[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Time is right to turn lawns into farmland

[Bill Totten]

by Wylie Harris

baltimoresun.com (January 20 2008)


I look at the empty countryside around our farm in Cooke County, Texas,
and can't help but wish it were as thick with people as when my
grandparents made a living here. Until recently, though, the kindest
name the rest of the world had for this wish was "nostalgia".

Back then, leaving the farm made sense. The economy was growing on an
energy-dense broth of cheap fossil fuels. The energy in those fuels
replaced that from the muscles of farm people and their animals. Today,
one person can grow food for more than 100.

A century ago, almost forty percent of the US population worked on
farms. But with industrialization, millions of farm folk, their labor
cheapened, headed to the city for better wages. That tide continued
until fewer than two million farmers - less than one percent of the
country's population - remain today.

Now, though, the seemingly limitless reserves of petroleum that fueled
the past century's exodus from the farm are about half gone. From here
on, fossil fuels - and all the everyday essentials that depend on them,
such as transportation and food - will grow increasingly costly.

Without some miraculous new energy source, muscle power could soon again
be a cheaper alternative to fossil fuels for growing food. Blunt
economic pragmatism seems set to out-shout nostalgia in the call to put
more farmers on the land.

Just how many more farmers would it take to cure farming's fossil-fuel
habit? Lots, according to farmer and writer Sharon Astyk and Oil
Depletion Protocol author Richard Heinberg, both leading activists for
facing up to life after world oil production peaks. They estimate that
without cheap fossil fuels, we would need fifty million new farmers.
That's one farmer for every two households in the United States.

This isn't a move-to-the-boonies-or-starve ultimatum. In fact, many
people are ideally positioned to become farmers right where they are.
It's the silver lining to suburban sprawl.

Suburbia occupies vast swaths of former prime US farmland. NASA's
ecological forecasting research group reports that the people living
there water about thirty million acres of lawn, three times the land
planted in irrigated corn.

Those lawns average somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of an
acre. Authorities such as gardening guru John Jeavons and The Contrary
Farmer (Chelsea Green, 1995) author Gene Logsdon say that's ample land
for growing a substantial portion of a family's food.

This isn't to say that the fifty million farmers-to-be should grow all
their own food, or that the entire country's food supply can come from
former lawns, parks and golf courses. Rather, it's to point out that
growing as much of one's food as possible can be a cornerstone of sound
household finance, and that the necessary land and water are in the same
places as many of the people who now participate only in the demand side
of agriculture.

The most effective tactics for making farmers out of more of us are
local: convincing homeowner associations that vegetable gardens look as
nice as lawns, zoning boards that chickens belong in back yards, and
state health agencies that bread baked in home kitchens for sale to
neighbors isn't any likelier to hurt anybody than Wonder Bread.

Rethinking what we mean by "farmer" is also important. "Farmers" who
plow thousands of acres with gigantic diesel-guzzling tractors and sell
corn by the bushel for their entire income aren't much use in an age of
expensive energy.

On the other hand, "farmers" who grow substantial amounts of food for
their families and perhaps also for sale to neighbors, as primary income
or not, are far better equipped to weather a forced fossil-fuel fast.
This is the kind of farmer many of us are within a hoe handle's reach of
becoming, and perhaps with less effort than we realize.

An agrarian nation isn't just a nostalgic wish after all. It's insurance
we can't afford to live without.

____

Wylie Harris ranches with his family north of Fort Worth. A former W K
Kellogg Foundation food and society policy fellow, he wrote this comment
for the Land Institute's Prairie Writers Circle in Salina, Kansas.

Copyright Copyright (c) 2008, The Baltimore Sun

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.farmers20jan20,0,6652757.story

http://peakoil.blogspot.com/2008/01/time-is-right-to-turn-lawns-into.html

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