The Future of Agriculture
Why Peak Oil & Pollution Mandate a New Farming Paradigm
Interview: Richard Heinberg
March 2007, Acres U.S.A.

   Richard Heinberg is more than a spokesman for the vision that sees beyond the age of oil. His home is the lecture platform, the classroom, the deep-think tank. He is a son of northern Missouri (now CAFO hog country) from an industrial farm supply family — his father was a quality control chemist, for which reason Richard discovered firsthand much of the bad science that now has the upper hand in agriculture. Intellectually, he rejected farming as an industrial procedure, and for the last 20 years has used his pen like a stiletto to nail fact and conclusion to the market wall. His last eight years have been devoted to writing when not teaching at New College of California, Santa Rosa.
   In the questions and answers that follow, Richard Heinberg concludes that too many farmers have disappeared since World War II, and the nation has been consistently short of independent growers. This shortage will be exacerbated as oil to service the overindustrialized world continues to falter.

ACRES U.S.A. According to the biblical book of Joel, old men dream dreams and young men see visions. Are we looking at dreams or at visions in what you recently presented at the annual E.F. Schumacher lecture?

RICHARD HEINBERG. It’s probably more in the category of visions. It’s pretty clear what the world needs in terms of future agriculture and future food production. Whether we’ll actually get there is quite a different question, because right now we’re on exactly the wrong track. We’re going to have to make a pretty dramatic change in our agricultural priorities if we’re going to arrive at anything like a sustainable system that will actually feed future generations. What I’ve tried to do is lay out a vision of what’s possible.

ACRES U.S.A. What is possible?

HEINBERG. Using the knowledge that we’ve built up over the last several decades about organic farming, about small-scale food production using techniques such as permaculture and bio-intensive and so on, I think it’s possible for us to produce food in a way that doesn’t destroy topsoil, in a way that preserves fresh water and that feeds as many people as we have in the world today. But it’s going to require a lot more people doing the work of producing the food, because truly sustainable agriculture is a much more labor-intensive process.

ACRES U.S.A. But in the lifetime of this interviewer, we have witnessed the situation change, from a system in which a man could make a very good living on 80 acres for a family of six or seven people, to what we see today, where he can’t make a living if he’s farming two or three sections of land because of disparity between agriculture and the rest of the society.

HEINBERG. That’s right.

ACRES U.S.A. Doesn’t that make the entire problem a political problem?

HEINBERG. It certainly is a political problem, and it’s also an energy problem, because the reason we’ve created the kind of agricultural system we have today is that we’ve had access to very cheap sources of energy. We’ve used fossil fuels to run giant farm machinery and to transport food ever-further distances and in ever-larger quantities, to process food and to store food and so on. When we no longer have access to that cheap fuel, after global oil production peaks and oil starts to become more scarce and expensive, we will have to rethink agriculture. It would help enormously if we started that process ahead of time and began the kind of transition that will inevitably take place in a proactive way, because if we simply wait for events to unfold, it’s likely that it will be a very chaotic and destructive kind of transition, and many people could suffer as a result.

ACRES U.S.A. What did you present to the Schumacher Society in terms of a program that would accomplish this kind of thing?

HEINBERG. I titled my talk “Fifty Million Farmers” because by my very, very rough calculation, that’s how many more farmers we will need in the next 20 or 30 years in order to feed the current population of the United States. Without cheap fossil fuels, we will need many more hands in agricultural production. The nation of Cuba has already gone through a similar kind of transition as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Cubans, who at that time were even more dependent on fossil fuels for agricultural production than were American farmers, found that they were forced to breed more oxen for animal traction, to break up the large state-owned farms, and to raise salaries for farmers to equal those of doctors and engineers, so that they could encourage people to move from the cities into the countryside to work on farms. They had a very difficult transition in any case — they called it the “Special Period” — the average Cuban lost something like 20 pounds of body weight during this time and almost everyone went hungry from time to time. Nevertheless, they did survive. I think we would be doing well to accomplish the transition as successfully as the Cubans did.

ACRES U.S.A. The organic movement has proceeded to accomplish some parts of that transition, has it not?

