2004 Conference Proceedings
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Charles Stevens Presentation: Agrarian Solutions to Peak Oil
Slide 1 At lunch we were talking variously about what we were supposed to do about marauding bands of folks with shotguns stealing our organic tomatoes that we grew in our intentional communities. And it was a disturbing conversation in many ways, but we finally decided that the answer – if there are any answers – are in community and focusing on local answers. I also came out of our conversation at lunch with a dissatisfaction with what I'm going to say today, because people are looking for specific answers. And I think what we're doing today and for the next couple of days is giving basic ideas out of which we can develop specific and appropriate answers to specific local ecological, environmental, and social issues. So I'm not going to come here and tell you exactly what kind of rotation cycle you need to put into your organic farm. There are people like Ned Snavely up in Holmes County who could tell you that. There are people here who could probably tell you that. But mostly, there is knowledge about how to do that, but we're going to have to work it out to a large extent. That's perhaps the bad news.
The good news is human beings have been doing agriculture for something like 10,000 years off and on, variously successfully, in some places extraordinarily successfully. Wet rice agriculture in China, 5,000 years, very sustainable system, highly productive system. I studied with people in the South Pacific on an island that was 99 square miles in size. That was a big island for them. They have been doing agriculture on this island for 2700 years, and until the 1960's, they didn't mess it up. That's a long time to do good, solid agriculture. Now not everything about Polynesian societies is touchy, feely and happy, but they certainly knew how to do good agriculture in a tropical environment.
Two of my heroes here, Thomas Jefferson, Wendell Berry. Guys who have pretty neat ideas. Ideas that we still kick around every day. Pursuit of happiness. All men being created equal. These are not easy ideas, and they are not going to become easy. But one of the problem we have with these icons, both of these men are icons, is that we think they're too romantic. And I think that that's not fair. They're really philosophers. Philosophers tell us about ideas, they give us concepts. Whether or not we can successfully put those concepts into action is another issue, but that's not their job. Their job is to give us philosophies, ideas, out of which we can work. So I don't think it's fair to say that Wendell Berry is too romantic. I don't happen to think he is. I think that in many ways, he tells us about good ways to live life, good ways to be in touch with the earth, good ways to grow our food, good ways to be independent, lots of good things. My concern is, and I will start off here talking about, whether or not this is a romantic idea, this idea of agrarianism, and also how we can make it a pragmatic reality.
Slide 2 So Jefferson got his idea out of Whig romanticism, this idea, this focus on history, of a time in history that actually never existed, about smallholders on the landscape, growing crops in more or less egalitarian communities, and everybody knew then that this Whig romanticism depicted a world that never existed. But this was fundamental in Jefferson's idea of the world and I have a quote from him later that points this out. But he had this idea of rural communities forming a philosophical basis for sustainable productive local agriculture that was not petroleum-dependent, and I think that we can draw out of his agrarianism a vision that works in many ways for us.
Slide 3 If what we can do is take this agrarian vision and add to it, with what is becoming increasingly scientific justification of agroecological principles, scientific justification for indigenous agriculture, which has been going on for a long time. Why scientific? Because in our culture, we won't pay attention to anything unless it's scientifically justified. So the fact that people have been doing good indigenous agriculture for a long period of time doesn't work for us for a lot of xenophobic, and other imperialistic ideas that permeate our culture. So we need a scientist to tell us yeah, this little brown guy over here really does know what he's doing when he's planting yams. And then we go, well, okay, it's not really the little guy over here, it's the scientists telling us how to do it. And I think that people, agroecologists like Miguel Altieri and Steven Gliessman, and a lot of other people, will tell you right up front the reason we are doing this agroecological research is to come up with the scientific legitimation of processes that have already been going on for a long time. And I think that that's our cultural deficit. Right? That's something we need to fix within ourselves. So if we have to legitimate it through science and trial and error, then let's do that. Anthropology also offers us an awful lot of examples of highly sustainable, highly productive agricultural systems from whom we can learn. So I think that what we can do with this agrarian philosophy that may appear to be romantic is to realize that we have now good scientific as well as anthropological information that will tell us that we can turn that vision into a reasonable, cooperative, communitarian way of getting to the world post-carbon. I think that we have lots of options, and I'm tired of being pessimistic, even after November 2nd. I'm tired of being pessimistic. I am tired of acquiescing to power.
Slide 4 We have a lot of options. I think we need to take them. Let them do their trip, we can do ours at the local level. Jefferson saw this. He saw America as a refuge for original Saxon values and he thought fundamentally that there was something good about being engaged in the land, about getting your hands dirty, about having your lifestyle structured by something outside of yourself, in this case, nature. Realizing even before it happened that the idea of 8 to 5 is a dehumanizing principle. And so, maybe this is highly romanticized. And Wendell Berry talks about this. David Kline talks about this. Gene Logsdon talks about this, about the benefits that people get when they start becoming part of a system that is larger than themselves. I'm not talking about the petroleum system and the corporate system. I'm talking about geological systems that have nothing to do with us. They existed well before us, will exist long after us. Human beings are not exempt from extinction. That's the bad part we're talking about here today, this weekend. We need to work on what we have control over. So it is highly romanticized. But he also thought that land stewardship brought with it a certain moral strength of character, and he envisioned, as we all know, that an America based on small agrarian farmers, because he felt that when you are in that place, there is a moral character that develops from working the land. And so he also taught that there was a correlation between closeness to nature and closeness to God. And we see that again in a resurgence of conservation congregations. So we have an ethos in Christianity and other religions that tie us back to a closeness to nature and gives us a closeness to God.
Slide 5 Now for Jefferson, he tied it into his political wisdom as well, and this is a wonderful quote of course, and I don't know how much, how comfortable I feel with this particular quote from Jefferson, but he says "the tree of liberty is refreshed with the blood of patriots, and tyrants is its natural manure". Thomas Jefferson thought that revolutions were good things once in a while. A few of us may have shotguns – they've got Apache helicopters. So how far we want to go with this is something we can talk about some other time.
