Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on August 15, 2022 | 92 Comments
I’d been planning to move on from my present focus on ruralism and urbanism, but since George Monbiot briefly broke cover to launch some fusillades at me on Twitter last week I’m going to ruminate a bit more on the issue in the light of his intervention. I mostly want to focus on the bigger issues that our little war of words raises, rather than the war itself. But a brief personal backstory seems relevant1.
I’ve long argued that the likeliest long-term future for humanity in the face of climate, energy, water, soil and political-economic realities will involve a turn to low-energy, small-scale agrarianism geared to local material needs. This future could be quite congenial or incredibly grim, depending on how it manifests. In my opinion, the sooner humanity takes active steps to manifest it positively rather than ignoring it so it happens by default the more congenial it’s likely to be. I’ve been writing about this in books, articles and – for more than 10 years now – on this blog, which is called Small Farm Future. I haven’t exactly been hiding the nature of my arguments.
When I wrote a critique of the Ecomodernist Manifesto in 2015, George enthusiastically embraced it and wrote an article in The Guardian taking on the ecomodernists at the Breakthrough Institute. Among other things, his article made the case for small-scale local agrarianism and invoked the inverse farm size-productivity relationship as a land-sparing argument for it, which in my opinion was a worthwhile avenue to explore. As I mentioned in a recent post, he also endorsed Simon Fairlie’s case for low-energy agrarian localism.
In the years since, he’s drifted ever closer to an anti-agrarian, anti-rural, pro-urban, high-energy, techno-fix ecomodernism, and his recent book about the food system, Regenesis, is a logical culmination of that. Last week he called the case for a small farm future associated with the likes of me and Fairlie “the most self-indulgent proposal I’ve ever seen”. I’m not too sure why he thinks it’s self-indulgent, but there we are. Presumably, he must feel his own erstwhile embrace of local agrarianism was a self-indulgent mistake and he’s now called himself to order with his case for high-energy urban-industrial society.
There’s nothing wrong, of course, with people changing their minds. But Monbiot hasn’t to my knowledge fully explained why he now repudiates low-energy agrarian localism. His occasional comments about it in Regenesis amount to little more than caricature, and the ‘self-indulgent’ remark is scarcely clarifying. Since he won’t debate further with me, I can only conjecture what’s going on. I surely must have touched a nerve to get such an aggressive response, and I wonder what’s behind that. In his Twitter comments, Monbiot wrote of me,
when we face real, existential crises that demand urgent attention, you want instead to engineer the biggest human relocation in history …. I’ve tried to address two great and real predicaments as empirically as possible. You propose pointlessly to turn the planet’s productive surface into a giant suburb, while making no attempt to count the environmental costs. Meaning: even you don’t take your vision seriously
Well, it’s true that I refuse to get into environmental cost accounting within his own frame of reference, because if you ask silly questions of the form “Globally, is farming good or bad for nature?” you’re going to get silly answers, however ‘empirical’ they are. Meaning, in other words, that I can’t really take his vision seriously. As to mine – well, I don’t hold out an awful lot of hope that most people in the future will experience a congenial small farm future. But I do think such a future is more likely in the long term, more worth aiming for, and more conducive to the wellbeing of humans and wildlife than the implausible techno-fix he favours. I aim to do some environmental cost accounting on that latter point, on my own terms, in due course.
I’ll say a little more about a small farm future later in this post, and explain why my proposal is not, in fact, “pointlessly to turn the planet’s productive surface into a giant suburb”. It’ll require a certain amount of self-restraint on my part to explain patiently, in the face of such low blows from a celebrated writer, why a small farm future is so very obviously different from a giant suburb future. But I’ll try.
Meanwhile, I’m still puzzling over Monbiot’s silent conversion to ecomodernism. As I’ve said elsewhere, the most generous spin I can put on it is that perhaps he thinks present predicaments are too big and too urgent for us to be messing around with proposals for ruralization, low energy agrarian localism and other such orientations to long-term cultural change.
OK, I get that. Peter Harper has said much the same to me, using the metaphor of a patient in cardiac arrest who at that moment needs their doctor to get to work with the defibrillator rather than pausing to lecture about long-term eating or smoking habits. It’s not a bad metaphor – although there’s a counter-argument I learned when I did a master’s degree in health policy long ago. Many of my fellow students were doctors from Global South countries who were utterly disillusioned by their work in patching people up day after day while the wider forces that made them ill in the first place only seemed to lengthen the queue for treatment. They were doing the degree because they wanted to get out of firefighting mode and gain a wider view of the forces underlying the sickness they were treating in the hope they could make more effective systemic interventions.
Our modern culture is good at heroic, high-tech mitigation of specific and immediate acute problems. It’s not very good at long-term, low-tech cultural adaptation that mitigates against these specific and immediate acute problems from arising. Rescue ecomodernism may be all well and good, but as well as rescuing people it needs to stop the flow of people needing rescue. In my view, anyone who plays the rescue ecomodernism card needs to provide a damn good account of how to step off the rescue treadmill and start building long-term, low-tech adaptation.
Monbiot doesn’t do that in his book, and nor do any of the other ecomodernists I’ve read. Instead, they basically deny that long-term, low-tech adaptation is necessary by embracing a sense of endless upward progress in humanity’s ability to deal with acute problems. In doing so, they draw on the mother myth of modernism, the notion that there is some inexorable force driving humanity to improvement, as a magician draws a rabbit from a hat. This myth has various specific manifestations: technological salvation, market discipline, nationalist progress, government dirigisme, class struggle. Monbiot’s Regenesis invokes most of them, explicitly or otherwise.
I acknowledge that all these forces do move societies. But I reject the notion that they move them forward or upward. In my view, historical metaphors of spatial progress in the passage of history are invariably problematic. One respondent to my Twitter engagement with Monbiot wrote “if you think you can unwind the industrial revolution and subsequent urbanisation then you are truly insane. We cannot and will not ever go back to being a rural, agrarian society living off the local land”. But who said anything about ‘unwinding’ or ‘going back’? And we never stopped being an agrarian society living off ‘local land’. It’s just that few of us now know where that local land is. We ought to.
Given the present world historical moment of profound crisis that the modernist myth of progress has generated and cannot tackle, it surprises me how powerfully it still animates almost all mainstream responses to the crisis. Well, we humans do like to retreat to our old familiar stories. In a fine recent essay, sociologist William Davies complains that “sociology was from the outset over-invested in a lofty vision of modernity, which can in retrospect appear deeply parochial”. Part of this lofty vision is the “claim that modern societies are constantly on the threshold of some great change that will liberate them from the past”, a claim that “turns out itself to be a historical relic, forged in a particular time and place, that continues to constrain our sense of chronology”. Instead of a lofty vision of modernity, Davies offers the grubbier mechanics of imperialism and imperial rivalry as a historical constant predating, animating and most likely outlasting modernity2.
I don’t think the failing applies only to sociology. You can fit the entire corpus of ecomodernism, including Monbiot’s Regenesis, into that parochial modernist sense of liberation from the past. Part of it is a disdain for agrarianism and for farmers and farming, especially low-input, locally oriented ones, who are implicitly identified with a deprecated past. It’s a theme that Monbiot shares with other modernist critics of mine like Kai Heron and Alex Heffron.
This is relevant to Monbiot’s commitment to the notion that modern urbanism is a ‘mathematical reality’ and his ‘biggest relocation in human history’ and ‘giant suburb’ remarks. It’s as if human history has passed through a ratchet or a non-return valve that makes ruralization impossible, whatever food, energy, water or socio-political circumstances might otherwise recommend it. But no such mechanism exists, except in the parochial modernist mind.
When it comes to big relocations, I guess this must be why the ecomodernists say nothing about the enormous relocations involved in the urbanisations of recent times, driven by cheap energy, labour coercion, capitalist growthism, and lofty modernist hubris. This now leaves humanity with one almighty problem of unsustainable biogeography, which I’d argue is very much a ‘real, existential crisis’, and not just maths.
As to Monbiot’s ‘giant suburb’ remark, a suburb is basically a place where rich people go to enjoy their wealth in energetically and spatially profligate and inefficient ways. It’s therefore the antithesis of a smallholder society where people make local livelihoods in energetically and spatially efficient and frugal ways, while attending to the biophysical sustainability of their environs because they’re intimately engaged with it in the course of making their daily living. To me, this is anything but pointless.
