Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

"Like Homgren and Mollison, Jeavons has worked for the past three decades in 
anticipation of the need for the de-industrialization of food production due 
to accumulating environmental damage and fossil fuel depletion. Currently 
Biointensive farming is being taught extensively in Africa and South America 
as a sustainable alternative to the globalized monocropping. The term 
“biointensive” suggests that what we are discussing here is not a 
de-intensification of food production, but rather the development of 
production along entirely different lines. "


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 
more successful than past ones, and even if we manage to avert a genetic 
apocalypse, the means of producing and distributing genetically engineered 
seeds is itself reliant on the very fuel-fed industrial system that is in 
question.

Is it possible, then, that a solution lies in another direction 
altogether—perhaps in deliberately de-industrializing production, but doing 
so intelligently, using information we have gained from the science of 
ecology, as well as from traditional and indigenous farming methods, in order 
to reduce environmental impacts while maintaining total yields at a level 
high enough to avert widespread famine?

This is not an entirely new idea (as you all well know, the organic and 
ecological farming movements have been around for decades), but up to this 
point the managers of the current system have resisted it. This is no doubt 
largely because those managers are heavily influenced by giant corporations 
that profit from centralized industrial production for distant markets. 
Nevertheless, the fact that we have reached the end of the era of cheap oil 
and gas demands that we re-examine the potential costs and benefits of our 
current trajectory and its alternatives.

I believe we must and can de-industrialize agriculture. The general outline 
of what I mean by de-industrialization is simple enough: this would imply a 
radical reduction of fossil fuel inputs to agriculture, accompanied by an 
increase in labor inputs and a reduction of transport, with production being 
devoted primarily to local consumption.

Once again, fossil fuel depletion almost ensures that this will happen. But 
at the same time, it is fairly obvious that if we don’t plan for 
de-industrialization, the result could be catastrophic. It’s worth taking a 
moment to think about how events might unfold if the process occurs without 
intelligent management, driven simply by oil and gas depletion.

Facing high fuel prices, family farms would declare bankruptcy in record 
numbers. Older farmers (the majority, in other words) would probably choose 
simply to retire, whether they could afford to or not. However, giant 
corporate farms would also confront rising costs—which they would pass along 
to consumers by way of dramatically higher food prices.

Yields would begin to decline—in fits and starts—as weather anomalies and 
water shortages affected one crop after another.

Meanwhile, people in the cities would also feel the effects of skyrocketing 
energy prices. Entire industries would falter, precipitating a general 
economic collapse. Massive unemployment would lead to unprecedented levels of 
homelessness and hunger.

Many people would leave cities looking for places to live where they could 
grow some food. Yet they might find all of the available land already owned 
by banks or the government. Without experience of farming, even those who 
succeeded in gaining access to acreage would fail to produce much food and 
would ruin large tracts of land in the process.

Eventually these problems would sort themselves out; people and social 
systems would adapt—but probably not before an immense human and 
environmental tragedy had ensued.

I wish I could say that this forecast is exaggerated for effect. Yet the 
actual events could be far more violent and disruptive than it is possible to 
suggest in so short a summary.

Examples and Strategies

Things don’t have to turn out that way. As I have already said, I believe 
that the de-industrialization of agriculture could be carried out in a way 
that is not catastrophic and that in fact substantially benefits society and 
the environment in the long run. But to be convinced of the thesis we need 
more than promises—we need historic examples and proven strategies. 
Fortunately, we have two of each.

In some respects the most relevant example is that of Cuba’s Special Period. 
In the early 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba lost its 
source of cheap oil. Its industrialized agricultural system, which was 
heavily fuel-dependent, immediately faltered. Very quickly, Cuban leaders 
abandoned the Soviet industrial model of production, changing from a fuel- 
and petrochemical-intensive farming method to a more localized, 
labor-intensive, organic mode of production.

How they did this is itself an interesting story. Eco-agronomists at Cuban 
universities had already been advocating a transition somewhat along these 
lines. However, they were making little or no headway. When the crisis hit, 
they were given free rein to, in effect, redesign the entire Cuban food 
system. Had these academics not had a planwaiting in the wings, the nation’s 
fate might have been sealed.

Heeding their advice, the Cuban government broke up large, state-owned farms 
and introduced private farms, farmer co-ops, and farmer markets. Cuban 
farmers began breeding oxen for animal traction. The Cuban people adopted a 
mainly vegetarian diet, mostly involuntarily (Meat eating went from twice a 
day to twice a week). They increased their intake of vegetable sources of 
protein and farmers decreased the growing of wheat and rice (Green Revolution 
crops that required too many inputs). Urban gardens (including rooftop 
gardens) were encouraged, and today they produce 50 to 80 percent of 
vegetables consumed in cities.

