Needed: new ways to farm

Coming after the International Energy Agency’s new World Energy Outlook published last week which expects the global demand for oil to rise from 85m barrels a day in 2008 to 105m in 2030, a paper published by the Uppsala University in Sweden in the journal Energy Policy, anticipates that maximum global production of all kinds of oil in 2030 will be 76m barrels per day.

As the UK Energy Research Centre noted, the date of peak oil will be determined not by the total size of the global resource but by the rate at which it can be exploited. New discoveries would have to be implausibly large to make a significant difference. A field the size of all the oil reserves ever struck in the USA can delay the date of peaking by only four years. Clearly, if we fail to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is doomed.

A report commissioned by the US Department of Energy shows, an emergency programme to replace current energy supplies or equipment to anticipate peak oil would need about 20 years to take effect. Columnist George Monbiot is among those who sees no hope for world economy, “but at least we could save farming”.

According to farm scientists at Cornell University, cultivating one hectare of maize in the United States requires 40 litres of petrol and 75 litres of diesel. The amazing productivity of modern farm labour has been purchased at the cost of a dependency on oil, says Monbiot. “Unless farmers can change the way it’s grown, a permanent oil shock would price food out of the mouths of many of the world’s people.”

What are the solutions? He cites two possible options: either the mass replacement of farm machinery or the development of new farming systems, which don’t need much labour or energy.

Labour is of course not as much an issue as energy in the developing world.

How fast all this can be done depends on whether we and our policy makers believe the crash will happen, and soon.

Share your ideas on how to wean farming from energy and water.