The great drought of 2012

by Chad Hellwinckel

As I’m laying here recovering from a back injury, I’ve had time to look into how our nation’s crops are doing this year. Wow! 3/4 of the corn crop is under severe drought. Corn prices are up over 50% in the last month, soybeans are up almost 30%, and the USDA says they are still assessing the damage. No rain in sight yet and we’re probably looking at another record spike in prices. Here’s an article on it : Drought of 2012.

What happens to the crops in the Midwest impacts the world. All grain prices will be up. Meat, milk and egg prices will rise too, because of the animals dependence on these feed commodities. This year grain producing areas of the US have been hit hard. Last year it was the Mexican vegetables and southern US livestock. Since 2007, climate model predictions of increased weather variability are playing out in the real world. We can expect bumper harvests in between the crop failure years.

Farmers also have the extra burden of shouldering the other of the Twin Trends ~ input price increases. As fossil energy production has leveled out since 2005, prices have increased, affecting the prices paid for fertilizers, chemicals, machinery, and seeds (which take energy to make). Along side the Twin Trends of increasing weather variability and increasing energy costs, we will have the Twin Crises of 1) increasing food prices and 2) farmers going broke. Experts on climate and energy see no let-up in these trends.

People are asking,~ How can we keep food affordable (especially healthy food), and keep the business of farming profitable?
The cost of food is bound to increase from historic low costs, but ‘healthy’ food will increase less than ‘unhealthy’ food if we allow market forces to work. By ‘healthy food’ I mean food grown with a low use of fossil energy and grown close to market — which will have the leg up on its ‘unhealthy’ industrial competition. Since 2005, and the sudden escalation of the Twin Trends, the local food movement has been growing steadily. New young farmers are locating in and around our cities, direct marketing to customers through CSAs, farmer’s markets, and restaurants.

These new farmers are struggling, and there are still many logistical problems to solve as the local market grows. Fortunately, local food economies have lots of inefficiency in them. Yes, I’m saying that’s a good thing. It’s good because as energy prices go up, we can make local food more efficient as it grows in market size. For example, local slaughterhouses and crop aggregators are big unfilled niches that can make local healthy food competitive with ever increasing industrial food prices. The industrial system has no such slack in its production efficiency after 80 years of making strides to reduce costs. This study shows that even with the record high prices starting in 2008, higher input costs were shrinking conventional agriculture’s net profit.

There are market forces at play pushing food production to be more decentralized, less fossil fuel intensive, closer to market, and, yes, healthier. BUT there is a countering force resisting movement away from centralized high-input monocultures. We must make sure that the countering forces do not harm the natural course of adaptation that is already emerging.

Smart policy would do three things:

1)Prioritize the growth of local agriculture, which grows vegetables, fruits, nuts, and raises chickens, eggs, beef cattle, goats, and milk cows on land surrounding our urban cores. Smart policy would educate perspective farmers on the efficiencies of permaculture design, subsidize land purchases, make land available for lease, incentivize slaughterhouses, develop food aggregating HUBS, alter city and county codes to make areas more farm and garden friendly, make soil building materials available at the neighborhood level for home-production. All these will help keep food more available and affordable than if we rely strictly on the conventional industrial supply lines. The growth in local low-input agriculture also has the side effect of being healthy.

2) Do not subsidize conventional agriculture unconditionally. Income crises will occur. Instead of giving conventional agriculture a blank check, any subsidization should be tied to conversion of land to practices that make the farm more resilient given the Twin Trends. Subsidies should be tied to practices such as cover crop usage, intercropping, crop/animal integration, conversion to pastures, and increases in soil organic carbon. Research shows that these practices can out-yield conventional practices. Current subsidized crop insurance programs place no conditions on practices. Our current policies are guaranteeing a net return on outdated and inefficient practices.

Local ‘urban perimeter’ agriculture will not likely supply a complete diet to all, and the vast hinterlands of the midwest will have a role. In 100 years, grains and some meat will still be produced far from markets and transported. But if we want such farms to operate without large subsidies, we must transition these farms to operate under lower input use and more resilient to extreme weather variability. A large portion of the land will likely be in pastures instead of grains, producing meat with less inputs. Grains will likely be grown in cover crops and in rotation with pastures.

3) Establish a national grain reserve to assure food in times of extreme emergency. A properly designed grain reserve would not operate as a subsidy, but rather as a market stabilizer by buying grain when its cheap and selling it when its expensive. Farmers of all types and sizes will benefit from relatively stable prices.

These three steps will help assure that our food is more resilient to the Twin Trends. Food will cost more regardless, but these policies will keep the price rises to less than if we continue along the conventional lines.

