[MikeinNeb]

I know we are going to have to transition to an electrified rail infrastructure for a civilized world to exist in a post-fossil fuel world. But how is agriculture going to work? Are we gonna go Amish? I can tell you first hand that horses are a huge pain to work with. Small tractors running on biodiesel maybe?

[Lore]

You'd be amazed at what millions of people with a hoe, rakes and scythes can do in the field. Even small tractors running biodiesel will require an industrialized center to make them. I believe, pretty much all the above will be employed.

[vtsnowedin]

There a lot of uses for oil we could reduce or eliminate as a higher priority before we reduce any agricultural fuel use. Ags. share of the average oil barrel is pretty small to begin with but other then improving Ag efficiency with yet larger tractors, cuts elsewhere should come first. First off I'd eliminate corn ethanol entirely and free up 0.2 gallons of net diesel for every gallon of ethanol we are producing now. Then I would reduce long haul trucking by sixty to ninety percent, switching the tonnage to trains and barges. Next I would reduce single driver commuting mileage by 80% and trips for shopping by 60%. Using oil to heat buildings would be curtailed either by supper insulating buildings or utilizing co-generation. Only after we have done all that and explored for other possibilities should we cut back the amount of fuel available to grow food.

[MikeinNeb]

You need an industrial base to make hoes and scythes too. I want a post-fossil fuel, sustainable but modern society. Bicycles, decentralized and local production of goods and services, electrified rail lines and steel mills powered by breeder thorium reactors, etc. etc. Less with less, but still a good life. And it definitely won’t kill anybody if they spend the time working in a garden than they do now watching “Breaking Bad” and “The Walking Dead”.

[dolanbaker]

There a lot of uses for oil we could reduce or eliminate as a higher priority before we reduce any agricultural fuel use. Ags. share of the average oil barrel is pretty small to begin with but other then improving Ag efficiency with yet larger tractors, cuts elsewhere should come first. First off I'd eliminate corn ethanol entirely and free up 0.2 gallons of net diesel for every gallon of ethanol we are producing now. Then I would reduce long haul trucking by sixty to ninety percent, switching the tonnage to trains and barges. Next I would reduce single driver commuting mileage by 80% and trips for shopping by 60%. Using oil to heat buildings would be curtailed either by supper insulating buildings or utilizing co-generation. Only after we have done all that and explored for other possibilities should we cut back the amount of fuel available to grow food.

We will go a very long way down the production slope before fuel for agriculture starts to get scarce and much of the work could still be done using electric (battery) equipment.

If the price of oil was to quadruple, there would still be plenty for agriculture, public transport & bulk freight transportation, but not much for anything else though.

[Pops]

Hi Mike, I believe the bigger problem in the near term isn't food scarcity, it's affordability. Rich world people aren't going to starve but they are going to have some changes to make. Not to belittle your concern, I was right there at one point. but check this, I'll quote myself:

. . . there is a years worth of 2k calorie meals in 8 bushels of shell corn - a bushel is going for less than $5 today. Pretty crazy to think that a year's ration costs $40, huh? (corn doesn't provide all amino acids, you need a few beans, too but they are cheaper because they don't make ethanol).
...(100 calories to the ounce, 16 oz to the pound, 56# to the bu)

That's a years ration of tortillas and beans for $100, if you do labor add 50% and throw in some lard to make the hair shine and you're set for $200 for an entire year.

The problem for us isn't that food won't be there, I think the problem is more likely to be that we have no job so no money to buy food.

There will be bigger problems way down the road. At some point, due to the incredible shrinking economy, labor will become so cheap and the cost of fuel so unaffordable that regular folks will once again start gardening out of necessity. Further on, quite a bit further I think, they will need to start growing for calories.

[Shaved Monkey]

I think there will be lots of government intervention in first world countries with abundant food.(Like Australia ,NZ,Canada)
(The US will resit government intervention its in their DNA)
Making sure resources were available for food to be produced and distributed.
Unemployed would become the labour force.(work for the dole, removing angry young men from the cities)
Keeping society civil enough for the elite to still be able to benefit from being rich.
It cost more to employ more police or military than it does to distribute food.
During the war people were put to war or to work on farms, governments took over unprofitable shops to deliver food and clothes and tools, ration cards were issued, black markets thrived.

Food poor countries its going to be a lot more difficult.(like Singapore,Japan,UK ME)
The less industrialised 3rd world might still do ok.

[PrestonSturges]

Farms will grow their own biodiesel, which will probably be refined in local co-ops. There is an oil crop for nearly any climate, including canola, sunflowers, and peanuts.

[dolanbaker]

Farms will grow their own biodiesel, which will probably be refined in local co-ops. There is an oil crop for nearly any climate, including canola, sunflowers, and peanuts.

