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December 30, 2005
Continuing with agriculture
A couple of months ago, I met with a friend who manages an organic farm for a nonprofit organization in the Pittsburgh area to learn about community supported agriculture (CSA). He and his wife operate a CSA enterprise that they call Cherry Valley Organics (see http://www.cherryvalleyorganics.com/). They produce vegetables, herbs, and cut flowers for a group of subscribers. I found that the CSA community is quite a bit more extensive than I had imagined.
Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education offers a link to a state-by-state database of CSAs. Use this link: http://wsare.usu.edu/pub/index.cfm?sub=csa I count 68 CSA listings in Pennsylvania; a quick study indicates that few areas of the state are not within a CSA's reach. One of the larger ones in this part of PA, Spiral Path Farm (http://www.spiralpathfarm.com/) serves the counties around Harrisburg as well as Philadelphia, about two hours away.
Another incorrect impression about CSA was that they provide fruits and vegetables, but my Pittsburgh-area friend pointed me to meat producers who work in much the same way: serving a group of subscribing customers. Heritage Foods (http://http://www.heritagefoodsusa.com/) seems to have broad coverage. Slow Food Pittsburgh (http://www.slowfoodpgh.com/) offers a service that they call Laptop Butcher Shop, which allows consumers to place orders with producers of beef, pork, turkey, and lamb.
So the point is that an infrastructure has already been established for food production and distribution on a local scale. I believe it will be very important to preserve this infrastructure, and to encourage the growth of consumer demand, which should draw more small farmers into the market. Local agriculture is far less dependent on liquid fuel than big agriculture, so the cost of local food should increase less quickly than the cost of food brought from a distance. Local food producers will also constitute a very important element of a food security strategy. Petroleum and natural gas price increases will affect big agriculture by at least raising costs, and the price of food at the grocery store. Serious disruption of petroleum or natural gas supplies may make food delivery less certain.
Local food also means decentralized production and processing. Decentralized activities will be far less appealing to bioterrorists than the large processing plants that distribute throughout the country.
Posted by aquacura.com at 04:58 PM | Comments (2)
December 10, 2005
Starting on agriculture
I have been procrastinating because I feel inadequate to address this aspect of petroleum depletion effectively. But food security is an essential part of life after petroleum, so I will give it a try and hope readers will help me to shape up my thoughts.
First, I have gotten another data point on how much liquid biofuel we might be able to produce along with adequate food for the US population. I met Stan Sersen, founder of the Environmental Design and Resource Center in Jessup, MD http://www.enviro-center.com last week. He is involved in another enterprise, MidAtlantic Biodiesel, which is building a plant in Delaware to produce biodiesel from soybeans, animal fats, and waste vegetable oil.
I asked Stan what portion of today's liquid petroleum use in the US he thought could be met by biofuels. He cited some research, which I will try to locate, and suggested that 20 percent would be a valid number. Let's be generous and double that number, assuming we will master efficient biofuel production from cellulose, producing both ethanol and biodiesel. So somewhat less than half of the amount of liquid fuel we use in the US.
Now to growing food. Petroleum and natural gas are fundamental to food production and distribution in the US today. Farm machinery, of course, runs on liquid fuel. Natural gas is the feedstock for synthetic fertilizer. I'm not certain whether petroleum is a feedstock for pesticides and would welcome guidance on this question. Growing the food is only the beginning. Our grocery stores are supplied from great distance. It's probably safe to say that very little of the food in the grocery store is grown locally. More accurately, whatever portion of the food is grown locally has probably travelled long distances to a processing plant and then back to the local grocery store. This movement, of course, depends utterly on liquid fuel.
This dependence on liquid fuel pertains to meats and dairy products as well as produce.
So food production as we know it in the US will become increasingly expensive as the cost of liquid fuel increases. And probably less reliably available.
My next entry will go into local agriculture. I'll tell you that I am surprised at how well developed the local food market is.
Posted by aquacura.com at 10:26 PM | Comments (2)