In fact, it seems to me more likely that Monbiot’s own vision will devolve to suburban giantism. In Regenesis he paints a picture of urban societies disconnected from an encompassing natural ecology and unconstrained by energetic or economic limits, freeing them to ramify their urban form endlessly. It seems likely to me that such atomized and denatured high-energy industrial societies would bust through planetary boundaries even quicker than our present ones with their tenuous remaining links to ecological constraint.
I concede that the probably inevitable global ruralizations to come do pose enormous challenges. But I can’t help feeling they may actually be less challenging that the realization of Monbiot’s vision. For one thing, given that about 40% of the global population is currently rural, presumably George is going to want to relocate most of those people to the cities to make more room as he sees it for nature – just when city infrastructures are straining with climate change and energy, water and materials scarcities. A lot of that 40% are well-established, and in some cases well-armed, country dwellers who won’t wish to play along. So emptying the countryside won’t be easy.
Deurbanization, on the other hand, runs more with the grain of human desires as city infrastructures flounder. And with the grain of creating a human ecology that’s renewable in the long term because it embeds livelihood-making in the cycles of the natural world, skimming its flows rather than mining its stocks, as would be necessary in a high-energy urban world. In many cases it may not even involve huge relocations, just a reorientation of small towns and cities to more populated hinterlands. What’s certain is that in the future people will move whenever they can towards prosperity, as they have in the past. And it seems probable that in the long-term prosperity will generally be found where people can grow food and fibre locally. As Jason Bradford puts it, ‘the future is rural’3.
Anyway, that’s the ground where I stand: convinced of the need for ruralization and an orderly turn to agrarian localism so that it doesn’t happen by default in a disorderly way; unconvinced by varieties of modernist magic that believe in inevitable or inexorable forms of progress, particularly towards high-energy urban futures; puzzled as to how to deal with what Monbiot rightly calls ‘real, existential crises that demand urgent attention’, but doubtful that the magic modernism he invokes can do so, and determined to face the reality of those crises without such comfort blankets.
I probably haven’t done as great a job here of skirting my war of words with George as I’d have liked. Oh well, I tried – you should have seen the first draft 🙂 I need to give a shout out here to Rupert Read for seeking common ground between us. Maybe that’s still possible. I don’t think I can align with George’s political sociology, but I could potentially align with his industrial food approach as an exercise in rescue ecomodernism. If rural folk weren’t pressed into being subordinate servitors to the city, primarily as food producers, there might be more room for them to serve humanity better by starting to develop renewable local agrarianisms. As discussed in my book A Small Farm Future, in truth I think this is more likely to happen as a result of declining urban-industrial power – of declining imperial power, as per William Davies – when people of necessity start building autonomies in the margins of declining empire. This also just might spare some land for the non-human organisms that Monbiot rightly wants to protect. I suspect post-imperialism will prove more truly ecological than eco-modernism. But I don’t think it’ll be easy.
The practical feasibility of Monbiot’s rescue ecomodernism depends on energy futures and the energetics of industrial food production. Whether it successfully protects wild organisms depends on various sociological and ecological factors. To be honest, I’m sceptical on both fronts but I haven’t yet looked in detail at these more technical aspects of his analysis, largely because I’ve wanted to focus on what I think is the probably more important issue of its questionable sociology. But I hope to look at these other two aspects in due course.
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I would like to see the energy balance of Mr Monbiot’s city of the future. When can we expect to see the results of the solutions he proposes ?
where I stand: convinced of the need for ruralization and an orderly turn to agrarian localism so that it doesn’t happen by default in a disorderly way
Monbiot seems to think that the difficulty in de-urbanizing modernity is so great that the default must be to stick with urbanism and somehow find a solution that lets everyone live in cities forever. I can see his reasons for grasping at his Regenesis straws, he wants to keep everyone alive after all, but the task of supercharging industrial civilization to get it past the problems brought on by ordinary industrial civilization is just too much to be accomplished (absent space aliens descending with some kind of dilithium crystal energy supply).
But similar energy and resource constraints plague an “orderly return to agrarian localism”. The effort required to move millions of modern city folk to the country as low-tech farmers is huge (not equally huge to ecomodernist ‘solutions’, but still huge). It also has a political drag against even trying to make the effort since most people in rich countries live in cities already. The easy thing to do is just leave them there and try to figure something out.
The only really significant advantage that a small farm future has over industrialism or ecomodernism is that it is the only truly sustainable future we actually have and will therefore happen by default (should humanity avoid extinction). I fear that mere inevitability will not be enough of a selling point to get rich country powers-that-be to actually attempt any program for creating small farms. Individual families and small groups may see the writing on the wall and turn to small farms as a matter of prudent self protection, but it looks to me like the time for a collective and “orderly turn” in that direction will never come.
I suspect your most receptive audience might be the 40% of the world’s population now living in rural areas. Perhaps they can be convinced to stay on or turn to small farms rather than migrate to cities. Getting existing small farmers all over the world to stay away from the trap of industrial inputs and distant markets would be very good, too. There’s more potential there than in trying to create a program for Londoners to leave the city and become subsistence farmers.
All that said, I am still willing to be convinced by a brilliant plan for a pilot project that could start moving city folk to small farms. Right now, I just can’t imagine what that plan would be, but I will gladly bow down to the person who comes up with one.
A reality TV show?
Or a comedy like Green Acres – 1965 in the U.S.
Given the 50+ years since it aired I’d imagine some of laugh lines will be missed or misunderstood now, and the portrayal of rural living was far from accurate… but there were interesting counterpoints to big city life that far back.
Green Acres – 1965 in the U.S.
They showed it in the UK too – I remember it. Or rather, I remember the signature music. Which turns out to be a very persistent earworm, which I am now haplessly whistling …
Really like the idea of a reality TV show to get the message across.
4 or 5 different groups trying to get a SFF off the ground. Challenges, tips, techniques. Also included a educating the public about the up coming crisis we all face.
Chris. Do you know anyone in TV production. You could be a “voice” brought in to help guide the participants. Different strategies from around the world could be discussed. Different forms of land allocation/management. Would be a fascinating watch.
Anyone got any spare land to offer up as the venue?
I threw it out there as a flip comment, so I’m surprised (and heartened) it got any attention.
It would be essential, as John, Chris and others point out, to put the real in reality TV. If I thought we had the time, perhaps a small farm version of the excellent “7-Up” documentary series could be most enlightening
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_(film_series)
… perhaps with shorter intervals? Two-Up?
My hope is that any nascent small farm futures, rather than just adding to suburban gigantism, instead blossom into a mosaic worthy of being considered a ‘painting for eternity’; at the same time the worry is the city becomes ever more the creeping, subtle and slow snuff movie. Thinking back to the discomfiting scenes, months ago now, of Ukrainians trying to flee Kyiv in their cars at the outbreak of the war, what doesn’t become a slice of reality TV these days? And yet I’d still be up for handing out leaflets in Frome High St for the premiere.
I just skipped through this, which focuses on one of the 7-Up series characters, up to the age of 49. The first few and the last minute is particularly poignant, for any unaware of this documentary series from British TV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBS3_G7NhHg
Simon H.
A lot of these types of programs set people up to fail as it makes good telly, but a serious look at setting up a long term community would be great. Could cover a lot of ground. Not just how to grow veg but also how to allocate land/resources. Group decision making etc.
What has driven relocation in the past? That seems like it might be relevant.
Maybe I’m too much a lumper but I think we can probably divide previous causes of migration into two categories. Let’s call them “carrot” and “stick”.
“Carrot” migration happens when people (or institutions) with some measure of power decide they want to live somewhere better — somewhere that will increase their wealth and status, or their access to further power, or their material comfort. For a merchant this might have been a move to a market town or a city with a port. For today’s billionaires it might mean building a private resort. For someone who grew up in a rural area but moved to a city it might just mean they could get a better job and meet more people, even though staying in a more rural location would still have been okay.
“Stick” migration happens when people don’t believe they can workably stay where they are, and often involves some pretty severe compromises on standards of living. It may be entirely unplanned. Refugees fall into this category.
Of course, many people who move have a mixture of motivations. But in general, I suspect that the larger the barriers to “carrot” migration, the bigger the “stick” has to be before people will move.
Anyone looked at Rural Resettlement Ireland ir The Land Settlement Association to se what they achieved?
But I have seen it suggested that Monbiot has stared into the abyss and seen what might be coming,in a way others have not, which has coloured his judgement.
Yes. I’d say that his current stance is quite clearly a counsel of despair.
