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Musings Report 2022-25 6-18-22 The End of Cheap Food
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The End of Cheap Food
Of all the modern-day miracles, the least appreciated is the incredible abundance of low cost food in the U.S. and other developed countries.
The era of cheap food is ending, for a variety of mutually reinforcing reasons.
I have long had an interest in growing food, dating back to my teens 50 years ago. I have been a gardener for decades, but my knowledge base has expanded rapidly over the past four years as we set out to create a Food Forest.
One of the key assets of the Of Two Minds blog is its far-flung network of global correspondents. I've learned a great deal about global food production from reading and from correspondents over the past few years, and increased my experiential knowledge via "hands in the dirt."
I'm in touch with readers growing vegetables hydroponically, with gardeners and ranchers in Texas, with small-scale gardeners and farmers in the Northeast, the Northwest, Ohio, Georgia, California and many other locales around the world (shout-out to Down Under).
What I've learned is that "every little bit helps"--even small backyards / greenhouses can provide some food and satisfaction.
I've also learned that almost every temperate terroir/micro-climate is suitable for some plants, herbs, trees and animals. (Terroir includes everything about a specific place: the sun exposure, the soil type, the climate variations, the bacteria in the soil, everything.)
Diversity and variety are key features of localized production that's optimized for the terroir.
We've forgotten that cities once raised half the food consumed by city residents within the city limits. Small plots of land, rooftop gardens, backyard chicken coops, etc. can add up when they are encouraged rather than discouraged.
Let's start with how disconnected the vast majority of us are from the production of the cheap food we take for granted.
A great many people know virtually nothing about how food is grown, raised, harvested / slaughtered, processed and packaged.
Highly educated people cannot recognize a green bean plant because they've never seen one. They know nothing about soil or industrial farming. They've never seen the animals they eat up close or cared for any of the animals humans have tended for their milk, eggs and flesh.
Most of us take the industrial scale of agriculture and the resulting abundance and low cost for granted, as if it was a kind of birthright rather than a brief period of reckless consumption of resources that cannot be replaced.
Trying to grow / raise food for money is difficult because we're competing with global industrial agriculture powered by hydrocarbons and low-cost labor.
That said, it is possible to develop a niche product with local support by consumers and businesses. This is the Half-X, Half-Farmer model I've written about for years: if the household has at least one part-time gig that pays a decent wage, the household can pursue a less financially rewarding niche in agriculture/animal husbandry.
Industrial agriculture includes many elements few fully understand. The shipping of fruit thousands of miles via air freight is a function of 1) absurdly cheap jet fuel and 2) global tourism, which fills airliners with passengers who subsidize the air cargo stored beneath their feet.
When global tourism dried up in the Covid lockdown, so did air cargo capacity.
I have to laugh when I read another article about some new agricultural robot that will replace human labor, as if human labor were the key cost in industrial agriculture. (Hydrocarbons, fertilizer, transport, compliance costs, land leases and taxes are all major costs.)
Left unsaid is the reliance of industrial agriculture on soil, fresh-water aquifers and rain. Irrigation is the result of rain/snow somewhere upstream.
Once the soil and aquifers are depleted and the rain become erratic, the robot will be tooling around a barren field, regardless of whatever whiz-bang sensors and other gear it carries.
The entirety of global food production rests on soil and rain. Robots don't change that.
What few of us who rely on industrial agriculture understand is that it depletes soil and drains aquifers by its very nature, and these resources cannot be replaced with whiz-bang technology. Once they're gone, they're gone.
Soil can be rebuilt but it can't be rebuilt by industrial agricultural methods--diesel-powered tractors and fertilizers derived from natural gas.
Few people appreciate that the dirt is itself alive, and once it's dead then nothing much will grow in it.
Whatever can be coaxed from depleted soil lacks the micronutrients that we all need: plants, animals and humans.
Every organism is bound by the Law of Minimums: heaping on one nutrient is useless unless all the essential nutrients are available in the right proportions.
Dumping excessive nitrogen fertilizer on a plant won't make it yield more fruit unless it has sufficient calcium, zinc, magnesium, etc.
All dumping more nitrogen fertilizer on the field does is poison waterways as the excess nitrogen runs off.
Irrigation is another miracle few understand. Over time, the natural salts in water build up in irrigated soil and the soil loses fertility. The drier the climate, the less rain there is to leach the salts from the soil. Irrigation isn't sustainable over the long run.
Plants need reliable conditions to reach maturity. Should a plant or tree be starved of water and nutrients, its immune system weakens and it is more vulnerable to diseases and insect infestations. Yields will plummet if there isn't enough water and nutrients to support the fruit or grain.
Erratic, extreme weather wreaks havoc on agriculture, even industrial agriculture. A crop can grow oh-so nicely and reach maturity, and then a wind storm or pounding rain can destroy the crop in a few hours.
Most people assume there will always be an abundance of grains (rice, wheat, corn) without realizing that the vast majority of grains come from a handful of places with the right conditions for industrial agriculture.
Should any of these few places suffer erratic climate change, then exports of grains will shrink dramatically. Once cheap grains are gone, cheap meat is also gone, because most meat depends on grain feed.
The scale required to grow an abundance of grain is other-worldly. Much of Iowa, for example, is fields of corn and soybeans, mostly raised as animal feed.
American tourists ooh and ahh over artisanal goat cheese in France or Italy without any appreciation for the human labor that goes into the artisanal food, labor that can't be replaced by robots.
Industrial agriculture only works at vast economies and scale and high utilization rates. The 10-pound bag of chicken thighs is only $25 because tens of millions of chickens are raised in carefully engineered factory conditions and slaughtered / cleaned on an industrial scale.