I very much doubt that as there wouldn't be too much left after fueling the fuel production to produce food.
When we eventually end up in the situation when there is a real scarcity of oil, farmers & food distributors will be at the top of the list when rations are decided.

Such a situation will be several decades into the future and the produce will be relatively expensive as the extraction of fuel will also be expensive then, regardless of the source.

[vtsnowedin]

We will go a very long way down the production slope before fuel for agriculture starts to get scarce and much of the work could still be done using electric (battery) equipment.

If the price of oil was to quadruple, there would still be plenty for agriculture, public transport & bulk freight transportation, but not much for anything else though.

I don't think there is any viable battery powered farm machinery.
Here something you might find interesting.
http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/c ... a1-20.html Go to the right and pick a selection such as corn following soybeans. Imagine planting the same 100 acres with hand labor at the $13.00 per hour labor cost and carry it down the form to the cost per bushel!!

[MikeinNeb]

Don't forget that it isn't just fueling tractors and combines. Isn't ammonia as an example derived from natural gas? There is a strong interconnection of fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides to hydrocarbons. And will this reverse the 120 year decline in rural population or will rural areas become more empty?

[farmlad]

I`m trying to set up my little farm for a post peak oil scenario (that does not include war, mafia,etc , but if TSHTF really bad, it probably have mostly been in vain.
The majority of the corn being grown today in the US has such an imbalanced nutrient profile,that even chickens can not survive on just corn, they might not even survive if you mix in beans. That's why the feedmills add PROTEINS, vitamins, calcium, Iodine, copper, etc.
The average yield is like 160 bushels or 9,000 lbs per acre x $5 per bu = $800. but the current cost for fertilizer is like $400 to $500 per acre and the price is very much tied to energy prices. think natural gas for nitrogen feed stock, energy costs for mining, refinery, and transportation of potassium, phosphorus, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, boron, copper.
This corn also requires pesticides, and fungicides, which requires scientist, lab technicians, petrochemicals, etc.
It also requires a hybrid seed source, and if you would stop using herbicides, it would make for a lot more cultivating or hoeing by hand.
So what I would guess for corn production once we can`t afford FFs is Open pollinated corn, which has a better balance of nutrients,and producing 35 Bushels per acre. This would be 15 bushels less than my Grandpa raised 50 years ago. And the reason for this smaller amount is because of the amount of soil degradation that has happened in these 50 years. This corn field would first need to be weeded and then planted by hand, ( for horses to become viable we would first need to get a lot more of them, and they only reproduce so fast, and who knows how to handle them these days, let alone train them, and how would we feed them in the winter) Seems to me that horses can only be viable when feed resources are abundant.
Since weed seeds germinate much more readily in degraded soil, as soon as the corn comes up it would need to be hoed, again, some of the plants would fall over from corn borers, so you would need to carry off and feed these plants to some livestock, if your fortunate enough to have any. With so much less acres in corn and that corn being Open Pollinated your little field would be a war Zone for the raccoons and possums, and once your bullets are all used up, someone might need to stay up with the dog to guard the field at night.
Then at harvest you go out and pick the ears and lay them out in the sun to dry, and if it rains you quick cover it up with something or carry it all inside, than you have to grind it up and cook it whenever your hungry and next spring the bugs are eating up the corn so you have to mix it with ashes. Anyways you get the point, corn will be precious again.
Now, I still think that in a post FF world it would be possible to feed a lot more people, with way more nutritious food, than we are today, and with way less negative and a lot more positive environmental impact, but it can`t happen overnight, and time is either fast running out, or has run out already, to implement the changes that need to be made to avoid mass starvation.

[careinke]

The top image is what you get with todays industrial ag. I can pretty much guarantee the produce on the bottom image took much less ff to produce. And you still have $2.99 to heat the range and toaster and buy the soap to clean up.

If you raise your own chickens it is even cheaper.

BAU is collapsing. Eventually, permaculture type systems will be the only viable option. Because nothing else is sustainable. Care for the Earth, Care for the people, return the surplus to the first two. Life will be different, but it does not have to be worse.

[KaiserJeep]

The problem is that 51.6% of the US population, and even a larger percentage in many other Western World cultures - are on fixed incomes of some nature. Here in the USA, both food and transportation fuels are thoughtfully excluded from the currency inflation statistics that are used to set the COLA (cost of living adjustment) for so-called "entitlement" programs.

I'm still working, but during the time when gasoline rose from $1.35 to $5.35, and then declined to $4.49 at the corner station, groceries increased from $10/bag to $40/bag.

It doesn't matter whether it's welfare or an "earned" retirement program, it is predictable that both space heating and food will replace disposable income that we presently spend on transportation in our senior years.

http://inflationdata.com/articles/2013/03/21/food-price-inflation-1913/

For the developed economies, this amounts to a serious inconvenience. For the Third World, it is starvation.

