Agriculture: the price of adaptation (Geasphere / Owen)

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Published on 12 Dec 2007 by The Archdruid Report.
Archived on 13 Dec 2007. Energy Bulletin

Agriculture: the price of adaptation

by John Michael Greer

One of the great gifts of crisis is supposed to be the way it helps
sort out the difference between what’s essential and what’s not. As
we move deeper into the crisis of industrial civilization, that
particular gift is likely to arrive in horse doctor’s doses. Those
who insist that the first priority in an age of declining petroleum
production is finding some other way to fuel a suburban SUV
lifestyle, or who hope to see some favorite technology – the
internet, say, or space travel – privileged in the same way, risk
finding out the hard way that other things come first.

At the top of the list of those other things are the immediate
necessities of human life: breathable air, drinkable water, edible
food. Lacking those, nothing else matters much. The first two are
provided by natural cycles that industrial civilization is doing its
best to mess up, but so far the damage has been localized. There are
still crucial issues to consider and work to be done, but the raw
resilience of a billion-year-old biosphere that has shrugged off ice
ages and asteroid impacts is a powerful ally.

Food is another matter. Unlike air and water, the vast majority of
the food we eat comes from human activity rather than the free
operation of natural cycles, and the human population has gone so far
beyond the limits of what surviving natural ecosystems can support
that attempting to fall back on wild foods at this point would be a
recipe for dieoff and ecological catastrophe. At the same time, most
of the world’s population today survives on food produced using
fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources such as mineral
phosphate and ice age aquifers. As the end of the fossil fuel age
approaches, other arrangements have to be made.

This poses a challenge, because nearly every resource currently used
in industrial agriculture, from the petroleum that powers tractors
and provides raw materials for pesticides, through the natural gas
and phosphate rock that go into fertilizer, to the topsoil that
underlies the whole process, is being depleted at radically
unsustainable rates. Some peak oil theorists, noting this, have
worried publicly that the consequences of declining petroleum
production will include the collapse of industrial agriculture and
worldwide starvation.

Still, this is one of those places where one of the central themes of
recent Archdruid Report posts – the theme of adaptation – is
particularly useful. If today’s industrial agriculture were to keep
chugging away along its present course into the future, the results
could be disastrous. One of the few things that can be said for
certain, though, is that this sort of straight-line extrapolation is
the least likely trajectory for the agriculture of the future.
The certainty here comes from two sources. First, the industrial
agriculture we have today did not pop fully formed out of a John
Deere plant like Athena from the head of Zeus. It evolved as farmers
and agricultural corporations took advantage of the abundant energy
supplies made available by the exploitation of oil reserves in the
20th century. At that time, increasing energy inputs into agriculture
was adaptive; it made use of an abundant resource – cheap fossil fuel
energy – to make up for other resources that were more expensive or
less available. That same equation, though, works equally well the
other way. As energy and other fossil fuel products become more
expensive, farmers have a strong incentive to use less of them, and
to replace them with other resources.

The second source of certainty comes from the simple fact that
adaptations in the other direction are already taking place. The
organic farming revolution, the most important of these, may be the
most promising and least often discussed of the factors shaping the
future of industrial society. It’s not a small factor, either. In
2005, the most recent year for which I have been able to get data,
some four million acres of land completed the transition from
chemical to organic agriculture, about a million acres over the
previous year’s figure.

Because it uses no chemical fertilizers and no pesticides, organic
agriculture is significantly less dependent on fossil fuels than
standard agriculture, and yet it produces roughly comparable yields.
It has huge ecological benefits – properly done, organic agriculture
reverses topsoil loss and steadily improves the fertility of the soil
rather than depleting it – but it also translates into a simple
economic equation: a farmer can get comparable yields for less cost
by growing crops organically, and get higher prices for the results.
As the prices of petroleum, natural gas, phosphate rock, and other
feedstocks for the agrichemical industry continue to climb, that
equation will become even harder to ignore – and in the meantime the
infrastructure and knowledge base necessary to manage organic farming
on a commercial scale is already solidly in place and continues to
expand.

As fuel prices continue to climb, tractor fuel and transportation
costs are likely to become the next major bottlenecks. The adaptive
responses here are already taking shape, though they’re back further
in the development curve – more or less where organic agriculture was
in the 1970s.