If conventional practices are kept afloat unaltered, then food prices will be artificially cheap in many years, and very expensive (or unavailable) in years where the system fails. With artificially cheap market prices, the more resilient, more input-efficient, local, urban perimeter agriculture will not scale up as quickly. This will leave our nation vulnerable to periodic food scarcity. And, as a nation as a whole, paying more for our food.

It looks like this year, the majority of people will be paying more for their food in the coming year. Our family will not be. We’ve been buying more local food for a few years. We pay more, but with this drought, our monthly food bill will not be increasing. The narrowing price spread between industrial and local food is propelling more people with every price spike to switch to local.

When the next mega drought (or flood) occurs in say 5 years, will we be ready? Will we have our cities ringed in farms, running off urban waste streams, growing their diverse crops upon an ever increasing sponge of soil organic matter. The deep soils and foliage canopies shielding crops and pastures from the worst impacts of drought and flood alike. Will our meat, eggs, and milk be produced upon pastures, resilient to feed grain price spikes? Will we have a grain reserve in place, assuring people a basic level of  calories in extreme emergencies?  To push forward, policymakers must keep the long-term trends and a vision in mind, and not fall into the narrow sighted tweaking of farm bill programs.

Interesting Articles:
USDA info on the impacts of the drought
Federally Subsidized Crop Insurance
More on Crop Insurance
Prices Up, Farm income Down
Organic methods as or more productive than large scale monocultures
Small Farms are High Yielding
Commodity Prices

Evolving permaculture solutions: keep it simple!

by Chad Hellwinckel

It’s great to see that permaculture is taking root in institutions of higher learning throughout the world. Groups like Sustainable Learning make up a growing wave of university interest and involvement in permaculture. As declining energy sources become more evident and food emergencies become more commonplace, governments will be looking to universities to find BIG solutions.  Along with the hope of BIG solutions comes BIG money. Permaculture may soon be looked upon as a potential big solution. So as we stand today on the threshold of increasing interest in permaculture, let us take a moment to discuss the potential pitfalls that come with the big money. You may think such warnings are a bit premature, but things can change quickly, and in the words of hockey star Wayne Gretzky – it’s always best to “play where the puck is going to be.” Specifically I’d like to communicate lessons I’ve learned from riding the most recent wave of societal hope in a BIGsolution– the emergence and likely failure of the biofuels boom.

I’ve been working in the biofuels boom of academia for the past 12 years. I’ve seen the blossoming of biofuels research go from one researcher across the hall, to including professors from every department on campus through the availability of millions of research dollars. The heart of the biofuels boom was the hope in cellulosic biofuels; of making gasoline out of grass—or ‘grassoline’. We were going to make a new crop, a new industry, and a new fuel, and we approached this endeavor like an Apollo mission. Specialists in grasses, machines, microbes, transportation systems, and economics all divided into designing their own part of the cellulosic biofuel system. As all these well-meaning scientists were working hard to figure out their small part of the whole system, nobody had a handle on how all these parts would fit together into a functioning whole. The agronomists bred high yielding grasses, the agricultural engineers designed machines to compact grass into dense shipping units, and microbiologists created enzymes to turn grass to sugar. My contribution was to estimate where the grass would be grown and at what cost. By necessity, we took data from other scientists on things like costs, yields, and time of microbe development. Because no part of the system actually existed, we had to get by on rough data.  We all published papers and built careers. The media played it up, and politicians came around with great interest to talk about our endeavor in biofuels.  Everything looked good, but then the first year’s ‘grassoline’ mandate went unmet.  As research continued, the second year’s mandate went unmet. Now it looks like a third year’s mandate will not be met, and there’s an uneasy feeling in the air. Could it be that something has gone wrong?

I believe that the biofuels research community is discovering the hard way that when it actually comes to putting it all together, building an energy-agricultural-industrial system is not like building a rocket ship; you can’t just bolt, for example, a densifying technology between the grassy fields and the enzyme vats. Bolts might work well on rocket ships, but they don’t work well in energy-agricultural-industrial systems.  Additionally, because the whole point of our endeavor is to create more energy than is used, the process of integrating the parts is vital to the energetic bottom line. The research community may now be discovering that these unwieldy systems cannot be quickly assembled. Yet as we look at alternatives, we see that similar systems have evolved.  Our goal of creating a ‘grassoline’ production system may be more like evolving a forest than assembling a rocket ship. Ecologists now know that if we want to create, say, a Smokey Mountains ecosystem, it would not only require the bolting together of species we find in the woods or even a succession of non-extinct species, but likely a succession of species that have gone extinct through the millennia of the forest’s evolution. The creation of a forest, or a cellulosic ethanol system, may not be as simple as a assembling a model but rather more like a dialog; a back-and-forth of trying one thing, seeing how it does, and then reacting in the next step. But when we went bravely into the biofuels endeavor, we did not think of it in such an evolutionary manner. Now after 10 years of research, millions of dollars spent, plus the spent faith of policymakers, we have not delivered.

