers; we are assuming that all resources are distributed rationally and equitably. (We are also assuming no increase in population, but famine and the attendant decrease in fertility will take care of that matter very soon.) Even if every inch of our planet’s “arable portion” were devoted to the raising of corn or other useful crops, we would have trouble squeezing in those 470 people mentioned in the previous paragraph.
Given such figures, I have little patience with writers who sprinkle the words “alternative,” “sustainable,” and “transition” over every page. Simple arithmetic is all that is needed to show that such a lexicon is unsuitable.
Nor can I do anything but shake my head when my “organic gardener” friends tell me that they can grow unlimited amounts of food merely by the liberal application of cow manure. Eliot Coleman, Andrew W. Lee, and other recent writers on “low-tech” agriculture (not to mention any farmers of the old school) agree that if cow manure is used on a hectare of farmland, for the first year of crop production at least 100 metric tons are necessary, and after that about 20 tons per year might be adequate. However, cows take up land. Another older but valuable book is Frances Mooore Lappe’s “Diet for a Small Planet,” in which she points out that one cow requires over a hectare in pasturage; that is in addition to the hay, grain, and other foods that the animal is given.
How many cows are needed for all that manure? I neither know nor care. All that is certain is that the use of cows to keep a garden in production would multiply the necessary land area enormously. There would also be no mechanized equipment to deliver the manure. The knowledge of animal husbandry, under primitive conditions, could certainly not be learned overnight. But I can say from experience that reality hits when the sun is going down and the shovel is getting heavy.
Many of the false figures that appear in discussions of the future are the result of armchair gardening of the worst sort. Growing a tiny patch of lettuce and tomatoes is not subsistence gardening. To support human life one must be growing grains and similar crops high in carbohydrates and protein, and these foods must be in quantities large enough to supply three full meals a day, every day, for every person in the household. We must also consider that in apocalyptic times it will certainly not be possible to stroll over to the tap and use a hose to pour unlimited amounts of water over one’s plants; on a large garden, the water is whatever the sky decides to send.
There may be an odd solution or two. There are parts of the Earth where population is actually decreasing in absolute numbers, as people mistakenly come to believe that country living is too hard. Well, yes, being squeezed out by multinationals is definitely too hard, but I’m talking about subsistence agriculture, not trying to survive by picking beans for a dollar an hour. Another partial solution may be a return to foraging, especially for those who choose to live in that non-arable 90 percent. Hunting and fishing have become unfashionable hobbies, but for the physically fit these skills could be a lifesaver; over-harvesting is certainly a concern, but the great majority of westerners are far too weak to spend a day plowing through underbrush.
The seacoast has possibilities that intrigue me. In various coastal areas it is traditional to grow potatoes by placing them on bare rock and covering them with seaweed. Even without a boat it is possible to get a meal by gathering shellfish.
Nor should we totally discount the practicality of animal husbandry. There are many parts of the world that are not suitable for agriculture, but the same land might produce wild grasses or other vegetation that in turn could feed domesticated animals. Under primitive conditions the density of human population in such areas would have to be very low, and the danger of over-grazing would always be there, but the truth is that there are large parts of the world that supported a pastoral life for centuries.
I don’t have much patience with cobbled-together happy endings, but I think there are answers for those who are single-minded enough to go after them. Remember that you can’t save the whole human race, you can only save a few people; learn to use a gun and an ax; head for the country. Oh, yes, and get yourself a reputation as a good neighbor; they may not actually adopt you, but they might help you out when there’s trouble.
Peter Goodchild is the author of “Survival Skills of the North American Indians,” published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is odonatus@live.com.
This is not a subject I know a whole lot about. But it seems like there are variations in the degree of arability. There are a lot of places that we can grow crops now, that without big inputs of water and fertilizer, the amounts we could grow in the future would be much lower. There are other places that can produce two crops a year, rather than one, because of a long growing season. I don't know how this works into the total calculation.
Gail, the point is that we are already producing the maximum, and that is with all the available fertilizers, weed and grass herbicides and pesticides. Places that can produce two crops per year are already producing two crops per year. And of course that is having a devastating effect on the topsoil in most of these places.
There are just not many places that could produce large crops without fertilizer and all require lots of water. Of course most places do not use irrigation and that is what causes famines in drought years. And in most places that do use irrigation are suffering from dramatically falling water tables. In some places in India and China water tables are falling from three to four meters per year.
And add to this the fact that per capita fish catch peaked in 1988 and is now down to about half that amount. Graph of the Day: Caught Seafood Per Person (Peak Seafood)
The point of the whole article, and an excellent article it is, that a decline in oil supplies will mean a corresponding decline in food supplies. And of course we all know what follows next. But before that happen we get a plethora of sure fire “fixes”, or reason why it really won’t be so bad. We can just use organic gardening or plant two crops per year or….
I remember, about twenty fiver years ago, a news commentator telling us of a think tank study about the future food supply, perhaps with a little tongue in cheek. He said: There is bad news and worse news. The bad news is that in fifty years we will all be living off crabgrass. The worse news is that there will not be enough crabgrass to go around.
Ron P.
I disagree completely that this is a good, or even useful, article. It is severely slanted to the doomer side (not necessarily bad in and of itself, but not useful for broad analysis), it ignores entire areas of agriculture, overstates the reliance on cow manure (composting doesn't exist?), and overstates the limits to arable land.
It's a polemic, isn't it? Worthwhile as one view, perhaps, but for a limited audience, and that being a particular sort of choir.
We need to think seriously on this issue. That means broadly and deeply - and outside the box.
Cheers
No, there is no outside the box, unless you mean a miracle or a visit from food-bearing aliens from outer space.
Actually I`ve really tried growing food without any fertilizer except for rabbit and guinea pig dung (a little secret humanure too)and composted kitchen wastes and cut grasses. It is incredibly challenging to get anything in any worthwhile quantity. Let`s just use the word "impossible" instead to be more accurate....It is impossible to grow anything in any worthwhile quantity but I`ve gotten some pretty and sort of budgetarily helpful lettuces, broccolis, potatoes, and eggplants, that have been profitable vis a vis the seeds I bought.
When the problems with fertilizer supply surface big time (and they will) I have no idea what will happen but mass starvation seems possible unless a govt is ready with a few massive "grain bailouts".
But lately I`ve noticed a real disappearance of many bugs. If a mass die-off of many species is on the way could we escape? For example, many tribes of aboriginal peoples are now experiencing starvation due to climate change---their food is dieing off!
What makes us special? We are just another species. Already the population is dropping in some countries---technically it`s a "die-off" since it`s not a war or anything.
I`ve become sort of resigned to this possibility recently. Not to demoralize anyone out there or anything but the odds don`t seem to be in our favor.
Living simply in a ruined parking lot near the ocean and starving slowly, growing weaker and weaker by the day although eating a few fish (but not enough) would not be the worst end I could think of. A traffic accident is a much more horrific end, or a heart attack or some horrible disease. Give me slow starvation any day......I think I would have a few books to help pass the days, perhaps some people I knew. What are you going to do? Fight on against unwinnable odds?
No, it isn't "impossible." I do it. Here's the caveat: I use a pickup truck and large trailer for hauling compostables home: equid manure, huge amounts of alfalfa & grass hay, spoiled grain, and anything else that will rot. I use power mowers & rakes, gas & PTO driven chipper/grinders, diesel front-end loader, etc., for processing & moving raw & finished compost. The amount of finished compost required to sustain yields would amaze most people. And even with all this I'm not averse to the spot use of a little MiracleGro now & then, as needed. My point is that I contest your assertion that it's "impossible" to sustainably grow food in quantity without using commercial fertilizers. However, I would agree with you that it's "impossible" to do so without employing fossil fueled equipment for acquiring, processing & distributing compost, on any but the smallest of scales.
I find the irony in this post so thick one could land a 747 on it.
Yes. That's what we'll do. Use all these mechanical devices. While I realize that you intend to point out that one way of doing the impossible is to use that equipment, you are missing the advances that have been made in permaculture methods.
Cuba went through peak oil when the Soviet Union collapsed. They called it their special period. They went from a per capita usage of fossil fuel per food calorie that was actually higher than the United States to a far lower level virtually overnight. They applied permaculture techniques and they survived.
The link at the end of this paragraph leads to a powerpoint that covers it handily. The presentation gives an overview of the peak oil problem but goes into the Cuban example about halfway through. Low-Energy Lifestyle: Lessons from Cuba
While I do not believe that we will be able to use to deploy this methodology quickly enough to prevent starvation since we are not a command economy, I do believe that many people who are currently working towards this will provide information vaults that will serve to help pick up the pieces when its all over.
As to the comments from ccpo, they are hilarious. I suspect that many people who are techno-worshippers will be found in the not too distant future, with their hands held out in the universal gesture of helplessness, wondering why their dreams of flying cars, electric doodads, and electronic social networks don't seem to fill their belly. "But they are doomers! They can't be right! We have technology!'
Grumble grumble goes the belly.
When people contend that they are perfectly capable of providing adequate food sustainably for themselves and families sans fossil fuel input altogether I ask: are you doing it now.
So, are you?
Citing a book you read about permaculture or talking about what the Cubans did doesn't cut it. Unless you, yourself, are growing all your own food without depleting soil fertility and without any fossil fuel inputs whatsoever, you have no credibility on the subject.
DD,
Yeah.
And Cuba is a tropical country with ample rainfall and plenty of good land with a population that was used to privation and hard work and not that far removed from the farm as individuals for the most part.
Plus they always had some foriegn exchange from exporting sugar and nickel and some remitted income from expatriates and some small earnings from visitors in spite of our embargo of thier economy.
And even the well to do under Castro weren't that well to do,so rationing was much easier to accomoplish.
The bankers wife and the dentists wife are going to expect more than a sack of beans and another of flour and another of cabbage here,and that's not going to help at all.
That is the banker's and the dentist's problem.
I agree with you about climate.
The Imperial valley and the great plains don't get enough rain. I don't know about the Southern US but it seams to me that anywhere will be wiped when the first drought hits.
Yeah.
And then there's the dictatorship angle - choose the hoe squad or the firing squad.
Don't forget how malnourished the Cubans became - they bred a whole generation of very short people.
As for Cuban "tourism" - aka national-scale prostitution - it hardly seems like a sustainable solution.
The End of the Beginning of the Collapse, an article on dailykos
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/7/27/758493/-The-End-of-the-Begin...
"...It seems to me we are likely to be entering the era of "converging emergencies..."
That would be yes. Actually, I'm sucking in every free input I can get my hands on, as would anyone with a brain: I use that to pay the mortgage, taxes, and the internet bill. There'd be food for my family with nothing from outside.
Permaculture did not save them.
Cuba imported most of their calories in the form of grains mostly from the USA
go look at grain import data
I've seen this claim a couple times lately and can find very little to support it. Some of what I did find is below. I think maybe 2002 was their best year for local food production. Corrections are welcome.
In 2002, 1.5 MMT grain imported, 3 MMT sugar exported, 3.2 MMT food grown in urban gardens. That does not include their own beef, grain, and tropical fruit production and produce not grown in the urban farms and gardens. As far as calories the sugar they exported was 6 times as many calories in they imported in grain. That's in 2002, current numbers are quite a bit different.
I got the grain imports from here,
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/376498/Cuban-Market_-Good-for-US-Grain
The urban farms and gardens datapoint from here (its on quite a few sites),
http://www.organicconsumers.org/organic/cuba_organic_food.cfm
The datapoint on the 2002 sugar exports from here,
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/FE626
Your comments are so far off-base wrt my comments you may as well have been responding on another site entirely. Me? Technocopian? Hahahaha! Now THAT'S funny!
Cheers
Cuba is a very bad example for the following reasons:
Millions of Cuban expatriates regularly sent back to Cuba money, goods, etc.
Cuba also had "escape valves" of emigration (legal or not) that allowed many of the most disaffected to leave.
Finally, there is the contribution of the big export earners like tourism with tourists from Canada, Europe, Central and Latin America that earned foreign exchange.
I wouldn't even go into the other tourist related trades that earned foreign exchange.....
Have you ever tried starving? I 'll take the car wreck.
no kidding...
I remember reading part of a diary of one of the participants of that experiment - I'll take the car wreck too.
I think the test subject mentioned above knew very well what he intended to do with his fingers...
In other words...
BRRRRRRAAAAAAIIIIINNNNNZZZ!
In our building we have the (occasionally implemented) option of jumping out the window--170ft in about 4 seconds. I could start charging a fee for entry.
I experienced many of those symptoms just trying to drop 15lbs for the summer!!
Gary Taubes deals extensively with this very study in his fascinating book, "Good Calories, Bad Calories". The volunteers were fed a diet based on the expectations of available foodstuffs in the immediate aftermath of WWII, i.e. low fat - high carbohydrate diets with insufficient calories to meet daily metabolic needs. The vast majority of people report little to no hunger while fasting and have none of the untoward psychological disturbances reported in the study. What drives this difference? It seems logical that if eating a little bit makes you go crazy with hunger eating nothing would be even worse, but it is not so.
Many people lose a lot of weight without experiencing obsessive food thoughts simply by cutting out sugars.
Its been a while since I've been there in the history books but if I remember correctly the folks who lived thru the concentration camps do not often describe starvation as physically painful.
I belong to the minority who have surived both a car crash http://www.smp.se/nyheter/alvesta/buss-och-bil-i-frontalkollision(729294).gm and starvation. The car crash was fun. Although I don't remember anything, I got to spinn around on the street, had an ambulance ride and a visit to the hospital, the crew there were very nice. I also have 20 stitches in my head, that is good for showing off. Starvation on the other hand was boring. I was hungry all the time, suffered alot of depressions and were very close to getting angry on everyone for small things the whole time. If I have to go, I take the car crash seven days a week.
Let's just get a bit of perspective on this. Oil, gas and coal are peaking. They are not disappearing overnight ala Cuba style. Peak oil will affect food supplies but it will do so incrementally. The human population can adjust at the same incrementas total food suplies reduce.
Japan is interesting case study for just this scenario. Japan is densely populated and must import food as they have outgrown their own agricultural production. However, the population in Japan is now ageing and is suffering a net loss of population which will presumably relieve some of the pressure in the future. Is it unrealistic to expect that future generations will adjust their reproduction to account for the available food supply? Nature itself may reduce the fertitlity of a starving poulation, a kind of biological feedback system that will kick in automatically. We can already see this happening in Africa and if it wern't for the meddlesome fools who want to 'make poverty history' by maintaining or even increasing the subsidised growth signals into such places, the populations would naturally decline to sustainable levels. It could also be managed much more humanely than the current mode of employing war and famine with all the psycholgical trauma to the individul people caught up in it. Stopping the gun running but also the food and medical subsidies is the only way that Africa will ever be free.
Termoil,
Personally I believe that your scenario of gradually powering down is entirely within reason and actually expect things to work out along similar lines in the US and some other countries.
Very tough times,much lowered expectations,but no starvation ,no freezing citizens-at least not on a large scale.
But I'm afraid we have already passed the point of no return in many parts of the world.
Just so long as it's peak oil,and not peak lead........
Termoil and Oldfarmer, I think this is a very dangerous assumption to start with:
I think many developed nations, including the US, could have a very similar experience if the world economy goes helter-skelter for some indefinite period of time.
A "bumpy" but gradual decline is one reasonable, and maybe even a high-probability, path for our future.
But I think a very disruptive and uncontrolled descent has a much, MUCH higher probability.
I think all industrial nations will experience something similar to the "cuban experiment" - how long the disruptions last and how severe the consequences will depend on the indivudual locales.
I agree that the uncontrolled descent is likely and propose that war is the likely reason things will get really topsy turvy.If you read all my comments you will see that I THINK we can make it in the US and a few other countries by means of stringent rationing while we make emergency adjustments-barring war.All bets are then off,depending on the course of the war.
You're right, population will adjust to match a declining food supply. But if the rate of decline is high, this process will not be slow and peaceful. Historically, this has almost always been the case.
Japan didn't. Food affordability in Japan today is almost the highest ever, and there's negative population growth. After the war, when nobody could afford meat etc., Japan had a baby boom.
I guess you can argue that subconsciously, Japanese "feel" that though food is almost the cheapest ever, it's unsustainable and imported, and this leads them to have less kids, but that seems like a stretch to me.
It comes down to rate of decline then. The author of the post alos didn't really take inot account that thre a mnay more calories consumed in western nations that are needless. Relocalization of food production may mean less of it, but better quality. A plate of vegetables with a little bread and maybe te odd bit of meat has got to be a whole lot healthier than a bucket of deep fried chicken and chips, smothered in gravy and washed down with a litre of high fructose cola.
