[JohnDenver]

I've often thought that moving to the country is one of dumber things you could do in response to peak oil.

My reasoning for this is simple: people in the country have a massive dependence on cars and gasoline. For example, my brother used to live on a ranch in the extreme boondocks of Idaho (the area was only electrified in the 1980s) and he and his wife had to drive about 100 miles to go to the supermarket. That's an extreme case, but the general principle is very true. The country has incredible sprawl, and you have to drive really long distances to take care of your daily business. Urban dwellers like myself, on the other hand, don't have to drive at all. My supermarket is a 3 minute walk from my front door. It seems obvious to me that country people -- at least those who aren't making good money from serious agriculture or some other business -- are the ones who will get it in the neck first from peak oil.

Here's an article from summer 2008 that pretty much says it all:
Rural U.S. Takes Worst Hit as Gas Tops $4 Average

Pops and I had a little exchange on this topic in another thread, but I'd like to go into it a little deeper.

Pops:

We'll further diversifying our meager income by planting some U-Pick berries on a couple acres and going as whole-hog into market gardening as time allows next year, direct selling grass fed beef and eggs and some value added (jams, jellies) and homemade stuff at the farmers markets and roadside.

JD:

Just curious, but how much driving is involved in these businesses? For example, how far would people generally drive for your U-Pick berries? And how far do you and your customers generally drive to a farmers market? Do you keep your beef chilled or frozen? Do you use a generator at the market?

Pops

I talked to neighbors who have blueberries they are about to retire from and they said people mainly come from the small town about 5 miles away but some come 40 miles from Springfield or Joplin. They bring their kids and grandkids and a picnic lunch and have a "Farm Experience". With the farmers market people show up with their straw hats and organic cotton shopping bags to be seen by their Green peers. I could make a little money today at the little market on our square but to do any good we'll need to drive to one of the bigger towns — our roadside stand can only make $50 or $100 a week and that's only a few weeks per year.

This is similar to smallpox girl who talks about driving from Seattle to Olympia (60 miles) for a farmer's market.

But these long drives totally negate the purpose of local food:

We have found that if a customer drives a round trip distance of more than four miles in order to purchase their organic vegetables, their carbon emissions are likely to be greater than the emissions from the system of cold storage, packing, transport to a regional hub and final transport to customer's doorstep used by large-scale vegetable box suppliers.Link

Another study gets the same results:

In the worst scenario, a UK consumer driving six miles to buy Kenyan green beans emits more carbon per bean than flying them from Kenya to the United Kingdom.Link

The same point can be seen another way. Suppose a family buzzes out to Pops' farm and picks 10 pounds of berries. Driving an average US vehicle, they'll burn 4 gallons of gasoline for a round trip of 80 miles. (Incidentally, that gasoline will weigh about 2.5 times more than the berries purchased.) Now, a commercial aircraft gets roughly 70 miles per gallon per passenger, and a passenger would be roughly equivalent to 20 boxes of berries (each containing 10 pounds). So for 4 gallons, you could send a passenger 280 miles, and a passenger is 20 boxes of berries, so you could send a box of berries about 5600 miles by air. In other words, driving 80 miles by car to buy 10 pounds of berries uses the same amount of fuel as shipping them 5600+ miles by air. And it just gets worse the less you buy. With a 5 pound box, you're talking 11,200 miles -- about half the circumference of the earth.

[Ibon]

It is today inefficient but not inherently so. Look at developing countries with huge populations still living in rural agricultural communities for hints on where rural american infrastructure is heading; Jeepnies, buses, tricycles, scooters, carts, horses, oxen take care of transportation. Food distribution and markets less consolidated in big box stores far apart and reemergence of small cottage industries more locally distributed. More grease monkey shops repairing things.

More bartering and trading of services. Extended families pooling resources,

Socialization moving toward shared transport, shared work, shared use of heavy equipment like grain harvesters etc.

Need will create this....

[TreeFarmer]

The country has incredible sprawl, and you have to drive really long distances to take care of your daily business.

Well here is the problem with your analysis. You have the rural people still living the same way post peak as they do pre-peak. In a post peak world daily business will mean staying on the farm and working with a "trip to town" once a week or maybe once a month.

TF

[mos6507]

A point is being made by JD, though, that people who think they are doing the right thing may have blindspots in their energy consumption. There are still a great many people who push the reurbanization agenda as a solution for peak oil, including Kunstler. There is a schism in the doomer community between reurbanization vs. back-to-the-landers that will probably remain until we run this experiment for real.

[JohnDenver]

The country has incredible sprawl, and you have to drive really long distances to take care of your daily business.