In actuality, agricultural stewardship as part of agrarianism didn't actually happen until the 1820's, when the devastation that was brought by the introduction of agriculture, particularly here to Ohio and other places, made people realize very quickly that they had to adopt an agrarian-type of agriculture. The colonization of Ohio, those of you who are historians, know that it was a thoroughly devastating event. People talked about sycamore trees that were big enough to ride your horse into and camp out overnight, and what did they do with those sycamore trees? They cut them down. The last native deer in Butler County was shot in 1825 at Stilwell's Corner not too far from my house. They had to be reintroduced. So this was a devastating settlement. And they began to recognized this in the 1820's. There is a great book by Steven Stoll called, Larding the Lean Earth, that talks about this agrarian vision in the 1820's that was resurrected because of practical necessity to do so. And I think to some extent, that's where we are again.
Slide 6 Aldo Leopold in 1949 was probably the founder of this modern vision of agrarianism. And here's this great quote, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community." A realization here, without going into evolutionary theory, but a realization here that human beings are also part of this biotic community, and to the extent that we destroy that community, we are destroying also the life support system that we as animals are also dependent upon.
Slide 7 This is another quote from Aldo Leopold, "The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soil, water, plants and animals, or collectively, the land." And Wendell Berry brings this back up again, that we should include our community, as we build these community alternatives to post-oil, that we include in it animal life, plant life, the ecosystem, as members of the community, and in a sense give them a vote in what it is that we are doing. In other words, we are not the only animals involved in this process.
Slide 8 Now Wendell Berry, it seems to me, purposely tries to get away from a romanticized vision of the farmer. So he says in this quote here, "The idea that farmers are the salt of the earth, a pure, independent person, a child of nature, is as wrong as the image that a farmer is some sort of bumbling idiot who, if he had any sense, would be doing something else." An awful lot of farmers, particularly all the farmers I've ever met, are doing farming because they love to do farming. That's the first thing, most of them. The second thing is, you can't be stupid and be successful at farming. Farming, even mechanized farming, is incredibly complicated. The knowledge system that indigenous farmers have is immense, generations long. I can't remember the fellow's name right now – it may come to me – but there's a fellow who did work amongst dry rice farmers in Africa who would count within a particular region 60 varieties of a single species of dry land rice. Farmers would have 15 varieties of the same species of dry land rice, and they would know what part of their property, what soil type, to plant specific varieties of rice, which varieties of rice would return in a dry season, which varieties of rice would return in a wet season. It takes an awful lot of knowledge to do this. The good news of that kind of system is if you have a drought, your yields will go down, but you will not starve to death. If you're a soybean/corn rotation farmer in Ohio, and you were in the wrong rotation three years ago, you lost the farm. Right? Because of the consequences, the risks of monocropping. So out of indigenous farmers, we get this image of farming that is highly biodiverse and therefore very stable. There are other problems with it – I don't want to be too romantic about it – but that biodiversity provides us with some stability.
Slide 9 So here's this great article, "Conserving Community," you can type it into Google, you can get a copy of it on the Web, and I just extracted some of the things that Wendell Berry said in this. And he said some very fundamental questions. I will have a slide later on that says these are radical ideas. They are only radical ideas because of the extent to which we have internalized, in some sense, unquestioningly, the ideological backdrop of our economic system. That's why these ideas seem radical now, is because he is proposing that we don't look about maximizing utility at the individual level. It's not about, what Wendell Berry is talking about, what I'm talking about, is not whether or not, I, as an individual, can maximize my capital. It's whether or not my community and myself as a member of it can maximize our common wealth. I as an individual benefit from that. I'm not talking about American individualism, I'm talking about the individuality that involves people in a community, if that makes any sense.
So here's a number of things. And I don't want to read them all out, because you all can read it "Always include local nature, the land, the water, and the air, as members of the community." I already talked about that. "Always ask of any proposed change or innovation what will this do, not so much to me, but to the community? What will this do to the community? How will this affect the commonwealth of the community? Always ask how local needs must be supplied from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbors." I had the pleasure of going to Italy this last summer, having a great dinner with some colleagues down there who work in agroecology, and we got talking about the Iraqi war, and Americans, and they basically said that they feel sorry for us, because we lack contact with our community. They see us as a bunch of atomized individuals. I think that's overstating it. I don't think we are entirely a bunch of atomized individuals, but what they have in Italy, if you've ever been there, is in the afternoon, everybody goes to the piazza and hangs around with each other and talks to one another and buys books, and eats ice cream. When these people close their shutters at night, they say good night to their neighbors across the street. And so they have this communitarian ethos, I think, that we're lacking here.
Slide 10 "We must strive to produce as much of our own energy as possible. Always supply local needs first," which is exactly the opposite of what is going on in industrial agriculture now, which is about buying into a global market, producing for a global market. Wendell Berry is suggesting here that we supply our local needs first. The idea that we ship in lettuce from California makes a lot of economic sense, because there's truckers making their living doing that, but it is ecologically nonsense. We can grow all the lettuce we need in Ohio. Can't grow oranges, or kiwi fruit. But we can certainly do carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, and lots of other things. We have to invest in ourselves as community rather than investing in General Electric. We cannot externalize the costs of keeping our community clean. In other words, keeping our community clean by putting our crap someplace else isn't part of the solution. That's externalization of cost, we can't do that. And I like the bottom one too, because this is an important part of being a community. And that is, we separate generations. Old people are stupid. We put them off into nursing homes. Old people are a wealth of information. Information that will disappear when they die. An intergenerational farm, I have been blessed to be able to stay in one and visit very shortly with some people who are letting me stay there for this conference, here's three generations of people on this farm, where I saw a daughter quite literally learning from her grandfather about how to take care of goats and chickens and stuff. That's the kind of communitarianism and family structure I think that we've lost in the United States to some extent, and Wendell Berry and others are suggesting we revitalize it.
