I just found this great site for an organisation that does training on sustainable farming and urban agriculture, as well as campaigning for a more sustainable and coherent food policy in the USA. It is definitely worth a read for everyone, not just those interested in agriculture because, in my opinion, urban agriculture is what will save the world (well, the urban part of it, anyway!!):
http://www.growingpower.org/index.htm
I don't know if I've mentioned this before, and so as not to seem hysterical and crazy wierdo armageddon-ist, I don't talk about it much, I just let everyone assume our farming is a lifestyle choice, an environmental choice, a moral choice. But its more than that -- a very large part of my motivation for our project is simple selfish security. If we reach peak oil within my lifetime, I don't want my family to starve.
When most people think of peak oil, they think of transport problems, perhaps they think "ah well, we'll do without the carribean holiday, we'll buy an electric car". and cars can be powered by electricity, methane, used fryer oil from restaurants. Yes, of course transport is effected by expensive oil, but it is a solve-able problem. We can use alternatives, we can do without, we can walk, we can buy local.
No, the Really Scary Problem of a world without enough oil is not transport, but agriculture. The first obvious issue is the work -- the agricultural machines that make mass production possible are all obviously oil powered. Tractors, combine harvesters, chainsaws, wood chippers -- one farmer cannot cultivate 200 hectares of corn with a remote controlled tractor if the fuel for the tractor costs more than the corn will earn. A single barrel of oil contains the equivalent of about
20,000 hours of human labour.
That's more than 2 years of work for about 150$.
(See
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4315) (in fact there is an interesting thing to think about...the rise in mechanized agriculture and cheap fossil fuel coinciding with the abolition of slavery...would humans have had the same moral strength and conviction to abolish slavery if they didn't have a cheap labour alternative?...i don't know, but its interesting to think about).
But that is only the small problem, and solvable... if there is no diesel for the tractors, then we can go back to horses and oxen. And perhaps there will be enough people hungry and out of work that there will be plenty of man-labour instead of oil-labour to replace the oil used in machines. Or perhaps we can invent solar powered tractors and electric chainsaws. We can make methane cars, why not combine harvesters? And we really are a very clever species, we will come up with alternative ways of doing the work if we really need to.
No, the real problem is soil health. Gosh, that doesn't really sound like a scary problem does it? Dirt Fitness isn't on everybodies cocktail conversation list. But a huge percentage of the world's food production is completely reliant on chemical fertilizers. Pretty much the entire american food production (except for those few hippy dippy organic producers) wouldn't be possible without it. I don't know much about the health implications of such fertilizers, and that's not my argument at the moment -- in a social aspect, they are a wonderful thing because they increase the crop yields enormously, and make it possible for enormous amounts of food to be grown. Enough to feed the whole world, power lots of bio-diesel cars, and even burn up tons just to keep the prices up. Hunger sucks. I'm all for something that makes it possible for no one on the planet to go hungry (wouldn't it be great if it actually worked like that, if surplus was sent where it was needed rather than wasted, sigh...).
There's a but though...(isn't there always?). The use of chemical fertilizers has replaced any need to maintain soil health, a laborious and delicate job. Why bother rotating crops when you can throw down some potassium nitrate and be done with it, with better yield too? And manure...ick! Did they really once actually fertilise our food with poo...eeeeeew.
Result? A huge and scary percentage (I forget the exact number so I won't mention it, but it was, like, huge.) of the main crop producing arable land is now sterile. Without the addition of nitrate fertilisers, the barren soil will not produce food. Have you guessed where this is going?...
Yes, nitrate based fertilisers are a petrolium product. If we don't have cheap oil, we don't have cheap fertilisers. And if we don't have fertilisers, we don't have food. No matter how many clever ways we figure out to do the work, at the end of the day, the plant needs to be fed. A plant eats decomposed and digested life -- in healthy sustainable agriculture, that means manure, compost, anything biodegradable gets broken down by the worms and the microbes in the soil and turned into nitrates and other nutrients for the plants to eat. ( In the case of petrolium by-product fertilizers, what the plants are being fed is basically compressed dinosaur poop: same shit, different billenia) A soil without microbes and worms cannot sustain life. And a soil that has been chemically fertilised, pesticided relentlessly, and never ever rotated or rested, has not got microbes and worms.
Its not enough to stick a seed in the dirt. You have to stick a seed in good dirt.
Oh, and I just love it when someone says to me "I'm not worried about peak-oil, after all we have bio-diesel now and can power our cars with corn" ay yi yi. Sorry fella, no oil, no corn.
It takes about 30-40 years for an average sterile field to regain its natural soil health when left to its own devices. When helped along by the farmer (adding compost, building it up year by year, with lighter green manure crops first, then heavy nitrate producing plants like the velvet runner bean) it can take as little as 10 years. 10 years is a very long time for just about everyone to be hungry. Most sociologists give any given civilization 3 missed meals before things start getting skanky.
This is what we affectionately refer to as "WTSHTF" also known as "TEOTWAWKI". (that would be "when the shit hits the fan" or "the end of the world as we know it" to those of you as yet unindoctrinated...and just an aside question, is the shit hitting the fan dinosaur shit?? ).
Ok, so anyway, that's the bad news. Here's the good news...its already happened. Cuba. 1989. Soviet Union falls, Cuba is cut off from its entire oil supply. The agriculture, once a marvel of modern technology (really, cuban agriculture was super duper modern in the 80s), ground to a halt. As an average, every single cuban lost about 10kg (22 pounds) in the first year. They were hungry. But they didn't starve to death.
They developed urban agriculture. Everyone started producing what they could, where they could. The mass production crop fields were useless, but the suburbs all turned over lawns and parks to market gardens. The highrises in the cities started growing tomatoes on the balconies instead of geraniums. Look around...there is a lot of empty good dirt even in the city. And a bit at a time, the main crop fields were rejuvenated and brought back to life. Much like the victory gardens in London during ww2. A city can produce almost enough food to feed itself, if the people know how!
So, yeah, um, that's what we're doing really. I guess I'm out of the wierdo closet now. We are learning how. We are hoping to help other people learn how too, if we can. So that when (if) that moment comes where the price of oil is too high to permit chemical fertilisation, there will be an alternative way to make food already on the table (so to speak!), already tried and already tested and already producing.
I'm counting on this change coming slowly, peak oil doesn't mean today we have oil and tomorrow we don't. Peak oil means the point at which we are consuming more oil than we are digging up, but there will still be oil, and it will be a slow turnover as things are reprioritised as the reserves get eaten up.
'Cause if the shit really does hit the fan hard and fast, I doubt we will be able to defend our wee plot...I'm planning on getting a shotgun and learning how to use it, but if the zombies are coming and they are hungry enough, my puny shot gun won't keep them off long...so lets hope we can make enough pockets of change before its so terribly necessary, and build up communities that are feeding themselves more and more -- lets start making the change to local produce rather than relying on the produce of sterile soil thousands of miles away...then maybe we can avert the zombies...
Right, so, back to the beginning...these guys are cool, check it out:
