A report issued this week in the UK, Fuelling a Food Crisis touched upon a critical issue that is often not brought up in public conversations about an impending oil crisis—our current food system’s extreme dependence on petroleum.
We don’t often think about agricultural energy consumption while we sit down for a steak dinner or a vegan pasta salad. Why should we, after all, since we are consuming that very food to provide us with energy in the form of calories. Doesn’t nature, via photosynthesis, some watering, and survival of the fittest, create the energy we will eventually harvest and consume? This may have been true in traditional agricultural settings; however, our current industrialized farming system consumes, on average, 50 times the energy input of traditional agriculture. According to the report, in the most extreme cases, energy use in agriculture has increased 100 fold or more. This is a huge shift in our reliance on fossil fuels for agricultural energy, in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, and hydrocarbon- fuelled farm machinery (such as tractors), and irrigation systems. There are many issues, social, environmental, and economic, that surface over a vast statistic like that, although one further statistic could bring it all down to farm and table level. Chemical fertilizers account for about one third (1/3) of total fossil fuel and agricultural energy consumption. While we are dousing our plants with chemical fertilizers (a serious human health issue in itself), there are hundreds of sources of natural fertilizer in each community, begging to be composted rather than trashed at the landfill. Unfortunately, because of the artificially low price of oil, and an industrialized agricultural system which has perpetuated the use of chemicals to solve biological problems, we have a created a problem which begins with a farmer dependence on the products sold by agri-chemical companies and ends every day with valuable, nutrient rich food and paper products flooding our dumps rather than enriching our fields.
A concept such as nutrient cycling may not be glamorous to land on the front page of the NY Times, however is a step on the rung of environmental sustainability. Food = waste was how prominent architect and green thinker William McDonough has puts it, not just meaning the food we eat, but the energy put into any of our products. Until we are able to eliminate the concept of waste from our industrial systems, we are throwing energy and valuable resources into the landfill at best, downstream to pollute our rivers, or into the atmosphere.
I bring up this concept in a blog about food to show that it is all related. Envisioning (and creating) a city-wide composting program which supplies the fertilizer to local farms is just one of the possible solutions. This could solve the problem of petroleum dependent fertilizers coating our fields (and then our rivers) while removing a biodegradable product from the waste stream and promoting a local economy.
These solutions by themselves won’t solve the world’s environmental problems; however they will help to release our agricultural system from an unnecessary dependence on oil. This dependence, while not apparent to us in everyday life, could prove to be the fodder for a food crisis like we have never seen globally. It is estimated that 95% of all our food products require the use of oil in our current system (Skrebowski, 2004). To raise and bring to market a single cow with current industrial practices, it will take 6 barrels of oil – enough to drive from New York to Los Angles (National Geographic, 2004). But we know traditional agricultural practices allowed for the successful raising of cows and more. What has changed are the methods used, the emphasis on mechanization and chemicals instead of a more holistic, sustainable approach to farming. Supporting local food systems, which are more likely to in turn support sustainable growing practices and resource cycling, is a direct way you can change this seemingly insurmountable problem of agriculture (and therefore our own) dependence on oil. Stopping the food crisis could be as simple as putting better food in your fridge. Buying local produce in season and preparing it at home can prove to be cheaper and healthier than eating processed foods. If you can’t make it to the farmer’s market or join up with a CSA (www.localharvest.org), supporting local shops and restaurants which buy from these farms can prove to create a ripple effect through your local economy and allow your dollar to have a much greater impact in promoting a sustainable world via your purchases.
References:
Chris Skrebowski, Joining the Dots, Presentation to Energy Institute Conference, London, 10 November 2004.
The price of steak, National Geographic, June 2004.