|
By Frederick Kirschenmann
On December 18, 2005, I finished the first draft of the year-end economic
analysis of our North Dakota farm in anticipation of filing our 2005 tax return.
One number stood out with unpleasant clarity. Our total farm fuel bill for 2005
was just over $30,000. In 2004, it had been just under $20,000.
Yes, we added 110 acres to the operation, but we also bought a new tractor that
was demonstrably much more fuel efficient than the one it replaced. The reason
behind the major jump in fuel cost, in just one year, was the significant
increase in the per-unit cost of the fuel.
Fortunately our year-end financial statement was not hit with similar cost
increases for fertilizer and pesticides (both tightly linked to fossil fuel
resources) because we had transitioned our farm to a closed nutrient cycling,
self-regulating pest management system almost 30 years ago.
Yet, to me, the 50 percent increase in our fuel bill was a loud wake-up call.
Our farm is still too fossil fuel-dependent to be sustainable much farther into
the future.
I am, of course, aware that there is still a debate raging among experts as to
whether or not we will very shortly reach our global peak oil production (the
point at which we will have produced as much oil per day as we will ever
produce). We reached that point in the United States in 1970. In the late 1950s,
M. King Hubbert, the legendary geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey,
predicted that oil production in the United States would peak between 1965 and
1970. Hubert was ridiculed for his predictions, but he turned out to be
remarkably accurate.
While everyone now seems to agree that Hubert’s method may not be a foolproof
way of predicting peak oil production, there is one thing about his analysis
that seems irrefutable – peak oil production is tightly linked to peak
oil discovery. Peak oil discovery in the United States occurred around
1930, and Hubert calculated that peak oil production takes place 40 years, more
or less, after reaching peak oil discovery. We reached peak global oil discovery
in the late 1960s. Do the math.
So, while some like Red Cavaney (President and CEO of the American Petroleum
Institute) still argue that new technology will postpone the reckoning day of
peak oil production for a long time, I don’t think I will bet the farm on it (World
Watch, 2006, Jan/Feb pp. 13-15). We need to be working right now to find
ways to make our farm less energy dependent.
So, what should we do?
In a brief introductory essay in Structure and Function in Agroecosystem
Design and Management (2001), Masae Shiyomi and Hiroshi Koizumi raise what I
think is one of the more interesting and important questions all of us farmers
have to wrestle with as we approach a farming era devoid of cheap and abundant
petroleum supplies.
“Is it possible,” they ask “to replace current technologies based on fossil
energy with proper interactions operating between crops/livestock and other
organisms to enhance agricultural production?” If the answer is yes, they go on
to say, “then modern agriculture, which uses only the simplest biotic responses,
can be transformed into an alternative system of agriculture in which the use of
complex biotic interactions becomes the key technology.”
On a small scale we already know the answer to their question. In Japan, Takao
Furuno transformed his fossil fuel-dependent, monoculture rice farm into a mixed
rice/fish/duck/fruit farm that is highly productive and now uses almost no
fossil fuels at all. The resources for the exceptional productivity of his farm
stem from the way all of the species in his operation “influence each other
positively in a relationship of symbiotic production,” as he puts it in his
book, The Power of Duck. More than 10,000 farmers in Japan have now
adopted his system. Joel Salatin in Virginia, whose operation has been featured
in numerous publications, uses a farming system based on similar biological
synergies. Salatin has developed a rotational grazing system which supports
seven or eight species of animals, all interdependent in ways that have allowed
him to dramatically reduce his reliance on fossil fuels.
We also have examples in Iowa. Jeff Kuntz has developed a corn/grape/pheasant
system that generates over $10,000 income per acre and uses very little fossil
fuel. Francis Thicke’s rotational grazing dairy farm is another example of an
Iowa farm that is more knowledge intensive than energy intensive. Boone's Dick
Thompson now rotates his prime farm land into pasture three years out of six and
reports that he makes more net profit during the years that the land is in
pasture then he does with corn and soybeans. In all of these operations
biological synergies replace fossil fuel energy.
So how does all of this knowledge apply to my farm in North Dakota, or to PFI
farms in Iowa–especially on the scale on which most of us are operating? I don’t
know yet. Unfortunately, almost none of our public research dollars is devoted
to this kind of research. Consequently, we know almost nothing about the
ecological wealth, encapsulating our farms in the form of various natural
organisms, which could be linked to biological synergies that could drive our
productivity.
How could any of us have known, before Matt Liebmann and his Iowa State
University colleagues did the research, that the common prairie deer mouse is a
voracious consumer of weed seeds and, under the right circumstances, can
dramatically reduce the weed populations in our fields during the winter months?
I know almost nothing about the natural prairie ecology in which my North Dakota
farm is embedded, so I am largely ignorant of the possibilities for developing
“proper interactions” that could operate “between crop/livestock and other
organisms to enhance [the] agricultural production” on our farm.
So, like most farmers, I probably have to make decisions without adequate
knowledge.
But I suspect that I must dramatically reduce the acreage currently devoted to
raising annual crops and increase the acreage devoted to rotational grazing, and
cultivate a greater diversity of animal species. But what is the right
combination of species? What is the most positive relationship among them to
optimize “symbiotic production” in that particular ecology in North Dakota?
Once again we will probably have to learn by trial and error, but I am convinced
that biological synergies will have to largely replace intensive energy use if
our farm is going to be sustainable very far into the future.
This column was written for the "Reflections" section of the
Winter 2006 newsletter of Practical Farmers of Iowa.
|
 |
