Richard Heinberg - Implications of peak oil for agriculture - 01/26/2007

Jonathan Dimbleby: He's flown in from California this morning, and I have to let you know in advance that his very presence here is a carbon offset worth having, and whatever footprint it is, he's also got to get back again. But we are extremely grateful for him coming, it's a measure of how committed he is because he's just been speaking at a conference, the California Eco-Farm Organic Conference, yesterday.

He is distinguished in America and elsewhere as the author of 'The Oil Depletion Protocol' and 'The Party's Over – Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies' and he in 2006 was awarded the M King Hubbert Award for excellence in energy education. Richard Heinberg, will you come and educate us?

(Applause)

Richard Heinberg: Thank you so much. Well, I'll have you know that the jet I flew here on was fuelled with biodiesel.

(Laughter)

Well, I'm going to be talking to you about agriculture and energy and of course food is energy. We human beings are energy junkies and we always have been, and for most of our existence on this planet, food has been the primary source of our energy and our primary means of exerting energy into our environment has been muscle power.

Now we have used our big brains over the past few centuries and millennia to find other ways of harnessing energy from our environments and agriculture actually in essence was a strategy for energy capture.

Now as such, it has been subject to the net energy principle. You have to expend energy in order to get energy; the fox has to expend energy chasing down the rabbit in order to get the food energy from eating the rabbit. Now if the fox has to expend more energy in chasing down rabbits than it gets from eating them, pretty soon, no more fox. That's the way it's been with agriculture over centuries of time. In good years, there was a surplus; in bad years, there was famine.

But we ran enough of a net energy surplus with agriculture over the centuries in order to be able to build complex societies, civilisations, and without agriculture that could not have happened. Pre-industrial agriculture was of course limited by a number of factors. Soil degradation resulted in the collapse of civilisations, repeatedly, and of course nitrogen was a limiting factor in that regard.

Since the beginning of the fossil fuel age, many of those limits have fallen by the wayside. As we have just seen, the human population has grown dramatically. We achieved one billion in 1820, two billion in the 1930s, three billion in the 1960s, four billion in the 1970s, five billion by the late 1980s, six billion by 1999 and we've added another half billion just since 1999, an extraordinary biological success for a species.

But of course it's a perilous kind of success, and what's that success rested on? Well, replacing draught animals with tractors - back in 1900 we used to have to set aside about a quarter of our crop land to grow food for horses, that was part of that net energy principle; we were investing energy to get more energy. Now a horse could do the work of 10 people, so there was a net energy payoff.

But now with tractors, that quarter of our crop land can be devoted to growing more food for more people. Of course, we have hybrid crop varieties, synthetic nitrogen fertiliser made from fossil fuels. We're able to transport food in ever larger quantities ever further distances to support populations in places that otherwise would not be able to grow sufficient food for their people.

Altogether, we're able to support an enormous, and growing, human population, but most of the strategies that we've adopted for doing that rely on fossil fuels. Fossil fuels temporarily made the net energy principle virtually irrelevant. Fossil fuels, formed millions of years ago as we've heard from Colin, and cooked slowly over time, we are extracting during the course of a mere 10 human generations.

And the net energy embodied in fossil fuels is enormous. Perhaps you've had the experience of running out of petrol in your car and having to push it for a couple of metres off the highway - you know that's hard work pushing an automobile. Well, of course a single gallon of gasoline can run a car for something like 30 miles, speaking in US terms here. So that's the energy equivalent of something like six to eight weeks of hard human labour in four litres of gasoline or petrol.

An enormous concentration of energy, and that's what's enabled us to build the industrial world. The amount of energy that we have to invest to get that energy payoff is trivial, the amount of energy that's required to explore or drill for oil compared to the amount of energy that we get back at the end of the day is relatively trivial.

I mentioned natural gas and fertiliser a moment ago. This all comes down to the Haber Bosch process developed just prior to World War I for creating or synthesising ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and the hydrogen in fossil fuels, and hydrocarbons. Using the Haber Bosch process we are effectively able to double the amount of nitrogen available to the biosphere.

