ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

The mobile slaughterhouse could play a critical role in the burgeoning local food movement. This photo of a “slaughtermobile” is from an article in the Washington Post. The article reports the USDA is paying more attention to small and mid-size farms, encouraging organic and sustainable agriculture, and investing in projects to bring locally grown meat and produce to consumers.

A mobile slaughterhouse, with a team composed of a butcher and a federal meat inspector, travels from farm to farm.

USDA’s efforts to help small farmers are focused within its “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” program, which seeks to help make the link between local production and local consumption.

USDA has published a Mobile Slaughter Unit Compliance Guide to help those who want to establish a mobile slaughter unit under Federal inspection and operate in accordance with Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) regulations.

The Land Institute near Salina, Kansas has been crossing selected strains of wild intermediate wheatgrass grain with annual wheat varieties to breed a commercially practical perennial grain. Gene Logsdon at OrganicToBe.org reports that pancakes made with flour (trademarked Kernza ™) from the resulting grain is pretty tasty.

The flour makes a light dough and the pancakes taste just a tad sweeter than ordinary wheat flour.  * * * It is exceptionally high in some nutrients known to be important to human health and deficient in many modern diets: Omega 3 fatty acids, calcium, lutein, and betaine. It is particularly high in folate, important for preventing stroke, cancer, heart disease and infertility. Folate is also believed to be important for maintaining good mental health in old age.  My mind generally glazes over when reading about nutrient values of various foods so that folate might come in handy. To me the important thing is that for once something that is good for me tastes good too. Kernza ™ does not have enough gluten in it to use alone for leavened breads, but as more and more crosses are made with it and regular wheat, all things are possible.

Being able to grow grain without plowing up millions of acres of soil every year would cut down on erosion and help build soil tilth while enabling farmers to cut way back on fuel and greenhouse gas emissions – saving farmers both time and money in the bargain.

But the search won’t be over until researchers come up with a good perennial bread flour.

Shirin Wertime has a must-read article at Culture Change that poses the question: what will happen to our food system as fossil fuels become increasingly scarce and expensive? The following is my summary of some of the highlights.

Today’s agri-food systems are almost entirely dependent on fossil fuel energy for everything from food production to transportation to food preparation and storage. The structure of agriculture production, aided and abetted by government policies, has spurred the expansion of farm specialization and consolidation, monocultures, the delocalization of agricultural production, and the adoption of industrial farming practices. The increase in globalized food production, which has come at the expense of local production, is sustainable only as long as cheap energy supplies can subsidize the transportation of goods across long distances. It will take deep-rooted structural and institutional changes as well as lifestyle changes on the part of individuals, their governments, and societies to transition to a more sustainable, non-petroleum based food system which oil depletion and rising costs will inexorably force on us.

Farming itself has become the least profitable and least energy intensive segment of the entire economy of agriculture. Only one-fifth of the energy that goes into our mouths is actually used for growing food.  The rest goes to transport, processing, packaging, marketing, and food preparation and storage. Farmers end up with only 10% of the total food dollar, while 25% pays for farm inputs and 65% goes for transportation, processing and marketing. A century ago, farmers ended up with closer to 40% of the food dollar and most farm inputs were produced by the farmers themselves by using draft animal power, storing seeds, and using animal manure for fertilizer.

As oil declines, industrial agriculture in its current form will become impossible. It will prove increasingly difficult to feed the world with diminishing fertile land and water resources. The current structure of power relations and resource control in the United States prevents the widespread move away from fossil fuel based agriculture and transition to localized, sustainable agriculture. Without a change in the status quo, small local and sustainable producers cannot compete against fossil fuel subsidized agribusiness. But the reality is that the present agricultural system cannot be maintained for much longer. Decreasing oil production and rising oil prices will effectively bankrupt the American agri-food system. Without petroleum and all of its benefits, there will be little choice but to revert to a system of local, organic production and consumption.

