The one thing depleting faster than oil is the credibility of those measuring it

[CHIMO]

The one thing depleting faster than oil is the credibility of those measuring it

I don't know when global oil supplies will start to decline. I do know that another resource has already peaked and gone into free fall: the credibility of the body that's meant to assess them. Last week two whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency alleged that it has deliberately upgraded its estimate of the world's oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets. Three days later, a paper published by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEA's forecasts must be wrong, because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible. The agency's assessment of the state of global oil supplies is beginning to look as reliable as Alan Greenspan's blandishments about the health of the financial markets.

If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by surprise, if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistle-blowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had last week with a Pembrokeshire farmer.

Wyn Evans, who runs a mixed farm of 170 acres, has been trying to reduce his dependency on fossil fuels since 1977. He has installed an anaerobic digester, a wind turbine, solar panels and a ground-sourced heat pump. He has sought wherever possible to replace diesel with his own electricity. Instead of using his tractor to spread slurry, he pumps it from the digester on to nearby fields. He's replaced his tractor-driven irrigation system with an electric one, and set up a new system for drying hay indoors, which means he has to turn it in the field only once. Whatever else he does is likely to produce smaller savings. But these innovations have reduced his use of diesel by only around 25%.

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. 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. Any responsible government would be asking urgent questions about how long we have got.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/16/oil-running-out-madman-sandwich-board

[notesdev]

1. won't matter much

with what Ben is doing to the dollar, you won't be able to afford oil much longer anyway.

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

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[Merchant Marine]

3. De-mechanization of farming, or "going amish"

Will lead to about 1/3 yields per acre and require humongous labor. Then there's the whole distribution problem, though I suppose in a pinch we could go back to coal fired steam locomotives. Not that that would do our environment much good.

[Nihil]

5. But on the plus side ...

... there will be "humongous labor" available (at least at first, before people
start to *really* starve) as most other "higher-level" jobs will have quickly
evaporated like a light frost in the Winter sun ...

[happyslug]

7. Actually may see increase per acre,

One of the side affects of modern Agriculture is that we no longer mix crops. In olden days, in days of manual harvesting, it was common in the US to follow the Native American custom of growing the "three Sisters" in the same field. Corn, Beans and Pumpkins can be raised in the same field and you get three crops out of every acre increase of just one crop. You can NOT do this with Mechanized equipment, you have to grow only one crop for the mechanism can only handle one crop at a time

This trend to only one crop to a field to maximize production of that crop started during the Civil War Period with the invention of the first harvester. The tendency to one crop can be traced even earlier to period of the War of 1812 when New England switched to Wheat from Corn for Wheat could be exported in the 1800-1814 period to Spain to feed the duke of Wellington's Army then in Spain). The British wanted wheat and only wheat, so it was planted even if other crops had to be cut out (Wheat could be harvested by hands by thrushes, a manual way to mass harvest wheat IF THE ONLY THING IN THE FIELD WAS WHEAT). Thus since at least 1800 there have been a push to produce only one crop per field, this was accelerated with the invention of the harvester, unlike the earlier and more productive triple crops most Americans grew.

There is an old saying, Figures don't lie, but Liars figure. Harvest per acre per crop have gone up since the Civil War, but even as late as the 1950s (Admiral Rickover of the Nuclear Navy pointed this out in a speech at that time) if you MANUALLY Farmed, since you could triple plant crops your harvest per acre FOR ALL CROPS often exceeded mechanical production per acre for mechanical harvest HAD to be set up for a single crop per acre.

Yes, the American three sisters, First Pole Beans (Most beans you buy today are from "bush beans", the same bean but the plant is selected for being able to grow as a bush as opposed to a vine, and as a bush can be harvested using a custom made harvesters, Pole beans actually can produce 3-4 (some people say 10 times) times as many beans, but each bean has to be harvested by hand, thus increase labor costs, when the triple sisters were planted it was with Pole Beans NOT bush Beans, the Pole Beans vined up the Corn stalks AND provided nitrogen to the grow for the other two crops).

The Second of the three Sisters was corn, the pole bean would grow up the Corn stalk and provide nitrogen to the soil (Which Corn takes out of it). The third was pumpkins (Or squash) a plant that could grow in the open spaces left by the corn and bean plants for Pumpkins vine follow the ground. The three sisters thus could produce more per acre then a mechanical system could produce per acre simply because he Mechanical system could only handle one crop per acre NOT the triple crop per acre you could do by hand (and given Bean's ability to fix nitrogen, providing the Nitrated needed by corn and provided in Mechanized system by Nitrate produced from Natural gas).

Yes, manual farming requires more labor but can be as productive per acre if you remember in a manual system you can have more then one crop per acre. Now since the 1950s (When Rickover made his observation) productively has increased even higher for mechanized systems. Manual systems have not kept up, but that is more the result of US Government research geared Mechanized system more then anything else. Much of the increase productivity
while not geared to manual farming, can be used in manual farming (i.e. crops that have higher yields, better fertilizers etc) but if you take out oil these improvements still exists and manual farming could again compete with mechanized farming. Food prices will have to go up, but we still be able to buy food (remember the 1950s was NOT a period of extensive food storages and manual farming was still viable even at that late date).