London was ‘de-urbanising’ from the early 1960s onwards. It reversed in the 1990s after the USSR collapsed and ‘globalisation’ began in earnest. The best account I’ve seen of 30 years of worldwide mergers and consolidation was in Peter Phillips’ 2018 book ‘Giants: The Global Power Elite’.
Politically, the momentum still seems to be towards ever more centralised systems. It seems that many people who work in large organisations can’t think of working any other way … or possibly, if they express contrary views too vociferously, they might be fired.
Peter Harper has said much the same to me
Really? (Surprised look). The CAT Peter Harper? Was he urging something similar or just playing devil’s advocate?
I don’t often read Monbiot’s opinion pieces in the Guardian, but my recollection is that he favors the effort to rewild UK countryside and believes the only farming possible is factory farming. He calls people who support sustainable farming methods “climate change deniers” (perhaps because he thinks politicians routinely lie to the public).
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/20/minority-rural-britons-farmers-farming-countryside-environment
“…claimed that “livestock, particularly if you do it with the right pastoral system, has a role to play in tackling climate change”. Though such claims are often made, there is no evidence to support them.”
One of the things about his more recent positions is that he is convinced that technofixes, like synthetic meat grown in labs, will save humanity. He thinks synthetic meat they will make farming obsolete. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet
I no longer agree with the positions he takes. Having grown up in a small rural community I hope that small agrarian communities do take root again. I firmly believe that this will be a necessity if humanity is going to feed itself. When Greece was suffering from austerity practices young people moved back to the countryside because it was the only way to find work and food. I’d also like to see more urban agriculture; people ripping up lawns and growing food in suburban areas, or on rooftops and vacant lots in urban environments. Our ability to feed our selves will rely on our ability to grow food wherever we can.
Perhaps such a migration will be easier in the US than the UK because we have less population density and more farmland than the UK.
I have also read that there was a rural migration of the young in Greece during their financial crisis, but there is no sign of it in World Bank data on urban population trends.
Even Venezuela has maintained its urban population levels during its long economic decline. And Cuba’s urban population also drifted up slowly during its “special period” hardship after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Austerity or economic hardship at the levels found in these examples has not been enough to drive a net migration toward rural areas, but maybe an actual urban famine would do it (though I have my doubts).
Your suburban properties are much larger in North America, too, as a rule. I sometimes watch a YouTube permaculturist who describes her garden as “small” at a quarter of an acre. To a Londoner that’s absolutely enormous.
“The practical feasibility of Monbiot’s rescue ecomodernism depends on energy futures and the energetics of industrial food production.”
Looking at what is happening Canadian farmers told to use less of everything same goes for the Dutch , feeding the world with this system is a non starter .
I rarely bother with technoutopian writers , they have far too narrow outlook ,perhaps they should go to the Crewe distribution depot and just see how much is moved daily , it serves southern Manchester 18 acres under one roof served by thousands of trucks a day , foodstuffs from manufacturing delivered then broken up into loads for retail delivery , it’s a bee hive totally reliant on diesel yesterdays tecnoutopia sustainable ? no chance !
Then there is not enough lithium on the planet to replace all the gas powered cars never mind their replacements or electricity to power them , the idea that the carry on as normal but in a electrified future is the height of stupidity .
We are crashing into the limits of what the planet can provide , Small,,,, local is the only way to go .
Technology uses energy it does not make it .
I’m new to this debate so it would help to have a few things cleaned up. The blog post talks about people choosing to move to rural areas to grow food but doesn’t address that rural areas already have landowners so it’s not simply a choice it requires capital.
As food globally becomes scarcer the value of productive land increases making it even more difficult to move to a rural area. To break the classic reciprocal arrangement between agricultural land owners and urban capitalists would require a revolution.
Moving out of an urban to a rural situation must appear to many to be a bridge too far. Having grown up in a rural area and working my entire career in agriculture I am quite comfortable with a rural existence. [the thought of moving into a city to live permanently makes me uncomfortable]
But I have traveled with folks who can’t tell a horse from a cow while traveling along a motorway. To someone in such a situation the notion of pulling up stakes and starting from scratch to raise one’s bread could be quite frightening. Better perhaps to hope for some miracle??
The anecdote Chris shared about his fellow medical students – seeking ways to solve matters before they become acute – speaks well of the foresight we’ll need as time goes on.
But I return to the ‘tool box’ metaphor from the last posting here… George may have turned his sights from agrarian to ecomodernist; and he may now be more invested in his opinions (and wishing to defend his opinions as a form of brand management) but I don’t have the impression he wishes mankind any great harm. Fermentation in and of itself is not some bugaboo tech that will destroy our habitat (or for that matter – save all humanity). It’s another tool. Fermentation was practiced on the American frontier in the earliest days of our Republic. Read – the Whiskey Rebellion. No fossil fuels, no magical thinking. [but the government did get involved – so there is that]
Well, there are the traditional (and natural) types of fermentation (such as lactic-acid fermentation for making yogurt and sauerkraut, ethanol fermentation for making alcoholic beverages and bread, acetic-acid fermentation for making vinegar and kombucha)… and then there’s ‘precision fermentation’ which can involve some major manipulations of genetic sequences to result in specifically engineered animal or plant molecules being produced by microbes.
‘Now that food technologists have genome sequencing and gene editing at their disposal they are exploring a realm of “precision fermentation” in which microbes can be chosen, or engineered, for very specific purposes.’
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2021/10/13/precision-fermentation-how-humans-are-harnessing-microbe-based-biochemistry-to-make-food-more-delicious/
The biggest thing stopping me from moving to a more rural location is that I don’t drive, and it’s incredibly difficult to even look at potential properties using public transport and a bicycle.
The second is that land we might be able to afford is land we wouldn’t be allowed to live on. I know with a canny approach to land use change applications, planning permission, etc etc it can be done, but I am horrible at that kind of bureaucracy.
Your restraint is admirable, especially given the titanic slander of calling a homesteader a suburbanite.
Regarding your comment about the possibility of small migrations (“just a reorientation of small towns and cities to more populated hinterlands”), I think this is a key point to emphasize. Distributist politics should probably give the nation-states (at least in the First World) up for lost, resisting them when necessary (and it will often be necessary!), but focusing on building new polities from the city/countryside ecologies which we seek to unshackle from capitalism.
And, as is my wont, I have a postliberal critique of a off-hand remark you made:
“Given the present world historical moment of profound crisis that the modernist myth of progress has generated and cannot tackle, it surprises me how powerfully it still animates almost all mainstream responses to the crisis.”
This doesn’t suprise me.
Progress, as a politico-religious concept, originated pretty definitely in ancient Israel. Before the Jews, cyclical views of history dominanted the ancient world from China to Mesopotamia to the Americas. The eschatological orientation of all history to the “Day of the Lord” was fulfilled in Jesus preaching the “Kingdom of Heaven.” All concepts of modern Progress (as you noted, all the Western ideologies have one) are politico-religious eschatologies, not merely “secular” short-sighted parochialism.
Therefore, I don’t think that returning to a view of history as “the grubbier mechanics of imperialism and imperial rivalry” is viable or desirable. To rely on a critical theory of history (which is an essentially postmodern strategy) is to tear something evil down (all well and good), but not to build up anything new in its stead. Nature abhors a vacuum, and no postmodern project persists without letting slip its skepticism and sneaking in some positive claims about Reality. The vision of a Small Farm Future needs to be inspired by a fully realist, but nonetheless utterly Hopeful politics. As far as I can tell, this is only possible within the original Judeo-Christian eschatology which has imparted an indelible mark on all of humanity.
And doesn’t that transition just perfectly to the next blog cycle! It’s almost, shall we say, Providential…
Hear, hear!
Thanks, Chris for a well argued essay. I don’t find anything to disagree with you here, and I think you make the case quite well, and while almost being nice.
I especially like the cardiac arrest metaphor.
I think it illuminates some of the strong feelings being expressed.
A few thoughts to expand on the metaphor:
Cardiac arrest is an instant occurrence, it is not a lingering condition. If you get prompt treatment, you might die anyway. But it’s a life or death thing. No wonder the strong feelings.
If ‘rescue ecomodernism’ is viewed as the prompt treatment, then we are assuming the societal equivalent of cardiac arrest that lasts for however long it takes to implement the gloop factories. Decades (if ever).
