The Connection Between Food Supply and Energy: What Is the Role of Oil Price?
Posted by Prof. Goose on October 23, 2007 - 10:00am
I became fascinated with the connection between our food supply and energy when I first learned of the problems that North Korea was having feeding itself. (see here). This data showed me something amazing about modern society, we don't live in the information age, we don't live in the industrial age, we live in the agricultural age. Without food, we have no industry or information. Unfortunately many don't understand this. Nor do they understand that today the modern farming system is merely a means to turn petroleum into food, via mechanized planting and harvesting, and the use of petroleum based insecticides and fertilizers which consume huge amounts of energy in their manufacture. According to Wikipedia, who gets it from Science, 1% of the world's energy goes into the manufacture of chemical fertilizer (here).
There has recently been a claim that in the post-peak oil world, life will go on pretty much as normal. For a while, as the world squeezes inefficiencies out of the economic system and fuel switching occurs, this is true. But one can not seriously believe that the world economy is infinitely elastic with regards to energy. With regard to the agricultural system, there is data which shows the limits to this inelasticity and these limits are due to the laws of physics.
The USDA provides information on the economics of farming. The data comes in the form of dollars spent on various items. I will focus on the dollars spent for fuel, chemical sprays and fertilizer. These three items are directly related to petroleum, and using the cost of the day and the price of oil of the day, one can convert these numbers into barrels of oil spent. For instance, in 1975 wheat farmers spent an average of $11.44 per acre on fertilizer. As noted above, fertilizer is an energy intensive product and its value is largely determined by the amount of energy used. Since the price of oil in 1975 averaged $11.53/bbl, this means that the wheat farmers spent .99 bbl/acre on fertilizer. The farmer spent only $1.19 on chemical sprays per acre meaning he spent .1 bbl/ac. Fuel is much more directly (although not perfectly) convertable to barrels. In 1975 farmers spent $4.02/ac. on fuel and lube, which is converted to .35 bbl/ac. With this methodology I studied the energy expenditures on wheat, corn, rice and barley farming.
These four crops are the major food-grains of the world. How the farming community responds to high oil prices is of immense interest to the world community. If, as that author, mentioned above, claims the world will have 25-30% less oil in 2030 with no ill effects, this can only be true if agriculture has the elasticity to handle such a reduction. Sure we can drive less, take buses to work, drive motor scooters etc. This will seriously reduce the demand for energy. But, can we drive a tractor plowing a field 25% less? I don't think so. This is because of the laws of physics. The energy used to move a tractor across a field is Work = force x distance. The distance is constant, and so is the force (or nearly so). The force here is actually the frictional forces the tractor experiences. They must be over come. If there were no friction, then Newton's first law, that a body in motion remains in motion would come into play and a tractor once set moving could continue to move in a straight line. But because the plow against the dirt, the tires against the dirt, the internal friction of the engine all operate to slow the tractor down, there is a minimal energy which must be expended if one expects to plow that field. The question is, can we see that limitation in the data from the USDA?
In plotting the oil price, yields and fuel costs of wheat farmers over time, I noticed that there does appear to be a minimum energy expenditure in the data. The inflation adjusted price of oil is scaled to fit onto this graph, and both the uninflated and inflated oil prices come from the 2007 BP Statistical Review of World Energy. One immediately sees that when the price of oil is high, the fuel use drops to approximately .3 bbl/ac.. When the price of oil is low, the fuel use rises. One can find a similar thing for rice, corn and barley.
I won't show the same thing set of charts for the other grains (although corns minimum effective fuel use seems to be rising), because one can display the data more effectively in another format. By making fuel use a function of inflation adjusted oil price, one sees the elasticity of fuel use on wheat farms. Below $40/bbl, the use of fuels to drive equipment rapidly rises. Clearly the farmers are having few pangs of guilt about driving any equipment when the prices is below $40. But the behavior is quite different when the price reaches $40/bbl. Fuel use flattens out, as if almost all of the elasticity has been removed from the system. Only at the $90 level is there any evidence of further restrictions in fuel use. I would conclude from this that at $75/bbl, wheat farming has already squeezed out the inefficiencies and given a 20-30% drop in future supplies as is expected, the only way to accommodate this is to not drive as much (although, fertilizer and chemical use will turn out to be more elastic)
Here is the same for corn, rice and barley
What about fertilizer use?
Looking at these charts we see more elasticity in the higher oil price regions. The use of fertilizer with wheat, rice and barley continue to drop as the price of oil goes up. Corn is a bit more complex and it isn't clear why. One sees two behaviors below the $45 oil price. But one thing is clear on all four graphs. Below $45 the application of fertilizer goes way up. This is not a phenomenon related to long term changes in the practices of fertilizer application. Even in the mid-1990s, the use of fertilizer rose more rapidly as the price of oil fell. It is clear that farmers are reluctant to go down in fertilizer use too rapidly as the oil price rises, but, this is the second place that they can cut when oil prices are high.
The next four charts show the elasticity of chemical usage. This includes insecticide. Clearly its use is even more elastic than is fertilizer. And once again we see a split behavior. Rapid rise of usage below $40/bbl and linear reduction above that value. We see this for each of the grains.
One surprise in this data, at least it was surprising to me. One can't easily correlate yield (bu/ac) with oil price. Nor can one see a correlation between farm profits and oil price. The best reason for this that I can think of is that both yield and profits are subject to so many other variables than oil price. Rainfall (and when it occurs), temperature, crop disease, all play a role in both yield and profitability. The oil price signal gets swamped.
Another surprise was that crop yield didn't correlate with fertilizer use in the
USDA data. One can have high expenditures on oil based items, only to have
the crop fail; conversely, one can have spend little and have the other
conditions simply perfect for maximizing yield. That may not be comforting when one looks at controlled
experiments with fertilizer.
This
Brady
Mt,
N
Yield
lb/ac bu/ac
Protein%
weight/ac
sulfur %
0
46.2 14.1
58.6
0.171
30
47.3 14.4
58.4
0.177
60 49.5
15.1
58.1
0.181
90 50.0 15.4
58.0
0.188
Sunburst,
MT
N Yield
lb/ac bu/ac
Protein%
weight/ac
sulfur %
50 33.3
12.7
57.3
0.177
100 37.7
15.2
56.1
0.204
150 35.8
16.9
54.9
0.228
And for corn, one can find this abstract
Proper
fertility management in corn production is important both from an economic and
environmental standpoint. A field study was conducted to investigate the effect
of starter fertilizer on corn yield northern Great Plains. The experiment was
established within a two-year corn/soybean rotation, with four replications. The
experiment was carried out for four years (2000-2003). Starter fertilizer
treatments consisted of four nitrogen (N) rates (0, 7, 14, and 21 lb N ac-1).
These N starter treatments contained phosphorus (P) and potassium (K). An
additional treatment of no starter fertilizer (no N, P or K) was also
incorporated into the experiment. All starter fertilizer was applied at planting
in a band 2 inches below and 2 inches to the side of the seed furrow. An
additional 75 lb N ac-1 was applied side-dress at the V6 growth stage to all
plots. Although the magnitude of grain yield varied for the four different
growing seasons, largely due to rainfall, the yield trend was consistent with
respect to treatment differences regardless of year. Comparison between the no
starter (no N, P or K) treatment and the P and K treatment (no N + P and K)
resulted in the largest yield increases, with yield increasing up to 36 % for
the 2003 growing season. There was a significant positive response to increases
in N rate for all years except the 2002 growing season, which was the lowest
yielding year out of the four. Application of starter fertilizer can have a
significant positive impact on yield and quality of corn grown in the northern
Great Plains.
Experiments tell us that lack of fertilizer will reduce crop yields and that is exactly what oil prices cause--reduction in fertilizer. Why the difference? Precision application of fertilizer rather than the spray-it-all-over-the-place techniques have begun to come into play, minimizing the effect of lessened fertilizer application--so far. Eventually, even that might not be enough to avoid a drop in crop yield.
With corn, one of the interesting realizations is that a 19th century farm grew about 30 bushels per acre, while today, with our machinery we can grow up to 160 bushels per acre. How this is done needs some explanation. The first thing is that on a modern farm, 30,000 corn plants grow per acre. This is about 1.5 square feet per plant. This simply can't be done without machinery. I am in the process of purchasing a 100-acre farm. Let's say I wanted to plant corn by hand and achieve those densities. At 5 seconds per seed, it would take 41 hours to do one acre. And 173 days to do the farm. Of course, by having lots of children I can put them to work. With 10 children, I could do it in 17 days. This shows that without machinery, the plant densities will drop. A modern wheat field has 1.3 million plants. Clearly, without machinery, this is a throw-the-seed-out-there-and-hope-the-birds-don't-eat-it-all exercise.
So, having shown the problem of planting without machinery, we can see that any reduction of oil is likely to cause a serious drop in crop yield, leading to famine. When we can only drive our tractors 80% as much as we do today, it will effectively mean only 80% of the land will be under cultivation. And like everything else, we are being squeezed from two sides. The population increase requires a higher rather than a lower yield per acre. In a recent article The Telegraph spoke of this problem. After pointing out that since the 1950s, there has been an 11 percent increase in cultivatable land, yields have gone up 120 per cent. As they say, 'they aren't making new land anymore'. Ferguson further states:
“But can world food production keep pace? Plant physiologist Lloyd T Evans has estimated that "we must reach an average yield of four tons per hectare… to support a population of 8 billion". But yields right now are, as we have seen, just three tons per hectare. And a world of eight billion people may be less than 20 years away.” (Ferguson, 2007)
Irrigation
Many areas of the world are involved with irrigation to support the agricultural efforts. My former sister-in-law lives on a farm in western Nebraska. They tap the Ogallala reservoir to water their land. Over the many years, the water level has dropped forcing wells to go deeper. This has happened throughout the world as the farmers try to get water to grow their crops. Vacuum pumps (the ones with the handle) can only bring water up from less than 32 feet deep. If you go deeper, you need either a bucket system or electricity. And therein lies the rub. As energy supplies grow scarce, electricity will begin to become less and less reliable. Consider these guys from India. Notice the depth of their water wells.
"Since
the 1990s, India has been a major net exporter of rice, shipping nearly 4.5
million tons last year.
"But annual yield increases began to
slow over the past decade. Farmers cranked up fertilizer and water use, draining
the water table. Many began planting two crops a year, taxing the soil. Punjabi
area officials discouraged farmers from planting two crops and in some places
outlawed it, but many farmers ignored them."
"I'm doing mischief against the
government,' concedes Kanwar Singh, a second rice crop recently on a stretch of
flooded land near the northern India city of Karnal. He says he now
has to pump water from 300 feet below the surface, compared with 70 feet
10 years ago." 'In a year or two, maybe it will be finished,' he
says." (Barta, 2007, p. A10)
"Lakhbir Singh, 35, this year planted aerobic rice for the first time. He says his costs have tripled over the past decade. His well was about 60 feet deep 10 years ago; now, it's down to 450 feet, and he has to use a special submersible engine to help haul the water to surface. The health of his soil has deteriorated, so he's using more fertilizer." (Barta, 2007, p. A10)
If electricity becomes problematical, as it must in a post peak-oil world, pumping water from those depths will become difficult but not impossible. There is the tried and true wind mill. At this site one can find a table on vertical distances one can lift water with a given size windmill. To lift water 450 feet, as Lakhbir Singh requires, one needs a 14 ft-blade windmill and a 15-20 mph wind. With this, and an estimated 4-5 hours per day of pumping, he could raise 190 gallons per hour during the pumping time for a daily 1000 gallons per day. This is 231,000 cubic inches of water, or enough water to cover an area 231,000 sq. in. in area one inch deep in water. That is 1600 sq feet or 4% of an acre and one inch isn't enough water for most rice varieties. This would hardly be classified as large scale agriculture and I wonder if he could feed his family, much less feed mine.
It can't happen in the U. S., right? Wrong. There was a recent report in the Wall Street Journal talking about how Texas will begin to experience the electricity problems that California is now experiencing. Why? Because we won't build coal-fired electrical plants. For the farmers in the drier parts of Texas, pumped irrigation is the only way they can grow the food we eat. Thus, the effects of peak oil will spread even to our ability to obtain water for irrigation.
Agriculture and Slavery
In discussing these issues with a statistics professor friend of mine, he made a comment that made me think. I had told him my favorite statistic (Price 1995)
“Today,
the extrasomatic energy used by people around the world is equal to the work of
some 280 billion men. It is as if every man, woman, and child in the world had
50 slaves. In a technological society such as the United States, every person
has more than 200 such "ghost slaves."
I also told him that the energy in one gallon of gasoline represents the physical labor of one human for 3 weeks. After hearing this, my friend then asked me if the modern world doesn't have slavery because of cheap energy. I must admit that was something I wish I had thought of. Slavery still exists in the world, but it exists in the poorer parts of the world. Looking at the calculation about planting corn above, one can understand the need for cheap labor, whether that labor is one's children or property. I must make it clear that I think this is absolutely horrible, but every society in the past was a slave-holding society. If we lose our energy and have to live the life they lived, are we naive enough to think our descendants will avoid the mistakes they made?