My point is simple, you will see a drop in productively per acre per crop, but much of this will be off set by the increase in productivity per acre of more then one crop.

[Merchant Marine]

8. Even the Amish use horse-drawn mechanical harvesters

on single crop fields because nobody wants to go to that sort of labor per acre.

[happyslug]

10. But in the late Soviet Union (and in Russia to this day) intensive small plots produce more.

One of the problems with the Soviet Collective farms (and such farms still exist, the end of he Soviet Union did NOT lead to a break up of such farms) was that the workers on the farms produced more on their individual plots of land then the collective did on the much larger collective fields. Estimates in the 1990s put such production on such small plots as high as 50% of the food produced in the former Soviet Union. This sounds high given the small plots involved, but given the tendency to multi-plant on such small plots doable (Through I believe the 50% was to high, but given the problems with the collective 50% was doable, but probably to high and may just be the value of the items produced as opposed to actual production i.e. Fruits produce more money per acre then wheat, watermelons may bring more money per acre then wheat, etc).

As to the Amish, yes they use harvesters, such harvesters have been around since the Civil War (And manual harvesters since the middle ages if not earlier). The issue is production per acre and I was just pointing out the production per acre can mean two different measurements, production per acre for ALL CROPS and production per acre per crop. The former is best shown in the case of the Native American Three Sisters, the later is production of Wheat. If wheat is the preferred crop, mixing other crops makes it almost impossible to harvest with a harvester (Even the middle ages manual harvesting methods such as with a Scythe). Wheat has always tended to be harvested as a stand alone crop. Corn is also generally harvested as a stand alone crop, but unlike wheat can be harvested by hand with relative efficiency (The corn Cob holds the corn so easy to pull the cob by hand and leave the rest of the plant standing, unlike wheat). Thus in most areas where manual farming survives, Corn of one of the main crops as opposed to wheat. Corn can be gown and harvested in fields where other crops are grown, that is NOT true of Wheat, Rye or any of its other close cousins.

Even today, where farm plots are small, the three sisters come back into play along with other plants that can be grown together. In larger fields, one crop tend to be the norm. Thus the small plots of land given to the workers on the Soviet Collective Farms could outproduced the Collective Farms themselves. These types of farming are NOT generally used together, but are also rarely exclusive of each other, i.e. small "gardens" are often grown around households using multi-crop methods, while the open fields tend to be used for one crop alone. This is true of the Amish and most small farmers I know of, both methods are used, one for the home garden (some of the produce may be sold) and the other for the larger fields (some of which produce is used by the household).

[wuvuj]

4. Don't panic...but ask for whom the bell tolls?

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23982.htm


Take the 2008 edition of World Energy Outlook, the annual report on which the entire energy industry and governments depend. It included the table also published by the Guardian today, and the version I saw had shorter intervals on the horizontal axis. What it made blindingly clear was that peak oil was somewhere in 2008/9 and that production from currently producing fields was about to drop off a cliff. Fields yet to be developed and yet to be found enabled a plateau of production and it was only "non-conventional oil" which enabled a small rise. Think tar sands of Canada, think some of the most climate polluting oil extraction methods available. Think catastrophe.

What made this little graph so devastating was that it estimated energy resources by 2030 that were woefully inadequate for the energy-hungry economies of India and China. Business as usual in oil production threatens massive conflict over sharing it.

Now, this all seemed pretty gigantic news to me but guess where the World Energy Outlook chose to put this graph? Was it in the front, was it prominently discussed in the foreword? Did it cause headlines around the world. No, no, no. It was buried deep into the report and no reference was made to it in the press conference a year ago.

[amandabeech]

6. Two points: 1. The U.S. probably not be able to comandeer 25% of the availabale

petroleum with only 5% of the people. We're now using approx. 21,000,000 billion barrels a day. Say the world output is 85,000,000 a day. Five percent of that is 4,250,000. That's a huge reduction.

While I expect that we will retain sufficient power to import more than our per capita share, I expect that we will have to plan for a very significant reduction as a result of not only decreasing world production but decreasing ability to grab an enormous percentage of it.

2. I'm not sure about Monbiot's number on the amount of petrol and diesel used to produce corn/maize. Current no-till methods require only 2 or 3 passed of the field rather than the 5 or 6 (from memory) standard tillage. No till is more commonly used in larger operations than his example. Admittedly, no till uses considerable weed killer, which is often made from petroleum or natural gas, but I recall that on balance, the use of petroleum products is considerably less.

[truedelphi]

9. Many farms in Brazil are up and running without any loss of mechanization

While operating on ethanol from the waste left behind the sugar crop. So with farmers able to rely on as many tractors and other equipment running on ethanol, there is no loss in productivity in terms of acre and crop yields.

But that is Brazil. You would not expect a third world nation like ours to follow such an agenda. Here it is imperative that we spend our money on the military and the endless wars, rather than gearing up for a large scale transformation of our fuel sources.