I understand the impulse to proclaim that we are obliged to save all the frail and infirm that we can, and I don’t disagree, but it seems that those rescue ecomodernists are vastly underestimating the costs involved.
And meanwhile, during the years-long cardiac arrest, what prevents the hardy youth from escaping the city and trying a little cultivation?
I think this is a very important question. Because we cannot ignore raw power. What have cities been used for so far? How has all our past fossil wealth been spent? I don’t see those large organizations that David mentions working their hardest to feed the world.
What I see urban populations doing mostly, is concentrating wealth for the tip of the social pyramid.
And what does that social tip do when they have a large concentration of wealth?
Feed the world?
Build weapons and armies, more like.
My enjoyment of urban life is probably somewhere near the mean, but when I hear somebody saying that everybody needs to live in urban areas, I can’t help wondering who they are supporting with that assertion. Sounds like nasty imperialists to me.
Chris.
I wouldn’t let Monbiot get under your skin too much.
When he says
“If you think you can unwind the industrial revolution and subsequent urbanisation then you are truly insane” he’s kinda missing the point.
Like it’s going to be some kind of choice??????
Without the present levels of energy inputs, there is only one future, anyone thinking otherwise is the insane one.
Maybe George has seen the reality of our collective predicament and can’t bear the thought of being without all the tech and gizmos that we all enjoy. He’s looked at an agrarian future and he doesn’t like what he sees? When I first read SFF it scared the shit out of me!!!!!!!!!!!
https://www.theguardian.com.
” What are the world’s most damaging farm products? You might be amazed by the answer: organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb. I realise this is a shocking claim. Of all the statements in my new book, Regenesis, ”
Looks to me that people are seen as a plague on the planet , the chosen will live in their technoutopia untill as E. M. Forster fortels the machine stops
US Rural Population Trends:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2019/february/rural-population-trends/
In 2016-17, the rural population increased by 0.1 percent, adding 33,000 people. This small overall increase continues an upturn in rural population since 2011-12, which stems from increasing rates of net migration from urban (metro) areas.
The general trend seems to be away from large cities:
Newly released census data for the first seven years of this decade signal a resumption of the population dispersal that was put “on hold” for a good part of the post-Great Recession period. The Census Bureau’s annual county and metropolitan area estimates through 2017 reveal a revival of suburbanization and movement to rural areas along with Snow Belt-to-Sun Belt population shifts.
Thanks for the many interesting comments here. Just working through some of them briefly:
Greg – at some point I’ll try to address the energy & carbon aspects of regenesis vs a small farm future in a bit more detail.
Joe – yes I’m pretty much aligned with your take. In the light of Sean’s comments about re-ruralization, arguably it’s possible to overstress the enormity of the exodus. The key point is that both its capital & revenue energy costs will be less than the alternative. Regarding your ‘brilliant plan’ point, a position I’m starting to inhabit more comfortably despite being criticized for it is that not only do I not have a brilliant plan and not only does nobody else have one, but also the whole notion of a ‘brilliant plan’ is a flawed bit of modernist wishful thinking along the lines I charted above – market dynamics, techo fixes etc draw from the same source. So as I see it, the response is going to have to be piecemeal, round the houses stuff, involving short-term adaptation & long-term cultural change.
Reality TV show – nice idea, provided it’s empathic and doesn’t fall into the ‘hapless city slickers make fools of themselves on the farm until rescued by salty country folk’ narrative. I think it would also need a counterpart: urban people trying to get by with increasingly erratic and costly energy, water, sewerage and transport services, as social conflict and inequalities amplify. Not sure I’d want to be on the production team, but if a likely producer is reading this you know where to contact me…
John B – thanks for the Irish land settlement reference. Looks interesting: https://www.agriland.ie/farming-news/rural-resettlement-scheme-could-revive-communities/ Further thoughts, anyone? And here’s another interesting Irish-themed link that somebody sent me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daWhb6QEO5w&ab_channel=Tastemade
On the point about Monbiot staring into the abyss – well, maybe. But if it results in him reaching for the comfort blanket of a fanciful bit of ecomodernist whizz bangery then I’d argue he hasn’t stared into the abyss enough.
Martin – yes the CAT Peter Harper. He’s a cat of many colours.
Diogenes – indeed, and relating back to Joe’s point, almost all responses to the crisis involve tech that uses yet more energy, including mine. The advantage of my proposals IMO is that the capital expenditure is less, and the revenue expenditure much less.
Stuart – thanks for commenting. I wouldn’t put it as voluntaristically as ‘people moving to rural areas to grow food’, but that indeed is broadly one of the upshots. I talk quite a bit in my book ‘A Small Farm Future’ about land access, landlordism & other related issues, and we discussed it on this blog during the winter. We’ll be coming to it again soon when we move onto discussing Part IV of the book. Whether my proposals would require a revolution depends a bit on what you mean by ‘revolution’ but I agree it would involve radical change in land arrangements. The same, of course, applies to Monbiot’s proposals to move everyone out of the countryside and concentrate them in cities.
Clem – I agree Monbiot doesn’t wish humanity great harm (though he’s not a great enthusiast for humans as ecological protagonists). But I think his proposals may unwittingly cause humanity (and other organisms) great harm, so I feel the need to call it as I see it.
Sean – thanks for that, interesting as ever. I agree with you that modern progress ideas are politico-religious eschatologies. Not entirely sure about your wider religious claims, but I’d be interested to explore that further with you. Regarding grubby imperial realities, I’m not saying (and nor, I think, is Davies) that this is a desirable basis on which to build, so much as it *is* the basis on which we must build – a point that liberal modernism has ducked (I’m sure we’d agree there). How to do so takes us back to the paused debate about the foundations of the political that you, Andrew and I were involved with, and I definitely want to get back to that. As you say, it also takes us forward into questions of religion, science and politics that we’ll come to soon.
Eric – ” What have cities been used for so far? How has all our past fossil wealth been spent?” Good questions. I’d like to hear George’s answers!
John A – just to clarify, that quotation wasn’t from George but another Twitter commenter. Wise advice not to let GM himself get under my skin. I can’t really help ecomodernism getting under my skin, because I think its approach is so destructive. But I’ll take your comment as salutary advice to shut down my computer and go do something on the farm in a moment…
…but not before thanking everyone else who’s commented and whose remarks I haven’t directly engaged with, but certainly learned from. In particular, I’ll try to track the urban-rural population movement issue a bit more closely at some point
I just think that ecomodernism is a non starter. Bit like colonising another planet. It’s not worth the effort to debate.
Much better to discuss what’s possible.
Keep meaning to come over and check out your place sometime. I believe you run some schemes through the Community Inclusion and Activity Team? My son has attended some of their days out.
Ecomodernism is the great panacea for all the world’s problems ( not ) !
People moved to cities because that’s where the jobs were , well productive jobs ain’t there anymore , it’s all service industry , want a spade , made in China want a car, made all over the world , here if you want a sack of cement made in Mexico .Monbiot rewilding is just another way to cut the population yes the hills of Britain could grow trees and the people will not eat mutton , Canada will have the buffalo back and the horn of Africa will starve .
Genocide hidden by green agendas .
Somehow I had entirely missed the fact that you have a master’s degree in health policy! Now I am even more curious about your thoughts on how to best organise medical care in a low-energy, small farm future. I am sure it will be nothing like what we have known previously, and also nothing like the plastic-intensive systems we have now. (Perhaps there are insights from the Global South that are relevant here.)
One of the things that unsettles me about high-tech, highly centralised approaches to our continued survival is that they seem to often assume economies of scale that simply aren’t guaranteed. I’m reminded of the (brief) shortage of industrial carbon dioxide a few years ago leading to a temporary interruption in the supply of carpets, of all things. Fine, I don’t live on crumpets and there was no shortage of flour or yeast so I could make my own, and did (and still sometimes do). But if there’s a problem with an industrial process that supplies, say, 5% or 10% of a region’s protein needs, rather than the literal holes in a delicious factory-produced pretend bread product, that’s a big problem with huge knock-on effects. I see no reason to believe we won’t have such interruptions, and potentially even more of them than we currently see with the effects of climate change on industrial agriculture. And problems don’t need to mean an interruption of supply, either; it could be something more insidious, like, I don’t know, designer genetic bacteria getting out into the wild somehow, or the food product causing health problems twenty years down the line. I’m not against novelty and experimentation, but putting all our eggs in one basket seems unwise. Even twenty baskets isn’t enough.
