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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Richard Heinberg: Fifty Million Farmers
  • Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:47:47 -0700


Richard Heinberg: Fifty Million Farmers
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Archives2008/HeinbergFiftyMillion.html

Editor's Note: This is the abbreviated text of a lecture by Richard Heinberg
delivered to the E. F. Schumacher Society in Stockbridge, Massachusetts on
October 28, 2006

There was a time not so long ago when famine was an expected, if not
accepted, part of life. Until the 19th century — whether in China, France,
India or Britain — foodcame almost entirely from local sources and harvests
were variable. In good years, there was plenty—enough for seasonal feasts and
for storage in anticipation of winter and hard times to come; in bad years,
starvation cut down the poorest and the weakest—the very young, the old, and
the sickly. Sometimes bad years followed one upon another, reducing the size
of the population by several percent. This was the normal condition of life
in pre-industrial societies, and it persisted for thousands of years.

Today, in America, such a state of affairs is hard to imagine. Food is so
cheap and plentiful that obesity is a far more widespread concern than
hunger. The average mega-supermarket stocks an impressive array of exotic
foods from across the globe, and even staples are typically trucked from
hundreds of miles away. Many people in America did go hungry during the Great
Depression, but those were times that only the elderly can recall. In the
current regime, the desperately poor may experience chronic malnutrition and
may miss meals, but for most the dilemma is finding time in the day’s hectic
schedule to go to the grocery store or to cook. As a result, fast-food
restaurants proliferate: the fare may not be particularly nutritious, but
even an hour’s earnings at minimum wage will buy a meal or two. The average
American family spent 20 percent of its income on food in 1950; today the
figure is 10 percent.

This is an extraordinary situation; but because it is the only one that most
Americans alive today have ever experienced, we tend to assume that it will
continue indefinitely. However there are reasons to think that our current
anomalous abundance of inexpensive food may be only temporary; if so, present
and future generations may become acquainted with that old, formerly familiar
but unwelcome houseguest—famine.

The following are four principal bases (there are others) for this gloomy
forecast.

The first has to with looming fuel shortages. This is a subject I have
written about extensively elsewhere, so I shall not repeat myself in any
detail. Suffice it to say that the era of cheap oil and natural gas is coming
to a crashing end, with global oil production projected to peak in 2010 and
North American natural gas extraction rates already in decline. These events
will have enormous implications for America’s petroleum-dependent food system.

Modern industrial agriculture has been described as a method of using soil to
turn petroleum and gas into food. We use natural gas to make fertilizer, and
oil to fuel farm machinery and power irrigation pumps, as a feedstock for
pesticides and herbicides, in the maintenance of animal operations, in crop
storage and drying, and for transportation of farm inputs and outputs.
Agriculture accounts for about 17 percent of the U.S. annual energy budget;
this makes it the single largest consumer of petroleum products as compared
to other industries. By comparison, the U.S. military, in all of its
operations, uses only about half that amount. About 350 gallons (1,500
liters) of oil equivalents are required to feed each American each year, and
every calorie of food produced requires, on average, ten calories of
fossil-fuel inputs. This is a food system profoundly vulnerable, at every
level, to fuel shortages and skyrocketing prices. And both are inevitable.

An attempt to make up for fuel shortfalls by producing more biofuels—ethanol,
butanol, and biodiesel—will put even more pressure on the food system, and
will likely result in a competition between food and fuel uses of land and
other resources needed for agricultural production. Already 14 percent of the
U.S. corn crop is devoted to making ethanol, and that proportion is expected
to rise to one quarter, based solely on existing projects-in-development and
government mandates.

The second factor potentially leading to famine is a shortage of farmers.
Much of the success of industrial agriculture lies in its labor efficiency:
far less human work is required to produce a given amount of food today than
was the case decades ago (the actual fraction, comparing the year 2000 with
1900, is about one seventh). But that very success implies a growing
vulnerability. We don’t need as many farmers, as a percentage of the
population, as we used to; so, throughout the past century, most farming
families—including hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions that would have
preferred to maintain their rural, self-sufficient way of life—were
economically forced to move to cities and find jobs. Today so few people farm
that vital knowledge of how to farm is disappearing. The average age of
American farmers is over 55 and approaching 60. The proportion of principal
farm operators younger than 35 has dropped from 15.9 percent in 1982 to 5.8
percent in 2002. Of all the dismal statistics I know, these are surely among
the most frightening. Who will be growing our food twenty years from now?
With less oil and gas available, we will need far more knowledge and muscle
power devoted to food production, and thus far more people on the farm, than
we have currently.

