Excellent essay. I can see that you're torn, but you're salvaging yourself by gardening. Especially since the industrial ag model is about to crash, and we have nothing in place to replace it.

I would recommend you look at Jeff Brown's Export Land Model http://graphoilogy.blogspot.com/2008/01/quantitative-assessment-of-future-net.html
which is discussed in the Oil Drum http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4092
about the rapidly declining state of global oil exports.

The way to look at it is; imagine that we export a third of our grain and feed much of the world. Then imagine that our grain production declines by a third over a period of, say, 8 years. Since we aren't going to go without, our exports would vanish over that period, which wouldnt' leave the food importers enough time to make "other arrangements."

Well, the same thing is happening with global oil exports. As oil production declines in places like Mexico, their local consumption continues to increase, so their exports vanish very quickly. And it looks like most oil exporters are in the same boat.

And since the US imports roughly half of all the global oil exports, our supplies are going to be devastated. Combine this with the machinations of Wall Street speculators, and we can imagine that growers and truckers are going to get wiped out, and thus our grain exports are going to decline, and you have a vicious circle that will be in full swing in the near term future.

So keep up your garden and keep your horses healthy and breeding. They are the mice running around the undergrowth beneath the dinosaurs feet as the asteroid sets it's sights for planet Earth.

We really don't have a choice any longer. The earth, farmed by primitive means, won't support the population. In many areas, it won't support the population even when farmed with advanced means.

We made our bed; the best we can hope for is that nature will somehow get us out of our predicament.

My question is, can we term this as a matter of how many chemical inputs you need to elevate production to a boosted level, Vs. using more traditional methods which require less nasty chemicals? For example, i heard about a chicken coop on wheels that can be moved around a pasture every day, distributing the rich droppings evenly, and also replacing a chemical input.

Because it seems like with oil scarcity on the rise, plus the chicanery of 'terminator' seeds that have to be purchased anew every year (for BS legal or genetically engineered reasons), then a more 'efficient' farm would be one that had a minimum of inputs, or relied more upon locally collected resources (manure from the neighboring farm, etc.).

there's a cool book out - i forgot the name - that gets into detail about a very kind of organic / kind of chaotic poly crop setup which reuses all these different naturally generated chemicals.

it seems like you have enough energy inputs from the sun, and a kind of negative entropy created by the organizing force of plants, to actually have a more efficient farm that is not so vulnerable to all the effects of oil shocks.

--
Hongpong.com

my old, dog-eared copy of "Diet for a Small Planet".

that the human intellect is a consequence of solving problems. If we were not constantly running up against increasingly complex situations and exposed to the consequences of failing to solve them, we would have the conceptual capacity of oysters, or be extinct already. There are difficult times coming, but it will be remembered as a time of character building in the history books, because it's the survivors that write them.

My daughter learnt about horses, for two reasons:

1. She would get married (she is married now and nearly 30), and would have to know how to handle large dumb animals.
2. The oil was not going to last for ever, and horses are the way to go. Don't need factories for horses to produce more horses.

My father grew up on his fathers' farm. He limped all his life from a poorly healed broken leg, broken in childhood when he was kicked by a horse. He had other, pointed, things to say about the hard work on a non-mechanized farm.

like efficiency is in large part a question of how things are subsidized.

I do tend to get a little carried away at times.

I did inhale.

It's not all dark. Many of my friends are farmers making a pretty decent (though very hard-earned) living off of anywhere from three to a hundred acres growing organic vegetables. They're mostly what you could call semi-mechanized: plenty of tractors, but lots of hand labor too. It works for them partly because they don't have to worry about scrambling to sell their produce--they sell either straight to eaters through CSA subscriptions or through the strong network of grocery co-ops in town. The organic price premium doesn't hurt, but it's not always as much of a factor as you might think--some of the CSA boxes are actually about the same price as you'd pay for the equivalent produce bought non-organic at any conventional grocery chain.

These systems aren't as efficient as industrial ag in food-per-labor-hour terms, but they are much more efficient in terms of food per acre and dollar returns to capital investment, and this allows them to support more labor--more jobs--while still providing a living for the farmer and high-quality generally affordable food to local consumers. Most of them use paid interns/apprentices for labor help. It's not an easy life, but it's a worthwhile and satisfying one, and it works economically in a way that industrial ag doesn't--industrial farmers often take a net loss on their crops, and are basically working off-farm jobs to subsidize their farming habit (as my first organic boss put it).

It's not a pipe dream, it's already in action. Not every city is lucky enough to have as many natural food co-ops as we do, but CSA has the potential to work anywhere--it spreads like wildfire by word of mouth, and my friends find themselves with waiting lists at the beginning of the season.

I would say that the notion of efficiency is misguided in this case. Challenge the assumption! Sustainable small scale farming is perfectly suited to the human circumstance if it is not required to support cities. Its when the sustainable farm is only required to sustain the sustainable farm, that it works....... and it works.

While I did grow 120 acres of genetically modified yellow corn this year, I also grew one 70 acre field of non-GM white corn for tortillas, the only non GM field corn that I am aware of in Gonzales County of Texas. I am happy to report that it's doing well.

Of course we used a tractor for plowing, making rows--cultivated it 3 times, irrigated with a pump powered by electricity (made from the burning of natural gas), fertilized with chemical fertilizer...

Not exactly sustainable agriculture.