Conclusion
Peak oil represents a grave threat to our food supply, in my opinion. Few are aware of how important the petroleum industry is to the agricultural revolution in which we live. This is why I am currently trying to buy a farm. Consider this, prior to the agricultural revolution, estimates of hunter-gatherer population sizes, based upon anthropological data show that humans were quite few in number.:
"Measures of world population size on the eve of the transition to agriculture, some 12 000 to 10 000 years ago, come from estimates of the maximum population density that this way of life could sustain. These generally range from 5 to 10 million people, and the highest figure--calculated on the assumption that the world was 'saturated' with hunter-gatherers --is only 15 million." (Landers, 1992, p. 402)
Agriculture based only upon animal energy allowed the human population to grow to about 750 million by 1750 (Cavali-Sforza, 1994, p. 68). Peak oil will do several bad things to the world's energy supply. It will force us to use coal, and if one uses coal to replace oil, because coal will be used at a faster rate, the US turns its 200 year supply of coal into a 44 year supply (assuming that there really is a 200 year supply to start with). This implies that by the end of this century, we will no longer have fossil fuels with which we can foster global warming. Nor will we have fossil fuels with which to run our tractors and we will return at the very least to the 1750s. Going back to an animal-energy based economy means that approximately 5/6ths of us must die. The post fossil fuel world, lacking some new energy source, will consist of not many more than 750 million souls. What an ugly century this will be. While there are some long-shot grasps-at-straws possible replacements for fossil fuels, the political turmoil resulting from mass starvation may preclude their development and implementation.
References
Patrick Barta, "Feeding Billions, A Grain at a Time," Wall Street Journal, Saturday/Sunday July 28-29, 2007, p. A10
L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paoli Menozzi and Alberto Piazzi, The History and Geography of Human Genes, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)
J. Landers, "Reconstructing Ancient Populations," in Steve Jones et al, editors, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Niall Ferguson, “Worry about bread, not oil,” The Telegraph, 7/29/2007 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/07/29/do2901.xml
David Price, “Energy and Human Evolution", Population and Environment, Volume 16, Number 4, March 1995, pp. 301-19
The Connection Between Food Supply and Energy: What Is the Role of Oil Price?
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The Connection Between Food Supply and Energy: What Is the Role of Oil Price?
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http://science.reddit.com/info/5yxi8/comments/
thank you for your support.
An excellent piece, sir. It just grazes the surface however. And simplifies some intensely complex problems that will become apparent when you farm the land you hope to buy.
I can't support the notion that agriculture as we know it in the developed world will disappear. The fact that will become apparent is that fresh water for irrigation will continually diminish and remove those areas from food production. Only to be replaced by fuel crops. Corn not being one.
The other problem that needs attention is fertilizer made from natural gas. Coming up with the main forms of nitrogen for plant use is also a natural process ripe for exploitation by the biotech folks. At over $500 per ton for anhydrous ammonia there is a lot of incentive.
For Americans the past 75 years has seen a huge change in crop growing practices and crop usage. Wheat was commonly grown as far east as Pennsylvania, but now is a rare thing east of the Missouri river. Corn was grown to feed the mules, chickens, hogs and cattle with mules getting first and best feeding thus using a very large share of the land's productivity to make selling of extra production possible. Without a couple of mules a farmer worked nearly all of the time just to feed himself and family. Then corn had no role in direct human food, it was fuel for mule power and the raw feedstock for protein production. Without being aware, the shift is going back with corn the feedstock for ethanol fuel (a poor choice) instead.
When you have a farm you will soon meet the Farm Service Administration and the County Soil Conservation people. Its not likely you will be plowing or tilling much of anything. The past decade has seen a huge reduction in fuel use per acre due to the need to avoid stirring the topsoil. You will either hire your chemical applications done or pass the tests to be allowed to buy the chemicals. The chemicals you choose will most likely be more weed control than insect control as the crop geneticists have gone a long way to eliminate insecticides.
As with all of the best communications that seek to enlighten, Glenn's work is one of the best, because the most valuable enlightenment raises more question than it answers and Glenn has that done that quite successfully.
On the fuel front, please visit http://newenergyandfuel.com/ I'm leaving to harvest corn that will likely be made into ethanol, animal feed and high fructose corn syrup. A side note: in 22 years of no-till I haven't used over 2.5 gallons of diesel per acre, all farm gross, delivered to the processors. For you land buyers, buy where it rains enough to grow garden crops.
Thank you for your comment. Comming from a farmer, I am deeply humbled. I know I am a city-boy. I grew up in a rural area. But peak oil has made me realize I better start learning everything I can.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
$500 per (short?) ton of NH3 is equivalent to $3/gallon of gas in energy cost. if the biotech folks can produce NH3 at a lower cost that would be great. but even then, shouldn't NH3 be used as fuel rather than fertilizer and processed biomass as organic fertilizer instead?
Glen, I spoke with David Hughes of the Canadian Geological survey at ASPO Houston and one mind blowing statistic he gave me was that agriculture is roughly 6% efficient. To produce 1 cal of food requires 17 cals of energy. Apparently, about 100 years ago the ratio was 1:1. Fortunately during transition we can eat less meat and boost that efficiency.
Are the data you produce for the USA?
Are you able to comment on crop yields and fertilizer usage - and throw us a chart showing declining yields with oil price?
Finally, with 5.75 billion dead - where are the slaves going to come from?
Yep, we have the least efficient food production system ever devised in the entire history of civilisation, by several orders of magnitude.
Personally, I see that as a cause for hope - it means that we have ample opportunity to improve it. We've gone down the brute force route simply because that was cheapest and easiest (well, that and a few historical accidents). When brute force solutions are no longer cheap or easy, then perhaps we can start trying more elegant approaches (I'm thinking Permaculture here).
As for slaves, I doubt they'll be needed. If the choice is work the land or starve, I know which one I'll be choosing. I've lived the life of an agricultural labourer before, and it really wasn't all that bad.
Yes, except as per our "let others do the work" ethos, the guys with the guns who don't want to muddy their hands, will take it from those who actually farm. By force.
This is the way it has been in the history of food production in times of scarcity and empires.
If things come to scarcity again at global scale, I think it is fair to assume that the same cause of action is at least probable.
Here's hoping it won't come to that.
Reading the One-Straw Revolution (Fukuoka), one can't help to think that a more efficient production system is possible, but it will take time to learn for most and even longer to transition to it. That is, if energy scarcity becomes so bad as to warrant a complete makeover of the "totalitarian agriculture" as Daniel Quinn has labeled it.
slaves? who need them if the robotics can do their jobs more cost effectively?
guns? who need them if the designer virus can do their jobs more cost effectively?
There is land that is adequate for pasture that is not adequate for much else. Grass fed beef can be raised without foregoing other crops, so what needs to be changed is the foolish feeding of grains to beef, not the elimination of the high quality protein that meat is.
I couldn't tease a relation between oil price and crop yield out of the data. Last year's wheat crop was abysmal because of weather, not because of price. I touched on that in the note. There are too many variables for yield other than fertilizer use.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
Nice analysis of the energy used by modern agriculture. However, the ag inputs are only part of the story. There are some good summaries of the total amount of energy used in the food system in the literature (e.g. Smil, Vaclav, 1991, General Energetics, John Wiley & Sons). It seems clear that the agricultural inputs are in the range of 1/4 of the total, with the remainder being energy used in the storage, transportation, distribution, marketing, and preparation of food. Meat production is perhaps an order of magnitude more energy-intensive than grain and bean production. Eating less meat and eating more locally-grown, in-season, foods will save a lot of energy.
Here are some links to data on the U.S. food system:
http://www.energyfarms.net/node/1389
Looks to me like the total food system consumes about 10% of U.S. energy use, with on farm consumption (including embedded energy in fertilizer, pesticides, tractor fuel, etc.) about 1/4 to 1/5 of that 10%.
The most energy intensive part of the U.S. food system is actually home storage and preparation.
I have been learning a lot about grain production lately as working to sow wheat. Conventional grain yields are incredible (about 6000 lbs/acre of wheat in CA) and I don't expect to approach those with our organic, low energy, dryland methods. And, we need to rotate fields with cover crops to put nitrogen back in. So, I expect yields half to a quarter of conventional when sown, and to only grow wheat half the time. In total then, I expect to get a quarter to an eighth of the yield for a given area over the long term.
But, I do expect to have a very positive net energy!
As a food engineer, let me tell you this is the case. something like 4.3 trillion dollars of food are turned over in the USA per year. Food goes into plant one place, comes out as prepared meals, canned goods, meats at another. Obviously different plants for different products, but usually we are constrained by a large problem:
Keep the water content as high as possible. (sell the rubes as little real food as possible)
Keep the weight down. As water is the #1 component of foods, this is in direct conflict with the above point. Less weight means less volume and cheaper transport!
You would be both surprised and disgusted by the amount of water shipped in packaged foods across the country.
I guess steak is off the menu in 20 years time...
Two things come to mind here:
- If you think this way why are you buying 100 acres? this is too large a farm for manual tech yes?
- There is a distinction between machinery and liquid fuel powered machinery. Prior to breeding up your 10 children (assuming that has not yet happened) you might want to get into ideas like this:
Productivity estimates for the Amish that I have seen range from 50% of that of modern agriculture to this one http://books.google.com/books?id=Kl3e1zMJby8C&pg=PA87&lpg=PA87&dq=amish+... that says it is several times more productive.
A factory farmer profiled in "The Omnivore's dilemma," said he routinely used 80% more fertilizer than recommended, just to be sure.
... or on an even smaller scale, this one:
[at Lehman's, a "big" retailer in Ohio Amish country]
There are lots of small machines that can drastically improve on 5 seconds per seed without using large quantities of fossil fuels.
I've got one of these and they do work. But, you'd better be prepared for considerable disappointment if you try to use it in a poorly prepared field. By that I mean pretty thoroughly cleaned of stumps, roots and rocks and fairly smoothed out.
I recently prepared a small plot of about 2000 sq feet and planted it in winter wheat. I built a small backhoe to remove the stumps and roots and then used a small walk-behind tractor to finish it up. The wheat is now up and if you'd like to see some pictures of the small backhoe I built look at my little web site:
http://www.catamount.org Click on pictures and then backhoe project. For someone just starting a new "farm" of pretty rough terrain I surely recommend that you build a backhoe like this first thing. You can build roads, lay culvert, dig foundations, remove stumps and be the envy of all your buddies.
From my experience the small backhoe uses fairly little gasoline too.
I am glad to sit at the feet of those who know things I don't. Thanks.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
Present-day seeders can befound here:
http://www.seedsofchange.com/garden_center/product_details.asp?item_no=S...
This would increase planting speed to approximately 1 seed/second and allow you to reduce number of children to 2 :-)
Retired on the river
That's an old seed drill and can easily be pulled by a single
work horse. What you don't know or say is that for it to work, the ground has to be plowed, disked, and disked again with a flat bar pulled behind it. This is where you need multiple teams of plow horses to do a hundred acres in time for planting. Seeding is the easy part.
And harvesting is much, much more time consuming and labor intensive than ground prep or seeding.
Too true. For my little wheat plot I mentioned above I hooked log chains to each end of a heavy beech log and dragged that over it a few passes and it worked very well.
John Milton wrote:
" Prior to breeding up your 10 children (assuming that has not yet happened) you might want to get into ideas like this"
I would love to try but two reasons stop me. Pretty ladies dont' like ugly men and my wife absolutely forbids me trying.
Yeah, I know about some of the late 19th century farm equipment. They were made with cheap coal and cheap iron ore. One of the things I have looked at is the quality of the iron ore now mined. In the 1930s the ore we now use wasn't even considered ore. What we use has about half the iron that ore then did. That means one must move more rock to get the same quantity of iron. Things will not be entirely symmetrical with the past.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
On the bright side, there are lots of chunks of really high quality iron ore already on the surface with no need for digging. Some of them still have wheels and engines, even.
And much, like the truck I played in as a child on a neighbor's farm, have rusted and the iron totally dispersed
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
Two quick thoughts without having completed reading this post:
Is it possible that equipment improvements increased production yields by reducing the time required for seeding/harvesting and hence the amount of oil used?
Also, what impact would the emergence and use of GMO crops have on the reduced use of chemicals?
use of GMO crops have on the reduced use of chemicals?
GMOed crops (that I know of) are just creating a toxin for the bugs or allow more toxins to be used on a field.
In both cases, some of the toxins will make it into the food supply - with unknown side effects.
NOVA just did a show that mentions epigentics. The link between diabetes and your grandmother/grandfathers diet was most interesting. We don't know what these changes in the food supply will do in the future - but odds are it'll be masked by many other things.
i saw that too. but i forget if it was famine or plenty that caused the grandchildren to be more suspetable to diabetes. i would think famine though.
The theory was plenty.
Plenty in the Paternal Grandfather between 6-10 had a correlation with diabetes in the male grandchild and famine in the female grandmother was linked to Schizophrenia?
Ghost in your Genes.
Er, golden rice?
GMO is just another tool that has been framed by the politcs of fear by luddites. Tools can be dangerous or useful.
Er, golden rice?
And you know what the side effects of that will be 3 generations out?
the politcs of fear by luddites. Tools can be dangerous or useful.
Says the man who pimps for expanding fission power.
How's that working out for Iran these days BTW?
And you know what the side effects of that will be 3 generations out?
Better than the side effects of vitamin deficiencies. We know the direct effects of that within months. This scaremongering paranoia not only is counterproductive but has a real cost in human lives. It might cause a problem 3 generations out, then using that new laundery detergent might spawn killer zombie cockroach swarms also.
