News | July '07 | The next revolution
This revolution was, of course, fuelled by oil. Some 95% of all our food products now require the use of oil: oil to manufacture fertilisers and pesticides, and oil to fuel machinery and irrigation systems. As a result, energy input of industrialised farming consumes fifty to a hundred times that of traditional agriculture.
Much of our revolutionary food system is also staggeringly inefficient: the modern food system consumes roughly ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food energy produced. Processing is particularly energy-dependent. Next time you reach for a typical 450 gram box of breakfast cereal, you might pause to consider that it could have required 7,000 kilocalories of energy for processing while the cereal itself provides only 1,000 kilocalories of food energy.
OUR COMMENT
This situation clearly can't continue. Easily-extractable oil is declining, and the long-overdue panic button has finally been pressed for carbon emissions and global warming.
A new food revolution is needed, one which is very carbon-friendly. Besides supplying us with food best eaten fresh and unprocessed, untouched by chemicals at any stage, and requiring minimal water and transportation, it should also be able to remove carbon from the environment. If this sounds like a technological food miracle which will need the insertion of a stack of at least five different sets of artificial genes to achieve, it is actually a description of properly implemented organic farming. The latter can easily be geared for fresh supplies to local retailers, uses no chemicals, creates soil which retains water, and typically uses 30% less energy than that needed to produce the same amount of conventional food. Organic farming methods are suitable for highly diversified, small-scale farming, and can fix CO2 in the soil using green manures.
COMMENT Crop productivity is usually expressed as the weight of a single crop produced per acre. A comparison of conventional and diversified organic foods based on nutrient generation per acre for might be more revealing. Conventional crops tend to have higher water content and lower nutrients than organic.
Industry is trying to replace the Green Revolution with the Gene Revolution for miracle yields, while sorting out our carbon problems at the same time with GM biofuels. It isn't going to work.
Check out MARRIAGE OF THE GIANTS – News, July 2007, and BIOFUELS: THE SUMS DON'T ADD UP – News, May 2007.
Start a very quiet revolution of your own. Buy local, fresh food, organic if possible ... and tell your friends.
PS 'Fresh', 'local' food in supermarkets may not always be what it appears, see THE CARROT THAT GLOWED – News, July 2007.
SOURCES
- Farmers Link 62 March 2007
- Living Earth 229 Spring 2007