Casaubon’s Book

Sharon June 24th, 2008

After “Where should I live?” the next most frequently asked question I get is “How much land do I need?”  And just like “Where should I live” is a deeply personal question, shaped as much by who you are, where your family is, what you do for a living, etc… as by any rules of thumb, the same thing is true of “how much land do I need.”  That is, it depends on where the land is, what kind of land it is, how much rain you get, what you want to do with it.  The one absolute truth is that with a few exceptions the answer is almost always “less than you think.”

Now when I went looking for land I did what a lot of people did - I wanted as much as I could afford.  I got 27 acres, and in many ways, that’s far too much.  Now don’t get me wrong - I’m delighted I have it.  It gives me choices that other people don’t have.  But I very quickly realized that 3 intensively managed acres could probably have done me nearly as well and that 1/2 acre could do an astounding amount.  There have been times when the only part of this property we’ve used is about an acre of it.

Ok, so the first set of questions applies to you - let’s say you want some land to grow food on.  What’s your situation?  I’d suggest you ask yourself these questions.  I won’t offer any real answers, just things to think about.

1. How old am I, and how good is my health? 

- I was sitting around at dinner with several young CSA farmers in their 20s, and we all agreed that about 2 acres is the absolute maximum that one young, healthy person can farm by hand on their own.  While I nodded my head, because I think I could do two acres if I had to,  at 35, with young kids, I think an acre or an acre and a half is more like it, if you aren’t using powered tools.  By 50 I suspect my estimate will go down to 1/2 acre or less.  And that’s assuming I’m in good health. 

So comes the question - how old are you? Who else will you have around to help?  How healthy are you?  Are you likely to be restricted by health or by something temporary, like pregnancy and babies?  What else do you have to do?

Now these numbers apply to land that you will garden intensively with minimal or no powered equipment - maybe a lawnmower, but not a tractor.  You can stretch that number by adding things that take less attention that an annual garden - orchards and fruiting or nutting plants, livestock, etc… I’ll move on to that in a second.  I’m also assuming you are starting from scratch - that is, if you move to a property (good luck finding it) with an acre worth of carefully tended, established garden with good soil, I would tend to think that someone over 50 could go on managing it as long as they were physically able.  But starting from scratch, and building soil while growing stuff, that’s more work.  More experienced farmer/gardeners will know the management techniques to do more with less, but also to do more with more.  Again, I’m assuming you are fairly new to this.

I would say that a 2 acre hand-tended garden is the absolute outside of what a young, healthy person should attempt to produce by hand working full time.  A 1 acre hand tended garden is plenty for a family with older kids who can help out, with one partner working full time.  A half acre is probably enough for a healthy older couple or people with young children.  And a quarter acre or less should be the absolute maximum for people with health issues mild enough to let them garden, but enough to constrain them.  And these are limits assuming that you really need the food, and that other things aren’t so pressing - you might actually want less garden than this, I’m talking about outsider rabges.

2. What can I use to expand my limits?  And is there really a compelling reason to try?

Obviously tractors fall into this category, as do rototillers (I don’t actually think the latter are that useful in many cases, but I do mention them), but affording the gas to run them can run into real money, and sometime it might not be available.  Plus, there are real limits in practical terms - yes, I know people with tractors on 3 acres, and if you really are farming them full time, that might even make sense if you can share it with others.  But for isolated ownership, the tractor isn’t going to pay for itself unless you are super-handy and can press into service an older model and maintain it.  Everyone I know with a tractor spends a *lot* of time maintaining the thing - and that’s time you aren’t planting or growing.  I know the lure of the tractor - but I’ve never quite given in to it, and mostly, I’m glad.  Since some of my neighbors have them, I can often enrich one of my neighbors for far less than the yearly amortized cost of a tractor.  Is it a pain?  Yup.  But the world doesn’t need more diesel engines, and I don’t need to spend more time with the internal combustion engine ;-).

So what else is out there?  Well, there are draft animals.  But the thing about those is that your draft horses, jacks, mules, oxen, water buffalo, etc… are going to eat a lot of pasture, probably some grain and a good bit of hay over the winter.  You have to have enough land to justify their presesnce.  Since only 8 of our acres are open (the other 19 are woodlot), we simply don’t have that much land - if I got even light draft ponies, I’d use them mostly to…grow feed for my ponies.

Then there are middle options, animals that can eat pasture or the bugs on it or some combination and harvest a lot of their own food, and then provide something you want, like milk or eggs or meat.  But if you are trying to net a better deal (as opposed to just doing it for a hobby or for a better food supply) think carefully about how much land you are devoting to them, and have a plan for what you’ll do if you can’t afford to buy outside feed.  A big herd of sheep looks great until you have to put all their hay up by hand with a scythe - you might find that you want fewer sheep then.  We do put up hay with our scythe, and both of us really enjoy scything - but we don’t try to do 10 acres, either.  And buying grain for animals that require some supplemental graining (poultry for example) can run into real money.

Still, animals can do a lot of work for you - pigs or waterfowl, for example, can do moderate scale tillage and fertilization, while living on mostly pasture and food wastes.  Penning pigs on a piece of land you plan to garden can really be worth doing.   And well maintained permanent pastures can sequester a lot of carbon as the organic matter builds in the soil.  Peter Bane estimates that Joel Salatin’s pastures sequester as much carbon as a comparable forest. 

But if you have a dry or cold season in your climate, you will need to put up feed for that period.  And animals do involve management - that is, you have to have both the time and the ability to handle them for hoof trimming, birthing, etc…  And if you have livestock or perhaps even pets, and the economy tanks, I hate to say it, but there is a decent chance you will have to kill something at some point.  Some of us are ok with this, some not, but because it is not part of contemporary American culture for most people, it is worth thinking about -  there is no retirement home for extra male animals, and meat is valuable in a poor world,  and sooner or later you will have something sick and dying and not be able to afford the vet.  Decide *now* whether you are prepared to do all the work of management involved, before you add livestock to your dreams. 

The other method of extending your management is with perennial plantings that don’t require as much attention as annual cultivation.  My own experiments with this suggest to me that in the first couple of years, while you are planting and establishing and dealing with pest weeds, etc… perennial agriculture isn’t that much less work, if any, than annual agriculture.  Or rather, it is less work for me, because my husband likes to dig holes, but most people who have to do it themselves won’t find that true ;-).  We’re just starting to see our orchards and forest garden plantings pay off (the first ones we planted we planted in a drought year on a field we didn’t realize ordinarily floods repeatedly- proof that hurrying doesn’t always save anyone time and that getting to know your land is key!) 