This is also part of why I’m not a huge fan of nuclear power: it’s alright as it goes, but mistakes do happen and we haven’t, historically, handled them all that well, and that’s with plenty of precautions in place. And it’s why I mostly like wind better than solar voltaic systems — things can still go wrong, of course, but the waste stream is generally much less toxic. (Though it doesn’t have to be toxic at all, if we’re using wooden windmills to grind grain.)
Our current food system is incredibly fragile, and even if the gloop factories could be made to work in terms of energy and material outputs, I don’t think they would really solve that problem.
Sorry to have missed your conversation with Rupert the other week.
There are so many distortions in GM’s book that it amounts to propaganda, and his replies are illogical and fantastical. If he thinks a smallholding is sub-urban, he should get his pale, skinny arse away from his Oxford suburb and spend a week working on one. He’ll see the difference in no time.
“Progress*” has been possible because of our sheer luck in getting access to free energy. Nature has cooked and concentrated 500 million years of sunlight, which we have spunked in an orgy of trinkets, poisons, bombs, and childish distractions. For someone who claims to love the Wild, advocating for more of the same thing that is killing everything is just mad. Also, his bit on complex systems and Jeavon’s Paradox should have pointed to the probable outcome of his “solution”: freeing up energy with new food provision will mean that the freed energy will enable a further population explosion like the Green Revolution, and an increase in pollution, like the Green Revolution.
Use less than what grows.
Waste less that what can be absorbed.
All else is fantasy, and ultimately self-terminating.
*in the modern mind this means “has more shiny bits and uses more energy”.
Your points remind me of a question I heard a while back.
If we humans found a bountiful amount of cheap clean, shiny new energy to replace fossil fuels, would it actually be a good thing??????.
We are trashing the planet due to an abundance of energy.
More energy=more destruction.
Cities are grim, give us the right to work from home and the rebalance to the countryside would be rapid.
Your points remind me of a question I heard a while back.
If we humans found a bountiful amount of cheap clean, shiny new energy to replace fossil fuels, would it actually be a good thing??????.
We are trashing the planet due to an abundance of energy.
More energy=more destruction.
Sorry. Didn’t mean to post this comment twice.
The commentators who have pointed out in various ways that Monbiot does not understand what energy is, where it currently comes from, and what its ultimate sources are, are spot on. Despite his fantasies, and whether he likes it or not, all humans (including all of those in cities) live on energy which has been transformed by soil, water and sunlight into plant food form, and from there to animal food form. Industrial agriculture has deformed and distorted this truth by applying fossil fuels to food production, but they have a finite lifespan. Trying to produce equivalent amounts of food-growing energy through the machinery touted as ‘renewable’ (solar power, wind turbines, etc.) is extremely inefficient compared to putting seeds into good soil and letting them go for it. So it ain’t going to happen.
Similarly, as others have said, Monbiot is equally mistaken/deluded in his concepts of how human societies work, and in his attempts to justify eating gloop and ending farming as ‘progress’.
In terms of how to counter what he says, he has an undeserved reputation as an expert or authoritative commentator on a range of subjects he actually knows little about. So any attempts to get him to see sense are going to resemble the outcome in this verse:
“Never wrestle with a pig
No matter who employs it.
Both of you get covered in mud,
But only the pig enjoys it.”
Best to stick to growing and preparing good food, sharing it around, and teaching others how to do it.
But if someone can’t resist telling Monbiot there is already a movie made about the future he envisages (Soylent Green, 1973, which – gulp! – is set in 2022 in New York, where ” The poor live in squalor, haul water from communal spigots, and eat highly processed wafers: “Soylent Red,” “Soylent Yellow,” and the latest product, far more flavorful and nutritious, “Soylent Green.” ) – feel free!
The people in power apparently don’t envisage a small farm future at all.
US federal government sends armed officials to raid Amish-owned organic farm in Pennsylvania. Summarised in this 2 min. clip …
https://youtu.be/FW8A_4dUhMg
The unwarranted personal characterisation of George Monbiot, from Benn (“pale, skinny arse away from his Oxford suburb”) is jarring – the usual casual internet offensiveness which passes as “robust discussion”.
… but despite myself, I find it does nonetheless raise an interesting personal question … far from being skinny and pale, George has shown real physical courage in his earlier life, and in addition at one point ran several allotments and was fond of eating roadkill. He has in the past shown an admirable alignment of stated opinions and behaviour. (oh and a UK suburb may well be a very different thing from a north american one).
I wonder does he still keep an allotment? And eat roadkill? (His veganism as self-described, seems to be less stringent than some). We’re used to people whose good words are betrayed by bad actions, but might his bad words be betrayed by good actions?
I know – this is irrelevant chitchat and I’m slightly ashamed of myself from posting it – but I’ve always been interested in people who change their views radically and can’t help wondering about it.
Yeah, I need to retract that. I am just upset that something I am interested in is discounted by someone I held in high esteem. Childish of me.
Is he right? I have a feeling that he is being truthful, but is it the truth? Not sure: statistics and presuppositions can tell a story that you want to hear. I got the impression that the book was a constructed arguement leading to his solution. There is a trail of dispair running through it, which is not surprising considering our predicament. Maybe this is why he is telling the story he is now. Before hope finally fades, one last straw is grasped: that of technical utopianism. Sorry, George. It was childish of me. I hope you find some scrap of peace in these times.
> In the years since, he’s drifted ever closer to an anti-agrarian, anti-rural, pro-urban, high-energy, techno-fix ecomodernism, and his recent book about the food system, Regenesis, is a logical culmination of that.
Monbiots (and other’s) anti-agrarian point of view might mean just industrial, intensive agriculture when it’s thinking of agriculture in general. They might think there’s no other agriculture left.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer tells of an experiment where they were looking which way of harvesting sweetgrass (undisturbing or even pulling the roots out) was better and found both were better than not harvesting at all. But in order to harvest anything in a good way that helps nature (or what is the Commons) is by following the Rules for Honorable Harvest. Here are some she put together from indigenous knowledge:
* Know the way of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them
* Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.
* Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
* Never take the first. Never take the last.
* Take only what you need.
* Take only what is given.
* Never take more than half. Leave some for others.
* Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
* Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.
* Share.
* Give thanks for what you have been given.
* Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
* Sustain the ones who sustain you and the Earth will last forever.
I’m not sure even extensive agriculture follows all of these rules. Yet they lead to abundance in nature, whereas modern agriculture definitely does not. And Monbiot wants to even more industrialize, it seems.
Thing is it made think of the way we collect mushrooms: exactly not like that. We treat the mushrooms in our woods as if they belong to us, specifically, and not as Commons as we should. And so we do with the rest of nature.
Yum ( not )
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2022/08/17/take-a-look-inside-a-cricket-farmwhich-is-where-your-food-will-come-from-soon-n1621822
Thanks for the further comments. I’m going to be offline over the weekend, but a few further remarks, briefly.
I worked in the health sector long ago, but I’m not sure if that gives me any privileged insights into health care in a small farm future. Maybe one or two. Anyway, I’ll come to that soon. Questions of scale economies are interesting in that connection. And in the wider one Kathryn raises, with which I agree.
Basically agree with John, and I think we discussed this here some years ago. Energy is critical and some access to extrinsic energy is no doubt a good thing, but multiple crises are telling us something – it’s not just about energy.
Re George, despite his jibes against me I agree with Martin that it’s good to keep things courteous here. Though I’d like to point out that pale, skinny people can also be courageous. His dogged tendencies have often been admirable in his role as an investigative journalist saying unpopular things – but unfortunately there’s perhaps a downside to it in doubling down against other voices. I do think his unwillingness to look at agroecology/agarian localism is an obvious failing, and I wonder if his aggressive response to me says something – like Martin I’m curious about the unremarked trajectory his work has taken.
As to wrestling with pigs, I’m aware of that danger, but I don’t think this fits the bill. Whatever his faults – and I agree with commenters here old and new (thanks new commenters!) that there are many in his new book – he’s highly influential upon progressive environmental folks, which is why I feel the need to engage. The underlying issues are pretty interesting anyway, so I will be writing some more soon about issues of land sparing, cost counting, urbanism/ruralism and futurology regardless of his engagement or (likely) non-engagement with me.
To John’s point, quite right – the people in power don’t envisage a small farm future. So we’ll need to discuss soon when I get to Part IV of my book in this blog cycle the implications of that.
Ciao for now.
I think that cheap, abundant fossil fuels have made possible all the environmental destruction that we humans have unleashed on the world.
