The two kinds of agriculture
Over at the Archdruid Report, John Michael Greer – one of the best thinkers out there on what happens after oil production peaks (see also the excellent Gregor Macdonald, whom I’ve just discovered) – makes the useful and important observation that when we think about agriculture, we have to think about two agricultures, not one. Before industrialisation, he writes,
Each farm [in the US] had, apart from its main acreage for corn or wheat or what have you, a kitchen garden, an orchard, a henhouse, and a bit of pasture for a cow or two. Those had a completely different economic function from that of the main acreage, and they were managed in a completely different way. Their function was to produce food for the farm family and farmhands, where the main acreage was used to produce a cash crop for sale; and they were worked intensively, while the main acreage was farmed extensively.
Extensive farming, he continues, “involves significant acreage”, and “maintains soil fertility through crop rotation and fallow periods, rather than through fertilizers or soil amendments”;
the crops that you can grow with extensive farming in temperate regions, in the absence of cheap abundant energy, are pretty much limited to grains, dry beans and dry peas, but you can produce these in very substantial amounts, and they store and ship well, so they make good cash crops even if the only way to get them to market is a wagon to the nearest river system and a canal boat from there.
Intensive farming, on the other hand, is a different story. It “has to be done on a much smaller scale”; the labour it requires is “too substantial to be applied to acreage of any size”; it “maintains soil fertility by adding whatever soil amendments are available – compost, manure, leaf mold, a fish buried in every corn hill, you name it – and the basic tools of the trade are a hoe and somebody who knows how to use it”.
The crops you can grow in an intensive garden account for everything other than grains and dry legumes, from the first spring radishes to the leeks you overwinter under straw; the chickens, the cow, and the fruit from the orchard all belong to this same intensive sector and participate in its tight cycles of nutrients. In an age without fossil fuels, very little of what can be grown intensively can be transported over any distance without spoiling, so intensive growing is always done close to where the food will be eaten.
So far, so good. But significantly, Greer thinks that as peak oil approaches and is passed, it’s on the intensive farming front that change is most urgently needed – and that developed countries will face the biggest challenge:
For the world’s nonindustrial nations … the end of the industrial age thus ushers in a difficult but ultimately positive shift in which the mechanisms of foreign export, along with the wild distortions of political and economic power they produced, come apart at the seams. For the world’s industrial nations, on the other hand, the end of a system that kept shoppers happily supplied with strawberries in January promises to usher in a time of food crisis in which a system of intensive local production will need to be revived in a hurry.
And here, I think that Greer and I part company – because it seems to me that (a) it’s very much developing countries who are most in the firing line, and (b) that the challenge on extensive farming is every bit as demanding and urgent as the one on intensive farming. (more…)