Post Oil Agricultural Solutions

Preface;  When one speaks of America, one is talking about a very big area that encompasses many countries.  For me to say I am an American is at the very least, confusing.  Do I mean I am from one of the two American continents or one of the many countries that exist on those two continents? In these pages distinctions are made between the U.S., North America and the rest of America.

Referring to U.S. farmers; the long held adage that ‘American farmers feed the world’ of course was never true.  What is true is that thanks to the fortuitous confluence of latitude, longitude, geography, weather patterns and fire, the great plains of the North American continent have, since the last ice age, become an incredibly fertile area.  This created conditions conducive for modern farmers there to produce a lot of cereal grains (wheat, oats, barley, rye) and corn.  On their own, these conditions are not sufficient to enable these crops to be grown in vast amounts.  The enabling factor has been artificially cheap fuel. It just so happened that the great plains were also home to one of the largest deposits of oil in the world which, when combined with the previous conducive factors, allowed for high grain production.

Today, all of these conditions are in flux.  In less than 100 years the fertility created by 10,000 years of natural conditions on the great plains is now mostly gone thanks to unsustainable farming systems fueled by oil.  But the greatest threat to our current modern cereal grain paradigm is the decline of oil. According to Jeff Rubin – who first predicted that oil would go over $100 a barrel – in his book “Why Your World Is About To Get A Lot Smaller; Oil And The Decline of Globalization”, the U.S reached peak oil production in the late 1970’s and the rest of the world is currently in the midst of peaking.  To employ an old farming adage, this means “all the low hanging fruit has already been picked”.  Sure there is some ‘easy to get’ oil left in the middle east and elsewhere, but that easily accessible oil is in short supply. To be sure, there are other oil deposits, but they are either very deep in the ground or very far off shore or locked up in shale or some other medium – all of which make it very hard to acquire – meaning it will be very expensive by the time you pump it as gas at your local station. As Mr. Rubin succinctly points out, it was gas at $4 a gallon that pushed the first domino in the chain that led to the ensuing sub prime mortgage crises. What he predicts when we recover from this current recession is that renewed demand for more oil will result in oil topping $200 per barrel with gas rising to $7 per gallon. If gas at $4 a gallon set off the current recession, imagine the effect of gas at $7. To cut to the chase here; we are in the last days of cheap fuel/food and we need to move from this failing paradigm to one that is less dependent on a single source of energy to produce our food.

What about; electric powered vehicles, fuel cells and biofuels? Jeff Rubin deals with these and all of the other options that are currently being bandied about as alternatives to oil.  In short they are all either decades away from being realized (if they ever will be) or will consume more energy to make than we get when we use them.  A good example of the latter is the use of great plains farm land to grow grain crops like corn, wheat and milo to make ethanol as fuel for our cars.  The energy required to manufacture the tractors, fuel the tractors, produce and ship the fertilizer, irrigate the crop (in some instances), harvest the crop, transport it, process it into fuel and ship that fuel to your gas station takes more energy than is produced. We are just now beginning to see how the usurpation of farmland from food production to fuel production is causing food prices to go up and if this trend continues so will the increase of food prices. In that our farmland is already degraded due to poor farming practices, this approach becomes a blatantly unsustainable use of our precious farm land.

  I have already explained why cheap energy is about to go the way of the dodo bird. To illustrate why a centralized approach to food production, distribution and marketing is an upside down system, it’s helpful to keep the dodo bird in mind while we take a closer look at one of this countries greatest crops; wheat. The current status quo says that wheat should be grown where its most economically viable to grow it and then transported to where it can be most economically processed, then the processed items (bran, germ, flour etc.) should be transported to where its most economically conducive to being made into final products. These products should then be distributed from a central warehouse to your grocery store. This is a system highly dependent on vast quantities of cheap oil for processing and transportation, making it very susceptible to failure due to high fuel prices or terrorist action. This antiquated “top down” type of food production has more to do with a few people at the top controlling the purse strings than it does with providing a practical way to produce and distribute the ‘staff of life’. This is not a good way to get fresh healthy food into your hands. By the time you receive this bread, you can be sure that the grain has long since gone rancid and that any nutritive value that the poorly grown crop may have had has long been lost in processing, travel and sitting on shelves. Is it any wonder that we are a nation fraught with health problems?
This all begs the question; will there be life after oil? Those who have been closely watching the oil issue realized long ago that there is no magic bullet. Politicians like to tout ‘pie in the sky’ solutions, but in reality it will take a combination of things to meet the food needs of our overpopulated planet. Perhaps one of the more effective solutions will be to focus much more locally than even the local food movement folks are encouraging. In short, I’m talking about food production in your own yard. Millions of people have sufficient room in their yards to grow enough food for themselves and many of their neighbors. In fact some backyard farmers currently make a living growing produce to supply nearby restaurants and farmers markets. Its not too hard to imagine the incredible amount of produce, eggs and small livestock that could be intensively grown in thousands of very local backyards scattered around the country. For crops more suited to larger scale production (like grains), our great grandfathers used what is perhaps the most sustainable solution; draft animals.

Ones first reaction to this might be that draft animals cannot plow the millions of acres of farmland that are currently being worked by heavy farm machinery to grow food. This is a valid argument under the current centralized, up-side down paradigm. Under a very local paradigm this argument falls apart. One hundred years ago wheat cultivation was grown in smaller parcels in much wider distribution. It was grown and harvested by draft animals and sold to a local person who often ground the wheat and immediately baked bread from it which was out on the shelf ready for sale the same day.   For those who have never had bread made from freshly ground wheat, I liken it to the difference between coffee from a can and freshly roasted/ground coffee.

Another key part of the local paradigm – in terms of grain production – should be large scale cultivation of perennial cereal grain. Wes Jackson at the Land Institute near Salina, Kansas has been working on this problem for several decades.  The Land Institute is developing a perennial* grain crop that would negate tillage of the soil and turn the prairies back into the vast grasslands they once were while producing grain at the same time.  These crops would only need to be planted once and would not require fertilization or pesticide application because they would be grown in complex guilds in conjunction with nitrogen fixing legumes – all similar to native prairies.  No tractors needed.  The only time the farmer would need to enter the field would be to harvest the grains at the end of the season.  This would vastly reduce the amount of embodied energy that currently goes into our grains.  If draft animals were used to pull the thrashing machines and widespread distribution of the crops was minimized, the amount of embodied energy would drop to level not seen since the early 1900’s.

Change will likely not occur until fuel costs force it. When bread made from wheat grown on a small irrigated parcel in the Rocky Mountains, milled at the local water powered mill and baked in the local bakery (as once was the case in numerous locations in the Rockies) becomes cheaper than bread from the current energy intensive system, change will happen. That day may be closer than we think.

*(annual – a plant that has a life cycle of one growing season and needs to be replanted each successive year in a field worked by farm equipment:  perennial – a plant that has a life cycle lasting more than two years, up to decades for perennial grasses which can reseed themselves)