Local food production after peak oil
January 27th, 2007
Opinion
Peak oil elicits a controversy much as anything else like religion or politics. With President Bush addressing some of our energy concerns in his recent State of the Union message, the discussion has moved more toward center stage. I am of the opinion that our fossil fuel energy dependency is one of the greatest issues we face. But there are others who take the opposite view. It is a broad and deep debate and one we should all be following closely. A good place to start is a 2005 white paper called “The Hirsch Report” that was sponsored by the Department of Energy. It’s conclusions are quite a bit different that those suggested by Robert Folsom. I’m not sure it serves us any great purpose though to side with the extremists - the doomsayers of the peak oil controversy. But they do make some excellent points. One in particular is the issue of food. Food is a bit fundamental to our “standard of living”. After all, what really makes life worth living are HD plasma TVs, iPods, SUVs, cell phones, etc. - food is essential, sure but we simply drive to the supermarket - or restaurant - and get a fill up.
Or maybe not. With the Industrial Revolution, advances in high yield agriculture have been driven by cheap and easy energy; crude oil. Not only the machinery we use for farming but the fertilizer we use to keep the soil “nutritious” entirely depend on crude oil. These facts alone should suggest that corn derived ethanol is probably not such a good idea (but that’s another discussion). With this fact in mind, many peak oilers are rightly concerned about our food supply. Richard Heinberg is one of those, and he suggests that to mitigate the problems we will encounter when crude oil supplies becoming limiting, a large number of people will need to return to local agriculture to ensure our food supply. According to this article, Oakland, California has a goal to produce 30% of its food supply within a 50 mile radius of the city by 2020!
Vermont may well consider returning to its agarian roots. While greater Burlington has converted to Bucks County, PA style living, the rest of the state longs for those more idyllic days of the dairy farm and backyard vegetable patch. I can remember my grandmother’s backyard in Fair Haven - a true cornucopia - and her classic farm house style kitchen was the “great room” of that nice old house! Rich fertile farmland will become again a valuable asset in New England. And while it looks like there’s a lot left- there’s not. The challenge for Vermont will be maintaining that asset while finding a way to sustain an economy that doesn’t tax the piss out of the land.
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