Slide 11 And here's this quote. He says, "These ideas are radical only because national and global economies have been formed in perfect disregard for and disdain of community and ecological issues." The market system will tell us that resource depletion does not exist because the market itself holds the automatic augmentating mechanism that will reduce scarcity to a nonissue. Because knowing actors, economic actors, seeing the price of a resource go up because of scarcity, will seek an alternative. Or they will seek a new way of extracting it. Or they'll seek a new way of processing it. And there is some truth in that. But then we get Julian Simons' idea that copper is a state of mind. And then he tells us that optic fiber was the very enactment of this market ideology that meant copper for wiring is no longer useful, because we developed optic fiber. He doesn't tell us of course that optic fiber was not developed because of copper scarcity. It was developed for completely other reasons. The market mentality is one of the things that we have to get away from, it seems to me. There are some truths in it, there are some truths about efficiency of economics, but we can't idealize economic alternatives for everything. Exactly. It only works on a small scale. But I'm not suggesting in my talk that we disregard markets altogether. What I'm suggesting is that we don't absolutize – if that's a word – market mentalities. The market cannot do everything.
Slide 12 So I'm suggesting that Berry and Thomas Jefferson and others, Wes Jackson, David Kline, who does the Farming magazine, which if you don't get, you should get, are presenting a philosophical basis for an alternative vision, that I think if we add scientific information and anthropological information, is actually the basis for or one answer to post, to peak oil.
Slide 13 So then that brings up the idea of sustainability. I see sustainability having these four components. Usually people talk about three components, but I think if we want to get from what is now an unsustainable world to a more sustainable world, we have to change the way we think. And that's why, and other people as well, have added this ideological component. We have to think differently about the world.
So the idea of sustainability includes environmental components, that's the one most of us are familiar with.
It also involves economic components. You can't be running in the red all the time, whether you're running into ecological red, or you're running into a financial red, it's not going to work. You're going to have to come up with some way of staying in business as well as staying within the confines of an environmental system.
There are social components. Social inequity is unsustainable. It is destabilizing. I am not suggesting – I'm an anthropologist by training – I do not know of any purely egalitarian society outside of hunter and gatherer societies, and that will not work with 6.4 billion people. The red squirrel population wouldn't make it past an afternoon, and then what are we going to do? But relatively egalitarian distribution of food resources is something that is attainable globally. And particularly it is completely attainable at the local level.
And ideological components here: we have to start thinking about ourselves, get rid of this human hubris. We are not the only species on the planet, indeed, we cannot survive without the other species. And, most importantly for Americans, and I hate to trash on us too much because we are good people in many ways – it's not all about us. As I tell my daughter, it's not about you! It's not about you. I also tell my daughter, you can make it easy or you can make it hard. But what's going to happen is going to happen, you decide how you want to go about it. And I think that's what we are at this conference, we can go easy, which I think all of us would like to do, or we can go hard, but peak oil is coming whether we like it or not.
Slide 14 So there are all kinds of ideological ways of rethinking the world to get to a sustainable relationship, which I think is a relationship between dynamic economic systems, and larger dynamics or more slowly-moving changing ecological system, which has nothing to do with us. The world we live in was here before we got here as a species, will be here after we leave here as a species, changed, yes. But there are systems beyond us.
Slide 15 But given that then, sustainability involves establishing systems where human life can continue indefinitely within the confines of whatever our species existence is on this planet, and that should be about seven million years. Depending on where you want to calculate the beginning of the human species, if we start with Homo sapiens, we're only 150,000 years into this. It doesn't look good at this point, that we're going to make it. The other 6 _ million years look pretty rocky from here. We'll see. I won't see, but somebody will see.
Human individuals can flourish. Part of the idea of sustainability is that individuals are happy with what they are doing, that they are comfortable in their social environments, that they find some intellectual as well as spiritual meaning in what they are doing. So individuals have to flourish in what they're doing, and look, a lot of philosophers said that from Wendell Berry to Karl Marx. Karl Marx told us that the most important thing about human beings is their labor, what it is that they do. What human beings do is their being, that's what we are, is what we do. The life we lead is based on how we spend our life and what it is that we do in our life. We don't think of Karl Marx saying stuff like that, but that was very much the basis of his idea, which we accept as capitalists. We all want to do things that we enjoy doing, and who wants to work in a drywall cubbyhole for their whole life? Some people do, but I don't know who they are.
The other thing is that human culture can develop or remain stable. I've got some notes that I've managed not to look at while I've been talking. I think that what I was going to say about the stability of things is that we are also obsessed with the idea of progress, as some sort of linear thing. And I don't think that progress is linear. It never has been and never will be. And so part of what we're talking about is not so much indefinite progress, but a form of stability. Not all cultures want to progress indefinitely. I think that some cultures want to remain relatively stable over the long haul. And I think that there are some positive aspects of that as well, as well as infinite progress and development, which is only available, after all, with cheap energy.
And fundamentally, sustainability is where the effects of human activities remain within the bounds of established ecosystemic constraints. In my opinion, those ecosystemic constraints are defined outside of us. They exist substantially outside of us. There are systems over which human beings have no control. Don't tell that to an economist. But there are systems that are beyond our control. And the ecological system, to some extent, is one of them.
Slide 16 To some extent there has been a realization that the remarkable progress seen in the last 100 years or so of industrialism has also been accompanied by egregious global inequality and conflict. Some folks have admitted that unequal distribution of economic rewards is characteristic of capitalist economics. Here I go getting political again. Some people can look back on the 19th and 20th century and what you get is a very positive vision, of everything's getting better for human beings, onward and better all the time, here we go. We have visions of Star Trek, and these wonderful multicultural communities on starships everywhere. You've got to be rich in the first place to believe that. And that's harsh. But when I look back on the 19th and 20th century, I see in the 20th century alone, 180 million dead people from conflicts. Is there progress out of that? Yes, there's some progress out of that. Is that a happy vision of the world? Not for me. Is there another alternative? There must be some other alternative, otherwise extinction is, it seems to me, just a matter of time. That's pretty depressing. I was going to come up here and give you folks solutions. And, with this Slide we can recall Aurelio Peccei and his founding the Club of Rome and Meadows and all publishing their Limits to Growth computer simulation models that first predicted in the 1970's a catastrophic collapse of the global system by the end of this century. So, for all the benefits and wonders of technological and industrial advancement that we are blessed in receiving, the last several centuries of economic growth have not been characterized by either egalitarianism or stewardship. While no one that I am aware of is contemplating a thoroughly egalitarian world, sustainability must include developing a system characterized by relative equality in economic access and in political rights and responsibilities.
