A reply from the HJHOP mailbag...
Today, in the comments to my brief eulogy on Norman Borlaug, I got the following response comment by the ubiquitous "anonymous" (love your medieval poems!):
Um... it's also worth noting that Borlaug is also the guy who made our food supply reliant on petrochemicals. When peak oil hits -- and the oil companies themselves certainly believe it will -- the price of food is going to rise along with that of gas, with lots of potential for disaster. Basically, he let us exchange a chronic problem for a catastrophe. Although that may be praiseworthy, I'd hold off on the eulogies until after we solve the problem of petrochemical fertilizer supply.Let me put this in terms you'll understand:
Bovine organic fertilizer.
A "petrochemical fertilizer," as far as I can tell, is not a real concept, that is to say, there are only 35,ooo or so hits on Google for the phrase, and the sites that I am looking at right now seem to be hippyish feel-good organic goof sites. At any rate, I am suspicious of anyone who tells me to spray my crops with gasoline. Luckily, I have access to the online resources of one of the best science libraries in the world and all of its databases. A quick search of the phrase "petrochemical fertilizer" in the Chemistry and Biochemistry journals reveals...no instances where the two words are joined in the manner you use them. For instance, I see the words in close proximity to each other:
"The Ria of Huelva is considered to be one of the high industrial estates in Spain, where several metallurgical, petrochemical and fertilizer industrial estates are located, surrounded by areas of a high ecological interest such as Doñana National Park." ("Geochemistry and origin of PM10 in the Huelva region, Southwestern Spain," Ana María Sánchez de la Campaa, b, Corresponding Author Contact Information, Jesús de la Rosaa, Xavier Querolc, Andrés Alastueyc and Enrique Mantillad) Environmental Research Volume 103, Issue 3, March 2007, Pages 305-316.)and
"Azerbaijan's air pollution stems from petrochemical plants, refineries, exhaust fumes, and the burning of untreated garbage. Water pollution is the result of oil spills, leaky pipelines and tanks, runoff from fertilizers and pesticides, and improperly treated sewage." (Azerbaijan. Population Today. Washington: Feb 1999. Vol. 27, Iss. 2; pg. 7, 1 pgs)...but that's it. So, you seem to not be actually talking about a "thing," per se. I'm not sure what your logic is, or even what your definition of "petrochemical fertilizers" is. Here are a few possibilities:
- So called chemical (i.e. manufactured) fertilizers that made using petroleum fuel during the refining reprocess.
- Farming methods that require gasoline, or, "machine farming."
You bet your skinny ass I can. Here's a 1930 john Deere tractor. Here's a history of the tractor, which stretches back into the '20s. There is a reason, of course, that tractors are used, and it's because they help farmers pull more calories out of the ground faster than they can with horses and manual labor. If you can farm more land, you can feed more people. It's that simple. Unless you want to argue that point, and I don't think you want to, I would drop that.
The first point is actually something that needs to be put in the ground. Let's compare what goes into organic and commercial fertilizers. Let's say that on one side you have the organic faves, bat guano or snail snot. What the plants metabolize in the fertilizers is nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. Bat guano and snail/worm mucus have these, but they have a lot of other stuff in there too that must be transported and adds nothing to the value of the fertilizer. Indeed, this extra goop just eats into transportation costs. The beauty of a refined fertilizer is that it does not have all this wastage. Because it is more concentrated, it costs less (in dollars and energy) to move around because you need less for the same results as you would have with the "organic" fertilizer. If you are looking to reduce your carbon footprint, refined fertilizers are the way to go.
When you point out that "the price of food is going to rise along with that of gas," well, of course it is. But you are selectively singling out modern crops, when, in fact, the cost of everything that is not pulled to market by free range horses is going to go up. This includes organics, which don't walk themselves to market, even local markets.
There is something dark behind your assumption, and while you are admirably concerned about the environment, your approach to solving problems related to modern agriculture do not take into account the fact that we actually have to feed people if we are going to insist on making more of them. That means making plots of land more productive and having higher calorie yields per acre. If you get in the way of that, you have to be willing to let people starve. I'm not.
Luckily, new, safe sustainable forms of energy are coming online, especially modern nuclear power. Once we are able to power agriculture with electricity (down the line), I see all of your objections fading.
For more information, I would recommend looking at two essays by Brian Dunning on locally grown produce and organic farming. Then come back and apologize.