HEINBERG. Absolutely — and if it hadn’t been for organic agronomists in Havana lobbying their government, I think Cuba wouldn’t have been nearly as successful. When the problems became apparent, these ecological agronomists were called in and given a free hand to redesign the Cuban food system. Something like that needs to happen in our country. We have people like Wes Jackson and many others who have pioneered sustainable, ecological food systems in North America, but they’re not being listened to. They are very much on the fringes, yet they’re the people whose expertise needs to guide our transition away from fossil-fuel agriculture.

ACRES U.S.A. During a trip to Cuba a few years ago, I had the opportunity to visit some of their agricultural stations and farms. I found systems in operation in those stations for producing azotobacter bacteria for use as a nitrogen-fixing procedure out on the farms. This was being done on a rather grand scale to service small farms. Is that the kind of thing you have in mind?

HEINBERG. Absolutely. The Cubans called this “biotechnology,” but of course in the United States when we use that term, we generally mean genetic engineering — not so in Cuba. They’re trying to use plant breeding and other more traditional techniques that call on the ingenuity of farmers and soil scientists to make their system not only as productive as possible, but also as sustainable as possible.

ACRES U.S.A. You mentioned Wes Jackson, who some years ago made the remark that the greatest invention of the 21st century would have to be an honest system of accounting. Of course, Wes Jackson is something of a wit, but in all honesty, if we paid for the fossil fuels that we’re consuming on par and didn’t hide it in subsidies such as maintaining armies all over the world to see that this flow is not interrupted, would we find this oil is really as cheap as we think it is?

HEINBERG. Well to be fair, it has been incredibly cheap in the past.

ACRES U.S.A. As a business proposition, but as an economic proposition, it really isn’t, is it?

HEINBERG. When you look at the full environmental cost and human cost, it has been the most expensive and ill-conceived adventure in human history. But of course that’s looking back in retrospect. At the time when we were becoming addicted to the stuff, it seemed irresistible. A gallon of gasoline contained the energy equivalent of over two months of hard human labor. So naturally, once we had access to the stuff, we quickly became addicted. We used it for everything we possibly could. It was only later that the full bill came due — in fact, that is what’s happening now.

ACRES U.S.A. But we cannot abandon the concept entirely, can we, when we have the wherewithal to make biodiesel and maybe make other fuels out of biomass?

HEINBERG. No, not altogether, but I think we have to be very careful. If we can use agricultural wastes and food wastes to make biofuels, then in that instance I think it’s a good thing. And of course over the short term many American farmers will probably enjoy an economic boom from being able to grow fuel crops and get higher prices for their harvest — but over the longer term, if we try to substitute fuel crops for food crops on a large scale, as a substitute for fossil fuels, then we get into a competition between food and fuel, and many millions of people could starve just so a few thousand people could continue driving their cars.

ACRES U.S.A. That would be true if you left everything equal, but some years ago we published a little magazine called Gasohol U.S.A. and we made the computation with the assistance of some scientists that if we planted fast-growing poplar trees in waste areas along the side of the highways in the rainbelt parts of the country and made a cellulose ethanol out of it, by harvesting those trees every second year, we could fuel the entire automobile fleet in the United States. Aren’t we shutting the door on technology we could use that is bio-friendly?

HEINBERG. Actually, I don’t think anyone is shutting that door. Quite the opposite is happening. There’s enormous interest in biofuels in the U.S. Department of Energy and elsewhere, and quite a lot of research is going into cellulosic ethanol right now. The conversion process hasn’t been perfected yet. But certainly over the next few years, I’m sure we’ll start to see pilot plants springing up.

ACRES U.S.A. So, then, your vision is the small farm that will support a family and the family that will provide its own labor?

HEINBERG. Yes, and also I think that’s the proper place for biofuels. If biofuels can be produced on-site for use on the farm, I think that’s something practical and sustainable. For the nation as a whole, I think it’s unrealistic to expect that we’ll be able to continue running cars and trucks to the extent that we are now. I think our entire transportation system is going to have to be scaled back and downsized.

ACRES U.S.A. Maybe we need to recover rail and other inter-urban service of mass transportation and so on.

HEINBERG. Right. We need to find more efficient means of transportation, not just different means of fueling our automobiles.

ACRES U.S.A. Presenting your vision to an organization such as the Schumacher Society — how did that resonate with those people?

HEINBERG. Actually, it resonated very well. What I had to say seemed to be exactly what they were interested in hearing. Of course, Fritz Schumacher was saying many of these things several decades ago, and he’s been an inspiration to me. I was very happy to be able to offer an updated version of his “call to arms,” if you will.