The opposition to golden rice is one of the great ironic tragedies of the modern age.
We still use chemicals on GMO crops. For instance, round-up ready seed allows farmers plant a field, then allow both the desired plant and weeds to germinate. Then the field is sprayed with glyphosate (round-up). This kills the weeds but not the mutant plants so the farmer doesn't have to cultivate the field.
Then we eat the questionable product this produces.
(And have babies born naked that die of cancer?)
I did inhale.
Positive and negative effects aside, I'm just curious if the cultivation of GMO crops requires more oil, less oil, or no difference. This may need to be categorized by disease-resistant GMOs and chemical-resistant GMOs to see any trend if one exists.
GMO crops do not reduce the use of chemicals.
GMO crops engineered by Monsanto require SPECIFIC chemicals to be sprayed on the seeds for them to start growing.
I repeat: you have to buy the chemical that you need to spray on a Monsanto seed, in order to get it even growing. The chemical is the germination trigger for the implanted gene.
In addition to that, many of the seeds are 1 year only killer seeds that need to be repurchased every year from Monsanto, to be able to keep growing food.
You can imagine how energy efficient these two methods are (mandatory spraying and 1-year killer seeds that must be redistributed to fields every year).
There is an eye opening documentary called "The Future of Food" (available probably on google video & youtube, but also on dvd).
Watch it to learn real life examples on how GMO see companies operate in the real world, not in PR fairy tales.
I'd be happy to learn about more sane uses of GM seeds in agriculture (beyond the normal seed bank tradition), but I've yet to find it in the commercial space.
It's all greed and big profits, no understanding of energy efficiency or natural processes.
Cite?
Bullshit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_Technology
Can't make anyone happy with a new technology. People worry about supercrops with wierd effects contaminating other crops, so terminator technology is developed, then they worry about imposed dependance. Oh well.
Seriously, there are bigger things to worry about than GMO.
monsanto is shitty guys. but don't get the science wrong.
the specific chemical not sited above is roundup ready.
the plants have genes spliced in which give glycophosphate(roundup ready) resistance,allowing application of the herbicide at a better time.
Typically it is not less of the herbicide that is used, but MORE at the crucial growth stage which kills growing weeds. A later application kills what survived the first. It basically allows you to dump a bunch more onto crops, ensuring a greater log kill of the weed seed.
terminator genes are retarded, they are anticompetative and should not be allowed. When they cross pollinate with adjacent crops, the seed from that year becomes sterile as well.
To repeat: I'm not against GM seeds per se. Just a certain type of application of it. If it's the way Monsanto does it currently, then no thanks for me.
A quick analogy is knives: you can cut cucumbers or people.
That is, many a technology can have beneficial or clearly harmful uses (and something in between).
Personally I'd rather cut cucumbers :)
Some quick refs for Monsanto (bribery, suppression of science, legal extortion, toxic GMO products, etc):
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427276/
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Monsanto
http://tinyurl.com/3aa4wm
http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/Monsantovsusfarmersreport.cfm
http://www.laleva.org/eng/2005/01/monsanto_fined_for_bribery.html
http://tinyurl.com/2tylza
http://tinyurl.com/2srbs9
http://tinyurl.com/ysm5sl
http://tinyurl.com/2yw2co
Of course, that is all just left-wing-commie-propaganda and Monsanto is the savior of earth.
Sure, you can also claim I'm a luddite, after having started two high-tech companies and after having worked in the high-tech industry for nearly 20 years. Sure, luddite. That's me. Very good argumentation form, btw.
Personally I think the truth is somewhere in between and Monsanto should re-check their ethics in their relentless pursuit of profit. Also, for me at least, Monsanto is just the poster boy. The practices in general should be looked at in this field.
PS The thing I agree on: there are bigger things to worry about than GMO. However, that doesn't mean one should let the GMO promoting companies do whatever they please. Checks & Balances rule.
Oh get real. GMO is just an advance in technology. Terminator genes were an interesting idea from a marketing perspective, but they're never going to take off.
All these things allow is for better crops, and being against that doesnt make sense to me. As for the bribery, it was in Indonesia. Have you ever tried to do any business in a developing economy? Theres no evidence Montsanto is acting any different than any other corporate entity.
Theres no evidence Montsanto is acting any different than any other corporate entity.
Well than. That makes it all OK eh?
Can you at all argument with manners and proper form?
I give up :)
"Theres no evidence Montsanto is acting any different than any other corporate entity."
That's quite possible. Doesn't make it right though. Nor legal.
PS Finnish companies do work / have done work in developing countries. And most of them _refuse_ to take bribes, even when it hurts their business not to give out bribes. That's my stance as well. Why? As long as it hurts the country and is illegal and only benefits briber/bribee, I don't think it should be done. You apparently seem to think otherwise.
Of course. If you refuse to do business in that country, you end up hurting its chances of development. Corruption is an unfortunate but systemic symptom throughout all developing economies. If you can do something about corruption, great; But being self righteous does nothing for them.
An ad-hominem and a strawman in a single paragraph! Why do I even bother. I appreciate your difference of opinion, but I'm sad for not seeing it expressed in logically valid and argumentatively suitable form.
An ad-hominem and a strawman in a single paragraph!
Oh don't be such a child. There's no strawman there and self-righteousness is descriptive as much as perjorative, but if you insist, take your ball and go home.
I very much welcome this topic and the dire warnings it reveals.
I note also that the author is attempting to buy a farm..and for me that speaks volumes and volumes..,as an embarrassed survivalist.
Darts and arrows aside,I believe that wem some of us, understood this at a deep level but just did not wish to give it voice,at least those who seriously read TOD and think about the future.
Many IMO will not be able on any real level to return to the agriculture of the past,the one I remember somewhat fondly, where we used mules and mule drawn equipment.
Around the country side and out of sight many of these old implements are still visible, some on junk piles of scrap metal, some decorating yards. I have a friend who collects them.
To replace all those soil nutrients,what we now refer to as N,P,K (but there are also other trace minerals) we are going to have to look to the past and find the ways and methods our ancestors used to keep from depleting the soil they lived on.
The common wisdom and urban legend is that they did nothing but just depleted it and then moved on. This is incorrect from my observations as a youth. It was not possible to do so. They had no real good means of clearing land except by hand and what land they had they could not deplete and expect to farm it for very long.(we had no bulldozers back then--30s and 40s--or at least not affordable or viable down on the farm.
On TOD I pointed out one very good and once used here, method of producing enough N(Nh3) was by use of hairy vetch, which once grew wild on my farm in huge stands. Its still here but modern farming is slowly eradicating it and will over time. Some legumes,vetch is a good one, can create up to 250 lbs of nitrogen per acre. Note that all plant material must be retained on the soil for this to occur.
There are possibly other methods,,one that I remember quite well was just letting it lie fallow but more so putting animals on it. Also the spreading of manure with a manure spreader. We also would not have been able to raise our farm gardens(and we always used the same plot) if we depleted the soil..it doesn't take long to do so in a garden unless your using chemical fertilizers , which is just about all everyone uses(except the embarrassed organic gardener).
This topic is of supreme importance. It will be the future...IMO...as in 'Back to the Future Part IV'.
airdale-sitting here on the farm where its been raining for 3 days and my rain gauge is overflowing
Airdale wrote:
"I note also that the author is attempting to buy a farm..and for me that speaks volumes and volumes..,as an embarrassed survivalist.
Darts and arrows aside,I believe that wem some of us, understood this at a deep level but just did not wish to give it voice,at least those who seriously read TOD and think about the future."
I refuse to be embarassed. My family has doubts about this new enterprise of mine. My wife occasionally thinks me daft. But she surprised me the other day by telling a guy that the oil prices were rising because we are starting to run out of oil. I almost wrecked the car when she told me that (at 70 mph).
I tell my children that if I am wrong, they will have a nice plot of land to sell at a profit and they could laugh at and toast to their fathers folly, but that the buying of the farm would be an act of love for them. That quieted them down.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
I would think that a good line of business to get into is making small biodiesel plants, where a farmer's coop could make their own biodiesel, for consumption on their own farms. Rudolph Diesel designed the diesel engine so that it could run on vegetable oils. This of course would all be part of the trend back to local food and local manufacturing.
... And alcohol stills. Spark-ignition engines can run on gasoline, kerosene, alcohol, or wood gas. Early spark ignition tractors were made that burned the first three. Kerosene was much more common on farms than gasoline at first.
Of course. Kerosene was originally sold as lamp oil (gasoline was the discarded byproduct for quite some time). Today, lamp oil has little use as most farms are on the grid. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes; time for grid-powered electric tractors?
Yes, we are going to need to run farms with electricity.
What I want to know: Can cables run out to tractors from tall towers or maybe on a series of wheeled mobile electric poles?
Yes, it can be guaranteed that out of necessity, everything will be tried, old and new.
If the world stays in one piece, innovation will become commonplace.
Imagine what could have been done a hundred years ago with plastics, kevlar, titanium, diamond tipped blades, lasers, nail guns, vinyl, carbon fibre and computers.
There is absolutely no shortage of ideas. The only fear I have, is that the innovations will come too late to help the majority.
It is best to dig the well before you are thirsty.
A book on making an Alcohol Producing Still
Precision application of fertilizer rather than the spray-it-all-over-the-place techniques have begun to come into play
Such as folar feeding. Few "large scale" operations are using folar feeding, but you can find plenty of small people doing that.
I also told him that the energy in one gallon of gasoline represents the physical labor of one human for 3 weeks. After hearing this, my friend then asked me if the modern world doesn't have slavery because of cheap energy. I must admit that was something I wish I had thought of. Slavery still exists in the world, but it exists in the poorer parts of the world.
Do you have a morgage? How about owe taxes? A loan of any kind? Guess what - you are a slave to those whom you owe a payment to.
Most of us are slaves, but the shackles we wear are of our own forging and therefore bind us better than most iron works could have.
Going back to an animal-energy based economy means that approximately 5/6ths of us must die
The Animal economy of the 1750's is because "we" did not have electric motors. Now a 16 hp hydraulic tiller is not trivial to power with Renewable energy, but the 40 mule teams used for sod busting were not trivial either. And ya didn't need the 40 mule team after the initial soil busting, nor do you need a 16 hp tiller for later soil work.
(Drools over the 16 hp tiller - damn fine they are.)
If one feeds the earthworms, they will do a fine job of soil working - but you have to not do things to compact the soil later. Like walking on it.
No one today owns their own home, in the US. You rent it from the government. If you don't believe me stop paying your taxes and see who owns it.
Hello Glenn,
Thxs for this keypost. I have been banging away on TOD, and other forums, for quite some time with numerous postings on NPK, guano, humanure, aquifer depletion, drought conditions, plowing of golf courses, and other info and speculation, trying to boost Peakoil Outreach to everyone. In short: IMO, for optimal Foundation transition, we need to not only continue industrial agriculture [even though the yields will plummet postPeak], but rapidly move 60-75% of our present labor force into relocalized permaculture to help minimize potential machete' moshpits. I have previously posted much on strategies and tactics to accomplish this goal, including building huge reserves of bicycles & wheelbarrows. But unfortunately, I lack the political connections to jumpstart this change: I couldn't even stop the building of a pointless Senior Center on the last piece of vacant, public land barely suitable for local gardening in my former neighborhood. Such is life.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
but rapidly move 60-75% of our present labor force into relocalized permaculture
And how does that address the demand of the masses to have 'things', be 'entertained', and still keep the government 'fed and happy'?
How does the lower energy lifestyle keep us all in Cable TV, Internet, and still keep get the CEO's their paychecks and Wall Street its returns?
it doesn't because thats part of the problem.
Now, how ya gonna have people to sign up for such a program eh?
When people are hungry, out of work, and apples are $5 each, they'll sign up.
Is that before or after the property crimes?
"Is that before or after the property crimes?"
During.
Hello Eric Blair,
Thxs for responding. As you know: I am a fast-crash realist; a tyoical Jay Hanson of Dieoff-type wannabe, but trying my best to optimize the inevitable decline with speculative application of Asimov's Foundation concepts.
Fundamental to my theme is the universal spread of Peakoil Outreach to alert the masses of what lies ahead. IMO, this is the only way to maximize cooperation and minimize violence. Even the topdogs, at every level, need to understand this if they wish to prolong their lives, and their offsprings lives.
I think my speculative Earthmarine vs Merc dynamic is essential too vs widespread, haphazard anarchy occurring at the local, regional, and continental scale. It is a focused conflict method for thermo/gene decline, and quickly establishes biosolar territoriality for habitat expansion and biodiverse species protection.
I have posted before that we should all gladly accept the naturally occuring nighttime darkness in exchange for food & water, and this is only the beginning of what we need to accomplish for rapid paradigm shift. Burning hydrocarbons for electricity to try and get FF-based black tarmac to reflect photons in the middle of the night is a loser's game, and so is much of the other pursuits of novelty such as coal-powered gazing at the stupid antics of celebrities and sports.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Even the topdogs, at every level, need to understand this if they wish to prolong their lives, and their offsprings lives.
Why? Do you somehow think that the 'top dogs' worry about the 'non top dogs' somehow removing them from their 'top dog' status?
I have posted before that we should all gladly accept the naturally occuring nighttime darkness in exchange for food & water, and this is only the beginning of what we need to accomplish for rapid paradigm shift.
