My
wife, Hillary, and I have both known Richard personally for nearly thirty
years. We've observed him to be a man of impeccable integrity as well as
being one of the most brilliant and visionary writers we've encountered.
This interview with Richard covers a lot of vital information regarding
the future of how we'll obtain our food and
fuel.
Doug
The Future of
Agriculture Why Peak Oil &
Pollution Mandate a New Farming Paradigm Interview: Richard
Heinberg March 2007, Acres
U.S.A.
Richard Heinberg is more than a
spokesman for the vision that sees beyond the age of oil. His home is the
lecture platform, the classroom, the deep-think tank. He is a son of
northern Missouri (now CAFO hog country) from an industrial farm supply
family his father was a quality control chemist, for which reason
Richard discovered firsthand much of the bad science that now has the
upper hand in agriculture. Intellectually, he rejected farming as an
industrial procedure, and for the last 20 years has used his pen like a
stiletto to nail fact and conclusion to the market wall. His last eight
years have been devoted to writing when not teaching at New College of
California, Santa Rosa. In the questions and answers
that follow, Richard Heinberg concludes that too many farmers have
disappeared since World War II, and the nation has been consistently short
of independent growers. This shortage will be exacerbated as oil to
service the overindustrialized world continues to falter.
ACRES U.S.A. According to the biblical book of Joel,
old men dream dreams and young men see visions. Are we looking at dreams
or at visions in what you recently presented at the annual E.F. Schumacher
lecture?
RICHARD HEINBERG. Its probably more in the category
of visions. Its pretty clear what the world needs in terms of future
agriculture and future food production. Whether well actually get there
is quite a different question, because right now were on exactly the
wrong track. Were going to have to make a pretty dramatic change in our
agricultural priorities if were going to arrive at anything like a
sustainable system that will actually feed future generations. What Ive
tried to do is lay out a vision of whats possible.
ACRES U.S.A. What is possible?
HEINBERG. Using the knowledge that weve built up
over the last several decades about organic farming, about small-scale
food production using techniques such as permaculture and bio-intensive
and so on, I think its possible for us to produce food in a way that
doesnt destroy topsoil, in a way that preserves fresh water and that
feeds as many people as we have in the world today. But its going to
require a lot more people doing the work of producing the food, because
truly sustainable agriculture is a much more labor-intensive
process.
ACRES U.S.A. But in the lifetime of this interviewer,
we have witnessed the situation change, from a system in which a man could
make a very good living on 80 acres for a family of six or seven people,
to what we see today, where he cant make a living if hes farming two or
three sections of land because of disparity between agriculture and the
rest of the society.
HEINBERG. Thats right.
ACRES U.S.A. Doesnt that make the entire problem a
political problem?
HEINBERG. It certainly is a political problem, and
its also an energy problem, because the reason weve created the kind of
agricultural system we have today is that weve had access to very cheap
sources of energy. Weve used fossil fuels to run giant farm machinery and
to transport food ever-further distances and in ever-larger quantities, to
process food and to store food and so on. When we no longer have access to
that cheap fuel, after global oil production peaks and oil starts to
become more scarce and expensive, we will have to rethink agriculture. It
would help enormously if we started that process ahead of time and began
the kind of transition that will inevitably take place in a proactive way,
because if we simply wait for events to unfold, its likely that it will
be a very chaotic and destructive kind of transition, and many people
could suffer as a result.
ACRES U.S.A. What did you present to the Schumacher
Society in terms of a program that would accomplish this kind of
thing?
HEINBERG. I titled my talk Fifty Million Farmers
because by my very, very rough calculation, thats how many more farmers
we will need in the next 20 or 30 years in order to feed the current
population of the United States. Without cheap fossil fuels, we will need
many more hands in agricultural production. The nation of Cuba has already
gone through a similar kind of transition as a result of the collapse of
the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 90s. Cubans, who at that
time were even more dependent on fossil fuels for agricultural production
than were American farmers, found that they were forced to breed more oxen
for animal traction, to break up the large state-owned farms, and to raise
salaries for farmers to equal those of doctors and engineers, so that they
could encourage people to move from the cities into the countryside to
work on farms. They had a very difficult transition in any case they
called it the Special Period the average Cuban lost something like 20
pounds of body weight during this time and almost everyone went hungry
from time to time. Nevertheless, they did survive. I think we would be
doing well to accomplish the transition as successfully as the Cubans
did.