Take all of the nitrogen produced from natural sources in a given year, and double that, and that's how much we get from the Haber Bosch process and of course that doesn't go just into the biosphere generally, we apply it specifically to the crops that we want to grow. Vaclav Smil at the University of Manitoba regards the Haber Bosch process as the most important invention of the 20th century because according to his calculations, something like 3 to 4 billion people would not be alive today if it were not for this process.

So, as a result, fertiliser accounts for about 30% of agricultural energy use. But that's not all that we use energy for in agriculture, we use it for powering farm machinery, for powering irrigation pumps, for mechanisation of food processing and crop production, maintenance of animal operations, and on and on. Altogether, over four barrels of oil are consumed to feed each Briton each year.

Now in the US it's almost twice that amount. So this dependence on oil for agriculture is quite extraordinary. In the US, for every calorie of food we produce, we invest ten calories of fossil fuel energy. Now think back to the example I gave you a little while ago of the fox pursuing the rabbits. Now we've created a situation where it's costing us ten times as much energy as we're able to reap from the process of food production. Clearly that would be unsupportable, unsustainable and impossible if it were not for the briefly available, intense source of energy from fossil fuels.

We already heard this morning about the opportunity and challenge of biofuels and for farmers, this can be in some ways an opportunity. Certainly in the US, many farmers are going to receive enormous subsidies for growing corn, soybeans and other biofuel crops. But inevitably, there will be a competition between the food and fuel uses of these crops.

Mariann Fischer Boel of the European Commission responsible for agriculture and rural development just a few days ago made this statement. She said, 'Let's not forget a simple obvious fact. Some biofuels feedstock competes with food production for available farmland. If this competition became too fierce our food production could feel the strain, as could those developing countries which are net importers of food'.

The US is talking about not just producing biofuels in enormous quantities but importing biofuels. And where are the most effective places to produce biofuels? The tropical regions, because the best biofuel crops to grow are sugar cane and palm oil and those are best produced in the tropics. So increasingly, we are going to see farmers in tropical regions growing fuel crops rather than growing food for their own people.

So in summary, industrial agriculture, which has been an amazing success story in terms of producing enormous quantities of food to feed burgeoning populations, nevertheless leaves society vulnerable because of its heavy dependence on depleting fossil fuels. At the same time, industrial agriculture contributes substantially to global warming, as a result not only of its direct use of fossil fuels but also because of the release of carbon from soils through the process of tillage.

So there are some obvious responses here. Clearly, we need to reduce fossil fuel inputs to agriculture. Secondly, we need to re-localise food systems. Why so? Because we have become dependent on food systems that are globalised, transporting ever larger quantities of food ever further distances becomes a questionable strategy if fuel prices are escalating.

We also need to reduce tillage to preserve carbon in soils, but most of the strategies to reduce tillage that are being adopted around the world entail more intensive use of herbicides, so that has to be avoided because of course those herbicides are overwhelmingly made from fossil fuels.

There is an opportunity here which is to begin to see the farm as a source of not only locally produced food for local consumption but also of locally produced energy for local consumption, and I'm thinking here not just of biofuels, but primarily of other sources of energy including wind power and solar power.

You will be hearing in a few minutes about the story of Cuba and how Cuba survived an artificial peak oil during the 1990s. I'm not going to rehearse that story for you now but I would just point out that in Cuba in 1990 there had already been a group of ecological agronomists advising exactly the sort of measures that were in fact required in order for Cuba to survive its energy famine.

Those ecological agronomists had been ignored for years, then when the crisis came they were called in and allowed to re-design the human food system. I think the Soil Association and other organisations of ecological agronomists and agriculturists around the world are in a similar situation to those Cuban advisors. We have been advising exactly these sorts of measures for years and decades. Removal of fossil fuels from food production, local production for local consumption. Now the crisis is upon us and that advice needs to be heeded, and very quickly.

One of the implications of all of this is the need for great numbers of new farmers. In the Cuban experience, they found that without easy, cheap fossil fuels they needed much more hand labour. After all, what happened during the 20th century: millions of farmers left the farm, or were driven off the farm because they could not compete with the giant agricultural machinery fed by cheap fossil fuels. And so the farming classes dwindled, and the middle classes burgeoned, and the order of the day was urbanisation throughout the 20th century and that's a trend still going on.