ACRES U.S.A. When you travel about the countryside giving presentations like that, how is it resonating with the other people you encounter?

HEINBERG. Generally very well — and I do speak to quite a lot of different kinds of audiences. Sometimes I find myself speaking to local governments, city councils and so on, and of course they’re quite worried to hear about the situation we’re in, not only with oil, but also future natural gas supply. Occasionally I find myself speaking with current or retired oil industry professionals, petroleum geologists, and petroleum engineers and so on, and surprisingly, they’re generally quite supportive of the things I have to say. They’re also quite worried in many cases. Even in some companies that take the official position that there’s no problem with future supply, the workers within those companies who are responsible for keeping track of oil reserves and production are personally quite concerned. So I have received quite a lot of support from those quarters as well.

ACRES U.S.A. We suppose that somebody will still be pumping oil a hundred years from now, but the idea that they can pump oil to support this overly industrialized world is a little bit of a fantasy, isn’t it?

HEINBERG. Absolutely, and the problems are actually coming on much faster than most people were anticipating. Over the last year, we’ve seen virtually no growth in the global oil supply. We’re not seeing the crisis in its full force right now primarily because prices have been so high that they’ve destroyed a lot of demand. Whole African countries have basically stopped importing oil because they can’t afford it. Once we see the supply start to turn down, however, which is likely to happen within the next two or three years, then we’ll see another round of price increases and more demand destruction — decreased demand as a result of high prices — and so on. I’m sorry to say that most people will not understand what’s going on. They’ll want to blame the oil companies or the nations of the Middle East, when in fact the real situation is that we are simply depleting a non-renewable resource.

ACRES U.S.A. They need to take responsibility themselves.

HEINBERG. Absolutely.

ACRES U.S.A. One thing that is increasing exponentially, though, is the pollution factor. When you have 40,000 ships hauling stuff around the world in order to accommodate the divisions of world trade, even the breakup of one or two of those ships when they’re worn out has become one of the biggest pollution factors on the planet, has it not?

HEINBERG. It has. Our oceans are being profoundly affected, not only by waste bunker oil from oceangoing vessels, but also by plastics and other materials tossed overboard. Fossil fuels may not be the root of all evil, but they are certainly the source of most of the unique problems of our time, including pollution, global climate change, oil wars, overpopulation, destruction of forests and topsoil, overfishing — all of these things are either directly or indirectly related to fossil fuels and what we’ve done with them.

ACRES U.S.A. And that extends itself into the way we practice medicine, with all the coal-tar derivative drugs that now seem to be the props of every physician alive.

HEINBERG. Yes, that’s right. The whole chemicals industry arose, as you say, starting with coal, but natural gas is now the basis for the modern pharmaceutical and agrichemical industry, and that’s a very worrisome situation here in North America because we’re seeing natural gas production turning down. Therefore we’re seeing high natural gas prices, and therefore high fertilizer prices, because of course fertilizer is made from natural gas. Most of the North American chemicals industry is fleeing for other shores where natural gas is cheaper. We’ve lost something like 100,000 jobs in the chemicals industry over the last two years, but of course we don’t read that on the business pages of the newspapers.

ACRES U.S.A. Have you and the people in the Schumacher Society made the connection between the imbalance in the different sectors of the economy and parity for agriculture in escorting this kind of a drift into our everyday lives?

HEINBERG. That’s a complicated topic because it partly has to do with the cheap fossil fuels that have replaced agricultural labor, and also it has to do with skewed government food policies. But overall, we have gotten used to very, very cheap food, and the price of that is that very few people can afford to farm anymore — a situation that can’t continue much longer. The average age of a farmer in the United States is currently over 55, so one has to wonder who will be growing our food in 10 or 20 years.

ACRES U.S.A. We’ve heard the statement that you’re going to see a country full of cattle and no cowmen out there. In other words, the technology that’s being adopted runs entirely opposite to what you were saying, especially when we look at confinement feeding and now cloning of animals in order to avoid having to deal with sexual reproduction — all of this with the steady approval of this kind of food faire for the public by the Food and Drug Administration.