I would generally say that another 1/4 acre of perennial plantings can be added to any estimate *if* you have help with the initial establishment - that is, an older couple who can manage a half acre garden could also manage 3/4 of an acre, with a 1/4 acre orchard, if they had additional assistance in the establishment phase, or could hire some work out.  

I’m no expert on draft animals, but generally speaking, I think if you have less than 10 acres of pasture/hayfield large draft animals won’t make sense - permanent garden plantings without tillage are easier to establish than to maintain horses.  The exception would be if you have a large woodlot, and can use the animals for logging.  A smaller draft pony might work well on a smaller holding, but finding equipment can be challenging.  But sharing draft animals might well make sense. 

A lot of us have more animals right now than our land can strictly support, because we can afford to buy hay or grain.  It makes sense for both those of us with livestock now and those who want it to think hard about what happens if the cost of transporting and buying feed rise beyond their capacities.  Are you prepared to butcher more animals, or keep a smaller flock?  Think about what strategies you might use to extend your land’s capacities - I’m experimenting a bit with growing root crops from seedballs, so that we don’t have to do any tillage on our hayfields.  But we’re still in the experimental stage.  Amaranth for our chickens seems to be a success as well, but we’re still buying some grain.

Water is another huge issue - all of what I’m talking about implies that you have water, and a reliable way of getting it.  If you have to hand-irrigate your garden for it to produce, you will want the most fertile soil with dense plantings that you can manage - you will not be looking to maximize your scale, but to minimize it, after just one day of hauling water.  The same is true of livestock - if you don’t have a reliable water source, think hard about how much hand pumping and hauling you will want to do in February. 

I haven’t included precise discussions of how many animals land can support, simply because it varies so much - and much of what varies is defined by water.  At the same time, water means that some land is suitable only for grazing - either because it is lush and green but too steep and erodable for easy gardening or because it dries up and turns to desert if it is tilled.  Knowing your place is essential, and choosing animals and plantings that can withstand the outer parameters of your soils, climate and water is the best way to succeed, but I can’t help you with that - the people who live near you who engage in food production can.

The other factor is figuring out what you want to accomplish.  A lot of people when they come to their land either want or imagine themselves to have to be completely self-sufficient, and that generally isn’t realistic.  A lot of us who have come at this through homesteading have played around with a lot of things - tried a little bit of this here and a bit of that here, and that’s a great thing - those experiments teach us all storts of stuff.  But people buying land right now may have to focus in on essentials early on. 

The truth is that most of us are never going to move 100% into the informal economy.  It is also true that the things that pay now aren’t necessarily the things that will pay later.  For example, I can buy 50lbs of potatoes for about 12 dollars in my region.  The seed to grow them would cost me more than that - so potatoes don’t “pay” - but I grow them anyway, for three reasons.  The first is that I can save seed, and the costs get spread out over years.  The second is that potatoes are a staple food crop, and while right now I get a greater return growing grapes or tomatoes or herbs on my food dollar investment, in the longer term, if I need to keep eating, potatoes are essential.  The third is that home-grown potatoes are one of those things that just taste better.  So I grow potatoes - but someone with a smaller garden space might choose now to grow other things, ones that cost more at the market and save her more money, while maybe experimenting just a little with potatoes, enough, perhaps for seed and a few to eat.

Right now, we’re in a transitional phase, and it might make more sense to focus on high value items that lower the grocery budget, and purchase staples - but with staples rising rapidly in price as well, we need to have the ability to shift towards meeting our needs for basics.  For example, right now I grow a lot of greens - we love them, eat them nearly constantly and eat a huge variety.  So I grow bok choy, collards, chard, 15 lettuces, arugula, edible chrysanthemum, beet greens, mizuna…and the list goes on.  On the other hand, my property grows all the lambs quarters, chickweed, plantain and dandelion I could possibly need for me.  While I like these things very much, I still grow the others because I like them.  But many of them will go by the wayside if I ever need the garden beds to grow more potatoes, amaranth and corn, and I keep enough seed to make this shift. 

The other issue is fuel - low input grown biofuels for tractors or chainsaws are one possible permutation that one might want, but in cold climates, wood for heating and cooking is even more likely.  In reasonably wet areas like mine, the estimate is that you can take one cord of wood per acre under good management practices - we’ve been taking a couple of cords (as much as we have time to cut ourselves) off of our land each year - in dryer areas this may be much less.  Very small amounts of woodland and brush should be sufficient to make very small hot fires to cook over, but if you require heating, besides reinsulating and getting used to being cold, you will want more wood.

Given my own concerns that the great eastern forest will be deforested by over harvesting in the coming decades, my own personal feeling is that I want private control over woods that can’t be logged - and having much more woodland than we need permits me to share with friends and family while still keeping the harvest contained. 

The place we’re in can argue for both bigger and smaller.  If you can get a reasonable amount of staple grains, gardens don’t actually have to be that big to keep you well fed - a well managed (note that term - well managed matters) 1/4 acre can grow all the fruit, vegetables and eggs and a little meat and fat for a family of four.  Less would be adequate too.  And the truth is that it is much easier to manage a 1/4 acre than a 1/2 acre - in many cases, a well managed 1/8 acre might produce more food than a 1/2 acre that a family is struggling to manage.

But what you can do now may not be what you need/want to do in the longer term - that is, if actual shortages of staple foods arise, you may find that it isn’t as hard as you thought to manage your 1/2 acre.  And if you can sell your surplus produce for cash or barter, that too has virtues.  Some of us may find ourselves with more people living in our houses, expanding both our need for production and our ability to do the producing.  Or we may shift from a one-gardener to a three-gardener situation as jobs are lost. 

So I have three possible answers to the “how much land do I need” and a bunch of caveats.

1. As much as you can afford.  This applies I think best to younger, healthier people (or the parents of young healthier people who imagine they may be joining them), experienced older farmers, etc… who see themselves working towards personal self-sufficiency plus surplus sales in their community.  In some places this may not be very much at all, for some people this may be quite a lot.  The old “God isn’t making any more land” comment really does apply here - bioproductive land is likely to be the basis of our “new” economy in a more direct way than in the past - that is, land is worth what it can produce, and food and warmth are going to be worth a lot. 

