[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Next Agriculture

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (March 05 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


Archdruids take breaks from time to time, but the peak oil debate does
not, and during my recent vacation a lively discussion sprang up on The
Oil Drum about the future of agriculture in a postpetroleum world. The
point at issue was whether today's mechanized agriculture will remain in
place, or be replaced by a new rural economy of small farms using human
and animal labor, as the world skids down the far side of Hubbert's peak.

Summarizing a vigorous discussion of a complex topic in a few paragraphs
is a risky proposition, so I'll focus here on the two essays that
defined the debate, Stuart Staniford's The Fallacy of Reversibility and
Sharon Astyk's Is Localization Doomed? Staniford argued that those who
expected a nonmechanized, small-farm economy in the wake of peak oil
were claiming that the history of agriculture over the last century
would simply run in reverse, tracking the decline in fossil fuel
availability in the same way it tracked the growth in fossil fuel
production.

If this view was correct, he claimed, rising fuel prices would have
already begun to push American agriculture in the direction of smaller,
less energy-intensive farms, and this would show in currently available
statistics about profitability, labor costs, farm size and the like. He
then demonstrated that no such changes could be found in the statistics,
and on this basis claimed that what he called the "reversalist" position
had no merit.

Astyk, responding to Staniford, made two major points. First, she noted
that nobody claimed that the transition from today's agribusiness to
tomorrow's rural landscape of small farms would simply run history in
reverse, and Staniford was therefore kicking a straw man. Second, she
suggested that the emergence of a nonmechanized, small-farm economy in
the postpetroleum future was not an inevitability, but a policy choice
that Staniford's so-called "reversalists" considered the best option in
the face of peak oil.

Like many readers of the debate, I found neither of these positions
really satisfactory. By the time I finished reading the comments,
though, it was getting late, and I decided to round out the evening by
pouring myself a glass of scotch and reading a few pages of a Gary
Larson Far Side anthology. Somewhere toward the bottom of the glass I
dozed off; I must have been reading one of Larson's dinosaur cartoons in
my last waking moments, because I slipped into a dream in which a
conference of dinosaurs pondered the approaching end of the Mesozoic era.

Quite a few dinosaurs had already given speeches about the threat of
global cooling. Several of them had mentioned that mammals, with their
warm blood and furry coats, might be better off in a post-Mesozoic
world. At this point in the debate, however, another dinosaur lumbered
up to the podium to speak.

"This talk of mammals taking over the world is nonsense", it said. "It's
true, of course, that the ancestors of mammals - the therapsids - ruled
the earth back before dinosaurs came along, in the Permian period,
before the earth's climate shifted to its long Mesozoic warm spell".
This sparked a good deal of discussion among the audience, and the
Tyrannosaurus rex who presided over the meeting had to display its
foot-long teeth and growl to quiet things down.

"Nonetheless", the speaker went on, "this claim that evolution will run
in reverse can readily be refuted. If that were true, the global cooling
we've seen already would have made dinosaurs become smaller and furrier,
and that hasn't happened. In fact" - at this point it nodded toward the
Tyrannosaurus rex - "it's clear that we're getting larger and scalier
all the time. There's every reason to think that as the climate cools,
and selection pressures become more extreme, big scaly dinosaurs will
have even greater competitive advantages than they do now".

At this point the buzz of conversation in the audience could not be
restrained, even when the Tyrannosaurus rex killed and ate one of the
loudest talkers. A few moments later, though, a bright light flashed
through the sky. "Did you see that?" said the Triceratops sitting next
to me, pointing toward the sky with the horn on his nose. "I've never
seen a shooting star that big". A moment later I was jolted awake by
what felt like the shockwave from an asteroid impact, but was actually
the Gary Larson anthology sliding from my lap and hitting the floor.

The parallels between Staniford's argument and that of his saurian
equivalent, as it happens, go well beyond the obvious. Both, strictly
speaking, are quite correct in their core assertions. As the Mesozoic
era drew toward its close, dinosaurs did not retrace the process that
led up to the monster reptiles of the Cretaceous. In fact, important
branches of the dinosaur clan - the carnosaurs that led to Tyrannosaurus
rex, the ceratopsians that ended with Triceratops, and others - got
progressively larger as the Cretaceous drew on.

These successful evolutionary lineages continued to follow their
established trajectory as long as it remained viable. When it stopped
being viable, they didn't shift into reverse and shrink back down to the
size of their Permian ancestors; they died out, and other organisms
better suited to the new conditions took over. In the same way,
Staniford's assertion that today's industrial agriculture will not throw
the gearshifts of its combines into reverse, and gradually retrace its
tracks into the 19th century, is almost certainly correct.

Staniford is also correct to point out that in a world intent on pouring
its food supply into its fuel tanks, rising energy prices mean that
industrial farming is becoming more profitable, not less. As a member of
the Grange, I've had the chance to watch this from an angle that may be
rare in the peak oil scene. Where the rest of the media bemoans rising
grain prices, the Grange News is full of satisfied comments by family
farmers who can finally make ends meet, now that their grain sells for
more than it cost to grow.

Yet Staniford's overall argument fails, for the same reason that his
imaginary Mesozoic equivalent missed seeing the future in plain sight -
both rely on linear models to predict a nonlinear situation. In his
essay, Staniford used the distinction between reversible and
irreversible processes as a model for historical change in agriculture.
The difference between linear and nonlinear change, however, is at least
as relevant.