I did inhale.

are finding local markets to sell their wares. Hang in there with growing small acreages and when the world runs out of oil, which is quickly being depleted, you'll be ahead of the game.

But growing your own in small places never was about profit--there are factors such as better taste and sharing with friends which I know you support. I've been growing a garden using intensive planting technology/methodology (square foot gardening with raised beds)...not suitable for acreages, but great when all you want is a tomato that doesn't taste like the cardboard ones that are sold in stores.

Canuck

The amazing part of your essay is that you tilled five acres of land. WTF? Your back thanks you for doing that for only a single season. How long did it take to till that much land?
I was born into a family of Irish quintupelets (all boys) and my parents had to do something to lessen the food bills. We all learned to fish and hunt (cue: "A Country Boy Can Survive") and we tilled up half of our one acre yard for veggies. It took me forever to weed that damn garden. I think I was the only modern eight year old American boy that ever complained about his perpetually aching back.

Antibiotic-free doesn't really mean "antibiotic-free". Our agro-business megacorporations are gaming the system.

is the enemy of the good. Hang in there, and keep finding improvements.
You can take one step at a time toward better quality and less petrochemicals.

Someone has to feed the cities.

In engineering, efficiency is defined clearly against some ideal. For instance, in thermodynamics first law effficiency describes the ratio between the energy released as heat and work extracted from that heat source. In this discussion, there have been a large number of ideas about efficiency.

1) efficiency of labor - how much food can be produced with an hour of labor. This is an essential idea. If a people is to produce arts and sciences, it only does so on a world-class way when a large portion of the adult workers are engaged in tasks not related to farming and raising children.

2) efficiency of land - how much food can be produced on an acre of land. In densely populated areas this becomes the limiting factor to sustaining a population. North America's great blessing is that we have a few more decades, perhaps a century, to go before this issue is nearly so constraining as it is now in China, Haiti, Bangladesh, or Rwanda. Recall that many historians believe that the Renaissance really got in full swing in Europe after the Black Death had wiped out a third of the population.

3) efficiency of energy - how much food can be produced with a given amount of exogenous energy input. Michael Pollan estimates that fully 15% of the food energy calories that Americans consume can be traced directly to ammonia used to fertilize the soil in which corn grows; and this ammonia is derived from natural gas. We are eating petroleum. This fact explains, too, why ethanol from corn is not such a great idea as a primary energy source.

In a purely economical sense, we would strive to create farms that have high efficiencies in all three areas. Artificially cheap oil has pushed us to substitute energy for labor. We have enjoyed huge number of material and cultural benefits from this. But we have also created industrialized agriculture which has its own set of dissatisfactions.

There is a great need to move toward cultivation techniques that are much more sustainable. A large enough collection of incremental improvements will position us well to make the leap when the energy crunch materializes. Windmills were economically viable in the Netherlands for years. They will probably be so once again here.

On a different level ..

What is most striking about your piece, Don, is that you establish farming as something more than a simple economic activity; You establish it as a means of connecting with nature. As a person who has filled a suburban lot with roses, shrubs and flowering plants and who enjoys hearing birds sing in the morning, I understand the satisfaction that comes from this connection. It seems to me that this is a factor missing from modern life, industrial farm not excepted.

Instead of interacting with nature, we do what is expected of us in a society that exists purely as an economic machine. Popping underdeveloped chickens on the head with PVC pipe is the metaphor of the current era. When we are no longer affected by this image, we cease to be fully functional as empathetic human beings. And society - no matter how economically successful - ceases to create meaningful relationships. We have been dehumanized.

Great piece.

Worry Wart

The Farm, Past, Present, and Future
June 04th, 2008 | Category: In the Garden, Culture

When is farming about connecting with nature; and when is farming about overcoming nature? It’s a question Don takes up in the case for and against industrial agriculture. Specialization and returns to scale make farming economically efficient; but they tend to take the joy out of the task of farming. Is there a kind of “middle ground” in which economic efficiency and the satisfactions of a connection to nature can happily coexist? Don’s commenters suggest there might be.

The power of Don’s piece is that he has hit upon a metaphor of the modern era. The question he asks is one that has been central to western culture since the Renaissance. We develop the question here, in a slightly different way.

In engineering, efficiency is defined clearly against some ideal. For instance, in thermodynamics first law effficiency describes the ratio between the energy released as heat and work extracted from that heat source. In this discussion, there have been a large number of ideas about efficiency.

1) efficiency of labor - how much food can be produced with an hour of labor. This is an essential idea. If a people is to produce arts and sciences, it only does so on a world-class way when a large portion of the adult workers are engaged in tasks not related to farming and raising children.

2) efficiency of land - how much food can be produced on an acre of land. In densely populated areas this becomes the limiting factor to sustaining a population. North America’s great blessing is that we have a few more decades, perhaps a century, before this issue is so constraining as it is now in China, Haiti, Bangladesh, or Rwanda. Recall that many historians believe that the Renaissance really got in full swing in Europe after the Black Death had wiped out a third of the population. Having lots of fertile land per capita has been the constant factor in the rise of the west for most of the last three millennia.

3) efficiency of energy - how much food can be produced with a given amount of exogenous energy input. Michael Pollan estimates that fully 15% of the food energy calories that Americans consume can be traced directly to ammonia used to fertilize the soil in which corn grows; and this ammonia is derived from natural gas. We are eating petroleum. This fact explains, too, why ethanol from corn is not such a great idea as a primary energy source. MORE