In this case, I’d say, manage and maintain your land for future use - grow woods, plant trees, put in perennial plantings, keep pastures down enough to keep them from turning into something else if you will want them, but don’t feel compelled to use every acre.  You are holding land for the future - this is a good thing. Meanwhile, concentrate your efforts on a small, well manage part and work outwards. 

2. Less than you can afford.  If you live in an expensive area, the idea of getting “land” can be intimidating, particularly if you are young and poor and tied there.  So don’t sweat it.  Astounding amounts can be done on small pieces of land. At first it will see hopeless, as though nothing can be accomplished, but every year you will find a bit more space, and have new ideas.  Commit yourself to managing what you have with the greatest intensity - think of yourself as the next Dervaes family. And recognize the power of sharing - Aaron, my co-author “farms” several of his elderly neighbor’s yards.  You don’t have to own it to grow on it.

For those who are older, in ill health or have their lives taken up by other pressures - elderly family members, babies and small children, etc… it is probably more important that you build fertility and intensively manage what you have than that you push yourself by trying to use a lot of land.  With limited resources, you essentially have the choice of building up or out - that is, you can make less do more or you can make more do less - and the former is usually the better choice, particularly since you can then work on adapting the property not only to your present abilities but to your long term situation.  And instead of trying to meet every need, think in terms of a balance between basic needs and reducing your costs.

3. None at all.  Remember, I mentioned that you don’t have to own land - right now is a difficult time to buy property - first time buyers find it hard to get credit and jobs are unstable.  So for some people, buying land will be a bad idea.  It is often possible to rent space, borrow it from friends or family, get an employer, church or community group involved in bringing land into production, etc…  Tons can be done in containers on a balcony.  Getting involved in your food systems is, I think, non-negotiable in the coming years.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean buying land.

 BTW, on that last note, my family is still looking for another family to consider moving to our property - I’ve described the situation we have here: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/11/52-weeks-down-week-26-more-butts-in.html.  We have more house than we need, ideally set up for sharing, and we’re still looking for the right people.  We’ve talked to a bunch, but it is always hard for people to relocate and give up what they have - but still, I have to imagine there’s someone out there who wants to share.

 Cheers,

 Sharon

• agriculture , garden
• Comments(27)

Sharon June 20th, 2008

John Feffer has a really, really good article over at Asia Times Online.  It points out the deep danger we’re in - how teetery both the world and America’s food and energy systems are.  It is well worth a read, particularly because of its clear articulation of the bind we’re in - the strategies we’ve used in the past to get out of disaster will only accellerate collapse in the very slightly longer term. 

 The analogy that I’ve been using for some time is to the seawater used to extract oil in the Ghawar and other aging giant oilfields.  Matt Simmons, the world’s expert on this subject, argues that you can make the oil production levels look good for a while - but the seawater you pump in only accellerates the day that disaster strikes.  And that’s true of our agriculture - at this point, we’re in a losing race between expanding food production and climate change - all the conventional strategies for growing more food push us faster and faster towards the day that the planet can produce much, much less food.  Every bite of food we eat now through conventional means takes food out of the mouths of our children.

I think many people, deep in their hearts, think that ecological disasters apply mostly to other people.  But, of course, as Midwesterners are finding out right now, that’s not true. And it isn’t over - every image of floodwaters we see is brown - washing precious topsoil away, and pushing artificial fertilizers into water tables.  And the rest of us will be thoroughly schooled in that lesson as well, most likely. 

So how do we avoid becoming North Korea - are there personal or policy approaches that can fix this?  Could you have guessed that I have some suggestions, some obvious, some perhaps not.

The first one is obvious - we need to get the oil and gas out of agriculture - and rapidly.  Farmers are already struggling to afford the fossil fueled inputs that are required for conventional agriculture, and industrial organic agriculture is almost as dependent on fossil fuels as conventional.  And all the fossil fuels, especially artificial nitrogen,  that we use are preventing future generations from eating.  Heck, it won’t take until future generations grow up - most of us under 50 will probably live to see it.

We’re seeing now just how oil and natural gas costs reverbate through the food system, and while it is possible to use wise forms of management to reduce those reverbations, the only possible way to stabilize the food supply and seperate it from volatile energy prices is to end the dependency of the food supply on fossil fuels.  We know that this is possible - besides the study mentioned in the paper above, other studies, including one last year at University of Michigan and a host of others have shown that organic agriculture can match and exceed yields.  Moreover, organic practices that match yields in optimal seasons often exceed conventional yields in times of plant stress - that is organic soils rich in matter hold up better to drought, heavy rains and other difficult conditions.  It isn’t a panacea, but in a world where drought and flooding are inevitable, we need the best cultural practices possible.

 But doing this involves replacing the oil and gas with *people* - that is, when Cuba moved to organic agriculture, it matched and exceeded agricultural yields on small farms.  But the large collective farms owned by the state never could match up yields - one of the agronomists concluded that “farms of this scale are not easily compatible with organic production.”  And that’s the problem - we can get our need for fossil fuels in agriculture down quite low, but we can’t do it without paying more people a living wage to grow food.  And no, this isn’t just me, the UNESCO report made essentially the same claims.

Which brings me to the second conclusion - gardens are even more essential in the fossil transition than they may be overall.  Think about it - food prices are already high - a shift in our economy towards more agricultural labor, and paying farmers better will keep food prices reasonably high, and involve large scale economic changes. That means the cheapest food out there is going to be food grown by those who are not depending on it to make a living - who grow food for subsistence or for very small scale sales on their own land or on community land.  And because they are less dependent on either hired labor or fossil fuels, gardens are the future of affordable food in the US.  Will they meet every need?  No.  But they can make the difference between getting by and widespread hunger. 

The next point is perhaps a bit less obvious.  A few years ago, in my paper “The Ethics of Biofuels” almost no one noticed that one of my principles was that we had to shift our “biofuel’ priorities from corn and soybeans for ethanol and biodiesel to…trees.  For wood.  And perhaps even more importantly, for climate stabilization and for erosion control and soil repair. The home heating crisis I’ve been discussing for years is beginning.  And there is the real danger that the US will deforest itself nearly as badly trying to keep warm as North Korea did trying to grow food.  The long term consequences of that would be horrifying. 