I picked Japan because of there recent demands on Australia that we somehow guarantee them food security. i thought this was an extraordinary and remarkable concept that Japan would publicly state how dependant and vulnerable they really are. I do remember that Japan launched the Pearl harbour attack after the US imposed an oil embargo. How far could they tolerate a food embargo I wonder, if relations deteriorated sufficiently or actual shortages ensued at some point in the future.
It comes down to rate of decline then. The author of the post alos didn't really take inot account that thre a mnay more calories consumed in western nations that are needless. Relocalization of food production may mean less of it, but better quality. A plate of vegetables with a little bread and maybe te odd bit of meat has got to be a whole lot healthier than a bucket of deep fried chicken and chips, smothered in gravy and washed down with a litre of high fructose cola.
I picked Japan because of there recent demands on Australia that we somehow guarantee them food security. i thought this was an extraordinary and remarkable concept that Japan would publicly state how dependant and vulnerable they really are. I do remember that Japan launched the Pearl harbour attack after the US imposed an oil embargo. How far could they tolerate a food embargo I wonder, if relations deteriorated sufficiently or actual shortages ensued at some point in the future.
It comes down to rate of decline then. The author of the post alos didn't really take inot account that thre a mnay more calories consumed in western nations that are needless. Relocalization of food production may mean less of it, but better quality. A plate of vegetables with a little bread and maybe te odd bit of meat has got to be a whole lot healthier than a bucket of deep fried chicken and chips, smothered in gravy and washed down with a litre of high fructose cola.
I picked Japan because of there recent demands on Australia that we somehow guarantee them food security. i thought this was an extraordinary and remarkable concept that Japan would publicly state how dependant and vulnerable they really are. I do remember that Japan launched the Pearl harbour attack after the US imposed an oil embargo. How far could they tolerate a food embargo I wonder, if relations deteriorated sufficiently or actual shortages ensued at some point in the future.
The Post War Japanese baby boom is characteristics of populations under stress, who go on a reproduction binge to ensure that they would have some members survive.
yeah, that was my point: japan's baby boom and subsequent bust had nothing to do with food, per se.
We also had a mini baby boom for 2007 I believe in the US.
Stopping gun running into failed states like Somalia, etc. have proven to be impossible.
Even Israel, with near total access and control over a very small land area called the "West Bank" and the "Gaza Strip", could not stop gun running.
Indeed, the evidence suggest that as order breaks down, gun running actually increase not only in quantity, but in the lethality of the weapons smuggled.
From basic guns to automatic weapons, then to things like Rocket Propelled Grenades and machine guns, IEDs, and finally, to regular military weapons.
I suppose by "regular military weapons "you mean tanks and bombers.;-)
I'm growing a garden in recently cleared forest http://mybostonmountaingarden.blogspot.com/. I do not till. The only soil amendment I apply is my own urine, dilute 1:15. I've found varieties that grow well without care. Cherokee Popcorn, Texas Hill Country Okra, Matt's Wild Cherry Tomato, Sarian Strawberries, ... I'll have proven seed to sell/trade to neighbors.
Very interesting. Your in the Ozarks I see.
Don't you have any creek bottom ground to plant on? I found in the Ozarks where I lived once that the soil washes off the hillsides and down to the bottoms. I therefore planted my garden right alongside a creek..mostly dry except in rainy season but the bottoms held closer to the water table and the soil was quite rich and grew great gardens.
Same area I fenced off for my horse pastures.
The neighborhood was tough though with lots of trailer folks who were apt to be difficult to live near. I knew many and they were pretty bad to steal and so forth. Yet there were some who were good people but hard to find.
Airdale
What drugs, chemicals, and other contaminants are in your "fertilizer"?
Edlin--how did you clear the forest? Some friends of mine chopped down trees but then left with daunting loads of stumps and roots to contend with. Should they have pulled the trees over first?
Robin,
You can work around them and keep the sprouts trimmed off so they die and after any where from ten years or so for a very small stump,you can probably dig it out by hand as most of the roots will have rotted off.A large stump of a species that is decay resistant -well ,I can't say for sure but a white oak stump two feet across will still be rock hard after forty or fifty years where I live,and it would take a couple of strong men a week to dig it out at least.
As a purely practical matter there is only one good way to get rid of stumps,other than growing old working around them.
Bulldozers and thier brethen the backhoe and the front end track loader- essentially a dozer fitted with a big bucket on the front. The bucket style front loader dozer is the machine of choice
for clearing land,but a big "track hoe" or excavator,which is a machine with a long articulated arm with a digging bucket on the end is really good for stumps if you can get it.
You can get rid of a stump or two a lot quicker than waiting by getting hold of a large drill and boring lots of deep holes in it and putting in a spoonful or so of fertilizer once and some water in each occasionally which will speed up the decay process quite a lot.Keep it wet and cover with dirt or anything handy to retard evaporation.
An acquaintance did this on a large stump in his yard and after four or five years the exposed top was soft enough he could chop it off in chunks easily.This particular stump was a yellow poplar,which would have normally taken at least two or three times to decay that much in the same sunny spot.
Thanks. I take it that in absence of dozer-type machines, it would be best to start by pulling the trees over (with block/tackle etc).
Robin,
If at all possible it would be best to hire the machine.For a thousand bucks Yankee money you can hire a big machine for a day that will do more work of this kind in a day than every body you know by thier first names can do in a month,if you don't know over a couple of hundred people.
Personally I would just find some open land rather than even contemplate any other solution.
But theoritically it IS POSSIBLE to uproot trees with a very large and very heavy block and tackle,although you will probably not find one big enough for the job.
I have seen a number of good sized trees up rooted with very powerful winches-which were mounted on the back of bulldozers!If the operator is so careless or unlucky as to get onto soft enough ground,the machine will sink in and settle down on it's underside,and usually the only way you can free it is with another equally large and heavy machine.
But if there is a large enough tree situated within reach of the winch cable,the winch will either pull the machine out of the mud, or it will uproot the tree.It can go either way.
I drank beer and watched a local contractor up root a dozen trees once with his winch before he gave up due to the fact that no more trees were within reach. He then hired another contractor to bring over his machine and pull him out.
That turned out to be an all day party laughing at the man-half a dozen people told him that the ground would not hold his machine but he was overconfident and wouldn't listen.
He should have waited for at least two or three weeks of dry weather and he could have worked that ground easy as pie.Haste makes waste.
We still have a little fun out of him over having to call his biggest competitor to bail him out.
Incidentally these winches are there so the operator can tie off his machine and drive down hillsides too steep to climb ,and winch himself back to the top.This is a common practice in building roads or mining in the mountians and the winch usually keeps the machine from running away or overturning on such steep slopes.
My great grand parents and my grand parents cleared land by hand by chopping down the trees and piling the brush on the stumps and burning them off to sone extent,then they used mattocks to get as many roots as possible and just worked around what was left for the most part.It the winter,when there was no other pressing work they would finish up a small patch near the house over a few weeks time, maybe a tenth of an acre ,or two tenths.
After twenty years of backbreaking work my great grandfather had close to fifteen acres of nice pasture and cropland free of stumps and undergrowth.Of course he raised nearly all the food for his large family on this same acreage at the same time,except for the first few years,when he worked as a share cropper for another local farmer and worked his own land part time.
Rough cleared land was usually put to pasture and the cow or horse deliberately confined to a small enough area to keep the sprouts and seedlings in check by eating them,since there was not enough grass to satisfy thier hunger. If not too steep,it could be converted to crops as the stumps rotted out.
It was common to uproot smaller well rotted stumps with a horse team ,but even the most powerful tean can do nothing with a green stump,even one no larger than four or five inches across-unless it is a maple or holly or some other species with very shallow roots.
This puts a radically different understanding on the history of the uk, given the huge number of English placenames ending in -ley, which means clearing in the forest, usually with little remaining woodland to be seen. I had been reasoning from the fact of trees getting uprooted by gales.
Rlobin,
It may be possible that in the UK there have been instances of considerable patches of forest being uprooted by storms.
A few small patches of forest here in the southeastern US are stripped of trees occasionally after periods of very heavy rain,which softens the soil, followed immediately by very high winds.Such conditions are produced by hurricanes sometimes.
The forests in areas frequently hit are very seldom uprooted,except by the very worst storms.This mostly only occurs when the heavy rain and high winds reach areas not often subject to these conditions.
The biggest such area I have seen near my home is less than an acre in extent and located on a ridge exposed to the wind.We are well inland and well to the north of what is usually thought of as hurricane country but every twenty or thirty years one makes it this far that still has a little life left in it.
It is far more likely that the trees were girdled,left to die,burnt,and the ground worked by hand and by horse or ox ,dodging the stumps until they rotted away.Or charcoal makers couyld have got there first,followed by farmers.
Time passed slowly in the hills of Virginia a century ago,and probably even more slowly in merry old England in the days those places were earning thier names.
If there is usually a source of good fresh water very close to the named clearings,it's good evidence that they were opened by farmers or woodcutters.
Charcoal making was a major industry prior to the coal era ,which really only got rolling around the mid 17 hundreds if I remember correctly.
At one time the need for charcoal used in smelting iron resulted in large areas of England being virtually stripped of trees.
¨Living simply in a ruined parking lot near the ocean and starving slowly¨
This is really a statement that we have become totally disconnected with our food supply, that we barely know hunger let alone starvation. Starvation is extraordinarily painful. Your body is digesting itself.
A very good article, actually. People need to be scared SH!!LESS, so that they will get off their a$$ and actually move to a different way of living. Those that don't, will soon be dead.
We do not, need to "think seriously" on this issue, the thinking time is over, we need action, now. Typical mindset of the techno-merry-go-round, yea, lets think on this awhile, then we could come up with little thorium reactors in the kitchen and blah, blah, blah.....and every one will sing along at the campfire while they roast their fellow human for dinner.
True change will only come with a bullet, real or imagined.....
Nope...See, in just a few years Iraq will producing almost 8 million bpd...add that to the almost 6 million bpd the U.S. is putting out...and you have 14 million bpd...Of course, all that will go to the U.S.....so things are just fine...(Why else would we spend over a trillion bucks on the Iraq war? To just remove Saddam???? Nyuck nuck yuck yuck yuck)
You are absolutely correct. What a great plan by Bush 1 and Cheney.
They put restrictions on Iraq to prevent them from pumping all the oil out of the ground after the first gulf war and then play cat and mouse for 12 years until the time is right to go in and steal all the reserves. All this BS about leaving the cities etc is a propaganda stunt. The US will never leave Iraq and definitely keep the lions share of the second biggest reserves left on earth. Any one that doesn't see this is just not paying attention.
you're absolutely right, porge.
people who don't see this aren't paying attention - intentionally.
mainstream life is a kind of fantasy-role-playing game. there are tangible benefits to staying in character at all times. those who stray off-message lose jobs, friends, and status. most people are smart enough to internalize this as a child.
i sense that just about all americans can understand the plan for iraq, but don't openly discuss it because that means playing the "truther" role - this role means being invited to fewer parties and getting fewer promotions.
people want to feel good about themselves at low cost. "truthers" are despised for deflating this with "facts."
I guess that I missed that day in childhood when I was suppose to "internalize" bullshit.
No seriously......I think you hang out with a perceptive crowd because most americans are oblivious to anything but Desperate Idol or is that American Housewife.
I understand all about professional and social butt kissing.
Truth might actually start coming back into vogue.
I've spent my life not getting invited to parties and not getting promoted due to what I refer to my personal "big mouth "probem.I keep opening it and pointing out that reality and the plans of mice and men are two different things.
Note: According to a little-known Reserves Sharing Agreement (RSA) among Iraq, Iran and Canada, the "second biggest reserves left on earth" are transferred electronically via a Swiss bank to whichever of the three countries' reserves are being talked about at a given moment.
Seriously, Iraq raised its claimed reserves figure from 47 to 100 billion barrels, literally from one year to the next, in the midst of its war with Iran, while it had clear war-related motivations to boost revenues by exaggeration. It then raised the claimed figure to 115 Gb during the sanctions period, during which one new field had been discovered (one now touted as potentially producing 50,000 b/d). Meanwhile, a UN Experts report on Iraq's oil industry determined in 2000 that production practices under sanctions had already resulted in "permanent loss of huge reserves of oil" - which can only mean that its four major fields, accounting for about 80 percent of Iraq's daily output, had suffered the said permanent losses. (In any case, those four fields had each been in production already for 50-80 years.) Yes, Iraq probably does have comparatively good discovery prospects (though probably not in the Western desert, as it often claimed), and it may (potentially) have the capacity to boost total output above pre-2003 levels for some length of time, if enough new-projects can come on line soon enough. But the claims that Iraq could easily produce 6 or 8 mbd (given stability and investment) has been dismissed by former CIA oil analyst Bob Ebel, for one, as being an absurd fantasy. Please, let us try to remember these facts when reading the next report uncritically touting Iraq's "world's second largest reserves of oil."
yes, iraq's reserves are a lot smaller than reported. but they're still the cheapest to extract - cheaper than saudi even. i've never seen anyone deny that.
Whooooooaaaa there big fellow!!!....Quoting a CIA operative/analyst as a reliable (truthiness is at stake)source?????.....Even us 'Murkins don't believe those guys anymore....LOLOL...Tell you what though...my bet is there is another Ghawar field somewhere in Iraq...Maybe the big boys already know that...maybe they are just guessing.....The geology though, now the geology of the place indicates that possibility...After all, the gangster 'Murkins running the good ole U.S of A. aren't going to spend trillions of dollars on a dry hole...They really care about the money...All those dead bodies, nope, no one cares one whit about that...
Once again, I agree with you. Watch what they do not what they say.
Not one of us here knows much beyond what we read or are told. I haven't been to the middle east with a giant dipstick checking all the holes.
They at least saved the oil in Iraq for 12 years and maybe there are other places to look but no matter what the reason the fact is the US controls Iraq.
aviator202 - I didn't actually cite Ebel as reliable. Rather I stated some of my reasons for thinking that the usual PR claims regarding Iraq's oil potential are an absurd fantasy, and in that context found it notable that one relative insider has reached a similar conclusion. (From memory, I think his actual words were "ridiculous" [=absurd] - as quoted by Greg Palast - and "beyond the realm of reality" [=in the realm of fantasy] - in his introduction to Matt Simmons at CSIS in February 2004. Personally, I wish I knew more about the reasoning and evidence behind these statements by him, but a consideration of basic facts is enough to draw one's own conclusions: Claims that Iraq can easily increase its output to 6 to 8 mbd are indeed absurd, if made without reference to the actual state of the fields responsible for a majority of Iraq's output.
As to your bet that there is another Ghawar field lurking undiscovered in Iraq. The oil majors have sometimes promoted the idea exploration ceased when they left the country in 1961, but of course that isn't true. Iraq did quite a bit of exploration up to about 1980.
Touted as Iraq's largest undeveloped field is Majnoon - I don't know how much credit we can give to the claimed reserve figures as cited in, say, Greg Muttitt's study "Crude Designs," but we may also keep our eye on neighboring Azadegan in Iran for clues.
As for your powers-that-be surely-in-the-know claim, I think one should not underestimate wishful thinking and desperation on their part. Their actions are not indicative of a super-clear perception of the underlying realities.
Finally, for the record, I don't think that Iraq will turn out to be a dry hole, only that current evidence leads one to expect that it will not live up to the inflated claims that are commonly made.
I will take you up on the Ghawar bet.... The fact that you think it is probable that another Ghawar exists shows how little you know about this topic. I suggest you read Matt Symmons book Twilight in the Desert. If there were another Ghawar in the middle east, it would have been found already.
Does extraction cost include cost of the war/police action?
Al
If you analyze the "cost" in terms of net energy and not money and lives you might get your answer.
And then there is the huge strategic value of having one of the last holes to run dry once TSHTF globally.
Once again, does the 'net energy' evaluation include the energy required for the war? And, does ease of extraction take into account political disruption? In Nigeria, political factors have more severely limited the extraction of oil than geological/technical factors have. I think the last holes to run dry when TSHTF will likely be the local, minimally producing ones. How likely is it that areas which are unstable now politically will become more stable when TSHTF? The muscle may be available to take Iraq's oil - but I think the costs, any way they are calculated, will be astronomical and will represent a huge opportunity loss when we consider the energy, resources and human ingenuity committed to squeezing out the last bits of BAU and diverted from transition to the new paradigm (whatever it might be)
IMHO anyway,
Al
I think that you are right that the oil here might be saved for when the world is a much more dangerous place by using more imported oil now and less later.