HEINBERG. The system that you’re describing of replacing human beings with more machines and more technology only works when we have cheap energy. As energy sources become more expensive, that whole system is going to start to come apart at the seams. The cost of food will go up, and gradually there will be more incentives for people to go into farming. But unless we undertake that transition proactively and with some sense of a plan and goal, it’s going to be a very chaotic and nasty kind of transition.

ACRES U.S.A. Let’s go back to this message which has to be repeated a thousand times — it’s like the old doctor at the University of Missouri who used to tell us that there’s only one story, but you have to find a thousand ways of telling it. You may not have a thousand ways, but I know you have several — why don’t you give us an example?

HEINBERG. Over the past 200 years the human population has grown from under one billion to now over 6.5 billion. That’s an extraordinary rate of increase — completely unprecedented in all of previous history. There are various ways of explaining how and why that has happened, but certainly it could not have happened without cheap fossil fuels with which to grow more food and to transport that food from where it’s abundant to where it’s scarce. I think it’s fair to say that there are somewhere between 2 and 4 billion people alive today who probably would not exist if it weren’t for fossil fuels. That’s a little worrisome to think about when one realizes that oil production globally is set to peak any year now, and global natural gas production will not be far behind. If we’re going to avoid a die-off of much of humanity through starvation and disease, we’re going to have to find ways of feeding people without fossil fuels or with a lot less fossil fuel use — and that really means redesigning our entire food system. It means growing more food locally, for local consumption, it means using smaller farm machinery and less of it, it means more people being involved in the process of producing food, and it means growing food with fewer chemicals and fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Fortunately, over the past few decades we have developed information, knowledge, experience and techniques that are capable of growing food intensively, organically and ecologically. Those techniques, those methods desperately need to be expanded and replicated and made the basis for our national and global food system.

ACRES U.S.A. What do you do to get through to the intellectual advisors who should be telling people these things instead of leading them in the exact opposite direction?

HEINBERG. I think the one thing these people most need to understand is our systemic dependency on fossil fuels and the fact that fossil fuels are about to become much more scarce and expensive. I don’t think that simple fact has penetrated the consciousness of most of our officials. They have been led to believe that business as usual will continue indefinitely, that the way we are doing things now is somehow the way they’ve always been done and always will be done, which is simply not the case. We live in an extraordinary moment in history, in fact.

ACRES U.S.A. Will you be able to put a number or a date on when this just can’t go any further? We’re not suggesting a cataclysm of any sort, we’re talking about a slow evolution, but there has to come a point where mathematical ambition and physical possibility part company.

HEINBERG. Yes, and I think we’re virtually at that point right now. The best estimates of the timing of global oil production peak are converging around the year 2010, which means we’re virtually there. That doesn’t mean that suddenly all oil production will vanish or collapse. We’ll start to see about a 2 percent per year decline in oil production from that point. Here in North America the decline in natural gas production will probably occur with greater speed, so we may in fact have a much more severe natural gas crisis at least in the early years, starting within the next few years, than an oil supply crisis. That’s going to affect agriculture, it’s going to affect electricity production, home heating, the chemicals industry and the entire American economy. Probably by the year 2015 or 2020 we’ll see an American economy in tatters compared to anything we’ve known over the past few decades, simply because we’ll no longer have the fuel to make it work.

ACRES U.S.A. We probably won’t be able to give frequent flyer miles to coffins being hauled back and forth across the country.

HEINBERG. No! The airline industry is going to be hit very hard by all of this, and of course the tourism industry is going to be completely decimated, as are other industries. The American automobile industry is already teetering at the brink of economic collapse, not just because of high fuel prices, but also because of some poor business decisions they’ve made in the past.

ACRES U.S.A. When Douglas MacArthur became the so-called shogun of Japan right after World War II, the first thing he did was order land reallocation. About 13,000 families owned all the land in the whole country, and he required them to turn the deeds over to the government and then sold it back to the farmers. Do you envision something like that happening in the United States, where we simply must come to terms with the proposition that we have to have land reform?

HEINBERG. If we were smart, that’s what we would do. My concern is that what’s very possible instead, even likely in this case, is that land will be held onto by banks and large corporations, while the growing hordes of jobless people will be hired as agricultural workers and become a new class of serfs.

ACRES U.S.A. “Guest workers,” you might say?

