Doing it Different

Doing It Different:

Industrial Agriculture, Peak Oil and Truly Sustainable Living

By Rich and Aimee Douglass

Chateaugay, New York

Original printed in the Small Farmer’s Journal, Spring 2006. Reprinted with permission of the author.

I have followed with interest the recent dialogue about "organic agriculture." When I read Lynn Miller's editorial, "Back to Basics - We know these things," (SFJ Fall 2005) I felt compelled to respond. As someone who has lived 18 years without running water and electricity and grows and raises 70% of the food our family eats, I feel I know a bit about basic living and sustainable agriculture.

Our country, and indeed our world is on the brink of a chasm so wide and so deep only a tiny minority can fathom how it ever could be possible to get across without falling into the abyss. On the side we are on now, we have a society that embraces materialism, consumerism, selfishness, money, power, short-sighted use, anger, stress, and unhappiness. On the other side, you have sustainable agriculture, close-knit caring communities, wise, sustainable use of resources, friends, family, health, and happiness. "Hey, wait a minute," you say, "didn't we used to be on that side a long time ago? How the heck did we get over here?" Yes, how the heck did we get over here. Let's start at the beginning and see where we went wrong.

The early history of agriculture throughout the millennia has been a mixture of responsible sustainable farming on the one hand and irresponsible, short-sighted use on the other. Until recently, irresponsible use would degrade the farmland to the point where it would not sustain the society any longer and the population would crash, then the earth would commence to heal.

Once men started traveling in ships and using horses for transportation, they found they could transport fertility from one place to another. Examples of early fertilizers are: manure, rotting compost, decaying fish, ground bones, wood ashes, bird and bat guano, chalk, wool remnants, seaweed, river and canal mud, and saltpeter. Being able to import fertility caused the carrying capacity of one area to artificially increase freeing a portion of the populace for other labor.

The industrial revolution in Europe during the mid-19t^h century required more and more food for larger populations that produced manufactured goods, but not enough food. Europe solved this problem by importing fertility in two ways; first through food imports from the U.S. (causing fertility deficits there) and second through massive shipments of guano from South America for her worn out farms. Soon the U.S. was in a similar fertility deficit situation and started massive importation of guano itself. By 1860 imported guano made up 45% of commercial fertilizer in the U.S. By the end of the 1860's, guano supplies began running low so another source of fertility had to be found.

Caliche, a Chilean nitrate product, had been known for years but, due to its remote inland location, had not been exploited. With the supply of easily accessible guano almost exhausted, Chilean caliche became the only commercial source of nitrates in the world. Nitrates were not only the raw material for fertilizer but also explosives. As populations increased and wars became more deadly, demand increased rapidly. In the early 20'th century, the last large commercial source of nitrates was being depleted at an alarming rate, raising the specter of widespread famine.

Against this backdrop, the race was on to invent an artificial nitrogen fertilizer. In 1909 Fritz Huber demonstrated the practicality of creating artificial fertilizer from coal using his process. Later natural gas was substituted for a feedstock and also provided the tremendous energy required for the process. Huber's discovery was to usher in a new age of bounty; a flourishing of agriculture crops that was believed would avert the impending food crisis and end world hunger. But what synthetic nitrogen production caused, through the "green revolution," was a rise in the earth's population from 1.6 billion in 1920 to 6 billion today, all as the result of another finite, non-sustainable, temporary, outside fertility source. Synthetic nitrogen use is now so pervasive it accounts for about half of the nutrient input into the world's crops.

All societies are subject to the king of diminishing returns. Greater use of resources (beyond sustainable levels) corresponds with greater population growth, which then causes greater pressure on non-depleted resources. If new resources are not found, the population will crash. Instead of populations crashing, since the middle ages, western civilization has had two great growth surges due to its ability to find and exploit new energy resources at critical moments. The takeover of the Americas, Africa, India, and the Pacific islands offered subsidies of slave labor, metal ores, timber, and agricultural products which all combined to fuel the beginning of industrialism. The discovery and harnessing of fossil fuels, the greatest energy subsidy ever, enabled the second huge growth surge which led to an astronomical population of 6 billion. World wide resource use and depletion, and environmental degradation was also pushed to a level that never before would have seemed possible.

If food production efficiency is measured by the ratio between the amount of energy input required to produce a given amount of food and the energy contained in that food, then industrial agriculture is by far the least efficient form of food production ever practiced. Traditional forms of agriculture produced a small solar surplus each pound of food contained somewhat more stored energy from sunlight than humans, often with the help of animals, had to expend growing it. Today from farm to plate, depending on the degree of processing, a typical food item requires between ten and 300 times its actual food value to produce. This energy defeat can only be maintained because of the temporary availability of cheap fossil fuels.

Modern industrial agriculture has become energy intensive in every respect. Tractors and other farm machinery burn diesel fuel or gasoline; nitrogen fertilizers are produced from natural gas; pesticides and herbicides are synthesized from oil; seeds, chemicals and crops are transported long distances by trucks; grain and prepared foods are processed or dried with natural gas; and food products are packaged in oil derived plastics before reaching consumers.

Modern agriculture is not only extremely energy wasteful, but has ruined formerly fertile and productive soil for any use except continuation of the abuse. It is a well documented fact that chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides are highly toxic to earth worms, all important soil micro-life, and contribute to greater pest susceptibility. Modern mono-culture farming also has removed a high percentage of our topsoil through erosion. In a word, modem agriculture has the worlds' eco-systems headed for disaster!

True sustainability in agriculture is living on the interest that nature gives us, not drawing down resources faster than can be replenished; recycling materials that are non-renewable such as metals, and glass; and returning all organic material to the soil. Maintaining fertility of soil is the good farmers’ foremost concern.. Soil amendments for the farm should come from on the farm, in the form of manures from animals, decayed organic material (compost), or green manures; thereby preserving "The wheel of life."

Fertility and resources cannot be mined from one area to provide short-sighted and temporary returns. Policies like this lead to the devastation of both areas in the long run. When resources are drawn down faster than nature can rebuild, dire consequences always follow, such as: deforestation, erosion, and desertification. We only have to look to lands that were productive, fertile, and diverse in Biblical times and through resource mining are now desert wastelands. The advanced cultures collapsed when their agricultural base literally blew away.

Continued

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