The third worrisome trend is an increasing scarcity of fresh water. Sixty
percent of water used nationally goes toward agriculture. California’s
Central Valley, which produces the substantial bulk of the nation’s fruits,
nuts, and vegetables, receives virtually no rainfall during summer months and
relies overwhelmingly on irrigation. But the snowpack on the Sierras, which
provides much of that irrigation water, is declining, and the aquifer that
supplies much of the rest is being drawn down at many times its recharge
rate. If these trends continue, the Central Valley may be incapable of
producing food in any substantial quantities within two or three decades.
Other parts of the country are similarly overspending their water budgets,
and very little is being done to deal with this looming catastrophe.

Fourth and finally, there is the problem of global climate change. Often the
phrase used for this is “global warming,” which implies only the fact that
the world’s average temperature will be increasing by a couple of degrees or
more over the next few decades. The much greater problem for farmers is
destabilization of weather patterns. We face not just a warmer climate, but
climate chaos: droughts, floods, and stronger storms in general (hurricanes,
cyclones, tornadoes, hail storms)—in short, unpredictable weather of all
kinds. Farmers depend on relatively consistent seasonal patterns of rain and
sun, cold and heat; a climate shift can spell the end of farmers’ ability to
grow a crop in a given region, and even a single freak storm can destroy an
entire year’s production. Given the fact that modern American agriculture has
become highly centralized due to cheap transport and economies of scale
(almost the entire national spinach crop, for example, comes from a single
valley in California), the damage from that freak storm is today potentially
continental or even global in scale. We have embarked on a century in which,
increasingly, freakish weather is normal.

I am not pointing out these problems, and their likely consequences, in order
to cause panic. As I propose below, there is a solution to at least two of
these dilemmas, one that may also help us address the remaining ones. It is
not a simple or easy strategy and it will require a coordinated and sustained
national effort. But in addition to
averting famine, this strategy may permit us to solve a host of other,
seemingly unrelated social and environmental problems.

Intensifying Food Production

In order to get a better grasp of the problems and the solution being
proposed, it is essential that we understand how our present exceptional
situation of cheap abundance came about. In order to do that, we must go back
not just a few decades, but at least ten thousand years.

The origins of agriculture are shrouded in mystery, though archaeologists
have been whittling away at that mystery for decades. We know that
horticulture (gardening) began at somewhat different periods, independently,
in at least three regions—the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Central
America. Following the end of the last Ice Age, roughly 12,000 years ago,
much of humanity was experiencing a centuries-long food crisis brought on by
the over-hunting of the megafauna that had previously been at the center of
the human diet. The subsequent domestication of plants and animals brought
relative food security, as well as the ability to support larger and more
sedentary populations.

As compared to hunting and gathering, horticulture intensified the process of
obtaining food. Intensification (because it led to increased population
density—i.e., more mouths to feed), then led to the need for even more
intensification: thus horticulture (gardening) eventually led to agriculture
(field cropping). The latter produced more food per unit of land, which
enabled more population growth, which meant still more demand for food. We
are describing a classic self-reinforcing feedback loop.

As a social regime, horticulture did not represent a decisive break with
hunting and gathering. Just as women had previously participated in essential
productive activities by foraging for plants and hunting small animals, they
now played a prominent role in planting, tending, and harvesting the
garden—activities that were all compatible with the care of infants and small
children. Thus women’s status remained relatively high in most horticultural
societies. Seasonal surpluses were relatively small and there was no
full-time division of labor.

But as agriculture developed—with field crops, plows, and draft
animals—societies inevitably mutated in response. Plowing fields was men’s
work; women were forced to stay at home and lost social power. Larger
seasonal surpluses required management as well as protection from raiders;
full-time managers and specialists in violence proliferated as a result.
Societies became multi-layered: wealthy ruling classes (which had never
existed among hunter-gatherers, and were rare among gardeners) sat atop an
economic pyramid that came to include scribes, soldiers, and religious
functionaries, and that was supported at its base by the vastly more numerous
peasants—who produced all the food for themselves and everyone else as well.
Writing, mathematics, metallurgy, and, ultimately, the trappings of modern
life as we know it thus followed not so much from planting in general, as
from agriculture in particular.

