Future of Food (unfinished)

I am not a rabid environmentalist sitting in a penthouse in New York City. I am not a dolt who has no concept how the world "works". And I am certainly not trying to make enemies in the world of agribusiness. I have to live here with all my fellow farmers and ranchers. I am a fourth-generation cattleman who cares a lot about the future of agriculture. I have lived on the same land my whole life. I have spent countless hours in a tractor seat and cleaned tons of dirt and grease off my hands. I really don't care to write books or run for public office. I would be quite content to feed cows and fix broken machinery the rest of my life. I like it and don't care what it does to my "image." But something is really getting to me lately. It needs to be said.

There is much debate about what is troubling our world. Some people contend that war and economic disaster are the worst evils that might befall us. Others insist that such "immoral" behavior like abortion, violence and terrorism are worse than those. I disagree with all of them. The fundamental problems facing our civilization are exactly the same as those faced by ancient man --- mass starvation and/or sustainable food production. Our mere existence is of more consequence than whether Osama Bin Laden lives or dies.

The naturalist Malthus observed that a population of animals will reproduce itself faster than its own food supply can. It will exceed the limits of its environment and either perish or move to another food source. The 6 billion people on this planet cannot move to outer space. We are stuck here with this one planet. In 25 years there will be 12 billion people scrambling over resources to determine who will live or die. I am not being an alarmist or doomsday predictor . This is a virtual certainty.

If we look at a timeline of world history, we can see that a population explosion started about 500 years ago. The first reason is because the Americas were invaded by a people who were very good at reproducing themselves through intensive food production. The second reason, and by far the most significant, is that we discovered how to harness massive amounts of energy in the form of fossil fuels. Coal, oil, and gas has transformed small farm villages into major industrial cities. A miniscule number of people is able to produce food for billions only because they have the fuel energy to do much of the work for them. Consider the American farmer who can feed hundreds of people using only his own labor and the relatively cheap inputs of fuel, machinery, water, and fertilizer. This begs the question, "How long will these inputs be cheap??"

Fossil fuel energy is a finite resource. No matter how vast a supply it is, there can be no question that it can't last forever. Humans are like the child who believes the cookie jar can never run out of cookies. "No one will miss just one little cookie." And life continues for generations of petroleum-spoiled kids.

Modern farming is an environmental catastrophe. We struggle to establish monocultures of grain in a world that is determined to bring biodiversity (multiculturalism) into our farm fields. We can temporarily win the battle with herbicides, pesticides, fuel, fertilizer, labor and machinery. Those inputs cost a lot of money and they are largely UNRENEWABLE because they originate with fossil fuel energy. The organic matter and nitrogen content of our farm soils has declined dramatically in the last 50 years. Our soil blows into the air or washes into the rivers because we disturb it with plows. We are in effect mining the earth of its fuels and soils to satisfy our hunger.

In many areas of the world large urban areas are getting dry. They are gobbling up water pumping and diversion rights from the very farmers who feed the cities. In my own area irrigated land is approaching $1800/acre. Ten years ago it could be bought for $700. The reason is because of speculation about the value of subterranean water, not because corn is so valuable. The city of Hays, Kansas bought some 5000 acres of water rights that were over 60 miles away. Some predict that water will become as scarce as oil. Former vegetable-growing areas in the desert southwest are gradually becoming pastures again. Thirsty people in Los Angeles will always pay more for drinking water than the farmer can pay. The former truck farms will be harvested by cows and sheep because it is too dry to grow lettuce. It is Nature's way. We can only delay it --- we cannot overcome it.

A large amount of the calories contained in a bushel of grain came from oil. There is much talk in agriculture about how "bio fuels" can help save the grain industry. If we burn ethanol (corn) and biodiesel (soybeans) we can save Alaska from being drilled and avoid OPEC's desert oil, so the argument goes. The problem is that for every gallon of ethanol it takes 3/4 of a gallon of fuel to grow the corn ingredients to make the ethanol. This is not a very efficient system of converting energy. It's like "one step forward, two steps back." People like to complain about how much it costs to fill up their car with gasoline. Very few of them realize that they spend way more money on fuel in the form of groceries. There has got to be a better way.

