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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Food in The Long Emergency
  • Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2007 20:44:52 -0700



"The U.S. economy of the decades to come will center on farming, not
high-tech, or "information", or "services", or space travel, or tourism, or
finance. All other activities will be secondary to food production, which
will require much more human labor... To put it simply, Americans have been
eating oil and natural gas for the past century at an ever-accelerating
pace. Without the massive "inputs" of cheap gasoline and diesel fuel for
machines, irrigation, and trucking, or petroleum-based herbicides and
pesticides, or fertilizers made out of atural gas, Americans will be
compelled to radically reorganize the way food is produced, or starve.

"As industrial agriculture reached its climax in the early twenty-first
century ...Farmland has in effect been strip-mined for short-term gain.
Instead of soil stewardship achieved by acquired knowledge of practices
such as crop rotation, manuring, and fallowing, corporate farmers just dump
industrial fertilizers and toxins on ground that has been transformed from
an ecology of organisms to a sterile growth medium for crop monocultures.
Iowa prarie soils 150 years ago had about twelve to sixteen inches of
topsoil; now they have only about six to eight inches of topsoil. The loss
continues.

"The few remaining farmers in my part of the state don't even cultivate
gardens for their own households. They get their food from the supermarket,
like everyone else. .. In the meantime, the agribusiness giants such as
Cargill, ConAgra, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and others organized like
them will go out of business. The food processing industry as we have known
it in recent times - the giant national conglomerates that turn ConAgra and
ADM's mountains of corn into taco chips and soda pop - will also wither as
their financial equations and relations with suppliers fail in the face of
oil market disruptions... Food will become much more expensive and far more
seasonal."

from The Long Emergency, James Kunstler, 2006
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0802142494/ref=nosim/bookfindercom0e







  • [Livingontheland] Food in The Long Emergency, TradingPostPaul, 02/16/2007

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