[Pops]

Thanks farmlad.

We do use a lot of fertilizer. But, as you know, we also grow a lot of food expressly as animal feed, maybe 3/4 of US grain production, worldwide it's probably getting up close to half. Not too long ago meat was flavoring, an extravagance, there is probably a reason they're called "bullion cubes" LOL

I'm not that old - 57 - but I can remember the big deal the supermarkets in California made of "Corn Fed Beef" back in the 60's. That was a direct result of the greater efficiency of fertilized, irrigated, hybridized corn and nearby feedlot finishing and packing, cheaper to send boxed beef to CA from the midwest than beef on the hoof. Prior to the Green Revolution, most beef was "grass fed" - grass finished is more appropriate actually. Some small amount was finished on grain to supply the carriage trade, maybe they should have called it the "Red" Revolution instead of the Green because we've fed most of the increased harvest to animals.

But you can't forget that producers have been growing more and more efficient right along, cost pressure is nothing new, they are a business like any other. The increasing power of the middleman has put such pressure on the grower that there is maybe a quarter's worth of corn in a $5 box of cornflakes. Most of the cost of packaged food is the package. So between the consumer shopping for value and the processor convincing them "value" is a pretty package, farmers have been under a strong "evolutionary" pressure for a hundred years now.

For example, I doubt that farmers will be using OP seeds again any time soon, at least the old fashioned kind. Why elect to go back to making 3-4-5 cultivation passes when the cost of fuel for traction is the biggest pressure on the bottom line? First generation Roundup Ready seed is going off patent this year. There are other patented traits and lots of legal stuff for Monsanto to jigger up, but I'm pretty sure RR1 seeds will be planted next year from seed saved from this harvest.

But more generally, hybrid seed is more productive - that's why it is used. So, if the cost to produce and transport hybrid and even GMO seeds is less than the value of the added production, farmers will use it, that won't change and just because OP is how it used to be done doesn't necessarily mean that is how it will be done in the future, at least in the case of the commodity farmer.

During the period of globalization, the pressures were to produce foods that could be transported long distances. So we have the perfectly round, red-but-never-actually-ripe tomato-ish item in the grocery store. It is an abomination but it is exactly what the consumer has selected for; just like the huge, beautiful but hollow and tasteless strawberry and 2 pound chicken breast - that doesn't taste like chicken; and on and on. The supermarket consumer is the evolutionary pressure on the foods we eat, what we buy decides what gets planted, it's really a perfect example of survival of the fittest - just queered up to be: survival of the purchased.

We probably won't have tomato-ish looking items from Peru in January (no great loss) and we may find we have more time to make cornmeal mush instead of opening a box of cornflakes since driving across town to the mall will be out. I think that will be the big evolutionary pressure in the medium-term future, wringing out the middlemen processors because less income means less protein and less prepackaged food.


Having said all that, I gotta go out now and throw some feed to the calves, LOL
.

[Simon_R]

Hi

Not a farmer, but living in an agricultural area.

Doesn't the question also entail what will be the future for farmers, what I mean is here (france) farms are combining and getting bigger, to utilise economies of scale.
I have also noticed that increasingly farmers buy in services rather than doing it themselves, with the cost of the latest kit, this is entirely understandable.
So in the long term are we going to see farmers as purchasers of services from experts rather than the pops of all trades.

If this is so (farmers purchasing in services), then the independent suppliers of services can buy bigger and better kit to get a competitive advantage, however I see in the local papers people offering services for seeding (semoire - not sure if seeding is the correct word) from quad bikes, so ... are we near a tipping point whereby the cost for a honking great tractor to seed a hectare is 150-200eur but the little guys can now compete.
Myself I will harness my two horses and would be quite happy to make 200eur per day.

so I think it will come down to fashion, do you want a contractor on a shiny red tractor with the latest kit to do the work, or a contractor on a quad bike .... or shall I harness the girls, we do a great job for only 2 bales of hay per day.
Alternately you may still try to do it all yourself, but why bother when you can make a phone call to get it done.

Sorry for rambling, going to shovel horse poo now

Simon

[Pops]

Corn beans and squash were American staples several thousand years before Amerigo arrived.

[Pops]

Simon, I heard one guy say he wasn't a farmer so much as a purchasing manager.

For a while yet I think tech will continue to increase, especially "soft" solutions like targeted application based on previous harvest, drone-mounted sensing, precision control - gps can get a tractor within inches of it's previous wheel tracks, and of course more designer genes.

But like you say, specialization equals efficiency. I'd argue however that time is money and no one is going to hire you to do a thousand acres with a team or a quad. OTOH, using a team for a small, local speciality crop may be the way to go for a few acres in a few years. But that hasn't anything really to do with basic commodity crops.