Slide 17 One of the biggest problems in attaining this sustainable world is to get ecologists and economists to talk with one another and understand, as ecological economists like Herman Daly and Robert Costanza have been doing, how to mediate between the widely different perspectives of economists on the one hand and environmentalist on the other.
Slide 18 With regard specifically to agriculture, while industrial agriculture is highly productive per unit of invested labor, it is quite impossible to do without petroleum products. So, some of the unsustainable aspects of industrial agriculture need to be understood.
Slide 19 When you irrigate particularly in agriculture, the water has dissolved salts and minerals which accumulate in the soil as the water evaporates or runs off and the accumulation of these salts can lead to salinization and, while the chemistry of fertilizer application is complex, adding chemical fertilizers can result in a changing in soil acidity, so farmers sometime need to add potash to sweeten the soil. Acids and bases result chemically in the formation of salts so salinization is a real problem. In the US particularly, soil erosion is a massive problem. While farmers have taken steps to try to minimize rates of erosion, it is still a major problem as you can see in these data … 400 million tons of top soil, if my math is correct, carries with in lots of nutrients and as a consequence, there is a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico roughly the size of the state of Connecticut … also, Wendell Berry noted in the Gift of the Good Land, that one bushel of corn grown conventionally can be associated with a loss of three bushels of soil. Not a good trade-off unless you work for ADM.
Slide 20 Overuse of water. Some irrigation water is drawn from fossil aquifers in the central western states in the US. There has been some reporting that the Oglala aquifer is close to 50% exhausted and that is could take several million years to replenish it. But ground water use in agriculture also has consequences to the regional hydrology. Since we have dammed the Colorado River, for example, the estuaries and fish spawning areas in the Gulf of California are at risk of environmental collapse. So, in order to grow subsidized cotton in Arizona, we divert water from the Colorado to southern Arizona without considering the long term consequences to fish stocks in the Pacific which can no longer breed in what use to be the rich wetlands of the mouth of the Colorado River. As an economic consequence, Mexican shrimpers are finding that the reserve of shrimp in the Gulf of California are diminishing too rapidly to allow for commercial shrimpers to make a living.
(Computer failure – slides stopped)
The part I wanted to get to next – I really do need my PowerPoint for the next part, so – are there questions that I can, can we stop and ask questions at this point while we're waiting for this to power back up?
Q: I just finished reading a book called Overshoot, by Catton. I haven't heard him mentioned, but can you comment on that?
A: Stevens: I've heard of the book. The question was, he had just finished reading a book called Overshoot, by Catton, that we've basically overreached environmental limits. For the disproportionate part of human history, I don't want to get overly romantic here, there is no way to do agriculture without disrupting the ecosystem. You can't start digging up the ground, and taking out trees, and replacing one group of biotic species with another, and call it natural entirely. It's not. But there are scales here of what it is that you want to release into the ecosystem. Preservation and rebuilding of soil fertility – a good organic farmer will tell you that organic farming done correctly will always improve the soil fertility. And now I know that we can't exactly say that the backyard garden is exactly the same thing as large-scale agriculture, but anybody who's got a good backyard garden plot that they've been working on for, let's say, for 5 or 10 years, is a work of art. Now you go out there and you pick it up and it's beautiful, it smells good, and it's got critters in it, and it just gets better and better and better. And in principle, there's no reason why you can't keep doing it, even on a larger scale. I know I'm being naïve in some ways, but with rotation, with rotation applications of manure, conservation of the resource, of biodiversity, but there's a way of doing agriculture, I'm convinced, where the soil quality only gets better. Limited water use, increasing dependence on local resources, nutrient cycling, soil conservation, manuring. One of the things I want to get to later on that may be a solution for the post peak period is that instead of having 5 acres of turf grass, we might have 5 acres of productive landscapes, which means that you can't rake your leaves and put them out by the road for some giant vacuum cleaner to come by and take them away. If you want to burn some of them because you need the potash, fine. But everybody should be composting their leaves, or communities should be composting our leaves for us. I think Oxford does that, for example; other communities must. But every leaf that falls out of a tree has a certain amount of nutrient capacity that we ought to hold on to. Protect the biological and ecosystem diversity.
I just purchased a small piece of ground that was overtaken by Japanese honeysuckle. And so the first year I've been there, I've more or less successfully gotten rid of the Japanese honeysuckle. And now I'm introducing indigenous grass and forage species, little blue stem and big blue stem grasses, and those are hard to germinate, but little by little, my backyard has changed. And before a year was out, I noticed increased species of birdlife, dragonflies. Within one year. I put in a little wetland area. Frogs started showing up. Nature finds a way. And I'm arguing along with people like Laura Jackson, that you can do a successful organic farm that in many ways mimics a natural habitat, that you can include things like pasturage of nature species, not fescue. Native species of grass, that you can use that not only for pasturage, but also for cellulotic ethanol. You have to be careful how frequently you extract that grass from your pasture, because you want to maintain soil fertility, and when you take stuff away from a pasturage or from a garden area, you're taking away the energy that you need to rebuild the soil. But there are ways of doing it carefully so that you can make alcohol, feed your animals, and have a rotation system that maintains your soil fertility.