I still think that it is a strategic move and the actual costs are secondary.
I guess what I am saying is that I think in the future it will be a world at war and in that case money or effort expended don't matter, survival does.
If you believe, like I do, that the planet is grossly overpopulated then my position makes sense.
Look at it this way.
If we don't get Iraq then someone else will.
Iran? China? etc. Do you think they like us?
The move was strategic.
I guess, the point I wanted to make is that i don't believe that Iraqi oil is cheap regardless of the metric used. Further, I believe that any resources sent chasing after oil not in north america are likely resources which are lost to planning and effecting transition.
Of course, it all may be perfectly the right thing to do. I just think that whatever strategic thinking was engaged in this plan was boxed in by the usual BAU paradigm. Instead of building resilience I see this plan as clinging to complexity (ie long supply lines and geopolitical conflict)
Of course, several large corporate players are doing well out of the whole affair. It is likely that we have here another case of privatized earnings and socialized costs. And in those situations I think it is very important to consider as many inputs as possible when evaluating cost. It may be a long time before anything like these resources are available again and expending them to enrich a few at the expense of the populace is, IMO, not a good use of those resources.
Regards, Al
bmcnett- I think you are quite correct here regarding relative costs of extraction, from the little I've seen reported. Saudi's new oil is invariably very expensive in terms of the absolute cost of the projects, and the only way it can be described as cheap at all is with very generous assumptions about ultimate recovery volumes. Cf. the 15 billion price tag on Khureis, or the fact that Shaybah, with the normal extraction wells of the past, would have only 1/35 the daily output as with the expensive high tech wells actually used to develop the field. See my paper "Largely About Access," which was put up on Energy Bulletin back in January.
Apparently some of you don't read my posts. (I am shattered, truly.)
Your rant is silly in the context of my posting history. Given their prevalence - or lack thereof - in developed countries, natural farming and permaculture ARE thinking outside the box.
Cheers
CCPO, You haven't been around for awhile...ifn your gone over a week or so then you are like a newbie here. Thats the way TOD works, seems to me.
BTW have you started your gardening yet after your move? Or have not moved as yet?
FWIW my garden is slowly failing. I got a half bushel of potatoes. Corn destroyed by coons. A few tomatoes are coming along. Some beans and peas and the rest is pathetic. Worse garden I ever raised.
Our weather is mostly to blame. Cool days for July must have set historical records. Lots of rain..4 inches one day...anohter inch last night...far too much rain and changeable heat.
I will have nothing to can at all. And last winter during the massive ice storm I lost a whole freezer due to almost a 2 month power outage.
The only thing that is growing well is cucumbers and okra. The rest is going nowhere.
Airdale
Hello,
It's hard to be on these days. Lots of family and friends to catch up with, as you might expect. We're working on some transportation, will be visiting ecovillages in August and Septemeber while simultaneously searching for land and also trying to make contact with certain entities about doing something more urban.
I've yet to get a single family member or friend interested in saving their own arse, so we are on our own for now. Funny-strange: so many people moving into sustainability issues, farming, etc., yet *SO* very hard to connect with.
Ah, but I am well behind in my work (research and outreach), so am likely to blame for the failures thus far.
Your experience this year may be everyone's future, Airdale. I don't discount that possibility, as you know. In fact, I find our systems exceedingly fragile and expect I shall need a lot of luck to raise a healthy, well-fed son. Ah, but sure an' e'es a kick in the arse just now!
Cheers
We're having drought this year. Most of the corn and beans in the fields around me are very stunted and likely worthless (the only good growth is in areas with clay subsoil).
The corn in my garden is doing very well, even though I planted three weeks later than the area farmers - thanks to irrigation and home-made chicken poop.
Funny, this morning my daughter discovered a single two-foot tall corn stalk growing in our bon-fire pir out back. It must have come from an ear of corn roasted last July 4th... that was the last time we could have a bon fire, due to the high fire hazard conditions.
That single corn stalk is very healthy. The fire pit's ash/charcoal bed must retain moisture because we certainly did not water the fire pit this month ;).
SOP,
What region of the country are you in?
Perhaps Arkansas or Oklahoma?
The beans are very spotty in some areas due to bad germination - and the corn is tasseling and silk is black but what I see are smallish ears.
We have had almost 9 inches of rain just his month. Rains almost every nite now...and only up to 75 degrees today...A very very cool July.
Airdale
Hi Airdale,
I'm sort of north-eastern Wisconsin.
The last few years the drought has been hitting the northern part of the state, and the southern part of the state has been getting excess precipitation - more of both snow and rain.
About weather changes, the last few years our winters have been returning to what they were like in the 1970's - very cold and lots of snow. For most of the late 80's, 90's and early 00's the winters were so mild snowmobiling almost went extinct and you could wear a T-shirt while deer-hunting in late November.
If we think broadly and deeply outside the box we will figure out how to feed 7 billion people with the aid of pointed stick planting and little or no irrigation water.
I think it you have it backwards CC. The severely slanted articles are those that claim we can feed billions if only we resort to organic gardening and fertilized from compost. The very idea that we can continue to feed the world's bulging population when the horsepower and chemicals from fossil fuels are gone is truly foolish. Magical thinking is common among those who cannot accept this simple fact.
Karachi has 10,772 people per square kilometer and Mumbai has 8,170 per square kilometer. The world’s 20 largest metropolitan areas have an average density of 4,209 people per square kilometer. How many people can one square kilometer feed? And we must consider the fact that within these metropolitan areas there is virtually no arable land.
To survive these people, and everyone in every other city of the world for that matter, would have to move to the country and stake out their own little plot of arable land. But all the land is already taken by someone. Needles to say there will be conflict.
The whole human situation and predicament is best described in this article.
Energy and Human evolution
And, when that abundant, cheap energy is no longer available…..
Ron P.
I don't mean to sound callous - I truly do care about the fate of all the world peoples. However, I do wonder how I can pretend to know how to solve the problems of people in other parts of the world, especially given the poor job we are doing of dealing with our own problems here in the USA. I also wonder how appropriate it is to attempt to go around telling other people what they should do. I would think that they've heard just about enough of that from us already.
Thus, addressing just the USA: We have a lot of good land, but we are not using it very well. We have allowed urban sprawl to eat up too much prime farmland. Too much land is being dedicated to the cultivation of ornamental grass, when it could be used to grow vegetables or pasturage for small livestock. A far greater percentage of the trees we grow could be fruit trees, with due care taken to preserve critical wildlife habitat. We could shift a lot of our herding on marginal lands from beef cattle to sheep. We could encourage people to shift their diets away from feed lot beef and pork, and toward grass-fed lamb, poultry, dairy, and a grains/legume combo. With a more intelligent approach, I suspect that the US could still feed its present population (450M is more questionable, but I doubt that we are actually going to see that level) even with much lower crop yields. That is not the same thing as saying that everyone can eat a full McDonalds meal three times daily and fill their tanks with biofuels.
WRT compost and soil amendments: Human wastes are going to have to be part of the cycle, there is simply no way around that. We need to retrofit all sewage treatment systems with anaerobic generators to get as much methane out of the waste flow as possible. These probably also need to be equipped with some sort of solar heating system to raise the temperatures of the processed slurry enough to kill all pathogens and parasites. We need to also ban all household products that contain toxins and that might end up in the sewage system, and we need to separate out industrial wastes into a totally separate treatment system. With these measures, the treated slurry should be safe to apply to the soil, especially if followed by a rotation of pasture or cover crops prior to that land being used to grow food crops.
Can we also ban the toxins that people ingest?
"medication residues pass out of the body and into sewer lines...."
http://www.epa.gov/ppcp/faq.html
It would be an interesting irony if we were to outlaw dumping into sewers the synthetic chemicals that physicians prescribe and insurance companies underwrite for human ingestion.
Observer,your comments as usual show a lot of careful thought.
Every point you make is a good one,but convincing the public that thse things are necessary is going to be one hell of a job.
Your point about meat being produced on more pastureand less feed is particularly important in that some seem to think that all our pasture lands can be converted to crop land.
This is not true,a very large part of our pastures are too steep, too rocky,or too dry to use for crops.
Darwinian,
I have mentioned the possibility of trying to move the population of say NYC to the delta lands of the deep south where the sun lnows how and putting ten milliom people in tent cities so they can get busy with hand tools double cropping veggies.
Can you even begin to imagine the chaos involved in just transporting the ones willing to leave and the dalta county sheriffs blocking the local roads saying no to the military police escorting the refugees?
The little girls crying over euthanized kittens,the iold folks who will have strokes and heart attacks on the road?
The length of the line in front of the tent where the doctor writes the medical exemption certificates that will turn "field hands"into "house servants"?
Hell the riots alone will probably take out the first third of the people who would otherwise starve in the first few months.
I might possibly get the first dozen looters that reach my place,but I won't likely last very long unless we can form a very hard core local militia that simply denies outsiders entry into our community.
Dig a moat and stock it with sharks and crocodiles.
no good. both sharks and crocs are edible and would draw that many more would be visitors ;-)
Just think of the videos you can get for animal planet.
Animals disappeared from the Havana Zoo when they lost the Soviet imports.
How about putting those people to work building a canal system that would distribute Mississippi waters everywhere from Texas to the Carolinas, modeled after the huge canal network of China, as F.H. King proposed circa 1910. I share the disdain for the easy "if only we shifted to organic farming" talk, but I would very much like to see some serious discussion of the ramifications of King's proposal today.
Check out agriculture and EROI in most any environmental science text, Miller "Living in the Environment" and you will find that EROEI for modern ag is 1 to 10. Locavores are starting to deal with this.
ccpo,
We don't have time to climb out of THIS BOX inless bau continues merrily a long for a few more decades at least while new technologies are invented,researched and commercialized.Any reasonable time frame would have to be based on continued bau and probably not a "few more decades" but a century or more of Rand D.
We would need nanotech on the level of a sci-fi movie....or alchemy.
ccpo stated
I believe this is an valuable article because it does not get lost in the myriad of details so many use to confuse and detract from the real issues at hand. It provides an excellent base for a broad analysis, one that so often does not get its due.
Goodchild's estimates of the available arable land around the world are in pretty good agreement with what I have read before. It also matches my life experience, starting as a farm boy in Oklahoma before the time of irrigation but after the dust bowl and re-enforced by my travels throughout the Midwest and Western states as an RVer in retirement over the past 12 years.
Back in the early days, when Dad depended on the rain to water the crops, and when we didn't have much except cow manure to spread for fertilizer, the crop yields were good but not great. As agricultural engineering took over and we had irrigation and fertilizer and insecticide and herbicides, crop yields climbed, maybe to double, but it was an increasingly hard fight to get any more from the land. BYW, corn was always a good crop. We had milk cows that grazed on the grass on the hillsides that could not be plowed, but they still required we raise alfalfa and feed them corn before they gave much milk.
The key thing I remember is that without water, we did not have a crop. That is true in most places. My folks moved to the San Joaquin valley in California in 1958, and we visited them many times. Around the Kings and Kern Rivers there were lush fields and green orchards, but to the west it was dry, dry desert. Then they put in the California Aqueduct and that land turned into lush fields and green orchards. This last year the water authorities told the farmers they would be cut back over 85%, receiving at most 15% of their former allotment. There simply is not enough water to share with the LA basin and the ecosystem of the Sacramento River Delta. Now you see dry, dry desert sprinkled with rows of dead fruit trees. It is a warning of things to come, for much of what the LA folks ate came from that "new" farmland in the 70s and 80s. Now it comes from Mexico and Chili.
I have seen the same thing happening in Iowa and Louisiana and Texas and Nebraska. Land has been pushed to its limit, water has been pumped until the wells run dry, and there is just not as much arable land out there as we once thought.
So I agree with the broad point that the amount of arable land is limited, and in fact I expect it will decline much more with time because of the growing lack of water.
Goodchild uses the number of 300 to 400 as the upper limit of people that can be fed by a square kilometer of farmland -- IF everything is working right. The world is at 470 per and counting. I doubt if these numbers are exact, but I think they are correct within a factor of 2 or 3, and the relative ranking is correct. The world already has more people than we can reasonably support -- I think the number of people already in the starving category number 800 billion or so.
Now, we factor in a changing climate and depletion of fossil fuels, both of which will severely affect the amount of arable land and the ability of getting the foodstuffs to the people that are hungry. I can envision farming in the great San Joaquin valley being reduced to the eastern side near the rivers that flow down from the mountains. My swag is a 70% reduction in productivity. Farming will be done with horses and mules (a great opportunity for future business growth), and the crops produced there will be fought over by the hordes of starving people in the LA basin (14m and growing), especially after water from the Colorado River runs dry and shipping food from Mexico and Chili costs too much.
Of course, whatever is grown in the San Joaquin valley for sale must be transported over the 4,000 foot mountains into the LA basin, but that takes fuel. Where does that come from?
My experience is with just one part of the world, but my vision of the future fits with what Goodchild is saying. Yes, he has ignored some of the other areas of agriculture, and maybe he expects more than he will get from cow manure. But his final message is on target.
Oh yes, choose carefully where you hunker down. Be sure the water supply will continue running without power and in a warming world.
For those who might be interested, in addition to pushing LEDs at PrudentRVer my newest effort is publishing a novel on twitter, one line at a time. You can follow along at WasATimeWhen.
Sam Penny
the Prudent RVer
Perhaps what you are referring to are "the facts"? How can you praise an article for leaving out the details? Wheteher they are used to confuse or not is another issue and not justification to leave them out.
Mitigation is all in the timing. I don't disagree with you, and yet, I do. The key post made claims that simply are not so. There is enough land. Comments in this thread provide info that support this. What there is not enough of are people willing to demand things be done differently, or to simply DO things differently.
See my post further down in response to one of the farmers.
Cheers
I find that to be the case with everything I've seen from Peter Goodchild. He has only a minimal ability to do calculations, and does roughly zero research to establish the numbers he calculates from.
I've no idea where he got his one hectare, plus grain and hay, per cow, but here in New Hampshire, from which farmers madly skedaddled throughout the 19th century, one hectare will provide both pasture and hay for one cow. (Grain? For cows? $20/bbl oil? same universe.)
I know I'm setting myself up for "put up or shut up", but probably the only thing I agree with X and KDoliso about is that the TOD staff have no clue about agriculture.
Jeavons claims his (low water use) system requires 4000 square feet to feed one person, including growing enough organic matter to sustain soil fertility, which works out to about 25 people/hectare.
A 25-year old maize study by Pimentel (who has been accused of using unrealistic agricultural numbers in his biodiesel papers) is I think outweighed by more long-term and systematic research which finds equal or superior productivity per hectare for organic over conventional agriculture. While small-scale intensive organic agriculture is more productive per hectare, it also requires more labour. This is a surmountable problem as while we have a shortage of good arable land, we have a longage of potential agricultural workers.
So if the permaculturalists are right we have the technical ability to grow the world's food without oil. However this does not provide a sustainable solution unless other prerequisites are met, including rational land and water distribution, decarbonised transportation, humanure, a long-term approach to soil fertility, population control, and of course massive cultural change.
Realistically we can expect overexploitation of natural resources to increase as food becomes more expensive and people become more desperate; food- and oil- exporting countries will protect their improving bargaining positions with higher prices while poorer, more corrupted or less agriculturally adaptable countries will suffer starvation, riots and social breakdown. Perhaps a few countries/regions will have the foresight to adopt a low-carbon permaculture approach, and these might then provide a model for the rest of the world.
Frank, Frank, Frank,
There is no one size fits all. It depends on the soil, the climate and how you do 'grasslands' management.
IIRC a hectare is about 2.5 of our acres. This is given by the Ag Profs as usual but its not.Like I said it depends on many factors.
If you can 'stockpile' fescue or some range land. If you have some spare corn to help winter them over. Do the ponds freeze and so on and on and on.
But I think he might be close to an overall average at that.
Myself I view livestock as having a beneficial effect on the land.
They will chew the grass to the ground and then ingest worm eggs. So again its all up to the farmer.
I ran some cattle and wintered them over a couple of times. They can eat the stuff I refuse to bale up.
Anyway..I liked his approach. It fits well with what I observe and most farmers today , at least here , are totally brain dead and suck the tits of the BiGAgBiz and BigChem folks.
Airdale
The rule of thumb where I live is a cow to the acre. That's including the land for hay; grains and supplements are starting to be used here for milk production, but not for meat. (NB: 2.5 acres to the hectare.)