Thus, instead of pushing to grow food on marginal land, moving Crop Protected soils into production (which we’re seeing now), we need to use hilly and marginal lands to grow forests, ideally forests at least partly composed of edible protein, oil and other crops.   We will need the wood, as home heating moves back to biofuels. We will also need the erosion control - midwestern fields once had hedgerows, that could stop the flow of soil, provide space for wildlife, and wood for stoves.  Bringing back the hedgerows might be a beginning strategy.

In already forested areas, the struggle is going to be for management.  And that’s going to have to be a big, big focus of our energies.  The thing is, it gets bloody cold up here ,and most of us have gotten used to “room temperature” being a heck of a lot warmer than it was in any other period of human history during northern winters.  The temptation to burn just a little more is going to be vast.  But we can’t - the pollution will be a disaster, and the deforestation worse.

So we’re going to have to strictly self-regulate our forests - and plant new ones as fast as we can.  And since this is not likely to make it on to the public agenda anytime soon, we’re going to have to do it on our own, on the small pieces of soil we tend.

It wouldn’t be easy for us to turn into North Korea - it would take a lot of bad management.  But it wouldn’t be so hard we couldn’t do it, either.  We’ve got to do better.

 Sharon

• agriculture , global warming , peak oil
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Sharon May 28th, 2008

“I am worried about the decline of farming communities of all kinds because I think that among the practical consequences of that decline will sooner or later be hunger.” - Wendell Berry

I was struck yesterday by this news report about the problems food pantries are having with new needs and fewer donations.  Although the whole thing is disturbing the most disturbing part to me was this passage:

 ”‘If gas keeps going up, it’s going to be catastrophic in every possible way,’ said Ross Fraser, a spokesman for America’s Second Harvest.

Food banks sometimes have to move food 150 miles to a food pantry, he said.

‘You’re going to get to the point where they are going to have to decide whether it’s cheaper to just give a food pantry a check,’ he said. ‘The price of gasoline is going to drive the price of everything else.’”

This is troubling not just because of its wider truth, but because the problem being articulated was precisely the difficulty in the Great Depression.  There was again, plenty of food to be hand, but most people were too poor to buy it, and producers couldn’t get enough to make it worth bringing to market.  I recently included this in _A Nation of Farmers_ and was chilled by how strong the echoes were.

Oscar Emeringer, testifying before a Congressional subcommittee in 1932 described the paradox of “appalling overconsumption on one side and the staggering underconsumption on the other side…” and described wheat in Montana left unharvested because of low prices, thousands of bushels of apples rotting beside the road in Oregon, an Illinois farmer who killed 3,000 of his sheep in a fall, and threw their bodies into a canyon because the cost of shipping the sheep was greater than the cost of sale. In Chicago, men picked for rotting meat scraps through garbage cans.  He goes on to add, 

“The farmers are being pauperized by the poverty of industrial population and the industrial populations are being pauperized by the poverty of the farmers.  Neither has the money to buy the product of the other, hence we have overproduction and underconsumption at the same time and in the same country.”

But I might just as easily have begun with the pleas of a Chicago school Superintendent, who begged Congress for funding for schools.  11,000  school children had no food at all at home, and were being kept alive by a collection taken up by teachers and parents.  But the teachers had not been paid for 3 months, and their ability to keep their students alive was fading.  As summer approached, William J. Bogan pleaded with the Illinois Governor,
“For God’s sake, help us feed these children during the summer.”

We are not there yet, but this passage of the above article seems an early harbinger:

” In Baton Rouge, La., the public school system has found students hoarding their free and reduced-price lunches so they can bring them home and have something to eat at night.”

The nutritional value of school lunches has already declined due to the rising cost of food.  Now we stand on the cusp of the summer months, in which millions of American schoolchildren who used to be assured of a free breakfast and lunch will now have access only to park lunch programs that can feed a tiny percentage of them. 

The way market forces and economies of scale prevent producers and consumers from connecting in hard times may well be the single best argument for a relocalized agriculture.  The scale of industrial production, in which food is transmitted long distances, advanced purchased on contract and unavailable to million and billions of poor people is destructive all the time - but it is acutely destructive in times of energy shortage and high prices. 

If we can bring food production into the cities and suburbs, getting as many lawns as possible covered with gardens, as many balconies and rooftops covered with containers, if we can bring food production back to the near areas of those regions, there is hope for those who eat and those who grow to come together in ways that are mutually beneficial.  If not, as energy prices rise and food prices move out of reach of more and more people, things, as they say, fall apart.  As they already are for the poor.

Shalom, 

Sharon

• agriculture , poverty
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Sharon May 1st, 2008

I have come to feel that the term “mess” does not adequately describe the complexity of our present food crisis.  In fact, the whole thing reminds me of that old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon in which Calvin complains that scientists give things lame names, and that the “big bang” should be called “the great big space kablooey.”  As I attempt to sort the present food situation into something that can be clearly articulated in our book, I find myself thinking that what we are experiencing might well be described as the “Great Big Food Kablooey.”

What do I mean?  Well, for a fairly long time, the world food system (if we can speak of such a thing as a coherent mass) went along mostly doing much of what it was supposed to.  It didn’t work super well - for example as Lappe et al document in _World Hunger: 12 Myths_, most of the claims that Green Revolution food increases reduced hunger were pretty much false - hunger increased even as food production increased in most nations, except China, which had huge reductions in hunger.  But whether communism or Borlaug was the cause, the number of hungry got kinda smaller, as long as you only looked at it on a world scale, and as long as you felt that the better diets of chinese peasants somehow compensated for starving Guatemalans.  And while the industrial food system shortened some lifespans and raised medical costs in parts of the rich world, still, lotsa people were eating - some too often.

That’s not to say that the system was optimal - for example, we’ve known for years that you could get the same yields with fewer inputs at lower cost using organic agriculture.  Many studies suggested that even if yields fell slightly (and that wouldn’t necessarily be the case) poor people would be able to have more food in total because their profits wouldn’t be so badly eaten up by the cost of fertilizers and seeds.  

Certainly, agricultural dumping drove millions of farmers off their land and into cities, and shifted agricultural production in complex ways.  It made poor use of land, since smaller farms are more productive and can be managed sustainably.  It stripped resources that will be needed by future generations and essentially threw them away.  It was a crappy, unjust, toxic system that sorta worked in the short - and thus, any solution that suggested that we didn’t have to have things be quite so crappy, unjust and toxic had to bear up under the shouts of protest by entrenched powers that nothing else could work, and this did.