I tell this story as a warning to the rising number of academics involved with permaculture. Whether we call it permaculture, regenerative agriculture, agro-ecology, sustainability or some other name, I believe the day is quickly approaching where big money will turn its eyes upon us to deliver big solutions.  When that day comes, we should not repeat the same mistakes as in the biofuels boom. The problems we propose fixing are big, and our solutions will span systems. We should not simply go about doing what academics and specialists are known for—going into their perspective corners and investigating, experimenting, engineering, and inventing. That would be rocket science, not evolutionary systems science. If we are to be successful, we should realize that we cannot build the solutions. We must evolve the solutions through the analogy of the dialog.

Who is the partner we dialog with? Where do we look to see if real change is taking hold? Where do we get the cues for what needs to be done next? It must be with the farmers and with the households who are using permaculture to meet and beat their bottom line. Truly, if you want to be on the forefront of innovating permaculture systems, the best strategy is to take a permaculture class, buy 20 acres, free up some time, and then try to engineer a living. I’m very serious about the above statement—the forefront of permaculture, which is a design system that I believe has the highest potential of seeing us through the energy descent era, should be on the farm and in the households of people that are constrained by the bottom line.

So what is academia’s role in the dialog? Our highest role as academics in the permaculture endeavor should be to:

1. Get out there and discover what the best innovators are doing.

2. Take the best models in terms of monetary, productive, energetic, and ecological success and let others know about them.

3. Communicate appropriate policies to policymakers that will benefit the innovators.

4. Train as many people as possible on the basic principles of permaculture and let them loose.

Simple, really! We should allow the innovations to bubble up from the people who practice permaculture, and then communicate these grassroots solutions to others.  We should mostly limit our role to one of the communicator, thus assuring that we don’t become the experts. To be successful at evolving complex systems, we need to be clear that the experts are the practitioners, not the academics. If we approach our work with this humble belief at its heart, we can avoid constructing a new system but help in evolving a new system. As Bill Mollison, one of the founders of permaculture, elegantly stated, “Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.”

Agriculture after peak oil: The role of policy

by Chad Hellwinckel

Problem
Agriculture, like all other industries over the past century, has taken great advantage of the extraction and refining of plentiful, energy-dense, fossil fuels. Today, agriculture has evolved into a net energy user for the first time in 10,000 years, where, instead of being a means of converting free solar energy into metabolizable energy, it is now a means of transforming finite fossil energy into metabolizable energy. The system has allowed for the cheap production of plentiful food to feed a growing population, but as the total annual quantity of oil physically capable of being extracted from the earth begins to decline over the next several years, agriculture may find itself dependent upon a scarce and expensive resource. Due to the global economy’s inelastic demand for energy, relatively small drops in annual oil and gas output could induce rapid rises in agricultural production input prices. The question must be asked now, how will our agricultural system work at energy prices equivalent to $250 per barrel and higher? How will the system deal with sporadic scarcity? And, most importantly, how will agriculture transition into a system less dependent upon these declining energy sources?

Framing of Discussion
The implications of peak oil could be so profound that it will be helpful to bring in concepts from complex dynamic systems theory when describing what is occurring—and what must be done to move agriculture in a more sustainable direction. This post will frame the discussion in terms of agriculture being a complex adaptive system within a fitness landscape.

In evolutionary biology, the relative fitness of a species can be likened to a landscape with high peaks, representing the adapted abilities of the more fit species for that environment, and lower peaks, representing the adapted abilities of the less fit species. This is called the fitness landscape of a particular environment (figure 1). Analogously, agriculture, in general, can be viewed as a fitness landscape, with particular agricultural systems resting at the peaks of this landscape.

Over the past 80 years there has been a rapid evolution of modern agriculture to take advantage of cheap readily available inputs. This has resulted in industrial agriculture resting upon the highest peak in the fitness landscape. What complex systems theory teaches is that when the environment changes and the peaks adjust accordingly, individual species (or agricultural systems) cannot jump from one descending peak to another ascending. Species (or agricultural systems) become stuck at a sub-optimal solution only inching up their smaller peak.

As peak oil changes the landscape facing competing agricultural production systems, industrial agriculture may find itself stuck upon a sinking peak. This is a significant dynamic to understand when analyzing post-peak oil agriculture. The free market is often looked to for correcting market inefficiencies, yet when faced with a changing fitness landscape, the free market may deliver minute changes upon a sub-optimal peak. Additionally, looking to fine-tune industrial agriculture to respond to the changing landscape may also strand us upon a sub-optimal peak while leaving the emerging higher peaks untouched.

Figure 1. Example of a fitness landscape with optimal and suboptimal peaks. Individual systems can evolve and climb peaks, but as the landscape changes, the systems cannot ‘jump’ from one peak to another without going down in fitness first.

