How close is our food supply system to a catastrophic crisis?

[northernsoul]

It seems like every day, I see a new headline about unprecedented crop failures (the latest re: massive failure of Australia's wheat harvest), runaway inflation in consumer food prices, eroding safeguards for food safety, the disappearance of bees, and possibility of rising fuel costs making the global food distribution system unsustainable. I also think about how few of us have access to the means of producing our own food (unlike the Great Depression when many Americans lived on or had access to working farms).
From my amateur perspective, it seems like there just needs to be a few things going wrong ecologically and economically to create a "perfect storm" for our food supply system, possibly resulting in actual famine in the industrialized world. Am I being alarmist, or are my concerns justified?

If there is cause for concern, what can we do?

[phantom power]

1. Food importing countries will be clobbered first.

I imagine it will proceed in the same way as peak-fossil: There will be waves of demand destruction, as the poorest countries get priced out of the market. Each wave of demand destruction will be followed by a temporary period of price stability.

That's a sanitary way of saying there will be waves of famine and starvation, starting with the poorest countries, and gradually working its way up to the most wealthy industrialized countries.

[havocmom]

2. oh, don't get me started....

Maybe later when I have more time. LOTS more time.

[northernsoul]

4. umm, that doesn't sound too comforting

I'll be interested in hearing what you do have to say, should you ever get the time.

[tom_paine]

21. havocmom, darlin', you CAN'T dangle a comment like that and LEAVE!

Might I suggest even a brief response would be welcome.

Please do...get started...

:evilgrin: :hi:

[havocmom]

38. Sorry lad. Been a bad week and momma's energy is low.

When a bunch of Montana ranchers worried about the effect Mad Cow was having with their ability to send beef to Japan, one or two SMALL processors here decided to test EVERY steer. USDA threatened them with all sorts of fines or closure if they would be so horrible as to voluntarily TEST EVERY STEER.

They not only don't care if bad meat reaches the consumer, they THREATEN small businessmen who try to lessen fears by raising standards.

Fuel cost- ah, now there's a mess. Takes diesel to till, plant, harvest and get to market. Custom combiners (bands of traveling specialist for you city kids) are not even coming to many grain producing areas. Grain sits and decays. Your food is sitting in fields here and there, making what gets to market cost you more and more.

USDA is one of those agencies bushco is destroying by appointing incompetent or just plain destructive upper management. As with other agencies, they are getting very top heavy and not hiring enough people to do the field work. That's FOOD INSPECTORS to you civilians. ;) From the top, the agenda is to make it less likely ANY problem with ANY of your chow would get noticed.

Early in 2001, the GOP Congress ripped the law requiring country of origin labeling. At that time, slightly over 40% of the foods in most grocery stores came from overseas.

Why would they decide you and I didn't need to know where the food comes from? Two guesses:
1) LOTS more of your food was coming from multi-national corporate farming giants and LOTS more was coming at you fast. They WANT the independent farmer out of business. Now, most family farms ARE corporations, yes indeedy. That is because the way tax laws and other legal hoops are written to benefit CORPORATIONS. So, to stay on the land, most family farmers are incorporated. It helps, but they are still disappearing from the land. GIANT AGRA buys lawmakers who make laws that hurt the smaller producers (who are MUCH better land stewards generally) and they sue family farmers here and in 3rd world nations alike. They just can't get enough.

The GOP just doesn't want you wondering just where your food comes from. If you knew, you would see how INSECURE the nation is because of all the imported foods.

Why does GIANT AGRA want you to not worry about origin so they can shove more imported food down your throat? Bigger profits!

Ah, that brings us to reason
2) Lower labor cost and less environmental/safety regulation to deal with. They can sell poison and make big bucks while paying shit wages to the workers they displace and then poison with bad farming methods/chemicals/water contamination.

The fewer family farms there are here, the more dependent you are on multi-national corporations for your daily bread. If you hate BIG OIL having control of your gas tank, consider: BIG AGRA is getting a strangle-hold on your belly.