I also found this article to be overstating things. Simple repairs to existing but dilapidated irrigation systems would help greatly in east Asia. That's without even investing in more water-efficient irrigation - pipes or impervious channels instead of earth-lined ditches. There's a large amount of "fat" -- unexploited land productivity improvements -- in agriculture around the world. (However, not enough for everyone to have a Western diet as we know it today.)
The primary reason that 500 million people are badly malnourished at present is that markets are not being allowed to work.
US and European farmers have squeezed subsidies and trade barriers out of their taxpayers, so farmers in poor countries can not make enough to buy fertiliser or tools. And the "rulers" in many poor countries are more like robbers, so even if the poor farmers did obtain some capital, they wouldn't have it for long. So they don't try.
Hurray for humans!
Frank,
Personally I don't think I ever heard of the man until I saw his piece here today.
He may be way off in some particular areas or aspects,I have no idea.
But painting with the broad brush,which is necessarily the only way you can paint in short a time and so small a venue as a guest post here,he is saying just about the same thing that any frank and no nonsense ag professional dealing in generalities would say-if said professional is also knowledgeable about world politics,peak oil,population,other resource restraints,and so forth.
Plus not in need of an establishment job.
You must realize that most such professionals have very good reasons to keep thier mouths shut-thier paychecks and thier pensions.Furtgermore they are usually very narrowly focused as reasearchers,as ag people work in an environment where immediate,applicable results are far more highly valued than basic research,which is more favorably looked upon say over in the physics or biology department.
If you expect a cow to forage entirely for herself,the amount of energy she can put into milkand a big fat calf is very limited,as she will need most of what she eats to maintain her own body.
But if you supplement her hay and grazing with some corn and maybe a high protien supplement,her productivity SOARS. THINK CARPOOL.If you travel alone in a twenty mile per gallon car,you get twenty passenger miles per gallon.Add a rider ,or two,and you get forty or sixty passenger miles per gallon.
The extra feed comes back to you in spades as milk and a fast growing new cow.And milk and the calf are the whole point of the game.You get much more milk and beef for the time and cash invested.
This is why pigs and broiler chickens are figuratively speaking force fed-to put the wieght on as fast as possible in order to get the most pounds of meat per feed dollar.
The editors may not be ag professionals,but they are pretty savvy researchers and do thier due diligence homework well as far as I can see.The only serious possible exception since I have been visiting was the space solar piece and I believe they ran it more to debunk it than to promote it.
And I do know some ag.Both hands on and professional.
Totally agree!!!...Do a bit of research on the author...Some folks think he is (at best) a bit of a nut...LOLOL
Totally agree!!!...Folks really need to be careful about coming to any conclusion about Prof Pimental's work...Lots of sane people wonder about his sanity...But please, do a little research about the man....because the work comes from the man....
Darwinian,
You are obviously on the money,as usual.And Gail-you're just being a tad modest ,obviously,given what you know about the world in general.
The author is right on the money.
Real Oil Drum nuts with good memories will remember that ever since I have been here,I have been raving about how the typical person or organization whio thinks that they are going to be able to survive industrial collapse-if it happens -is so ill informed,niave,or just simply ignorant of the realities of agriculture that it makes me want to scream,cry, cuss,and break heads with sticks to get their attention.
I have had some backup from Darwinian, Airdale and Alan from Big Easy,but not much from anybody else.
People who have obviously never farmed in a serious way,and know absolutely nothing from a long term hands on pov throw links to idealistic websites at me as if they were bullets,but in this respect I really am like superman-I am am armored with reality and possessed of xray vision that allows me to see such claptrap for what it is.
I earned my armor and xray vision the old fashioned way-by growing up on a hardscrabble farm under the tutelage of people used to working like railroad coolies in order to eat and maybe buy thier kids a bag of candy and five dollars worth of new clothes for Christmas.
I caught the tail end of the horse and axe era ,hands on, and spent many a day as a child in the fields with my Old Pa ,who never went to school a day in his life and was yet a much wiser man than some people I know with doctorates.
I know Mr Murhpy well,he has been to visit us many times.His favorite presents,and he is very generous with them, when he visits in my nieghborhood,are drought,hurricanes,late frosts,hail,and politicians who decided that American apples are too expensive and that we need processed apple juice,etc, from China.
We lost our entire peach crop and eighty percent of our apples this year to late frost,although we are in a very good spot,statistically speaking,from that pov.Then we lost ninety percent of our cherries to excessive rain,and now we are running pumps to irrigate some of our gardens.
And some of the optimists think that I am being unduly cautious when I said that our personal survival plan is overly robust because it calls for two to two and a half acres per person of PRIME LAND.Plus the wood lot,the hillsiude pasture,the occasional deer and ground hog and turkey from the overgrown lasnd aroiund the nieghborhood.
Goodchild is if anything trying really hard to come on as reasonable and not a foaming at the mouth doomer.You can rest assured tat his infoemation is rock solid but I don't mean to imply that you should be able to sleep well when you go to bed thinking about it.
If you believe that ts is gthtf,and you don't have some sort of truly valuable skills that are transferable to life in a very tough and primitive world,such as dentistry,shoemaking,etc,you are going to be in a truly desperate situation.
If you move to an area with plenty of rain,a good long growing season,good soil,and so forth,you really do have a CHANCE OF making it as a newly minted one horse farmer-if you can put your hands on a fairly spacious homestead,and you get started now in learning how to do the work,and are willing to work half a day every day-either half will do,as long as it is an honest twelve hours.
And if you have an extended family to trade help as needed- old folks who can't really chop wood very fast,or chase down a loose pig, can babysit,cook, and make clotheing and repair tools etc.
And if you are good enough, to gain a years suppy of food ahead,and store it seculely,for the year that is surely coming when your crops fail.And you are also physically tough enough to hold onto it,and emotionally tough enough to watch your nieghbors kids starve so your won't until you make another good harvest.
Now I am still hopeful that if and when the situation gets really bad that by dint of draconian rationing of fuel and he diversion o trrsources into farming as necessary ,that we can avoid mass starvation in the US ,Australia,western Europe,etc.
I shudder to think how bad things will be in countries that have no oil of thier own and also import lager amounts of food bought with manufactured exports.
An for those who might be wondering if I have any professional qualifications to back up my personal background experiences, I do.
This is ag ,and you can take it to the bank,although I doubt they will accept it as collateral.
OFM
Class of 72
College of Agriculture
(and Life Sciences)
Virginia Tech
Ps I have been working on a piece covering this general topic in some detail for some time now which I had hoped to submit as a possible guest post but there has been a lot of coverage of the ag situation lately,including this fine article,and most of my piece would now look like poorly disguised plaigarism.
PPS Nothing in these comments should be interpreted by supporters and members of the various transition movements as criticism of thier work,which may well be the difference between life and death for a lot of people,except in the following respect:
Such strategies can produce huge amounts of food,and if there is some viable means of generating income,there is a good chance the rest can be bought or bartered.
But If things really do collapse to the point that the grid is down,you better get the hell out of Dodge in a hurry,cause you are not going to have the land,water,weather,acreage needed to go it all the way in hardly any city.
If you don't get started now your chances are slim indeed. If you get started at least a year ahead of the crowd,your odds of success will be greatly improved.
But not very high,unless you are tough and knowledgeable and pick a good spot.
Good stuff young FarmerMac,,
Class of 72? college or high school. I guess college. I got maybe 10 yrs on ye?
Again goodly stuff,
Got a neighbor down the road. Has about 7 donkeys(jacks and jennys) and a horse mare. Been thinking of getting him to breed me up a nice mule.
I have raised, bred, trained, shod and rode many horses over my time. Had a dozen in my corral at one time. But none anymore and I sorta miss them. But a mule beats a horse for work about any day. IMO.
Airdale-and I did have a good walking breaking plow around chere someers
I've still got my Old Pa's horse drawn turn plow,his cultivator,and his lay off plow that doubles pretty well as a potato plow.I don't know what happened to his spring tooth harrow.
But I don't have a horse or mule,and I have never trained one.I guess I really need to be thinking along those lines,but I'm a good mechanic and I keep enough diesel on hand to run as a subsistence operation for at least three years,and at the first sign of really imminent trouble I will double or triple that.I'm betting that our old tractors are good for my personal duration,with lots of tlc,and that if not good tractors won't be that hard to swap for,once the owners have no more fuel.
My understanding is a work cow is best. No shoes, hardier, better temperament and can produce milk.
Also
If your a farmer you can make your our fuel. I'm experimenting with fodder beets this year. Last year a buddy and I started making apple cider. In my area freeze distillation is a great primary technique.
The Amish use oxen, ie cows that can be trained from the time they are calves. Go to Energybulletin.net and look for Longson.
The Hutterites, Mennonites and Amish will become our national survivalist heros.
Yes I have studied this. I found that Red Poll make the best oxen. Are good milkers and have good slaughter meat. A very gentle breed by the way.
I toured a lot of farms where Red Poll was being raised and fed out.
Excellent cattle and make good draft animals. If I get the chance I always wanted to get a start of them. Also you can cross for hybird vigor by using other Red Polls but of different lineage. Like perhaps Black Polls but Red still in the rest. Just different color.
Airdale
OFM's comments hit a cord with anyone who has farmed for a living. Fortunately this is farming in the existing infrastructure. Break your back before breakfast, lunch, and dinner. While it is useful to point out the problems with the, "Back to the land" philosophy, it is more useful to point out what is the right direction.
As has been pointed out, there are a number of problems with the organic movement's belief that we can transition to a manure/compost scenario easily. It should also be pointed out the most of the successful long term agricultural practices through time use just this system and there is really no other choice except on virgin soils.
An ongoing discussion in most of the "Natural Farming" list serves is about how to maintain fertility through on-farm, input free agriculture. Discussions parallel those found here in terms of considering the eroei of different farming/gardening practices. The general consensus is this is possible and desirable depending on climate and fertility. Of course this presupposes the average farmer is also the average head of household and is interested in providing food for themselves, their families, and maybe a little surplus to trade. It also presupposes the average farmstead is about one quarter acre arable with committed acreage for heat energy production. The appropriate tools are the ones I use daily in season; shovel, hoe, wheelbarrow, rake, grub hoe, etc. Ok, I broke down and got a tiller after two heart attacks and five by-passes. I guess I have a little bit to learn about feeding the human organism.
In general terms forget the idea of converting all land into equivalent grain harvest as a ballpark calculation. Start with vegetable produce as the mainstay of diet instead. "Diet for a small planet," with all it's faults shows the calorie densities of growing food products. This is calorie densities on the land, not densities of calories in food.
Also, forget human densities of cities. As a child of the sixties, I left the big world a long time ago for the "hinterlands" as my NYC relatives refer to anywhere without Starbucks. Now I enjoy an abundance of space, time, nature, good food, poverty, unemployment, back breaking labor, lack of culture, etc.. One thing I don't need to consider is being so cramped on the land as to make anyone psychologically dangerous. Before anyone criticizes this as not applicable to the population as a whole, consider that city dwellers have made their bed and must now remake the bed.
Another advantage of the less well traveled road is an abundance of naturally occurring organic material to substantially improve your little piece of arable land. Most of the land in my region is not considered arable, i.e. can't be commercially farmed. It can be improved to the point of very good yields with a little work over a number of years. It is true winter comes early, but this is a good excuse to close the schools and go deer hunting. Most of my circle grow a good portion of their food now, hunt for more, trade for more, and buy what they can't get otherwise. As things get worse, I suspect this will continue more so.
Finally, forget thinking you will invent or rediscover a way to do "agriculture." Those degrees from past decades taught farmers to have a closed mind to anything but centralized agriculture. What we are talking about is farming, or even just humble gardening. The times are such that eighty percent of the population have to be farmers just as it was in 1900. If transportation becomes the horse, we would have the manure for farming and could start arguing about how horses waste good farm land and whether the land is good enough for human crops or just grazing crops. Good farmers don't starve, the rest of us have to learn quick. Regressive thinking? Yes, I think appropriately so.
Class of '94
College of Agriculture
University of Minnesota
Both my husband and I are graduates of our state's land grant university. He farmed before going back to school and so could fill in the blanks when he took weed science and soil fertility. As a non-farmer I was frustrated with soil fertility class because it was completely seperated from anything "natural" or even farm related. Fertility started with Leibig's experiments in a barrell and went from there to chemistry and chemical. Weeks worth of this...
Fast forward 15 years and we are back on the farm and trying to transition away from conventional corn/soy. Old Farmer is right-- this is back breaking. We're trying to do organic edible legumes- to supply our soil nitrogen. Sadly, there is a huge knowledge gap in how to grow crops without the chemical inputs/pesticides. I've asked the Agriculture faculty, gathered around morning coffee, if they could turn their research (genetics/lab bench) "on a dime" if it was critical to do so.... They just look at me like a curious creature in their midst.
Well now the roosters crowing. Better pull on those old jeans.
view,
Unfortunalely you are correct in that the course was (for your purposes) oriented to theory rather than practical matters.
You needed a survey course,something smilar to "business math".But the specialists need every iota of that theory,it's first grade stuff for them.Then they need to move over to life sciences and pickup another degree in mycology or genetics or something similar.
This is not going to happen overnight,obviously,but it is obviously happening.
And now that you know it,you are much better prepared to conduct your own research,formal or informal,and to understand what may or may not be happening on your own place.
Just like the guy who makes his living refitting commercial lighting systems for his living.
Most likely he was not specifically trained to specialize in energy efficiency,but simply opened his eyes and created his own niche,using his conventional engineering training for a different purpose.
I know it's late to comment, but I'll bring it up again at some point if I get no response.
My understanding about the legumes is that they do not put much nitrogen into the ground if you take away the pods. This is supposed to be especially true for beans and soybeans, which are high in protein (read, nitrogen).
Peas might do a better job of fixing nitrogen into plant tissues (NOT roots!), but it only becomes available if you put the whole plant back into the soil.
I know Native Americans used to plant the "three sisters" together, but I am getting the impression that the beans couldn't possibly be putting nitrogen into the soil while they are growing - nitrogen is used for protein synthesis, and for photosynthesis. At best, they would not-compete with the corn and squash for soil nitrogen, and enjoy the shading and the trellising corn provides. Then when the beans are harvested, the rest of the plant can be plowed back into the soil, or composted, but would have no more nitrogen per unit weight than any other green plant.
Legumes can fix up to 150kg nitrogen per Ha, about 100lbs/acre. All of the tissue contain N but the pods are especially high. The residue including roots will return N to the soil. Young tissues are higher in N than mature dried tissues.
Other plants can be much lower in N content, for example cereals, especially if grain is removed, or plants are grown under low N conditions. Some of the highest N fixing legumes are pasture legumes, alfalfa, medics providing they don't contain too many weeds.
Sweet Clover
In the first year Sweet Clover hasn't started its seed production yet. Farmers have mixed feelings about it for hay because it can be an animal killer if it molds. I'm trying to get patches started around fruit trees.
The best fixers IMO are the vetch...Hairy Vetch is very good. Old timers used it to put N back into tobacco beds which need a lot of N.
There is also Crown Vetch...and used to be used on the roadsides.But not anymore.
Hairy grows best in the spring and possibly the fall but I can't get it to start from seed in the middle of summer..tried and failed..it sprouted by put on no growth so it is highly seasonal...Crown I haven't tried yet but I will soon enough.
Hairy is tender and very easy to control...excellent all around...excellent.
Airdale
There's one of the roadsize vetches that turned out to be a pest, I think it is Crimson Vetch. I've got another kind of vetch growing, it looks like the Hairy Vetch except without the hair. I think its just called Purple Vetch.
For groundbuilding, I like Sweet Clover (actually not a clover but a pea that doesn't bother to produce a pod). It fixes more nitrogen than any other of the field legumes, its deep rooted, and can utilize sequestered phosphates unavailable to other plants. For cover crops it has the added complication of being a biennial that blooms in its second year. If you're a bird fan Gold Finches really like the seeds. If you have a plot that you don't want to touch for a while its really good, roots can go down six feet right thru hardpans.
But that nitrogen is still a net contribution as opposed to a break even or a loss.
Depending on other characteristics of the soil there can be some significant nitrogen contribution from azotobacter. It needs a lot of organic matter and is picky about ph. I think its the "azobacteria" mentioned in some of Steve Solomon's writing.
Hey old farmer; What did you put in that coffee you were drinking this morning, About half way through that post it looked like you got your glasses crossed. LOL
which post ,Herrmit?