There is a "free lunch" available to us. It is the Sun. Sunshine is the fuel source from which all life is made. When it is mixed with water and carbon dioxide it makes plants (photosynthesis). Plants feed animals and those animals feed people. 1 million years ago there were only 3 major plant sources --- ocean plants (algae, etc.), grasslands, and woodlands. All 3 of these sources are completely renewable because they come only from sunshine, rainfall, and carbon dioxide (CO2). The problem is that these plant sources are almost completely useless as a human food source. In the natural world corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice do not exist in very large amounts. Edible fruits and nuts do not either. The vast majority of plant life in the world was/is tied up in fibrous plants which man cannot eat.

Three kinds of animals can make quick work of this plant fiber. The fish can eat the ocean plants. The ruminant animals (buffalo, goats, deer, camels, etc.) can digest the grasslands. And the insects breakdown both the woodlands and the grasslands. These processes have gone on for eons and will continue long after mankind is gone. This is Nature's farm and it is a harmonic orchestra. It is the essence of life. Sunlight makes plants, which makes animals, which decompose into soil and water to make more plants that collect more sunlight, etc. This process creates protein without ANY labor or petroleum input. In fact it actually makes the fossil fuels themselves over millions of years. When we burn oil we are harvesting yesteryear's sunlight.

Insects are the largest biomass of animal protein. In gross tonnage they outweigh all other animal life COMBINED. This is because they can digest any plant life available to them. They have to be considered as a food source. A starving person cannot live by eating trees, but he can live by eating termites. (Did I really say that??) Large-scale insect farming has rarely been discussed. People spend fortunes trying to exterminate insects with fossil-fuel based pesticides. We will never win the war against bugs. The sun and plants will keep churning them out forever. Maybe we can find a way to use just a fraction of them for our own gain. Afterall, primitive man sometimes ate insects because he could catch them, eat them, and live another day.

Fish have long been a major food source. They are efficient converters of protein. In the Deep South large amounts of catfish are produced artificially using grain products. Again, the problem is that we are converting oil to grain to fish. Isn't there some way to reduce the oil for food ratio?? 3/4 of the earth is covered in water. There is a vast source of plant life in the oceans that can support fish. It will have to be exploited to the limit in tommorrow's agriculture.

Grassland provides more plant biomass than does the sea. It will have to be used to support human life. Since there is no intellectual database about insect farming we will have to "go with what we know." And that is ruminant agriculture. It is the only large scale source of protein that we have that does not REQUIRE big inputs. Admittedly, today's animal production is not very efficient. Cash inputs are still cheap enough to justify feeding mechanically harvested ingredients. The POTENTIAL for labor and fuel efficiency is HUGE in future ruminant agribusiness. One man can oversee thousands of tons of protein on thousands of acres of grass. Fuel, fertilizer, and machinery inputs are minimal. The entire High Plains was once harvested by buffalo. A civilization of Native Americans was built on this renewable resource of ruminants and grass. Even after the native people were gone relatively few American cowboys harvested this same grass with even greater efficiency than we do now by farming it with tractors. And they did it with no oil and no electricity. They had no fertilizer and no machinery. The protein produced PER UNIT OF INPUT by this system is phenomenal. We will never find anything as simple or efficient, guaranteed. Even on today's largest soybean farm we cannot approach the efficiency of ruminants and grass.

The cash inputs of grain farming simply outweigh the benefits. Look at the harvesting costs alone on an acre of wheat. We farmers spend at least $20 per acre just to put the crop in the bin. One cow can do the same work for PENNIES in feed cost and she will gain weight (value). Obviously, cattle are not worth enough now to feed that high value wheat to. What happens in 50 years?

Someday our cows will start to look like the valuable harvesting machines they are. I know one farmer that has told me "if it weren't for wheat pasture grazing, I wouldn't even plant the stuff." Interestingly, the largest cattle feeder in Idaho is also the largest potato farmer. Mr. Simplot makes french fries for McDonald's Corporation and others. He has thousands of cattle to eat potato skins and other waste products. For all I know he sells the meat to McDonald's too. I have heard of people feeding watermelons, reject pizza crusts, reject Twinkies (still in the wrapper), sugar beets, and prickly-pear cactus to cows. Why do they do this?? Because they can convert an otherwise useless plant product into something valuable. A cow is a remarkable animal because of her stomach. The microbes in her 4-chambered stomach do the work of breaking the cellulose of forage. She lives off the energy of dead microbes. It is important to understand that a pig, chicken or horse cannot do this AS efficiently as a cow does. A chicken lives off the insects IN the grass, not the grass itself.