HEINBERG. Yes. Instead of having the Jeffersonian vision of agrarian democracy realized, we will see instead a new feudalism with millions of Americans reduced to serfdom.

ACRES U.S.A. And you see no way around this?

HEINBERG. Oh, there’s certainly a way around it! What you suggested, land reform, is the way to go — there’s no question about that.

ACRES U.S.A. But land reform is political, and political activity is now governed by the corporations, the banks, the insurance companies.

HEINBERG. That’s right. So if all of these problems are bound up together — the problems of agriculture, the problems of energy, the problems of finance and politics — it’s going to take some brilliant and courageous leadership to disentangle all of those and set this country back on a good course.

ACRES U.S.A. So far we have not addressed the quality of the food that we see coming out of factories and industrial agriculture, prefabricated, processed foods — manhandled milk and so on.

HEINBERG. Yes, much of this relates to fossil fuels, too, because of course growing food cheaply and in large quantities is a recipe for producing poor-quality food. Now we’re seeing an epidemic of obesity in the United States, and that’s not because people are overnourished, it’s because they’re overfed with food of poor nutritional quality.

ACRES U.S.A. They’re fed GMOs; they’re fed with genetically modified milk.

HEINBERG. And soft drinks with corn syrup and aspartame and so on. Soil minerals have also been declining in quantity for decades now. I think the USDA has actually kept records of this, showing that the mineral content obtained back in the 1940s was in some cases 40 or 50 percent higher than it is today, so we can eat the same quantity of food and yet we have a hidden hunger.

ACRES U.S.A. So the whole thing wraps back into, is there the vision to install a proper agriculture to feed the people properly?

HEINBERG. Right, and this really should be the most important topic of conversation right now. Agriculture is the farthest thing from the consciousness of most urban Americans’ minds. They go to the grocery store, and they buy their food. They assume it’s always going to be there for them, and that’s about as much thought as they give to the matter.

ACRES U.S.A. Many of them even reject food if it’s organic or at least wholesome, because it’s too high priced. If it looks like food and tastes like food, they seem satisfied that it really is food.

HEINBERG. In most cases, they don’t know any better. Many of them have never tasted anything really nutritious — a carrot straight from the soil, something that they’ve grown themselves, or simply something that has been grown without chemicals and fertilizers.

ACRES U.S.A. In view of the impact you’ve made with some of your talks around the country, can you tell us a little bit about the group you represent or what keeps you afloat out there in the circuit?

HEINBERG. I work with an organization called the Post Carbon Institute, which is searching for local solutions to the kinds of problems we’re likely to face as a result of peak oil and climate change. These kinds of solutions are varied and have to do with things such as energy farms — putting together a network of small research farms where we can look for ways of reenvisioning agriculture on a smaller scale, to grow both food and fuel sustainably. We also work with local governments, city councilors, mayors, etc., in towns around the country to help them begin to devise energy transition strategies away from fossil fuels.

ACRES U.S.A. You’re also quite interested in global warming?

HEINBERG. Yes, very much so, and I’m also working with a project called the Oil Depletion Protocol, which is a plan to systematically and proactively reduce oil consumption on a national and international basis. Actually, this is the subject of my most recent book.

ACRES U.S.A. Would you give us the title?

HEINBERG. Yes, it’s called The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism and Economic Collapse.

ACRES U.S.A. You mentioned in the name of your organization the word “carbon,” presumably you’re talking about carbon dioxide?

HEINBERG. Yes.

ACRES U.S.A. And carbon dioxide, of course, is a global warming gas that’s running amok. You know we have taken agriculture to high nitrogen use, not only in the United States, but worldwide, and this nitrogen is mostly wasted because it goes off into the air — especially anhydrous, less so with natural nitrogens — where it locks into the oxygen and becomes one form or another of nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide, in turn, is 183 to 212 times more polluting in terms of global warming than carbon dioxide. Yet we find that Al Gore doesn’t even mention it in his film, An Inconvenient Truth.

HEINBERG. That’s right — thank you for pointing that out! That’s yet another reason why we have to reform our entire food system, and very quickly.

   Richard Heinberg can be contacted at 1604 Jennings Avenue, Santa Rosa, California 95401, website www.richardheinberg.com.
   For more information on the Post Carbon Institute, visit www.postcarbon.org. For information on the Oil Depletion Protocol, visit www.oildepletionprotocol.org.