Depends whther you put me on Ignore or not as to how much of your time I can waste As I recall, I wasted penty of it arguing for Sail as opposed to Bunker Fuel, but that one is past History

Anyhow, I am not talking post peak oil scenario here, I am talking about the here and now in this case. Fuel CLEARLY is getting more expensive, and people in service industries are CLEARLY being put out of work. Would it not make sense to put a greater percentage of the population and human labor toward the pursuit of producing food, just to keep the costs down of buying oil from the Saudis?

Economically speaking, this seems to me to make sense. Please feel free to disabuse me of the notion however

Reverse Engineer

Hmm, the problem it seems is that once the food industry is organized in its current shape (as a response to cheap fuel and relatively more expensive labor) that it is not that easy to reverse this process. Circa 1945 you may have had closer to 50% of the population on the land, and the average land holding was a quarter section (give or take a few acres). Now that would be considered a hobby farm. Even with more expensive energy (either petroleum or bio-fuels) the dynamic between fuel and labor still tilts in fuel's favor.

A 40HP tractor with a front-end loader, 3-point hitch and power take-off replaces a lot of human labor or draught power. The best part is that you do not have to keep your tractor fed and housed when you're not using it. And at least in the N. Hemisphere agriculture is still mainly seasonal. I just do not see agriculture absorbing great amounts of excess labor? And for seasonal work like picking fruit or bringing in the harvest what do you do with this labor when it is not needed?

At the moment (not at some interval in the future) we (Canada and USA) spend approximately 43-percent of our discretionary income in restaurants and bars versus just 6-8 percent on basic food. That means that the food industry absorbs vastly more excess labor than agriculture. But it also means that as economic times get tougher, and energy prices increase, that consumers will cutback first in meals eaten out.

How the world spends its money

If we look at the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the period of time leading up to that event, then we see small garden plots and weekend homes in the country as being a very important stop gap measure in helping families cope with both higher food prices and the inavailability of some foods. But these plots of land were more of a garden size versus being classified as farms. Even in places like Poland I would not consider 1 or 2 hectares a proper farm. Certainly enough to provide a meagre subsistance at best.

Cows and chickens in the backyard or a hutch of rabbits in suberbia? Maybe. It depends on enforcement of zoning laws. Will our rules and regulations change (quickly enough) to respond to the higher unemployment that comes from fuel scarcity? That is not really an economic question so much as it is a social and political response to a new physical reality.

I think that the average shop girl sales person if moved to the farm, properly supervised and directed ,but denied the use of any oil ,would not be able to grow enough food to pay her the minimum wage. The minimum wage is an artifical device that is inflationary and will fall by the wayside post peak.
Now post peak but pre collapse ,why not have robots do all the labor? we have been working in that direction post WWII. Look at how many employees worked on a auto assembly line in 1950 and payed income taxes on the wages, and look at how many fewer work that same line today. Bad part is the robot welders and painters don't pay income tax or into the retirement fund. Might have to switch to a value added tax to make the robots the tax payers. Wonder what R2-D2 uses for fuel?
As oil becomes scarce I expect to see more robots not less. Many applications can be fed by electricity from what ever source and you dont have to provide them food or health care. Even the replacement of the infantryman is approching. much easier to order another one from the factory then to write a condolance letter to a lost soldiers mother.
So post peak your shop girl needs to find work that a robot can't do well and charge enough for it to pay the bills. Hemmm.??

In the relatively recent past, say 1870 to 1914, so within the industrial age period, if you did not have a skilled trade or did not own land then with all likelyhood you were very poor. The first social safety nets as in old age pensions only appeared under Bismark in that period. But in general if you could not work, or if you performed manual, unskilled labor, you did not live well, and you were always one injury away from the poor house.

It would take a generation to teach unskilled workers how to farm again. But even then they would not likely own the land they were working, so the economic benefit would still go to the landowner and not to labor. Not a lot of Mexican farm laborers are getting rich. That may be better than being unemployed and very poor in the city, but it would still be a whole new reality compared to what unskilled labor in the developed world has come to expect as their birthright. Welcome to the everyday reality of the developing world.

Current consumption patterns are changing very quickly, last year's stats don't really provide a good measure for this year's reality. For instance. last year there were Bennigan's Restaurants all over the place and a Starbucks on every street corner (metaphorically speaking of course). A year later, no Bennigan's and way fewer Starbucks.