HJ
Seed Newsvine
14 comments:
See, now, THAT was a blog entry, Bing! Well written, researched, good job! Excellent point about using refined fertilizer as a way of reducing carbon footprint. (The whole earth-friendly/organic topic is very complicated and self-contradictory in many ways. The crunchy-granola types don't seem to grasp the complexity of what it actually costs, in terms of energy and reasonability, to be as earth friendly as they seem to demand.)
I'm still waiting for you to apply your obvious intellect, writing and reason skills to an updated entry about young breast cancer.
Patience, dear Cassie...I just tossed that one off. I want to do this one right.
(My word verification is hershes. Heehee.)
HJ
There were, till the economic fubar, plans to create solar driven steam turbine electricity plants in the middle of the desert along the northern coast of Africa. These plants, in addition to producing large amounts of electricity, would produce large amounts of distilled water.
That water was to be used for large hydroponic farms, which in addition to producing food, would reclaim the desert.
The thing that came along and put the kibosh on the idea was the sudden downturn in the price of oil. Expensive oil would mean expensive elctricity, and expensive electricty means investment in new and inventive production methods.
So... the thing stopping the greening of the deserts and new large scale agriculture is the CHEAP price of oil.
Someone hasn't been reading their Buckminster-Fuller.
Sweet.
HJ
(Arrgh! I'm the original anonymous poster, and my response to your response is too long for a single comment. So here's part 1 of, I think, 3.)
While I admit that my original comment was poorly phrased, you're being very optimistic, and glossing over a few things.
they [tractors] help farmers pull more calories out of the ground faster than they can with horses and hand labor
Although this is somewhat irrelevant to the issue in question -- Borlaug didn't invent tractors, and we're really talking about him -- this statement glosses over the problem. This argument, in the context of peak oil, is equivalent to saying "yes, we're selling at a loss, but we'll make it up on volume". Tractors (and other mechanized farm equipment, such as irrigation equipment) consume a lot of oil. When peak oil hits, the more land farmers have opened up through the use of oil-powered equipment, the worse the resulting catastrophe will be, which was kind of my point. I'll return to this later, assuming Blogger doesn't cut me off. :)
A "petrochemical fertilizer," as far as I can tell, is not a real concept
That's because I (a) used an admittedly poor phrasing if you're going to type directly into Google and (b) wasn't trying to put the entire argument into a single sentence anyway. But since you've responded, allow me to expand a bit:
The "green revolution" involves as material components fertilizers, pesticides, tools, and seeds.
At the time of Borlaug's initial inventions, thanks to the relative prices of oil and natural gas, both fertilizers and pesticides were both commonly (though not exclusively) produced from oil. Later on (in the oil shocks of the 1970s), it became more economical to produce fertilizer from natural gas. So: petrochemical fertilizers no longer really exist, but fossil fuel fertilizers do. (We still use pesticides manufactured from oil, though, at least where we don't use naturally-occurring ones.)
From the perspective of long-term feasibility, that's a distinction without a difference. Putting "fossil fuel fertilizer" into Google brings up around 642000 results, of which the first page should be enough for anyone not interested in reading a scholarly treatment directly.
As for pesticides: well, I hope you're not going to argue that pesticides derived from petroleum are a good idea. And if you are, you're going against most of the field, which regards pesticides in general as a necessary evil, not an actual good idea. The general trend right now is towards looking for naturally-occurring substitutes. (A quick run-through on Google suggests that research has found that spice-based alternatives work well but dissipate too quickly, and that there are vegetable-based oils which are being investigated.)
Tools: between farming tools and distribution, the average crop consumed in the U.S. rather famously tends to have had a lot more energy put into it than the eater gets out of it. Since the input is basically all oil, that's a problem when considering peak oil.
As you point out, electric-powered farming and transportation would allow us to use sustainable energy sources. But electric-powered industrial farming is going to be very difficult, maybe impossible in any form which would sufficiently resemble unsustainable industrial farming to be commercially attractive.
(Part 2 of, well, probably 4 after all)
It's okay if the trucks which carry (say) a tomato from the farm to your supermarket aren't as powerful as the diesel-powered version. Your tomato will taste pretty much the same whether it travelled at 40 mph or 70, as long as it doesn't spoil en route, and most current distribution channels could manage with slower trucks if absolutely necessary. (They already have contingency plans for slowdowns anyway.)
But building an electric-powered tractor is a much more difficult task. In fact, making one which provides the same power and maneuverability as the gas-powered variety while maintaining a similar size is actually impossible, at least for the time being. It's just down to the physics of electric motors and power storage.
