Peak Food or an Agrarian Ideal?

Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. Thomas Jefferson

On March 30th, the Post Carbon Institute released their Food and Farming Transition document.  As I’ve come to expect from this organization, it is a carefully researched and offers both a clear and concise description of the current situation combined with a broad roadmap for a transition to a post fossil fuel food delivery system.  I’ll provide a brief summary, however I would encourage anyone to read the entire document.  You can download a PDF version by clicking here.

The document starts with premise that industrial agriculture and our global food delivery system, both of which are highly dependent on fossil fuels, is patently unsustainable.  We have managed to triple the world’s agricultural output in the last hundred years, but the entire system depends on the exploitation of fossils fuels which are non-renewable and whose extraction rates will eventually peak and decline.

This unprecedented achievement in humanity’s quest for food security and abundance was largely made possible by the development of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; new hybrid crop varieties; the application of irrigation in arid regions; and the introduction of powered farm machinery.

The leveraging of fossil fuels to create this tripling of food abundance has also supported and made possible an increase in human population from 1.6 billion in 1900 to about 6.7 billion today.  One way to look at this is that we have created an artificially huge increase in human carrying capacity based on a specious and temporary foundation of non-renewable and unsustainable resources.  In that context, the stakes become very high, as billions of lives will depend our ability to produce and deliver just as much food in the future without the leverage of fossil fuels.

Natural gas provides the hydrogen and energy used to produce most nitrogen fertilizers, and both gas and oil are the sources for other agricultural chemicals, including pesticides and herbicides. Meanwhile, oil fuels most farm machinery (often including irrigation pumps), and has enabled growth in the scale and distance of transportation of crop inputs and outputs. Today, food items are shipped worldwide and enormous quantities of food are routinely transported from places of abundance to sites of scarcity, enabling cities to be built in deserts.

The authors are hopeful but not certain that such a transition can produce sufficient food for the current and projected population, however under the best of circumstances the changes required will be both massive and disruptive.  They hope that these changes can be made gradually and proactively, but history suggests that they will be made reactively and in the clear face of a global food crisis.  There are many powerful vested interests dependent on the current system and agricultural giants like ADM and Cargil are not likely to quietly into the night.  If the powerful get their way, we are likely to revert to a version of ancient Rome’s latifundia, a crude industrialized agriculture dependent  on captive and abundant cheap labor and the huge land holdings of an agrarian oligarchy.

The Post Carbon Institute’s authors provide a more hopeful vision of the future than the slave labor model of ancient Rome and outline seven key elements that provide us with a transition roadmap:

1. More or Mostly Locally Grown Food (follow this link to learn more about Food Miles)
2. Smaller Farms Powered by Human, Animal, and Renewable Energy including bio-fuels grown to power a diminished fleet of farm machinery
3. Natural Soil Fertility based on Composting, Animal Manure, and Crop Rotation
4. Transforming the American Diet – Less Meat more Vegetables and Grains – A Diet that is Seasonal, Fresh, and Local
5. Knowledge-intensive, Holistic Farming Systems – Reviving the Tribal Knowledge of our Great Grand Parents crossed with todays best Organic Farming Practices – PermaCulture versus Mono Culture
6. Open-pollinated Seed Varieties adapted to Local Soils and Climates
7. Decentralized Processing and Distribution

Ideally a post carbon agricultural and food delivery system will look like a modern version of Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian ideal married to business models like community supported agriculture (CSA) and using solar, wind, and liquid bio-fuel technologies to augment human and animal power.  With this new/old vision, the huge industrial farms of middle-america would be carved back into pre-industrial 100 acre operations and some 25-million americans would reverse migrate from the cities to re-populate the heartlands.  Imagine a section of land (640 acres) farmed by four well and newly educated families sharing 100 acres devoted to animal fodder, another 100 acres devoted to bio-fuels, and a few more acres given over to shared wind and solar power.  The balance of the acreage would be devoted to the free market ingenuity of each family.

None of this will happen quickly and as idyllic as it sounds, not without hardship and suffering.  It would have been interesting if the authors had devoted some space to what the transition might look like in crisis mode.  I can imagine victory gardens and backyard chicken coops to help build a tenuous food bridge to the future.  Homeowner associations turning the front lawns of suburbia into agricultural co-ops.  A massive natural agriculture training program to prepare us for the migration back to the heartlands.  A government sponsored mechanism to breakup large land holdings into smaller, family size parcels, along with government sponsored rationing, food relief programs, and the National Guard stationed in front of grocery stores and other food distribution centers.

Peak Oil makes this painful and hopeful transition not a question of if, but of when.  It may be sooner rather than later and it is likely that once in motion, events will unfold very quickly.

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A “Crash Course” in Reality

I recently took the time to wade through Chris Martenson’s (free) online Crash Course and found it to be a brilliant and accessible summary of the economic, energy, and environment forces shaping our very unsustainable future.  If you have that uneasy feeling that the current financial meltdown is much more than just another business cycle, then this course is a must.  Martenson makes the case that a financial system that must grow to survive married to energy and environmental systems that cannot grow is a ticking time bomb that will make next 20 years VERY different from the last.