I ask your indulgence as I skip back a bit. Momma IS tired and this is being written as stream of thought rather than actually composed.

bushco cut inspectors. 'Who cares what you eat' is pretty much the attitude. Well, we are JUST NOW considering the problem of about 95% of all imports NOT being inspected.

Not enough inspectors in the meat plants, processing plants, hell, even out in the fields where things grow GUARANTEES more tainted food will get into our markets. Not enough inspectors in US ports? Not only DITTO for the foods, but you could send in FRIGGEN armies with weapons in those trailer containers!

Ever watch work at a dock? Ever see a documentary about modern port operations? The cargo comes over already packed into locked containers. Those are loaded, by huge cranes, onto semi trucks or rail cars and off they go, across America. More and more big ports have automated systems which require VERY SMALL crews to unload those huge ships.

And not enough inspectors. Inspectors, whether on the ships, dock, in meat plants, in canning plants, testing soils and water in the fields where your kid's fresh veggies are growing, cost money. Yep, boots on the ground cost and the boots of inspectors on the ground are just as important to the security of ALL Americans as the boots of our troops on the ground.

Money. Yep, it costs money. BUT, the corporations that such services are being privatized to don't want to spend money on payroll. It is much easier to steal larger sums via obscure hardware for war than when you have to actually pay boots on the ground to assure that America's food is safe.

Sorry for the rambling, disjointed rant, Tom, my lad. You know I am capable of better. What I lack in form tonight, I hope I made up for in passion. ;)

America, they don't care that you are eating crap, literally.

And they want the independent food producers out of business here and overseas. They are tying up water globally. They are patenting seeds and suing farmers here and in 3rd world nations who dare to do what farmers have done for tens of thousands of years, save seed to plant for next year's crop. They are all too happy to SELL seed (which many in 3rd world) can't afford. And a lot of what they sell has a 'kill gene' so any farmer who dares violate the law against saving seed can't use it. They want only mega-corporations to have the ability to sell you food. They want every penny they can squeeze out of you

[WCGreen]

3. The US has the most productive breadbasket in the world...

Through the simple and time proven practice of crop rotation, the US has been able to increase yields and preserve farmland...

Unfortunately, we are at a point where we can not produce much more...

What can we do...

Stock up on frozen and canned foods...

Have at least a two month supply of canned food available...

[NickB79]

8. The biggest increases in yields have come from fossil fuel inputs

Most farmers have been relying on massive amounts of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides to sidestep the process of crop rotation for decades now. Smaller farmers still practice it, but even they "cheat" a bit by growing corn in the same field two-three years in a row instead of only one by using fertilizers, for example. The whole Green Revolution and all that jazz.

The problem is that our supplies of fossil fuels are peaking, and will begin to decline in the coming decade. When there is less fertilizer, less diesel for the tractors, yield declines will follow.

[happyslug]

19. Watch your terms, productively per acre per person peaked in the 1950s

The problem was as the US and the rest of the world went from horse powered farms to oil powered farms. mixing of crops had to give way to mono-culture. The old practice of combining Corn with beans had to give way to Corn only. When you HAND picked the Beans and Corn, combing them made sense, you picked both as their mature. The beans actually added nutrients to the ground that the corn took out. Afterward you ran Cattle through the crop which ate the stalks. Very productive but human input intensive.

With oil driven tractors you can have one person grow crops on huge number of acres, the number of bushels per WORKER climbed extensively, but productivity per person dropped (i.e productively for total crops per acre dropped). On the other hand if you looked at each crop separately, Oil and increased fertilizers increased production per acre. This was known in the 1950s and one of the reason the Former Soviet Union manged to feed itself (The farm workers on the Collectives had the right to farm a Small patch of land for their own use, they used old fashion multiple crops like corn and beans for maximum production on these small lots, while the collective as a whole planted huge areas just like large american farms do today.