That may change -- but it would be irresponsible to bet the future of the world on the development of a particular technology. (Our ability to predict the directions and effects of technology is pathetic. In the 1960s, everyone thought artificial intelligence was -- relatively speaking -- just around the corner. Instead we got 3D rendering, video support, GUI interfaces, and the Internet -- but even a top-of-the-line computer can't hold a meaningful conversation with you. So when people say "oh, we'll have tractors powered by renewable energy any year now" I tend to be skeptical. If anything, we'll probably have a high-energy-density inedible GM crop to use as biofuel before we have practical purely electric tractors.)
Finally, there are seeds -- the actual crops we grow. A certain amount of the problem with the green revolution is that the usual regimen for implementing it has involved growing crops which don't grow well in many regions without artificial fertilizers and pesticides, rather than simply attempting to improve the farming of local crops, or look for better varieties of local crops.
(This is partially caused by our own unwillingness to change our diets. Western civilization basically eats only a tiny fraction of all the known edible species of plant, not because of crop yields or economics but because we aren't very adventurous. It's been that way for a long time -- millet grows very well practically anywhere on the northern shore of the Mediterranean, and is reasonably nutritious, but the ancients wanted bread and could basically only eat millet as a sort of porridgey goop, so it was a crop of last resort for most people.)
One of the reasons organic food competes so poorly with conventional food is that organic farming as currently practiced doesn't do well with the usual set of crops we want. We have no data one way or the other on how well it would compete if allowed to grow food which were nutritious but not "normal".
(Part 3 of, yes, 4)
Luckily, new, safe sustainable forms of energy are coming online, especially modern nuclear power.
Whoa, wait a second there. Are you writing this in an alternate universe?
A. Nuclear energy isn't new. In terms of energy generation, concentrated solar power (a.k.a. solar thermal) is newer and better for the ecology.
B. Nuclear energy isn't sustainable -- were we to switch from primarily coal-fired power to nuclear in the first world, the estimates I've seen say we would hit "peak uranium" by the middle of this century.
C. Nuclear energy isn't safe -- even proponents of nuclear energy on ecological grounds -- such as James Lovelock -- don't claim it's safe. They merely claim it's less dangerous than continuing to use fossil fuels, because of the current state of global warming.
D. As of the last time I checked, sustainable energy isn't really coming online anywhere in anything but small dollops. What's happening on a large scale is an increase in coal-burning power plants, which is both unsustainable and nowhere near being good for the environment, contrary to greenwashing attempts by the American coal lobby. This despite the fact that there's more than enough sustainable energy available for our purposes.
your approach to solving problems related to modern agriculture do not take into account the fact that we actually have to feed people if we are going to insist on making more of them
There are two problems with that statement (aside from the subject-verb mismatch: if should be "your approach ... does not take into account").
Problem #1: You're attributing an opinion to me which I do not hold. I acknowledge that organic farming as it is currently practiced in America would not be sufficient to feed the world's current population at first-world levels, which is presumably the goal. But organic farming has not been given the serious study which it could use, largely thanks to the combination of the green revolution and humanity's dangerously short-term perspective on the world.
Cuba -- which has a population density of more than twice the world average -- has been close to completely organic, thanks to their relations to the U.S., yet they aren't starving. This suggests that organic farming in the U.S. is nowhere near as good as it could be, particularly if we were willing to change our diets to accommodate "better" crops rather than insisting on eating the same foods no matter what. (Heck, if Americans cut their average meat consumption by a quarter, it would solve a lot of problems right away.)
In addition to this, local food production -- and by that I mean truly local, as in kitchen gardens and community gardens -- is practically nonexistent in the U.S. This was not always the case -- up until the second half of the 20th century, vegetable gardens were extremely common, and helped people keep their food budgets down. We've gotten out of the habit now, but that doesn't mean we could start again. The real ecology buffs I know aren't spending much time clamoring for locally grown food at the supermarket, they're trying to get homeowners to garden.
(Part 4)
Regardless: I think you're assuming that the problems will be solved, and that's not warranted optimism. Masking the fact that no solutions exist to the problems involved won't make the problems go away; it will just set us up for a whole bunch of fancy new solutions which completely don't work. You cite only very optimistic sources in support of your assumptions, and nothing I have seen leads me to believe that these have any serious connection with reality.
(Oh, and Brian Dunning's essays don't make me want to apologize. The essay on locally-grown food, for example, basically assumes that either you use as large distribution centers as possible, minimizing the number, or else you use none at all, with one anecdote as evidence that this is a valid analysis. Mostly, he just seems intent on beating on a strawman, in this case a left-wing one. Well, if you're so desperate to read that kind of thing, you can go ahead, but it doesn't impress me a bit.)