Watch a frozen lake melt and you have a seasonally timely example of
nonlinear change. The transition from ice to liquid water doesn't happen
gradually as temperature rises; it happens at a specific point in the
temperature spectrum, 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and only then once the ice
has absorbed enough energy to overcome its thermal inertia and provide
the heat of fusion. A five-degree warming can be irrelevant to the
process, if it's from fifteen degrees to twenty degrees Fahrenheit, or
for that matter from forty degrees to 45 degrees Fahrenheit. The same
rise between thirty degrees and 35 degrees Fahrenheit, on the other
hand, can cause drastic change.

Nonlinear change happens most often in systems that have negative
feedback loops which balance out pressures for change. In the case of
the frozen lake, the main sources of negative feedback are the stability
of water's solid state and its capacity as a heat sink. Only when enough
heat has entered the situation to overcome these factors does change
happen, and when it does, the lake shifts from one relatively stable
state to another.

The modern agricultural economy is a classic candidate for nonlinear
change. The feedback loops resisting agricultural change in the modern
world are at least as potent as the ones that keep a lake from melting
at twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The food production and distribution
system is oriented toward business as usual, and the psychology of
previous investment and the very real costs of retooling to fit a
different model both raise obstacles to change. Monopolistic practices
and the government subsidies and price supports that make most of
today's "capitalist" agriculture a case study in corporate socialism
also give the status quo impressive inertia.

At the same time, if something is unsustainable, it's a given that
sooner or later it won't be sustained. Today's industrial agriculture,
with its far-flung supply and distribution chains, its dependence on
huge inputs of nonrenewable resources, and its severe impact on topsoil,
water quality, and environmental health, is a case in point. As
transport costs rise, fossil fuel and mineral reserves deplete, and the
burden of coping with ecological damage climbs, industrial agriculture
will sooner or later reach the point of negative returns - and as Joseph
Tainter pointed out in a different context, that's the point at which
collapse becomes the most likely outcome.

Staniford has argued elsewhere that the energy crisis caused by the end
of cheap oil will be temporary. He proposes that nuclear power and other
technologies will sooner or later make energy cheap and abundant again.
If he's right, it's possible that new energy sources will come on line
soon enough to keep industrial agriculture from hitting the wall. None
of the theorists he critiques in his essay agree that the approaching
crisis will be temporary, though, and this latter assessment gives their
argument compelling force: as energy supplies dwindle and a social
fabric predicated on cheap energy comes apart, the pressures on the
agricultural status quo will eventually reach a level high enough to
force nonlinear change.

This is where the second half of Sharon Astyk's argument comes in. She
points out that many of the writers critiqued in Staniford's essay see a
nonmechanized small-farm agricultural economy not as the inevitable
result of economic forces, but as a deliberate policy choice. If our
existing agriculture could fold out from under us, they suggest, getting
plan B in place is a good idea.

Now this may well be true, but history teaches that when ideology
collides with economics, it's inevitably ideology that comes off worst.
The same trap that has blocked most proposals for lifeboat communities
so far - how do you make them economically viable in the world we
inhabit today? - lies in wait for schemes to relocalize agriculture that
don't take the actual economics of farming in today's world into account.

Fortunately, there's reason to think that economic factors will favor
the rise of a nonmechanized small-farm economy in the industrial world
in the decades to come. The best evidence for this suggestion comes,
ironically enough, from Stuart Staniford. In posts about the
agricultural side of peak oil - notably Fermenting the Food Supply -
Staniford pointed out that the use of grain as a feedstock for ethanol
is likely to drive up the price of basic foodstuffs so far that many
people will no longer be able to afford to eat.

This is potentially a serious crisis, but it also represents an
opportunity. Sharp increases in the price of food mean that food
production methods that may not be economical under current conditions
could well pass the breakeven point and begin turning a profit. To
thrive in the economic climate of the near future, of course, such
methods would have to meet certain requirements, but most of these can
be anticipated easily enough.

These alternative farming projects would have to use minimal fossil fuel
inputs, since fuel costs will likely be very high by past standards for
much of the foreseeable future. They would need to focus on local
distribution, since those same fuel costs will put long-distance
transport out of reach. They would have to focus on intensive production
from very small plots, since acreage large enough for industrial farming
will likely increase in price. They would also benefit greatly by
relying on human labor with hand tools, since the economic consequences
of peak oil will likely send unemployment rates soaring while making
capital hard to come by.

All of these criteria are met, as it happens, by the small organic farms
and truck gardens that many relocalization theorists hold up as models
for future agriculture. Already an economic success, especially around
West Coast cities, these agricultural alternatives have evolved their
own distribution system, relying on farmers markets, co-op groceries,
local restauranteurs and community-supported agriculture schemes to
carry out an end run around food distribution systems geared toward
corporate monopolies.

As more grains and other fermentable bulk commodities get turned into
ethanol, and food prices rise in response, such arrangements may well
become a significant source of food for a sizeable fraction of Americans
- and in the process, of course, the economics of small-scale
alternative farms are likely to improve a great deal. The result may
well resemble nothing so much as the agricultural system of the former
Soviet Union in its last years, featuring vast farms that had become
almost irrelevant to the national food supply, while little market
gardens in backyards produced most of the food people actually ate.

If Staniford is correct and the postpeak energy crisis turns out to be a
passing phase, that bimodal system might endure for quite some time, as
it did in the Soviet Union. If more pessimistic assessments of our
energy future are closer to the mark, as I suspect they are, the
industrial half of the system can be counted on to collapse at some
point down the road once energy and resource availability drop to levels
insufficient to sustain a continental economy. If this turns out to be
the case, the small intensive farms around the urban fringes - mammals
amid agribusiness dinosaurs - may well become the nucleus of the next
agriculture.
_____

The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA),
John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/03/next-agriculture.html

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/