Another aspect of this is the switch from pole beans (Which can climb on Corn Stalks) to bush beans (Which can be harvested by tractors). Productively per person per acre has increase with this change, but at the cost of dual production (SOmetime triple production for many human only
"farms" (More gardens then farms, but can be extensive) included growing pumpkins on the ground between the corn Stalks).

The problem for most of the world has been, how do you make a living on the farm? Dual crops, hand planting etc is man-hour intensive, but more productive per acre. On the other hand, if you adopt oil run tractors that same person can farm a much larger area, but has to change his method of farming to one crop. That crop is made cheaper then it can be done using manual methods, so the price of the crop DROPS which forces the small farmer into bankruptcy for he or she can NOT sell his or her excess to pay the taxes on the farm. This has been the problem with Rural America (and the rest of Rural Farmers world wide) since at least the 1930s (Mechanization starting in the US Wheat fields in the 1860s, leading to the Wheat Tariff of the 1880s by the Germans, for the US could raise wheat and ship it to Germany, cheaper than the German could raise wheat do to the increase mechanization of US Wheat harvest).

While world wide food production has increased even more so since the 1950s (Most American farms have doubled in size at least twice since that date, by taking over other farms) much of that has been do to new hybrids of crops in addition to fertilizer and tractor tiling. Most of the new hybrids (And other variations of known crops) will remain and be productive even in the post-oil world. The main concern will be HOW do you maintain "surplus" of food to sell (and for city people to buy)?

My point I am trying to make is that they are Alternatives to tractors. The alternatives are almost as productive as tractor on a per acre basis, but NOT on a per worker basis (and NOT on a pro-one crop basis). Most of these techniques are well known and done to this day on small gardens. They tend to be manual driven as opposed to machine driven, but food is produced (But at much higher prices then with oil based system). What I see happening is today's large farms being divided up among family members as Farmers switch back to horse/manual labor type farming as the price of oil goes through the roof. As long as the price of oil stays "low" tractors will be used, but as the price of oil goes up, horses will make a slow but steady comeback. I remember my father's comment of hat a farmer told him as he worked on the farmer's farm in the 1930s. Use the horses, they eat every day, whether they are used or not. The tractor only cost money to operate if it is used.

As the price of Oil goes up, the "cost" of having horses will stay about the same on most farms (Which raise their own food for they horses). Manual farming methods will be seen as more productive as the price of oil goes up (i.e. as people give up on tractors, they will revert back to pre-tractor days farming techniques while using the new hybrids i.e. Beans, pumpkins and corn raise together in the same field, but these will be hybrids or better beans, pumpkins and corn then what was planted in 1900). Fertilizers will be applied to keep up production levels, but being hand fertilizers less per acre will be used. People will revert to hoeing away weeds instead of herbicides, another fuel savings. You will see a lot more people on the Farms AND the price of Food will raise, but Food will be available (And I am NOT going into the food savings as people switch to a more grain based diet from the more meat based diets they are eating today).

My point is the price of Food will go up as oil goes up, but sooner or later the alternative to an Oil based agricultural system will be embraced. I expect this to be slow, but it will be steady. Food prices will HAVE to go up to make these alternative systems profitable, but that will occur sooner or later, while before we run out of oil in about 140 years.

[daninthemoon]

5. I'm pretty much seeing what you are. If my kids weren't grown, I'd

be terrified of how to feed them. As it is, I don't know how they and others will get by the next few decades. Just remember that gay marriage is the only thing we need to fear, right? Between oil shortages, climate change, and rampant globalization and corporate takeover of food supplies, things are going to get impossibly tough. Neocons don't have to worry though, because they will be "raptured" beforehand.

[kestrel91316]

6. Everyone with access to even the smallest patch of land needs to

learn how to produce as much of their own food as possible.