But somewhere between here and now and the future you see, your vision needs to address what the citizens have come to expect, what they are gonna get, and why 'the man' has what they no longer have.
Hello Eric Blair,
Your Quote: "But somewhere between here and now and the future you see, your vision needs to address what the citizens have come to expect, what they are gonna get, and why 'the man' has what they no longer have."
Don't you think Universal Peakoil Outreach best addresses your quote?
Nope.
No it does not, Bob, because it ignores basic human psychology and behavior as documented by thousands of years of human history. You see the problem but you keep dreaming of a utopian power-down future. I'll bet money you are wrong, dead wrong. One of two things will occur - either we will get lucky and pull new energy sources together in time to avert an immediate catastrophe, in which case life as we know it generally goes on, with the internet, entertainment, bread-and-circuses and beers for all continuing as-is, or we will kill each other violently in an effort to maintain our grasp on what we think is "ours". I'll bet on either one of those futures against your peaceful power-down scenario any day of the week.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Hello Eric & Greyzone,
Forgive me, but I respectfully think you guys misunderstand my Earthmarine vs Merc, and Foundation dynamics--it will not be a peaceful powerdown at all, but will be less destructive, therefore more optimal than universal anarchy to ourselves and the ecosystem. I suggest you reread some of my earlier postings in the TOD archives.
A crudely sketched brief example:
I have posted before on the possibility of a huge migration from the SW drought to Cascadia, and more recently on SE Atlantans relocating to Detroit.
Imagine, if to jumpstart a sequential migration to these areas: the insurance companies will only payoff a burned-out Malibu or San Diego homeowner's protection coverage if he signs a document to sell his land, then relocate much further north in a Cascadian biosolar area specifically designated and designed for relocalized permaculture lifestyles. Otherwise, the homeowner gets nothing. This could be easily accomplished by legislation from Peakoil Outreached leadership.
If something like this had been instituted for Nawlins a long time ago: the city would have either been pumping in silt to constantly keep above water-level [no levees needed], or they would have long ago mostly abandoned the place except for the bare-minimum industry and shipping infrastructure that is ideally river-to-ocean-trade located in this geography. IMO, this Foundation plan would have been much preferred to the sudden levee collapse, flood, and immediate descent to the dire urban civilizational Liebig Minimums of no water, no food, no electricity, etc, etc.
A Foundation-planned FEMA multi-year, multi-million people exodus from the SE & SW to Cascadia, the Great Lakes, and the New Vermont Republic with carefully designed Foundation strategies, policies, and iterative feedback mechanisms would be much better IMO, than 50 to 100 million suddenly trying to migrate from widespread pockets of southern anarchy to recreate more instant anarchy in the northern habitats. Compare with Zimbabwe's condition, and subsequent migration into South Africa, or Haiti's into the Dominican Republic, or Mexico's migration into the US.
The big Question: is FEMA doing a heckuva supercomputer cluster modeling of this possibility according to their mission statement, or are all the taxpayer-supported employees just Brown-nosing each other?
If FEMA is foolish: I remain as a fast-crash realist.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
The big Question: is FEMA doing a heckuva supercomputer cluster modeling of this possibility according to their mission statement, or are all the taxpayer-supported employees just Brown-nosing each other?
FEMA's reason for being is the continuance of government. Not the civilian public. Look at Katrina as an example of how good they are at the latter.
I see that people are starting to get hip to the problems I have been vilified for mentioning in the past.
The fact that we may soon, very soon, find ourselves unable to feed ourselves should strike some people as alarming, at best.
To understand the magnitude of the problem, one only need characterize the solutions offered here in the comments section. Most largely appeal to the idea of the Permaculture garden, which would work just fine if we all happened to live on our own little stretch of land with appropriate water supply, knowledge, tools, and starter seeds.
But we don't. We live in a distribution that is most amenable to the current fossil energy rich situation. We are heaped together in unsustainable cities where any hope of these leviathans being self-sufficient is largely a pipe dream. Even though many people insist upon spinning a vision of rooftop gardens, and city parks turned into Permaculture havens, it simply is not enough land to feed those people. Seven million people just in New York City. Combine the population of the entire eastern seaboard, the vast population in the desert southwest, which includes LA and San Diego, and you begin to see the problem.
Others will note that we may be able to tear up our suburban lawns, demolish our driveways, and tear up all but one lane of our streets in order to feed ourselves, and this may prove suitable for some people who are well-trained, who have the many hundreds of canning jars, who have alternative energy sources to do the canning, who know how to dry their foods, who have an uncontaminated well, and who know how to deal with human waste. But not all do. But where will all the displaced people go? Suburbs? Cities? Of course not. They must go into the plains states.
The primary question becomes, "Who will train these people?"
If you are a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, like many appear to be on this site, government intervention ala Cuba's "Special Period" would be unthinkable. That means we have to tell people the truth, advance a series of choices, their probable consequences and hope that the brilliant American mind will somehow sort things out for itself. I know that many of you will immediately shout, "Oh forsooth!!! I will be able to do just fine for myself!!!" This is of course the cry of the modern conservative: a selfish, anti-social, hell-bound look at how to manage society. For them, as long as they get theirs, the rest of the nation can go to hell. The problem with that is, even though they are armed to the teeth, they will be overrun. They will be killed and eaten, their marvelous stores ransacked and their wives and children sold into sexual slavery. That is what happens to rugged individualists who go it alone.
So, that means government intervention. What may be done? Well, first is education. We need a MASSIVE public awareness campaign. We must not only make this seem a matter of life and death, we must make it attractive. For the average advertising firm, this should be a piece of cake since they has been selling the average American shit-sandwiches for years and we have been gladly buying them by the caseload.
We will need to train people in the organizational skills necessary for a complete rethink of society and how it functions. These people will organize the training of other individuals who will train yet more. By using this exponential method, we can assure the quickest possible growth in trained individuals.
We will need people trained in the use of natural wetlands for the disposal of human waste. (Why waste money and energy throwing away vital resources that are found in human waste?)
We will need people trained in the use of natural materials and methods for building shelter. Depending upon climate, we will need cob builders, adobe builders, waddle and dab builders, and any other builders capable in whatever regional material is available.
We will need experts in population control.
We will need people who know how to make clothing from hemp, wool, and hide. We will need people who know how to build, use and maintain the equipment of clothing manufacture.
We will need oxen and the skills necessary to raise, care for, and train these traction animals.
We will need to plant millions upon millions of nut and fruit trees and learn how to husband those resources.
We will need to know where our water is going to come from and how we will recover as much of that grey and black water as possible once it has been used.
We will need to resettle people in the cities to farmland. That means taking ownership from the corporations. As a first step, I suggest we repeal the entire idea of corporate personhood. Then we must redistribute land.
Then we must redistribute people. Every community must have all the basic skills necessary for survival, along with a method of passing down information to future generations.
We face an immense project. We can either do it now while energy is relatively cheap, or we can do it later amid the smoking ruins with a vastly decimated population.
I believe that we have a chance if people accept the rather easy to understand physics of the situation and decide to be positive rather than negative about our future. In this case, a negative attitude relates to the negative entropy-ridden lifestyle advocated by the techno-worshippers. By failing to understand where we must end up, given the physics of the situation, these people think that their vision is best when in fact they are dooming the world to even deeper pits of despair and suffering.
Remember, living in a closed system that does not result in our deaths, or the deaths of millions of other species, is a GOOD thing.
Their children will not be sold into sexual slavery. They will be eaten. Slavery is for when you have more food than people.
Why do you imagine we can do it (or much of anything) while energy is relatively cheap? Seems very improbable absent the price signal.
We can only do "it" if energy costs are rising inexorably but slowly enough both to force people to make changes and to allow them to do so ....and if prices fail to cooperate and rise really quickly we may be looking at "smoking ruins."
Hello Cherenkov,
Simply very well said--kudos!
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Totneila, my pleasure is from your pleasurable reaction to my simple musings. As to your question about whether or not humans are smarter than yeast--I would in general answer in the negative. :-)
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
Very good analysis, but unfortunately incomplete. Because it only considers the role that oil's increasing scarcity and price rise after PO will play as INPUT to the food production process. It does not take into account the role those factors will play as incentives to divert agricultural feedstock into production of biofuels. So the prospects for food production and population levels are even worse.
And when analyzing this issue, we must avoid finding comfort in realizing that (quoted from Robert Rapier) "the petroleum equivalent yield from planting all of the world's arable land in one of the more popular biofuel options is just under 30 million barrels per day." Because the decision about how much agricultural production will be diverted into biofuels will not be made for the whole world by a hypothetical council that considers the world as one unit and takes into account the energy and food needs of the world's population.
Rather, the decisions will be made by the countries which today are big agricultural exporters taking into account THEIR needs. And the key point here is that the countries with more biofuel production potential (e.g. Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay) have much lower liquid fuel (and energy in general) usage per capita than OECD countries. Therefore if they maximize the allocation of THEIR agricultural potential into biodiesel production (plus sugar cane to ethanol) for THEIR use, they will be able to run the critical part of THEIR current infrastructures FOR EVER, and it is just not reasonable to expect they will forego that possibility.
Therefore people in countries that today depend on imported food will have a problem.
These are my conclusions:
- With biodiesel from soybean, sunflower and rapeseed (SSR for short) being a clear net energy gainer, it is most unlikely that agriculture will ever revert to using animal and human energy.
- Once significant biodiesel production capacity has been built, fuel arbitraging will make the price of diesel fuel (however high it goes after crude oil production starts to decline) set the floor for the price of SSR oils.
- Land arbitraging based on farmers' profits per acre will in turn drive the allocation of land to biodiesel crops or to grain crops, setting the floor for grain prices.
- There is a food Export Land Model, where food exports will be falling not because rising internal consumption, but because of ever increasing feedstock and land diversion into biofuels production.
- This is independent from the issue of lower yields from lack of fertilizer.
- Poor food importing countries, and poor people in general, will be priced out of food.
- The world is NOW at peak food.
- Demographic scenarios of 9 billion people don't stand a chance.
- Opposition to the expansion of arable land by way of Amazon deforestation, in order to preserve biodiversity, amounts to increasing the number of people condemned to starvation.
- Ditto for further loss of arable land by suburban and exurban real state "development".
"- There is a food Export Land Model, where food exports will be falling not because rising internal consumption, but because of ever increasing feedstock and land diversion into biofuels production."
But that has the same flaw that the Export Land Model does: we have food to export that the oil exporters cannot live without; they have oil that we cannot live without; but people extend the model to the point of absurdity when they assume that the Middle East would rather starve to death and we would rather burn all of our food for fuel than trade them.
IMHO, the upper limit to both models is that the Middle East will always be willing to trade enough oil to buy enough food to avoid starving, and we will always be willing to trade them enough food to buy the oil needed to produce food, as long as trade is possible. If (or when) we get to the point that that trade is no longer possible, we'll no longer be able to worry about economic models anyway.
You assume that trade is the only solution to these differences in resources. You assume that governments would not willingly let some sectors of their own populations starve. Both of those assumptions are disproven by history and thus should not be relied upon in times of extreme stress.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
No, actually I assume that there is currently trade and it is likely to continue until it's no longer viable. You do agree that there is currently trade in these commodities, don't you?
No, I don't assume that the governments won't let some of their population starve. I'm not willing to assume that they'll allow general starvation in Saudi Arabia however. The Saudi regime's grip on power is already questionable. If they let too many people starve Bin Laden will be put in charge.
I absolutely agree that these can't be expected in times of extreme stress. That's why I wrote "If (or when) we get to the point that that trade is no longer possible, we'll no longer be able to worry about economic models anyway." That would indeed be a time of extreme stress!
You assume that governments would not willingly let some sectors of their own populations starve
Yes, and I think China would almost welcome a 200-500 million drop in population size.
Mother Nature Bats Last
Then China would lose the ONE thing that has allowed them to have 10% growth rates -
ARMIES of cheap, well-behaving, better-than-world-average educated labor. Once this advantage is gone, China hardly has any other to replace it.
India? Perhaps. Pakistan? Sure. Indonesia? Why not? China?
HELL NO.
Of course, net oil exports don't have to go to zero for serious problems to develop, but in any case I thought that it was interesting that the UK and Indonesian net exports crashed in seven and eight years respectively, with vastly different economic characteristics.
And the US in the early Forties was a key supplier of oil to the Allies, but we became a net oil importer in 1945, 25 years before our oil production peaked.
Yes, I absolutely agree with this. I'm not arguing that the end result of ELM will be any less painful, just that there is something of an upper bound that isn't being accounted for. It may even have the same end result, since a situation where the Saudi's are forced to cut their consumption or give up food imports may result in such social unrest that they end up with neither. I think it's more likely that the Saudi's will make the same changes that Iran did, and start raising prices slowly before it becomes a problem. The Saudi princes may not be democratic, but they are smart.
The biggest advantage of a horse over a tractor is it's ability to self replicate. The logistics of bringing spare parts to a tractor is alot more complicated than that of producing a foal: just take your mare to your neighbour's stud and nature will take it's course.
Wether or not beasts of burden will be made of flesh or steel in a post oil future depends on the economics of it. If a farmer can't afford spare parts for his complicated machinery he may choose instead to keep a horse and devote some portion of his land to growing feed for it. The huge rubber tires a tractor needs for instance will in a world of scarce petroleum require a long supply line.
