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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Richard Heinberg: Peak Oil Demands a New Farming Paradigm
  • Date: Sat, 05 Dec 2009 22:26:22 -0700



Richard Heinberg: Peak Oil Demands a New Farming Paradigm
Interview with Acres U.S.A.
http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/archives/0307InterviewHeinberg.htm

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. It’s probably more in the category of visions. It’s pretty
clear what the world needs in terms of future agriculture and future food
production. Whether we’ll actually get there is quite a different question,
because right now we’re on exactly the wrong track. We’re going to have to
make a pretty dramatic change in our agricultural priorities if we’re going
to arrive at anything like a sustainable system that will actually feed
future generations. What I’ve tried to do is lay out a vision of what’s
possible.

ACRES U.S.A. What is possible?

HEINBERG. Using the knowledge that we’ve 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 it’s
possible for us to produce food in a way that doesn’t destroy topsoil, in a
way that preserves fresh water and that feeds as many people as we have in
the world today. But it’s 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 can’t make a living if he’s farming two or three sections of land because
of disparity between agriculture and the rest of the society.

HEINBERG. That’s right.

ACRES U.S.A. Doesn’t that make the entire problem a political problem?

HEINBERG. It certainly is a political problem, and it’s also an energy
problem, because the reason we’ve created the kind of agricultural system we
have today is that we’ve had access to very cheap sources of energy. We’ve
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, it’s 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, that’s 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 hadn’t been for organic agronomists in
Havana lobbying their government, I think Cuba wouldn’t 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 they’re not being listened to. They are very
much on the fringes, yet they’re 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. They’re 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 we’re consuming on par and
didn’t 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 isn’t, 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 that’s 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 what’s 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 it’s 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. Aren’t we shutting the door on technology we
could use that is bio-friendly?

HEINBERG. Actually, I don’t think anyone is shutting that door. Quite the
opposite is happening. There’s 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 hasn’t been perfected
yet. But certainly over the next few years, I’m sure we’ll 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 that’s the proper place for biofuels. If
biofuels can be produced on-site for use on the farm, I think that’s
something practical and sustainable. For the nation as a whole, I think it’s
unrealistic to expect that we’ll 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 he’s 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 they’re quite worried to hear about
the situation we’re in, not only with oil, but also 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, they’re generally quite supportive of the things I have
to say. They’re also quite worried in many cases. Even in some companies that
take the official position that there’s 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, isn’t it?

HEINBERG. Absolutely, and the problems are actually coming on much faster
than most people were anticipating. Over the last year, we’ve seen virtually
no growth in the global oil supply. We’re not seeing the crisis in its full
force right now primarily because prices have been so high that they’ve
destroyed a lot of demand. Whole African countries have basically stopped
importing oil because they can’t 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 we’ll see another round of price increases and more demand
destruction — decreased demand as a result of high prices — and so on. I’m
sorry to say that most people will not understand what’s going on. They’ll
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 they’re 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 we’ve 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, that’s 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 that’s a very worrisome
situation here in North America because we’re seeing natural gas production
turning down. Therefore we’re 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. We’ve lost something like 100,000 jobs
in the chemicals industry over the last two years, but of course we don’t
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. That’s 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 can’t 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. We’ve heard the statement that you’re going to see a country
full of cattle and no cowmen out there. In other words, the technology that’s
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 you’re 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,
it’s going to be a very chaotic and nasty kind of transition.

ACRES U.S.A. Let’s go back to this message which has to be repeated a
thousand times — it’s like the old doctor at the University of Missouri who
used to tell us that there’s 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 don’t 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. That’s 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 it’s abundant to where it’s scarce. I think
it’s fair to say that there are somewhere between 2 and 4 billion people
alive today who probably would not exist if it weren’t for fossil fuels.
That’s 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 we’re going to avoid a die-off of much
of humanity through starvation and disease, we’re 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 don’t 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 they’ve 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
can’t go any further? We’re not suggesting a cataclysm of any sort, we’re
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 we’re 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 we’re virtually there. That doesn’t mean that
suddenly all oil production will vanish or collapse. We’ll 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. That’s going to affect agriculture, it’s going to affect
electricity production, home heating, the chemicals industry and the entire
American economy. Probably by the year 2015 or 2020 we’ll see an American
economy in tatters compared to anything we’ve known over the past few
decades, simply because we’ll no longer have the fuel to make it work.

ACRES U.S.A. We probably won’t 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 they’ve 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, that’s what we would do. My concern is that
what’s 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, there’s certainly a way around it! What you suggested, land
reform, is the way to go — there’s 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. That’s 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 — it’s 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 we’re seeing an epidemic of obesity in the United
States, and that’s not because people are overnourished, it’s because they’re
overfed with food of poor nutritional quality.

ACRES U.S.A. They’re fed GMOs; they’re 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 it’s always going to be there for them,
and that’s about as much thought as they give to the matter.

ACRES U.S.A. Many of them even reject food if it’s organic or at least
wholesome, because it’s 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 don’t know any better. Many of them have never
tasted anything really nutritious — a carrot straight from the soil,
something that they’ve grown themselves, or simply something that has been
grown without chemicals and fertilizers.

ACRES U.S.A. In view of the impact you’ve 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 we’re 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. You’re also quite interested in global warming?

HEINBERG. Yes, very much so, and I’m 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, it’s 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 you’re talking about carbon dioxide?

HEINBERG. Yes.

ACRES U.S.A. And carbon dioxide, of course, is a global warming gas that’s
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 doesn’t
even mention it in his film, An Inconvenient Truth.

HEINBERG. That’s right — thank you for pointing that out! That’s 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.






  • [Livingontheland] Richard Heinberg: Peak Oil Demands a New Farming Paradigm, Tradingpost, 12/06/2009

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