Leanan wrote:What you mean is that agribusiness is efficent in terms of human labor. It is horribly inefficient in terms of energy. After peak oil, energy efficiency will become more important.
No, that's not what I mean. I mean it's efficient, in that it produces a whole hella of a lot of food.
Remember Malthus' Doom? People seem to think that because we haven't seen it yet, Malthus was wrong. He didn't foresee colonialism and the Green Revolution.
But he was wrong only in timing. Even if oil doesn't run out, worldwide famine is likely to be a problem within our lifetimes. By 2020, the U.S. and Canada will be eating all the food they produce. They are the last major food exporters. And the population, at home and abroad, is still growing.
Add in peak oil, and yes, disaster is looming.Although I appreciate many of your points, Leanan, I think this is hysteria.
Ironic, because agriculture is one of the things I understand best. Since I grew up in the field, so to speak.If Cuba, a much poorer country than the US and the industrial West, can make the transition to a low-energy agriculture, why can't we?
One, they are a communist dictatorship. If Fidel says "Food will be rationed, and everyone shall carpool," it happens. Two, they are a tropical country. Plenty of warmth, sunshine, and water. They can grow food all year around. They are about the size of Pennsylvania, with about the same population. It's a fairly low population density, for such fertile land. Three, they have the rest of the world to bail them out. Their staples - rice and beans - are mostly imported. So they don't have to grow all their own food.
When we're in this situation, the wealthy will continue to eat filet mignon and drive SUVs, while the poor and middle class are priced out of the market. We won't be able to grow food year-round in most of the U.S. And perhaps most critically, there will be no one to bail us out. No UN food handouts, no bags of rice or corn or flour stamped "A Gift From the People of United States of America." No imports, because no one will have any food to sell.
Food has always been so plentiful for us that most of us have no concept of what it was like before the Green Revolution, when one bad year could result in millions starving. (Though it's still like that in some countries.)
China is right on the edge. Though they are considered "food sufficient" by the UN, that is only on the balance. Some years they grow enough so that they can export, some years they must import. But of course, once the "insurance" of cheap food imports whenever you need them is gone, it will be a different story. You can't tell people to wait until next year to eat.
Could we be more efficient? Yes, of course. And I'm sure we will be. But it won't be enough. We are, as the saying goes, "Eating Fossil Fuels."
http://www.energybulletin.net/281.html
One bad year only results in mass starvation because of the goofy system we currently use, shipping all of the excess grain out for cash. Grain can be stored for a long time without loosing its food value with quite low technology, yet today we ship it out within a couple months to the 'world market' where it is consumed.
I live in farm country, I grew up in farm country on a very small farm. If you drive around here for any real distance you will see two kinds of silo's at most farms. The open top silo's are for silage, but the closed top silo's were designed for grain storage. Drive (or bike if you prefer) up to the farm house and ask how much grain thaey have stored. None is overwhelmingly likely to be the answer, they get a better profit selling than storing so off it goes soon after harvest. Then check out the local grain elevator company, they will have a large number of silo's. Except for strictly local needs for feed grain almost everything they take in is shipped back out to world markets within a few months.
This system developed because transport was so cheap with cheap oil that you could get a better return selling on the world market than internally. It is also a truism that if cheap oil goes away the incentive shifts back. In the past grain not needed right now was stored long term, then when you had a shortage in the future years you made a good profit selling off your stored grain. People have forgotten what famine is in the USA, and dumping every ton of excess production on the world market has had two major effects outside the USA. One effect is to make food cheaper than ever before, which has led to a lot of fat people in the first world and a lot fewer skinny people in the third world. The second effect is more horrible, by dumping grain in the world market the USA has created major disinsentives for people to farm in the rest of the world. Why be a subsistence farmer and bust your hump 12 hours a day (72 hours a week) year round to get enough for you and your family to eat when you can move the whole group to a nearby city, work for low wages for 10 hours a day (60 hours a week) and feed them all well with time and energy left over for recreation?
If the USA converts a significant portion of its excess ag bussiness to bio-fuels as so many wish they would this dynamic will change. Given the choice between a 72 hour week to feed your family or a 60 hour week where someone in the family starves most people will go for the longer work week.
