Who is Really Feeding the World?
A recurring theme I've read in discussions of Energy Depletion theory has been that without fossil fuels we won't be able to grow food for the world's population. We use natural gas to make fertilizer and oil to make the diesel fuel that runs the farming machinery. Without those, we are told, people starve.
That argument also figures in the arguments of proponents of organic agriculture, and proponents of more local distribution against the practices of agribusiness agriculture.
But in responding to the agriculture debate, A Nation of Farmers author, Sharon Astyk, offers new information:
The assumption, of course, is that industrial agriculture has always been engaged in the project of "feeding the world" - Cargill, ADM and Monsanto regularly argue that these are their goals, that their research is required to bring new crops that will make it possible to feed two or three more billion people.
The problem, of course, is that there is no evidence whatsoever that industrial agriculture has ever had the objective of feeding the world. I am repeating here something Aaron and I say in much more detail in A Nation of Farmers (and with full citation), but if you track the research, what you find is this. The vast majority of increases in grain yields since the beginning of the Green Revolution didn't feed hungry people - they went to feed livestock, to make meat in the rich world, and then to ethanol - with the help of the same industrial corporations that we plan to rely upon to feed us. The same corporations that are going to "feed the world" by introducing new, drought resistant crops invested heavily in ethanol infrastructure, helping move more of the world's grain harvest into gas tanks, rather than into people's mouths.
So what is really at risk is the meat and fuel that serve our current Western lifestyle.
The UN FAO reports that at this point, two billion people in the world live on the product of low input, small scale, non-industrial agriculture. I often hear people observe that without fossil inputs on a large scale we can feed only half a billion or a billion people - McWilliams puts this figure at 4 billion, which is at least more credible. But we are already feeding 2 billion people that way. Moreover, large scale industrial agriculture is not presently feeding the world - 85% of the world's farms are small farms, smaller than 5 hectares. These farms produce nearly half of the world's total grain, and much more than half (since they are usually diversified) of the world's total food calories. Local food may not be feeding New York City and the I95 corridor, and it never will - I know of no rational thinker who believes so. But local food is already feeding much of the world - the majority of the world's poor don't eat a Caesar salad that travelled 1,500 miles - they don't even eat rice that travelled that distance.
Excellent Points. Thanks for the links, Donal.
I'd also point out that lack of productive work has led many to destructive acts, so what is all this machinery really good for? I'd rather see more people employed, and less machines. It would be better for the planet, and better for the people of the planet.
September 12, 2009 1:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah. Where is all that 'food' produced by chemical fertilizers going anyhow?
Certainly not to these people.
http://www.wfp.org/stories/number-world-hungry-tops-billion
September 12, 2009 2:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks Donal.
When food prices spiked, people focussed on ethanol, which irritated me because there was such an obvious lobby (oil) which stood to gain by identifying biofuels as "the" problem. But look more closely, it is the absolutely mammoth amounts of land/food being shoved into industrial meat production that jumps out. It simply devours the Earth.
We produce massive amounts of grain here on the Prairies, which is fed into industrial livestock operations, and the meat is then flown around the world. It's batshit insane, but the farmers/locals were told it was a way to "add value" locally, rather than just produce grain. But when you see how much of the American corn crop, goes to feed livestock (and corn syrup), it's enough to make the knees wobble.
Change how much, and how we do meat, and allllll sorts of our agricultural and environmental ills become manageable. I say environmental, because people bellow about how humans can't feed the world, and not even bother looking at the results of making just one little change - a reduction in the amount of meat we eat. Change that, and the amount of land which is available to produce other food is astonishing. The equivalent of adding entire new nations worth of arable soil.
September 12, 2009 3:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, by all means shut off the production of nitrogen fertilizer by the Haber Bosch process and see how that works out.
September 12, 2009 5:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Classic straw man.
September 12, 2009 6:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
I've worked on organic farms many times over the years and you can produce equivalent yields per acre without fertilizers and pesticides. You'd have to break up the large farms into smaller units and plant crops in smaller plots with greater diversication and crop rotation.
The problem without fossil foods is transporting that food to the cities. The bigger problem with or without fossil fuels is irrigation. Aquifers and reservoirs are being drained faster than they can replenish.