But the system has more or less stopped working,  rather, I think to the surprise of all of the people (me included) who thought it would eventually stop working.  It wasn’t that we hadn’t been saying that all these problems would build up - but to have it happen quite so rapidly is something of a shock.  And it brings home the message - food is complicated. 

 Moreover, the driving forces of our present crisis are precisely the same structures that worked so (kinda) well.  In order to change our present model, we’re going to have to back up, pick a new course, and go over some heavy ground (rendered heavy by us) as lightly as possible.  Is that feasible?  Sure - I wouldn’t be writing a book about it if I didn’t think it was possible.  But it is also the case that what is falling apart is rather larger than the food or energy system itself.

Now despite the fact that virtually every post I’ve written on this subject has included the terms (often in big capital letters for emphasis) that THERE ARE NO ACTUAL SHORTAGES AND WE HAVE ENOUGH FOOD TO FEED THE WORLD’S POPULATION, people keep insisting that I don’t understand this point.  I admit, I’m a bit at a loss as to how to make it clear that I do ;-).  Unfortunately, that observation doesn’t help us nearly as much as it would seem to. 

It is certainly true that almost all of our food problems have to with access, not absolute quantities of food.  But then again, as Amartya Sen has shown, that’s always the case - since the end of the last century, famine has virtually always been a result of access issues.   Even the famous 1980s Sahel famine occurred while Ethiopia and Eritrea were exporting substantial quantities of food.   Saying that this is “just” bad policy doesn’t get us very far - because the bad policies we’re talking about - rationing food by price, globalization of agriculture, over-reliance on fossil inputs, growing inequity, powerful corporate interests whose profits come ahead of feeding people,  heavy consumption of meat and oil or food-based oil substitutes by the rich - are very powerful forces, heavily institutionalized and hard to counteract.  They aren’t so much policies, as expressions of our deepest social inequities. 

But more than that, acknowledging that access is fundamentally the problem doesn’t mean that there aren’t issues of scarcity tied into the larger issues of access.  And this is what I mean by “Great Big Food Kablooey” - that is, it is insufficient to say that there’s enough rice to feed the whole world plus reserves for whatever number of days.  Why?  Because food is complicated.

When there’s a scarce resource, the closer you get to having just enough for everyone, the lower and lower the chance of equitable distribution.  Now it is important to note that this chance is not 0 - just smaller.  Markets as we have them now mostly work on the theory that if you pour out lots and lots of something, most people will get some, and that’s kinda, sorta true if you ignore the ones who don’t.  But as supplies for a given population get smaller, equitable distribution becomes more important - if there’s two of everything for everyone, and everyone needs at least one, some mechanism is required to make sure that everyone gets at least one. But that’s exactly the opposite of what global industrial food systems are designed to do - they are designed to concentrate resources.  And that’s what is happening now - biofuels, meat consumption and speculation, along with increases in agricultural yield and input availability that are often not keeping pace are causing a crisis.

Is there enough rice to feed the world?  Well, yes.  Estimates suggest that there is, and a bit more.  We had record rice harvests last year.  But those number are complicated by a host of things.  One of them is the political necessity of building reserves.  World food reserves have fallen steadily, but the world picture doesn’t really give you a good perspective.  Vietnam, according to one report I had from a UN official I queried, was down to a two day supply for its country.  China, which already holds large reserves, also has fairly recent cultural memories of famine, and several reports have suggested that China is buying rice up rapidly, because of the urgent necessity of reassuring its population that it will not go hungry.  At least two different people I spoke to also suggested that China was replacing its purchases of US Treasuries with rice, since rice was a better deal.

Reserves are not just speculation - and they aren’t a bad thing.  That is, as terrible as the situation is right now, if countries were to open up their rice reserves (as Thailand is doing right now) and then have a bad harvest, the situation would be that much more dire.  It is also a difficult political balancing act - keeping the anger of the hungry in check requires that countries do something about it - stockpiling and keeping prices low is one of those things.  But that does have the result of exacerbating hunger in nations that cannot be food self-sufficient.  That is, operating in a society where food sovereignty has been heavily penalized, those solutions solve one part of the crisis by exacerbating another. 

That doesn’t mean that there is an absolute shortage of rice, but that there is a shortage of available rice for sale in some places - and it isn’t much consolation to rice eating people if there’s no absolute shortage, but no rice in their stores.  Even less if there’s plenty and not a bite they can afford. 

In some places in the US, there are supply constraints, as the US, which is virtually the only major rice exporter not to raise tariffs or limit exports, attempts to compensate for loss of supplies that come from Thailand and India without reducing exports.  Globalization has meant that most nations import and export lots of equivalent items - just because the US grows rice, doesn’t mean that the rice in your supermarket comes from the US - the rice grown in Louisiana or California this year may have been committed to export to Thailand long before it was harvested.  So short term supply problems are probably the name of the game.

Now one would expect (and indeed experts are predicting) rising food prices to motivate farmers to plant more grain.  And that almost certainly will be true in some places and in some circumstances.  For example, Thailand is planting a third rice crop this year, which should help stabilize prices somewhat.  But on the other hand, in Tanzania and Vietnam, farmers are finding themselves unable to afford the rising costs of inputs and transport.  Tanzania is supposed to be food self-sufficient - but because the country technically produces enough food does not mean that that food ends up in the hands of the hungry, or that they can afford to buy and eat it.

“‘The uncontrollable increase in food prices is becoming a serious problem in Tanzania. I say so because in most cases I do buy food to feed my family and it is a fact that there has been a constant increase in food prices in Tanzania. Maize, rice and beans, which are staple foods here, have doubled in less than three years.

“There are number of reasons leading to the rising food prices. One is that poor farmers in Tanzania are no longer planting more food crops as was the case in the past because they have no money left for inputs which are also becoming too expensive.

“Unfavorable weather conditions in recent years have led to the decline in food production. For instance, last year in Tanzania we faced drought. With scarce rainfall, food production declined a large percentage. Consequently, this has a negative impact on the country’s poverty alleviation efforts.

“Another reason is the spill-over effects of the increased world fuel prices. This is attributed to the fact that in some regions of the country there is plenty of food harvested, yet the food cannot be transported to the other regions facing the scarcity because it is too expensive to meet such transportation costs.