Slide 21 One of the increasingly obvious consequences of industrial agriculture is environmental pollution. Agriculture, ironically, is the largest non-point source of pollution on the planet. I did a simple web search on agriculture and pollution and found this article from the National Academy of Science and I am no toxicologists but there was something I found disturbing in reading that Atrazine, which we seem to have in abundance in Ohio's ground water, has the apparent effect of demasculinizing frogs…and Atrazine seems to result in hermaphroditic frogs. I don't want to seem too sexist but this whole demasculinizing thing, I found that disturbing for some reason…
Slide 22 There are many other aspects of industrial agriculture that are unsustainable, we don't know what the consequences might be of putting genetically modified organisms into the ecosphere, we do know the economic consequences to small farmers of their dependence on external sources of farm inputs. What negative effects that dependency on petroleum products might have on US foreign policy I will leave with you to discuss. And, for all of the wonders of industrial farming, there is still persistent world hunger. Many people have argued that there is plenty of food to go around but in a system where food must be purchased and is distributed along corporate distribution channels, the result is that, according to the World Bank, 728 million people on the planet do not have sufficient caloric intake of food to lead active lives. A UN report in 2001 put that number at 842 million people.
Slide 23 Alternatively, then, what does a sustainable agriculture look like minimally? Many of these are to opposite of what we see in industrial agriculture. Releasing no toxic material into the ground water, air or soil, for example. Rebuilding soil fertility by adding manures and soil organic matter to feed to micro-organisms that make soil alive and fertile, and, related, minimizing use of irrigation water or improving irrigation systems to limit waste of water. I recall seeing a farmer in Arizona growing Pima cotton and irrigating his crop with giant sprinklers spreading Colorado River water over his fields. Some reports suggest that in that type of irrigation system, about 60% of the water will never reach the plants roots to be absorbed.
Slide 24 Laura Jackson at the University of Northern Iowa has said that it is already well accepted that a biodiverse and ecologically balanced and sustainable form of agriculture that acts in many ways like a natural habitat is completely doable. The limitations are not because of our lack of understanding of agroecology but because of market and policy restrictions. The food distribution channels and the market limitations for small farmers as well as government policies that reward big even if big is economically unviable. Constrain small and biodiverse farmers from successful participation in the market. Small producers are out competed since subsidies and cheap oil as well as government policies that allow externalization of costs, especially environmental costs of industrial production to be carried by the tax payers rather than the market, this creates an economic environment that is difficult to enter and compete with successfully in economic terms. With regard to nutrient recycling and improving soil fertility with on-farm or near farm resources, there a re farmers like Ned Snavely in Holmes County, Ohio, who have successfully designed rotation and manure application systems that maintain and even improve soil fertility while maintaining an economically viable farming operation. And these processes by themselves, since they do not use pesticides and petroleum fertilizers, enhance the biodiversity of the farm, even without purposeful introduction of diverse crop and non-cultivated plant species. Some organic farmers purposely introduce flowering plant species into the farming systems because these plants, buck wheat, dill, and many types of flowering plants, attract parasitic wasps, insectivorous insects, carnivorous insects and these insects keep the herbivores insects under control. Finally here we have equitable access to appropriate technology, which means: technology and knowledge about how to do effective agriculture ought to be part of the human knowledge system. I know there is plenty to be made off patents, but it seems to me that part of this system later on post peak will be, if you know how to grow crops really well, you ought to tell your neighbor about it. It's not about you. It's not about Monsanto. Agroecological knowledge ought to be widely distributed among knowledgeable farmers.
Slide 25 Now I put this separate, this is another example of what I think is a requirement of sustainable agriculture. I put it separately, because in the temperate climate, talking to organic farmers in Preble County and Montgomery County, they will tell you that they cannot do organic agriculture without animals. Can't do it. And why? You don't have to eat the animals if you don't want to. They need the manure. Animals do wonderful things. They turn cellulose into manure, protein and fats, and we can't do that. And so all the farmers I know say we've got to have animals as part of our system. In the market they're working right now, they need them to make ends meet. They need to sell the eggs, need to sell the meat, because they don't get enough on market value for their organic crops for the most part. And so every farmer I've talked to says they understand the idea of the animal ethicists people, the PETA people; they understand what you're trying to say about humanitarian treatment of animals, but they will say, "Look, I can't do organic agriculture without animals."
Q: When it comes to it, earthworms are livestock, and you feed them organic matter, and you can definitely do organic agriculture without eating the animal.
A: Right. I think there's an issue of scale. But you know, you're right. When you look at it that way, the worm becomes your livestock. There's an animal involved in the process somehow.
Q: Microherds?
A: Right. Microherds. I'm seeing all these worms wiggling down the Chissom Trail. The other thing of course is that in a post-peak period, animals will be required for traction. If you're going to be operating on a scale larger than you can use hand tools, you're going to have to have some animals for traction. And the nice thing about horses and oxen is they do something that tractors don't do, they reproduce. If they could make a tractor that would reproduce, like a John Deere, they would have some issues with that.
Slide 26 So the agroecosystem concept is that the crop field is basically an ecosystem. And so instead of trying to control as many aspects of the field, you allow it to be as biodiverse as possible. In some ways, it's exactly the opposite of what industrial agriculture is trying to do. Instead of limiting biodiversity, you want to enhance it.
I've got this little backdoor garden. And several years ago, I came home from school, and I went in the back as I do, immediately, pop a beer, go in the garden. And what I noticed was there were horned tomato worms on my tomatoes. And if you've had a backdoor garden, you know that one of those puppies can take a tomato plant and render it completely dead, eat all of it in a heartbeat. It's amazing how much they can go through. Well, I had planted some buckwheat and some dill and some other flowering plants that I knew attracted parasitic wasps, and those horned tomato worms got through half a leaf. I'm not exaggerating. And when I got home, they were dead, full of all these larvae that the parasitic worms had planted in them. And it works. Now it doesn't work completely. You're going to have some yield loss. Everybody will tell you that. But you can work with nature, and I think at a large scale, to have a highly productive agricultural system.
A lot of this information comes from a book by an anthropologist who has passed away. His name was Bob Netting, Robert McC. Netting, and the book is Smallholders, Householders. It's Stanford University Press. Netting, Smallholders, Householders: Ecological Basis for Sustainable Agriculture, or something like that. You can get it on Amazon. It's even a nice buy, it's $13. Bob was an English major, so it's really readable, well-written. Lots of cross-cultural information about sustainable ecologically viable agricultural systems and so a lot of this I get out of Bob's books.