Disagree. Many countries still rely heavily on human labor for farming. Why is this? Do they just not realize that rapeseed can be grown for biodiesel?
Of course not. It's because labor is cheaper. A situation we may be returning to.
Leanan quoting someone wrote:
'With biodiesel from soybean, sunflower and rapeseed (SSR for short) being a clear net energy gainer, it is most unlikely that agriculture will ever revert to using animal and human energy.'
"Disagree. Many countries still rely heavily on human labor for farming. Why is this? Do they just not realize that rapeseed can be grown for biodiesel?"
"Of course not. It's because labor is cheaper. A situation we may be returning to."
Having lived in China, I would agree with this that China uses human labor because they need every acre for food production. Growing fuel is a luxury. I have seen some of the smallest wheat farms I have ever seen while traveling China. I have also drank the stiffest alcoholic drink made from wheat. What a kick that Naxi jiu had!
And leanan, thank you for doing the news every day. I read what you post all the time.
glenn
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
need every acre for food production
Which is why animal labor is a long term poor plan, because one can put power sources like PV or windmills so they do not effect the crop growing locations.
According to my calculations, it would require about 5-10% of total cultivated acreage to be devoted to sunflowers or rapeseed to produce enough oil to fuel farm equipment.
Compare this to the amount of acreage needed to feed each farm worker or beast of burden. Without mechanization, most farming becomes subsistence farming. Rarely are societies built on subsistence farming able to produce enough surplus to allow the non-farm population to exceed the farm population. This suggests that perhaps 50% or more of arable acreage must be devoted to feeding farm workers or beasts of burden on non-mechanized farms.
A VERY good observation, that we tend to forget.
mechanisation freed up a lot of foodstuff resources!!
Put a sail on your plow instead of a horse..
A couple of things that don't immeadiately come to mind is that horse manure is great stuff. Apparently virtually 100% of the nitrogen phosphorous and potassium are returned. In housing of older times the livestock lived below the living quarters and so provided heat for the house in winter.
What the bio-fuel should do is to run the motor to drive the thrashing machine. It can also be used to drive the motor that runs the baler (balers however are high maintenance) that the horses will pull.
I think we will need all of the tools that we can get. Horses can eat off of land that can't be cultivated. So as Wendell Berry pointed out they are well suited to a small mixed farm on a different class of land. We need to get rid of the one size fits all paradigm.
A British organic farmer in the 40's named Freind Sykes (Wrote: Humus and the Farmer) noted that aside from an increased stocking rate conferred by having a diversity of livestock on the farm (You can keep more animals of a diverse nature on the farm then just one kind). That the livestock had a pulsing effect on the land (he had his own pasture model that let animals on to pasture in a various order). This pulsing created healthy soil. Mr Sykes boasted that he could bring cows that were infected with foot and mouth disease onto his farm and not only would his cows not contract the disease but the infected would get better.
Ecotones or 'edges' are vectors where the more intersections of woods, water, and field come together offer greater wild-life habitat and diversity.
Song birds increase the frequency of the environment and crops respond favorably (like fertilizer) to say nothing of helping to keep insect predation under control.
In a Small Farmers Journal years ago there was an article about a Korean rice harvesting machine that looked a bit like the brush off of street sweeper that a man had altered to create a horsedrawn grain harvester. The idea seemed very intelligent and when thinking about our current knowledge base I would suspect that new types of horse drawn equipment could greatly improve the effectiveness of horses.
Lightening the draft, increases mileage. Since the moldboard plow when over-used can inflict such damage no-till horse drawn machinery could prove to be quite advantageous. Other thoughts along this line are that realizing that monoculture is a large part of the problem so explore polycultural practices. And that if you can increase soil quality you get big yield increases. So initially if we are forced into a crisis return to subsistence farm models then yields would be substantially below where they would be in 10 years with proper soil management and weather blessings. Of course if we don't hit a wall then expect to have lost your time and capital investment since you can only take a beating in this marketplace.
A couple of things that don't immeadiately come to mind is that horse manure is great stuff. Apparently virtually 100% of the nitrogen phosphorous and potassium are returned.
Citation please showing that "virtually 100%" of the N K and P taken in by the horse mouth is output in the fecal matter.
Sorry Eric i don't remember where I came across that tidbit.
I hope you are not insinuating that I'm shovelling it?
Ask gardeners of old how much they liked horse manure for some references on its merits as fertilizer. On a straight npk analysis sheep manure scores better.
One thing that could be elaborated on is the fact that seeing the nutrient profile through just n.p.k. analysis leaves us sorely short sighted. Albrecht pointed out that Calcium is king. How often do the public hear of the role of calcium.
Beach Boy wrote:
"It does not take into account the role those factors will play as incentives to divert agricultural feedstock into production of biofuels. So the prospects for food production and population levels are even worse."
I would agree with this fair criticism. We are already taking food out of the mouths of poor Mexicans so that we can have ethanol.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
The essence of biomass energy:
The desires of more affluent people for liquid fuels directly competes with the desire of poorer people for food.
Oh, and both those desires compete with the desire of wild animals for food.
We have too many people on the planet.
Hello,
The role of irrigation, soil depletion, water scarcity and most importantly salinity are deeply under-appreciated by those outside the agricultural community. Many great civilizations have been decimated by the desire to abuse the natural ebb and flow of soil fertility (See Babylon).
Today we dam rivers like the Nile, destroying the natural silting of one of the great bread baskets humanity has ever known while at the same time losing 1/3 of the 'stored' water to evaporation. No wonder Ethiopia is seen as the number one threat to Egyptian national security.
Upper Pradesh in India is having tumultuous politics while trying to establish who gets the Himalaya run-off. Forget Bangladesh... the wettest drought ridden country ever.
Israel builds walls around every West Bank spring (and you thought they feared bombers).
Governor Arnie wants to build more evaporation pools instead of refilling aquifers.
The Aral 'Sea' is now the Aral salt marsh.
The Colorado barely makes it past Yuma.
Lake Superior is shrinking.
What's left of the Mississippi poisons the GOM in an ever exanding dead zone.
Western Australia has expected grain harvests at 25% of norm.
The rivers of China are 100% tapped and the silting process is now stopped by the great dam projects.
And yet Europe, the US and Asia want to 'expand' bio-fuels.
Grim LOL,
Gary
I suspect there's latitude to reduce the energy requirements of mechanical ploughing for a given yield, by changing methods (what of so-called "no-till" farming?). Or perhaps we will tolerate slightly lower yields for a major energy saving?
Retired on the river
No till farming required the use of a lot of herbicides to make it work and the main advantage of no till is top soil
retention. Without the weed killers, no till is a no brainer.
What happens when herbicide loses effectiveness? Already some ryegrass is becoming immune. How will we deal with 'Roundup ready' GMO varieties when they escape or perhaps cross pollinate? The next round of herbicides may have to be a lot nastier than glyphosate. Organic farmers tell us white vinegar is a herbicide..try putting vinegar on millions of acres.
Slightly lower yields will mean someone in the world starves. Malthus was merely 2 centuries ahead of his time.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
You have made an underlying assumption - that a gallon of oil spent on food production is equal to a gallon used to take a yummy mummy to get her nails done.
That's not likely to be a view that governments take.
With a hypothetical 25% reduction in oil supply comes rationing and differential pricing. Market pricing is no longer the arbiter of how and where oil gets used. All farm usage of oil is a pin prick in relation to the other uses, thus it can continue essentially unchanged for many decades, at least in the first world.
Much more important for the future of food production is the impact of social order and its disintegration. If that collapses then the countryside becomes an all you can take buffet for those with hungry bellies.
Exactly right. Petrochemicals are a high value oil product. It is therefore fairly obvious that $85 worth of petrochemicals requires much less than one barrel of oil to produce.
We earlier estimated that around 2-4% of total oil & gas supply are dedicted to fertilizer production (Leanan and Odogragh comments if I recall). This is a much more useful way to view it.
Also, as you mention a 25% reduction in oil supply would not imply a 25% reduction in petrochemicals or fertilizer. The first things that will be cut back are low value, or replaceable oil uses (such as getting nails done, driving huge cars, eating processed food and meats).
I also expect that even a 25% reduiction in fertilizer use could be accomplished without any significant reduction in the amount of nutrients that reach our tables. I would guess cutting meat consumption in half would do it. Eliminating fast food would also help. Less land used for tobacco, alcohol and cotton production would also be likely.
So:
1) It is still possible for oil supply to fall 25%, but fertilzer use to remain stable or fall a much small amount as equilibrium at a new higher price is reached.
2) The agriculture system is highly inefficient in energy terms because energy is cheap. When that changes we will be able to produce much more beneficial food from land than now without any new technology.
It's not the oil, it's the natural gas. We manufacture anhydrous ammonia from it and that is what we pour onto our fields enabling yields high enough to feed us.
Plus, you must consider the effect of interlocking economies. Food must be transported, milled, refined, refrigerated, etc. If the grid is malfunctioning, and there is a good chance it will be, then our just in time food system will be out of time.
If energy is directed to food production, distribution, packaging, and processing, then what will happen to the rest of the economy? Will we continue to allow an increasing population? Will former cubicle monkeys used to passing each other pieces of paper start passing joints on the front stoop? Will we be smart enough to use that grace period to move people from the city/deserts to areas where they will eventually be forced to grow their own food and live within their local climate and resource base?
It is just not enough to consider the short term. We must run out the simulation, play out the scenario.
It amuses me to consider your countryside as "all you can take buffet." Those who might wander out into the farmlands, will undoubtedly be disappointed. First of all, unless they are in certain very localized areas like California's central valley, they will be unlikely to get any vegetables or fruits. Out in the great grain belts of the US, their best hope is to stumble upon a full grain silo, already picked and threshed. Even luckier, they might find a processing plant where the grain has been further processed thus eliminating some of the steps they will have to take to actually be able to eat that food.
But, given the way life tends to play out, I doubt that they will be wandering the fields like zombies at exactly the right time. Instead, they will see stubbly fields that had been harvested, windbreaks comprised of hedge which have no edible fruits, farms with cattle that will stomp more than a few of them into human hamburger, and ordinary lawns that the farmer mows with his tractor. No vegetables here, because the average owner/operator of a farm buys his vegetables from the supermarket just like the zombies.
No, if there is a hiccup in this vast just in time machine, it will not be fixed by some magical store of food just waiting to be handed out while we patiently wait for the miracle of nature to make new crops in a few months to a year.
The fragility of our food system apparently eludes most people.
Please check out:
http://www.rense.com/general78/riots.htm
there is a good chance it will be, then our just in time food system will be out of time.
What I refer to as 'wack job radio' I point you to:
http://www.gcnlive.com/Program_Samples/samplcrash.htm
Who on the show on the 20 claimed that there is only 3 days of food "in the system".
You're aware that we've been making ammonia from coal for decades, right? And that you can make ammonia from any hydrogen source...
We use 4% of the world's natural gas production for ammonia fertilizer, which is where Wikipedia's "1% of the world's energy" figure comes from. NG is a depletable commodity with a worse decline profile than oil.
Here's a scenario. It's 2050. Natural gas production is 40% of its present value. Home heating, electrical generation and the plastics industry are still competing with the fertilizer industry for the remaining supply. The price of ammonia has gone up 10x. The world now has 40% more people, every last one of them in a poor country for a total of 7 billion energy-poor (aka just plain desperately poor) people along with 2 billion or so "middle class". Those 7 billion poor couldn't afford fertilizer at its current price, let alone at 10x the price and with peak oil hammering them as well.
The only way Malawi went from famine to agricultural riches was fertilizer subsidies, which hints at what poor nations are going to face as the fertilizer goes away.
Welcome home, Mr. Malthus sir.
Of course, the flip side of this is that there are fairly ample supplies of natural gas in other parts of the world and we have a few more years until they peak. As it is, fertilizer and chemicals production are shifting to the Middle East because of cheaper supplies; part of the reason North American natural gas prices haven't gone through the roof yet.
I don't think that changes your 2050 scenario, though. By 2050 enough former grain producing regions will be in perpetual drought that we won't be producing grain there whether there is fertilizer available or not.
This sort of scaremongering is silly. Ammonia is gated on hydrogen production which is easily produced from coal, and someday, nuclear, wind or solar.
It can be produced from coal, but at what cost, in both economic and environmental terms? The main reason CH4 is used right now is because it is very cheap. No other source is likely to match that. Coal has the disadvantage of containing not much hydrogen but lots of carbon, so the CO2 production profile will have to be reckoned with as well as the higher cost of handling a greater mass of a solid to get the same mass of hydrogen.
By 2050 there are likely to be 5+ billion people living on less than $5 a day. Where does the money come from for nuclear-cracked hydrogen to fertilize their fields? Unless you're claiming that such hydrogen would be as cheap as that derived from methane, they are going to be in a serious bind. Read the Malawi article - some third world farmers are already finding it tough to afford fertilizer at today's prices.
Given its produced with steam reforming and coal based hydrogen production uses the very close cousin of the water shift reaction, the cost should be pretty similar. As to the CO2 production, its all about priorities; You can make up for it by replacing just a few coal power plants with nukes or wind farms.
I'm claiming that coal derived hydrogen is nearly as cheap as methane derived hydrogen; I dont have any illusions as to the prospect of nuclear cracked hydrogen before 2050.