ACRES U.S.A. The organic movement has proceeded to
accomplish some parts of that transition, has it not?
HEINBERG. Absolutely and if it hadnt been for
organic agronomists in Havana lobbying their government, I think Cuba
wouldnt have been nearly as successful. When the problems became
apparent, these ecological agronomists were called in and given a free
hand to redesign the Cuban food system. Something like that needs to
happen in our country. We have people like Wes Jackson and many others who
have pioneered sustainable, ecological food systems in North America, but
theyre not being listened to. They are very much on the fringes, yet
theyre the people whose expertise needs to guide our transition away from
fossil-fuel agriculture.
ACRES U.S.A. During a trip to Cuba a few years ago, I
had the opportunity to visit some of their agricultural stations and
farms. I found systems in operation in those stations for producing
azotobacter bacteria for use as a nitrogen-fixing procedure out on the
farms. This was being done on a rather grand scale to service small farms.
Is that the kind of thing you have in mind?
HEINBERG. Absolutely. The Cubans called this
biotechnology, but of course in the United States when we use that term,
we generally mean genetic engineering not so in Cuba. Theyre trying to
use plant breeding and other more traditional techniques that call on the
ingenuity of farmers and soil scientists to make their system not only as
productive as possible, but also as sustainable as possible.
ACRES U.S.A. You mentioned Wes Jackson, who some
years ago made the remark that the greatest invention of the 21st century
would have to be an honest system of accounting. Of course, Wes Jackson is
something of a wit, but in all honesty, if we paid for the fossil fuels
that were consuming on par and didnt hide it in subsidies such as
maintaining armies all over the world to see that this flow is not
interrupted, would we find this oil is really as cheap as we think it is?
HEINBERG. Well to be fair, it has been incredibly
cheap in the past.
ACRES U.S.A. As a business proposition, but as an
economic proposition, it really isnt, is it?
HEINBERG. When you look at the full environmental
cost and human cost, it has been the most expensive and ill-conceived
adventure in human history. But of course thats looking back in
retrospect. At the time when we were becoming addicted to the stuff, it
seemed irresistible. A gallon of gasoline contained the energy equivalent
of over two months of hard human labor. So naturally, once we had access
to the stuff, we quickly became addicted. We used it for everything we
possibly could. It was only later that the full bill came due in fact,
that is whats happening now.
ACRES U.S.A. But we cannot abandon the concept
entirely, can we, when we have the wherewithal to make biodiesel and maybe
make other fuels out of biomass?
HEINBERG. No, not altogether, but I think we have to
be very careful. If we can use agricultural wastes and food wastes to make
biofuels, then in that instance I think its a good thing. And of course
over the short term many American farmers will probably enjoy an economic
boom from being able to grow fuel crops and get higher prices for their
harvest but over the longer term, if we try to substitute fuel crops for
food crops on a large scale, as a substitute for fossil fuels, then we get
into a competition between food and fuel, and many millions of people
could starve just so a few thousand people could continue driving their
cars.
ACRES U.S.A. That would be true if you left
everything equal, but some years ago we published a little magazine called
Gasohol U.S.A. and we made the computation with the assistance of some
scientists that if we planted fast-growing poplar trees in waste areas
along the side of the highways in the rainbelt parts of the country and
made a cellulose ethanol out of it, by harvesting those trees every second
year, we could fuel the entire automobile fleet in the United States.
Arent we shutting the door on technology we could use that is
bio-friendly?
HEINBERG. Actually, I dont think anyone is shutting
that door. Quite the opposite is happening. Theres enormous interest in
biofuels in the U.S. Department of Energy and elsewhere, and quite a lot
of research is going into cellulosic ethanol right now. The conversion
process hasnt been perfected yet. But certainly over the next few years,
Im sure well start to see pilot plants springing up.
ACRES U.S.A. So, then, your vision is the small farm
that will support a family and the family that will provide its own
labor?
HEINBERG. Yes, and also I think thats the proper
place for biofuels. If biofuels can be produced on-site for use on the
farm, I think thats something practical and sustainable. For the nation
as a whole, I think its unrealistic to expect that well be able to
continue running cars and trucks to the extent that we are now. I think
our entire transportation system is going to have to be scaled back and
downsized.
ACRES U.S.A. Maybe we need to recover rail and other
inter-urban service of mass transportation and so on.
HEINBERG. Right. We need to find more efficient means
of transportation, not just different means of fueling our
automobiles.
ACRES U.S.A. Presenting your vision to an
organization such as the Schumacher Society how did that resonate with
those people?