Class of 67
College of Agriculture
California State University - Fresno
Oldfarmerjmy
I think it is fairly obvious that the OBAU/F (Old Business As Usual/Farming) was a pretty tough row to hoe. I think it's also quite obvious that Climate Change is going to be a deal breaker for many a person attempting to feed themselves. What is not so clear to me is that you have actually studied and attempted to implement permaculture techniques, Fukuoka's methodologies, bio-intensive gardening, etc., etc. Perhaps I've missed some of your posts?
There is always a fair bit of hand waving that goes on in these threads as posters do not, cannot, remember everything ever posted. There is plenty of evidence that people can use various techniques to grow impressive amounts of food, yet you continue to say it is impossible. This is false. What I do accept, and it should be obvious to anyone who reads this site regularly, is that it is highly unlikely that the coming transition will involve 6 billion people farming. That is to say, a huge number of deaths from various causes is probably likely. But it is still incorrect for you to claim we *cannot* feed ourselves. We almost certainly will not, but that is not the same thing.
There is enough acreage in arable land alone (see other areas of this topic thread) to feed at least 9 billion people. But that's just a math problem sum. The reality involves the distribution of land, farming for profit, transport, prices, diversion for bio-fuels, weather events, etc. Will we ever feed 9 billion a healthy diet? No. Not likely. But not because we can't.
I think it unfair of you to regularly mix up the issue of farming techniques and the current global geo-socio-political wackiness. Yes, when discussing solutions, particularly at the societal level, we must combine the two, but in terms of helping people attempt to adjust to the changing reality and seek out survival solutions, there is great value in teaching, being open minded and in NOT making false claims.
I find it amusing that some of you old farmers harp on about lost skills, lost knowledge, unrealistic expectations and what some of you consider delusions, but not one of you has offered to take in apprentices to teach, or offered workshops, etc.
Great AgriSensei: None of you know what you are doing!
AgriAcolytes: Teach us Great AgriSensei!
Great AgriSensei: No!
What the hell?
Where, also, are the people joining together from this site to do some of what is discussed - other than some of our esteemed who are looking at making farmland an *investment*? Here's my open call:
I am now in the US. I am actively seeking a home, good neighbors, partners and like-mindeds to put word to deed, most likely in a LandTrust structure, but things are very fluid. I could just as easily end up trying to set up a community farm in a city somewhere. Regardless, I hope to have first crop up next spring, tho today I've got nothing but what we brought from Korea, and any and all willing to work hard to build something sustainable are welcome.
I am hopeful of a future that is better, but am realistic about a future that involves a fall before a possible new paradigm.
Feel free to keep screaming, "Can't be done!", or, get about GETTING it done.
Cheers
CCpo,As an aside when threads get long,I usually address people by thier handles as I makes it clear what exactly you are responding to-sometimes I include the time too as 7/28/8;59 to identify your particular post.This might help clear up a lot of confusion from time to time.
I agree that we are making a mistake when we intermingle the political and the psychological -the cultural-factors of eating in the future with the technical factors of actual production.
And incidentally I do personally believe that it is technically within the realm of possibility that we could actually grow enough food to feed every body without the ff inputs,or at least w/o most of them.
But only in the sense that I believe we could(technically )build out a wind solar and geothermal electrical system so powerful we could quit burning coal.
Lets just take another toke and another slug and see how it could be done,command economy style.
Outlaw all new personal passenger vehicle manufacture with curb wieght over 2500 pounds,or more than 1600 cc engines.
Require that they be manufactured rust proof and modular and that all components be 100 percent interchangeable for ten years,and that any component,including the engine ,be removeable in one hour.
Make it against the law to move atruck over 4000 piunds unless it is loaded or onits way back from a deilvery.
Taxjet fuel at the same rate that motor fuel is taxed,and on a big luxury tax per ticket.
require all new construction to be superinsulated,and issue refundable tax credits to all low income homeowners to retrofit thier homes insulation wise,etc,and put in state of the art heatpumps.
All things of this nature combined would easily free up the energy and materials needed for the new uinfrastructure.
Add about another dozen or two such proposals,and shanghai all people out of work into the renewable energy buildout.
Of course the chances of anything along these lines actually happening approach zero in the mathematical sense.
Ditto the ag revolution ."POSSIBLE "technically(maybe) versus impossible practically
I'm fairly sure that it is possibly technically to establish a colony on Mars.But as a practical matter it will have to wait until we have the future technology that is "magic" in present day terms.
I have already been roasted by several others for pointing out that a lot ofyoung ag researchers today are ready and willing to work outside the bau box.the replies correctly and sadly point out that it ain't happening for the most part ,and they seem to think that it won't,but it will-just not soon enough,unfortunately.
I should have composed that comment more carefully,to reflect the inevitable time lag.
Human change comes slowly-and apparently never faster than a generation or two at a time.
It took three generations of forestry pros to admit that fire suppression is bad forestry,and the fight between the blank slaters and the evolutionary psychologists has lasted my entire adult life and is still not finished,and won't be until the last of the blank slate school graduates prior to about 1980 are retired or dead.
CCp, my own thought. I can't join you there but from over here in her majesty's kingdom I am trying to work on something practical as per www.energyark.blogspot.com and www.energyark.net. (Though at the moment my time/energy is consumed with trying to sort out my lack of health/wealth situation and trying to move things from my secret garden at an old persons home due to be destroyed next wk, to another neglected site (railway embankmo-viaduct). But hopefully will eventually get on to getting people clued-up and involved, just too late with any luck).
Why? There happens to be a lot of protein in jellyfish and there are increasingly larger blooms of them as a direct consequence of overfishing of fish stock. Eating insects I believe will be another option. If all else fails there's always Soylent Green... Dig in!
While there are a lot of ways to increase food production (e.g. use the oceans to grow Algae or somehow harvest plankton as a primary food crop), it is none too appetizing.
The question that I have is whether there is likely to be an orderly "build down" of population, or conflict as the solution, or both.
History would seem to suggest a mix of both, and in many parts of the world, there will not be a "build down", but Rwanda like collapse.
IMO, a sustained decline in food production of 30 to 70 % can only lead to war. War will, by its nature, destroy infrastructure such as dams and irrigation ditches that supply water. These wars will lower carrying capacity even more.
Blondie,
War is virtually gauranteed in such a situation as we now face,judging from the historical record.
Although I have no formal training as a historian or a military man,I have spent most of my life reading good books,including many histories including military histories and several military treatises,since I'm too lazy to work much.I might have spent my time touring the world or hunting big game in Africa,but that would have entailed lots of work earning the necessary money.
And I have made good friends with a dozen or so career military people,some of them very well educated officers.One is a historian and a brother in law.
All agree that if the peak oil scenario is correct and the peak is here that the odds of widescale war are very high.But they don't say so in public.
The one thing that might prevent it from coming is that most of the more powerful countries are now members of Nato,and the fear of a nuclear response to an ordinary invasion.
As i've said before,my personal opinion is that we will squek by in the US,but if there is an all out war,even if it doen't go nuclear,all bets are off.
I don't find this "inevitable war" notion at all convincing. Wars require (1) spare physical resources (not least oil), (2) a sufficiency of personnel loyal/cowed and willing to obey orders, and (3) a population sufficiently loyal and supportive of the venture. I question whether these conditions are anything like as present as they were in say ww2. Ww2 was only able to happen because a high proportion of the German population believed themselves (correctly) to be the victims of unfair collective punishment bullying by other nations. Such a sentiment does not apply anymore in Europe/Uk/Eire (Muslim colonists apart). Instead there is a strong sentiment of fervent anti-militarism. Meanwhile the coalition forces (and their economies) are exhausted from the ongoing Afghan and Iraq operations.
The only warfare of any scale I forsee in the eu/uk/ei is between the Muslim colonists and the various natives, and it's rather obvious which side would be the total loser in that.
Robin,
I hope you are right but wars can start almost anywhere and spread like plague.
I did add that I thought since so many powerful countries are allies that it might not happen.
But weakness in one place enables aggression someplace else.
Saddam would have stayed home if he had thought we had the will and the power to keep him there.He miscalculated.
This is not to say I approve of occupying the Middle East,but only that weakness,actual or percieved,anywhere,changes the equation.
The cornucopians always claim that there is far more more potential sources of food and there are mouths to feed and it is only a question of the market/geopolitics/stupidity that leaves nearly a billion people short of food right now.
The fact is, we do have markets, which means buyers and sellers, winners and losers. The losers go hungry. We do have geopolitics, and wars, and insurgencies, and corruption and natural disasters and climate change. We also have more people than ever before, so there is less and less slack in the global food supply. More and more people are forced to live on marginal land - be it low fertility or in danger of flooding/earthquake or whatever.
As energy gets more expensive, it is as always the poor who will go without. Rich countries will be able to afford to feed their people (although some may chose not to!)
We are not heading into a cornucopian future. We are at the practical limits of the planet can support in terms of human life, and we continue to reduce that limit through over exploitation even as our population continues to grow.
There will be more Rwandan style events. Nigeria is looking increasingly like a failed state to me just now, but the population decline will be localised, violent, and hidden from the global media. Mass starvation was common in China until recent decades. A million people starved in India in 1943(?) in the midst of a good harvest under British control.
The future will be messy, bloody, miserable for billions of people. But there will still be corners of the world of relative peace and prosperity where the population remain (almost) wilfully ignorant of the global reality. It has always been that way. I knew a white South African in the early eighties, who was friendly, laid back, hopelessly pampered lifestyle, and completely unaware of the poverty and brutality most of the people suffered in his own country. He wasn't a bad person, just living life in the context that he grew up in.
Future generations will learn to live with mass poverty and starvation, just as was taken for granted by everybody until a few hundred years ago.
I agree with Amartya Sen that famines are caused more by poverty than by lack of food. So far, there has always been enough food, just not enough purchasing power of the poor. Here in the UK, virtually nobody starves; we take from the rich and give to the poor. We could choose to operate this social safety net on a global scale if we wanted to.
The (usually) unmentioned elephant in the room is that, pretty much by definition, no rational plan can sustain anything near the existing population.
(By definition, since man living rationally in the first palce would never have reached anything near this population level.)
To openly say the obvious, that any such plan would have to involve massive triage, has obvious political drawbacks.
And many of us feel, rightly, that we would never have advocated the policies that got man into this mess, so it's not our responsibility to present "solutions" which either claim to sustain the unsustainable or which openly speak the truth.
(After all, no one else has ever felt any responsibility to do so.)
But the result is intellectually and morally unsatisfactory.
Russ writes:
Yes, overpopulation is one of those taboo zones for both the left and the right of the political spectrum.
Time for Asimov's bathroom hypothesis (and apologies to TOD readers who've read it a hundred times before):
http://www.wesjones.com/asimov.htm
Hi Russ,
But, was not "man" created in the "image and likeness of god" to be superior to all the "beasts"? Was man not insructed to go forth and be "fruitful"? Does it not follow that, as god's chosen people", that sufficient prayer will result in devine intervention and a happy life for people with the "right" religious "faith"?
Rationality is somewhat hampered when an entire society is suffering from massive delusion.
You sure got that right.
In the old days that delusion was publicly explicit. In the 19th century there was a public ideology that the wilderness, the forests and wild rivers, were the domain of Satan, and that by subjugating the wilds for economic exploitation we were "reclaiming" them for god. Thus the seemingly odd term "reclamation" for destroying the primeval. The idea was that by conquering nature man was artificially restoring the Garden of Eden and thus returning to god.
Needless to say, big business found this ideology very convenient and funded its propagandists like William Smythe.
Almost nobody publicly talks this way anymore. Maybe James Watt was the most recent prominent figure. But lots of them still feel that way.
No. Corn is nutritionally poor, and the Meso-Americans suffered from eating it. Pellagra is common among people who live in rural South America, where corn is a staple. The spread of corn (maize) consumption caused an epidemic of malnutrition.
Only if you prepare it wrong as most of the world does because when the Europeans spread maize seed worldwide they did not spread the preparation techniques. Maize has to be prepared with an alkali ie lime or ash water to release the niacin to avoid pellagra. Look closely at your reference: people in Central America living on a maize diet don't get pellagra because they use nixtamalization. As well, traditionally one eats beans with one's tortillas or hominy. Of course, if you are so poor so as to only have one single item in your diet, and nothing else, you're going to become sick with some deficiency disease or another.
Yes, quite, but any food that requires soaking in an alkali before consumption is not the ideal food the poster seems to think it is. Other staples are inherently better.
Huh? Ash water! It's easy once you get used to it. And very tasty. How do you think people managed for 1000s of years? That way grinding is simple as the grain is soft and you don't need major infrastructure to mill grains the way Europeans do.
Yes, that is the brilliance of corn, and many other traditional plants. They do not provide complete nutrition. This makes them insect resistant. We, being humans, can add the vital nutrients from another source, or by special processing. We should be breeding LOW lysine corn, and then adding the lysine back from another source. Its not an accident that beans and corn tortillas are a traditional staple.
Tortillas are fine DrChas...but I far more prefer hoe cakes, cornbread and grits.
Tortillas are over done IMO. Yet some real grits, slow cooked and biled down just so, some butter and pepper and ham fat(red eye gravy) and your good to go.
In Lexington at Buffalo and Dad's..they might still be serving hoe cakes for dinner(thats lunch to city folk)..alone with white beans and all that great southern cookin.
Airdale-just run water thru wood ashes and you got enough lye to take care of that home grown corn...grits I say, grits
Sorry, Airdale - Buffalo & Dad's is no more - another victim of drive-thru BurgerDeath that all these brain-dead young'uns seem to prefer ...
Corn is a good crop, OK, but you better have a good-sized patch of ground. For one thing, your yield out of the same patch will fall off a cliff after a couple of years; and for another, racoons will eat your corn blind. And if you don't grow beans too, then you're wasting your time, energy, and garden space growing corn.
You need a grain ...
if your area can grow grain corn, then corn is the best crop to grow along with beans
You need 400 plants per adult for the year
I Grew all my food for over 12 years and ate corn everyday
We soaked and rinsed the corn till it germinated , but did not use lye , wood ashes or anything else.
The whole lye thing is a speed texture thing.
Mamba, according to your second link the Mesoamericans did not suffer all that much.
Of course corn, or any other grain or vegetable, when used as a single source of nutrition, would be poor. But according to the article the vitamins in corn, especially niacin, can be liberated by soaking it overnight in lime water as the Mesoamericans did.
Ron P.
"You cannot live by bread alone....you need peanut butter". But I never tried peanut butter with cornbread. ;-)
Mamba,
Your link above to "an epidemic of malnutrition" does not appear to support the thesis that Meso-americans suffered from eating corn. Rather, it suggests you need to soften the corn first.
Compared to grains like wheat, rice, and barley, corn isn't that bad. It has moderate quantities of vitamins B-1, B-2, and even vitamins A and C. It is a poor source of calcium and iron (which however are not plentiful in these other grains either). I'd grow some other dark green leafy vegetables to go with whatever grain you've got like collards, for example, which are pretty easy to grow and are loaded with calcium, iron, and many vitamins.
Keith
If you examine the labeling on a bag of Masa Harina you will note that it says it has been treated with an alkaline solution.
In the south and the indians, used lye made from wood ashes. Called 'seeping water'.
You are wrong about corn. Very wrong.
I have made corn hominy using lye. Not that hard. I eat a lot of grits.
Not the storebrought trash for that is not treated. At one time it was but they quit that.
Airdale
Yes. The conversation devolves, once again, on the ever intrepid "Oil Drum" into a pissing match about some minor side issue, in this case, corn in the Americas.
Hold on honey, someone on the Internet got something wrong!!
This little side road indicates with remarkable clarity the reason why we will not have an orderly, timely, humane, or appropriate transition to an effective and sustainable lifestyle. No, while the dorks argue over the tensile strength of Superman's cape, the rest of us will be fighting to the last man and woman for a handful of grain.
Good grief.
Peace Cherenkov, There's something seriously major going on underneath this rangling: people forgetting agricultural knowledge (or never having it), ie. how to nutritiously (and practically with relatively low technology) prepare a major grain or calorie source. We have a serious erosion of knowledge going on as well.
'Best
Maybe Nate has found a way to manipulate dopamine and serotonin levels with subliminal HTML and is testing it. IIRC he mentioned recently he wasn't going to be posting for a while. Hmmm...
http://www.infinn.com/subliminal.html
OMG!!! have you examined the source code for this post?! ;-)
Dude... Made me laugh.