Peak oil will turn our entire world upside down. There will be a return to localized, small-scale photosynthesis-based, appropriate-tech agricultural production and an end to the domination of economic and power structures that place profit above all else.

Now, I can buy all of this except the last part of the last sentence. I’ll believe in the end of avarice only when I see it.

The focus of public and policy debate about the climate change impact of food has mostly been on transport.  “Food miles” has become shorthand for thinking about the climate change impact of food. But food system related emissions  result not only from the transport of food. Emissions also result from the conversion of land for farming, the process of farming itself, the energy used in food processing and retail, and from food waste.

A new report from Britain titled Local food and climate change – the role of community food enterprises looks at all stages of the supply chain. Using a life cycle analysis, the report takes into account emissions impacts at all stages, from agricultural production (and its associated inputs) through to processing, packing, transport, retailing, home storage and preparation, and final disposal. Its conclusion: carefully designed local food networks can reduce greenhouse gas emissions in every part of the food chain.

Farming itself is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture is a major source of methane, which is many times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (methane is 25 times more potent than CO2 over a 100 year time horizon but 72 times as potent over 20 years); and nitrous oxide, which is 296 times more powerful. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that agriculture is responsible for 13.5% of emissions worldwide. If the connection between deforestation and agriculture is taken into account, farming’s contribution to causing climate change rises considerably. In Latin America, for example, about 70% of previously forested land in the Amazon is used as pasture, and feed crops cover a large part of the reminder. Deforestation is responsible for just under 18% of emissions around the world.

Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture arise both from the process of farming itself and from the production of inputs such as fertilizers, fuel for machinery, energy for heating and materials, and animal feed. The process by which fertilizer is produced is both energy intensive (generating carbon dioxide) and results in the production of the powerful greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. Emissions arise from land use change as soils are disturbed, vegetation destroyed and forests cut down. Farming practices are closely intertwined with the use of external inputs. Conserving soil carbon through methods such as conservation agriculture, organic farming, integrated nutrient management, cover cropping, agroforestry and the use of biochar not only reduces emissions from the soil but also conserves soil nutrients and reduces the need for fertilizers.

The emissions impacts of raising livestock, both direct (livestock raised on recently converted land) and indirect (the raising of crops such as soybeans and corn for animal feed) are significant: in Britain, meat and dairy consumption is responsible for 58% of food-related emissions; and globally, livestock are estimated to account for 70% of agricultural land use (30% of the Earth’s land surface) and more than half of the greenhouse gas emissions attributable to agriculture.

In assessing emissions from the food transportation system, how close food is produced to its point of consumption proves to be far from the only factor. Route planning, loading, the timing of deliveries compared with traffic and vehicle efficiency are all factors in road freight emissions. And reducing emissions from transport is not just about reducing the distance that food travels between the supplier and the retailer – transport between the retailer and the customer is even more important. It is no use reducing emissions associated with transporting food from the farm to retail, only for the good work to be undone by longer or more frequent shopping trips by car.

Emissions reductions from more efficient transport can be undone by higher emissions from storage, packaging and processing of food products. The best way to reduce emissions from food processing is to reduce the extent to which food is processed at all. But this takes thought – if processing reduces the need for later cooking or refrigeration, or uses food that would otherwise go to waste, it is unlikely that eliminating processing in favor of fresh produce would reduce overall greenhouse gases. Refrigeration is a big culprit, contributing to climate change both because of the energy used to operate the equipment and because of the impact of refrigerant gases, which are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. And the interactions among refrigeration, packaging, food transport, food product innovations and various socio-economic developments have helped create cultural norms and practices that are highly energy-dependent. For example, take out-of-season consumption of fruits and vegetables. It may be less greenhouse gas-intensive to ship fruit and vegetables from Mexico or South America during the winter than to produce them locally in heated greenhouses. Similarly, emissions associated with storing apples for many months or keeping foods frozen can more than make up for the transport emissions saved by not bringing them from around the world. People have gotten used to having most foods to be available throughout the year. Slashing emissions from our food systems requires that we once again learn to live with seasonal variations.