I also see a lot of statements about how it takes zillions of calories of energy to make Ammonia based nitrate fertilizers for modern Ag and how this will screetch to a hault with the peak. This statement has a lot of problems, starting with the fact that the current method of making Ammonia using Methane as the feed stock is horribly wasteful of energy, but it has been so cheap that farmers have been over using nitrates by a large margin. As the price cloimbs the excess use will decline because the marginal financial gain from over fertilizing will be quickly offset by the increase fertilizer cost.
Secondly all throughout the USA you have running water in homes and septic or sewer systems connected to them. Setting up a fertilizer plant at the sewage treatment site to seperate out the uric acids in the sewage would replace the need for most of the fertilizer used in farming. You won't get it for free because you will have to process the sewage and make sure your fertilizer is sterile, not to mention store it for months until it is needed for the crops. Everything here will depend on which method turns out cheaper, sewage to nitrates and uric acid or Ammonia through hydrogen production and the Haber-Bosch process. Either way liquid fertilizer for Ag bussiness will still be availible, it just won't be as cheap as using Natural Gas to make the Hydrogen and produce the heat for the process.
As for Father Thomas Malthus, he lived in a world of dynamic change and all he saw was bad things resulting. He ignored the fact that if you look at history as a whole humanity has gone through boom and bust agricultural production many many times. The Bible exhorted Malthus himself as a Christian to store up one seventh of produced grain every year and rest the land every seventh year while consuming the stored grain. The grain stored under the biblical planning of the old testement provides a healthy cushion for a bad year, if you grew up in farm country you know a 'bad year' rarely means you have NO crop, it just means you have a small crop. Just like the USA with the refinery situation, we actually had enough gasoline stored before Katrina that we could have gotten through the winter without imports from other IEA signatories, the fact that we did get those imports has lowered price by 25%. Unless you get some odd blight like Locusts that eat your crop to the root you will get something back for the effort expended to plant a crop. Even in droughts or wet seasons you get a crop, albeit a much smaller one. If you take whatever crop you get in a bad year and add it to the average stored excess of the 7 year plan in the old testement you get this years small return plus 14% per year storage. Rarley is yeild less than half of 'normal', that is how a normal average is calculated after all, so if you are at half a normal yeild and you have 3 years of excess storage which is 43% of a 'normal' crop you can get by with a 7% reduction in your usage for your bad year. If you have 7 bad years in a row you are dead or you moved somewhere else, but the current system of just in time food shipments is more stupid, because you have no fall back position.
Agricultural wisdom from ancient times, produce a crop, subtract seed for the next year and store in spot A, subtract family needs for next 12 months and store in spot B, Subtract 14% for long term strage and store in Spot C. Take remainder to market and sell it.
Agricultural wisdom in 2005. Produce a crop, sell everything. Use money received to buy seed and pesticide and herbicide and fertilizer for next year. Store nothing, because the market might go down if China or India have a good crop, so you need to get to the market ASAP. Next year repeat.
Method A is sustainible long term, method B only works if energy is cheap and you never have to worry about a local crop failure causing a local famine.
Which method makes more sense from a long range planning point of view? Modern people scoff at the Bible, but if you read through it as a set of guidlines and analize it you will be surprised. It teaches you how to store up for bad times, it teaches basic hygene for all the faithfull, and it teaches sanitation. The Jew's have been attacked through the centuries for not dieing in plagues or famines like their 'Christian' neighbors in Europe. Because they followed the bilical guidlines for hygene, sanitation and food storage they did not become famine weakened and they did not act as vectors for disease the same way the dirty (as in covered in dirt and germs, defecating in the street not washing before eating) neighbors they suffered far fewer losses during hard times. The response of their 'christian' neighbors was to attack them as witches or poiseners because they could not understand why the difference in lifestyle meant a difference in survival rates during plauge or pandemics.
If you could get everyone to store up even 10% of their food budget each year, wash their hands frequently, and wash their bodies at least once a week, you would cut death due to famine and disease 90%.