Helpful references:
Carla Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living
http://www.carlaemery.com/country-living-book.htm

Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew
http://www.squarefootgardening.com/

Learn how to save your own seeds for next year's crop:
http://www.chelseagreen.com/2002/items/523

And pass heirloom varieties on to others:
http://www.seedsavers.org/

Learn how to process and preserve what you grow, so your summer garden can feed you year-round:
http://www.freshpreserving.com/pages/home/1.php
Good books are: the Ball Blue Book (use most recent edition), Putting Foods By, and Stocking Up. And of course Carla's Encyclopedia of Country Living, the bible of home food production.

Learn how to do this NOW. Or at least get familiar with the techniques and tools needed.

[northernsoul]

7. Thanks for the links

I'm not optimistic about how much I grow on a corner lot in a major city, but I'll start looking into it.

[IDemo]

9. Hydroponics is one option

You can get a surprising amount of produce out of a spare room (likely not to self-sufficiency, however) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics

[kestrel91316]

10. You'd be surprised how much you can grow. Be aware that sweet corn,

though a pleasure to pick and eat fresh, is a space hog for the actual amount of food you get.

[northernsoul]

11. what do you recommend growing?

I have been growing heirloom tomatoes for several years now for the sheer hedonistic pleasure of having homegrown heirloom tomatoes. This year's crop was my worst ever, partly due to neglect and partly due to extreme heat and drought here in Minnesota.

If I were looking to actually get a fair amount of calories out of what I can grow in my yard, what would you recommend?

[hatrack]

15. I'd recommend planting lots of beans, both bush and pole

They're prolific and easy to grow. Dry beans keep beautifully and also provide good source of non-meat protein.

Beyond that, garlic is easy, keeps well and tastes far better than what you'd pay way too much for at the store.

Cabbage is easy and if you can do sauerkraut, it's one of the best low-tech means of preserving food around.

Beets, turnips, zucchini, cucumbers, cauliflower and broccoli make great sources for pickled home-canned pickles and vegetble mixes, and, well . . . tomatoes . . . .mmmmmmmmmmmmm - you've just GOT to grow tomatoes!

:toast:

[Kolesar]

16. Winter squash: butternut, acorn, or spaghetti squash ought to succeed

And winter squash keeps well in a chilly basement. Potatos would be worth growing. I have not tried spuds in a few years. Onions. I would think that in your climate, the cabbages: broccoli, brussel sprouts and cabbage would do well. Cauliflower is a cabbage but it needs a lot of fertilizer and is tricky.

Visit the DU gardening forum and ask around.

[kestrel91316]

17. Potatoes. Winter squash. Jerusalem artichokes (a perennial native

sunflower whose roots are tasty). The three sisters are an American tradition: corn (that you dry on the plant and grind for meal), beans (dry), and squash.

I grew a test plot (9 sq ft) of wheat a few years ago here in Los Angeles. Hard red winter wheat, planted in the fall, harvested in early summer. Got enough to make at least 2 loaves of bread (I grind my own flour).

You can save a lot of money growing leafy greens of all sorts, and they pack a lot of nutritional punch. Oh, and don't forget your brassicas up north, especially cabbage (you can make homemade kraut). Tomatoes are always a good bet. There are varieties that grow well in just about any climate. I did a test of 15 kinds one year to ID which varieties did best here.

Four Season Harvest is another good reference work:
http://www.chelseagreen.com/1992/items/fourseasonharvest

[northernsoul]

22. Wheatfields in L.A. - who woulda thunk it!?

Thanks for the advice and the inspiration. Any recommendations as to beans? I've grown my own haricots verts alongside my tomato patch, but I'm interested in growing preservable legumes. How much space do I need to get a worthwhile yield? Are these "pole beans"?

[kestrel91316]

30. I don't know what varieties do best in your area, but Blue Lake Bush is

a great canning, freezing, and fresh eating bush green bean. Kentucky Wonder is the definitive standout pole green bean.

If you are talking about dry beans (that you soak to cook), there are all sorts of cool heirloom types, like Jacob's cattle and Anasazi and such. Not sure what would do well in your area, again. Some of these are bush and some are pole but that's just their growth form.

