The talk is starting to become reality. I was just helping a neighbour with some plumbing equipment for a water well to boost local food production. That neighbour also has holiday cabins for rent and the current occupants are contemplating a move from a drying region to an area with larger untapped water resources.

The PTB still need to explain how we will grow grain when there is no diesel, no concentrated mineral phosphate, no synthetic urea and no irrigation water.

Hi Jason - Nice piece, with the caveat that my figures were always based in large part on present day agrarian populations in lower energy societies. I can't speak for Richard, of course, but I'd tend to guess that the same is true for him.

A couple of things I'd note - one is that number of farmers is also impacted by cultural preference and governing approach to agriculture - for example, in Russia the trend seems to still be towards smaller and smaller farms, and more of them, not for lack of land base, but because since the collapse, people trust small farm agriculture in a way they do not trust large farm agriculture. Japan's government has tended to support small scale agriculture, and thus has more farmers per capita than its energy use would lead us to expect. Those are, of course, just a few obvious examples, but it is worth noting that the energy-land-resource-population equation is complicated by a host of things.

Boof, artificial nitrogen is not the only source of nitrogen available to us - you pee out enough nitrogen to grow about 1/2 acre of food every year, and there are other sources. And large scale grain cultivation is not necessary - nearly half of India's rice, for example is grown on small farms of less than 5 acres. Worldwide, nearly half the rice eaten is grown on small farms, according to the FAO.

One of the reasons I see the "farming" (and I use this term broadly, rather than precisely) population growing so much is that most experiments with deindustrialized agriculture find that small scale farming can match agricultural output with industrial agriculture, or even exceed it, but large scale agriculture can't. Cuba and the former SU both found that without lots of fossil fuels, very large scale agriculture, even with equivalent hired labor, didn't work very well. Small farms, ideally worked by people who profit from them, on the other hand, tend to have higher total per acre outputs.

The other reason is this - farming pays badly - really badly. If we actually manage to create some kind of sustainable (and by this I mean only "can be sustained for a while, and that seems doubtful enough) national health care system, we might make full time agriculture doable, but without that benefit, it becomes a losing proposition for a lot of people. Small scale intensive agriculture/horticulture/gardening in combination with other formal and informal economy activity seems generally more economically
feasible in the transitional phases than a switch to farming for most. Later, who knows. That is, yet another factor may well be the larger economic picture and land access issues that face us. At no point is my own analysis, anyway, assuming anything other than complex and multiple causes.

Thanks Jason - a nice piece, as always.

Sharon Astyk

Jason,

"Since mechanization and the fuels that power machines are what enable such a small agricultural labor force, is it reasonable to assume that a decline in fossil fuels will require more farmers?"
This is not a reasonable assumption if you ignore mechanization and the possibility of powering by non FF.
I couldn't see any figures for farm energy or fuel use. How do they compare with small scale suburban lawn mowing? How much energy is used in rail movement of grain 1,000 km to a mill, then to a supermarket by 18 wheeler, compared with local transport by half ton vehicle?

In past 100 years food prices have been falling while oil prices have been increasing, this suggests that oil is only a small part of farm costs, more than compensated by increases in farm productivity, such as dairy, grain, poultry, electrification of rural farms and mechanization.

In Australia, 60 years ago, dairy farms had 10 milking cows, now they may have 100 or more. Milking mechanization is the reason, the cows still walk to the pastures, similar energy used for hay bailing, spreading manure. Similarly, chicken farms produce more meat/ grain inputs, more mechanization, better feed conversion saves energy. Beef feed-lots however, do use more energy than range fed beef (similar labor? ).

You have not shown a relationship between farm size and FF use. Did a 100 acre farm use less fuel/acre 50 years ago than a 1000 acre farm today? Minimum till has dramatically reduced diesel use in grain farming, but more herbicide use.

Before combined harvesters were wildly used, a large migrant labor force was employed to stack swaths of grain and then load into mobile steam threshers. Still one farmer, lots of hired hands. Steam power used a lot more energy. Horses even more.

Jason,

the almost 6 million farmers number may be suspect. I can't recall in which conversation I heard it lately but I was told that there are possibly as few as 2 million farmers in the U.S. The remainder are 'farmers' for tax purposes but don't produce material amounts of food.

Any thoughts on this?

Strictly from a mathematical point of view there are two ways to get a higher percentage of the population on the farm. One would be to keep total population the same, and move people from cities to farms; another would be to keep the number of farmers the same and reduce the number of people in cities through deaths exceeding births for city dwellers. Of course there are plenty of combinations of these two options that would produce a higher percentage of the population being farmers.

I think that the need for more people on the farm will also force prices of food up. In a free market, price is the mechanism that tells people where to put their productive efforts, so you can look for food to become a more costly part of staving alive. This would be true in a controlled economy as well, but only worse because of the lack of efficiency when the free market does not operate.

My own view is that lack of food will be the rule rather the exception in the post peak struggle to survive. It is not only that human and animal energy will replace machines, but that yields will drop to be more in line with what was possible when a farm was just a farm and not a manufactory.

We are stupefyingly wasteful when it comes to energy and there are massive amounts of fat that can be trimmed away from our consumption before we even get close to the relatively small fraction of energy used for essentials such as food production. This is where in my opinion a lot of the doomer arguments fall down. They focus on areas that are critical for survival but ignore the fraction of energy required to maintain those systems in contrast to the fraction used for discretionary purposes.