“Authorities say up to 300,000 tonnes of maize imports are currently required to meet the national food requirements. Maize is a staple food in Tanzania. Prof. Peter Msolla, the Minister for Agriculture, Food Security and Co-operatives, a few days ago was quoted saying that so far only 6,500 tonnes of maize have been imported despite the government’s waiver on taxes on imported foodstuff as an incentive for importers.

“The waiver was aimed at stocking up the national food reserve. In January, the government announced the tax waiver for a period of five months from January to May. This was arrived at following an analysis by the Ministry of Agriculture of the declining food production, with maize production for the 2007/2008 season, coupled with severe food crises in 21 districts of Tanzania.

“Maize importers however said that even after the duty waiver, they were unable to get substantial volumes and attributed this to the fact that most countries that produce grains in large quantities had turned to the lucrative bio-fuel production instead.”

 In one report, Vietnamese subsistence farmers are actually going hungry, because they can’t afford enough fertilizers to feed themselves - the majority of the world’s poor are land poor farmers who grow much of their own food - and who also buy some.  And all through the poor world, there’s increasing evidence that energy and input costs are simply eating up the profits:

“‘The profits are not in the hands of the farmers,’ said Vo Tong Xuan, a rice economist and professor in Vietnam. ‘The profits are enjoyed by middlemen and speculators who hoard the rice to sell it at a higher price.’

He worries that the Vietnamese government, bowing to pressure from urban consumers, will order a reduction in rice prices. This would impoverish many farmers, since their costs are still rising, he said.”

Because the profits from agriculture are not reaching farmers, their incentives have to be not some noble goal of “feeding the world” but the bottom line - keeping their families fed and their land going.  The article above blames this on export restrictions, which probably don’t help, but the root cause is industrial agriculture’s constant distortion of markets (in the false name of “free” markets) by concentrating agricultural profits into the hands of middlemen, processors and speculators. 

Over the last decade, the percentage of profits that farmers worldwide receive on a bushel of grain has plummetted all over the world, while the proportion of inputs need to keep up crop yields has risen.   This concentration of wealth has most disproportionately affected small farmers - who provide a majority of the world’s food.  Hundreds of millions of small farmers have been displaced into cities, their land nationalized or developed.  Reversing that trend will require major systemic alterations.

And it is worth noting that this destruction of small scale agriculture is not an accidental consequence of industrialization, it is intentional.  That is, the concentration of wealth into smaller and smaller numbers of hands is the intended result of growth capitalism.  We are told, endlessly, that if we just increase productivity and yields a bit more, eventually some of it will leak down to the poor, but, of course, the opposite has occurred - inequity has spiked, and many of the gains of the developing world have come at the cost of working class denizens of the Global North, as analysis after analysis suggests.  That is, the industrial system *works* in part by displacing farmers into cities, and paving agricultural land, and by impoverishing farmers.  It is not at all clear that a system in which they were enriched, or even just paid fairly, would work. 

And while there is no absolute shortage of food, there are actual shortfalls of fertilizer availability - and fertilizers are the lifeblood of the industrial system we’ve created, remember?  Again, at this point, there is not yet an absolute shortage - but the chances of any resource ever being 100% equitably distributed is pretty much nil - and less when its distribution is controlled by market forces whose primary goal is not equity, but profit.

Thus, many of the same factors that are affecting poor world food production are affecting it in the rich world.  For example, world demand for wheat is expected to rise again next year - one would think that would lead to more acres of wheat planted in the US. In fact, that’s unlikely:

“The ethanol boom, in particular, is providing strong incentives to keep former wheat acres in corn. Within a year, Braaten will be able to truck his corn to three modern ethanol refineries, one already built and two others near completion. These huge distilleries will need corn from an area about the size of Rhode Island, and many of the acres will come at the expense of such traditional crops as wheat and sugar beets.

Corn has even begun to make inroads in the western part of the state, where sparse rainfall and the short growing season traditionally have ruled out most crops except wheat, barley and oats. Spurred by the availability of cheap coal for power and a local cattle industry that will buy the dry byproducts for feed, a new ethanol plant opened last year in Richardton, west of Bismarck, the capital.

“There’s getting to be more and more corn all the time,” said Clark Holzwarth, the refinery’s commodity manager.

At current prices, farmers like Braaten can make more money from an acre of corn than from an acre of wheat, according to North Dakota State University economist Dwight Aakre. But wheat’s biggest problem is susceptibility to disease, which has turned many farmers against it.”

Since most of the growth in corn production will go directly into gas tanks, and the soybeans in large part of livestock, what we will see is a net reduction in land actually producing food for people.  This is at a time when nearly everyone agrees that what is desperately needed is more land put into agricultural production.  The problem is that where there is land, there is often not water.  And where there is water, the land is often under development. 

This essay is already too long for me to do a full analysis of water or climate change - but the net realities of both aquifer depletion and the increased levels of irrigation required to keep up with rising temperatures mean that as long as we’re working on the theory that we need enough for cars and cows as well as people, agriculture productivity will never be able to keep up - period.  It is the original caucus race.

The problem is markets themselves, and globalization itself.  That is, despite food riots and unrest breaking out all over the world, the voices that demand more equity are being overpowered by the idea that we must produce more food.  The problem is that, just as in the Green Revolution, more food does not translate to more equity. 

And the present situation means that gains in food production, even if they could happen quickly will likely to be lost.  For example, agricultural speculation and trading is profitable in a world where an increasing number of other sources of profit are drying up.  Although US interest rate cuts are still not keeping the economy alive, and are increasing hunger worldwide, US interests always trump hunger as we saw in yesterday’s rate cuts - even when growing numbers of Americans are among the hugry.  With world population growing at 1.6% a year, and consumption of meat growing far faster in the Global South, it is wildly unlikely that food production will ever keep pace.  Scrapping biofuels would help, but it would also drop the bottom out of agricultural prices for farmers and likely see thousands of American and European farmers driven into bankruptcy and off their land in the shorter term. 