But there is an element of cultural triage here. Get it? We've lost an entire body of knowledge in a few generations. I'm eating up (pun intended) this whole corn/ash water thing. I'm like so going to soak my Bloody Butcher flint corn in the alkaline water from my wood stove. And I'll probably chuckle thinking of your comments. Tensile strength of batman's cape.
I hear there I have neighbors that make their own hominy- unheard of in our Norwegian community. Then they make corncob jelly.
Old timers use an ash hopper. Simple to make. Some boards nailed together to form a sort of chute, open at top and closed at bottom but a hole drilled with a spigot like deal to let the seeped water/lye mix exit the bottom of the hopper.
But I think putting the ashes in a bucket then adding water and straining might work. I guess getting the strength right is key but I used just a tad of Red Devil and some water and it did the job...took a while for the kernels to pop open but they did. Then I rinsed it like hell. Let it dry sorta and put it in a quart mason jar in the refrigerator...likely better ways to store I guess.
Trial and error since I never saw it done but just heard of it and there is info on it in the Fox Fire books.
Also we did use to make lye soap and I watched that...with lye and lard. Its supposed to be more healthy for you than storebrought for its almost pure glycerin. Not all the chemicals of storebrought stuff.
Airdale
Air dale.you've got it straight.An here in the Southeast ,its easy to grow some beans right in with your corn,ans some smaller patches of other veggies,and apples are super easy to grow and can ,and are easily dried,although drying fruit is rather time consuming.
And there are a lot of wild plants that can be used to advantage,such as wild "kreasy salad" and persimmons.
If tshtf,hunting and fishing will not help much beyond the first few months,as nearly all the game and fish will be wiped out,but later,after most of the people die off,the prospects for gathering a little wild meat on a fairly regular basis might not be so bad.
My smart old Pappy used to plant those purple hulled pinkeye peas(some call blackeyed) right in with the corn ...not too far from the house...and the peas would climb the stalks all the while trying to put some nitrogen in the soil as well.
My Mammy would stick some of those pods right in her wood range to slow roast for me to gnaw on as it rained outside and I sat near the kitchen window watching the ducks playing in the rain as a tadpole.
Purple pods they are. I just picked a canner full this morning and got another canner full or two to go. Coons got the corn but I got the peas at least.
Airdale
My grandparents made hominy and I often ate it as a child,Delicious!
But my Mom is senile now and nobody can remember the exact recipe.
How about posting yours?
Hominy is simply dried kernels that have been processed by an alkaline solution til the shell pops open. Then canned or cooked right off.
I once tried Red Devil Lye but it scared me..Yet the shells did pop and it fluffed up like popcorn.
Better to use lime..not so dangerous. You got to rinse it a couple of times good.
I thought then that ifn I let the popped open hominy dry out that I could then run it through my grain mill and make real true grits but I never went that far. I still got lots of ear corn laying around and this fall might try again.
I saved all last winters wood ashes in a big plastic trash can so I can leach out the lye. Weak lye I think is probably best.
Now as to cooking the grits. Say you buy the grocery store type..its Instant and that I do not use. Nor the Quick...Quaker Oats has done a bad number on their Grits.
So I got a couple pounds from a stone mill down in N. Carolina last time I was over the mountains..at a real downhome mill.
But I asked them if they treated it and they said NOPE. So its not THE REAL THING..yet its what I use. I got yellow and white.
Down there they only EAT the yellow since they are so used to it but I always liked the white..so I got 10 lbs of it. Kept it in my icebox so the weevils wouldn't hatch out and they most certainly WILL if you do not put it up real good. Might even hatch out in glass jars!
So you got some grits to cook. Here is my way.
Bring a right sized pot with half full of well water to a good boil. Drop in handfuls of enough grits. This is an experience call for they will surely swell up a whole lot.I might use 4 big tablespoons for just my self and some will be left over. But its a judgement call and you can always add more water if you got room.
So bring to a good boil..and stir a lot or else it will surely stick to the bottom bad. The more it cooks down the more it might stick. Yellow is worse to stick than white.
So you let the heat down to get just a good bubble..and now it will really really start to thicken up real fast..add more water then...and keep on boiling them grits down...you don't want half done grits...add some salt to taste about now..takes quite a bit...then simmer it on down..and then when judged to be about done..maybe like 1o minutes or 15 or so..judgement again...you add the last water to make it about like good white gravy in thickness...it should barely make bubbles now..then cover with a lid and let the heat way down..stirring so it doesn't stick on the bottom...
You can now turn the heat off if its down..try a taste...and let it sit. This does a couple things..you wait til your eggs are done and it keeps it from sticking..I use stainless pots just in case that aluminum is like the urban legends say it does......good stainless and thick is the ticket..not cheap cookware.
So dip you up some in a small saucer...shouldn't be runny..add pepper. I do. Some don't. I put in a hens egg size of real cow's butter...and maybe some sugar or not..or sugar later or not..this is up to each person...some good red eye gravy in the middle of it is right good too. Or eat is with just salt , butter and pepper...
You learn each time you make it. And done right those grits are very healthy as well as tasty. Now remember mine are straight ground corn...ground not quite as fine as corn meal..a tad rougher..and not as fine as corn flour...and its ok if some black specks get in it for that shows you are dealing with the real thing. Part of the process.
But once you grind the grits? Better bag it and put in icebox..the moths/weevils will take it...a glass jar airtight might work.
Good luck. I am sure you outght to be able to find a miller around there somewhere or order on the net...white I like..yellow is far more countyrough.
Ifn you let the grits sit overnite..one can try to fry them in a skillet the next day and pour syrup or molasses on them but they always broke apart on me and never browned right..
Airdale-its all in the technique,,,and not the recipe of quantities
PS. I got a feeling that the old timey Hominy Grits was like canned hominy but dried and ground..surely very hard to find those today..
but just good coarse ground corn that is not 'field corn' should do the job...like White Hickory or Truckers Favorite..or any good heirloom corn...
Airdale said
I don't think so, old timer. It's just not that wonderful a food. I'd rather grow something that (a) doesn't require so much feeding (corn is a gross feeder) and (b) doesn't require special treatment to yield up its nutrients.
Only in an extreme emergency will anybody depend on corn for the bulk of thier diet.It's easy to balance the protiens out with some beans and anywhere you can grow corn you can grow the beans.
Corn is physically VERY EASY to grow by hand,compared to wheat or rice,and easy to harvest and store.it lends itself well to the land in far more places than most other crops,and fits in well with other farm work-the days you need to be in the cornfield are not the same days you need to be in an orchard,or a cow pasture.Harvest can actually be put off for weeks or months if necessary.
And it is not especially hard on the land if you are subsistence farming and return the nutrients to the field rather than exporting them from your farm.
Amen ,
Corn may be a heavy feeder ... that is because it is a HEAVY producer
Easiest to hand raise and harvest , easiest to store , and keeps the best.
To the Native people of this land Corn was a GOD.
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During the mid 60's I read The Destruction of California by Raymond Dasmann. If memory serves he estimated that the California Indian population was about 100,000. The California population is now approaching 40 million
http://www.ucsc.edu/currents/01-02/06-24/dasmann.html
And the punchline is ..?
BRRRRAAAAAIIIIINNNNZZZZ!
For the puzzled, (s)he's referring to The Return of the Living Dead. Intended to be a horror movie, but seen in retrospect as a comedy.
Most people are by now familiar with the evidence that carryforward stocks of grain are declining, while grain production continues to increase. Lester Brown tracks and promotes these figures, but one graph he doesn't draw is the history of per-capita grain production. I used his data at http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/Grain/2006_data.htm#table1 and drew the graph:
One of my very favourite quotes about population and ecology comes from an unnamed friend on the Internet:
The point of the quote is that most people have the ecological cause and effect of food and population exactly backwards. The real problem is not that a rising population requires more food, but that an increasing food supply drives populations ever upward. Given that general principle, the above graph hints at why our population growth rate is dropping.
Population growth rate is slowing only in urbanized, most industrialized economies.
On the other hand, population growth is exploding in economies that are under severe stress, like Mali.
Peter Goodchild writes:
Beautiful - but the tragedy is that most of the alternative/organic farming community just don't get it. If they got it, they would probably be doing something else. 'Sordid' numerical calculations are not their thing, since it's the 'spirit' that counts, not the counting. Above all, most of them DON'T SCALE UP. They ignore the fact that a practice that 'works' at some micro-level will not necessarily 'work' at the macro-level, and that orders of magnitude MATTER. They fail to distinguish between toytown and the real existing world. It's a pity - but perhaps they will learn something from reading Peter Goodchild's article.
Great stuff. Keep it coming.
I'm an organic farmer and I do get it. Peter Goodchild's article echoes my own thoughts and I've said many times on TOD that Organic Farming will not feed the World. I also say that economics and farming are incompatible. Farming isn't a business, if it is then it isn't farming - few businesses last more than a few years as they are unsustainable.
Having enough food to eat is the individuals problem and one they must solve themselves. I've solved the problem for my family and some of the community by being an organic farmer, as for the rest... well that's their problem. As you say I ignore the fact that it doesn't "scale up" and doesn't work on the "macro-level", because I couldn't care less whether it does or not.
I think people better get used to the idea that putting food on their table is their responsibility and not someone else's.
It's their problem until they zombify and head to your 'stead. Then it's your problem.
Mos,
It ain't only the street wise city guys that are stocking up on ammo.You're lucky to find as much as a box of most calibers in Wal marts located in small towns out in farm country.
For those interested,imo in the long run twelve gauge shotgun, twenty two long rifle, and 30 /o6 and 308 are the most likely to be of the highest long term utility,because they are so popular.there are so many kinds of pistols and rifles these days that if ammo is gets hard to find ,lots of them will be useless after a few years, but twenty twos ,nine millimeters and 38 s are very common and 357s will shoot 38.I'm not much into pistols so don't take this to the bank,except for the twenty two.
I was put off by the author's assertion that there would be NO fossil fuel available and that EVERYONE would have to live on the arable land. This is simply not true. We will never run out of transportation capability and the transport of foodstuffs will always be a high priority. Long before the fossil fuel age the Romans transported grain from Egypt to Rome by ship.
While I agree that there will be hard times ahead it will take more profound thinking than was exercised here to get a good description of what is in our future.
To paraphrase: 'I have total confidence in the ability of human ingenuity to rise to the occasion and solve every problem caused by resource limitations. Don't ask me what the solution will be - it will involve technology and I, personally, am technologically challenged. But the specifics of the solution don't matter much; what's important is that we go on with business as usual fully confident that the solution will be found. Should our confidence ever waver we may give up the quest for the solutions to our problems and societal collapse could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.'
May as well go whole hog & profess faith in Jesus or benevolent aliens as have it in some unspecified future technological breakthrough.
Well that's a strenuous response to what I didn't say. Do ye take me fur yon cornucopian? Wow.
My point is only that fossil fuels aren't going to disappear overnight and transportation options, sans ff, are also not going to disappear overnight. While there are any humans alive in the future there will be towns and people trading goods for food. Farmers will want knives and hoes and beads for the women-folk. And there will be ox drawn wagons or bicycles or pack animals to transport goods. And probably the population will be 1/10th of what it is today.
While I consider myself the doomerest of the doomers, and no fan of Jesus by the way, I do try to understand how things are going to play out and over what period of time. I simply think that the article has so many oversimplifications about future scenarios that it neither informs with facts nor stimulates thought. Eskimos don't live on arable land.
jj ,yuor comments about not running out of enough fuel to farm in the short run are correct.
personally I believe that we have fuel enough and to spare to continue farming bau long enough -at least here in the US-to make the sooner or later inevitable transition to a new ag model.
The real question is whether we can manage the economic problems w/o guillotines in every town square and peak lead.
The population overhang is simply enormous and the difference between what might be technically possible and what will actually be done is as great as ther biblical distance from thr east to the west.
And incidentally Jesus is not the problem.The priests who have hijacked his reilgion are the problem.;-)
Taking some artistic license with his coment there, are we?
I didn't ready ANY of what you said into his comment. His point was that we are not running out of fossil fuels overnight. So it is silly to think that everyone will starve.
Food has intrinsic value. Fuel only has value after we have satisfied the need for food. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume food production and distribution will be continued as long as we can. Maybe some will starve for lack of funds... but that's always been the case thanks to capitalism. Maybe more will starve now. But to insinuate that we cannot feed 7 billion people anytime soon when only a few percent of fuel use now goes to food proudction/distribution is just silly.
The point is, the Roman society collapsed, their infrastructure wasn't adequate or sustainable longterm even for a population of just 200 million or so.
Comparing an unsustainable society of 200 million with what could be 8,000 million for us in just 10 years gives some idea of the population collapse required without the oil essential to our intensive agriculture system.
You should not assume that fossil fuel is going to be the limiting factor for adequate amounts of food, plants require many inputs to thrive but as the Romans showed fossil fuel isn't required at all! - but without fossil fuel you can't grow many plants, net exports problems means many countries relying on impotrted oil will have almost zero oil long before the oil runs out.
No, that's not the point at all. Rome was fed for maybe 500 years by distant farms. Constantinople was a major metropolis for over 1000 years, fed by distant farmers, and still is. Come to think of it so is Rome. They didn't cease to be important cities because of a lack of fossil fuels or failed transportation infrastructure.
Some serious fallacies in this subthread of jjhman. The transport from Egypt to Rome was possible because at one end the ships could access up the Nile to a superb growing land and at the other end Rome was up the Tiber (and just across the Med). That doesn't apply to a huge number of contemporary cities. Furthermore the Rome supply wasn't built in a day, it developed over centuries which we don't have to spare. Plus the much higher populations now as pre-mentioned.
The notion that "we aren't going to suddenly run out" also hides a dangerous fallacy. Consider instead the corporatised-oilised system of food supply. That system could catastrophically seize up for other reasons than "running out" of oil. Running out of credit for one. Or a functioning currency for another.
So I think the Darwinsdog paraphrase was nearer to the mark than given credit for.
I am not sure the author of this POST is reading these comments but I would like to add some additional data to his values.
The "148 million square kilometers" of arable land.Being arable does that assume that it is 'open' and already in cultivation? Or how much of that is woodlands? How much is creek bottoms? Or areas that are easy to measure from Google Earth but how much is ACTUAL tillable of that amount?
If it includes woodlands then we have a huge problem. That being we will absolutely NOT be able to clear all that arable land. We must have fuel in the form of woodland timber. Fallen or otherwise. We must and so if you remove the forests then we will not be able to build shelters,heat our habitats nor cook our food.
Another issue. Foraging. Lots of those foragable species of plantlife are still around in large quantities. It takes a nut tree some time to grow and mature.An oak quite a long time. Hickory shorter. Gathering materials for usage such as the Native Americans used inner bark for twine and for other purposes much of those species are no longer in sufficient quantities. We have destroyed much of what the pioneers and NA(native americans) used.
You cannot slaughter hogs without quite a bit of water and heated at that. You must render down the lard. You must scald the body to remove the hair.
Tanning hides is not that easy. You need certain types of material. Not so easily found these days in the land.
But if one observes very closely the Cherokee Tribes and their usage of the land in the South Eastern areas you would find that they farmed extensively and also wisely used what nature provided. In fact the garden plots were owned by the women and passed down to daughters. The closest to my type of terrain is the same as those Cherokee Tribes was.
As for the rest of the USA? Good luck with that. The buffalo are long gone. We killed them off by immense slaughtering. An animal well adapted to what was here before we came to this area. Even so far as in Kentucky,,,there is a site we call Stamping Grounds over near Lexington given that name for the buffalo crossed the river and then stamped their hooofs to shed the water.
Airdale
No, that's only 15 million that is arable.
That is all assuming we only eat corn.
Are these figure for real? Ok, we can produce 3 times the 7 million calories with mordern agriculture, but how much arable land is used for meat, houses and freeways?
I am still uncertain as to whether the woodlands have been subtracted out or not.
We must have woodlands. A stripped and bare landscape will sustainably support no one,eventually. We need to take as much care of our forests as we do the usuable soil that is cleared.
Of my farm over half was wooded. That half was the part I most enjoyed. The rest was work. Good honest work but still hard hard labor. Yet the land grew better and better as I worked it with tractors and tools and never put it back on food crops.
So 15 is all we have for crops then I take it.
Airdale
It does include fruit trees, pecan trees and such but it does not include woodlands or other areas that might be turned into arable land if only cleared and then plowed. In other words the rain forest is not counted as arable.... not yet anyway. However it does not include pasture, land that could become arable if we did not use it to feed the cows and horses. So if we turned this into arable land we would no longer have, not just beef, but also no milk products or horsepower to pull ploughs.