Clearly all the folks who worked as Barristas in those Starbucks and as Cooks in those Bennigans are now out looking for work. Meanwhile, farmers are going bankrupt because the cost of the diesel to run the tractors in just the palnting and harvest times is more than they actually will get from the crops they grow. Somehwere in between these two problems is a middle ground, it seems to me anyhow.

People need to go back to the land, but as you mention it does not have to be year-round. Mainly large numbers would be needed during the planting and harvesting times, not the intervening growing time or the fallow time through the winter. During these times, people could pursue other work, as they always have.

The problem of course is moving the people around to do this, that is a hard thing but not impossible to overcome. People could be moved en masse in various times of the year to do the work necessary on the railroads, these structrures do in fact bring the crops the other way of course. Unemployed barristas from Starbucks might go work for 3 months out of the year and provide enough labor to bring in enough crop for themselves for a year and 2 or 3 others. At the very least, you give them something to DO, and just don't devolve into starvation for all.

Of course, few Americans want to go out in the fields and swing a Scythe like the Peak Oil Goddess, but given the choice between starvation and swinging a scythe, I think most would choose the latter. We just have to enable the transition, it does not have to happen all at once.

A 25% of agricultural workers is not a sustainable percentage, I think a 50% percentage might be. In any event, its a better scenario then just saying the end of Oil is the End of Civilization.

Reverse Engineer

Human labor cannot compete with a tractor. It takes more calories to feed them. Whether you grow food to feed farm laborers or grow crops to be made into bio-fuels (either ethanol or bio-diesel) the tractor performs more work. At least for growing crops. Farm labor is best kept for intensive operations like picking fruit, harvesting a small garden or tending to livestock. Even if the marginal cost of labor is zero (and it is not as labor needs to be fed and housed even when it is producing no work) it cannot compete with the energy efficiency of a tractor. I cannot accept the argument that in response to fuel scarcity and high prices that we will choose to become less energy efficient. Food, Fuel and Fertilizer are the Holy Trinity. Like Oxygen, Fuel and Flame are to Fire. They are not independent of one another.

As long as the price of th fuel remains low enough, and as long as the fuel is available, this remains true.

Problem is of course that the fuel is becoming more scarce all the time, and about anything can disrupt the flow now. You just cannot depend on it being available. One decent hurricane can knock out production for months.

Its an open question as to how long we can maintian the flow of oil to all the various sectors of the society that curently depend on it. However, its a canard to believe that human labor cannot copete with a tractor over the long haul. The tractor loses because the cost of the oil to run it becomes to great, and the difficulty of bringing that oil to market is even grreater. it demands you project out military force to nations of the world tat have the resource, and take it from them. It cannot last long this way.

Reverse Engineer

Anything with a carb can "easily" be made to run on ethanol and you get a lot more work from a tractor running on home distilled ethanol than you would get from a human being consuming the same amount of corn. I think this is what mr. bill is getting at. So yes with a ten acre wood lot (fuel for the fire to distill the corn) and an acre or two of corn would be able to give the fuel I would need to use a tractor for a lot of work... and a whole lot more work than people could do on the same amount of corn... esp if I have to keep them alive through the winter (unlike a tractor)... but MB has already made these points.

You're talking about petroleum and I am talking about bio-fuels such as ethanol and bio-diesel. I am not talking about supplying all the transport fuel needed to support the economy's current infrastructure. I am talking about the bio-fuel needed to run a tractor for the explicit purpose of growing food. I can also foresee certain scenarios where food will consume not 6-8% of our incomes, but 33-50% of our incomes with less variety, less fresh fruit and produce and/or less meat. This will result in much less non-discretionary disposable income and most likely falling living standards for many. Basic goods such as food, fuel, clothing and shelter will take a larger percentage of our total income leaving less for all other purchases large and small.

I see it as quite plausible that a certain percentage of the grown crop is used for the purpose of fueling the tractors to harvest the crop, just as I see it as possible that over time we build more windmills to generate more electricity. And then some tractors which run on lead acid batteries scavenged from SUVs no longer able to get gas, etc.

These ameliorating factors are why I do not think we will need to devolve to total slave labor or the economy of 1750 I like to use as a baseline. I do NOT see the outcome of Peak Oil as a return to the Stone Age, by any means.

However, in the short term the changeover necessary involves a lot of economic dislocation, and it will be quite hard for many to live with this reality. Its the social aspect of this that is the biggest bear, not the economic one. The economic problems are mostly soluble although they demand a change in the way people live. What is not so easily soluble is the intevening period of dislocation. Its the Zero Point, you divide by Zero and the result is undefined. Until we work through the Zero Point, you simply cannot predict anything.