Slide 27 Relatively stable production per unit of land. Contrary to popular opinion, sustainable organic agriculture is more productive per unit of land than is industrial agriculture. It is more productive per unit of input energy by far than industrial agriculture. It only lacks in units per unit of labor, and that's an artificial construct, because labor has been replaced by petroleum. So don't let anybody tell you that we can't do organic and nonpetroleum agriculture because we can't feed enough people, it doesn't produce enough per unit of land. That's simply not true.
The World Bank actually commissioned a private investigation, because continuously they found that small landholders kept producing more than big landholders, and it screwed up their model. They were saying, this can't be right! Economies of scale, etc., it can't be right. Everywhere they went: India, Thailand, Cambodia, desert Southwest, everywhere they went. Small landholders are more productive per unit of land than big ones. And anybody who has got a backdoor garden knows how much you can get out of a small garden, it's remarkable. And I think, as Gene Logsdon has said, you can transfer the agricultural model from a small garden to a big garden. I think that you can do that.
Q: I hate to tell you, but what if your working ten hours of labor, that's a positive, not a negative.
A: Stevens: That's the thing. The thing that obviously was going on and is lurking behind here is labor costs are high. If you want to do this kind of agriculture, you're working hard. So, the returns or yields per unit of labor are not favorable compared to industrial agriculture but, as I said, that is because oil is cheaper than labor and oil has, essentially, replaced labor and the labor that is invested in industrial agriculture tends to be migrant and the costs there do not include retirement plans and health insurance. But, in terms of individual farmer labor, I've also had lots of people tell me, "I love what I'm doing. I get up, it's good solid work, I'm thinking while I'm doing it, it's not drudgery at all. But am I working hard? Yeah, I'm working hard." Farming is hard work. But hard isn't bad work. You're just physically working. But people get huge amounts of enjoyment out of that kind of work.
And the yields per unit of land are high, and the calculation is called the "land equivalent ratio", you can figure out yield returns per unit of land in a multicropped and intercropped system and compare it to a monocropped system and the yields per unit of land are very favorable to small and biodiverse agriculture. Now if you start putting in more inputs; it says here, conversely, soil erosion, water table reduction, declining resistance of crops to pests and stress, indicate that yields will drop even if they have not already. So these issues, soil erosion and such, are warning signs of a diminishing effectiveness of your production system.
Slide 28 So a really good way of figuring out whether or not agriculture is sustainable is, if your yields stay the same but you're putting in more input, something's wrong. Similarly, if you have to suddenly put in more labor or petroleum input, something's wrong. Energy inputs on sustainable farms are predictable and relatively sustainable.
Slide 29 And this is the most important in understanding sustainable aspects of a farm, and that is input/output ratios are relatively stable. I'll get to that in a second.
Slide 30 So if that energy is coming from the farm itself, then that means you're not wasting energy getting those inputs to the farm. Now that's a problem for some people like me who have to go someplace to get my manure, there's embodied energy in the transportation of the input.
Slide 31 Returns to labor and energy inputs are sufficient to provide a local livelihood for producers. Small farmers in all of America are going out of business in droves, because they can't make a living at being a farmer. Part of that is because the bank may be very sympathetic when you can't make a payment on your $350,000 combine, but it's just business, right? Pay it or give us back your combine. And it's a part of the problem with industrial agriculture, the reason that farmers are going out of business, is because of the sheer costs of inputs and the machinery required for it.
Slide 32 I'm going to skip back to this, in not too long.
Slide 33 I want to go to this one. I can't tell you where I got all of these. I just didn't have time to give you citations for each of these numbers here, but here's a whole bunch of production systems. Some of them are in permanent fields, some of them are in shifting cultivation, some of them involve human labor, some of them involve animal traction. And so here, the Tongan cassava, the fourth one down there, are actually my data. And I calculated that by this. I had a farmer putting in some cassava on a field that I measured, and I just started counting the number of hours he spent putting in this cassava. It was the third crop in a rotation. And I estimated that he was spending, I think it was a liberal estimate of how hard he was working, but I estimated 400 kilocalories per hour, is about how hard he was working. You're sweating at that, at 400 kilocalories per hour, you're working out. But I said, let's err on the side of caution. I forget exactly what the numbers are, but the kilocaloric return on his investment on that parcel of cassava was astronomical, so I divided it all out, and he ended up getting almost 82 kilocalories for every kilocalorie of energy he put into that. That is sustainable agriculture right there. That is what you want to see. Now there are no other inputs in most of these systems except for labor and manure, and that shows up here when we show animal traction, and all of a sudden your rates of return go down, because the animals themselves need to be taken care of, and the manure needs to go out in the field and all that kind of stuff. But generally speaking, all of these except when we get to the bottom, which is the sad part, all of these are very efficient forms of agriculture in terms of input-output ratios, until we get to industrial agriculture. And then we see – this is common, this 10:1 ratio is a very common kind of statistic with regard to corn/soybean rotation. When we start making meat, eggs, and stuff out of it, then all of a sudden the input costs are astronomical, and this is even not to get the product to Kroger. This is just to grow the stuff. Because everybody knows that food really comes from Kroger. So add to that the cellophane. Add all this polystyrene and stuff, and by the time you pick it up in the store, the input costs are huge and it's impossible to do this without petroleum. It is quite literally, from here down, you can't do it. So all that's gone with loss of cheap oil. Am I right? All these systems up here can have the feasibility of remaining. All of these don't, it seems to me, unless I'm missing something.
Q: They can't be done that way.
A: Stevens: They can't be done that way, exactly. They can be done other ways, but they certainly can't be done by what is generating these numbers.
Slide 34 So I think that part of my answer is that the smallholders are the modern variant of Jeffersonian agrarian smallholders or farmers. We have plenty of examples in the anthropological literature of rural cultivators practicing intensive permanent agriculture in relatively dense, densely populated places. How that looks like from where we are now I'll get to in a second.