September 12, 2009 7:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Without nitrogen fertilizer, you have to rotate legumes frequently to preserve nitrogen levels. So you would severely reduce production of other crops. And even with legumes in rotation, you wind up without enough nitrogen for the modern high-yielding crop varieties.
For example, nitrogen fertilizer is essential to high-yielding short-stem varieties of rice.
The only source of nitrogen fertilizer that is productive enough to maintain current levels of food production is Haber Bosch, which uses natural gas as a source of energy and of hydrogen in the synthesis of ammonia.
September 12, 2009 10:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
There was farming before Haber Bosch, right?
September 12, 2009 11:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
There was. The population was fairly small, and it was spread out and not urbanized. Furthermore, there were new agricultural areas like the US midWest, Australia, South Africa, Argentina, etc. that were newly plowed and not yet worn out.
You could sustain a smaller population for some time using pre-industrial farming methods.
But in urban societies, farming is essentially a method of mining various elements from the topsoil and transporting them to the cities. In the cities, the food is consumed, and the sewage runs to the ocean via the river systems.
So you need to replace the nutrients. For nitrogen, approximately 100 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer are manufactured and put back into the soil.
Other elements are also needed. For example, the scrubbing of sulfur from coal-fired electrical generation plants has removed a source of sulfur from fields in Europe which are sulfur poor. So to grow crops that need sulfur, like cabbage, rape, etc. they are now having to include sulfur in the fertiliser.
September 13, 2009 12:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
But our ability to increase yields with nitrogen from bat guano and natural gas won't last forever.
September 13, 2009 11:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nothing lasts forever. Wind and water erosion will eventually deplete tha supply of soil. At that point, we will need to be able to produce food without using soil.
September 13, 2009 12:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is ridiculous. There are many areas all over the world that have been farmed for thousands of years. Sorry to have to say this but that statement tells me you really don't have much of a clue about farming. But it is the difference between organic farmers and others. You see a constant degradation of the soil to the point where it is unusable. Organic farmers see the soil improving year after year.
When my family bought the land we gardened 1/4 of it was deadpan clay. A bulldozer had removed scrub, tree stumps and all the topsoil to build a temporary road. Only by constantly breaking up the deadpan around the plants after every rain where we able to grow anything there at all. Some years we just planted and let any seed that sprang up die. It was unfarmable even with chemical fertilizers.
In several years we had turned it into @6 inches of decent topsoil. The other 3/4 which had been barely adequate was by that time such excellent soil that anything we planted there just grew like crazy. It was 12 inches of rich black topsoil.
September 13, 2009 1:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's simply not true. You're looking at crop yields from severely depleted soil that is being forced to yield with chemical inputs. Tens of billions of tons of topsoil where lost in the dust bowl of the thirties. While creation of wind breaks and low till agriculture stabalized the loss little was done to improve the quality of the soil.
Economic pressures increased plowing until by 1982 the us was losing an estimated total of 3.08 billion tons of topsoil from its cropland every year. We're farming with a thin layer of top soil that is depleted of all minerals from years of use with out returning organic matter to revitalize it.
Legumes are a major source of nitrogen. We're already planting massive quantities, sometimes year after year on the same plot of land. Smaller farms could easily intergrate rotation. But legumes are not the sole source of nitrogen.
September 13, 2009 1:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
Healthy soil has free ranging bacteria that produce nitrogen. And earthworms produce tremendous quantities of high quality fertilizer. A small 400 sq ft garden with a low worm population of only 5 worms/cubic foot will be provided with over 600 lbs (about 1/3 lb per worm) of top-grade fertilizer by the worms, each year. Over use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides deplete the soil of both earthworms and bacteria and thin top soil with little organic matter is a poor living environment prone to erosion.
Were I to get a piece of land in the condition most farms are now days I wouldn't immediately eliminate all chemical fertilizers. But I would cut back. Nitrogen fertilizers are over used, since they are so cheap. That results in large amounts of run off that pollute our streams and result in the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, about 8,000 square miles
With several years of work rebuilding the soil with organic matter, organic fertilizers and remineralization with stone dust could increase the amount of topsoil and produce living soil that would equal or exceed the yields from the depleted soil and chemical fertilizers.