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Footprints, Limits, and Human Carrying Capacity

Lately, I’ve been thinking about footprints.  I live in the Rocky Mountains near the Pike National Forest and often hike or ride my horse in the forest.  Counting my wife and neighbors about a dozen of us tramp through the woods on a regular basis.  We mostly followed faint game trails that over the years have become miles of well established two foot wide tracks through the Ponderosa, Lodgepole and Aspen environments of the adjacent public lands.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s a relatively small footprint.  A slight loss of carbon sink and still too faint to cause any erosion damage.  Judging by the animal prints and scat, it’s safe to say that that the local fauna also make frequent use of our primitive highway system.  Still, however faint, our impact is still visible, clear evidence of our small tribes foot and hoof fall on the local flora.

Out of the forest, back in the neighborhood, our footprint grows ever larger.  Our homes cast their own footprint on the land.  The roads that serve those homes cast an exponentially larger footprint.  In Colorado, the electricity that serves those homes casts a carbon footprint of 1.8 lbs per kwhr and most of us contribute addition carbon with propane furnaces and supplemental wood heating.  We do a bit better with water.  We draw water from shallow wells that tap into the first water flowing out of the eastern slope of the continental divide and we return 85% of the that water to the local aquifer through our septic systems.   When you factor in some of our 100 mile round trip commutes to Denver and the vast global supply chain that delivers pineapples to our households in mid winter, you begin to just get a glimmer of the immense footprint that our small mountain tribe casts upon the world.

The concept of “footprint” used as a way to measure humanity’s impact on the earth first gained traction in the 1990’s when Rees and Wackernagel introduced the idea of “ecological footprint”.  The ecological footprint was and is an attempt to quantify the amount of land required to supply the world’s population with what they consume.  Recently we have added “carbon footprint” and “water footprint” to our lexicon ecological metrics.

Footprints are a very helpful way to visualize environmental impacts. In essence they are direct or indirect references to limits or to the concept of limits.  They help me to frame my mountain tribe and it’s forest tracks within the context of the 6.7 billion human inhabitants of earth hell-bent for growth and the pursuit of happiness in a closed and limited eco-system.

One way to think about limits is through the concept of carrying capacity.  For example, the carrying capacity of a biological species in a closed environment like an island is the population size of the species the environment can be sustained indefinitely, given the food, water and other natural resources available.  The concept of human carrying capacity is a bit more complex since one has to factor in the possibility of leveraging technology to increase the earth’s carrying capacity.  You also have to consider the equal possibility of unintentionally leveraging technology to decrease the earth’s carrying capacity.  Since the free market does not see any “carrying capacity price signals”, technological impacts on organic or natural carrying capacity tend to be skewed toward the negative.  William Catton, author of “Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change”, defines human carrying capacity not just in terms of population but also in terms of humanity’s “load” on the environment.

[Human] Carrying capacity needs to be understood as the maximum load an environment can permanently support (i.e., without reduction of its ability to support future generations), with load referring not just to the number of users of an environment but to the total demands they make upon it. For human societies, as for populations of other species, the relation of load to carrying capacity is crucial in shaping our future. Public comprehension of the concepts of carrying capacity and load is both vague and inadequate, and the need to correct these deficiencies is urgent.

When load comes to exceed carrying capacity, the overload inexorably causes environmental damage; then the reduced carrying capacity leads to load reduction (i.e., a crash). – William Catton

In the world of flora and fauna, a species will sometimes stumble upon an environment rich in nutrients creating a large and temporary surplus in carrying capacity.  The usual result is a sharp increase in population leading to an overshoot and a deficit in carrying capacity.  Tragically, this causes both a sharp degradation of carrying capacity and a total population collapse.

Whether humanity will suffer the same fate is subject to debate.  Some predict extinction while others believe that technology will continue to keep us safely in a state of carrying capacity surplus.  While either extreme is possible, I think the truth will end up somewhere north of extinction.

Our greatest danger today is that we rely too little on natural or organic carrying capacity and too much on borrowed or specious carrying capacity.  To use a quasi-mathematical formula:

Human Carrying Capacity = Organic Carrying Capacity + Specious Carrying Capacity

where (in simplest of terms),

Organic Carrying Capacity is a function of:

• the biosphere
• surface water and hydrologic cycle
• the atmosphere
• solar irradiation
• top soil

and, the Specious or Borrowed (from the past) Carrying Capacity is a function of non-renewable resources such as:

• fossil fuels
• minerals
• groundwater from slow recharge aquifers

In the case of human carrying capacity, both categories are acted on by technology and our economic systems of finance and trade.  The population explosion starting with the industrial revolution was made possible by the massive technological leveraging of non-renewable resources to create a temporary and specious carrying capacity surplus. The same technological advances caused and continue to cause a concurrent and accelerating degradation of our organic carrying capacity.  As a result, human carrying capacity now rests on an unsustainable house of cards.

As our total population and standard of consumption(load) have taken us back into a condition of carrying capacity deficit and we are now on the brink of collapse.  The tipping point will depend on Liebig’s Law which states that “whatever necessity is least abundantly available in an environment sets the environment’s carrying capacity”.

In our case, the Liebig trigger could be the peaking of oil production, food or water limitations, or a myriad of environmental ills that continue to further degrade organic carrying capacity.  It may even be systemic breakdown in our economy – call it “peak debt”.

Whatever the initial trigger, the question is how we will react.  Will we recognize it for what it is and navigate our way to a new state of equilibrium and balance, or frantically cling to “growth” as we compete for resources in a race to extinction?

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