The 21st century will, I think, almost certainly see the opposite trend, the trend of re-ruralisation, because we will need lots more people engaged in food production. The Cuban experience was that they found they needed something like 15-25% of their population involved in food production, growing food in urban gardens, moving from the cities back to the countryside to work at producing food. If that same percentage holds for other industrialised nations, then extrapolated to the UK we're talking about something like a minimum of 10 million new farmers needed over the next 20 to 30 years.

That's an extraordinary cultural shift to take place in this country, in North America, in many other countries. I believe it will happen whether we plan for it or not. If we don't plan for it, we will see people fleeing cities to the countryside, hoping to grow some food for themselves, and they will fail miserably because as I'm sure as many people in this room realise, it actually takes some skill to grow food.

If we plan for the process, I think we could see a cultural renaissance throughout the world. Our urbanisation has carried an enormous cultural and social cost, including the death of many rural communities. Certainly in North America, I'm very familiar with the story there having grown up in Missouri in the mid-west and seeing that part of the country become a cultural wasteland in the past 50 years.

Exactly the opposite trend needs to occur over the next 20 or 30 years. We need to re-vivify the culture of rural communities so that these places become attractive to people who wish to farm. Now we have examples not just in Cuba but also in North America and in Britain during World Wars I and II. We saw Victory Gardens, the Victory Garden movement. I'm not sure what the story was here, I'm more familiar with the situation in North America.

There, these movements were a genuine social movement. In fact, the US Department of Agriculture tried to discourage the Victory Farm movements in both World Wars because they were concerned that they would get in the way of industrialising agriculture. During World War II, Eleanor Roosevelt decided to grow a Victory Garden on the White House lawn and that sort of changed the course of things, the US Department of Agriculture then decided that Victory Gardens were a good idea and they then took credit for them and started to promote them.

Well, the point of my bringing this up is that during World War II the US grew something like 40% of its vegetables and fruits in backyard gardens. So this is a success story that can be repeated. But policies are going to be required, ultimately, in order to assist in this process of cultural transition of re-ruralisation, of re-localisation of economies and food production.

Policies like land reform, of education for farmers, of loans and other financial incentives. We need higher and stabilised food prices just as we need high and stabilised energy prices in order to give the proper price signals for organisations and companies and individuals to respond.

One positive example I can point to is that of Oakland, California, which has made the goal of growing 30% of the city's food within 50 miles of the city limits by 2020. That city has also made the goal of becoming petroleum free by 2020. We'll see how it does; I've been asked to be on the Mayor's task force to design the strategy for accomplishing this. Quite frankly, I'm not sure how we're going to do it but I know that we have to set robust goals of this nature and use all of our creativity and effort in order to achieve them.

One suggestion I would leave you with is the possibility of the Soil Association conspiring with other similar organisations elsewhere in the world. This last Wednesday evening I was speaking with the Ecological Agriculture Association of North America on the same topic; a few weeks ago I was speaking to the Canadian National Farmers' Union, and others.

I can assure you that there are many other organisations that have exactly similar concerns right now about the impact of future energy shortages on food production, about the need to educate and support millions of new farmers. This is an enormous task, it's going to require more than just one organisation working at it, and it's a task that will have to be addressed in many nations around the world, so this is just a suggestion: that some form of coalition be created to very vigorously pursue the policies that will enable this to happen.

So, finally just to summarise: if the 20th century was about moving people off the farms into the cities, if it was about depending more and more on limited but powerful fossil fuels to replace human labour in food production and to move food ever further distances, the 21st century is going to be just the opposite. It's going to be about the relocalisation of food production. It's going to be about declining oil and gas availability, the declining availability of chemical fertilisers. It's going to be about the increasing need for human labour inputs and the need for more food producers as a percentage of the population.

This century is the century of the great energy transition, a transition away from fossil fuels to what? Well, we don't know exactly. Certainly the bulk of the transition is going to be a matter of simply dealing with less energy, and making up for the gap wherever we can by using renewable sources of energy.

It's going to be an enormous challenge for every segment of society and for every society, but the longer we wait, the greater that challenge will be.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

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