Hello Dezakin,
See my post upthread. Shutting off continental nightime illumination, so we can enjoy the natural darkness, will allow the shifting of enormous amounts of electricity to making nitrogen fertilizer, and continuing the mining of potash and phosphate rocks [while it lasts]. I hope some leaders are considering my earlier postings on the need for stockpiling NPK and building bird & bat guano shelters before this method is inevitably required. If most of us are engaged in daily relocalized permaculture: we will be too tired to stay up very long after sunset anyway. At a minimum: except the Halliburton workcamps to be dark at night, with night-vision & infrared equipped Merc Snipers picking off those who refuse to mentally-assimilate Peak Everything and the Thermo/Gene Collision.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Your hand-waving got me interested in the state of hydrogen from coal these days. I went looking, and found this on the DOE web site:
I'm not quite ready to park my skepticism just yet, I'm afraid.
Oh come on; Its all mature and works. The DOE sketchyness is attatched to the carbon sequestration nonsense and using IGCC for hydrogen production and power production when you would optimize it either for power production or chemical synthesis.
SASOL has been producing ammonia from coal for decades after all. At a profit today.
Natural gas can be turned into hydrogen at low cost. Making hydrogen from water using intermittant power sources like windmills that don't always have a market is possible, but more expensive than is commercial at present wholesale electricity and natural gas prices.
Unless there are too many windmills, or not enough coal or nuclear power. Then the windmills can make power that sells at a higher price, so we will build more, so there will be more off peak windmill power than we can use, so the offpeak price will go down, which will make it cheap enough to use to make hydrogen.
In short, if wholesale electricity prices go up, hydrogen production from water will explode. We cannot have high wholsale electricity prices AND high nitrogen fertiliser prices past three times the present price for both.
That isn't politics, it's arithmetic. We aren't going to run out of wind power sites in the Great Plains Windbelt the way we ran out of water power sites in the Rocky Mountain Wetbelt.
Not to be contentious or anything but the claims in this article rest on some implicit assumptions over the next 20 years (small sampling):
* fuel would be reduced by 25% equally for agriculture and other purposes
* there will be no electrification of farm equipment
* there will be no non-oil mechanization for farming or gardening
* there is no flexibility in farm practice and fuel use (no-till for example)
The article also:
* mixes data for fuel use over a 40 year period without adjusting for changes in farm equipment or practices
* doesn't normalize for conditions, such as droughts, which skew the data markedly
* uses oil prices as a proxy for natgas vs. fertilizer instead of natural gas itself, which is the actual feedstock for fertilizer as far as I know (and which had 10x gas price changes over the same time frame)
Water depletion, soil loss and climate change seem a more pressing threat to agriculture. We can chose to allocate oil to agriculture a number of ways, and promptly.
Doomy today, but not gloomy.
Excellent. Completely agreed. Correct the article for your points and we have the full picture. And I also agree that climate change looks like a much bigger problem for agriculture. [Edit: And we still have problems!] Thanks for posting that.
Do these considerations apply equally well in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Chindia, Mali, Ethiopia, Congo, Cote d'Ivoire or Benin ? American agriculture may in fact survive Peak Fossil just fine, but the world of hunger (and continuing population growth) doesn't stop at the borders of the USA.
In all these places water supply problems are going to hit hard, along with the rising cost of fertilizer. I doubt they'll have many electric tractors, though.
NervousRex wrote of the assumptions:
" fuel would be reduced by 25% equally for agriculture and other purposes"
I moved to the UK in 2000. They had peaked production in 1999. Today they produce approximately HALF of what they produced the day I moved there to work in the oil industry. One can view this in two ways: I either single-handedly destroyed the UK oil industry, or in large regions, production drops due to depletion occur very fast. If the world production drops at the same rate as the UK did, then in about 7 years post peak we will be producing half the oil we do today. If I am off by 50% we will have a 25% reduction in 7 years. Given what I know of depletion rates, that would be a real blessing for the world--to only have a 25% reduction 7 years post peak.
"there will be no electrification of farm equipment"
Solar vehicles don't move fast, and using electrical energy will happen, it doesn't have the efficiency of oil.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
Glenn,
I'm in the process of turning 340 rocky acres into a self sufficient farm. Unfortunately it looks to me like you're approaching agriculture from a business as usual standpoint, as well as not recognizing it for a skilled complicated line of business, right in there with geology or my own field of electrical engineering.
I just don't know where to start with direct comments, but here are a few:
First, the guy who psoted the picture of the horse-drawn grain drill was right on. There's the planting density you were worried about with only enough fossil fuel to smelt the steel. Not much over a foty year equipment life.
Second, US grain is grossly over fertilized. Water is what to worry about.
Third, trasnport and processing overwhelm direct farm inputs in the current setup. Give up peppers from Chile in Jnuary and we can afford a lot of fertilizer and potatoes on trains.
All that said, there is reason for other parts of the world to be concerned. North America will likely have to cut its food exports. Which might let farmers in the third world make a living instead of moving to urban slums.
Frank
Hi Frank. I won't claim to know it all. I learn every time I post something. As I said to someone, I know I am a city boy and I have no doubt I have some naievetes. The real problem that worries me is that when peak oil starts, countries will squabble over the remaining oil and eventually start throwing nukes at each other. Humans have a tried and true approach to problems of scarcity--if I can't have it neither can you!
So, while I agree that business as usual is where I will start, I know I won't end up there. Will I be able to get replacement seed drills if the economy and government go into chaos?
But lets look at that seed drill. I grew up in northern Oklahoma and am familiar with wheat farms of several square miles in size. While one guy can drive equipment and handle farms of that size, I doubt that a seed drill can suffice on farms of that size. Then there is the problem of harvest. I used to watch the combines move their way north, from NOrthern Texas, through Oklahoma and eventually up into Canada. Horse drawn or human pushed equipment simply won't be able to cover the acreage that these behemoths do without having a whole lot more people pushing seed drills and walking behind mules.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
The Oil Drum is fun because it uses economics to make massive extrapolations, hyperbole as in the ...end of abundant oil will be the new beginning of slavery.
Oil use, importation, and wasteful consumption remain a forbidden topic for US energy policy. Before we bring back slavery, I hope we can bring back the "n" word. The article and the US policy refuse to return to effective use of (n) nuclear power to displae coal and oil energy sources.
A fascinating piece that, unfortunately, sacrifices much creadibility at the end with dire prediction of a return to 1750s population levels. It seems that at least a few differences with 1750 must be recognized. First, I can point to the American Midwest as one of many areas that have contributed to a massive increase in farmed land as compared to 1750. Even were productivity per acre to remain the same, an increase in acreage is very important. Second, the world is full of machines that rely on human power, mule power, horse power, or other means other than oil to plant and harvest crops. Many of these came about in the 1800s or later. Third, there are likely to be other sources of power to offer some assistance, such as wind, solar, or hydro, albeit perhaps not nearly so much as oil. Finally, as we all here should realized, peak oil does not mean that oil will be gone in 50 or 100 years, it merely means there will be much less of it available. I know it is tempting to end an article with attention-getting warnings that most of us will die, but it seems to be a poor choice unless it is very carefullly thought out, and may require an article of its own to establish. Otherwise, why not let a fascinating look at energy in agriculture stand on its own?
An Engineering Realist
I was not aware of the true extent of energy consumption in agriculture. We can't risk the security of our future energy supply as so much more than our SUV fleet is at risk! This deal places our lives, and the lives of our kids, on the line.
The cruel irony is that we're going to tip the earth's climate, with its own set of dire consequences, if we go on a coal-buring binge to keep basic systems running such as food production. We must transition to non-carbon based means of providing the truly massive amounts of energy needed to survive.
We better get moving on all alternatives because fossil-fuel dependency is going to destroy us by means of war, starvation, social breakdown, or massive climate disruptions. My top pick for this is sustainable nuclear (Gen IV systems), but I suspect we'll need everything we can get our hands on.
What the hell are we waiting for? Leadership!!!!! The current leadership in Washington needs to be fired (impeached?) and replaced with people who GET IT!
Hello TODers,
http://www.farms.com/news/readstory.asp?storyid=13061
--------------------------------
The market saw further support from Russian export tariff fears overnight and the threat of shutting down Russian exports, especially before some of the southern hemisphere crops are available to the world market has provided underlying support.
---------------------
Proof of Food ELM? Just imagine if Russia has decided to build a seven year internal grain supply, just in case.
More from this link:
-------------------------
The potential for extreme tightness ahead if Russia limits exports continues to provide underlying support. Keep in mind, if the US sells more than 5.44 million tonnes of wheat in the next 33 weeks, the export projection will be met and any further sales will be pulled directly from ending stocks which are already at the lowest level on record (since at least 1960) at 8.36 million tonnes.
-------------------------
Does the US have a seven year grain supply? Or are we still moving to a stupid JIT system where the next crops had better be a guaranteed success because there will be nothing if it fails? US pop. in 1960 was roughly 177 million [see change in piecharts please]:
http://www.umass.edu/ecologicalcities/diagrams/pop.htm
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Does the US have a seven year grain supply?
Nope. Down to 53 days (based on my memory)
The 7 year silos of grain was done away with back in the 1970's I believe. An effect of the golden fleece awards.
For fun, someone should ask Rommney about food storage at a campaign stop. Or post links about the question.
That 53 days is the global carry-forward.
And that is down from about 110 days carry forward in 1999. No problem here! Nothing to see! Move along, move along! :P
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Why isn't 53 days enough? Maybe 35 is the right number.
1 day is fine, so long as everything keeps working.
Yes. The reason that supplies are down from 100 days in 1999 to 71 now is that things have been working.
The supply of everything in inventory is down from 1999. I would bet that bookstores have a far lower portion of sales in inventory now than they did in 1999. It does not present any support for a peak book argument.
I am not claiming that things will continue to keep working or that there are no problems. However, I do think that using days of grain supply as an indicator of the health of the world is silly. No one would even think of it unless they could twist it to support their party line.
The "days of grain in inventory" indicator, much like the "number of media stories about blackouts that I can find through Google" indicator only have such a strong following because they appear to support pre-existing faith-based conclusions, not because they actually tell us anything useful.
I agree with the article with the exception of the following statement;
There was a recent report in the Wall Street Journal talking about how Texas will begin to experience the electricity problems that California is now experiencing. Why? Because we won't build coal-fired electrical plants.
There is no reason to believe that more coal burning power plants is the automatic answer to any question of electricity capacity. Texas has immense wind resources and vast untapped baseload reduction possible through the widespread adoption of Demand Side Management.
Also note that Texas primarily has the dirtiest coal, lignite.
Will stewart thinks we already burn too much coal down here in Texas. That may be correct, but we don't have enough new plants planned to account for the expected electricity demand, whatever their energy source will be.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
If we understand agricultural slavery more broadly, it is the normal experience of large scale human society in the pre-industrial age. Slavery has not always been race based as in the US and West (and that is what we usually think of.) But the masses of humanity have long toiled in agriculture, tied to the land, while small elites have captured sufficient food and energy resources from their activities to support a military force capable of defending and acquiring territory. This is the basic feudal condition... an agricultural peasantry and a military ruling class.
The relationship between the formal demise of American slavery (1865) and its final collapse with the demise of Jim Crow (1960s) bears an interesting relationship to the rise of the coal based and then oil based economy. The industrializing higher energy North tried to impose a new economic order on the agricultural South but largely failed by the 1870s.... slavery was formally ended but the conditions of slavery were not, for many reasons, including the fact that the energetic basis of industrial civilization really had not reached the South. And so strong were the social structures of Southern racism and agricultural economics that the system only cracked in the energy intensive 1960s, at the peak of the growth in per capita energy use.
You can make a strong argument that energy use above all, and the industrial economy that it enables, and not any good will toward slaves or former slaves, broke the back of slavery. (And you can make a strong case that the slave holding mentality is still strong in many places in the Southern U.S.)
Whether the Energy Descent will lead to racially based slavery, or to simply a new agricultural peasantry, is an interesting question for speculation. (I for one never underestimate the American capacity to invent new forms of racism and new ways to use ethnicity and "race" to distribute political power to the advantage of elites.) But the idea that the decline of fossil fuel production will place inexorable pressure on more and more people to live on the land, close to the production of food, seems sound. I don't have much faith in the democratic or egalitarian impulses of the American body politic, so I imagine that there will be no shortage of institutions and strong men who will attempt to enforce people's connection to the land. This will be the new feudalism.
(Other options exist... maybe wave and solar energy can support some version of contemporary social economic reality... maybe we are headed for total die off and collapse.... but neo-feudalism seems one serious option, one that I see as an "intermediate" option between optimistic renewable energy visions and visions of total collapse. Neo-feudalism won't be pretty... but it would be pretty normal relative to human history. And most people in that neo-feudal order would, for all practical purposes, be what we would call "slaves" or "peasants.")
I have a feeling that the first people pressed into chain gangs will be those who won't shut up about the environmental effects of using coal. Call it a hunch.
I've thought along similar lines myself. The Civil War as the end to slavery looms so large over the American consciousness that we often don't notice that slavery ended at about the same time throughout the hemisphere. Why? Not a sudden moral uplifting. (Similarly, the reason people freed their slaves in the north before they had to had nothing to do with any moral superiority over southerners.)
My guess: we'll see the return of "poor farms," for poor people of all races. The government won't be able to afford welfare or food stamps or jobs programs like they used to. In the old days, they even used to auction off the poor. (The winning bidder would get a year's labor from the person auctioned, in exchange for room and board.)
