De-Industrializing Agriculture and the Fate of Cities

There is perhaps no arena of modern life that is as precarious as its system of food production. In 1900, there was there was one farm for every 13 people in the United States; by 2005 there was one for every 143. In the span of that same hundred years, the nation went from a primarily rural country where half of the labor force were farmers to one in which only 2 percent worked in agriculture.

Worldwide, almost every nation has seen massive urbanization in the 20th century—urbanization made possible in large part by the widespread mechanization of food production. One doesn’t have to believe in the total collapse of industrial civilization to accept that in a world of declining and uncertain oil and natural gas resources, the production of food will be threatened. It seems irrefutable, therefore, that one sure consequence of energy depletion will be a rapid return to agriculture by large numbers of the population.

This point was eloquently made by small-scale upstate New York farmer Sharon Astyk last summer in an address to the Community Solutions Conference in Yellow Springs, Ohio, titled “A Hundred Million New Farmers”. In the address, Astyk called for a return of the Jeffersonian ideal of “a nation of farmers” as a way of mitigating the threats of peak oil and global climate change.

Richard Heinberg took up the issue in an October speech to the E. F. Schumacher Society. It wasn’t that long ago, Heinberg pointed out, that famine was an expected part of life; there were good years, and lean ones, and sometimes much worse. Such times may seem like a distant memory to citizens of industrialized societies, but in light of the imminent decline of oil and natural gas, it is a possibility that must be entertained again. As Heinberg puts it,

“Modern industrial agriculture has been described as a method of using soil to turn petroleum and gas into food. We use natural gas to make fertilizer, and oil to fuel farm machinery and power irrigation pumps, as a feedstock for pesticides and herbicides, in the maintenance of animal operations, in crop storage and drying, and for transportation of farm inputs and outputs. Agriculture accounts for about 17 percent of the U.S. annual energy budget; this makes it the single largest consumer of petroleum products as compared to other industries. By comparison, the U.S. military, in all of its operations, uses only about half that amount. About 350 gallons (1,500 liters) of oil equivalents are required to feed each American each year, and every calorie of food produced requires, on average, ten calories of fossil-fuel inputs. This is a food system profoundly vulnerable, at every level, to fuel shortages and skyrocketing prices. And both are inevitable.”

Clearly, finding ways to rapidly reduce the energy intensity of our food production will be of critical importance in the coming years. Genetic engineering of crops is likely to be the answer put forward by agribusiness. But while genetic engineering might (in theory) provide for crops that require less water and are more pesticide resistant, it does nothing to reduce all of the other energy inputs in the system, and it carries additional risks of unintended consequences that are unacceptable for an already vulnerable food system.

Astyk and Heinberg put forth a different answer: the “de-industrialization” of agriculture and a return to small-scale, organic farming and gardening, exemplified by the Permaculture and Biointensive movements—methods which, while more labor intensive, have also demonstrated the possibility of achieving much higher yields on a per acre basis than conventional agriculture.

A key component of both Heinberg and Astyk’s visions is a re-imagining of what it means to be a farmer. “We have come to think of a farmer as someone with 500 acres and a big tractor and other expensive machinery,” writes Heinberg,

“We should perhaps start thinking of a farmer as someone with 3 to 50 acres, who uses mostly hand labor and twice a year borrows a small tractor that she or he fuels with ethanol or biodiesel produced on-site . . . The stereotypical American farmer is a middle-aged, Euro-American male, but the millions of new farmers in our future will have to include a broad mix of people, reflecting America’s increasing diversity. Already the fastest growth in farm operators in America is among female full-time farmers, as well as Hispanic, Asian, and Native American farm operators.”

According to Heinberg, a successful transition would include a revitalization of small-town rural life. It is, in its way, an enticing vision; and if the post-peak energy situation unfolds as badly as it could, an utterly vital one.

But it is only the beginning of the conversation. As Jane Jacobs repeatedly pointed out, successful rural areas were historically those which lay in the regions of successful, vital cities. In her books The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations, she actually inverts the almost universally accepted wisdom that cities are traditionally built on a rural economic base. On the contrary, she writes, “rural economies, including agricultural work, are directly built upon city economies and city work.”

In fact, almost all of what we take for granted about what constitutes rural life, according to Jacobs, began in cities—even the development of agriculture itself, which, she hypothesized, began from experiments in horticulture arising in trading-post cities which arose in hunter-gatherer times. Whether or not her thesis is entirely accurate, Jacobs gives enough historical examples of rural areas which decline in tandem with their regional cities to at least provide a cautionary footnote to proposals to re-ruralize our economies.

On the one hand, it seems inarguable that the current globalized economic system, driven from gigantic urban and suburban agglomerations around the world, is far from a permanent or natural state of affairs. But if Jacobs is correct, even in primitive times, creative, vital cities were the indispensable ingredient to successful rural regions. The other side of “de-industrializing” agriculture must be finding a way to downscale and reduce the energy intensity of urban life without losing its life-nourishing vitality.

Comments

[Sharon Astyk]

I really like your point about the link to Jacobs and vital urban areas - this will definitely inform my thinking. Thanks for making this important connection.

Sharon

[Lakis]

Hi Sharon,

Thanks so much for your comment. I have found your blog to provide a very thought-provoking perspective on the issues of peak oil and global warming, and I hope to get a copy of your book when it comes out.

Lakis