This is a guest post by Phil Harris, a plant scientist based near the Scottish border in the UK. He has worked for government agencies in such areas as food safety and plant quarantine. Since 1997, he has worked amid the agricultural results of system-collapse in ex-communist countries of Europe.

While there has never been more food around, modern production is not really a ‘success’ story. In the face of a long term decline in fossil energy, there is significant doubt whether production relying on nitrogen fertilizer can ramp-up to feed the expected world population, or can even maintain existing levels. Similarly, in almost wholly urbanized industrial countries, ‘Western’ production equates to mechanized farming, which requires very significant fossil fuel. Future problems are potentially exacerbated by the spread of the up-market ‘Western’, urban, dietary pattern. Already much of global primary calories and protein are diverted to the meat sector. In addition, this dietary pattern exacts a high price on health. In this post (part 1), I discuss these and related issues.

Through the years, most of the world has lived in village ecosystems, and produced most of its food locally through those ecosystems. An important part of this farming is recycling the nutrients and exporting only relatively little outside the system, unlike the demands made on farming by our urban world. In Part 2, I will talk more about village ecosystems, and will discuss approaches that might be used to overcome deficiencies of our current system.

This is a guest post from Jim Dunlap (Wyoming) about his experience as a new farmer in Virginia and is part of our Wed pm/Sat pm TOD: Campfire series, where we will post articles more related to personal, local and social responses to our resource and environmental predicaments.

Like many posters on The Oil Drum (TOD) I find the subject of how we are going to feed ourselves in our future world of constrained energy supplies and climate change fascinating and complex. Partly by design and partly by happenstance I am living a version of the kind of life some believe will become not only the norm but required of large numbers of people in our future world. This post is an attempt to describe some of my experiences growing food on an 11 acre farm during 2008. Earlier TOD discussions, involving such posters as Jason Bradford, Wisdom from Pakistan and others on carrying capacity, minimum food requirements, production possibilities and other aspects of small scale agriculture, led me to think that a description of the effort and results of one farmer, at the small end of the farming spectrum, would be interesting information for many on TOD and might generate meaningful discussion. So here goes.

Today is World Food Day. To celebrate the day, we are publishing an excerpt from Aaron Newton's and Sharon Astyk's forthcoming book, A Nation of Farmers. We are publishing two sections from this book:

• Industrial Agriculture: Stealing from the Future

• Organic Agriculture Can Feed the World Better

A longer excerpt from the book is available on Hen and Harvest. A Nation of Farmers is being published by New Society Publishers, and is expected to appear in the Spring of 2009. The excerpt begins below the fold.

This month's edition of National Geographic has a feature article on "Soil", which looks at the steady degradation of agricultural land and the problem this poses in world where the population is heading for 9+ billion people - effectively calling attention to the "peak dirt" problem (however soil is renewable, so any "peak" should be able to be reversed if sufficient time and effort is put into doing so).

The article uses an acronym I've never come across before to describe the problem faced by those trying to draw attention to the issue: MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) - a phenomenon which should be familiar to anyone who has ever talked about peak oil, global warming or any of the other "limits to growth".

This year food shortages, caused in part by the diminishing quantity and quality of the world's soil, have led to riots in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By 2030, when today's toddlers have toddlers of their own, 8.3 billion people will walk the Earth; to feed them, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, farmers will have to grow almost 30 percent more grain than they do now. Connoisseurs of human fecklessness will appreciate that even as humankind is ratchetting up its demands on soil, we are destroying it faster than ever before. "Taking the long view, we are running out of dirt," says David R. Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Journalists sometimes describe unsexy subjects as MEGO: My eyes glaze over. Alas, soil degradation is the essence of MEGO.

One subject that features in the article is soil restoration, including a look at "terra preta" - rich, fertile artificial soils found in the Amazon. In this post I'll have a look at modern day techniques to produce terra preta (often called biochar or agrichar) which have the potential to increase soil fertility, generate energy and sequester carbon all at the same time.