Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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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.