I was elated to find the embedded BBC documentary on YouTube. A Farm for the Future (2009) looks at modern farming’s dependence on fossil fuels– be it organic farming or not– and the problems this dependence causes.
Colin Campbell is probably the top expert on ‘Peak Oil’ and I was pleasantly surprised to see him featured in this documentary. I can’t recommend his writing highly enough. Dr. Campbell’s ideas have met resistance in financial and government circles for two reasons: 1) it’s not yet clear how the powers that be will share the profits from peak oil 2) peak oil has a lot of ugly, unpopular consequences. Therefore, there’s no first-mover advantage in addressing the oil-problem and Dr. Campbell’s warnings are not welcome.
It would be foolish to expect any leadership from government on the issue of oil-dependent farming. It’s painful to admit that we just can’t feed all the people we have. Yet, that’ exactly the problem at hand. Modern farming is unsustainable, but modern cities were grown to be fed this way.
The second point of gloom is that we’ve waited too long to develop alternative energy sources. It takes energy to make energy, and cheap oil was our chance to transition to energy sources that are more efficient. Solar power, wind energy, wave energy, nuclear (cough) aren’t going replace crude oil.
Any way you cut it, we’re all going to have to figure out how to survive on something closer to 1850s-style agriculture. That’s not recycling newspaper, nor is it running a 400-horse-power tractor on biodiesel, nor is it spraying 1/8 as much as usual with an FDA-approved-organic fungicide. 1850s agriculture means a lot more farmers, smaller farms, a few horses per farm, only using materials that are available within a few miles of the farm and drastically reduced output.
A Farm for the Future tries to offer some innovative alternatives to current farming practices, which is both a strength and weakness of this documentary. It’s refreshing to hear some rational thinking about food sustainability; but there’s little analysis of alternative food production options, and even less thought about the unavoidable consequences of sustainable farming. There are just too many people, and nothing about any Western-inspired social policy is calibrated to deal with that.
So, according to the producer Rebecca Hosking, what are the best alternative food production options?
Woodland gardens and ‘permaculture’: Woodland gardens are food-producing gardens that rely on indigenous ecosystems to support a range of foods: like berries, chestnuts, mushrooms. Permaculture is a slightly more organized implementation of the same idea. The thinking farmer’s consensus is that the only sustainable way of feeding ourselves is foraging– or something very close to foraging.
As I’ve written before, the concept of foraging is appealing to me. Last week was morel season on our farm and it’s easy to get romantic about feeding yourself from a cozy woodland plot. A Farm for the Future shares this romanticism, and there is no shortage of permaculture-enthusiasts making predictions about how one acre of forest might feed 10 people with only 10 days of maintenance labor a year, etc.
But the truth is, for 95% of the year, woodlands produce very little food that humans can eat, and left to its own devices, our 10 acres of forest can just about support 3-4 deer and a family of foxes. The same limitations apply to hedgerows. While hedgerows are pretty, you need a lot of blackberries, thistles and mulberries to feed a grown man. I’ve collected from our hedges for a few years now, and even with ‘careful steering’, a hedge is not going to make a dent in your grocery bill. And they certainly won’t with only 10 days of labor per year maintaining them!
To put that in perspective, back before European farming technology, the entire landmass of North America supported somewhere between 3-10 million American Indians. Now the US population alone is around 310 million. Obviously, the amount of land hasn’t grown.
If there isn’t thirty times as much land, have forests become thirty times more efficient? Woodland evolved over millions of years. It’s a very efficient system, but a small acreage (like 10) is maxed out at a few deer, foxes and even fewer humans. There is a natural limit to the productivity of woodland.
Therefore, woodland gardens probably aren’t the answer to our oil-crisis, even though the idea is attractive. I don’t believe there is a pretty answer and while A Farm for the Future tackles some thorny problems head on, it skirts the ugly issue of malnutrition– or, let’s face it, starvation. 310 is a lot larger than 3. What are places such as Paris, London, New York or L.A. going to look like when the food runs out?
While we have way too many people to feed, we don’t have enough of the right type of people to make oil-free farming work. Hocking believes that we couldn’t go back to 1850s style farming even if we wanted to, because the knowledge has been lost and farmers aren’t as physically strong as they used to be. Her elderly neighbor Pearl, who is probably the most valuable resource in the documentary after Dr. Campbell, describes how farming was done when there were just men and horses. Families of owner-operators worked all day doing manual labor for little pay, outside the value of their land and a healthy lifestyle. Pearl liked living this way, because although the work was hard, it was productive work that made her feel good.
The farming lifestyle is 180 degrees from what many working people are used to now: namely bureaucracies where responsibility and initiative are discouraged. And that’s just the working population. People can get strong quickly if they need to, but their attitudes take a lot longer to change. How many college grads who ought to be in the fields are actually going to be happy working there?
So, while A Farm for the Future is a great documentary, it doesn’t answer– or even seriously attempt to answer– the title question of this post. The message is this: we can’t go on as we have been. Nobody can, because a lot of the second and third world depends on cheap American grain.