If greenhouse gas emissions from the food system are to be reduced significantly, we will need to change the balance of the food we eat. A lower impact diet is seasonal, largely based on food that comes from plants, and can include some meat and dairy products grown to high environmental standards. Eating less – in particular, less factory-farmed meat and poultry – would be an effective way to reduce total greenhouse gas emissions.  And, as a bonus, we would be healthier for it.

In the United States, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of honeybee colonies have failed to survive the winter.

As an article in the U.K. Guardian explains, if honeybees are in terminal collapse the world could be on the brink of biological disaster:

The decline of the country’s estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

* * *

The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

Scientists believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies.

Losses in some commercial honeybee operations are running at 50% or greater. Continued losses of this magnitude are not economically sustainable for commercial beekeepers.

The Guardian article includes a litany of the catastrophic consequences of honeybee colony collapse:

Flowering plants require insects for pollination. The most effective is the honeybee, which pollinates 90 commercial crops worldwide. As well as most fruits and vegetables – including apples, oranges, strawberries, onions and carrots – they pollinate nuts, sunflowers and oil-seed rape. Coffee, soya beans, clovers – like alfalfa, which is used for cattle feed – and even cotton are all dependent on honeybee pollination to increase yields.

In the UK alone, honeybee pollination is valued at £200m. Mankind has been managing and transporting bees for centuries to pollinate food and produce honey, nature’s natural sweetener and antiseptic. Their extinction would mean not only a colourless, meatless diet of cereals and rice, and cottonless clothes, but a landscape without orchards, allotments and meadows of wildflowers – and the collapse of the food chain that sustains wild birds and animals.

Back in December I wrote a post about our poultry shed project. The predator-proof poultry shed is now complete (except for painting, a project awaiting warmer and drier weather).

And the ducks have arrived, special delivery by U.S. mail, 19 day-old ducklings squashed together for warmth in a 12 x 10 x 6 cardboard box. Here they are – seven Pekins, six Rouens,  and six Khaki Cambells – in their new quarters in the brooder room of the poultry shed.

In addition to the ducklings, you can see the heat lamp for warmth, the automatic feeder, and the plumbing for the automatic waterer (hidden behind Zooey the duckshund). We’ll have six Muscovys arriving in late May or early June.

Zooey has never shown much interest in the sheep, but she’s fascinated by the ducks. Her new assignment, when the ducks get old enough to be outside on their own, is going to be to round them up every evening and herd them back into the poultry shed for protection from night time predators. We’ll see how that works out.

You may ask, why bother to raise a few ducks? It’s most certainly not going to provide an income stream worthy of mention.

John Michael Greer has a post this week that helps explain why it’s not only worthwhile, but an enriching endeavor. It’s all about reinvigorating the household economy.

Here’s a chart from Wikipedia, showing how the labor force participation rate changed from 1948 to 2006:

United States’ Labor Force Participation Rate 1948-2006. Source: United States Bureau of Labor Statistics

And this chart from a post at Calculated Risk breaks the labor participation out by gender:

A good part of the gain in per capita GDP over the last 60 years is the result of increased labor force participation, especially by women. Americans have been abandoning the household economy for the money economy. And as Greer describes, people are often worse off as a result of the trade.

What’s all this got to do with ducks? Ducks are hard to find, and expensive. Check out Willamette Local Foods: ducks range in price from ~$30 for a small one to ~$45 for a large one. Duck eggs are expensive, too – $7.20/doz. Ducks and duck eggs are a luxury we could seldom afford, if we had to pay cash. But we can raise them ourselves, and live richly.