Slide 35 Agrarian smallholders calculate their interests over long stands of time, so they are disinclined to accept immediate technological fixes. They are conservative people. They are disinclined to default on expectation of market return, because they calculate their time not only for this season, not only for next season, but for the fact that they're going to pass on their farm to their son or their daughter. And they got it from their father and grandfather. And so instead of thinking about what I'm doing right now, most small farmers are thinking about, actually embody their family history, are living their heritage, and thinking, "I can't do this to the farm for an immediate return, because it's not about me." It's about Granddad, and it's about my great-grandson who hasn't been born, or my great-granddaughter. And that changes your vision, changes the way you manage your property.
The amount of accumulated knowledge – getting back to this idea of Wendell Berry's, that you ought to learn from your grandparents and so on and so forth, of the amount of accumulated knowledge that it takes to run an efficient, ecologically sustainable farm is an immense amount of knowledge, and you don't get that disproportionately from books. You get it from somebody who's got dirt under their nails and calluses on their hands.
Slide 32 Let me go back to that. Just a few of the things that you have to keep in mind, the species of plants you're growing, the species that are involved in a natural ecosystem, varieties of species of plants that you're growing, what kind of soil you've got, how that soil behaves under certain kind of tillage, how that soil behaves if it rains too much, how that soil behaves if it rains too little, how the plants in those soils behave if it rains too much or too little, the amount of stuff that farmers have to keep in mind, is immense, including the market conditions, because that's still part of the equation.
Slide 36 Smallholders, permaculturists, aren't just doing it on a horizontal scale. You're growing tree crops, you're growing bush crops. Now there are a lot of systems that are tropical, and some of this is more applicable to tropical systems, but I don't think it's entirely applicable at all only to tropical systems. Those are just the anthropological examples that we tend to have. So there is a huge amount of variation with regards to plant species.
Particularly community relations. Small farmers learn very quickly, and we have an example right here in Ohio, of the Amish. There are things that small farmers can't do by themselves, like build a barn. You're trying to hoist a whole side of 6x6's, you're not going to do it on your own, you know, unless you're one of those Incredibles guys. And so you need your community to help you build barns, to put in irrigation systems, to do all numbers of things. And so it is community-based, it is communitarian.
Slide 37 Here's an example from the Philippines of the kind of nutrients, recycling, and the kind of multistory production systems. And obviously this is a truncated kind of model, and farmers now – in Tonga, where I did my work, farmers are well aware of this. They're well aware of what kind of pests they've got to deal with, they're well aware of what kind of nutrient cycles they've got going on. They know that if they put chicken manure into this system here that the fish will eat the manure and when they get the muck out of the bottom of it, they've got this really ripe stuff that they can put immediately on their plants without burning it. They know all these kinds of things. The depth of their knowledge is remarkable. And they're not scientists. They're not sophisticated, scientific folks. I remember a farmer in Tonga who had a third-grade Tongan education, and so he wasn't well educated. But he was doing perfect trial-and-error field testing. I said, how do you know about which variety of plantains you want to grow? He said, well, I took this plot over here and I made sure that nothing else had been planted there for a long time, and I planted all the varieties of plantain that I knew, and I picked the ones that grew best. We've got Ph.D.'s at Ohio State that are doing that. Here's this Tongan farmer who's going, duh, trial-and-error, dude.
Slide 38 So, they're small in size, permanently located, densely rural populated areas, highly continuously productive, serve both subsistence and market demands. I think that that's what's really missing, and it's fairly typical of an industrial farm. You go to a stereotypical industrial farm and there are no animals, there might be a backdoor garden, but the entire farm is a factory. It's not about producing for the family, it's not about producing for the community, it's about making corn and soybeans so that we can do corn oil and stuff on the international markets.
One of the things that will come out of good sustainable agriculture in my opinion is local communitarian, labor-intensive, highly biodiverse farming. We've been doing it for a long time. So this is kind of redundant now.
Slide 39 We've got crop diversification, livestock production, manuring, terracing. There is a great picture of those terraces. Those take generations to build and generations to maintain, but once you've got them in place, you've got a very viable, long-term, highly sustainable, biodiverse system that will return huge amounts of grain for every kilocalorie you put into the field. Elaborate folk systems, including ritual systems that don't seem to make any sense, but that's part of the system too. If you've got to do some sort of religious thing to make you feel better about what you're doing, cool. Go with it. Whatever you want to believe, if that makes your crops grow, or even if it only makes you feel good about what you're doing, that's part of it too.
Slide 40 Labor is skilled and complementary, responsible. That means you're not hiring somebody you've never met before. You're hiring your neighbor or your son or your daughter to do it, you trust in what they're doing, their methods that they have applied over long periods of time.
Slide 41 Traction increases the amount of labor you need to do on the farm, but it still returns a favorable energy input/output ratio.
Slide 42 Productivity of unit of land is inversely related to farm size. The smaller the farm, the more production per unit of land. And that's because of great returns on investments of labor.
Slide 43 This is important too. In anthropological studies, one of the things that is really key is that there is a system of long-term intergenerational holding on the land, so that people can invest knowing that they're not just doing it for themselves, but for their progeny. It's not all about you. And they can do it without the tragedy of the commons. There are lots of systems where they have communal land held for certain resources, because it makes more sense to have large pieces of land for timber, for matting that you can get out of a forest, that should be held in common. But if you break the common rules, justice is swift. Because you're not just taking away from yourself or from the forest, you're taking away from the community and you're going to pay. So Garrett Hardin's idea of the tragedy of the commons because of freeloading is not entirely true. We have safeguards. People have safeguards in place to see that freeloaders don't get away with it.
Slide 44 Inequality of access is characteristic of smallholder agriculture, but it is not egregious inequality. Everybody gets to eat. In Tonga, where I went, there was lots of variation in wealth but nobody went hungry.
Slide 45 So they can be shown to be sustainably productive, biologically regenerative, energy efficient, equity enhancing, and participant and relatively socially just.
Slide 46 Here's an example of indigenous agriculture in the Philippines. This is a work by a guy named Harold Conklin, years ago. Now there are two varieties of cassava in the world, but this is only one of them. It doesn't finish there. That's just what's in the swidden field. There's also a backdoor garden. Medicinal plants. Also grown because they are pretty. I like this flower. I think I'll grow some.