As important an instance of intensification as agriculture was, in many
respects it pales in comparison with what has occurred within the past
century or so, with the application of fossil fuels to farming. Petroleum-fed
tractors replaced horses and oxen, freeing up more land to grow food for far
more people. The Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing ammonia from fossil
fuels, invented just prior to World War I, has doubled the amount of nitrogen
available to green nature—with nearly all of that increase going directly to
food crops. New hybrid plant varieties led to higher yields. Technologies for
food storage improved radically. And fuel-fed transport systems enabled local
surpluses to be sold not just regionally, but nationally and even globally.
Through all of these strategies, we have developed the wherewithal to feed
seven times the population that existed at the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution. And, in the process, we have made farming uneconomical and
unattractive to all but a few.

That’s the broad, global overview. In America, whose history as an
independent nation begins at the dawn of the industrial era, the story of
agriculture comprises three distinct periods:

The Expansion Period (1600 to 1920): Increases in food production during
these three centuries came simply from putting more land into production;
technological change played only a minor role.

The Mechanization Period (1920 to 1970): In this half-century, technological
advances issuing from cheap, abundant fossil-fuel energy resulted in a
dramatic increase in productivity (output per worker hour). Meanwhile, farm
machinery, pesticides, herbicides, irrigation, new hybrid crops, and
synthetic fertilizers allowed for the doubling and tripling of crop
production. Also during this time, U.S. Department of Agriculture policy
began favoring larger farms (the average U.S. farm size grew from 100 acres
in 1930 to almost 500 acres by 1990), and production for export.

The Saturation Period (1970-present): In recent decades, the application of
still greater amounts of energy have produced smaller relative increases in
crop yields; meanwhile an ever-growing amount of energy is being expended to
maintain the functioning of the overall system. For example, about ten
percent of the energy in agriculture is used just to offset the negative
effects of soil erosion, while increasing amounts of pesticides must be
sprayed each year as pests develop resistances. In short, strategies that had
recently produced dramatic increases in productivity became subject to the
law of diminishing returns.

While we were achieving miracles of productivity, agriculture’s impact on the
natural world was also growing; indeed it is now the single greatest source
of human damage to the global environment. That damage takes a number of
forms: erosion and salinization of soils; deforestation (a strategy for
bringing more land into cultivation); fertilizer runoff (which ultimately
creates enormous “dead zones” around the mouths of many rivers); loss of
biodiversity; fresh water scarcity; and agrochemical pollution of water and
soil.

In short, we created unprecedented abundance while ignoring the long-term
consequences of our actions. This is more than a little reminiscent of how
some previous agricultural societies—the Greeks, Babylonians, and
Romans—destroyed soil and habitat in their mania to feed growing urban
populations, and collapsed as a result.

Fortunately, during the past century or two we have also developed the
disciplines of archaeology and ecology, which teach us how and why those
ancient societies failed, and how the diversity of the web of life sustains
us. Thus, in principle, if we avail ourselves of this knowledge, we need not
mindlessly repeat yet again the time-worn tale of catastrophic civilizational
collapse.

The 21st Century: De-Industrialization

How might we avoid such a fate?

Surely the dilemmas we have outlined above are understood by the managers of
the current industrial food system. They must have some solutions in mind.

Indeed they do, and, predictably perhaps, those solutions involve a further
intensification of the food production process. Since we cannot achieve much
by applying more energy directly to that process, the most promising strategy
on the horizon seems to be the genetic engineering of new crop varieties. If,
for example, we could design crops to grow with less water, or in unfavorable
climate and soil conditions, we could perhaps find our way out of the current
mess.

Unfortunately, there are some flaws with this plan. Our collective experience
with genetically modifying crops so far shows that glowing promises of higher
yields, or of the reduced need for herbicides, have seldom been fulfilled. At
the same time, new genetic technologies carry with them the potential for
horrific unintended consequences in the forms of negative impacts on human
health and the integrity of ecosystems. We have been gradually modifying
plants and animals through selective breeding for millennia, but new
gene-splicing techniques enable the re-mixing of genomes in ways and to
degrees impossible heretofore. One serious error could result in biological
tragedy on an unprecedented scale.

