Food Production as Net Energy Consumer

The sun has been raining down a large amount of energy on the surface of the planet for billions of years, while the molten core of the planet has been sending heat and various reactive substances to the surface and asteroids rained down water, possibly even the organic compounds that were the building blocks of life.

The heat provided by the sun and volcanic vents on the ocean floors has been used by living organisms to power endothermic chemical reactions. (Pause: An endothermic reaction is an interaction between elements that needs an external energy source to get started.)

The net effect of those reactions has been to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, combine it with things like hydrogen, nitrogen and phosphorus, and form a gaseous envelope around our planet composed mainly of inert nitrogen gas with a reasonable amount of free oxygen and a few other trace elements thrown in. The new compounds contain and store, in those chemical bonds, some fraction of that energy that can be released on dissolution of the bonds. The energy, the work, captured in all these reactions is enormous.

What needs to be understood about phrases like 'destroying ecosystems' or 'reducing biodiversity' is that they mean the slowing of the mechanisms used to capture the energy of the sun and make it available for living things.

While the sun drops a lot of energy our way ...

... The amount of energy from the sun that falls on Earth's surface is enormous. All the energy stored in Earth's reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas is matched by the energy from just 20 days of sunshine. ...

... neither we nor our photosynthetic friends are very efficient at capturing it. Life has been around for billions of years, after all, and it has managed to store and bury for the long haul only 20 days worth of sunshine. And while we're using that stored energy at an astonishing rate, we're mainly ignoring the solar wealth constantly raining down on us:

... Every year, the sun irradiates the land masses on earth with the equivalent of 19,000 billion tons of oil equivalent (toe). Only a fraction — 9 billion toe — would satisfy the world's current energy requirements. Put differently, in 20 minutes, the amount of solar energy falling on the earth could power the planet for one year. ...

If this explanation has merely put an extra dimension on how ridiculous our situation is, I will have done my job here. But naturally, I had a point specifically about how this relates to agriculture.

I'd mentioned early last week having run across this study from the Post Carbon Institute about the need to transition our food and farming systems to be less reliant on fossil energy (pdf), where they explain this, emphasis mine:

... Before the industrial revolution, farming and forestry were society’s primary net producers of energy. Today the food system is a net user of energy in virtually every nation; this is especially so in industrial countries, where each calorie of food energy produced and brought to the table represents an average investment of about 7.3 calories of energy inputs (Figure 1).

It has been possible to create and maintain net energy-consuming food systems only because of the development by society of ways to extract and use fossil fuels, a one-time-only gift from nature to humanity representing sources of energy of unprecedented cheapness and abundance. The benefits of industrial (that is to say, fossil fuel-based) food production and distribution are easy to see: our modern food system delivers products that are themselves cheap and abundant. In 2005, for example, the average U.S. family spent less than 12 percent of income on food, whereas 50 years ago that percentage was about twice as high. Exotic foods are widely available in supermarkets, whose shelves display thousands of distinct food products. Famine, which used to be common throughout the world, is banished from most countries. Hunger, where it still exists, is nearly always due to an inability to afford food, rather than absolute scarcity.

... The 2008 oil price spike contributed to a near-simultaneous doubling of food commodity prices (Figure 3); other causes included poor harvests due to drought and other adverse weather conditions in several key countries, growing demand by expanding Asian economies, commodity speculation, the decline in the value of the dollar, and the growth in biofuel production. As a result of these high food prices, more than 30 nations saw food riots in late 2008.

... Fertilizer prices spiked with oil prices in 2008, reflecting the fertilizer industry’s dependence on cheap energy.

... Higher fuel costs hit not just farmers—who have to buy fuel for their tractors, as well as fertilizers and other agricultural chemicals made from oil and natural gas—but the entire food system: the cost of processing, packaging, and shipping food rose, making food costs a significant contributor to overall economic inflation.

... The price spike of 2008, whose full impacts have yet to be calculated, was not an isolated event but the beginning of an inevitable trend. Higher oil prices and oil shortages will hit poor farmers first. Already, many farmers in Africa are seeing yields plummet as they try to maintain the industrial methods they have been trained in (by the World Bank, IMF, and various aid agencies) while withholding the petrochemical inputs they can no longer afford. ...

We can't, as they say, continue to assume the availability and affordability of the fossil energy inputs that have allowed the expansion of our calorie base. Or to put it another way, that has boosted collection of human-usable solar food energy.

Absent these fossil sources of stored sunlight, along with fossil water in many cases, industrial methods of agriculture are going to fail to produce their accustomed yields.

The era of periodic famine will return. Then it will become the norm.

Without a change of direction, our modern agriculture and energy management practices will become a recipe for scarcity and starvation.

The Post Carbon Institute outlines a plan for slowly replacing our low diversity, fossil-fueled food ecosystems with carefully managed, small scale agricultural methods that rely on promoting the energy capturing potential of living systems. They propose decentralizing and relocalizing production; not doing away with international food trade, but stepping it down.

At some point, we need to find substitute energy sources so that we can maintain the best of our modern systems of production and distribution, while incorporating whatever has worked from old methods of subsistence farming and new methods of organic crop production. We need a hybrid of the best thinking of many generations of people and a systematic pruning of ideas that, while they may have been innovative and clever, didn't test out so well.

This will require a great deal of research and intelligent application of effort, not a return to Medieval peasantry for all. I mean, I don't even like camping if there isn't plumbing available, there's no way I want a global Amish takeover.

Becaus the Amish are fine, and have an admirable commitment to non-compulsion in matters of faith, but that lifestyle is so not me.

(Photo credit: Matt McGee on Flickr.)