This is such a brief summery. There is so much more that could be done. I grew up working the soil. My family had about and acre of land that we gardened organically. As well as numerous varieties of fruit trees, grape vines, berry bushes, nut trees, etc. I've also worked off and on for many years on organic farms. I've seen what can be grown in healthy living soils. I've sat down with the farmers who owned the land and compared yields after harvests. Time and time again I've seen yields that experts in chemical farming claimed were impossible without their inputs.
September 13, 2009 1:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'll add one more thing that I wasn't going to mention because too many people are not ready to think about it. There are 300 million mammals (humans) more than all the cows, pigs, hogs, goats and sheep combined in the US. These 300 million people are producing tons of high quality manure if we didn't turn it into toxic waste mingling it with industrial waste and dump it in streams or bury it in landfills.
September 13, 2009 2:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
oceankat, thank you for your comments.
September 13, 2009 10:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
That's a good point.
The only problem is the question of how to segregate human waste from other sewage.
Seeing as compost toilets do not seem to me to be a very realistic solution, the question becomes whether or not the toxic waste is all industrial.
If so, then segregation should be easy; regulate waste disposal more harshly and create a separate system for industrial waste. In factories, only the toilets should go into the human sewer.
If a non-neglible percentage of the toxic waste comes from homes (e.g. from people putting chemicals in their sink) then that could be somewhat more problematic.
Alternately, if we could find a way to filter sewer waste, that could also solve the problem.
September 13, 2009 10:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't know how much comes from households or whether its an acceptably low amount. I do know most comes from industry. Its really the heavy metals that are the problem since with repeated applications they can build up in the soil.
Whether its used as fertilizer or disposed of by some other means, landfill or incineration, its a gigantic problem that we will need to solve. The US produces 6,900 million tons of the stuff every year.
Its such a valuable source of fertilizer that we really should find a way to get it clean enough to use. My guess would be that seperating the waste streams might be sufficient.
September 13, 2009 12:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
I also grew up on a farm. It was 120 acres, which is by now pretty small. The crop rotation was among corn, oats and alfalfa, with some soybeans in later years. The manure from the dairy herd, the hog barn and the chicken coop was returned to the fields. Fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides were used sparingly. Almost all of our food was raised on the farm and in the garden.
Clearly one can take a small plot of hardpan soil and improve it. As the article you link to says:
The question though, is where does the organic mulch that is used to fertilize the soil come from? If it is from the same plot, then you are just recycling the same nutrients back into the soil, unless in the case of nitrogen, you've planted a nitrogen-fixing crop.
Actually, you seem to realize the problem of mass balance of nutrients in your comments about sewage. The fundamental problem, as I pointed out before, is that we are essentially mining the agricultural hinterland and moving the elements through the cities into the oceans. That's why we fix nitrogen to make fertilizer and put it back into the soil. That's why we mine rock phosphate in order to put phosphorus back into the soil.
If you look at the biochemistry of plants, they are not just composed of chemicals containing carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. Plant proteins, enzymes, and other biochemicals contain a variety of elements. Nitrogen, phosporous and potassium predominate, but they are by no means the only ones.
Yes, parts of the world have been farmed for thousands of years. However, for most of those thousands of years, the uban population has been trivially small, and population densities have been light. Some of the heavier densities have been inplaces like China, where the winds blow dust in from the Gobi desert to replenish nutrients. In India, the melt waters from the Himalayan glaciers bring the products of erosion to the valleys below. There are counter-examples, such as the Tigris-Euphrates valley or the Mayan cities of the Yucatan, where civilisations depleted their agricultural hinterlands and collapsed.
September 13, 2009 1:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree that that is the fundamental problem. But you seem to be saying its inevitable and that is just not true.
Yes clearly. So the degradation process is not inevitable. Soil can be improved. Of course you couldn't change 1,000 acres of hardpan into topsoil with out an unordinate amount of effort. But the soil that is now farmed is not hardpan.
I'm not suggesting its possible to ban chemical fertilizers today and expect the same harvest next growing season. But over time organic farms can produce equivalent yields. By the way, I'm not the purist I was when I was younger. I'm still 98% against use of poisons but not totally against chemical fertilizers. Though with efforts to rebuild soil health and quality the use can be drastically lessened.