Problem #2: We currently have a serious problem in the form of overpopulation. Leaving aside food supply for a moment, fresh water is a problem which is going to go critical in the next few decades. Even the U.S. military agrees on that one. Then there's the usual round of societal problems arising from overpopulation -- and I hope I don't have to enumerate them for you.
I'm not suggesting we should commit mass murder to solve the problem -- so don't bother telling me that's what I want to do, please -- and obviously it follows that we have to keep feeding the people we have if we aren't going to do that.
But I can't ignore the fact that the green revolution was half of the cause of the mess, the other half being the usual mass human shortsightedness. (I don't have anything against cheap food -- but cheap food and people who will have as many offspring as they can afford are a bad combination.) So Borlaug has to bear some of the blame for the mess. To sum up: until the "little problems" of making all this sustainable are solved, he doesn't deserve much in the way of eulogy. Make farming sustainable, and I'll subscribe to a monument.
HJHOP got most of the points right, but let's look at machine vs. horse. Where does the energy come from for the horse? The farm...prior to widespread adoption of machine farming, about 1/3 of all farm production went to feed the power source, horses. Hmm, might be that much food and feed is being used to feed humans now.
The other point is, plants don't know whether the nutrient they use came from BS or 'synthetic' fertilizer. Most nitrogen is produced using natural gas; most other commercial fertilizers are MINED, i.e. phosphate, potash...then processed into a form most readily available for plants given the area where the fertilizer will be used.
There seems to me to be an ethical problem here, where some seem to be willing to trade human life that currently exists, for some as yet unknown benefit it the future.
Shorter Anonymous - Norman Borlaug kept a lot of people from starving, and that will cause a lot of people to starve. It's better for people in poor countries to starve than it is for me to have to pay more for my organic wheatgrass tofutti. And technology is evil.
I think that sums it up pretty well.
Well, anonymous 2, the horse and the man eat different things. Actually, that's the neat thing about animal husbandry and then killing the animals. They actually convert calories from a form we can't digest into a form we can. Cool, huh?
Anyway, as for the long, long post. Yeah, that was long. I'm going to think about it. I may or may not do a long response, but not anytime in the immediate future, as I have 75 more papers to read today than I did yesterday.
We need to take charge of our wieners and stop mating like lions. Roar.
HJ
sorry, this is a completely different anonymous (I'm too lazy to register....)
Most of the peak-oil arguments only lead to one end conclusion, and they appear to be pretty accurate. we have too many people. Considering what the tiny bump-in-the-road in grain prices did some 2 years ago, millions of people starving, rioting, governments getting displaced....it seems pretty safe to say, if/when the poop hits the fan, we're going to have a lot of death, and there's just no way around it.
Ultimately that is what it always comes back to. If we only had 2 billion people on the planet, we'd have a much much different situation to deal with. No one seems to take the population issue seriously, not that there's much we can really do about it.
A really big war would fix it.
I'm a wholly different anonymous than all the others so far, and I love your site.
I'm 48 years old and grew up on a 75 acre family farm. We farmed with MULES until 1964, when we got a 1951 Case tricycle tractor. With independent power takeoff. Sweet.
For reasons I can't really explain, I somehow got 12 post graduate hours in agribusiness while I was an undergraduate majoring in anthropology.
For everyone's benefit, here's the short version of the problem as I learned it. Agricultural chemical runoff is about the leading cause of pollution in the US.
The meat we eat is fed grain, which requires the most intense and invasive kind of agriculture practices to produce. If cows ate grass and pigs ate garbage (pigs will eat anything), and farmers weren't forced to compete with giant factory farms, we could eliminate a lot of the chemical fertilizers and pesticides while reducing the amount of petrol used to produce massive amounts of grain (corn, which is also not nutritionally dense enough for practical human consumption anyways) we feed the bovines.
In the meantime, lay off the corn chips and taco shells, and eat a LOT more chicken.
Solution 2 is your backyard vegetable garden. You don't have one? When I was a kid, everybody did. Everybody. It's more productive than you think, so get your hands dirty. They do it in Europe so it must be smart.
Mind my lesson. Because if the endtimes dystopian future really does come, I'm gonna take all your canned goods and your women, and sleep like a child.
Oh, and I left a thing out. COTTON. Cotton is the worst offender of all as far as needing chemicals and petroleum for production. We only got on the cotton wagon, because old Eli invented that gin thing that got the seeds out. That led to all kinds of problematical crap like slavery, and South Eastern Conference football and the like. So we better get to seriously growing some hemp in the near future, and milling it in the US and paying US textile workers to make cloth or China is gonna screw us sideways way before the endtimes.
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