Without, our ability for destruction will be greatly reduced.
One of the challenges in contemplating a small farm future is how it will be arrived at. Without some deep thinking, on the face of it I would guess for most ordinary people it does seem a fanciful idea bearing in mind how ingrained ideas of progress and its urban and economic concomitants are. Who, in the market town of Manchester in 1800, would ever have envisaged it would grow to 250,000 just 50 years later?
As far as I can see the lack of political will, the power of vested interests and a likely protracted denial of the concerns this blog highlights will make an ‘orderly’ ruralisation very unlikely. However, was there ever a major socio-economic transition, for example on the scale of the industrial revolution, that was ever orderly and arrived at by an overarching policy? (I am not an historian so happy to be corrected). Different social and economic factors come together and trends begin, perhaps initially unnoticed. There will be conflicts along the way but the trends gather momentum. Problems are picked up and piecemeal policy responses are implemented. There will always be residual resistance.
So, could one scenario be, as things get tough, people will increasingly drift to a more ruralised lifestyle? Those who are more able to first within existing systems, then, as momentum builds, the pressure for system changes will follow. Ruralisation might even be encouraged and then enabled as the penny finally drops. In this way a disorderly transition might happen but not necessarily resulting in societal collapse. Or does this sound too much like the Fabian principle of the inevitability of gradualism. Or will we run out of time by then?
Perhaps with dwindling fuel / price of same medium sized farms will gravitate to human muscle that are trying to find work / food ” will work for food ” is already seen in cities here , maybe it will disperse into the countryside , cities like Manchester can’t be supported without diesel, IF the wind down is not violent the reemergence of the farm laborour may happen .
Thanks for that Philip – I meant to respond earlier. Very nice summation. Possibly too Fabian or too late, but still very nice! Hoping to come back to your scenario in due course.
Chris wrote, “The advantage of my proposals IMO is that the capital expenditure is less, and the revenue expenditure much less.”
Adding to the listed advantages, small farm systems are of course more resilient than manufactured food systems, due to less complexity (less things that could go wrong) and less concentration (less eggs in one basket).
Foods manufactured by complex industrial processes seem much more vulnerable to supply-chain disruptions and energy supply issues.
Considering the energy requirements of manufacturing “single-cell protein” from microbes (using hydrogen made with electrolysis), numbers from a major study suggest that about 58 kWh of energy input is required per kg of protein produced (not including the energy required to make the manufacturing equipment and facility). This scenario assumes that 100% of the electricity input comes from photovoltaic panels, with no generation losses requiring more energy input (as there would be when generating the electricity from natural gas, coal, or oil).
Soybeans grown on farms in the US, on the other hand, on average require less than 1 kWh of energy input per kg of protein content (including fuels and the energy equivalents for fertilizers, minerals, herbicides, etc.), according to another study. And besides the protein, the soybeans also provide oil and other nutrients, at no extra energy cost.
58 kWh vs. 1 kWh of energy input. The difference is of course largely due to the sun automatically providing energy directly to the plants for free.
I’ll have more to say about these studies in a future comment, after I re-check my calculations.
Soybeans grown on farms in the US, on the other hand, on average require less than 1 kWh of energy input per kg of protein content (including fuels and the energy equivalents for fertilizers, minerals, herbicides, etc.), according to another study. And besides the protein, the soybeans also provide oil and other nutrients, at no extra energy cost.
I’m not familiar with the particular study cited here, but in terms of a small farm future with human labor to hand the fuels, and herbicides can be dismissed without affecting yield (so long as the human labor is competent)… fertilizer needs (particularly P and K) for high end yields might still require some inputs. But one can reasonably argue why “high end yields” are necessary (I can argue for either side of that).
If I might – there is a bit of misdirection in the thought that a plant can provide additional benefits for no additional energy cost. A plant will fix a given amount of carbon and must allocate that carbon among a broad range of end uses. Like money in a market (where there is a fixed supply) there are opportunity costs. If you make more protein, then you are prohibited from making more of something else (say oil or sugar). There are different biological costs for making some materials – oil takes more energy to make than sugar for instance.*
To the farmer these energy issues are much less relevant – she can raise a high protein soybean plant for a comparable amount of energy as she might expend to raise a broad bean.
In the end Steve’s comparison of energy inputs for the two foods is still a strong argument for growing food with plants in a field and harvesting solar energy.
* if anyone wonders how higher yields are possible given these matters – there are at least three issues at play. A plant might fix more carbon; a plant might more efficiently use the carbon to hand; and the plant might allocate more carbon for the particular end uses that we seek (at the expense of uses we care less about). All 3 of these possibilities are amenable to modification through breeding.
There may be a lack of clarity but there’s no misdirection in my statement, “besides the protein, the soybeans also provide oil and other nutrients, at no extra energy cost.”
I was referring to the 1 kWh of energy cost which was “paid” to obtain an amount of soybeans containing 1 kg of protein. That amount of soybeans also contains oil and other nutrients that were already “paid for” with the 1 kWh of energy cost, thus there is no extra energy cost (beyond the 1 kWh) for these additional foodstuffs which coexist in those soybeans.
One place where technology has made a difference is fertilizer , the God system hooked to combines and fertilizer spreaders has caused the drop in fertilizer use around here by around 50% , no more dump it in and hope , combines measure the crop yard by yard , that information is used by the spreaders to apply fertilizer only where it’s needed , again yard by yard , only just enough is used to get the maximum crop , most research is using old data a decade or more old , Canada used the same systems , Australia is moving toward it , inputs are getting so expensive none is wasted .
I’m assuming the study about energy input in soybeans grown on farms in the US is largely talking about conventional farming, in which diesel hauls around huge amounts of very heavy equipment in order to obtain a yield…
… so, presumably, it could be even less than that if we used human labour instead.
Yes. “The farm input data from 19 major soybean‐growing states were averaged weighted by harvested acreage to derive energy used for soybean agriculture (table 2).”
Table 2. Soybean agriculture system inputs, weighted averages of 19 major soybean‐growing states, 2006
Looking at all the inputs in Table 2, diesel and gasoline comprise more than half of the total “Life-Cycle Energy Equivalent”, and the next highest is herbicide.
Pradhan, Anup & Shrestha, Dev & McAloon, Andrew & Yee, Winnie & Haas, M.J. & J.A, Duffield. (2011). Energy Life-Cycle Assessment of Soybean Biodiesel Revisited. Transactions of the ASABE (American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers). 54. 1031-1039. 10.13031/2013.37088.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233955304_Energy_Life-Cycle_Assessment_of_Soybean_Biodiesel_Revisited
It’s the scale of today’s prairie farms that is the bugbare , I know farms where you can plough 18 furrows wide and drive in the same direction for two hours before turning round and coming back . The scale of industrial farming is mind boggling !
A research article published last year by the National Academy of Sciences (USA) is the source of the data I used to calculate the energy requirements of manufacturing food from microbes. This article is geared toward showing how “Photovoltaic-driven microbial protein production can use land and sunlight more efficiently than conventional crops” (the article title).
In the article, a comparison is made between two hypothetical one-hectare plots of land (Fig. 4). One of the hectares is covered with photovoltaic panels for supplying energy for the microbial protein production. The other hectare is used for a crop of soybeans. When the hectare of PV panels operates year-round in a location with as much sunshine as the Imperial Valley (Southern California), the resulting energy can cover the production of 15 tons of protein per year. The hectare used for growing soybeans provides 1.1 tons of protein per year. This leads to the conclusion about using land and sunlight more efficiently (which is not too surprising considering that the PV panels are collecting energy every day of the year, while the soybean crop occupies the plot for only part of the year and at varying stages of growth).
I’m not finding where the article actually discloses (or admits) the grand total energy requirements (per kilogram produced) of the microbial protein production process. The energy requirement (per kilogram produced) for the electrolyzed hydrogen input seems to be missing from the report and supplemental materials. I obtained this energy requirement indirectly by using what relevant data was provided (namely the irradiance of 2,000 kWh/m2 and equation [1] in Methods).
So, if the estimates in the article are correct, then for situations where arable land is scarce while photovoltaic energy is plentiful, a microbial process could maximize the amount of protein produced on a given amount of land. However, in situations where there is enough arable land to produce adequate amounts of food, while energy supplies are already stretched, then it seems ill-advised to devote PV production to do something the sun is already doing for free (considering that the farming of soybeans requires less than 1 kWh per kilogram of protein, while the hydrogen-fed microbe process requires 58 kWh/kg as mentioned above in an earlier comment).