Yet even if future genetically modified commercial crops prove to be much
price that includes alienation from nature, loss of community and tradition,
and the acceptance of the anonymity and loss of autonomy implied by mass
society. In essence, this tradeoff has its origins in the beginnings of
urbanization and agriculture.

Could we actually regain much of what we have lost? Yes, perhaps by going
back, at least in large part, to horticulture. Recall that the shift from
horticulture to agriculture was, as best we can tell, a fateful turning point
in cultural history. It represented the beginning of full-time division of
labor, hierarchy, and patriarchy.

Biointensive farming and Permaculture are primarily horticultural rather than
agricultural systems. These new, intelligent forms of horticulture could,
then, offer an alternative to a new feudalism with a new peasantry. In
addition, they emphasize biodiversity, averting many of the environmental
impacts of field cropping. They use various strategies to make hand labor as
efficient as possible, minimizing toil and drudgery. And they typically slash
water requirements for crops grown in arid regions.

We have gotten used to a situation where most farmers rely on non-farm
income. As of 2002 only a bit less than 60 percent of farm operators reported
that their primary work is on the farm. Only 9 percent of primary operators
on farms with one operator, and 10 percent on farms with multiple operators,
report all of their income as coming from the farm.

The bad side of this is that it means it’s hard to make a living farming
these days. The good side is that we don’t have to think of farming as an
exclusive occupation. As people return to small communities and to farming,
they could bring with them other interests. Rather than a new peasantry that
spends all of its time in drudgery, we could look forward to a new population
of producers who maintain interests in the arts and sciences, in history,
philosophy, spirituality, and psychology—in short, the whole range of
pursuits that make modern urban life interesting and worthwhile.

Moreover, the re-ruralization program I am describing could be a springboard
for the rebirth of democracy in this nation. I do not have to tell this
audience how, over the past few years, democracy in America has become little
more than a slogan. In fact this erosion of our democratic traditions has
been going on for some time. As Kirkpatrick Sale showed in his wonderful book
Human Scale, as communities grow in size, individuals’ ability to influence
public affairs tends to shrink. Sociological research now shows that people
who have the ability to influence policy in their communities show a much
higher sense of satisfaction with life in general. In short, the
re-ruralization of America could represent the fulfillment of Thomas
Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian democracy—but without the slaves.

If we do this well, it could mean the revitalization not only of democracy,
but of the family and of authentic, place-based culture. It could also serve
as the basis for a new, genuine conservatism to replace the ersatz
conservatism of the current ruling political elites.

What I am proposing is nothing less than a new alliance among environmental
organizations, farmers, gardeners, organizations promoting economic justice,
the anti-globalization movement, universities and colleges, local businesses,
churches, and other social organizations. Moreover, the efforts of this
alliance would have to be coordinated at the national, state, and local
level. This is clearly a tall order. However, we are not talking about merely
a good idea. This is a survival strategy.

It may seem that I am describing and advocating a reversion to the world of
1800, or even that of 8,000 BC. This is not really the case. We will of
course need to relearn much of what our ancestors knew. But we have
discovered a great deal about biology, geology, hydrology, and other relevant
subjects in recent decades, and we should be applying that knowledge—as
Holmgren, Mollison, Jeavons, and others have done—to the project of producing
food for ourselves.

Cultural anthropology teaches us that the way people get their food is the
most reliable determinant of virtually all other social characteristics.
Thus, as we build a different food system we will inevitably be building a
new kind of culture, certainly very different from industrial urbanism but
probably also from what preceded it. As always before in human history, we
will make it up as we go along, in response to necessity and opportunity.

Perhaps these great changes won’t take place until the need is obvious and
irresistibly pressing. Maybe gasoline needs to get to $10 a gallon. Perhaps
unemployment will have to rise to ten or twenty or forty percent, with
families begging for food in the streets, before embattled policy makers
begin to reconsider their commitment to industrial agriculture.

But even in that case, as in Cuba, all may depend upon having another option
already articulated. Without that, we will be left to the worst possible
outcome.

Rather than consigning ourselves to that fate, let us accept the current
challenge — the next great energy transition — as an opportunity not to
vainly try to preserve business as usual, the American Way of Life that, we
are told, is not up for negotiation, but rather to re-imagine human culture
from the ground up.






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