Slaves (like all humans) are far less energy efficient than machines. In an energy constrained environment, wouldn't it make much more sense to use scarce energy on more efficient mechanisms?
Food and energy are the same thing. We can more of one by making less of the other. It will always make more sense to divert food to energy to run machines than to divert energy to food to run people.
Ha, Ha.
Just for the record (I know you were kidding), food is not just energy. It is also a source of negentropy for humans and a source of essential constituants since our organisms are inable to synthesize quite an impressive number of molecules and so we have to eat them to keep supplemented.
A few years ago I wasn't fundamentally pessimistic about our civilisation but then we decided to grow food to make energy for our machines ...
An extremely important topic.
One thing you didn't deal with (unless I missed it) is the soil itself: depletion. (There's a book, Dirt by David Montgomery, that I recommend.) It's not the issue you are addressing, I know. But I think it's a crucial issue, especially in light of declining energy availability. It (soil depletion) also bears on the issue of slavery and whether or not it will return.
"...but every society in the past was a slave-holding society." That's not true. It's only true of agricultural societies. Hunter-gatherers captured (and/or killed)members of other tribes. But those not killed were incorporated into the tribe.
Slavery was economically viable when the soil was in much better shape than it is now. Slave labor is not intelligent and careful labor. A slave has no incentive. But the soil is going to need TLC, along with the rest of the human environment, as well as humanity itself. I think that the future will demand of us a full and conscious involvement of all citizens in both society and labor.
There is no hope that the present population level can continue. War and famine will thin our ranks until we realize that we have to control ourselves and adjust our relationship to the planet. There's another book I recommend: Eating Fossil Fuels by Dale Allen Pfeiffer.
Very important and really scary post.
Looking at your charts, it seems that the biggest drop in fuel consumption is occurring between $20 and $30, do you know why? is it possible that the use of more transgenic crops may biased the results (i.e. higher yields and less pesticide required)?
Khebab, I don't know if transgenic crops have biased anything. I simply used the data for the past 25 years as provided by the USDA.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
One correction: not all pumps with a handle are limited to 32 feet. Some pumps have the pumping cylinder mechanism in the body above ground; these are cistern pumps, and are limited to 20-30 feet as stated. Other pumps have a cylinder immersed below the water level deep in the ground, and these function to pump water from much greater depth, albeit with proportionally greater force required on the handle.
I believe that there is really only one company making the latter pumps (sometimes called a lift pump stand, since the true pump is the cylinder down in the well): Baker Monitor, available at this link:
http://bakermonitor.com/domestic_new/hand_pump_stands/index.html
Also more information on both types of hand pumps is available at http://www.lehmans.com/
just two annotations:
- Haber-Bosch takes mainly use of natural gas, not crude. So the price of gas is of more relevance when calculating the quantity of fertilizer per acre.
- today for Haber-Bosch mostly natural gas is used as a hydrogen source, one could also take use of coal for the synthesis.
Charcoal or biomass would also serve to feed such a process (ask Eprida how they do it).
Yes, of course. Even hydrogen from (Wind/PV) electricity would be possible.
Simplified you need the following conditions for Haber-Bosch:
Pressure: 300 bar
Temperature: 450 °C
Hydrogen+ (atmospheric) Nitrogen (plus iron as a catalysator)
No matter how these conditions have been made...
Does anyone here know Acetobacter Diazotrophicus, a nitrogen-fixing bacterium (no legumes-crop-rotation needed)?
http://ag.arizona.edu/pls/faculty/kennedy_plp.htm
http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/45/6/757
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=14707947
I wrote a book based on this hypothesis: That oil supplies would be restricted and alter our ability to grow food.
Ruminations from the Garden.
The book describes one year of gardening without power tools and the various thoughts that go through my mind while at work.
I couldn't get a publisher for the book, in spite of the fact that I am a previously published writer. The book needed an editor, but in my not-so-humble opinion, it's worth your time.
Anyone wanting a free electronic version can e-mail me and I'll send you a copy via e-mail.
Not only will the fuel and chemicals we employ to grow food be lacking, but also our distribution system may fail. Few know how to grow food in a changing climate; even fewer know how to prepare, preserve and store food.
I did inhale.
The OP's point is theoretically weak.
Here's why:
He's making a dumb assumption; Tractors don't NEED to be driven 25% less when there is 25% less oil.
Use ELECTRIC tractors powered by wind or hydro.
Puleese people.
There is a SERIOUS case of GROUPTHINK going on here.
Peak oil is a transport and economic problem.
We are going to get POOR not DEAD.
Perfect.
* We are going to get POOR not DEAD. *
is as good a die-off scenario as another when I look at life-expectancy vs personal income. And speaking of certainties, the latter is a better instance than the former !
If you look at a graph of the exponential rate of increase of the human population on earth over the history of our species (I tried to insert one here but couldn't figure out how to do it). And eyeball the area under the curve going forward 50 years compared to the AUC going back 1000 years, they look about the same. Assuming that one person alive for a year represents a standard amount of subsistence food production, does this mean that we will have to produce roughly the same amount of food in the next 50 years as we produced in the last 1000? That sounds nearly impossible even if we had all the oil, soil and water we wanted!
Great piece.
2 comments though.
Inflation adjusted price of oil is computed using govt hedonic statistics. IMO oil is nowhere near the inflation asjusted high of 1980 at present.
Inflation adjusted price of oil is kind of an oxymoron. As it is impossible to have really low nflation with high oil prices and to some extent vice versa.
Fireangel, One can't win with inflation. If I used dollars of the day, I would get hit with the correct criticism that today's dollars are not yesterday's dollars. But using inflation--even hedonistic inflation (what is that anyway?), one can at least lessen the first pitfall. For a month's work, my grandfather made $25. I won't tell you what his grandson makes but it is orders of magnitude greater. Is my work really worth all that much more--btw, he was a very successful business man in his day.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
Great post, I found many of the comments to be most apt. To enlarge on several points made. If for arguement sake all commercial fertilizer was to magically disappear overnight then conventional farm operations would suffer crop failure.
Small mixed farm operations are the only types of farming known that can be sustainable. The efficiency gains conferred by this model of agriculture will again become necessary as our ability to provide the subsidies to the big guys will prove too expensive.
It will take years of allowing crops to grow and be plowed down or left fallow to help recharge the organic matter levels that will be necessary to secure crops. (this is understated but very relevant) Soil that has low levels of organic matter produces unhealthy plants that have a hard time mounting a defense against insect predation. When improved the soil will increase its ability to retain moisture and this will help to buffer negative weather events. The practice of leaving the soil fallow once every 7 years served this purpose. But this was starting with viable soil. Soil that is compacted has lost it's tilth and has had many years of chemicals applied to it requires a time investment to help return it to productivity.
My preferred rotation is pasture for livestock for 3-4 years then into grain (corn, oats barley) then buckwheat plowdown and rye then back into hay with a oats and peas or barley nurse crop for several years then start over. (this has meant a large time investment and $ into fencing)
If farmers were now behaving in a way that served the soil. This would mean (at least to my level of understanding that) a complete collapse of the commodity markets would then ensue. The commodity markets are in effect dictating the rotation and planning schedule for farmers. As we will, no doubt eventually realize -stock brokers make poor farm managers. As such even as food gets exhorbitantly expensive do not place your faith in the market to address this problem.
You don't need a farm, but in fact a small acreage of 10-15 acres where you can grow your own food. Unless purchasing the farm was to fulfill a huge need in your psyche to achieve indentured servitude.
Should you buy a farm and start 'farming' this paragraph will become increasingly clear to you as your bank account goes and stays in the red. Though I am in Canada and am not able to access the subsidies that you potentially could access. I suspect that small scale farming offers the same negative financial return on investment that is universally shared by most small farmers aound the globe.
The explanations offered for this discrepancy no doubt is due to the fact that there are fewer people who require food or that we are producing far too much food This is the apparent logic of the market. Supply and demand, but farmers are price -takers (a brilliant idea on par with functional obsolescence!) so that when fuel goes up they have the same choice as ever, produce or don't produce.
So when tomatoes are $10.00 each this will still mean that the farmer is getting .01 cents. But is somehow absorbing the increased cost of production. So up here what the farmer has been doing is quitting en masse we are watching the end of small scale farming which is the opposite of what we need.
Is this not also the case in the U.S.?
If you guys don't promote Wendel Berry then we might borrow him.
Hooray for Wendell Berry and Dr. Wes Jackson of the Land Institute, Kansas.
Sustainable Farming the only way to go!
Eat local, support your farmers.
You're gonna need us.
We're ALL gonna need us.
"negative financial return on investment that is universally shared by most small farmers aound the globe"
There's a lot of wealth to be had from farming. It's just that the farmer doesn't get it. People herding skills (whether you are a bank manager, a politician, or a feudal lord) seem to be much more profitable than production or design. Technical skills like farming or mechanics or designing switch mode power supplies are as common as they need to be; being able to make people do things they don't want to is much more valuable.
The thing is, tech skills can be propagated exponentially. One experienced old guy can supervise a lot more smart newbies; only a few of them will ever need to become the experienced old guy. And after a few years, the newbies are old hands, 90%/95%/99% of the time. Usually, if 1/1000 remembers hearing about the Great Venusian Potatoe Famine of 1832, that's good enough.
I'm not sure how one develops managerial skill. I've never been trusted with management tasks. I suppose I would need to start by volunteering and organizing on a small scale, but I've never bothered. It would probably be profitable though.
Thanks Eliyahu. I plan to lease the land out for a couple of years while I learn the ropes and prepare a garden area and an orchard. I am really more interested in producing food for my family, not feeding the world. I figure we might need that. But as I said, If I am wrong, I will be happly to let my kids laugh at my folly.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
My own view is that this article is too optimistic.
The analysis relies on a 20%-30% reduction in oil by 2030. I think when you combine the 3.5% annual effect of a continuation of the deterioration of EROEI, a continuation of decline in US domestic production using 4%, and the idea that once the world hits peak in 2011 or so, the burden of decreasing worldwide production will come out of US imports, then you can reasonably conclude this 20% - 30% reduction in oil by 2030 will be closer to 75% or worse for the USA, and 2020 might be a more likely date as opposed to 2030.
If you consider that we might go from 160 bu/acre for corn now down to 50bu/acre without oil, you are only looking a a fraction of the problem. Older agricultural practices required crop rotation so you cannot count on grain being grown year after year without planting a legume. Next consider that even to get 50bu/acre you need draft animals and natural fertilizers like manure or plowing under alfalfa. If you allow for some of the land to be devoted to feeding these draft animals then that 50bu/acre is not all available to feed humans. The reality might be closer to 30bu/acre available to humans.
You need draft animals; where are they going to come from? The herds of horses, mules, donkeys, and oxen are a small fraction of what they were 150 years ago. The time to build up mature herds would be measured in decades, not years. During the formation of these herds, many young, non working animals would need to be fed and trained. Where are the qualified trainers? Where are the many necessary pieces of equipment needed to outfit these working animals, and for them to pull, or the skilled people to create them? Where is the energy to come from to create all this new infrastructure when there is not enough to even sustain the existing human population?
What about seeds? Lots of this genetically engineered crap is not usable, so how long to build up the supply of old line seeds that farmers can get seed corn from? How long for the new generation of farmers to gain good skills at operating the old way? You know you can't count on a good harvest every year. Too much rain, too little rain, late frost, early frost, insect infestations, crop diseases, animal diseases all will contribute to less than the expected 50bu/acre each and every year.
When systems collapse, they do not do so smoothly. There are often punctuated with sudden catastrophic events. There would be intense pressure from a desperate population to do something, and that might include plunder of farmers by government including the foolish taking of draft animals for meat and seed corn for immediate consumption. It has happened in recent history in some African nations.
Maybe the estimate of a 5/6th population loss is a little on the light side!
The analysis relies on a 20%-30% reduction in oil by 2030. I think when you combine the 3.5% annual effect of a continuation of the deterioration of EROEI
As soon as someone seriously starts using the concept of EROEI in a post you can guess that a mountain of nonsense is soon to follow.
Which brings us back to one of the primary axioms of psychology, "denial is the first defense." Or maybe in this case there is another element, ridicule, which precedes denial.
mountain of nonsense is soon to follow.
No mountain because you don't post alot.
Henry,
Your view of where US per capita oil consumption will be in 2030 agrees with mine:
How fast oil use will drop before 2030 depends on how fast oil imports decline. With our balance of payment problems, declining oil exports, and rising energy costs, I expect my graph is optimistic with respect to per capita oil use in 2020, and possibly even 2010.
I have had some similar questions with respect to draft animals and seed. It is hard to see a good way for this to work out.
Confirmation of my own thinking by someone so much more admired and well spoken on this powerful site elevates my mood.
This is a difficult subject, especially for those most at danger by their current living arrangement, so I find it remarkable that we can all openly discuss such a frightening, yet obvious future.
The reality is reflected in the numbers. The Gaussian curve is powerful both when applied to oil fields, from whatever perspective viewed, local, national, or worldwide, buy also when applied to human population. I can't remember if I have posted this idea on this site, but certainly elsewhere, that the human population is well beyond the third standard deviation from the long term mean, meaning that we, ourselves are out on the edge of the bell curve, and cannot hope to remain at such excessive numbers. If one were to look at the trend in human population, and fit any reasonable long term curve, the current mean value now is much closer to 1 billion than the present 6.5 billion. We will snap back to the mean, and overshoot will take us below that mean value. The relationship between oil, food production, and population only gives the more understandable everyday framework for us to understand how the underlying principle of nature, expressed in the Gaussian curve, will force us into balance with the ability of the planet to encourage our species to exist.