The research article also examines another scenario using a different type of microbial process. In this scenario, most (94%) of a hectare is used to grow sugar beets which subsequently provide sugar to feed some protein-producing microbes. The remaining portion (6%) of the hectare plot is covered with PV panels to provide the energy required for this process. The resulting protein is 2.7 tons per year (compared to the previously mentioned 1.1 tons of protein resulting from growing a hectare of soybeans).
The energy requirement (per kg of protein) for this sugar-beet scenario is also not disclosed, but I did some calculations based on the 610 m2 of PV panels powering this process, and found that 20 kWh were required for each kilogram of microbial protein (compared to less than 1 kWh required for farmed soybeans containing a kilogram of protein).
[Note: I am willing to provide details of my calculations if there are any specific questions about them.]
Again, my conclusion here is that if energy supplies are already stretched, and there’s enough arable land, then it seems ill-advised to devote PV production to do something the sun is already doing for free. The energy advantages of growing soybeans (less than 1/20th of the energy input required per kg of protein, compared to the sugar-fed microbial process) seem more compelling than the spatial advantages of the microbial protein production (around 2.5 times the protein produced per year with a one-hectare plot of land). In other words, getting 2.5 times the protein output per hectare doesn’t seem worth 20 times the required energy input per kg of protein.
“Photovoltaic-driven microbial protein production can use land and sunlight more efficiently than conventional crops”
Dorian Leger, Silvio Matassa, Alon Shepon, Ron Milo, and Arren Bar-Even
June 21, 2021
118 (26) e2015025118
doi(dot)org/10.1073/pnas.2015025118
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2015025118
_______________________________
ADDENDUM: Capital Cost Requirements
(continued in a comment below…)
ADDENDUM: Capital Cost Requirements
The research article and supporting material seem to have some significant flaws. I’ll mention a couple. Some of the assumptions have a wide range, such as the annual capacity of the microbial protein production facility (25,000 tons for the low value, and 108,000 tons for the high value).
The listed capital cost for a facility ranges from 60 million to 351 million USD, and the cost of the PV “solar farm” for powering the process isn’t included in the capital cost estimates. So I did some calculations to estimate the required capital cost of a “solar farm” which could power such facilities, starting with the low end of the ranges (a facility costing 60 million USD and producing 25,000 tons of biomass per year:
Since 1 hectare of PV is required for 15 tons protein per year (figure 4), divide the 15 tons of protein by .55 which gives
27 tons of biomass produced per hectare of PV panels (assuming 55% protein content of the biomass, if I recall correctly);
then divide 25,000 tons (the total biomass production of the facility) by 27 tons (produced per hectare of PV panels)
to result in 925 hectares of PV panels required to power the smaller facility.
925 hectares! Some online sources estimate that a “solar farm” costs about 1 million USD per hectare, in which case the PV system for the smaller facility would cost 925 million USD (in addition to the 60 million USD facility cost).
Doing similar calculations for the larger facility size, producing 108,000 tons of biomass per year, results in 4,000 hectares of PV panels required to power the process, costing roughly 4 billion USD just for the required PV system (not including the cost of the land itself), in addition to the 351 million USD cost of the manufacturing facility.
Plus the PV has only a 25 year life span before it all needs replacing. Replacing NOT using fossil fuels in their manufacture and ever more expensive ore extraction to create the PV. All the easy to get at stuff has already been had.
According to that study, the lifespan of the microbial protein production facility equipment is 25 years. Assumptions and projections that are made to financially justify the construction of such a facility, such as the expected cost of inputs, may no longer apply when it’s time for replacement, leading to the facility becoming yet another shuttered factory. Such technology is not much of a “rescue”, and its precarious existence (if it ever gets off the ground) is a poor reason to shut down farms.
Even if the PV-powered microbial protein production is feasible in practice at such a large scale, which remains to be seen, a major impediment is the huge capital cost (where a facility cost in the hundreds of million dollars is dwarfed by the cost of the PV “solar farm” required to power it).
The research article promoting this PV-powered scheme effectively dodges the issue (of the huge capital cost for the PV energy source) by assuming that enough PV energy (or other renewable source of electricity) will be available during the entire 25-year life of the facility, at a cost of only 5-10 cents per kWh.
In my previous comment I mentioned how the expected favorable costs of some inputs may no longer apply when it’s time for replacement after 25 years, but here the expected cost of energy has already been exceeded after only one year beyond the publication of the article.
from the article’s Supplementary Information:
“The main capital investments for equipment and infrastructures included the fermentation and post-processing steps of SCP plants producing between 25,000 and 108,000 ton-dw-biomass [per year]…. considering a range of $0.05 to $0.10 [per] kWh for renewable energy, and applying these to the energy demand of SCP production…”
https://www.pnas.org/doi/suppl/10.1073/pnas.2015025118/suppl_file/pnas.2015025118.sapp.pdf
One wonders at the motivation and methods that produce slipshod and unhelpful papers.
To the credit of the paper I quoted above, they didn’t use the theoretical output of PV panels (as some other studies have done); instead they derived their PV efficiency numbers from real-world performance data for “solar farms” operating around the world.
“To obtain a more realistic view of solar farm efficiency, we used available data from >600 utility-scale sites (Dataset S1A). As explained in Methods, we found that ηpv ranges between 4.1% and 5.6% (30th to 70th percentiles), considerably lower than the solar cell efficiency.”
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2015025118
I think that a lot of the world has gone way beyond grasping at straws. I don’t think the Mr Monbiot is the only one to peer into the abyss and not be able to accept what they saw.
The result of dumping all the carbon from 150 years of coal, oil and gas use into the atmosphere has created a problem that will continue to get worse for the next 40 to 50 years, unless there are ecological tipping points that are already behind us. But even on the bright side, climate change is going to be with us for 500 years or so.
Looking at global energy sources and consumption, all renewable energy sources and nukes provide about 20% of the total produced and consumed. The rest is fossil fuels. Living with 80% less energy, resources and products is unimaginable, especially if it is not going to help in our lifetimes. It is better (easier anyway) to hope for a techofix that won’t have any unintended consequences, will cheaply and painlessly solve the problem, than to live without all the creature comforts of modern urban life.
Everyone knows that climate change is a problem. They know that it is going to get worse. They know how it got to be a problem. They can not imagine making the changes necessary to keep it from becoming a complete disaster.
Just for fun I looked up how much energy a big city (NYC) uses in a year and estimated how many solar panels it would take to provide that energy.
NYC uses the equivalent of 320 billion kWh of energy per year. It would take 60 million panels that would cover 90 million m^2 ( est. 5500 kWh/yr/panel, if they were located in a sunny climate) to produce that much power. At 4000 (close enough for this) m^2 per acre that comes out to 22,500 acres or 35 square miles covered by panels.
Even rougher numbers – it takes about 750 kWh (this number seems low) to produce a solar panel, roughly the energy content of 600 pounds of coal when converted into electricity. And then there is silicon tetrachloride…
Adding to this I have read a paper on wind farms , here in TX the turbines are 6 to the square mile , for optimum performance they should be 1 per square mile , each turbine interfere with the next when they are close together lowering performance by up to 70% therefore needing a enormous amount of land and cable .
And in another point the golden eagle is about to be declared endangered as wind farms chew them up , estimates state two million bats are killed in TX alone per year .
And to add to that, the present banking/financial/economic system requires endless growth to keep the whole show on the road. More of everything including people to consume all that production!!!!!!!!
How much energy does it take to mine the coal or drill for the oil to produce as much energy as one solar panel produces over its lifetime?
And how many square miles of empty rooftop is in a city like NYC?
Not that I think photovoltaic panels on every rooftop would solve things, mind.
Another issue with energy provision, I think, is induced demand. In transport planning, induced demand is the phenomenon whereby if you take a two-lane road and turn it into a four-lane road, traffic flows more freely for a short while, but within about five years it is just as bad as it was before because more people are driving. The only way to make any real dent in traffic is to encourage modal shift to cycling, walking, public transport, or staying home.
Adding capacity for renewables without addressing fossil fuels is like adding two lanes to a sixteen-lane highway. It won’t work, and energy demand will probably rise. What we actually need is for people to travel less, insulate their homes, use non-electric local power where possible (e.g. solar hot water; drying laundry on a washing line, using wind to draw water from a well or grind grain, using a waterwheel to power a sawmill….), and use and transport orders of magnitude less stuff.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Era-of-Cheap-Renewables-Grinds-To-A-Halt.html
The National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) estimates that utility sized (100MW) solar projects cost about $1 per watt installed. By that measure a 320 billion kW system would cost 320 trillion dollars.
