Guest Appearance - Efficient Farming By John Gossop
John Gossop is an East Yorkshire farmer with over 45 years experience, author of the blog Peakfood and avid researcher of threats to food production. I am pleased to say that he has written a thought provoking article for farmingfriends entitled Efficient Farming.
Modern farms, with their giant tractors and gleaming machinery give the impression of being highly efficient. And so they are in terms of output per man. Each man now produces many hundreds of tons of food, much more than at any time in the past.
However, we must remember what it is that farmers do. Our job is simply to convert the sun’s energy into food energy, something we are now doing very inefficiently and unsustainably.
Up until WWII, most of the energy used in farming was collected by plants that used solar energy through photosynthesis to provide food for the millions of horses and men doing the work. Since then we have increasingly used the solar energy from millions of years ago, stored as fossil fuels to increase our labour efficiency but decrease our energy efficiency.
Amazingly, on average it now needs about 10 calories of finite fossil energy to deliver 1 calorie of food energy. It should be obvious that such a system can only work while supplies of fossil energy in the form of oil and gas are reliable and while fossil calories are cheap compared to food calories.
If we don’t plan now for the inevitable day when oil and gas are neither cheap nor plentiful, we will face a disaster.
Efficient Farming By John Gossop, author of Famine in the West(£6.49) and Peak Food.
If you have a farming story, memory or farm visit that you would like to share or a farming issue that you would like to raise, then please send me your story or article and I will happily include it on a guest appearance post.
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Hi John
Very thought provoking article, but is any one listening and also what is the solution and why are farmers still encouraged to be subsidies ed by having Set a Side land
Hope to read your book after looking at Sara’s
Guest Appearance
John
Comment by Farmer gies — February 18, 2008 @ 8:38 pm
This whole topic is of course fascinating. When I allow myself to think about it (which I don’t often, because it upsets me), it blows my mind that we are all so staggeringly complacent about the vast quantities of fossil-fuel energy we use to keep it all going.
Even if you ignore the pernicious side effects of anthropogenic greenhouse global warming, and particulate pollution, the danger of our dependence on coal, oil and gas is terrifying; they’re finite resources. They will run out (gas and oil in the foreseeable future).
I see no serious plan for their replacement. So just what the hell are we all going to do when they’re gone?
It sounds so fatuous. But you know, the energy issue is going to be the number 1 problem that totally dominates the daily thoughts and worries of human beings in the latter half of this century. Possibly sooner.
Comment by Soilman — February 20, 2008 @ 5:45 am
Thanks Sarah for allowing me the guest post and thanks Farmer gies and Soilman for the comments.
It’s true, not many are listening so far, but recent food price increases seem to have woken some people up to the fact that we do not have the resources of land, water, oil, gas and phosphate to continue to indefinitly increase food production.
Soilman,I agree that the energy issue will become dominant because we are now totally dependent on finite fossil energy to produce our food, but the burning of those fuels are changing our weather patterns, making devastating droughts and floods more common.
If the public do become aware of the problem and demand action, my personal opinion is that a massive carbon tax to replace all other taxes is the only thing that would drive innovation and fuel saving fast enough to slow down oil and gas depletion and also keep global warming down to levels that we can cope with. I wish I could say I was optimistic.
Comment by John Gossop — February 20, 2008 @ 6:49 pm