Same thing goes for lamb. Leg of lamb goes for ~$8/lb, and lamb loin chops even more. We first raised sheep ourselves because we can’t find good lamb at local supermarkets, and we couldn’t afford it if we could find it. Now we raise a little, sell a little, and live wie Gott im Frankreich.

And then there’s wine. A decent bottle of Pinot Noir fetches ~$15/bottle. We grow our own grapes, make our own great wine (if I do say so myself), and have a bottle on the table every night, plus plenty to share with friends. That adds up to a minimum $5,500/year – way more than we could afford, in after-tax dollars, if we had to buy it from a wine shop.

Plus we don’t have to commute to work, we don’t have to do shit work,  we don’t have to put up with bosses, we don’t have to worry about getting laid off or fired. We get to putter around the farm most of the day, enjoying the sunshine or the rain, the fields and the woods, and the company of each other and our critters.

Now, if we could only raise doctors and nurses . . .

The planet is beset with a number of unprecedented crises that, as Dennis Meadows points out, are symptomatic of an underlying problem: exponential physical growth in a finite world.

At Countercurrents.org, Helena Norberg-Hodge makes a compelling case that “going local” – shifting economic activity back into the hands of local businesses instead of concentrating it in fewer and fewer mega-corporations – may be the single most effective thing we can do to begin to tackle the problem.

Norberg-Hodge points to food as a clear example of the multi-layered benefits of localization.  Local food systems can help reinvigorate entire rural economies and have social and environmental benefits:

• While globalized agriculture demands monocultural production of cash crops, a food system oriented towards local and regional markets gives farmers incentives to diversify.
• Diversity creates many niches on the farm for wild plant and animal species.
• Diversified farms can get by without heavy machinery or heavy doses of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
• Most of the money spent on food goes to the farmer, not corporate middlemen.
• Small diversified farms employ more people per acre than large monocultures. Wages paid to farm workers benefit local economies and communities far more than money paid for heavy equipment and the fuel to run it: the latter is almost immediately siphoned off to equipment manufacturers and oil companies, while wages paid to workers are spent locally.
• Local food systems provide better food security.
• Small-scale, diversified farms have a higher total output per unit of land than large-scale monocultures.

Agribusiness interests dominate at the state, national, and international levels. For example, the Agribusiness Council is upfront about its aspirations for dominance of the global food system:

The Agribusiness Council (ABC) is a private, nonprofit/tax-exempt, membership organization dedicated to strengthening U.S. agro-industrial competitiveness through programs which highlight international trade and development potentials as well as broad issues which encompass several individual agribusiness sectors and require a “food systems” approach. Examples of such issues are commercialization of new technology/crops, environmental impacts, human resource development, trade and investment policy, natural resource management, and rural development.

touts its incestuous relationship with  the U.S. government:

Initiated under Federal government auspices by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967, The Agribusiness Council was formed by a group of business, academic, foundation and government leaders in order to facilitate American agribusiness participation in agricultural trade and development programs with developing countries – and represent private-sector agriculture interests to Federal government decision-makers.

and makes no bones about its objectives:

As an organization with international linkages, The Agribusiness Council seeks to strengthen the U.S. agricultural sector’s international outreach through stimulating private enterprise trade and investment solutions in Third World agro-industrial development.

Agribusiness interests may be too entrenched and government too corrupt to change. But we can change. We have the power to opt out of the global food system and to begin to grow local food systems, from the ground up.

The planet is beset with a number of unprecedented crises that, as Dennis Meadows points out, are symptomatic of an underlying problem: exponential physical growth in a finite world.

At Countercurrents.org, Helena Norberg-Hodge makes a compelling case that “going local” – shifting economic activity back into the hands of local businesses instead of concentrating it in fewer and fewer mega-corporations – may be the single most effective thing we can do to begin to tackle the problem.