For comparison, the US federal budget is about $6T and the US GDP is around $23T.
NREL estimates that residential solar projects cost $2.70 per Watt installed. Other estimates put utility scale wind power at $1.30 per Watt installed.
But the us national debt is 36 trillion if the interest rate rises to 4% the entire tax income of the us government will be needed to pay the interest . The general financiers say interest rates should be 2%above inflation to crush inflation that would put us interest rates around the 10% level , in anyone’s estimation the USA is bankrupt , much like the UK and euro area .
In the last two years the Biden administration has printed 40% of ALL dollar’s in circulation on the planet unleashing inflation in all dollar priced commodities driving inflation everywhere .
Simply put printing dollars has nearly halved the purchasing power of the dollar .
Each year 90% of new currency printed is used to replace worn out bills. The lifespan of a bill is roughly 5 years so 40% over 2 years seems pretty typical.
Some one famously said deficits don’t matter. I’m sure that you are as disappointed as I am that the big tax cuts for the rich have not paid off like promised.
Very true out here where land / climate is not that hospitable land prices have increased from $1500 a acre to $12000 a acre in ten years , there are no building regulation apart from a decent septic system , around the burbs of the big cities half a million dollars for three acres in not unusual , ranches being broken up for enormous amounts of money .
Agree. I am doing a sustainable retrofit course and the greenwashing, energy blindness (as Nate Hagens puts it), and magical thinking has been surprising to me. Example: “which heat source is most low-carbon: oil, gas, electricity or a heat pump?” I got it wrong, because I was thinking of gas, with it having an eroei of 20, compared to 3.5 for a heat pump -in summer.
Nobody seems to have thought of the implications of turning the 70% of gas heating here in the UK over to heat pumps: the grid would have to more than double, and generation would too. That is before everybody’s favourite technofix, the electric car, gets plugged in.
Nobody admits to overshoot, and the consequences of it. Fair enough: it is terrifying.
Off on a tangent from the current conversation, but relevant to a SFF… canning (and small farms are specifically mentioned):
https://dailyyonder.com/yes-we-can-the-rise-fall-and-potential-rebirth-of-municipal-canning/2022/08/10/
This might be the sort of item for a ‘resources’ page here. And it is less dire than the “we’re all doomed” tack.
If you’re not into canning, perhaps some state political attempt to reduce food insecurity with a nod to local efforts might interest:
While Farm to Food Bank was conceived before the pandemic, its goal has gained greater urgency due to soaring fuel prices and supply-chain backlogs exacerbated by Russia’s war in Ukraine. Those disruptions “revealed the perils of a national food system that depends on capacity concentrated in a few geographic areas,” the USDA said this June. “The food system of the future needs to be more distributed and local.”
This from:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-16/how-local-farms-can-feed-families-amid-high-food-inflation
And more to the topic at hand… when you do have plenty of wind turbines deployed, what do you do with excess capacity? Shut it down. 🙁 🙁
Or maybe you could split water to make some formate or hydrogen for fuel or to feed bacteria.
From Texas: https://www.keranews.org/energy-environment/2022-08-02/high-plains-turn-off-its-turbines-to-limit-wind-production-while-the-texas-power-grid-is-stressed
We often discuss land tenure, land access, and exposing city folk to farm issues here at SFF. Another issue that frequently gets some attention is the politics of moving toward a small farm future. So here’s a recent piece from Michigan that checks all these boxes:
https://www.farmprogress.com/conservation/township-picks-buyer-conserved-farmland
Conservation easements here in the US are not a brand new development, but this particular approach has some interesting new features. The local government’s participation is also something to note. Contrasted with Chris’ own experience with the Mendip council there is much to like here.
Thanks for further comments. I’m a bit behind the game both on this page and in real life to say much more just now but I’ll look at the links & other suggestions with interest.
And thanks to Steve and others for tracking the energetic issues. I’m aiming to come back to this soon-ish, and I’ll be sure to come back to those figures.
I know we have all hoped for a gentle reset of civilization and a wholesome life led by all , then you read this ……
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/08/19/green-energy-nightmare-german-politician-labels-poor-people-enemies-of-the-state/
Looks like the powers that be refuse to accept the inevitable .
I’d take WUWT with a large pinch of salt 🙂
A bit of push back against Monbiot in The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/21/how-livestock-grazing-is-benefiting-the-planet
The sentence Joe pulled out is the reason I love Small Farm Future.
where I stand: convinced of the need for ruralization and an orderly turn to agrarian localism so that it doesn’t happen by default in a disorderly way
Thanks!
https://www.theguardian.com.
” Macron warns of ‘end of abundance’ as France faces difficult winter
Sombre first cabinet speech after summer break criticised as snub to poor who have already made sacrifices”
and it starts , he is perhaps the first to admit that energy , food and just about everything else is getting right .
Simon Fairlie’s review of Monbiot’s “Regenesis” is now online at The Land magazine.
https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/monbiotic-man
“Studge” is what Simon calls the factory food, in reference to the short story “Filboid Studge” by H.H. Munro (1870-1916), quoted below:
“And so it was with the new breakfast food. No one would have eaten Filboid Studge as a pleasure, but the grim austerity of its advertisement drove housewives in shoals to the grocers’ shops to clamour for an immediate supply. In small kitchens solemn pig-tailed daughters helped depressed mothers to perform the primitive ritual of its preparation. On the breakfast-tables of cheerless parlours it was partaken of in silence. Once the womenfolk discovered that it was thoroughly unpalatable, their zeal in forcing it on their households knew no bounds. “You haven’t eaten your Filboid Studge!” would be screamed at the appetiteless clerk as he turned weariedly from the breakfast-table, and his evening meal would be prefaced by a warmed-up mess which would be explained as “your Filboid Studge that you didn’t eat this morning.” Those strange fanatics who ostentatiously mortify themselves, inwardly and outwardly, with health biscuits and health garments, battened aggressively on the new food.”
Other than Mr Monbiot, has anyone tasted the PF Fuud Chunx / Studge ? Since the creators are making pancakes I’m guessing that they are not a competitor to Beyond Meat or Impossible Burgers.
Who will choose to eat this stuff ? If they choose not to, will they be forced ?
There are physical limits to the business as usual economy. Our current predicament stems from not recognizing that. More of the same blinkered thinking does not help solve the problem.
‘Fun fact’ about the factory food (which Simon Fairlie calls studge) – the product from the bioreactor can be used as animal feed but it’s not considered safe for humans to eat until some additional steps are done to remove the nucleic acids (according to the paper I quoted earlier).
“For the production of human food, the food downstream processing includes two additional steps to reject nucleic acids, bead-milling and microfiltration”
“The removal of nucleic acids is crucial when SCP serves as a human food since in too high of concentrations, their catabolism leads to an accumulation of uric acid, which cannot be easily degraded and can form gout (20). Unlike humans, all farm animals possess the enzyme uricase, which precludes this effect, therefore making nucleic acid removal unnecessary for feed production.”
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2015025118
Reminds me of Oliver Twist , gruel .
May I have some more please ? proves starving people will eat anything .
So we give up farming and rewild the country then build millions of windmills to provide the power to produce gruel , he needs to walk round under the wind bird / bat grinders and count the numbers killed by them (1.million bats estimate in TX ) , rewild the land , but turn the air above it into a slaughter house
Simon Fairlie’s review of Regenesis (‘Monbiotic Man’) is excellent. His concluding paragraph says:
“Farming and livestock husbandry have been with us for around 12,000 years. The curves that describe human population growth, global atmospheric CO2 levels and the extraction of fossil fuels all share the same exponential rise over the last century, and that is no coincidence. The imperative is not to stop farming, but to phase out fossil fuels very quickly. Cavalier
polemics that cast primary responsibility for our predicament elsewhere are a dangerous diversion.”
This is a really important point, and worth stating any time someone suggests that cows not coal and goats not gas are the root cause of climate change and biodiversity loss.
Priorities.
Notice the EU wants radical change to farming yet keeps the tax breaks on private jets .
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Thanks for the further comments on Monbiot and Simon’s indeed excellent review. A bit more on that in my next post, coming up shortly.
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