All the confirmations we see in the articles on this site add to the evidence that supports a calamitous future for the human species, much closer than anyone of us might be willing to know. I personally am excited, but frightened to compare my own vision of the future with the reality that unfolds.
Gail:
That is a super useful chart! One of the very best I have seen on this site (and there is a lot of competition for that award)!
What this very clearly shows is that each and every one of us here in the USA needs to be thinking seriously in terms of cutting our oil consumption by 50% over the next decade, and then achieving a further 50% reduction from that over the following decade. Furthermore, most of that is going to probably have to be actual energy savings,, not energy substitution. That is what we will HAVE to do to bring our consumption in line with supply.
That is a tall challenge, but not an impossible one. It will require major lifestyle changes as well as major investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy substitutes.
WRT seed: Fortunately there are plenty of people out there keeping the old reliable open pollenated heirloom varieties alive. Remember that if the supply of seed were to merely double each year (and one can do much better than that with seed saving if one really wants to), then a decade of doubling will result in more than a thousand-fold increase in the number of seeds available. We have a lot to worry about, I'd put this one pretty far down the list. Just start patronizing sellers of OP/heirloom seeds, plant them, and get into seed saving yourself.
WRT draft animals: This is more of a concern, but a long-term one. Most of these animals can only produce one offspring per year, so the population doubling rate is a lot slower. I think that in the short-term, what is going to have to happen is that farm machinery is going to have to be fueled by biodiesel.
a quick reply of cudo's for this piece & the dots it connects.
I have gardened a good bit the last few yrs.. At first w/o power equip; then an ailing back & having a one time opportunity at my father's equipment I got a tractor & tiller.
gardening for food production is dam hard. recent dry weather is a major wild card too. Sooo with fossil fuels it is lots of work & experience is needed.
as cheronok said upthread unless we go about this in an organized way we are in deep trouble.
IMO the basis of our civilization was grains, particularly wheat, due to it's ability to store several yrs. We are setting up a disaster with erratic weather & limited grain cushion.
timely post!!!
I have had the good fortune to move onto a 2 acre block in a fertile subtropical hinterland and about 300m elevation in Australia. The soil is reasonable and the rain is fair, though a little erratic. I moved there with my parents so the place is debt free. The basic deal is that my folks save me from a crippling mortgage and I in turn save them from the horrors of the nursing home (and do most of the hard work managing the land). I'm currently setting up food production and estimate the block could support 3-4 people maximum allowing for generous fallow rotations.
My approach is guided by the belief that we have been steadily squeezed by reduced world per capita access to fossil fuel energy for decades now, and that while a sudden collapse is possible at some point in the immediate future we will just be seeing a continuation of these existing trends. I think people too readily fast forward through all the complex possibilities of the nearer future to the bitter end pretty much out of intellectual laziness. So my first priority is to supply the higher quality food stuffs (anything perishable, so greens, fruits, eggs, no room for dairy unfortunately though) as these are already expensive and suffering poor quality at any price in the shops. On the margins I am perfecting growing staples with an even mix of root crops, grains, pseudocereals and dried legumes.
The plan here is to gradually break up the aggresive kikuyu sod in the paddocks and prepare the soil and rotate it into easier to control species that do more to improve the soil and can be readily pushed back if we need to scale up our production. At the same time I am collecting and trialling as many of the staple crops as I can get my hands on so I will have the stocks and experience to scale them up as necessary later on. Growing potatos at the moment is interesting and strategically useful, but not economically worth doing large scale with the price at 1.50 a kilo in the shops.
I am still working part time, and intend to do so for as long as possible, but always looking for more stable employment options closer to home. The village is on a train line so work in the nearby city is an option for now.
My advice for most people living in more urban situations is to get out of debt, get healthy (complex medical care is fading away) and to learn how to cook from basic ingredients. I think in the absence of civil unrest most first world nations have a lot of capacity to reallocate resources to agriculture so that basics should be accessible and relatively affordable, though environmental limitations may prove less negotiable in keeping farming going. If you have a little space grow high quality foods only, but expect it to take time and practice.
One thing makes me wonder about the talk of population levels without fossil fuel powered agriculture. Sure the population was under one billion at that stage in history, but it was still steadily increasing. Can we really say what level the human population would have continued to gradually expand to without fossil fuels? Maybe fossil fuels just kicked the process forward a few thousand years worth of normal growth? Violence and war will probably pick some of us off, but disease is usually orders of magnitude more effective.
So eat well. Stay healthy. Cultivate close allies you can mutually rely on in times of need.
Thanks for this article. You have done a lot of great work to emphasize what I have been saying for a couple of years in various places while trying to modify my farm for a future without much fuel. (there will be some, but not as much, for sure)
"We have spent the last 100 years replacing people on the land with oil. Now we have to figure out how to put them all back."
AG
Let's take those in order.
A gallon of diesel fuel has approximately 140,000 BTU of chemical energy. However, diesels do not need all of their fuel in liquid form; high-octane fuels can be carbureted into the intake air and ignited by a small "pilot" injection of high-cetane oil.
Carbon monoxide is quite suitable as a gaseous motor fuel, and it can be made from solid fuels using a gasogene. There are some losses in the gasogene (carbon has a heat of combustion of 93960 cal/mol IIRC, while carbon monoxide is 68000-something), but if there's enough of the alternative fuel available this is no handicap. Supposing 1/3 losses for the gasogene and related processing (e.g. torrefaction to preserve fuel over the winter without covered storage), one gallon of diesel could be displaced by 210,000 BTU of solid fuel for the gasogene.
One gallon is roughly enough to make one pass over one acre with the tractor. Taking corn stover as the fuel, one acre would yield roughly 2.5 dry tons of excess stover (not required for erosion control) at 15.8 million BTU per ton for a total energy of 39.5 million BTU/acre. 5 passes over the acre per season would require a bit over 1 million BTU, leaving a hefty surplus (which could be converted to charcoal and added as a carbon-sequestering soil amendment).
Conclusion: There is more than sufficient non-petroleum fuel to run the machinery for the fields. (When you consider the inefficiencies of animal labor and the acreage required to feed it, it seems obvious that machinery would be more efficient.)
The engine of a tractor is just a means of turning the various bits of machinery to make it go. If you could get the same amount of power from a kite pulling it along, or a steam engine powered by sunlight, or even some magic spell animating a wheel tied to the transmission shaft, it would all be the same to the tractor. The question is, how much does it take?
A modern medium-speed diesel engine is 40-45% efficient. 140,000 BTU of diesel fuel would yield as much as 63,000 BTU of work, or 18.4 kWh. Per this page, a Zebra sodium nickel chloride battery module holds roughly 18-20 kWh of energy and weighs 450 lbs. It would appear to be possible to plow roughly 1 acre per module per charge; the rate of plowing would depend on how fast the modules could be recharged (perhaps swapped). The electricity to charge the modules could come from anything: solar panels, wind turbines, gensets running on biogas from the manure of dairy herds fed by corn stover silage, even far-away hydro or nuclear powerplants. Fuel requirement at the tractor itself: zero.
So no, I don't think a petroleum crisis would mean we'd be looking at serious trouble due to inability to cultivate farmland with machinery. If Eprida isn't a total scam, we wouldn't need to give up nitrogen fertilizer either (though cutting back is a very good idea). If there's unavoidable trouble, it's somewhere else.
the rate of plowing would depend on how fast the modules could be recharged (perhaps swapped).
With the present system of maximizing money VS time, swapping is how the work would be done. The local resistance to electric tractors had to do with the time to move the 3 point hitch.
If Eprida isn't a total scam, we wouldn't need to give up nitrogen fertilizer either
Err, part of Eprida's pitch is the use of Nitrogen fertilizer.
IIRC, Eprida's pitch is the manufacture of nitrogen fertilizer (ammonium carbonate in a charcoal matrix) from crop wastes.
I'd really like to see how you're going to take CO and turn it into fuel for your tractor. I'm not saying it isn't possible, I'd just like to see the details. Production, storage and application. More importantly, do you think that CO as a tractor fuel is a 'doable thing' to mitigate Peak Oil with regards to all of its current implications? Do you think that CO will provide a fuel source to feed billions?
I am absolutely not being confrontational here.
-Safi
You take the CO-containing gas (which, being made from air, will also contain a very large fraction of nitrogen) and mix it with the intake air. The fuel-air charge burns when ignited by the combustion of the injected oil.
Here is a patent on co-fueling diesels. Here is some mailing list discussion.
Edit: I forgot to answer your questions about production and storage. The production chain is relatively simple:
I think something is missing here, the correct calculation should be something like that:
(kg of fertilizer per acre)x(bbl of oil per kg of fertilizer)
Your statement seems to imply that the ratio of the two prices (11.44/11.53) is giving the correct result, am I missing something?
Khebab, as I said, in the OP, the USDA reported costs of the various items. I divided those costs by the inflation adjusted cost of oil for that year. I am assuming that price is a proxy for energy content. EROEI has the problem of where do you stop at the energy input. Cost seems to be the mediium through which energy summations are done, or could be done. The method isn't perfect, but I have no access to the various manufacturers bbl/lb fertilizer. If you know of such a source, I will redo those figures.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
Re: I am assuming that price is a proxy for energy content.
I understand, but if the quantity (bbl of oil per kg of fertilizer) has diminished over time due to technological and manufacturing improvements, this lowering will be interpreted has a reduction in the amount of fertilizer per acre.
It is true that everything gets more efficient over time, including fertilizer manufacture. So, when the bbl/lb of fertilizer goes down, so does the cost, so cost should, within some limits of error, delimit the bbl/lb especially if one uses the inflation adjusted dollars. At least I don't see the problem. Maybe I am dense (which won't be the first time in my life)
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
I think you have a handle on the primary problem of our day: without fossil fuels, ag productivity declines drastically, reducing the carrying capacity of the earth after we have already pushed it to its limit. I believe this was the primary concern of the Limits to Growth researchers in 1970-72 when their model showed a "business as usual" scenario leading to overshoot of earth's carrying capacity and collapse.
Good luck on your farm purchase; it's a tough time to buy. My wife and I bought our second property in Iowa two years ago, with fingers crossed because of the super-high prices; it was barely yielding a 5% income on our investment. Since then, with "ethanol madness", Iowa prices have doubled again. Rents are going up too, but not as sharply as prices- this seems to be typical of price spikes.
- Bob Wise
IIRC, electrolysis of sea water can produce hydrogen for fertilizer at a cost that is only slightly higher than natural gas, at current NG prices. If you use surplus night time electricity from wind or nuclear at $.05/KWH (see www.thewattspot.com , click on "today", look at early morning prices), electrolytic hydrogen could compete right now.
Electrolytic hydrogen supplies about 4% of hydrogen production right now. It hasn't expanded because NG has been dirt cheap, but it represents an essentially limitless supply, at a price only slightly higher than current fertilizer prices.
Concerned about electricity supplies? Peak Oil is a problem for liquid fuels, but electricity supplies will be just fine, given only modest governmental competence. Current supply problems in the US are modest, related to peak capacity, and easily fixed with new supply from wind/solar/nuclear and smart metering to smooth the peaks.
You write that all former societies used to enslave others.
By writing so you are continuing an old myth.
Very small bands of gatherers and hunters did not make slaves as long as they had enough space and food and other means to live on and of. As long as they had that much to make and control slaves would have meant extra work. Why should they have done so? There was no need for that.
Beside that thanx for your great article. Highly appreciated.
Ona
I am the author of the paper on North Korea mentioned at the top of this post. The correct address of the updated paper is: www9.ocn.ne.jp/~aslan/dprkeng0409.pdf
I hope a further update will be published in the second edition of the Final Energy Crisis (Pluto) in about a year's time, along with an update of my study on food and energy in Japan, written in 2000 but still worth looking at if you're interested in this field. The pdf can be found at: www9.ocn.ne.jp/~aslan/fande21e.htm
Hope that helps... (Sorry, slight mistake in the links has been edited... should work now ;-)
I never thought of it that way.
I find it surprising that no one lately is talking about the dangers of ethanol.
Ethanol’s lead lobbyist, Bob Dinneen, and politicians keep making wild promises about ethanol helping America’s energy needs, but no one has even mentioned the problems shipping this stuff.
Ethanol eats through pipelines so you have to truck the flammable liquids on busy rail lines and highways.
Just a couple of months ago, a truck carrying ethanol in Baltimore wrecked and exploded, killing one person and setting nearby cars ablaze. Fire fighters had to work for more than three hours to put this blaze out and the wreck shut down part of a major interstate for more than a day. http://homepage.mac.com/oscura/ctd/docs/051407bstankerfire.pdf.
This isn’t an isolated incident. Ethanol plant explosions, train derailments, and other accidents are occurring at alarming rates.
And our politicians are talking about expanding ethanol production by 7 times over the next decade or so? How do they expect to move all of that ethanol and what will that mean for our roads, bridges, and rail lines?
I would love to hear a politician answer that question while on the stump in Iowa.
Ethanol plays an important role in our energy future, but at what price?