[Kolesar]

28. Yeah! The LA wheatfield story is way cool

Mother Earth News did an article on growing wheat on a modest scale--an area that was large enough that you would need machinery to get started. They asked the rhetorical question--why grow wheat when the yield is so low? Their answer was that what you do get has a very high caloric/energy value, and that makes it worth it.

[kestrel91316]

31. There are a few books out there that tell how to grow and harvest wheat

by hand.

Small Scale Grain Raising by Gene Logsdon (rare, out of print, I have a copy NFS, lol)
Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery

Corn is really the definitive calorie crop for North America. It's native, so will do well in a wide variety of NA climates. I am referring to the dried corn kernels aka flint corn or dent corn. You don't grow these from SWEET corn seeds - wrong variety. If we Americans HAD to, we could all grow corn for cornmeal/hominy/masa right in our useless front yards.

[emmadoggy]

25. Seed Savers is located in the next town over from me.

Several years ago, when we lived in a different town to the north, we used to drive by it on our way to work every day. Never really knew what they were about.

I've looked through all of your links and have bookmarked them. Thanks for the great info.

[Colorado Progressive]

26. I just canned my first jam this week!....

How strange that its so easy! Next, up goes the greenhouse. I am doing this also because I am so sick of the unhealthy additives in our food, like hi fructose corn syrup (and who know's what from China).

[ramapo]

12. About as close as a lack of oil and water

Global food production is primarily based on two resources: oil and water. The future supply of both is precarious.

Agriculture across most of the world has undergone a tremendous consolidation. Far fewer farms and farmers. Workers have been replaced with machines. Most all production is specialized and product is routinely transported thousands of miles. We all enjoy tremendous variety at still reasonable cost though it often doesn't seem that way after a trip through the checkout counter.

Logically the present system cannot sustain itself. It is simply too resource intensive. I'm not sure that it'll just collapse (barring some kind of bizarre climate event) but food will become more and more expensive and the present system will someday clearly seem like folly.

So what will happen?

Cuba may provide us with a shining example of what to do. When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did the heavily-subsidized, oil-dependent Cuban agricultural system. The small farm has made a remarkable comeback. Significant production comes from city farmers. They've come to rely on experience and organics as opposed to oil-based fertilizers, pesticides and machinery.

If you have local farms, buy their products. Maybe there's a farmers market nearby. Some areas have co-ops. If you're really ambitious, plow up the lawn and plant some veggies. I always say I'm going to do it, but never follow through. It is a lot of work, but I'm sure very rewarding.

If there truly is a catastrophic collapse, then you're likely screwed along with most of the rest of us. Society will turn very ugly, very quickly and your garden, and probably your home, will be ransacked. Months of canned food might not do you much good.

[GliderGuider]

13. When the crisis comes, climate will make all the difference.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did the heavily-subsidized, oil-dependent Cuban agricultural system.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did the heavily-subsidized, oil-dependent North Korean agricultural system. Now, Kim Il-sung suffered from a worse case of ideological recto-cranial inversion than Fidel, and NK isn't exactly a tourist destination, and their isolation was largely self-imposed compared to the external embargo on Cuba, but what has killed the North Koreans since the oil went away is largely their climate. It makes a big difference if you can grow three crops of veggies a year versus just one.

[northernsoul]

14. I'm in Minnesota AKA "The Frozen Tundra"

3 growing seasons? Not bloody likely, barring profound climatological shifts.

[Xithras]

18. Greenhouse.

My parents grow food year round in their coastal Oregon property, and it gets insanely cold there sometimes too. What is important is LIGHT. Clear and cold can grow food just fine if you're doing it in a heated greenhouse. Obviously, ensuring that you have a sustainable heat source is important, but my dads 900sf greenhouse is heated quite well using a single wood burning potbelly stove that he picked up at a yard sale. As long as you can keep the internal temp above freezing, there is food that will grow in a greenhouse.