HEINBERG. Actually, it resonated very well. What I
had to say seemed to be exactly what they were interested in hearing. Of
course, Fritz Schumacher was saying many of these things several decades
ago, and hes been an inspiration to me. I was very happy to be able to
offer an updated version of his call to arms, if you will.
ACRES U.S.A. When you travel about the countryside
giving presentations like that, how is it resonating with the other people
you encounter?
HEINBERG. Generally very well and I do speak to
quite a lot of different kinds of audiences. Sometimes I find myself
speaking to local governments, city councils and so on, and of course
theyre quite worried to hear about the situation were in, not only with
oil, but also future natural gas supply. Occasionally I find myself
speaking with current or retired oil industry professionals, petroleum
geologists, and petroleum engineers and so on, and surprisingly, theyre
generally quite supportive of the things I have to say. Theyre also quite
worried in many cases. Even in some companies that take the official
position that theres no problem with future supply, the workers within
those companies who are responsible for keeping track of oil reserves and
production are personally quite concerned. So I have received quite a lot
of support from those quarters as well.
ACRES U.S.A. We suppose that somebody will still be
pumping oil a hundred years from now, but the idea that they can pump oil
to support this overly industrialized world is a little bit of a fantasy,
isnt it?
HEINBERG. Absolutely, and the problems are actually
coming on much faster than most people were anticipating. Over the last
year, weve seen virtually no growth in the global oil supply. Were not
seeing the crisis in its full force right now primarily because prices
have been so high that theyve destroyed a lot of demand. Whole African
countries have basically stopped importing oil because they cant afford
it. Once we see the supply start to turn down, however, which is likely to
happen within the next two or three years, then well see another round of
price increases and more demand destruction decreased demand as a result
of high prices and so on. Im sorry to say that most people will not
understand whats going on. Theyll want to blame the oil companies or the
nations of the Middle East, when in fact the real situation is that we are
simply depleting a non-renewable resource.
ACRES U.S.A. They need to take responsibility
themselves.
HEINBERG. Absolutely.
ACRES U.S.A. One thing that is increasing
exponentially, though, is the pollution factor. When you have 40,000 ships
hauling stuff around the world in order to accommodate the divisions of
world trade, even the breakup of one or two of those ships when theyre
worn out has become one of the biggest pollution factors on the planet,
has it not?
HEINBERG. It has. Our oceans are being profoundly
affected, not only by waste bunker oil from oceangoing vessels, but also
by plastics and other materials tossed overboard. Fossil fuels may not be
the root of all evil, but they are certainly the source of most of the
unique problems of our time, including pollution, global climate change,
oil wars, overpopulation, destruction of forests and topsoil, overfishing
all of these things are either directly or indirectly related to fossil
fuels and what weve done with them.
ACRES U.S.A. And that extends itself into the way we
practice medicine, with all the coal-tar derivative drugs that now seem to
be the props of every physician alive.
HEINBERG. Yes, thats right. The whole chemicals
industry arose, as you say, starting with coal, but natural gas is now the
basis for the modern pharmaceutical and agrichemical industry, and thats
a very worrisome situation here in North America because were seeing
natural gas production turning down. Therefore were seeing high natural
gas prices, and therefore high fertilizer prices, because of course
fertilizer is made from natural gas. Most of the North American chemicals
industry is fleeing for other shores where natural gas is cheaper. Weve
lost something like 100,000 jobs in the chemicals industry over the last
two years, but of course we dont read that on the business pages of the
newspapers.
ACRES U.S.A. Have you and the people in the
Schumacher Society made the connection between the imbalance in the
different sectors of the economy and parity for agriculture in escorting
this kind of a drift into our everyday lives?
HEINBERG. Thats a complicated topic because it
partly has to do with the cheap fossil fuels that have replaced
agricultural labor, and also it has to do with skewed government food
policies. But overall, we have gotten used to very, very cheap food, and
the price of that is that very few people can afford to farm anymore a
situation that cant continue much longer. The average age of a farmer in
the United States is currently over 55, so one has to wonder who will be
growing our food in 10 or 20 years.
ACRES U.S.A. Weve heard the statement that youre
going to see a country full of cattle and no cowmen out there. In other
words, the technology thats being adopted runs entirely opposite to what
you were saying, especially when we look at confinement feeding and now
cloning of animals in order to avoid having to deal with sexual
reproduction all of this with the steady approval of this kind of food
faire for the public by the Food and Drug Administration.