Should the utilization rate and scale drop, the entire operation ceases to be economically viable.
The global scale of industrial agriculture relies on exploiting low-cost labor forces and soil that hasn't yet been depleted. This is why clear-cutting the Amazon is so profitable: hire desperate workers with few other options to earn cash money, stripmine the soil until it's infertile and then move on.
It's slash-and-burn agriculture on an industrial scale.
There are many misunderstandings about industrial agriculture and the reliance on cheap hydrocarbons. Many pin their hopes on organic vegetables without realizing every organic tomato is still 5 tablespoons of diesel and 5 tablespoons of jet fuel if it's grown on an industrial scale and shipped thousands of miles via air.
Much of the planet is not conducive to high-yield agriculture. The soil is infertile or depleted, and restoring it is a multi-year or multi-decade process of patient investment that isn't profitable on an industrial scale.
Much of the grain we rely on is not easy to grow. It must be threshed, sorted, dried. milled and then protected from insects.
The potato is a miracle crop because it grows in poor soils and far from ideal weather, and produces a crop relatively quickly.
In our tropical terroir, breadfruit was a key staple of the indigenous Hawaiians. It grows quickly, requires relatively little care and produces 2 or 3 harvests a year. The fruit is heavy, nutritious and easy to prepare: just bake, steam or boil and peel the skin. Once fully ripened, it can be eaten raw.
We planted our breadfruit tree 4 years ago as a seedling that didn't even reach my knee. Now it is 15 feet high, a large tree that bears 60 to 80 fruit in its peak season and 40 in its off-season.
This one tree supplies food for many people, as we give much of it away in trade for what our family-friends network share with us (fresh fish, home-smoked meat, etc.)
Our focus is efficient use of our limited land and labor: get the most bang for the buck, so to speak. This requires efficient experimentation and adaptation.
There are dozens of different terroirs on this island, and thousands around the world. Some regions are remarkably consistent for hundreds of miles, while others change every 10 kilometers.
We've discovered by trial and error that long beans and Northeaster beans do well here (Photo below). Friends in other terroirs on the island have found bush beans do better.
Our goal is optimizing our terroir for the lowest-input, lowest labor, highest yield production of high-quality food.
As a means to make money, localized / optimized production can't compete with diesel-jet-fuel industrial agriculture. But that's not the goal.
The goal is to replace dependence on diesel-jet-fuel industrial agriculture with our own much smaller footprint production, and grow a surplus that helps feed our trusted network of family, friends and neighbors.
This article describes localized / optimized production on a larger scale than we have here, but the philosophy is the same: a mutually beneficial diversity of plants and trees in a Food Forest. The farmers restoring Hawaii’s ancient food forests that once fed an island.
Our food forest and gardens don't make much of an impression on the untrained eye. It looks like a conventional yard with an occasional mish-mash of greenery, which it is, on purpose.
Tidy rows of monoculture crops aren't the goal. That is appropriate in other terroirs, but not this one.
As industrial agriculture consumes the last of its soils and aquifers, hydrocarbons and mineral fertilizers are becoming scarce and costly, and as climate change disrupts the 50+ years of relatively mild, reliable weather we've enjoyed, cheap food will vanish.
Once the scale and utilization rates decay, industrial agriculture will no longer be viable economically or environmentally.
That which is unsustainable will decay and then collapse. We're witnessing the decay of industrial agriculture in real time. What most view as "impossible" is actually inevitable.
As industrial agriculture decays, food will become much more expensive: even if it doubles or triples, it's still cheap to what it may cost in the future.
I'm struck by the great productivity of localized / optimized artisanal food production. Small operations aligned with the terroir can produce a surprising amount of food.
I am also struck by the amount of human labor it requires to bring food not from the farmer's market but from soil and animal husbandry.
The TV cooking programs never show the hours of preparation required to clean the harvest and prepare it for the kitchen. They also fail to communicate the difference in taste and nutrition between factory-farmed and "grown right here" produce.
The future of sustainable, affordable, nutritious food is in localized, optimized production of what grows well in the terroirs where we live.
The satisfaction and well-being this connection with the land and Nature generates is under-appreciated. It is not accidental that the long-lived healthy people among us--for example, the Okinawans, the Greek islanders--tend their plots of earth and their animals, and share the bounty of their labor with their network of family, friends and neighbors.
I just harvested one of our small (45 sq. ft.) taro patches. I'm still learning best practices; that's the nature of growing food. Things change, we have to change, too. Learning and experimenting is part of the process and the fun.
This is dry-land taro, not wet-land taro that is used to make poi. We have five kinds of dry-land taro. The corms (roots) are small because our soil is only a few inches deep.
There are 12 different edible plants in the first photo. Since our soil is rocky, our gardens are micro-plots rather than expansive fields.
At last count, there are 47 different edible plants / herbs / fruit trees in our residential yard. Every terroir is different, so the mix of what grows well will also be different.
It's fun and rewarding to grow food. It might even become important. Those who can't grow any food would do well to befriend those who do.
A taro root and peeler. The top part of the root is cut off and replanted.
Three kinds of taro leaves, utility knife for scale:
The laborious part: cleaning /prepping for cooking in the instant pot: note the sweet potatoes that grew in the same garden.
Taro on the table: the taro tastes a bit like caramelized dense potatoes. The taro leaves taste like spinach.
The beans that grow well in our terroir:
Some random goodies from the garden: Malabar spinach, :Guajillo peppers, eggplant and some wild fiddlehead ferns shared by a family member. (Local name: warabi)
More random goodies from the Food Forest: bananas, breadfruit, papayas and air potatoes:
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Thanks for reading--
charles |
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