Jason Mark: 'Will the end of oil be the end of food?'

American agriculture is fatally dependent on oil. A few forward-thinking
farmers are trying to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.

Jason Mark, AlterNet

Farmer Richard Randall doesn't believe in the notion of "peak oil," the
argument that civilization will soon experience an acute -- and
irreversible -- petroleum scarcity that will fundamentally alter our way of
life. A 61-year-old wheat and sorghum grower from Scott City, Kan., Randall
says he's seen high oil prices before, and that today's expensive petroleum
is just part of a natural market cycle that will eventually adjust itself,
leading to lowered fuel costs.

"I think there's plenty of oil there," Randall said recently. "I feel that
if we allow the marketplace to work without interruption in the supply, we
will find a level. It's not going to be as low as it was, but it will come
down. We do need to produce oil where we can."

Randall may not be certain when oil prices will level out, but it's
abundantly clear to him that $70/barrel petroleum is taking a huge bite out
of his business. Nearly every part of his farming operation is being
impacted. The price for the diesel fuel that runs the tractors and trucks on
his 4,500-acre farm have more than tripled in the last four years, rising
from 80 cents per gallon to close to $3. Fertilizer prices are also up
sharply. Since synthetic fertilizers are made from natural gas, they too are
impacted by higher fossil fuel prices; the cost of fertilizer has gone from
about $160 per ton to $460 per ton in the last three years. Smaller, organic
growers are also feeling a pinch from costlier petroleum. The price for the
plastic drip irrigation tape commonly used on organic fruit and vegetable
farms is up 20 percent from two years ago.

Because farmers operate in a commodity market where buyers and brokers
dictate the price of the harvest, high oil costs have been particularly
painful. Unlike other businesses, farms have no way to pass their rising
costs on to consumers.

"All of our expenses have gone up pretty well, but we can't put on a
surcharge for fuel like everyone else can." Randall said. "It's made it a
lot tougher."

Tomorrow's crises

For farmers like Randall, today's challenges may be tomorrow's crises. The
problems of coping with high oil prices reveal how utterly dependent our
food production system is on nonrenewable fuels. As long as oil is
plentiful, that dependence isn't a concern. But in some circles fears are
growing that if global petroleum production begins a steady decline, our
entire food system will be strained, testing our ability to feed ourselves.

"How dependent on oil is our food system?" Richard Heinberg, a leading "peak
oil" scholar and the author of The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of
Industrial Societies said in an interview. "Enormously dependent. Fatally
dependent, I would say."

Of course, you won't find any oil on your dinner plate, but petroleum and
other fossil fuels are inside of every bite you eat. About one-fifth of all
U.S. energy use goes into the food system. The synthetic nitrogen
fertilizers that are essential for high crop yields are a byproduct of
natural gas. Gasoline and diesel fuels power the combines that rumble
through the grain fields. Countless kilowatts of electricity are burned up
in the factories that process all of the packaged goods that line the
supermarket shelves. And then there's the gasoline required simply to get
food to market. We now have a globalized food system, one in which the
typical American meal travels 1,500 miles from farm to fork. Organic
products -- though they may have a more sustainable veneer -- are in many
respects no different; 10 percent of organic products come from abroad.
Without oil, we would all be on one harsh diet.

"We've created an agricultural system where, on average, for every energy of
food calorie we produce, we need to expend about 10 calories of fossil
fuels," Heinberg said.

Such an imbalance would not be worrisome if there were an inexhaustible
supply of oil. But, as every child learns in elementary science class,
petroleum is a nonrenewable resource. A heated debate is under way about
when that resource will begin to decline. Some say that we have already
passed the summit of peak oil and point to a leveling of global petroleum
production as proof. The U.S. government argues that we have decades before
oil extraction begins to decline. Others calculate that we will hit the peak
oil mark sometime in the next 10 years. Regardless of when exactly oil
production starts to drop, it's clear that in this century humanity will
have to learn to live without cheap, abundant oil.

What this means for our food system is also up for debate. At the very
least, costlier oil will lead to more expensive food, especially for
processed and packaged goods. At the very worst, peak oil could seriously
disrupt agriculture, especially in highly industrialized nations like the
United States, where food systems are heavily reliant on oil.

"This era of increasing globalization of our food supply is going to draw to
a close here in the next decade or so," Ronnie Cummins, executive director
of the Organic Consumers Association, said. "I think it (eventual oil
scarcities) is going to mean the end of importing billions of dollars of
food from overseas. It's going to mean the end of relatively cheap food in
the U.S. And it's going to mean a significant increase in starvation and
malnourishment across the world."

Fuel vs. food

In response to alarms about the fragileness of the food system, some farmers
are taking initiatives to wean themselves from petroleum and find more
sustainable ways of growing food. One of the most popular approaches is
biofuels. For farmers, it's a solution to high oil prices that makes
intuitive sense, as it raises the possibility of growers cultivating their
own fuel, just as most farmers did a century ago when they harvested oats to
feed their horse teams.

Phil Foster is one farmer who has made a commitment to reducing his farm's
reliance on fossil fuels. A prominent California organic fruit and vegetable
grower who is a supplier to Whole Foods, Foster runs nearly all of the
trucks and tractors on his 250-acre farm on B100-pure biodiesel. The
remainder of his machines -- older tractors with more finicky engines --
operate on B30, which is a blend of biodiesel and conventional petroleum
diesel. At the same time, Foster is trying to reduce the amount of
electricity his farm pays for. Several years ago he installed a bank of
solar panels to help power his packing shed, refrigerators, irrigation
pumps, and sales office. He calculates that the sun provides about 20
percent of his energy.