Well here is the problem with your analysis. You have the rural people still living the same way post peak as they do pre-peak. In a post peak world daily business will mean staying on the farm and working with a "trip to town" once a week or maybe once a month.

If you're talking about savvy people who are already making money on serious farm operations, or wealthy farmers who own their farms outright, then yes I would agree with you. Rural areas will tend to operate more the way they did in the past, with people making infrequent trips and really stocking up. Those are the people who belong in the country and will remain there.

However, the vast majority of peak oilers (and farmers/rural residents) don't fall into the above category. They are people who need to work -- to pay the mortgage on the land they are buying; to pay for improvements, stock and equipment for the land; or just simply to pay bills. And if you read the article I cited above, you can see how rural sprawl + high oil prices is absolutely lethal to their finances. These people work on farms, fish processing facilities, slaughterhouses... anything they can get. The pay is crappy; they're competing against illegal immigrants; and they have to drive long distances. They don't have the option of driving to town once a month.

As Todd Getzel, a long-time homesteader with 40+ years of rural experience writes:

Fourth, you have to assess your marketable skills and whether you and/or your partner are willing to take any job. Jobs of any kind are hard to come by in the boondocks. It is not terribly unusual for men to work so far from home that they live where their jobs are and come home only on weekends-–not too good for relationships.

Hey also has a jaundiced eye for farmer's markets and so on:

Typically, all the cutesy-pie, city ideas of making money like selling organic vegetables (right – make $100k per acre growing “greens”) or arts and crafts prove to be non or minor money makers for the time they take.

As I noted in the OP, my problem with Farmer's Markets is that they totally defeat the purpose (relocalization) which they are supposed to achieve. They are just as, or even more, fuel intensive than the 3000 mile salad.

Medical care is also an issue. Many rural people have to travel very long distances to their doctors, and that too is not optional.

Heres the conclusion of the NYT article:

Sociologists and economists who study rural poverty say the gasoline crisis in the rural South, if it persists, could accelerate population loss and decrease the tax base in some areas as more people move closer to urban manufacturing jobs. They warn that the high cost of driving makes low-wage labor even less attractive to workers, especially those who also have to pay for child care and can live off welfare and food stamps.

In other word, peak oil will drive people away from the country, not to it, because country life is so gasoline intensive.

[mos6507]

country life is so gasoline intensive.

And agriculture, required to feed all these people who cram into the city, is not?

This is not as black and white as you make it out to be.

[JohnDenver]

It is today inefficient but not inherently so. Look at developing countries with huge populations still living in rural agricultural communities for hints on where rural american infrastructure is heading;

I agree that the deep 3rd world is very resilient in terms of fuel prices because they use so little commercial fuel (aside from biomass etc.) The vast majority of people in the world get by fine on cough syrup levels of oil consumption (i.e. tablespoons/day).

On the other hand, that amounts to true peasant living, and those people are some of the poorest people on earth. That's partly why they just keep flowing into cities:


It's hard for me to see a return to peasantry in the US and other developed countries, no matter how poor they get. Because in virtually all of the poorest countries in the world today, like Haiti, they are undergoing rapid urbanization.

[mos6507]

JD, for those of us who accept overshoot and the inevitability of a die-off at some scale, reurbanization does little more than buy time. But there will come a day when the cities can no longer import enough food. So in the early stages of collapese, a technofixer's reurbanization plans can seem perfectly rational, but it's only at the latter stages when we see how far down we get pushed in energy descent and ecological collapse that the reurbanization model will be truly tested under fire.

For you to suggest that no matter how bad things get, people will huddle in the city doesn't necessarily mean that it is the wisest thing to do. Haiti is no model for wisdom, considering their poor stewardship of their environment that has led to them eating mud cakes.

[JohnDenver]

country life is so gasoline intensive.

And agriculture, required to feed all these people who cram into the city, is not?

Agriculture definitely is fuel-intensive. But the key point here is the relative efficiency. On the one hand, you can grow grains on vast industrial farms, with economies of scale and intensive use of capital and labor, then transport those grains in fully loaded trains to large, dense cities. Within the cities, the grain is transported by fully-loaded trucks to markets, which people access by bicycle or walking. It really can't get any more efficient than that on a pounds delivered per gallon basis.

That approach is certainly far superior to a farmer packing up 10 baskets of food, and driving 20 miles so that people can come from 20-30 miles to buy a sack full of food. Or to a person driving 20 miles to the grocery store. A number of studies have shown that the consumer's trip to the supermarket by car consumes the most fuel per item of any shipment in the distribution chain. As I noted above "In the worst scenario, a UK consumer driving six miles to buy Kenyan green beans emits more carbon per bean than flying them from Kenya to the United Kingdom."