That’s not to say we shouldn’t do it, but there is no such thing as an act without consequences - and food price volatility is part of the problem.  For example, the volatility of the last decades in agriculture has meant that 77% of the children of farmers don’t have any interest in following in their parents’ footsteps, despite the fact that North American and European farmers are overwhelmingly nearing retirement age.  Their parent discourage them - most don’t want their children to be farmers, and the ethanol boom has not changed the opinions of the farmers I’ve talked to - yes, they are having a boom now, but there isn’t a farmer I’ve met who believes that they won’t have the rug jerked out from under them again and again and again.  Whether that’s true or not (and it probably is) the overarching forces of the markets are again pushing against more farmers, which means against future yields.

John Michael Greer has an essay that takes me to task at some length for overstating the case in my essay “We Regret to Inform You.”  He says,

“Meanwhile, on the other side of the spectrum, the number of voices proclaiming the imminence of total collapse has skyrocketed. Typical is a recent post in Sharon Astyk’s useful peak oil blog. Astyk claims that recent events have decisively settled the debate between the fast-crash and slow-grind models of post-peak oil reality, in favor of the fast crash – and we’re already in it. Her argument is basically that the drastic spikes in food and energy costs over the last few months have outrun the limits of the slow-grind scenario; ergo, the fast crash is here.I’ve commented several times in these essays about the way that linear thinking distorts our view of the future, and Astyk’s prediction makes a good example. The drastic price spikes in many commodities over the last few months offer a warning that shouldn’t be ignored, but treating them as evidence that industrial society is about to implode imposes a linear model onto the complex realities of socioeconomic change. The fact that change is happening quickly right now does not mean that it will continue to happen at the same pace, or even in the same direction.”

Greer seems not to have understood my point, in that he seems to think that my claim was that we are entering “total collapse” and that I made prediction of “the immanent collapse of industrial society.”  In fact, I didn’t go so far as to predict anything - I described what had occurred, without ever mentioning my vision of the future of industrial society.  The whole point of my post was that we are in a fast crash - and that crash doesn’t necessarily look like a post-apocalyptic novel, or lead to the immediate and complete downfall of industrial society.  I wrote:

“And so how does the story end?  If you were reading this in a history book, what ending would you expect to see?  Because just because the crash doesn’t quite read like a post apocalyptic novel doesn’t mean that we aren’t the new Po-Apoc (like Po-Mo, only darker) generation.”

That is, crashes aren’t, as Dmitry Orlov puts it, a one stop drop to the bottom of the elevator shaft - 100 million new hungry in a matter of a few months is a crash - that is, it is a complete and utter disaster. And we are part of that disaster, we are not seperate from  it, as Greer seems to suggest we are,  in either a moral or cultural sense. As I point out in a subsequent post:

“…the perfect equal opportunity crash probably won’t ever happen.  The question is how much any given crisis will apply to you - or rather that’s part of the question.  The other question is this - if the world is crashing down around the poor and the hungry, when do we see it, not as their problem, but as ours?  When do we see it as a world-crash, not a poor-crash? 

My major objection to Greer’s post is that their analysis amounts to a “the poor are always with us” narrative, in which “crash” is always, ever-more deferred.  Of course, if we’re waiting for the stockbrokers and the Begali rice farmer to experience the world through lenses of equal suffering, the crash will never, ever come.  Of course, those who suggest that this is a disaster that is fundamentally different from what has come before us (and yes it is different too from most of the 19th century famines that Greer invokes) are overstating things - one can, of course, invoke larger historical narratives to claim that anything is a blip.  In historical overview, historians have been known to argue that even Rome didn’t crash - it merely had a 2000 year period of consolidation with a substantial dip in population growth and a less than perfectly smooth transition to a tourist, rather than empire, economy ;-).

As others have said, it is perfectly possible to over-react to signals of a crisis, to see the sky falling in every eclipse.  It is also, however, perfectly possible to *under* react to such signals - for example, most economists predicted a minor bump and a quick recovery during the Great Depression.  Up until the very moment that people had to acknowledge that the Soviet Union had fallen apart, there were competent, intelligent analysts saying this was merely a downturn.  It is both risky and potentially problematic to predict early in a crisis that bad things are happening.  It is also risky and potentially problematic to predict that they aren’t - the truth is that sometimes short term signals do lead, more or less directly - to disaster.  All disasters show some signals beforehand, and in many cases, the results are predicted by some people correctly.  I don’t claim to say that my predictions are right, merely that the argument that short term data doesn’t necessarily tell us where the larger picture is going is wrong.  Sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes it does.

Greer assures us that the crisis is driving market signals in a complex system amounts to a balancing.

“At the same time, rising prices in a market society also help drive responses to crisis. Here in Oregon, much of the farmland in the long and fertile Willamette valley has been used for years to grow grass seed for the lawn-improvement market. This year, though, a good many of the grass-seed farmers are planting wheat instead – the grass seed market is weak, while the price they can expect for wheat is higher than it’s been in generations. Similar responses are beginning to show up in other agricultural and economic sectors; that’s the sort of response that can be expected, after all, from a complex homeostatic system.”

And he’s right - up to a point.  Am I glad that the grass seed people are growing some wheat.  Sure.  Is that a good sign.  Sure.  But, as Greer himself acknowledges (and I rather agree with most of the latter half of his post), the system under which those signals are being sent is failing miserably.  As I think I’ve shown above, the problem with the system is that it isn’t enough to do a light overhaul - the distortions in signals being sent under the current system are so great that averting disaster means overhauling the global economy. 

The good thing is that this is probably necessary, and thus may actually happen, to the world’s long term benefit.  The bad thing is that overhauling the global economy will most likely be extremely rough on those most held in thrall to it - the world’s poorest people, and the poor and former middle class of the Global North, who have given up pretty much all ties to the informal economy and replaced them with links to the formal economy.  Greer’s “rough couple of decades” and my “fast crash” are really not very far apart at all.  Neither of us believe that peak oil or climate change is the end of the world (in fact, I wrote a post with that title a bit over a year ago). 

So why call it a crash?  Well, because it is one - because the system is literally falling apart because of its own internal structure.  The Great Big Food Kablooey is an implosion, created by the system itself, and it will have to be replaced with another system if we are to have a working food system - it isn’t just a matter of some minor modifications on what exists already.

Greer ends with an assumption I find somewhat inexplicable.  He says of living in his rough few decades,

“That need not stop us from facing the emerging crisis with as much grace and humanity as we can muster, while doing our part to lay the foundations for the ecotechnic societies of the future – unless, that is, we allow premature proclamations of triumph or catastrophe to distract us from the work that must be done.”