HEINBERG. The system that youre describing of
replacing human beings with more machines and more technology only works
when we have cheap energy. As energy sources become more expensive, that
whole system is going to start to come apart at the seams. The cost of
food will go up, and gradually there will be more incentives for people to
go into farming. But unless we undertake that transition proactively and
with some sense of a plan and goal, its going to be a very chaotic and
nasty kind of transition.
ACRES U.S.A. Lets go back to this message which has
to be repeated a thousand times its like the old doctor at the
University of Missouri who used to tell us that theres only one story,
but you have to find a thousand ways of telling it. You may not have a
thousand ways, but I know you have several why dont you give us an
example?
HEINBERG. Over the past 200 years the human
population has grown from under one billion to now over 6.5 billion.
Thats an extraordinary rate of increase completely unprecedented in all
of previous history. There are various ways of explaining how and why that
has happened, but certainly it could not have happened without cheap
fossil fuels with which to grow more food and to transport that food from
where its abundant to where its scarce. I think its fair to say that
there are somewhere between 2 and 4 billion people alive today who
probably would not exist if it werent for fossil fuels. Thats a little
worrisome to think about when one realizes that oil production globally is
set to peak any year now, and global natural gas production will not be
far behind. If were going to avoid a die-off of much of humanity through
starvation and disease, were going to have to find ways of feeding people
without fossil fuels or with a lot less fossil fuel use and that really
means redesigning our entire food system. It means growing more food
locally, for local consumption, it means using smaller farm machinery and
less of it, it means more people being involved in the process of
producing food, and it means growing food with fewer chemicals and
fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Fortunately, over the past few
decades we have developed information, knowledge, experience and
techniques that are capable of growing food intensively, organically and
ecologically. Those techniques, those methods desperately need to be
expanded and replicated and made the basis for our national and global
food system.
ACRES U.S.A. What do you do to get through to the
intellectual advisors who should be telling people these things instead of
leading them in the exact opposite direction?
HEINBERG. I think the one thing these people most
need to understand is our systemic dependency on fossil fuels and the fact
that fossil fuels are about to become much more scarce and expensive. I
dont think that simple fact has penetrated the consciousness of most of
our officials. They have been led to believe that business as usual will
continue indefinitely, that the way we are doing things now is somehow the
way theyve always been done and always will be done, which is simply not
the case. We live in an extraordinary moment in history, in fact.
ACRES U.S.A. Will you be able to put a number or a
date on when this just cant go any further? Were not suggesting a
cataclysm of any sort, were talking about a slow evolution, but there has
to come a point where mathematical ambition and physical possibility part
company.
HEINBERG. Yes, and I think were virtually at that
point right now. The best estimates of the timing of global oil production
peak are converging around the year 2010, which means were virtually
there. That doesnt mean that suddenly all oil production will vanish or
collapse. Well start to see about a 2 percent per year decline in oil
production from that point. Here in North America the decline in natural
gas production will probably occur with greater speed, so we may in fact
have a much more severe natural gas crisis at least in the early years,
starting within the next few years, than an oil supply crisis. Thats
going to affect agriculture, its going to affect electricity production,
home heating, the chemicals industry and the entire American economy.
Probably by the year 2015 or 2020 well see an American economy in tatters
compared to anything weve known over the past few decades, simply because
well no longer have the fuel to make it work.
ACRES U.S.A. We probably wont be able to give
frequent flyer miles to coffins being hauled back and forth across the
country.
HEINBERG. No! The airline industry is going to be hit
very hard by all of this, and of course the tourism industry is going to
be completely decimated, as are other industries. The American automobile
industry is already teetering at the brink of economic collapse, not just
because of high fuel prices, but also because of some poor business
decisions theyve made in the past.
ACRES U.S.A. When Douglas MacArthur became the
so-called shogun of Japan right after World War II, the first thing he did
was order land reallocation. About 13,000 families owned all the land in
the whole country, and he required them to turn the deeds over to the
government and then sold it back to the farmers. Do you envision something
like that happening in the United States, where we simply must come to
terms with the proposition that we have to have land reform?
HEINBERG. If we were smart, thats what we would do.
My concern is that whats very possible instead, even likely in this case,
is that land will be held onto by banks and large corporations, while the
growing hordes of jobless people will be hired as agricultural workers and
become a new class of serfs.
ACRES U.S.A. Guest workers, you might say?