Norberg-Hodge points to food as a clear example of the multi-layered benefits of localization.  Local food systems can help reinvigorate entire rural economies and have social and environmental benefits:

• While globalized agriculture demands monocultural production of cash crops, a food system oriented towards local and regional markets gives farmers incentives to diversify.
• Diversity creates many niches on the farm for wild plant and animal species.
• Diversified farms can get by without heavy machinery or heavy doses of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
• Most of the money spent on food goes to the farmer, not corporate middlemen.
• Small diversified farms employ more people per acre than large monocultures. Wages paid to farm workers benefit local economies and communities far more than money paid for heavy equipment and the fuel to run it: the latter is almost immediately siphoned off to equipment manufacturers and oil companies, while wages paid to workers are spent locally.
• Local food systems provide better food security.
• Small-scale, diversified farms have a higher total output per unit of land than large-scale monocultures.

Agribusiness interests dominate at the state, national, and international levels. For example, the Agribusiness Council is upfront about its aspirations for dominance of the global food system:

The Agribusiness Council (ABC) is a private, nonprofit/tax-exempt, membership organization dedicated to strengthening U.S. agro-industrial competitiveness through programs which highlight international trade and development potentials as well as broad issues which encompass several individual agribusiness sectors and require a “food systems” approach. Examples of such issues are commercialization of new technology/crops, environmental impacts, human resource development, trade and investment policy, natural resource management, and rural development.

touts its incestuous relationship with the U.S. government:

Initiated under Federal government auspices by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967, The Agribusiness Council was formed by a group of business, academic, foundation and government leaders in order to facilitate American agribusiness participation in agricultural trade and development programs with developing countries – and represent private-sector agriculture interests to Federal government decision-makers.

and makes no bones about its objectives:

As an organization with international linkages, The Agribusiness Council seeks to strengthen the U.S. agricultural sector’s international outreach through stimulating private enterprise trade and investment solutions in Third World agro-industrial development.

Agribusiness interests may be too entrenched and government too corrupt to change. But we can change. We have the power to opt out of the global food system and to begin to build local food systems, from the ground up.

A few days of blue skies and warm sunshine is all it takes to turn one’s thoughts to spring.

Over the last week of clear weather, temperatures have been cool at night – like in the low twenties – but have been getting up to the low or even mid-sixties during the day. In the greenhouse, minimums are in the low forties, with maximums reaching the low seventies. Time to plant seeds!

Two weeks ago I planted seeds left over from last year: the first batch of lettuces, and herbs – parsley, chervil, cilantro. Those seeds have already sprouted. As soon as the plants are big enough, they’ll be set out in cold frames, where we’re still harvesting lettuces planted last fall.

This weekend, after a seed-buying expedition to Nichols in Albany, it was an orgy of planting. Six types of lettuces: Australian Yellow, Black-Seeded Simpson, Flashy Butter Oak, New Red Fire, Red Velvet, and our old favorite Merlot. Artichokes, to replace any that may not have survived the brutal cold of early December (at least some old plants show signs of new growth, too soon to know how many). Two new varieties of cabbages – Megaton and Stonehead – to expand on last year’s very successful experiment with sauerkraut. Cauliflower: Snow Crown and Cheddar. Lemon cucumbers. Tomatoes: Oregon Spring, Siletz (would have planted Legend, but I proved to have saved an empty seed packet). Peas, snap and sugar pod. Winter squash – Cornell’s Bush Delicata, our favorite (I know, it seems awfully early, but you catch the planting bug . . . ). And flowers! Sunflowers, pansies, violas, nasturtiums, all in several varieties and mixes. All to be set out at the appropriate time.

Even with all this planting, the greenhouse isn’t even near full. No more seed trays in the windowsills in the house!

We got a whole selection of commercial-grade seed trays in various plug sizes from Yarnell’s Red Barn nursery in Stayton – for a mere dollar each. The planting mix we made ourselves, from compost run through our Steinmax chipper-shredder.

Garlic, onions, and shallots have been in the ground since last fall. Oops, forgot the leeks! Put that on the list for the next visit to Nichols, along with Legend tomato seeds and doubtless a few others we’ve overlooked.