Early on, it was realized that more farmers were needed, and that this would 
require education. All of the nation’s colleges and universities quickly 
added courses on agronomy. At the same time, wages for farmers were raised to 
be at parity with those for engineers and doctors. Many people moved from the 
cities to the country; in some cases there were incentives, in others the 
move was forced.

The result was survival. The average Cuban lost 20 pounds of body weight, but 
in the long run the overall health of the nation’s people actually improved 
as a consequence. Today, Cuba has a stable, slowly growing economy. There are 
few if any luxuries, but everyone has enough to eat. Having seen the benefit 
of smaller-scale organic production, Cuba’s leaders have decided that even if 
they find another source of cheap oil, they will maintain a commitment to 
their new, decentralized, low-energy methods.

I don’t want to give the impression that Cubans sailed through the Special 
Period unscathed. Cuba was a grim place during these years, and to this day 
food is far from plentiful there by American standards. My point is not that 
Cuba is some sort of paradise, but simply that matters could have been far 
worse.

It could be objected that Cuba’s experience holds few lessons for our own 
nation. Since Cuba has a very different government and climate, we might 
question whether its experience can be extrapolated to the U.S.

Let us, then, consider an indigenous historical example. During both World 
Wars, Americans planted Victory Gardens. During both periods, gardening 
became a sort of spontaneous popular movement, which (at least during World 
War II) the USDA initially tried to suppress, believing that it would 
compromise the industrialization of agriculture. It wasn’t until Eleanor 
Roosevelt planted a Victory Garden in the White House lawn that agriculture 
secretary Claude Wickard relented; his agency then began to promote Victory 
Gardens and to take credit for them. At the height of the movement, Victory 
Gardens were producing roughly 40 percent of America’s vegetables, an 
extraordinary achievement in so short a time.

In addition to these historical precedents, we have new techniques developed 
with the coming agricultural crisis in mind; two of the most significant are 
Permaculture and Biointensive farming (there are others—such as efforts by 
Wes Jackson of The Land Institute to breed perennial grain crops—but 
limitations of time and space require me to pick and choose).

Permaculture was developed in the late 1970s by Australian ecologists Bill 
Mollison and David Holmgren in anticipation of exactly the problem we see 
unfolding before us. Holmgren defines Permaculture as “consciously designed 
landscapes that mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while 
yielding an abundance of food, fiber, and energy for provision of local 
needs.” Common Permaculture strategies include mulching, rainwater capture 
using earthworks such as swales, composting, and the harmonious integration 
of aquaculture, horticulture, and small-scale animal operations. A typical 
Permaculture farm may produce a small cash crop but concentrates largely on 
self-sufficiency and soil building. Significantly, Permaculture has played an 
important role in Cuba’s adaptation to a low-energy food regime.

Biointensive farming has been developed primarily by Californian John 
Jeavons, author of How to Grow More Vegetables. Like Permaculture, 
Biointensive is a product of research begun in the 1970s. Jeavons defines 
Biointensive (now trademarked as “Grow Biointensive”) farming as:

. . . an organic agricultural system that focuses on maximum
yields from the minimum area of land, while simultaneously
improving the soil. The goal of the method is long-term
sustainability on a closed-system basis. Because biointensive is
practiced on a relatively small scale, it is well suited to anything
from personal or family to community gardens, market gardens,
or minifarms. It has also been used successfully on small-scale
commercial farms.

Like Homgren and Mollison, Jeavons has worked for the past three decades in 
anticipation of the need for the de-industrialization of food production due 
to accumulating environmental damage and fossil fuel depletion. Currently 
Biointensive farming is being taught extensively in Africa and South America 
as a sustainable alternative to the globalized monocropping. The term 
“biointensive” suggests that what we are discussing here is not a 
de-intensification of food production, but rather the development of 
production along entirely different lines. While both Permaculture and 
Biointensive have been shown to be capable of dramatically improving 
yields-per-acre, their developers clearly understand that even these methods 
will eventually fail us unless we also limit demand for food by gradually and 
humanely limiting the size of the human population.

In short, it is possible in principle for industrial nations like the U.S. to 
make the transition to smaller-scale, non-petroleum food production, given 
certain conditions. There are both precedents and models.

However, all of them imply more farmers. Here’s the catch—and here’s where 
the ancillary benefits kick in.

The Key: More Farmers!