[Pops]

JD makes a good point regarding exurbanites driving to town and urbanites driving to the country, most people living away from town including farmers are just extra-long-distance-commuters.

I used to think suburbia was bound to dry up and blow away but it turns out that since the '70s more and more businesses are locating near suburbia so their commute is much shorter than when people drove to the city center. Add to that the fact suburbia is mostly veneer, by that I mean there is no component so huge it can't be changed - heck it's mostly asphalt as it is!

There are lots of older cities and towns designed and grown before oil which are walkable, newer cities like Dallas, LA or wherever not so much. Their big problem is they DO have lots of money sunk into driving.

Anyway, as to Pops' berries. They will have more embodied fossil energy than berries flown in from the Pacific Northwest and more than berries from Peru in December. As well, home cooking and preserving them (and most everything else) uses more energy than industrial processing – small farming in general is less efficient that large scale enterprises as things stand today.

I'll readily concede that local food is more energy intensive than industrial production what with small ICEs, probably lots more chemicals/packaging/transportation/processing per amount produced.

So there is no justification from the standpoint of conservation. But to quote one of my heros "We can't simply conserve or ration our way out of this energy crisis". Dick isn't really my hero but I agree with the point. The best use of cheap energy is to try to design a better world – not sit on our hands using up what's left and thinking we're doing the world a favor by burning 'less than the other guy'.

It's like the guy in the sinking lifeboat doing nothing but convinced he's making a contribution because he's not pissing on the guy bailing.

It could be that January tomatoes (or August for those down under) will be with us forever because the Energy Fairy pulls a miracle out of her ear – if it does I will have a nice little country experience for those city folks and outfits like this will keep on flying.

But I don't think they will. I think energy will become more and more expensive and basic calorie crops like wheat, corn, beans and staples like sugar, salt & coffee will occupy a larger and larger portion of the food budget because the way to grow them most efficiently will continue to be large scale and people will be forced to pay the price.

But as bulk transport becomes prohibitively expensive the only way the average family will have fresh fruits and vegetables will be either to raise it themselves or buy it from the local guy who can grow it by hand and transport it by foot.


http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mivhs ... arvest.htm
http://www.communitysolution.org/talks/ ... Megan.html
http://www.mindfully.org/Air/Lawn-Mower-Pollution.htm

[smallpoxgirl]

This is similar to smallpox girl who talks about driving from Seattle to Olympia (60 miles) for a farmer's market.

Understand, my reason for driving to Olympia has nothing to do with local buying or trying to minimize carbon footprints. It's much simpler. If I'm buying 100 pounds of apples, then I can save $100 by driving to Olympia and only spend $10 in gas doing it. It's not like the apples grow in Olympia. They're trucked in from Yakima anyway. I like the Oly farmers market because I can buy in bulk and get bulk prices, not because it's locally grown or something.

I totally agree with you though about the degree to which rural America is dependent on petroleum. People in Montana think nothing of a 100 mile round trip commute or of driving 8 hours round trip to go to the mall. It always impressed me how independent the people where I lived were WRT snow cleanup. It could dump a foot and the next morning everybody would be out with a loader or a snow plow cleaning it all up. In one sense they're very self sufficient, but all that equipment runs off petroleum. Take away the gasoline, and that area would be totally uninhabitable in the winter. To a large extent it's this sort of fake independence. They're more self sufficient in terms of being able to use different technologies and manufactured materials without the aid of a specialist, but they're just as dependent if not more so on the extractive and manufacturing industries in far away places keeping them supplied.

[Ibon]

It's hard for me to see a return to peasantry in the US and other developed countries, no matter how poor they get. Because in virtually all of the poorest countries in the world today, like Haiti, they are undergoing rapid urbanization.

That flowing into the city has two sources. Population excess and economic opportunities. That is not an issue here in the US. And peasants are not how I would describe the vast majority of agricultural workers in developing countries. They are farmers, land owners, usual with very small acreage farms compared to the US and still living in extended families in tight knit communities.

There is nothing stopping rural US from falling back to this basic structure. There is still a high quality of life possible. It only requires a re socialization. It will take a generation augmented by the catalysts of necessity.

This will all happen so much more easily than most people imagine. Necessity can knock you off your high horse of self entitlement within a couple of years. Rural folks are more resilient and already adapted to external forces beyond their control that they submit to........like the weather for example.

No problem here really

[smallpoxgirl]

That flowing into the city has two sources. Population excess and economic opportunities.

You left out probably the biggest one. Multinational agriculture corps buying up the farm land.

[mark]

City? suburban?, who the fark knows. I know that once IT happens, everyone will say the answer was obvious all along.