Over the weekend we raised the borders of the herb garden and added several inches of compost. Got the raspberries pruned, and dug up a couple of dozen plants to give away to friends.

Now comes the true test of the greenhouse, to see if we can sprout all these seeds with no heat other than from passive solar gain, and no protection from cold other than thermal mass and insulation.

We’ve now gotten far enough along to make a progress report on our poultry project.

After a fabulous meal of “duck three ways” prepared for us at the farm by friends visiting from Portland, we’ve decided that this coming year we’re going to raise ducks. Ducks and duck eggs are too expensive to buy for our own consumption. Conversely, they yield a lot of profit for the effort – much more so than chickens, even free-range, organic chickens.

We’ve raised chickens before in the past, giving up on most recent attempt because a fox was making away with one every night. That was painful to wake up to each morning. So we gave the remnants of our flock away to someone with more secure facilities, before the chickens all disappeared.

So one key is a predator-proof shelter where the poultry can be safely locked away each night.

The design we settled on is based on Gene Logsdon’s design for a chicken coop, posted at The Energy Bulletin.

Okay, so ducks don’t roost or use nest boxes (at least that’s what we’re told) – but we want a flexible design to accommodate whatever poultry we might want to raise in the future.  The roosts and nesting boxes can always be added if necessary.

We had a run-down shed that at one time served as our lambing shed (we’ve since build much better lambing facilities inside the barn itself). We figured we could move the shed to its new home and then rebuild it for its new purpose.

First, the shed had to be reinforced a bit and all the rotten parts replaced. Then moving it proved to be more of a challenge than I thought. I had moved it once before, dragging it with the tractor from its old home to a spot within the area fenced for the sheep – but that was years ago in the summer, when the ground was dry and hard. Now that the rains have commenced, the ground is soft and slippery and the tractor couldn’t get any traction. The key proved to be jacking it up on fence posts laid down as rollers and rolling it to its new location, running the rollers from the back to the front as we went.

So here it is, in its new location and partially reconstructed.

Alright, so it doesn’t look like much – it’s a work in progress.

Just wait ’till we’re through, and ’til its flocking with ducks!

Last night (actually Tuesday morning, December 8 ) it got down to 4° F – three degrees colder than ever recorded here at the farm since we arrived in 1994 and began keeping records, and five degrees colder than the 9° F low of the previous night.

How did the passive solar greenhouse cope with record frigid temperatures? At eight in the morning, I found the door frozen shut and had to first break the ice seal with a small sledge and block. Inside, it was a relatively balmy 34° F – cold, but safely above freezing. All plants and seedlings had survived.

At 4:00 on Monday afternoon, the temperature inside the greenhouse had reached 56° F. I’ll update this post with today’s high temperature this afternoon. If we can figure out how to get the camera to communicate with the laptop, we’ll post a photo (Irina’s computer is on the fritz).

Note to self: get high/low thermometer for greenhouse.

Update 9/12: Yesterday’s high: 36°
Last night’s low: 3° (!)
Greenhouse high: 54°
Greenhouse low: 32° (whew – that was close!)

Not bad. I don’t expect we’ll ever see weather conditions like this again here, at least in my lifetime.

You can see from the satellite image below why it’s so cold here – frigid air is pouring straight from the Arctic Ocean, down across Canada to the U.S., including the west coast.

Odd – in this WordPress program, if I type the number “8? and then “close parenthesis” without a space, it shows up as a smiley face with sunglasses, like this

Zooey has arrived to fill the enormous paw prints of our beloved black lab Pinot.

Zooey is a 65-pound black lab/blue heeler mix. She doesn’t yet know her destiny is to be a sheep dog. She’s still under the happy illusion her mission in life is to chase balls and catch frisbies – so far, she completely ignores our sheep.

Have a great Thanksgiving!