For Foster, using biodiesel and employing solar technology isn't just an
effort to be environmentally correct. It's simply smart business, he says, a
way to ensure that his farm will be economically sustainable over the long
run.

"It was kind of a no-brainer for me to move in that direction," Foster said.
"Especially in a business like ours, customers that buy organic would tend
to like their growers to be kind of on the forefront. As a business that
wants to think about longevity, I want to know how we can position
ourselves."

Organic growers aren't the only ones bullish on the future of biofuels.
Large, conventional grain farmers are also looking at biofuels as a way to
reduce their costs, and many corn growers are hoping to make money by
selling their surplus harvest to ethanol processors.

"Diesel fuel used to be a minor cost, but now it's become a major cost,"
said Paul Penner, who farms 1,000 acres of wheat north of Wichita. "It looks
like biodiesel is going to become a long-term solution. So I think we are
going to be seeing some bigger switches across the country."

Some people, however, caution that biodiesel is unlikely to evolve into a
permanent fix. Though biofuels may be useful in reducing petroleum
dependence in the near future, it's doubtful that fuels made from plants
could completely unhitch us from oil. Why? For the simple reason that making
biofuels requires lots of land, and at some point -- were biofuels to become
widely popular -- the nation would face a choice between growing food and
growing fuel.

"As good as it sounds, you're taking crops that initially were being used as
a food source and now are being used as fuel sources," said a U.S.
Department of Agriculture scientist who asked to remain anonymous. "So where
will all the additional food crops come from to feed the demand from
American consumers? I expect some problems coming."

Problems involving the trade-off between cultivating food and cultivating
fuel are already appearing. According to Ferd Hoefner of the Sustainable
Agriculture Coalition, last year farmers in North Dakota sold a large
portion of their corn harvest to ethanol processors. But that left local
cattle ranchers short of grain to feed their cows, and so they had to import
corn from Canada to beef up their herds, corn that was more expensive that
the locally grown stuff.

Freewheelin'

As the North Dakota experience shows, there are no simple solutions to
agriculture's deep reliance on oil. The fundamental challenge facing
farmers -- and, by extension, everyone who likes to eat -- is how to reduce
off-farm inputs and make farms more self-sufficient. That will likely
require a dramatic overhaul of the food system, a wholesale restructuring
that would return agriculture to a system of local production for local
consumption.

"The only good thing about this is that there will be a massive stimulus for
rebuilding local and regional food and farming systems, and a big increase
in organic and sustainable farms, which are less energy intensive," the
Organic Consumer Association's Cummins said.

Amy Courtney is a farmer who is pioneering less energy-intensive ways of
farming. Courtney is the owner and sole employee of Freewheelin' Farms, a
tiny operation on California's Central Coast. Four years ago Courtney, 31,
started farming by herself on a one-acre plot just a few hundred yards from
the Pacific Ocean. On her oceanview parcel she grows strawberries,
blackberries, hothouse tomatoes, cabbage, squash, leeks, and a range of
other vegetables. Her produce goes to 16 households in a Community Supported
Agriculture (CSA) program and some restaurants in a nearby town, all of
which she delivers on her bicycle after a seven-mile ride.

"I was a bike activist and chose not to have a car in my life," Courtney
said on a recent sunny afternoon as she stood near the chicken flock that
supplies eggs to her CSA members. "Then I got involved with agriculture and
saw how much we were spending on diesel and oil spills on the fields, and
the whole thing was kind of gross to me. I don't want to support that with
my life. Or at least I want to unplug as much as possible. And now, with
everything in the Mideast, it's like, duh."

Courtney does use some petroleum. She employs a gasoline-powered rototiller
to supplement her hand digging of the soil, and she has a biodiesel truck
for hauling manure from a nearby ranch so that she can make her own compost.
But she estimates that her farm's annual fuel use is less than 30 gallons.
She also tries to be more sustainable by using as many recycled materials as
possible. She inherited her greenhouse, and the bike trailer she uses for
delivering her produce was scavenged from a junk pile.

"There's stuff out there that people aren't using, including land and
equipment," she said. "I'm amazed how much food you can grow on a little
piece of land. I don't care if they can't make Pez as cheap as they used to.
I don't care if GM can't keep it together anymore. If we can't feed
ourselves, we're fucked."

Freewheelin' Farms may not be scaled to feed a country of 300 million
people. But it is an illustration of the basic principles that will be
required to grow food in a post-oil age: Muscle-powered, localized,
dependent on personal relationships. Courtney's model -- in which it takes
one person to feed about another 20 -- also reveals one other change that
will likely have to occur with the agricultural system: More people will
have to start growing their own food. Currently less than two percent of the
U.S. population are farmers. If we can no longer rely on the muscle of
carbon energy, that number will need to grow.

Author Heinberg says the island nation of Cuba offers a model for how such a
transition can occur. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Communist
nation found itself cut off from the subsidized petroleum it had long
depended on. In order to feed itself, the government launched a sweeping
program to enlist citizens in urban gardening and composting. In the last
decade, the country has become an internationally recognized model of
sustainable agriculture.

"[Cuba] basically had an oil famine in the early '90s, and they had to break
up the big state-owned farms and start smaller farms," says Heinberg. "They
included farming as part of the curriculum in our schools. They raised the
salaries of farmers.

"And they had to do these things, or otherwise they simply would not have
survived as a society."

Jason Mark lives and works on an organic farm in California. He is the
coauthor, with Kevin Danaher, of "Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to
Corporate Power."