Grassland agriculture will make a comeback. The cost of a loaf of bread or package of macaroni will eventually rise because it will cost too much to produce. Farmland will revert back to grass, just as it was 1000 years ago. And people will continue to live off the land. The difference is that they will learn to live within their environmental means. They will again learn to live by the sunlight and the rain as their ancestors did. They will use what is left of their petroleum reserves for priority applications such as household heating and lighting. They will slowly stop pumping irrigation water with it. They will stop fertilizing crops with it. They will have to because the cookie jar is empty.

We must expand our knowledge of solar-based agrisystems. Ruminants and grassland are fundamental necessities in tomorrow's food production. Government must get out of the grain-subsidization business. We can invest a large portion of those subsidy dollars into academic research of sustainable, renewable agriculture. Grain farms will perish and become grassland without those support dollars. The free market must be allowed to take its course. Generations of family farmers will slowly adjust to becoming sheperds and cattlemen, just as their forefathers were.

Large corporations control our university funding and legislative bodies. These companies thrive in the status quo. John Deere, ADM, Cargill, Exxon and their political allies effectively stimey the brain trust that is necessary to break this cycle of energy suicide. (I'm trying to think of some solution to this situation..........someone help!!!)

Some organization needs to launch a media advertising blitz about the demise of solar agriculture and the need to revive it. There are many industries that would benefit from such a change, not the least of which is the beef business. These companies might have the fortitude and financing for such a challenge.

Nuclear power must be considered for large-scale electricity generation. We will find a way to dispose of the radioactive waste. We tolerate coal and oil pollution rather well, so why not contaminated fuel rods?? We can always launch them into the Sun.

batteries.........

I am not brazen enough to claim that this revolution will happen any time soon. It will probably never happen even in my grandchildren's lifetime. But it has to happen someday. World population will decline as our fossil-fuel supply declines. It will eventually return to pre-1500 levels, back when we had no oil. The survivors of this petroleum-induced holocaust will be sustainable farmers once again.

And the buffalo will return to the High Plains.

There are precious few acheivements or ideas which have changed mankind in cataclysmic ways. These are the major accomplishments or discoveries that will survive our species in some alien's history book (?).

---- Use of fire

---- Hand tools (stone, copper, iron)

---- The mastery of simple machines (lever, inclined plane, wheel)

---- The domestication of dogs, cattle, sheep, goats

---- Development of language and the written word.

---- The cultivation of food (farming and ranching) replaced hunting/gathering

---- The change from nomadic life to village life (because of agriculture towns were born)

---- Invention of gunpowder

---- Invention of the printing press

---- The Age of Petroleum (Industrial Revolution and urbanization)

---- Invention of antibiotics, anesthesia, and vaccinations

---- Invention of electricity and its devices (telephone, television, transistor, microchip)

---- Invention of internal combustion engine

---- Invention of airplane

---- Control of nuclear reactions

---- Mission to the moon and outer space

These are a few of the "biggies" I can think of. There is one more that I am certain we will be able to add. I'll go ahead and put it in CAPS because it is the point of this essay (if this was on the internet, people would think I was shouting) ::

---- THE REGRESSION TO SOLAR-BASED AGRICULTURE

None of the information contained in this essay is groundbreaking. It has been said before. I don't claim to have any crystal ball. But sometimes even large ideas take years to percolate into common practice. "Necessity is the mother of invention." We will only invent new survival tactics when we NEED them (i.e., economics dictate behavior or people get hungry).

Copernicus wrote his "Little Commentary" in 1514. He said that the earth was NOT at the center of the universe at all and that it moved around the Sun. He couldn't prove it and people thought he was crazy. They had seen the sun, moon, and stars move across the sky ("around" the earth) their whole lives. But a seed of thought was set in place. An idea began to percolate. It took 86 years until Tyco Brahe proved this theory was correct. He carefully mapped the movements of the various heavenly bodies and introduced the world to astronomy.

"Hindsight is 20/20". Isn't it easy now to look back at those uninformed people in 1500 and say "Come on, folks.....it's so obvious." ?? Sure it is. Someone will say the same thing about us in another 500 years. We are tomorrow's primitive and uninformed people. I like to think we are in an intellectual quandary right now. We are like the people in, say 1580, wondering if that old coot Copernicus was right about the Sun. "Nahhh........"