The renaissance of horsedrawn agriculture is one adaptive response
moving steadily toward the takeoff point. After a long period when
diesel was so much cheaper than feed that horses no longer made
economic sense, the balance is swinging the other way, and farmers
are waking up to the advantages of “tractors” that run on grain and
hay, rather than expensive diesel fuel, and can be manufactured in a
horse barn by the simple expedient of letting a stallion in among the
mares. The percentage of North American acreage farmed by horsedrawn
equipment is still very small, but it’s many times larger than it was
even a decade ago, and the infrastructure and knowledge base needed
to expand further are coming into being.

Transportation, at least in North America, is a thornier problem. The
railroad system that once connected North American farmland to the
rest of the planet, and enabled it to become the world’s breadbasket,
was effectively abandoned decades ago, and it’s an open question
whether enough of it can be rebuilt in the teeth of catabolic
collapse to make any kind of difference. In the meantime, though,
another set of adaptive responses is taking shape. All over the US,
though it’s especially common on the west coast, local farmers
markets have sprung up over the last decade, and much of the produce
sold in them comes from small local farms.

In cities where the farmers market movement has set down strong roots
- I’m thinking particularly of Seattle, where five weekly farmers
markets and the seven-days-a-week Pike Place Market supply local
shoppers with produce of every kind – the economics of modern farming
have been turned on their heads, and truck farms from 10 to 100 acres
located close to the city have become profitable for the first time
in many decades. Once again, the infrastructure and knowledge base
needed for further expansion is taking shape.

All these transformations and the others that will come after them,
though, have their price tag. The central reason why modern
industrial agriculture elbowed its competitors out of the way was
that, during the heyday of fossil fuel consumption, a farmer could
produce more food for less money than ever before in history. The
results combined with the transportation revolution of the 20th
century to redefine the human food chain from top to bottom. For the
first time in history, it became economical to centralize agriculture
so drastically that only a very small fraction of food was grown
within a thousand miles of the place where it was eaten, and to turn
most foodstuffs into processed and packaged commercial products in
place of the bulk commodities and garden truck of an earlier era. All
of this required immense energy inputs, but at the time nobody
worried about those.

As we move further into the twenty-first century, though, the
industrial food chain of the late twentieth has become a costly
anachronism full of feedback loops that amplify increases in energy
costs manyfold. As a result, food prices have soared – up more than
20% on average in the United States over the last year – and will
very likely continue to climb in the years to come. As industrial
agriculture prices itself out of the market, other ways of farming
are moving up to take its place, but each of these exacts its price.
Replace diesel oil with biodiesel, and part of your cropland has to
go into oilseeds; replace tractors altogether with horses, and part
of your cropland has to go into feed; convert more farmland into
small farms serving local communities, and economies of scale go
away, leading to rising costs. The recent push to pour our food
supply into our gas tanks by way of expanded ethanol production
doesn’t help either, of course.

All this will make life more challenging. Changes in the agricultural
system will ripple upwards through the rest of society, forcing
unexpected adjustments in economic sectors and cultural patterns that
have nothing obvious to do with agriculture at all. Rising prices and
shrinking supplies will pinch budgets, damage public health, and make
malnutrition a significant issue all through the developed world;
actual famines are possible, and may be unavoidable, as shifting
climate interacts with an agricultural economy in the throes of
change. All this is part of the price of adaptation, the unavoidable
cost of changing from a food system suited to the age of fossil fuels
to one that can still function in the deindustrial transition.

The same process can serve as a model for other changes that will be
demanded of us as the industrial system moves deeper into
obsolescence. Adaptation is always possible, but it’s going to come
with a price tag, and the results will likely not be as convenient,
abundant, or welcome as the equivalents were in the days when every
American had the energy equivalent of 260 slaves working night and
day for his or her comfort. That can’t be helped. Today’s industrial
agriculture and the food chain depending on it, after all, were
simply the temporary result of an equally temporary abundance of
fossil fuel energy, and as that goes away, so will they. The same is
true of any number of other familiar and comfortable things; still,
the more willing we are to pay the price of transition, the better
able we will be to move forward into the possibilities of a new and
unfamiliar world.