Why, when land area, population, climate range and gdp/capita, are so similar for Europe and the US do Americans use twice as much energy/capita as Europeans? And us Europeans are still horribly wasteful when it comes to energy. I live in Scotland and have, over the last couple of years, cut my driving in half and my home power consumption by 20%. Simply by being less wasteful. No significant consequences regarding my overall standard of living except that I am now quite a bit fitter. Even my 7 YO daughter has stopped whingeing about having to walk - I think, amazingly, she's even starting to enjoy it!

We need to step back and look at our habits. It's really not that surprising to me that there are examples of developed countries around the World that use a fraction of US or even European energy levels. I've visited some of these countries and the people seem just as happy as here.

It would be an interesting excercise to see how much discretionary energy use could be peeled away before we get to a real pain threshold. I suspect it would surprise a few.

TW

Hello Jason,

http://www.sacbee.com/news/story/1685691.html
----------------------
Today, residents of the Wild Wings golf community near Woodland will make a hard choice: Will they revive the now-closed golf course by taxing themselves, or let it go to seed?

..Built during the housing boom, Wild Wings was once a high-flying golf course community, with million-dollar homes lining its links.

In the past year, its residents have watched home values plummet and the nine-hole golf course, operated by an outside firm, go belly up. It closed in December.

..The election has pitted neighbor against neighbor, including some who say they can't afford the cost of taking over the golf course in the bleak economy.

"I'm afraid that it's turned into a little bit of class warfare," said Pam Kazmierczak, an opponent of taking over the links. "There are people who think, if you can't afford to maintain it as golf course, then why are you here?"

Kazmierczak said she would rather see the course become a park or nature preserve. It would be less risky and more environmentally sensitive, she said.
----------------------------
I would advise them to turn this abandoned golf course into permaculture, especially if they have to assume the debts and unpaid back taxes. Moving those Sacramento homeless tent-people [from an earlier weblink on TOD] into the foreclosed properties on the condition that they work to become Master Gardeners could be a win-win for the entire area.

There are over 16,000 golf courses, with most of these doomed to postPeak failure. IMO, it only makes sense to develop a national conversion strategy as many of these courses are in urban and suburban areas. I have posted earlier my speculation on how O-NPK recycling by SpiderWebRiding can do much to leverage the permaculture conversion and Kunstlerization of these areas. We just need to get Tiger Woods and the PGA onboard as it could be short to intermediate term highly profitable.

Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

I'm not comparing the politics of the situation, but in Zimbabwe, a small number of skilled, high tech farmers using high fossil input farming used to provide all the country's food requirement and more for export.

Most of these farmers have been evicted and replaced either with cronies of the military dictatorship with little or no interest in food production, or previously landless poor with little residual farming knowledge, with zero access to machinery or fossil based inputs. We all know the practical outcome.

In the US (and the UK) we have a tiny, skilled and aging farming population. As they retire a large part of their skills and knowledge will be lost. If we are facing a shortage of fossil fuel inputs, we are going to have to be very organised to train large numbers of new 'peasant' farmers or we are going to very rapidly see a catastrophic fall in agricultural output.

At the end of the Roman empire, agricultural output fell catastrophically, because the farming class were taxed out of existence, and farming became a slave profession, where children were forced to take the farm (and taxation) on from their parents. Farmers simply walked away and left the land fallow.

The picture would suggest that there is an inverse relation between energy consumption and jobs in agriculture in your country of about the same order of magnitude.

So if we are decades past peak oil, and we would have to cut our oil use in half, we also would have to double the people working in agriculture.

In the west, about 3% of the people work in agriculture.

That would be 6% of the population then.

Cutting your oil use in half is very easy to do: relocate back to town, cycle to work and walk your kids to school. And don't take flying vacations.

The need to provide adequate fuel for food production and distribution is why I favor direct rationing over taxation as a way to insure that food isn't too expensive for everyone to have enough. I see those who favor higher fuel taxes as being financially able to keep buying as much fuel as they want for their luxury cars and SUVs.
I have seen the figure of 7 to 10 gallons per acre-year for farm energy needs. Setting aside roughly 1/6 of arable land for biodiesel production is the alternative as is gasification processing of stover, straw, and other 'waste" materials of the fields.

Jason,

In various comments I have made on this list, I have suggested that farmers, engineers, ag scientists, etc., look into the potential of sea water greenhouses, as presented at http://www.seawatergreenhouse.com The successful implementation of this technology could greatly expand the surface area of land that we normally consider to be "arable".

In this technology, sea water is not used to water the plants directly, but rather is used to create an atmosphere that is much more humid than it would otherwise be. Evaporation is also retarded by making air flow through the system enclosed inside a greenhouse covered with polyethylene sheets, which also may be treated to avoid excess heating with rays not involved in photosynthesis.

Since you do interviews, why not conduct an interview Charlie Paton (charlie@seawatergreenhouse.com) to get his take on his estimate of the degree of success he has achieved, including an estimate of the limitations in terms of nutrients, types of crops, sustainability practices needed to improve soil, use of brackish water, polyethylene requirements, etc?

In other words, will this be the "Messiah Technology" for food production, as the Atmospheric Vortex Engine (Ref:http://www.vortexengine.ca) will be, IMO, for economic, decentralized, carbon-free, electricity production)?