Finding the organinc material can be a problem and not one that farmers can solve on their own, at least not if all farmers wanted to do it. But there are tons of organic material that go unused. Most every city has mountains of yard waste and wood chips that they can't get rid of. There is still quite a lot of animal manure that just piled up. But the biggest source will be the human waste stream. 6,900 million tons of dry solids every year. Governments need to make sure the human waste stream is free of heavy metals. Like I said its a problem we need to deal with someway.
And there's a synergy to all of this. More organic matter in the soil and it holds mosture better, less evaporation. That means less need for irrigation from our ever lower and lower aquifers. More moisture in the soil and there is less wind erosion. Since the soil now holds more moisture there is less run off when it rains. Also more organic material holds the soil together so any run off has less soil particles. Less water erosion.
I'm not a purist but the quality of our food will increase with the quality of our soil even if we continue to use chemical fertilizers. And with high quality soil we won't need much or any chemical fertilizers.
September 13, 2009 3:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think that it is somewhat unjust to say that increases in meat productions went to the "rich world". New middle class in Asia is eating much more meat than in the past, and I guess that the working class there is eating more meat too.
But the new diet is not healthier, as increasing obesity is indicating. A combination of (a) more family planning -- particularly in places like most of Africa, (b) more vegeterian calories and protein, and fewer animal products, (c) genetic engineering and/or farming practices would assure adequate, and more healthy, nutrition even after drastic decreases in the energy input.
September 12, 2009 9:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
To Astyk and Julian Darley and other so-inclined thinkers, the buying habits of the large Western middle-class is far more influential than the habits of the rich. They tend to lump the Western middle-class in with the rich.
September 12, 2009 11:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
See Donal, another blog that covers issues WE DO NOT NORMALLY THINK ABOUT.
Just saw a great lecture on water and ethanol on CSPAN today. I will be able to get it again tomorrow.
Five gallons of water to process one gallon of ethanol. 100 gallons of water to grow enough corn for one gallon of ethanol.
California cannot afford that. No frickin way.
Great post.
September 13, 2009 1:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
The assumption, of course, is that industrial agriculture has always been engaged in the project of "feeding the world" - Cargill, ADM and Monsanto regularly argue that these are their goals, that their research is required to bring new crops that will make it possible to feed two or three more billion people.
Sometimes, you have to read what is being proposed another way.
Being a food/farm advocate, Donal, I would think you have seen the movie Food, Inc. Everyone should. A poignant part in the movie was when the agribusiness was finishing off the guy who gathered seed for farmers so they could plant next years crops. The agribusiness was using lawyers to accuse those farmers of planting contraband seeds that were actually of the patented variety the agribusiness was selling to 95% of the farmers in that state, essentially, the entire fucking state was beholden to the agribusiness for their seed and unable to use their own natural seeds or anyone elses. Competition had ended. What's my point?
Those corporations that insist they want to feed the world do not want anyone else to have the privilege, not even the smallest of farms. They were honest in what they said. We just give them more credit then they deserve. We assume they want the world to be fed, which is wrong, they want to be the only ones that feed them.
PS - Are you going to blog about the NAIS animal numbering proposition next? I really would love to see it. I'm still educating myself about it, but if the agribusiness is not required to number their animals, what's the point?!?
September 13, 2009 3:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Frankly I wasn't aware of the seed situation until we started planting our own gardens a few years ago. Even though I was raised near working farms, I was amazed that I couldn't find any natural seeds for flowers or plants that reproduce themselves. They want you to buy their non-reproducing seed every year.
And I'm not aware of NAIS, either. Thanks for the heads up.
September 13, 2009 11:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
Have you looked up Territorial Seed Company or Johnny's Seeds?
They're the organic gold standard here in Oregon. And Nichol's in Albany, Oregon, has real, natural seeds as well,
September 14, 2009 2:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
Necessity is the mother of invention.
September 13, 2009 11:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
It sure is.
September 13, 2009 11:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
Wow! Always respect mother!
September 13, 2009 12:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
Great video. I've read a little about Cuba's organic revolution so it was nice to see a bit of it in action. Thanks
September 13, 2009 1:19 PM | Reply | Permalink