« Gleanings for an Understanding of the Endgame | Home | An Outline of Benefits from a Lower Energy Civilization »
Implications for Agriculture of Peak Cheap Energy
By Karl North | November 27, 2011
By way of introduction to what I have to say, let me explain the evolution of my thinking. As a farmer for 30 years, I have been an active participant in the movement to develop alternatives to Industrial Agriculture. As you may know, much of the motivation for that movement was a growing awareness of the damage that Industrial Agriculture was doing to the land and to the quality of food. Because the damage was a slow moving disaster, and the productivity of Industrial Ag was high, there has been a sense that there were choices; Industrial Ag did well at cranking out the food, but we were developing healthier methods.
Now, with the advent of peak global production of oil and soon coal and gas, we are faced not so much with choices as with imperatives. They are imperatives because they are not simply a matter of economic or technological debate, but are the result of human use of planetary resources coming up against permanent hard, physical limits. Let me stress that: in my view and in the view of many in the sciences who have a strong grasp of the laws of nature, ultimately there are no economic or technological solutions, although there are ways those efforts can slow things down, kicking the can down the road as it were.
Here are the basic elements of the story: Access to fossil energy has accelerated its depletion and the depletion of most other nonrenewable resources that are essential to modern industrial society; now declining access to fossil energy limits access to most other resources even more because it takes energy to extract and process them. Hence the depletion of fossil fuels imposes the descent of modern society to a much lower energy civilization, and will impose specific, fundamental changes in the way we produce food, changes that most of the alternative agriculture movement has not considered fully. It will finally cause us to take much more seriously the question of what is a sustainable agriculture.
I would like to take a few minutes to summarize the case for these claims, because these issues are so strangely absent from public discourse, and because, more than any other questions, I believe they will affect how we envision a new agriculture.
I said that these issues are “strangely absent from public discourse”; the reason that is strange is that the highest levels of government are completely aware of the situation I will describe. As resource scarcity deepens and translates into food scarcity, military white papers that are available to the public are describing plans for dealing with the resulting increasing social conflict, both within and between nations. A German military document recently released for publication describes the expected social upheaval and ensuing chaos and general insecurity with unusual candor.
What the high command in Western nations is reacting to is a situation where human society, benefiting from a uniquely high quality energy source in fossil fuels, has used them and other nonrenewables with no restraint to the point where their production is beginning to decline while global demand still increases. Oil in particular has allowed a temporary extravaganza in human history that we call industrial civilization. Cheap oil has led to the rapid depletion of all nonrenewables that are critical to this civilization. Because we took the easy oil and other resources first, the decline in production of all these resources will be necessarily steeper than the ascent. The early warning therefore in all cases is longterm rising costs of all production that uses fossil energy or other essential nonrenewables. The price of phosphorus for example, an essential mineral in food production, has risen steeply in recent years, and the world is nearing peak phosphorus production.
In sum, the energy sources that underpin industrial civilization will become permanently scarcer over the next decades, and the material consumption we have become used to over the last two centuries will decline accordingly as a degree of deindustrialization occurs. Industrial Agriculture, which derives over 80% of its energy from oil, will perforce deindustrialize as well, so our task is not so much to bring it down, but to prepare a timely replacement.
For some, none of this is news. Those of you who are familiar with the Limits to Growth project know that forty years ago the authors modeled the likely future scenarios with impressive accuracy. In 1980 William Catton was one of the first to combine the perspectives of social and ecological science in his book, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, in which he said that the advent of fossil fuels had led to an unsustainable “phantom carrying capacity” in natural resource use. He called it phantom carrying capacity because it permitted temporary human population levels and, in the West, per capita resource consumption that both took the planetary ecological load far above real carrying capacity, which would become clear once fossil fuels became scarce. Systems ecologists Eugene and Howard Odum, who were instrumental in the emergence of ecology as a scientific discipline in the US, have been writing in the same vein for decades.
All of these early warnings were ignored or angrily rejected by the high priests of business as usual. However, there is now a copious literature that describes our overshoot of planetary carrying capacity and its most likely consequences. This literature can be found both in print and on the alternative knowledge medium provided by the internet, even as the general public remains largely in ignorance or denial. This issue is so important in terms of both personal and global consequences that I strongly encourage everyone to look at the evidence.
What are the consequences of all this for designing a new agriculture? The future we must design for in agriculture will, in the analysis of many of these writers, of necessity have access to little more energy than the farms of 150 years ago, and lack other key resources that we commonly use today. These changes may impose themselves gradually, but sudden temporary complete losses are likely as well, as fragile supply chains dependent on cheap oil break down. In fact the most immediate vulnerability for agriculture is the supply chain of both farm inputs and food outputs that keeps food in grocery stores, which consists of a complex and fragile mix of processing, transportation, financial transactions, and above all communications. Food retailers keep on average only three days of inventory. A single hiccup in the fuel supply chain could cause food to disappear from grocery shelves.
What other adaptations will the new agriculture need to cope with the arrival of humanity at this unique historical tipping point? Most generally, we will need to design farming systems that, like natural ecosystems, are highly input self-sufficient, that utilize the full potential of species diversity on the farm and in the larger ecosystem to provide ecological services to replace external inputs, and are sized and designed in other ways to serve a mainly local human community and food economy. These systems will be knowledge-intensive because they will be highly complex integrated systems. In sum, we must design agroecosystems if we are to continue sufficient food production in the era of energy descent that we are now entering. We talk a sometimes about these goals but could make little progress toward them in the present economy. That will gradually change. In the energy descent economy, much more sustainable farming systems that are not yet competitive will gradually dominate the agricultural economy.
Agroecosystems as I understand the term will differ markedly not only from industrial agriculture but from much of organic agriculture as well. But it is not as if we have to design from whole cloth. Although these systems will inevitably differ from historical models, there are many excellent historical models to learn from that go far toward achieving these design goals. Indeeed, the old integrated general farm with its heavy participation in the local economy was common in the US from colonial times to well into the 20th century in places. At its best it had a number of the necessary internal cycles and species and market relationships.
To design whole agroecosystems, that is, farms that achieve the same level of sustainability as many natural ecosystems, we will need to learn from systems ecology. You won’t find that taught much in agricultural schools. That is why independent research farms, like Hawthorne Valley Farm in New York with its resident scientists and promotion of communication among local farmers, are so important.
I want to end with an example of what we need to learn from systems ecology: it is the importance of what ecologists call Net Primary Production (NPP). NPP is the living organic matter created by photosynthesis and is the entry point in an ecosystem of the solar energy that fuels all other growth in the system. As it is the base of the food chain, the productivity potential of the whole system rests on the quantity and quality of NPP. The same will be true of farms designed as agroecosystems, so from a systems ecology perspective our first design focus should be on the health and productivity of NPP.
Topics: Agriculture, Northland Sheep Dairy, Political and Economic Organization, Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Uncategorized | No Comments »