Living in California, I thankfully don't have to worry about that. I let most of my garden go fallow in the winter, but the parts I DO plant only need a little plastic sheeting to keep them warm.

[Kolesar]

33. I think of that "deep freeze to two feet below" as my garden's "reset button"

Bugs-b-gone! I'll start with new bacteria next year.

I have heard that one can get their greenhouse plants to "coast" through the winter by watering them a lot less. They will not grow much with the room just above freezing, but they will be fully formed plants early in the spring and ready to produce.

[losthills]

20. Chicken Little Never Sleeps

Where I live (Amerika) every home has an ornamental front lawn with various types of shrubbery, and a backyard full of junk. They pay illegal immigrants 70 bucks or so a month to keep this worthless shit green. It could just as easily be squash and tomatoes.

Problem solved.

You're welcome....

[Colorado Progressive]

27. Pure fucking genius. Why do people waste all that water and

chemicals on a useless ornament???? Those same illegals could be harvesting the gardens.

[GliderGuider]

29. I heard a woman say at a conference,

"If you don't have sheep, why do you keep a sheep pasture in front of your house?"

We've gone over entirely to edible landscaping - nothing ornamental unless its also edible (like nasturtiums). Lots of tomatoes, peppers, beans, squash, eggplant, fruit trees, raspberry canes etc. All on a tiny urban lot, and I still have some #&@ing grass to mow...

[Colorado Progressive]

34. Get a goat to eat it then LOL, then you'll have milk too nt

[GliderGuider]

35. Comes the revolution...

and all the zoning and bylaw mullahs are put up against the wall and shot, the first thing we'll do is get some goats. And chickens.

[Colorado Progressive]

36. OK just watch out for poop nt

[Kolesar]

32. squash and tomatoes are going to need a lot more fertilization than grass, shrubs, and annuals

(Just sayin') I suppose that tanker truck of Chem-lawn some people subscribe to could be put to better use.

[NMDemDist2]

23. the people have no bread? Let them eat cake!

do I really need the sarcasm smilie here?

[The2ndWheel]

24. Upside down economics

http://www.energybulletin.net/32718.html

The second chart is how I conceive a properly informed ecological economist might depict the same data. The entire economy stands on the shoulders, as it were, of agriculture, forestry, and mining (especially the extraction of oil, gas, coal and uranium) and on the utilities that deliver the energy mined in usable form.

This method for depicting the economy was suggested to me by two things. First, Liebig's Law of the Minimum states that an organism's growth is limited by the amount of the least available essential nutrient. In the case of world society that nutrient would be food, though many would argue that fossil fuels are the essential nutrient since so much food production depends on the use of fossil fuels and their derivatives including fertilizers and pesticides. Second, a piece by Dmitry Podborits argues that it is nonsense to say that the U. S. economy is less vulnerable to oil supply disruptions today than in 1970s because it produces twice as much GDP per barrel of oil. Instead, Podborits suggests, we are more vulnerable to oil supply disruptions because we have so much more GDP balanced on each barrel of oil. The same argument might be made with respect to agriculture which in the United States in 1930 employed 21.5 percent of the workforce and made up 7.7 percent of GDP. In 2000 the numbers were 1.9 percent of the workforce and 0.7 percent of GDP. We are balancing an ever larger total economy on an agricultural economy that on a relative basis is shrinking. Certainly, we are getting more efficient, but are we becoming more vulnerable?

[losthills]

37. I don't buy into the myth that agriculture is dependent on oil.

The current agribusiness model is unsustainable and is also poisoning us. We should look forward to it's demise. Let Kellogs and McDonalds die, and don't waste any tears on their passing. We can feed ourselves just fine.

Sustainable organic agriculture can be practised anywhere, indoors or outdoors, in any climate, and people will be healthier and happier than they are now.

The end of the Oil Age can't come fast enough for me.