Rebecca Hoskins – A Farm for the Future

The recent documentary on BBC2 by Rebecca Hoskins was very informative about the way farming and food is dependent on finite fossil fuel. The interview with Richard Heinberg was excellent as he was able to explain how perilous the situation is and how urgent is the need for sustainable solutions.

Rebecca’s conclusion that we would have to eat less meat would be hard to argue against, but the other ideas of year round grazing and permaculture do not seem to me to be the way to feed 6.7 billion mainly city dwellers when oil becomes scarce.

Instead we need a system where we can efficiently utilise both the seed and the straw in cereal and oilseed crops in a way that does not damage the soil, so that agriculture can produce enough food but also enough biofuel for it’s own energy needs.

We believe that harvesting the whole, ripe crop unseparated and then processing it at a bio refinery may be part of the solution.

Water Shortages in India and Saudi Arabia

Water shortages are adversely effecting food production in many parts of the world, and are going to get much worse. Two examples have been reported on this week. In Fortune magazine, Daniel Pepper reports from India about falling water levels due to over extraction.

Ground water has been depleted to such an extent that it is devastating the country. A soil and water expert estimates that the energy used to subsidize rice production in the Punjab region costs $381 million a year. He and other experts warn warns that, if unchecked, future drilling will bleed state budgets, parch aquifers, and run farmers out of business.

Meanwhile, Reuters says that the Saudi government has decided to stop all subsidies to agriculture, and aims to rely entirely on imports by 2016.

This is due to fossil aquifers becoming depleted due to the previous policy of self sufficiency when grain was produced regardless of cost. Massive circles of green apeared in the desert as centre pivot irrigation systems were installed. These systems consist of a massive gantry carrying pipes and watering jets that go slowly round in a circle, the pump and well being in the centre.

Saudi became a major food exporter but will now instead become a major importer. As other countries are also changing from exporters to importers, and as big producers such as the US use more grain for biofuel, severe shortages are bound to happen as other threats to food production mentioned in other posts, come in to play.

Less than 1% of Land in Niger is Good Enough to grow Crops

80% of Niger is desert, and of the rest only 4% is worth trying to grow crops on.”   This is what I read in a fundraising leaflet Save the Children sent me today. If people are starving to death now, when there are rich nations who are able to give food aid, what will happen in the future when the West no longer has sufficient food stocks to feed its own people?  What will happen when 20,000 more square miles of productive land are lost to desert globally every year while world population increases?  My book, Famine in the West discusses this further.

Intact Harvester

These days it seems you can’t turn on the TV or read a newspaper without being confronted with yet another news item about the problem of climate change. Again and again we hear about how CO² levels are and average temperatures are rising, how the icecaps are melting, and how weather is becoming more extreme. We know it’s all caused by using gas and oil too fast, but the one thing we don’t hear a lot about is acceptable solutions. By acceptable, I mean ways that will not adversely effect our standard of living.

Until now, that is. What follows is a description of a new invention that will reduce our reliance on fossil fuels (and so help to address the problems of climate change) without using agricultural land to grow crops for fuel. Even more importantly this idea will go someway towards feeding the expected 8 billion world population in 2025 at the moment of Peak Food as biofuels can be produced without using the food portion of the crop.

The Intact Harvester
See diagram (intact harvester invention)

The diagram above shows a machine that would replace the combine harvester and after swathing or spraying with roundup to reduce moisture content, harvest cereals intact i.e. harvest the grain and the straw. The straw and grain would be sent together to local processing plants where they would both be processed. The straw (which often contains almost the same amount of energy as the grain) would be used to make electricity or cellulosic ethenol. In the case of oilseed rape, the seed would be crushed for vegetable oil and the residue used to feed livestock. For cereals, the grain would be used for food and any further drying required would use waste heat from the burning of the straw instead of oil.

Thus the advantage of this machine would be a far higher energy balance than present, as shown below:
See diagram (energy balance for intact harvesting)

See diagram (conventional harvester energy blanace)

Tax Carbon Campaign

We at Peakfood advocate change now, to prevent world famine and extreme weather. We outline 6 ways this can be achieved in chapter 19 of our book, Famine in the West.As one of these ways (taxing carbon) must be government led, we ask people to support us in our campaign to tax carbon. Yes, it will mean accepting a slight dip in our standard of living for a few years, but  this would drive technological innovation at the speed needed to drastically cut CO2 emissions and delay oil and gas depletion. For more details on how we see a carbon tax working click here.