Ron P.
Thanks Ron for the clarification.
Airdale
Note that most pasture land isn't suited to growing crops, especially in a mechanized production system. This fact gets missed by a lot of folk (especially those in favour of a vegetarian diet).
The land that I own is too hilly to be tilled. Yet it was for a half-century. The result is that, after a couple of decades of pasturing, the soil on the hill-tops is still very thin, almost non-existant. I'm trying to remedy this with better grazing practises (MIG). I also tend to harvest hay (by scythe!) at the base of hills, mostly since thats where it grows best, but also to allow me to even the nutrient distribution. Winter feeding this hay (and much much more mechanically harvested purchased hay) near the hill-tops is helping, but slowly.
If I were to put the land back into cultivation, whether mechanized, or with draft animals, bald spots would quickly develope and grow. Soil and nutrients would move down-slope.
The bottom line is that sustainably (ie. low-to-no input) animal husbandry is far more possible than is the cultivation of crops. This is especially true on land that is marginal for cultivation (ie. mine).
Moreover, waning fossil fuel production may shift the balance further towards animal husbandry. I can imagine myself raising a great deal of sheep on my land (~140 acres) without hiring any help and using more than a few sips of fossil fuel (to get the animals to an abbatoire). I really can't imagine producing a cultivated crop without machinery. This year, even with the help of a walk-behind garden tiller (first) and a small tractor, I haven't been able to turn a quarter-acre of pasture into a garden. However, I've had my sheep graze about 7 acres in a controlled fashion. There will be no product from that garden this summer, but three ewe-lambs will reach reproductive maturity, five lambs will reach harvest-weight, and 30 pounds of wool were produced as a result of the grazing program. And the livestock really seem to be increasing the fertility of the land, while I know that I'm going to require more inputs and much more work for the garden to produce a crop next year.
When we bought our land, I was imagining a 5-acre market garden (ala Eliot Coleman) with livestock on another 5 acres (and trees on 10 acres). Now that I've got some experience and had some time to think about nutrient flows, I think the balance would be more like 50 acres of grazing livestock for 5 acres of garden (and trees on yet another 50).
On the farm of the past back in the 40s we would put out a small field of corn. Used it to grind for food, feed the mules and the milk cows.
Didn't take a lot of land..maybe 6 acres or so. Depending on herd size. We just fed the cows as needed at milking time,twice per day.
Then we sometimes put in a very small tobacco patch. For the money.
And then a big garden. This is what we lived on. And my grandmother raised a lot of chickens and traded those pullets and fryers to the roving peddler for flour and such.
Ran some hogs and sheep as well. Sold the wool. Slaughtered the hogs for meat.
This was the sum total..and on a farm with only about 30 acres cleared, rest was woods.
It worked well and we only had three mules and no horses. All horse drawn implements. My grandfather could lay off a corn field in two days with his walking plow. Cut a field of hay in another two days. A day getting it up in the wagon and in the loft.
The soil was good and ponds didn't dry out. We ate good and were healthy. Didn't go to town. Would help other neighbors as well with hay and hogs and whatnot.
The garden though was the mainstay. With out that we were in trouble.
Caught water off the roof into the cistern. No well. Washed clothes in a cast iron kettle outside. Wore no shoes except in the winter.
Took a bath in a washtub maybe once every other week or so. Went to a lake nearby to swim if need be. Caught a lot of fish out of it too.
Like as very very good for us young ones. Lots of girl cousins to play with. Woods and fields to roam.
I never forgot my upbringing on the farms of my youth.
Airdale-remember,,the garden was key to this,,we got off school when it was time to dig potatoes., no one worried too much about school though.
Mark,
Your situation visavis pasture land and cropping is true in most places,and I suspect nearly all places that DEPEND on pastured animals.
Your comments are another nail in the coffin of the cornucopians,but they won't listen,it's much more fun being lied to than hearing the truth when the truth is bad news.
But there Is SOME hope of replacing SOME pasture with crops.Lots of small farmers around here are pasturing some good fields because they can make a little that way on beef w/o the much larger labor and equipment commitment needed to raise crops.This enables them to continue farming part time on farms too small to compete otherwise.
I suppose that there are a lot of small farmers in other areas pursueing a similar strategy,but my guess is that the total acreage they own is not enough to change the big picture much.
The one optimistic note in this piece was the possibility of supplementing agriculture with foraging, hunting and fishing. Certainly the author was being facetious.
Once people start to starve for want of food produced by the agricultural system, it would take a very short time for the populations of wild animals to be over hunted; state restrictions on hunting would be largely ignored and impossible to enforce.
If you look back in time when there were not restrictions on hunting enforced by the various State Conservation Departments, the populations of deer, wild turkey, and the like were decimated by those who supplemented their diets with wild game. For example, it is estimated that in what is now the State of Missouri the whitetail deer population was about 700,000 in 1700, but was hunted down to a mere 400 (that is right, four hundred) by 1925 with unrestricted hunting. The population is up to about 1 million now, with about 200,000 being killed each year under State control. Those 200,000 which are taken produce about 15,000,000 lbs. of meat and bone, or about 2.5 lbs. per person when averaged out over the entire state population (each deer field dresses to about 75 lbs.).
A quick google reveals that the "Global Footprint Network" calculates that we have 13.4 billion hectares - or 2 hectares per person - or productive land or water on Earth. That's 50 people per square kilometer (100 hectares per km sq). We might need a more sophisticated measure than the author uses. Some of this "productive" area might be less productive than the arable land he quotes, but some (cultivated wetlands) are up to twice as productive.
I am curious about this calculation, and about whether the author has tried to live off the land, and see how much is needed. I admit that I haven't, but I was a vegetarian for 15 years (until I got pregnant). He says he "has doubts about the wisdom of a purely vegetarian diet", which strikes me as a strange comment. Kind of like saying that he'd rather drive than bike. Yes, of course, but what we are discussing here is whether the vast majority of humans can be fed in a reasonable (not optimal) way long enough to implement population reduction. Also, are there communities where each person has about 1/2 acre (that's equivalent to 470 people per square km) and what are their limitations in terms of self-sustainability?
Using John Jeavons numbers (who actually lived on his diet, had several other people live on it for several years, and has devised a system that supports ongoing land fertility without manure), we might have a decent diet on 700 square feet per person ( whole different ballpark), and this includes, I believe, 60% devoted to compost crops. As Toby Hemenway notes about urban permaculture, you would not have to do this in cities, where food waste, urine, etc, can be available as sources of nitrogen, and tree clippings, dried leaves for the carbon component. Humanure would have to be composted. A square kilometer (10 million + square feet), after giving each human 1000 sq feet of living space and 1000 of food growing space, would support 10,000 people, not 470 (please correct me if I'm wrong). It's true that you quickly get into trouble adding animals - even chickens need dedicated land to grow their feed on. However, the most productive (in calorie per unit area) type of setting is the swamp where plans are grown along with fish.
A bigger problem might be water, as the breadbaskets of the world are precisely some of the areas threatened by climate change, and political will, which is lacking and will be the realistic cause of our coming disaster. I'll admit also that I don't know whether Jeavons uses mechanized equipment for compost-making. I fully believe DD that the task is otherwise daunting. This means we have to also devote land to biofuels, save some of the FF, design what runs on electricity - also complicates things further.
I would love to hear from more people who are actually growing almost a totality of their diet. Sharon Astyk, Jason Bradford?
I would also like to see a comprehensive plan. Jason Bradford and John Jeavons already have guidelines for what we need to be eating. at a minimum. I think Jason's includes eggs. How much compost will they require? How much fuel might that use up to move around? How many people would be involved in growing food?
I'm taking a permaculture class, and just yesterday we were involved in designing "self-sufficient" communities. We were grappling with the following questions:
- How would one slow the water flow to maximize crop irrigation?
- How would we maximize roof space and other vertical crop growing options?
- How would one site the buildings to create favorable microclimates?
- To minimize the energy used to cool and heat buildings?
- How would one site schools, shops, etc... and design light rail to maximize the efficiency of transportation? (presumably then some people might live up in the mountains where land is not arable - there are systems for transport that could involve a wagon loaded with water traveling downhill, pulling up a wagon loaded with food traveling uphill)
- What's to be done with garbage/human waste?
I do get the sense that the possibilities are more abundant than we think by analyzing a single aspect of the process. I also understand that there will be no worldwide benevolent dictator.
Another consideration is how much river bottom ground is counted.
There is a heck of a lot of it for the river flood plains are replenished by the settlement of nutrients from upstream.
All protected by levees. And when those levess start to break up for lack of maintenace? Then goodbye to thousands of acres of very rich bottom ground.
In fact as dams might disengrate or be uncontrolled the losses could be greater, or possibly less depending. There are catch22s all over the place.
Airdale
As a farmer with real experience not only in raising crops and animals but also maintaining machinery and equipment,I will stick my neck out and suggest that your posed questions are mostly way off base and indicative of the fact that nobody in your class really has a clue.
Sorry to be so blunt but we may be talking about the lives of small children if you have toddlers.
Water flow in ditches can be diverted with a shovel and a few bunches of grass sod in a minute or two. Water in a pipe can be shut off at the origin by removing the end of the pipe from the source or with a valve-and if you have pipe,you have will have valves too.
The real question is where do you get this water from that is uphill from your garden space?
The real question concerning roofs is how you modify them to withstand the extra loads,the necessary attachments to hold containers w/o leaking,modifying surfaces to withstand lots of foot traffic,etc.
If you refer to capturing water running off a roof diring a rainstorm,it must go into a cistern of some sort.Crops exposed to rainstorms are not in immediate need of irrigation,and diverting the water to them would be wasteful.
As a long term question siteing of buildings is a very good idea to explore but in terms of actually doing something,within any time frame that means anything to you and me-unless you are verry young-you will be using existing buildings.
architects and engineers and others have answered the energy efficiency questions for you already,in great detail.All you need do is read thier work and maybe call in one occasionally to help with a particular problem.
Designing a community to minimize shipping from building to building is a great concept ,but only if you plan on moving to a pristine area and start out in an empty field.Otherwise the answers are self evident-you use whatever is available and locate the most valuable exsting buildings and work out from them,selecting secondary bldgs as close as possible from any suitable.
Building a counterbalanced tow line might work in a skyscraper-if for some reason there were to be lots of water on the roof.How will it get up there?
The odds of successfully building such a thing "in the mountians" in an energy constrained world where miles of cable and lots of big idler wheels with durable bearings,concrete to set posts,etc ?
Garbage will become nearly nonexistent,except for food scraps etc,which can be composted.Ditto all manures,including human.Matter of absolute necessity.
And then there is the real sixty four dollar question-if somebody shows you a busineess plan for running for instance a convenience store which is perfect in every way,except ONE-the location is simply LOUSY-WOULD YOU BUY IT?
If you are taking this seriously you will have realized that this is literally a life and death series of choices you are contemplating,and you will not handicap yourself by making an extraordinarily difficult job even harder by staying in a place where you NEED to garden on your roof(although if you are able to design a green roof into new construction it can be a very good idea) or HAVE to collect rainwater,etc,as a matter of course.
Can you point to a Sustainable Permaculture Diet ?
I mean a daily diet that they grow.
I'm sorry but this whole Permaculture Trip is a bunch of Hogwash.
Also , I suggest you go to Jeavon's Place and see what the people eat.
I do think Jeavons has tried very hard to help people.
Paraniod, all things are possible when starting with a blank sheet of paper for designing a self-sufficient community. Unfortunately, is far more difficult when trying to apply that design in the real World.
We're facing financial collapse, climate change and energy depletion and these things aren't going to suddenly happen once the self-sufficient community is built. They're happening now and they will affect every aspect of creating the self-sufficient community with the result that much of the design becomes infeasible for one reason or another.
What we are faced with is turning existing communities into self-sufficient communities using nothing more than what they already have. My WAG is that the failure rate will be very high. Permaculture is very good at minimising resource use and increasing utility of the given resources, but it is still limited by the resources it has to work with. Money, climate and available energy will act like Liebig's minimum on the growth of the community as well as the quality of the existing resources at hand.
Permaculture is a tool, but its still only a hand pick to help move a mountain. Also, many people seem to confuse the use of Permaculture with some kind of labour saving technology and in so doing massively underestimate the enormity of the task that lays ahead.
Amen, Burgundy!(to your 7/28/7;34am)
I feel like an old and wornout walking on crutches soldier rotating off the front passing the young new gung ho troops on thier way to kick the shit out of the enemy-troops who have not yet been under fire.
The permaculturists and the transistiom movement people don't really seem to have a clue as to what they are going to be up against.
Or at least the ones just reading about it don't.Probably some of the handful of real McCoys are figureing it out for themselves.
The Permculturists need to figure out how to stop importing there food.
How are they going to raise/store their 2000 calories a day and maintain/improve soil quality ?
Not by producing a book or promoting a conference.
People around the world depend on seeds (grains etc.) and tubers for their calories.
Mostly Corn , Wheat , and Rice ... potatoes , peanuts etc.
OFM, please keep posting your real world experience and gems of knowledge.
This city boy is wondering how he is going to get into the battle and survive. Have friends who have bought a 130 acre farm two years ago so seeing how they are getting on - I like to learn from other people's experiences & mistakes. Your points about visits from Murphy elsewhere in this topic are spot on, in my business have had odds of one in ten million come up let alone thinking about a year of drought or heavy frosts etc which you are going to get at least once every ten years or so.
Tony,
Thanks!It's good knowing that you are getting thru to some people at least.I suspect there are many more who like you can extrapolate from other experience and see the possible pitfalls,but doers do and talk little for the most part.I'm free to talk as much as I like,since my doing days are mostly over.
One thing that occurs to me as a result of reading your comment is that lots of people may have an opportunity to move to a working farm owned by relatives or friends if tshtf hard.
Living quarters will be one of the biggest problems.
Due to possible problems with authorities such as zoning and building inspectors,you will have to "just do it" and figure something out.
Something that works well for several people I know of is a large camper trailer parked inside a barn,either existing or built for the purpose.A distant relative has taken in an out of work female inlaw with a small child by this means very recently and his costs are about as follows.
Elderly twenty four foot camper in good overall condition 1000 dollars.(I have not priced campers lately but given the state of the economy,I bet you could get a really big one in great shape for peanuts,relatively speaking.)
pole barn built to enclose three sides,porch roof extended out over open side-three weeks labor,two people, and about two thousand bucks in building materials-posts boards,nails,screws and metal roofing and siding.
electrical supplies,water pipe sewer pipe,backhoe hire 1000 bucks
Electrical load is only one twenty amp 240 circuit and two 15 amp 120 volt curcuits piggybacked onto his personal house which has two hundred amps fused incoming and had lots of spare spaces in he distribution panel for the three new breakers.
water and sewer lines and electrical lines are buried and up to standards,there is no piont in cheating yourself on such a job.Water is from a spring on he property that supplies the house and the camper sewer output is tied into his existing septic system.The septic system is "three bedroom" rated which in practical terms means it should work ok even for a very large family,and only four people will be using it.
The camper is more than adequate for one person,and two could easily live in it if necessary,especially with ample outside storage space available.
It will last indefinitely since it is not exposed to the weather and is much easier to heat and cool than it would otherwise be since it is not exposed to the wind or summer sun.
I estimate the "rental " value of this solution at this time and this place as being around two hundred dollars to two hundred fifty dollars per month,as a small house goes for four hundred plus utilities.
Breakeven,two to three years roughly.
future value-maybe nothing except the value as a shed for a truck or hay.
maybe priceless to my cousin as a source of rent in the form of shared or in kind labor if the shit really does get bad, or lots of free beer if he takes in one of his old drinking buddies with a social security check and nothing else.
.
Incidentally he stays in the camper more nights and evenings than not and the girl and the baby stay in the house all the time,as his wife enjoys the company and the baby,even if it is throwing a tantrum.
To put it another way, we can't all "head for the hills."
That is, we are long past "Peak Hills"!
Overhunting would be the least of the problems
North Korea (or Haiti) represents a good example of a population reduced to living off the land. The following narratives from N.K. illustrate what a starving population is reduced to. From pg 2- 8 North Korea Today
I would like to say that this cannot go on forever but, then again, they have had repeated famines since the mid nineties. As one news anchor noted on a rare visit to N.K. ‘there are no cats or dogs or obesity in this city’.
Defense Secretary Gates has made the same observation
Then there is Haiti, the poster child of a country whose population is devouring the land like locusts – only 3% of forested land left.