HEINBERG. Yes. Instead of having the Jeffersonian
vision of agrarian democracy realized, we will see instead a new feudalism
with millions of Americans reduced to serfdom.
ACRES U.S.A. And you see no way around this?
HEINBERG. Oh, theres certainly a way around it! What
you suggested, land reform, is the way to go theres no question about
that.
ACRES U.S.A. But land reform is political, and
political activity is now governed by the corporations, the banks, the
insurance companies.
HEINBERG. Thats right. So if all of these problems
are bound up together the problems of agriculture, the problems of
energy, the problems of finance and politics its going to take some
brilliant and courageous leadership to disentangle all of those and set
this country back on a good course.
ACRES U.S.A. So far we have not addressed the quality
of the food that we see coming out of factories and industrial
agriculture, prefabricated, processed foods manhandled milk and so
on.
HEINBERG. Yes, much of this relates to fossil fuels,
too, because of course growing food cheaply and in large quantities is a
recipe for producing poor-quality food. Now were seeing an epidemic of
obesity in the United States, and thats not because people are
overnourished, its because theyre overfed with food of poor nutritional
quality.
ACRES U.S.A. Theyre fed GMOs; theyre fed with
genetically modified milk.
HEINBERG. And soft drinks with corn syrup and
aspartame and so on. Soil minerals have also been declining in quantity
for decades now. I think the USDA has actually kept records of this,
showing that the mineral content obtained back in the 1940s was in some
cases 40 or 50 percent higher than it is today, so we can eat the same
quantity of food and yet we have a hidden hunger.
ACRES U.S.A. So the whole thing wraps back into, is
there the vision to install a proper agriculture to feed the people
properly?
HEINBERG. Right, and this really should be the most
important topic of conversation right now. Agriculture is the farthest
thing from the consciousness of most urban Americans minds. They go to
the grocery store, and they buy their food. They assume its always going
to be there for them, and thats about as much thought as they give to the
matter.
ACRES U.S.A. Many of them even reject food if its
organic or at least wholesome, because its too high priced. If it looks
like food and tastes like food, they seem satisfied that it really is
food.
HEINBERG. In most cases, they dont know any better.
Many of them have never tasted anything really nutritious a carrot
straight from the soil, something that theyve grown themselves, or simply
something that has been grown without chemicals and fertilizers.
ACRES U.S.A. In view of the impact youve made with
some of your talks around the country, can you tell us a little bit about
the group you represent or what keeps you afloat out there in the
circuit?
HEINBERG. I work with an organization called the Post
Carbon Institute, which is searching for local solutions to the kinds of
problems were likely to face as a result of peak oil and climate change.
These kinds of solutions are varied and have to do with things such as
energy farms putting together a network of small research farms where we
can look for ways of reenvisioning agriculture on a smaller scale, to grow
both food and fuel sustainably. We also work with local governments, city
councilors, mayors, etc., in towns around the country to help them begin
to devise energy transition strategies away from fossil fuels.
ACRES U.S.A. Youre also quite interested in global
warming?
HEINBERG. Yes, very much so, and Im also working
with a project called the Oil Depletion Protocol, which is a plan to
systematically and proactively reduce oil consumption on a national and
international basis. Actually, this is the subject of my most recent
book.
ACRES U.S.A. Would you give us the title?
HEINBERG. Yes, its called The Oil Depletion
Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism and Economic Collapse.
ACRES U.S.A. You mentioned in the name of your
organization the word carbon, presumably youre talking about carbon
dioxide?
HEINBERG. Yes.
ACRES U.S.A. And carbon dioxide, of course, is a
global warming gas thats running amok. You know we have taken agriculture
to high nitrogen use, not only in the United States, but worldwide, and
this nitrogen is mostly wasted because it goes off into the air
especially anhydrous, less so with natural nitrogens where it locks into
the oxygen and becomes one form or another of nitrous oxide. Nitrous
oxide, in turn, is 183 to 212 times more polluting in terms of global
warming than carbon dioxide. Yet we find that Al Gore doesnt even mention
it in his film, An Inconvenient Truth.
HEINBERG. Thats right thank you for pointing that
out! Thats yet another reason why we have to reform our entire food
system, and very quickly.
Richard Heinberg can be contacted at 1604
Jennings Avenue, Santa Rosa, California 95401, website www.richardheinberg.com. For
more information on the Post Carbon Institute, visit www.postcarbon.org.
For information on the Oil Depletion Protocol, visit www.oildepletionprotocol.org.
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