Transition in the Fitness Landscape
What complex adaptive systems also teach us is that when the environment changes, there will be new fitness peaks that have emerged and may be hereunto unexplored. As we enter the peak oil era we should be mindful of the full spectrum of possibilities.

As we look to the future, we can see that at some point on the long slide down from peak oil, agriculture will, once again, have to become a net energy source. The transition to a more ‘fit’ system does not come through the evolution of the old system, but by the rising of other systems that emerge to find themselves at the base of optimal peaks. Unfortunately, in complex evolving systems, we do not know what the ‘most fit’ systems will be.

In order to uncover the new landscape and find the emerging peaks, alternative agricultural systems must be encouraged to take root and grow. This does not have to be a completely blind endeavor. We do know what some of the qualities of a successful system (or systems) will look like in a post peak oil future. There are three criteria that can help identify successful agricultural systems:

1) The systems will be net energy sources instead of net energy users.
2) The systems will be highly productive per unit of area.
3) The systems will improve soils over their initial state.

The Role of Policy
High input agriculture will not disappear overnight, nor would we want it to. By definition, peak oil means we are roughly halfway through global deposits. Fossil fuels and high input agriculture will still have a place in coming decades at supplying enough metabolizable energy to sustain seven billion humans. Global agricultural policy must facilitate a stable environment for the new systems to evolve and propagate. Rising energy prices will eventually reward the low-input innovators over industrial agriculture, but too volatile of a marketplace can stifle change. Additionally, volatility could lead to more rapid consolidation of agriculture, which is contrary to the policy goal.

To foster the emerging systems, global agricultural policy should:

1) Provide extension of systems that meet the three criteria. Particularly extension work must be done in;
i. Developing countries where energy and food scarcity will first be felt.
ii. Urban areas, where local production of fruits, vegetables and meats close to market can be profitable.
2) Institute an international grain reserve to even price volatility and avoid a crisis situation of food scarcity.
3) Use bioenergy policies to accomplish two goals;
i. Provide some alternative to fossil fuels (albeit small).
ii. Use the excess agricultural demand to keep prices high enough to allow investments in alternative systems.
4) Allow regions to have the right to food sovereignty and set their own unique food policy strategies.

Milton Freedman once said, “In times of crisis, people pick up whatever ideas are handy”. As we descend from peak oil, we need to investigate and populate the landscape with many alternative low-energy high-productivity ‘ideas’ as we can. These can be the seeds out of which agriculture can evolve into a system that feeds the large global population, does not need energy subsidies and also improves the environment.

Newly Emerging Alternative Systems
Agriculture has long been thought of as a degrader of land from its natural conditions. At best, agriculture-done-right can reduce erosion and soil degradation, but it is part of conventional thinking that agriculture cannot improve soils over their natural undisturbed state while being highly productive.

This post will list only a few systems within a growing body of work that shows that agricultural production systems can, in fact, meet the three criteria of successful future systems. Unlike the Green Revolution, where one system was implemented on many unique ecosystems, the next revolution will likely consist of diverse agricultural systems uniquely adapted for individual ecosystems. Examples of proven emerging systems include;

a) Short rotation grazing systems first championed by Allan Savory,
b) The use of swales, rock lines and zai methods in the Sahel of Africa.
c) The traditional VAC system of Vietnam which integrates aquaculture, garden, livestock and forest agriculture within small plots.
d) The no-till rice-legume-rye system developed by Masanobu Fukuoka in Japan.

In addition to the many existing systems which can meet the three criteria, there is ongoing research into new systems that may radically change the face of agriculture. Examples include;

e) The perennial polyculture system being developed by Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.
f) The use of biochar in agricultural fields to simultaneously increase soil fertility and sequester carbon long term. This new endeavor has come out of recent investigation into terra preta soils of the Amazon basin which indicates that indigenous populations use of biochar allowed them to intensively farm fields for thousands of years while building soil health.
g) The development of a blight resistant American Chestnut and the designing of edible forests adapted to the eastern US.

Final Remarks
The occurrence of peak oil will be the most significant event in agriculture in the past 80 years. In describing its influence, one must go beyond a conventional description of cost increases or a discussion of novel industrial agricultural practices. A framework must be laid out that will enable people to grasp the scope of the problems we will soon be facing. With the framework of seeing agriculture as a fitness landscape, people may more easily understand the logic and importance of adopting the four policy points.

To borrow another term from complex adaptive systems theory, punctuated equilibrium states that species genetic makeup will be quite stable for long periods of time, but when change does occur, it happens quickly through a rapid branching of events. As one system begins to break down, there is vast potential for others to emerge. The evolution of new systems can occur quickly. It is our role to feed production methods that meet the three criteria and provide an environment that will not stifle their propagation.