FROM THE DIRECTOR:
Sustainable ag and the long emergency
So far, most of us have been directly affected by the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina only through increased fuel prices. However, this disaster foreshadows the issues raised by J. H. Kunstler in his new book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. Kunstler integrates critical details about when the world will run low on the cheap oil and natural gas that have fueled modern industrial society, and more importantly, predicts how we will (or won't) deal with that occurrence. Whether or not one agrees with the predictions he describes, that world production of oil will peak between 2000 and 2010 (specifically Thanksgiving weekend 2005) and there will be great social upheavals (the Gulf Coast diaspora magnified?), the fact is, sooner or later, we will no longer be able to power our world on the cheap energy of oil and gas.
Conservation tillage production systems reduce fuel use by minimizing tillage operations between crops including disking or plowing.(photo by Jeff Mitchell)
Or run our agriculture. Kunstler reviews the various alternatives to oil, including biofuels, and concludes that for most part, the energy returned does not greatly exceed the energy invested in its production. For many years, Cornell University's David Pimentel has been raising this concern about the way biofuels, including ethanol, are produced. Without fuel for our machines, both organic and conventional agriculture will become much more difficult and labor intensive. It is easy to forget that cheap power is only a recent phenomenon, available for less than 100 years, and to forget how hard transport and work were.
Without cheap energy, the importance of the various components of sustainable agriculture will take on a whole new emphasis, gradually perhaps, but inexorably just the same. Food systems will probably have to be more local. The costs are not limited to mechanization and transport. For example, synthetic nitrogen fertilizers produced by the natural gas consuming-Haber-Bosch process (also only a century old) are currently necessary to feed approximately 40 percent of the world's six billion people. Many experts believe there simply isn't enough land or sources of organic nitrogen to produce the food needed, which is a key reason for continuing to pursue practices that reduce this dependence. Energy costs on farms have been considered in sustainable and organic farming (as Jenny Broome reports from Switzerland), but it is hard to fight the sense that this is still an academic rather than a practical exercise. Still, changes will be needed, perhaps most obviously in reducing the use of tillage even if this costs something in yields. Similarly, fertilizers will have to be used more sparingly and efficiently, both to save costs and to preserve clean water without energy-costly repurification.
Will energy sustainability be considered in future farm bills, and if so, how and when? (See Bev Ransom's farm bill story.) As we have seen recently, food will be a critical priority during any emergency. Energy sustainability on the farm must become a priority for government, both in leadership and investment, lest we end up with horse-drawn plows. In the meantime, we need to develop practices and technologies that will allow us to adapt readily to whatever the future brings.