Dave Christensen (in red-lined jacket) consults with agronomists and missionaries in North Korea about how to grow and select Painted Mountain corn.
http://seedweneed.com/index-1.html
The simple answer is that the population declines to fit the carrying capacity of an earth without fossil fuels.
I do question the logic of 2 million kilocalories a year though - that suggests 6,000 kcl per day, which is too many surely, even for an active farmer. Most could survive on half of that, which doubles the carrying capacity of a square kilometre to 600-800 people, more than we actually need.
That said, all of the other points are valid. I suspect that the solution is a combination of pushing each variable marginally in our favour - if we can get to a population of, say, 5bn and improve the arable land to, say, 13% by being a bit smarter, plus add in fishing and hunting, we might still be able to feed a fairly large population. Whether we would want to, of course, is another matter.
Loggers in the 1800s have been documented as consuming as many as 9K kilocalories in order to fuel their aerobic output at the ax or crosscut saw. 6K for a farmer doing heavy manual labor during the harvest is not an unbelievable figure.
Yeah, I agree. I was raised on a cotton farm back in the days before cotton pickers, hill planting and herbicides. (Hill planting means you don't need to thin the cotton.) The cotton had to be chopped by hand in the spring and picked by hand in the fall. We also grew corn and hay. The corn had to be picked by hand but we did hire a hay bailer. Our farm was not big enough to afford our own hay bailer. But back then the hay had to be forked into the bailers. Nothing is harder than working hay all day.
Farming is hard backbreaking labor.
Ron P.
Well of course it was hard and thats why women back then bore several children. My grandmother birthed 14 on my fathers side. A lot on my mothers side as well.
That gives you free labor. The younger girls qualify to help with the younger and do a lot of the cooking and cleaning.
One man and one wife? Not gonna work too well. Someone gets sick and your in trouble.
Airdale
Six thousand calories per day sounds about right for a soldier in a combat environment. Farmers also work long days.
I'm old and fat now,but when I was young and going to the orchard with my folks about daylight breakfast would consist of two or three large buscuits-made with lard,drenched with butter,and liberally coated with jelly.four or five lagre sausage patties-much bigger than the ones in fast food biscuits.A couple of large helpings of stewed apples,cooked with lots of sugar and butter.A couple of eggs ,unless it was three or four eggs.White pan gravy made with whole milk flour,and the sausage drippings.Two tall glasses of raw whole Guernsey milk-six plus percent butterfat.At least twenty four ounces .
And try as I mightI could not keep up with Daddy who was in his late thirties when I left home.
And by eleven oclock my belly was always tying itself in knots and I would have given almost anything if Daddy would have knocked off for "dinner" rather than working until five minutes till twelve.
Back in those days my belly was perfectly flat and the only fight I got into at school I just grabbed the other fellow -who was a lot bigger and a football player-and held his hands until the coach made me turn him loose.
Yes, I would like a reference for the 2 million C a year as well. I don't buy it. That means 5500 C per day, every day, for each family member. No way. And no, having worked crosscut saws, I don't buy that every member of a logging community was burning 9000 C per day *every day* either. I haven't been able to find a calorie calculator that bought that either.
Here's a decent one.
I plugged in 8 hours. 5500 C per day would mean about the same amount of work as everyone chopping, splitting, carrying, and stacking wood 8 hours a day, every day of the year. And to the real farmers out there, yes, I've been busting my butt over the past year trying to turn 10 fertile acres of weeds into productive land without herbicides. I completely agree it's sweat-buckets, back-breaking work. It's just not 5500 C per day, per person, 365 days a year work. I'll believe that when I see the well-done study that comes to that conclusion.
Here's another source, an article on the Tour de France at the Wall Street Journal. Tour riders burn between 7000 and 9000 C per day that they're riding. So we're being told that in farm families, everyone is burning about 2/3 as much as Tour de France riders, every day of the year. Again, I'll believe it when I see the study.
No one claimed that every logger was capable of a 9K kilocalorie output every day. These values were for elite loggers on days they really busted ass. Work days were from sunup to sundown and certainly exceeded eight hours labor. No one claimed that "every member of a logging community was burning 9000 C per day *every day*." You're correct that you can't extrapolate from such extreme values to a yearly sum.
But if you look at the original article, that's what Goodchild is saying.
He's extrapolating a number, that's highly questionable even for a hard-working adult farmer, to the general population. He may not be that ridiculously sloppy with the rest of his numbers, but I have a hard time going any farther with such a big problem to start with.
I'll be happy to believe that a large adult male farmer burned an average of 6000 C per day from May to October and 5000 C average per day the other months, if there were a study that said that. However, Goodchild doesn't mention such a study, he just throws out 2 million C per year.
And then he concludes that 7 million C / hectare means you could only feed 3 or 4 people. But even if you buy the 5500 C per hard-working, large, adult, male farmer, that means that you could only feed 3.5 hard-working, large, adult, male farmers per acre. What about the wife and kids? What about the non-farmers in the population? He's talking about a population that's only made up of hard-working, large, adult, male farmers!
Fair enough. I was only defending my post about oldtime loggers' caloric balance, not any claim Goodchild made.
kj,
You are right that it would not be a 365 day for every family member thing in regards to the calories.Having been there as a child and a very young man I would guess that two hundred fify days would be about right for the men,as some days are easier,and some are really easy,such as repairing tools when it is raining,etc.
Most of the women were working really hard but not at the very toughest jobs as the usual thing.Hoeing corn is hard,but not as hard as stacking hay for instance.
And farm laborers do often have to work at or near thier physical limits.
:Lots of jobs are time sensitive,such as gathering hay in front of rain,picking apples with a huirricane ion the way ,etc.
and farm workers and small farmers doing it by hand necessarily compete physically to succeed the same way small business owners do in very competive fields,with thier heads-flat out-as well as thier hands
Those elite bike riders wouldn't last very many years if thay had to ride that hard that long every day-probably not even a year would finish them off.even at thier age and even with the coddling they get in every other respect.
I have no problem believing the 5500 calorie number. Check this link for activites/exercise and look at the caloric rates per hour for a 190 lb. man. Also remember the raising of calories has to be yielded as we don't consume all of them. As many have noted the critters, insects, weather all cut down on the net before we harvest not to mention the trimming, cutting out bad spots, culls and associated damages as we use them and then the rats, insects, time, molds and etc. continue the yield loss during storage.
http://www.nutristrategy.com/activitylist4.htm
I swim 4 1/2 miles 2x a week along with some additional training it takes me just under 3 hours. During that time I am burning around 2500 calories so on those days my caloric breakeven is around 4500 calories. Thats just 3 hours of work! When I am done I am not winded breathing at a normal rates often capable of doing more. Now I also do a fair amount of physical labor around our place on the weekends and get a lot more physically spent than my pool workouts. While my rates are slower I am still burning a lot of calories. Unfortunately for me my penchant for good food and red wine still keeps me with a few extra pounds.
I also seem to remember in Stephen Ambroses' book on Lewis and Clark expedition that the experts had estimated the boat crew members were burning about 30,000 calories a day when they were rowing up the Missouri river based on the amount of food they were consuming per day while still losing weight. While I found that amazing I did not find it unbelievable. Dawn to dusk rowing against a current with heavy boats. Burn baby burn. I'm not sure my memory is correct but I seem to remember they were each eating around 15 lbs of meat per day. Plus a decent ration of hooch!
A moderate day of leaf raking would burn (8 hours) around 2800 calories making your breakeven around 4800 a day. Not that far off from 5500 now the wife and kids may temper the total a bit plus the winter and downtime but again don't forget the yield loss.
1. 190 lb men are not typical. As I noted above, the 5500 C average per day might make sense for a large man like that.
2. "The wife and kids may temper the total a bit plus the winter and downtime" - meaning that 2 million C average per person per year is extremely unlikely.
3. "Don't forget the yield loss" - but Pimental's numbers, which are the ones Goodchild cites, are for corn production in a non-mechanized system. Even Goodchild is claiming that 2,000 kg/hectare, about a third modern production, is a reasonable bottom line. That includes losses to "critters, insects" etc. What's your basis for saying that Pimental has overestimated?
Your wrong the mean weight for men now exceeds 190 lbs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_weight
Yield loss for corn is not what we are talking about unless you are a freaking swine. I know of no one that eats 100% corn for their calorie intake. Grains are the least perishable of our foods veggies, meats, dairy, fruits you know the stuff we eat all have higher yield loss and perishablity.
Kids actually can require more calories as they are growing my son easily consumes more calories than I.
I'm afraid your mind is made up and you are oblivious to reason.
This is kind of a late comment - but I wanted to talk with my dad before I wrote.
My dad worked excavating in the 70's. They got a lot of contract work in tight spaces because they had a rep for not damaging things. Made extra money that way. Their secret was using men and shovels - old men (>40 - lol) because often the summer hires - university kids - couldn't keep up. My dad ate bacon, eggs, fried potatos, toast, juice, sweet tea for breakfast every work day. His lunch was 4 sandwiches (texas cut bread, 1/2 inch sliced meat, lettuce, cheese), thermos soup, fruit, veggies, 1/4 pie, 2 - 4 litre jugs frozen lemonade, thermos sweet tea, cookies. And when work was over he ate a large full supper.
When he started the job he had a 44 inch waist, it dropped to 40 inches and stayed there. These guys worked 8 - 16 hours daily depending upon workload - and true, they weren't shovelling every day. He tells me this wasn't as hard work as in the gold mines earlier on, and that wasn't as hard as exploration before that.
So my dad used about 4-5k calories in 1970, at a stable weight.
I don't have a hard time believing in huge caloric requirements if folks are physically working.
Regards, Al
Is there a database of food production output depending on location and inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, know-how, others)?
I see lots of isolated data points, never sourced, never located or averaged.
Looks like food production data is more secret than nuclear launch codes :).
Wikipedia has some data but the number of studies cited is very low:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_agriculture#Productivity_and_profit...
Without public data, there's no debate.
This is a field study comparing organic and conventionl techniques side-by-side:
http://ecommons.library.cornell.edu/bitstream/1813/2101/1/pimentel_repor...
Included are different rotations, manures including green manures and different crops.
Yes this one is included in the wikipedia link I gave.
But this doesn't match what others are saying in comments and the variance with other studies is left unexplained.
Organic food isn't any more nutritious
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/organic-food-isnt-any-more-nu...
That report fails to mention the important matter that organics lack pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, hormones, etc. Just more corporate propaganda for suckers.
This BBC article claims that organic food is higher in secondary metabolites. If true organically grown coca would have more cocaine.
I really don't think we have scratched the surface of what might be done to increase food production. Also I think there is aneed to think more laterally on this one. A few ideas for the pot:
1. Ocean farming -creation of upwelling zones in dead ocean using OTEC (increased amounts of sea-food and kelp can be used as land-fertilisers).
2. Forest gardening -use of the 7 'layers' from Canopy to sub-soil to vertical.
3. Healthier eating: protein rich diets are a main cause of some horrible ailments (and no I'm not a Vegetarian -I like a good juicy steak as much as the next man). Think Wartime Britain -limited meat, more Veggies = healthier population.
4. Vertical farms and better use of urban environment (may need fertiliser input -see 1.)
I think its our focus on meat-rich, monocultural, fertiliser and pesticide rich farming that is the issue. If we carry on down this path then, yes, we probably will face some very serious depletion problems.
Nick.
Wow! Creating upwelling zones in dead ocean using OTEC. I am blown away. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. But I feel a lot more like crying.
Ron P.
Yes. My keyboard is too slick with tears to type accurately.
Arrghh.
And I have to make another trip to my beer keg to handle that one.
Or open another fifth of Four Roses.
Airdale
OK, now you have all had a chance to settle down and stop the stitch from hurting so much what's the problem with trying it?
Nick.
I think the monoculture which is most inappropriate is human bodies. Spreading their tentacles over the ocean and former forests sounds ghastly.
There is a perfectly good place for tens of billions of humans: spread out in the future, if we're not silly enough to preclude it.
Well, the author gives me my mandatory dose of doom for the week. To summarize his position, Malthuis was wrong only because he overlooked the advent of cheap energy. Which begs the question, what are the author and other like thinking folks missing at present?
I like GliderGuider's contribution.
One other take away is that we (humans) can't stay here, we must move out into the solar system soon. This is an alternate way by which the author's thesis can be true, but one which recognizes the inventiveness of mankind.
Now I know damn well I'll cry.
Ron P.
I'm going to go hill the potatoes....
Where is the line for tickets?
How much arable land is there on Mars?
Moving humans out into the solar system is a species survival daydream. If we want to ensure the survival of the species, we can do that just fine here on Earth.
The way I look at it is this:
The cost of getting a relatively few people off the planet and set up for long-term independent sustainability in a hostile environment is going to be enormous. We don't have the capital, the infrastructure or the knowledge needed to do that. We also don't have the time or the political will.
Much better to start out where the environment is already suitable, and figure out ways to help as many people as possible make it through the coming disruption. I really don't see what advantage going out into a fundamentally hostile environment would give us over the next hundred years. Within that hundred years we will either be a sustainable species (within whatever parameters you choose) or we will probably be toast. If we become toast, I don't see how we could nurture off-planet colonies. If we become sustainable I don't see the need for them.
Since I think we will in fact become sustainable (though probably not voluntarily) and the species will continue, I regard the dream of extra-planetary diaspora as yet one more technology-driven distraction. Kind of like fusion power...
I have a modest proposal....
I assume that it is a "Swift" idea. . .
Cummon GG, it's MAN'S DESTINY to boldly go forth at warp speed and colonize the galaxy, terraforming all wet space rocks and feeding our hundreds of trillions with McDonalds hamburgers & fries. Erecting the Golden Arches from the Orion Arm to the galactic center is what MAN was MEANT to do. Happy motoring among the stars. :)
Indeed, and when/if we do find an earth-like planet, we have clearly deserved it since we have been such great stewards of the one we found ourselves on!
If some species is already trying to live intelligently on that planet, we will also completely be in our rights to wipe them out (maybe save a few for zoos or reservations) and take over.
Perhaps all those who claim that we can just go terraform some other planet into a productive food growing situation should first have to prove themselves by terraforming some unproductive bit of earth territory.
Perhaps some desert area in the US southwest for practice, then the Sahara Desert to really show us their abilities?
Needles, California is an example of terraformed desert on Earth watered by the Colorado River. The transformation of a little patch of the Mojave Desert is easy compared to doing the same on Moon or Mars. A more apt challenge would be to terraform several acres of desert doing something similar to the closed missions in Biosphere 2. If the people want to go outside, then they would have to use spacesuits. If they receive any help from the outside other than materials dropped by parachute, then the mission would be a failure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sohI6vnWZmk
It is true that there is a lot of land on the moon. The dirt is very loose and friable, from what I understand, and should be very easy to plow. Great views, too, if you stake your claim on the near side.
Just a few little challenges to overcome, like air and water.
Why?
Can't solve overpopulation and resource depletion problems that way -- do the math on what it would take to move 3 x 109 people out to, say, the asteroid belt. Then post the blueprints for your magical energy device.
You want a refund because the laws of physics don't have loop-holes specially for you? Apply at the complaints desk, handily located in the Alpha Centauri system.
Yes, Malthus was wrong for that reason. He's wrong now because we are far into overshoot, so there won't be a drawn-out, stable suffering at the limits of the food supply; there'll be a crash.
"The other problem with the 10:90 ratio is that with “low technology,” i.e. technology that does not use petroleum or other fossil fuels, crop yields diminish considerably."
So are we saying that mobile phones, electric cars, electric rail transport, manufacturing ammonia, nitric acid by electricity , wind and solar power are all "low technology"?
Does Peter Goodchild not realize that most of the productivity of maize is due to plant breeding, yields have increased 50% since 1984, and FF use per acre has declined >25% since then.
Peter may as well envision a world where we have not metals, no wind and no sunshine; then we will not have cheap energy when FF's are exhausted. Renewable energy may not be as cheap as FF but its a lot cheaper than muscle power, its ludicrous to suggest we won't use it and all return to the countryside: This is another Paul Pot's Year Zero!
Extreme Doomerism
Despite the improvements in productivity, yields, and use of fossil fuels, the amount of land available stays constant while population grows. Plus, huge yields and healthy soils are not particularly compatible, especially where monocropping is practiced to induce high "productivity" and "yields."
The trend in the graph below cannot be sustained for much longer. Goodchild has observed that arable hectares cannot be increased very much. That leaves the human population as the variable most likely to change.