Reverse Engineer

Human labor cannot compete with a Horse either Mr. Bill, the reason farmers world wide use livestock is simple. A properly harnessed horse will eat 5 times as many calories per day as a man, but it does 10 times as much work, a 100% improvement on your food invested. Even better a horse during the spring/summer/fall can be put out to forage for a couple hours before and after working and feed itself on meadows which are not being cropped. If you use field rotation they can also be grazing on the fallow field adding manure to the soil and reducing the time it takes for the land to recover.

Old and new ideas will be needed. Try this for a catastrophist take on the problem. It is mainly wrong, in my view, because of the final conclusions:



He seems to agree with ReverseEngineer that we could possibly dislocate most labourers to labour intensive activities - pretty much like farming or hand-producing consumer goods. This will increase the prices of those goods - because human labour is more expensive - and will reduce discretionary income of those labourers, which will not be able to afford those consumer goods. Henry Ford said a well-paid worker would give him the money back, buying a car; these people will not be able to afford the stuff they make, period.

So, unless you are really betting on that catastrophe scenario, we better search for smarter ideas. Remember the new port in London I posted about? I heard an interview of the responsible for the project this week, and he was stating that getting the port closer to the shops (it will be built further up the river Thames) would take lorries out of the roads, help reduce CO2 emissions and possibly reducing total costs. That's an old idea (the port should be as close to the shop as possible) being used alongside new ideas (electric-operated cranes to increase energy efficiency).

Tanada wrote:


So true, but according to the facts I read (sorry no link or source) the conversion from draught power to the internal combustion engine freed up approximately 25-percent of farmland for food versus feed production. A huge increase in productivity. However, as we grow bio-fuels we lose (or give back) some (or all) of those productivity gains, unless we can grow bio-mass on marginal land that is not suitable for mainstream agriculture.

That is a big if. Certainly we have the land in N. Canada, Russia, across parts of Africa, Asia and S. America, but then, of course, we have the problem of growing bio-mass where it might not be needed only to have to transport it to where it is needed, so we have a lower EROEI (again). And to sustainably harvest forest and other marginal land for bio-fuel production we also have a real trade-off between the environment, economic development and the need to protect fragile natural flora and fauna.

Understanding that we also have limited resources in terms of water for irrigation and sources of inorganic fertilizer. Although this is manageable I do not think anyone believes we can match current yields with alternative farming techniques or even traditional methods such as natural crop rotation. We still require a substantial amount of demand destruction to limit our energy use and to allocate it only to those economic pursuits, such as growing food, where there is a positive (360 degree) return on energy invested.

I never understood why agriculture was such a hot topic on this board.
I lost count how many people like to cry, "omg when PO hits we're all going to grow a garden."
These are the same folks who probably just got back from spending $15 / person eating at the Olive Garden.

Cooking at home instead of eating out is a topic that barely hits the radar screen on this forum but I believe that will become one of the biggest social changes ---> NOT everybody running out of the cities and onto the countryside to grow a garden.

MrBill wrote:

Now, that is one of the most intelligent things I've read around here for a long, long time. I've always known that there's too many people and not enough jobs, and that the majority of jobs are just "filler" - not essential for the basics of life.

Know why service-class workers are paid so little? Because we don't need them. They're there just so we can blow our money on totally useless pursuits, such as drinking that god-awful sludge they serve at Starbucks, or eat cardboard food at chain restaurants, or shop for overpriced trinkets at the mall.

Of course, when the economy falls down, there won't be any "discretionary" spending, so all of those service-class workers will be unemployed, leaving approximately a quarter of the working-age population to carry the load. It's not a pleasant thing to think about, but there's no getting around that. There's simply *not enough work* to keep everyone employed. As it stands now, only about 65% of all adults between 18 and 65 are currently employed, and this figure will get smaller from here on out.

So how to keep the jobless fed and housed? My idea would be implement Huey Long's minimum income plan...everyone gets a share of the nation's GDP whether they work or not. This keeps the food on the table, roof over heads and prevents the total breakdown of society. Those that do have jobs, as actual producers, will be able to keep a portion of what they earn, in addition to the minimum state income, so they'll enjoy a higher standard of living than those who do not have jobs. If those folks don't like the idea of the majority living off the fruits of their labors, then tough sh*t. Which would you rather have, a society like I've just described, or a new Dark Age with burnt-out cities and starving zombies?

Don't know about you guys, but I'm voting for the most sensible option.