I admit, I’m a little puzzled as to how the articulation that we are in a different, and rapidly changing crisis, is a “distraction” from what we must do.  Of course we agree that we should do the work and gracefully.  But why is it that we also must not attempt to figure out whether we are on the cusp of a deep or shallow change?  I realize that the time I spend writing my posts (and he his) could perhaps be used more usefully, and I will gracefully conceed to wasting time now and again.  But I think that ultimately, this operates as a strawman, and a troubling one at this.  The idea that saying “things are different now, we need to work faster and harder” is a “distraction” (with no evidence provided for this claim) not only is a distraction itself - that is, it suggest we’re better off arguing about whether we should be arguing about this than getting to work, and it artificially magnifies comparatively small differences - but it also, I think, works against human psychology.  As Samuel Johnson noted, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Most radical changes in society occur when they *have* to - Cuba transformed its agriculture, not when its agronomists made a compelling case for organics, but when people were going hungry.  Already, world hunger is driving both good and bad responses - one government already overthrown, the Egyptian army baking bread, nations concerned about food sovereignty.  Articulating that we can no longer go on as we have been is not, I think a distraction, but of great utility in creating food sovereignties and economies that can feed the people. 

Sharon

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Sharon April 28th, 2008

This is a guest post by my internet friend, Elaine Solowey.  She sent me this piece and I liked it so much that I couldn’t resist publishing it here:

Elaine Solowey is a displaced orcharder who went into agricultural research in 1985. She has been researching low water use, sustainable crops for arid and saline areas for the last twenty years and domesticating desert plants for use as food and medicinals. She has worked cooperatively with MERC/AID, the IALC, the FAO and the Natural Medicine’ s Unit of Hadassah Hospital. She lives, works and teaches at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies with her husband Michael. Her books _Small Steps Towards Abundance_ and _Supping at God’s Table_ are both available through Amazon, and highly recommended - the latter, though is a bit more technical.

Here’s her wonderful essay on yet another thing we’ve thrown away as though it were garbage. 

Peak Farmers— “Not a Bibbed Overall In Sight”
That was the title of a particularly obnoxious article written in the late 1990’s extolling the wonders of agribusiness and agri-tech — promising fertilizers delivered by guided rocketry, fields plowed by smart lasers and huge computer run combines cultivating and harvesting whole counties for crops that would not be touched by human hands.
And not a bibbed overall in sight.
 

That was the point of the whole shallow, arrogant, machine-worshipping paen to the destruction of the countryside–.
 

The article was promising production without producers, an ultimate free lunch.
 

Would anyone write a piece like that now in 2008?
 

Joel Stein, the Angelino columnist said just last fall. “Agribusiness feeds us. Farmers are obsolete. They are one step above fire starters and cave painters”.
 

Now with food prices rising, food riots in 35 countries as of this writing and the concerns about peak oil, peak food, peak phosphorus, peak fertilizer finally crashing into mainstream consciousness it is surprising to me that no one connects the current crisis with a peak that was passed long ago.
 

Peak farmers.
 

But that peak should not be a surprise to anyone.
 

For the last 100 years there has been a world-wide effort to get rid of farmers…
Some were eliminated for political reasons the way that Stalin starved the Ukrainians to death and shipped the kulaks off to Siberia.
 

Some were driven off their land by the vast illegal enclosure actions of wealthy landowners in South American nations.
 

The Nazis in WWII swept up the farming inhabitants of Russian and Polish and Jewish villages and worked them to death in the factories that fed their war machine.
 

Millions of farmers were displaced by dams financed by the World Bank
 

Millions more were removed from agriculture by the policies of the WTO.
 

Some had their farms were taxed out from under them and the land tuned over to developers who built cheap houses and strips malls on it.

And more were eliminated by agricultural globalization, the belief that every farmer should specialize and produce as much of their single product as possible (to the neglect of everything else) - then we would all merrily cross- ship these things to each other for ever.
 

Still others were “sanitized” out of business. The small dairies and animal husbandry operations could not afford the large and expensive machines needed to raise animals and process milk and meat under the rules of “modern” hygiene.
 

These small operations were declared to be inefficient and dirty, never mind the fact that modern “hygienic” production units for meat and milk are nightmarishly cruel, filthy, and squalid.  (Indeed, a backyard pigpen or chicken coop is a relative paradise compared the confining “crush” pens of the modern pig farm or the cage batteries of the modern poultry house.)
 

So farmers were eliminated, one after another, by murder, displacement, bankruptcy, by taxes that would not let land be passed from generation, by on- farm prices that left farmers unable to feed their own families, by subsidies that favored farms beyond human scale.
 

Many studies over the years showed that the small farm produced much more food with less environmental damage than the larger “economic” models. But the “economic” models produced more of their one product and looked good on paper, never mind the cost to the locale, the water or the soil or the people who lived in the area.
 

Get big, said the US secretary of agriculture.
 

Or get out.
 

So we got out.
 

Not that we had much choice in the matter.
 

I escaped into agricultural research, I will probably never own a piece of land that I can improve and cherish, but at least I have had the privilege and pleasure of taking care of trees and medicinal plants, tasting strange fruits, working with other people who love the green growing things of the world.
 

There is not much financial support for the kind of work I do and grants are hard to come by–I may have to go through the tiresome scientific rituals of recorded observation, boring empiricism and endless paperwork-but I regard that as an acceptable price to pay.
 

Most of us were not so lucky and had to make do with whatever job a dumb farmer who lost the farm could get.
 

And for many of us there were no jobs at all.
 

Though the peak for farmers was passed long ago there is still a persistent strain of anti- farmerism in the world, reflected by rules and laws that coddle GM technologies and outlaw open pollinated seeds, that allow modern dairy farmers to burn out their animals in a few years by giving them growth hormones but outlaw the keeping of a few goats or chickens in a rural yard.
 

In the US the average farmer is 55. And there is no one to follow.
 

Exactly my age by the way.
 

And I am getting tired of the endless, thankless work I do, the reports no one reads and the policies that never change and thinking longingly of a little garden somewhere where I can grow my own food and do what I have always wanted to do while I still have the time.
 

We are almost gone-and now that we are as the modern world has wanted us to be.
Extinct, obsolete, one step from the fire starters and cave painters.
 

Who will grow your food for you?
 

Just when you need them—there is not a bibbed overall in sight.

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