Slide 47 And now here on the bottom, returns which for rice alone, the most labor intensive of crops is 2 _ kilograms per person per hour of invested labor in the long run.
Slide 48 What's this have to do with Ohio? Same principles of sustainable agriculture, local food distribution systems, hold for temperate climates as well as tropical climates. I showed you tropical climates. The difference is we'd better learn also how to store food, but look, our grandparents did it. It's not as if you need to be a rocket scientist. Just get the temperature up so you don't get botulism, everything's going to be all right. Local food systems, large varieties of vegetables and meats. I buy all of my meats from a local farmer. I haven't bought industrial meat in a long time, and I don't think I'm exceptional here. I buy as many vegetables as I can from local farmers. I haven't had a garden because I just moved to this new place, but when I've got my garden in, I can feed myself more or less from June until about October. If I'm really, if I had a lot of time on my hands, I can grow enough stuff to can a great proportion of my stuff as well. I don't have a big garden. I think a lot of people can do that. If your neighbor is helping you, and he is growing tomatoes, or she is growing tomatoes, and you're growing peppers, and you've got chickens, you can share your labor and share your resource to one another, build that kind of neighbor-to-neighbor relationship, and then you only need a small amount of land. And you could do it in suburbia. You can do it in your backyard.
Demand for local and organic foods is increasing at a consistent rate of 20% a year and every corporation in America knows that. What is sure if you're buying local organic food, it's also sustainably organic food. It's not confined animals being fed organic grain. That's not enough. It's got to be sustainable production. Know where you get your food. Know the guy or the woman you buy your food from. You can do that in Ohio. You can certainly do it in Berkeley. Okay, it's got to come in on a truck, but it's there.
Slide 49 MOON, Miami-Oxford-Organic Network, is brand new. We're trying to open up a storefront. We don't happen to have a quarter of a million dollars, but if you can help us figure out where to get one, I'll be open. And those are all external kind of impositions on us, but our goal is to open up a cooperative that will basically cater to local producers. And it brings together people from Indiana and all of these counties in Ohio, for southwestern Ohio, some education in seasonal eating and canning and storage techniques are required, will be part of the cooperative mission. But we can do all these things.
Slide 50 Sustainable organic systems of production are distinct from corporate marketing systems. They involve highly biodiverse cropping systems, humanitarian use of animals, crop rotation systems, maintaining the soil fertility, no use of toxic pesticides, local distribution system, and structuring a local distribution system is tough. But I think that's part of a deal.
Slide 51 You can involve in your rotation system at least in principle, cellulosic ethanol production as part of a pasturage system, done very carefully, it seems to me.
Slide 52 So I'm kind of wanting to end on a positive note. Humans have been doing agriculture for a long time, and disproportionately without petroleum. In principle, I believe that we can – I won't say go back – we can continue the tradition of non-petroleum-based agriculture. You're going to get dirty. I had a student say to me one time, "but I don't want to work in a garden." My response to her was, you're not hungry enough. My suspicion is that with peak oil, we will all get hungry enough if we haven't figured out how to do this, and I think that that's it.
Question and Answer Session
Q: I very much enjoyed your presentation. I can't recall the first part of the question but the second part had to do with using human manure for fertilizer.
A: Stevens: Grains disproportionately take a lot of space and so that's the only problem there. So that would require, it seems to me, animal traction, but we grew grains for a long time without tractors or petroleum. I'm not a farmer. I wish I was, in some ways, so I can't answer entirely your question. Potatoes are fun. Let your kids grow the potatoes, it's like a treasure hunt for them. They also take a little bit of space too. But the deer don't like them, so that's a good thing. And your other question was … The Chinese, the Japanese, and the Thai people have been recycling human waste into agricultural production for a long time, and there are systems to do that, for composting human wastes that I don't know very much about, but I note that they are beginning to be used. I'm not a toxicologist or a parasitologist, but my suspicion is that our digestive tract may have to get used to some of the consequences of using that. But I think it's completely doable. If you can compost it, if the compost pile gets warm enough, then I think that whatever concerns we may have about using human waste for fertilizer can be remedied by an efficient composting system. That's kind of out of my range.
I do think there is a type of fertilizer we're not tapping. I think there are a lot of taboos in our culture about our human waste and getting away from us. Americans tend to be – we're into antibacterial soap, the whole trip about germs. And there's some truth to that. But it seems to me that that's a lot of energy embodied in that manure that we ought to use.
Q: In the breakdown earlier, I mentioned Reuben Brenner, he lives in Canada, and one of his ideas is mobility of capital. He points out that capital comes from five ways: inheritance, savings, capital markets, and the other two are not too appealing. The government can pay you, or crime. He says that these are the five sources of capital. Have you ever given any thought to how mobility of capital relates to this, or let me leave it as a challenge to you?
A: Stevens: That would be the best thing, since my answer to your first question is no, I have never thought about mobility of capital. My bias, and I'm not an economist, so my bias is that some of our most fondly held economic ideologies are going to have to be eroded. Wes Jackson and those guys talk about contrary to mobility, they talk about rootedness. About knowing a place very well, and the capital that is inherent in that, in that place, that is not mobile. Now I am obviously talking completely off the top of my head, I'm not an economist. So I can't answer your question. The first thing I'll do when I get back to Oxford is look it up.
The question was based on a concern that the idea of agrarianism could be co-opted by political interests as the Nazi regime in Germany did with naturalism.
I would agree. And I intended to respond that the same kind of risk exists in any other kind of philosophy that I can envision. So agrarianism is certainly not alone in being corrupted by alternative visions. Capitalism comes to mind. And the same regime that you were talking about was clearly capitalist, right? BMW was very busy doing some highly profitable egregious things with slave labor in the 1940's. So I don't think that agrarianism is alone in being at risk of being coopted. I don't know what else to say. I think that we have to be vigilant and be truthful to some sort of an idiom that I think is communitarian and isn't all about us as individuals.
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