One way or another, re-ruralization will be the dominant social trend of the 
21st century. Thirty or forty years from now—again, one way or another—we 
will see a more historically normal ratio of rural to urban population, with 
the majority once again living in small, farming communities. More food will 
be produced in cities than is the case today, but cities will be smaller. 
Millions more people than today will be in the countryside growing food.

They won’t be doing so the way farmers do it today, and perhaps not the way 
farmers did it in 1900.

Indeed, we need perhaps to redefine the term farmer. We have come to think of 
a farmer as someone with 500 acres and a big tractor and other expensive 
machinery. But this is not what farmers looked like a hundred years ago, and 
it’s not an accurate picture of most current farmers in less-industrialized 
countries. Nor does it coincide with what will be needed in the coming 
decades. We should perhaps start thinking of a farmer as someone with 3 to 50 
acres, who uses mostly hand labor and twice a year borrows a small tractor 
that she or he fuels with ethanol or biodiesel produced on-site.

How many more farmers are we talking about? Currently the U.S. has three or 
four million of them, depending on how we define the term.

Let’s again consider Cuba’s experience: in its transition away from 
fossil-fueled agriculture, that nation found that it required 15 to 25 
percent of its population to become involved in food production. In America 
in 1900, nearly 40 percent of the population farmed; the current proportion 
is close to one percent.

Do the math for yourself. Extrapolated to this country’s future requirements, 
this implies the need for a minimum of 40 to 50 million additional farmers as 
oil and gas availability declines. How soon will the need arise? Assuming 
that the peak of global oil production occurs within the next five years, and 
that North American natural gas is already in decline, we are looking at a 
transition that must occur over the next 20 to 30 years, and that must begin 
approximately now.

Fortunately there are some hopeful existing trends to point to. The 
stereotypical American farmer is a middle-aged, Euro-American male, but the 
millions of new farmers in our future will have to include a broad mix of 
people, reflecting America’s increasing diversity. Already the fastest growth 
in farm operators in America is among female full-time farmers, as well as 
Hispanic, Asian, and Native American farm operators.

Another positive trend worth noting: Here in the Northeast, where the soil is 
acidic and giant agribusiness has not established as much of a foothold as 
elsewhere, the number of small farms is increasing. Young adults—not in the 
millions, but at least in the hundreds—are aspiring to become Permaculture or 
organic or Biointensive farmers. Farmers markets and CSAs are established or 
springing up throughout the region. This is somewhat the case also on the 
Pacific coast, much less so in the Midwest and South.

What will it take to make these tentative trends the predominant ones? Among 
other things we will need good and helpful policies. The USDA will need to 
cease supporting and encouraging industrial monocropping for export, and 
begin supporting smaller farms, rewarding those that make the effort to 
reduce inputs and to grow for local consumption. In the absence of USDA 
policy along these lines, we need to pursue state, county, and municipal 
efforts to support small farms in various ways, through favorable zoning, by 
purchasing local food for school lunches, and so on.

We will also require land reform. Those millions of new farmers will need 
access to the soil, and there must be some means for assisting in making land 
available for this purpose. Conservation land trusts may be useful in this 
regard, and we might take inspiration from Indian Line Farm, here in the 
northeast.

Since so few people currently know much about farming, education will be 
essential. Universities and community colleges have both the opportunity and 
responsibility to quickly develop programs in small-scale ecological farming 
methods—programs that also include training in other skills that farmers will 
need, such as in marketing and formulating business plans.

Since few if any farms are financially successful the first year or even the 
second or third, loans and grants will also be necessary to help farmers get 
started.

These new farmers will need higher and stabilized food prices. As difficult 
as it may be even to imagine this situation now, food rationing may be 
required at some point in the next two or three decades. That quota system 
needs to be organized in such a way as to make sure everyone has the bare 
essentials, and to support the people at the base of the food system—the 
farmers.

Finally, we need a revitalization of farming communities and farming culture. 
A century ago, even in the absence of the air and auto transport systems we 
now take for granted, small towns across this land strove to provide their 
citizens with lectures, concerts, libraries, and yearly chautauquas. Over the 
past decades these same towns have seen their best and brightest young people 
flee first to distant colleges and then to the cities. The folks left behind 
have done their best to maintain a cultural environment, but in all too many 
cases that now consists merely of a movie theater and a couple of video 
rental stores. Farming communities must be interesting, attractive places if 
we expect people to inhabit them and for children to want to stay there.

If We Do This Well

We have been trained to admire the benefits of intensification and 
industrialization. But, as I’ve already indicated, we have paid an enormous 
price for these benefits—a 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.