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 July 9, 2026 | 79 Comments
Every year I take a look at the annual energy data published toward the end of June by the Energy Institute in order to ask the big question: Has the energy transition that everyone keeps talking about actually started yet?
So far, the answer has always been no. Every year since 1983, total global fossil fuel supply has increased, apart from in 2009 (financial crisis) and 2020 (Covid), when the entire energy system nosedived in relation to those crises before rebooting to the status quo ante.
And so we come to the recently published 2025 figures, where the answer is … also no. We used more of every type of primary energy in 2025 than ever before. Yes, more photovoltaics, wind, hydro and nuclear than before, but also more coal, oil and gas were burned in 2025 than in any previous year in human history. Still no transition!
I prepared a couple of charts in Excel to show some of the figures, as I’ve done in previous years. But somehow I can’t get them to size properly in WordPress – if anyone has any wizardly advice on how to do this, please let me know. For now, I’ll just reel off some figures instead. So, the global energy supply in 2025 comprised 518 exajoules of fossil energy, and 83 exajoules of everything else, with fossils comprising 86.2 percent of the total, down from 86.6 percent in 2024. Thus, for the first time in human history, humanity’s primary energy use exceeded 600 exajoules. Which is the equivalent of all 8.2 billion people in the world boiling the water for a cup of coffee about 2,400 times every day.
As is usually the case these days, the greatest proportionate rise was with renewables (photovoltaics and wind), which increased by nearly 10 percent on the previous year. In 2025, renewables comprised 5.9 percent of global energy supply, up from 5.4 percent the previous year. In absolute terms, renewable energy supply increased by 3.2 exajoules from 2024-5 whereas fossil energy supply increased by 4.6 exajoules.
So, to reiterate – not a transition.
Proponents of renewable transition often point out that due to the greater efficiency of electrical processes that don’t produce waste heat in the way that fossil fuel combustion does, you need less renewable than fossil energy to power the world at a given level of final output. This is true, albeit offset by those cases – typically where ‘waste heat’ isn’t actually waste – which require more electrical than fossil energy, for example in fertilizer, steel, concrete and plastic manufacture. Most of the basic industrial infrastructure of modern life, in other words. Anyway, it may be the case that we could transition to a lower (electrical) energy supply for the same level of output. But first we do actually need to have a transition.
Breaking down the figures further into the richer and poorer parts of the word, let’s take the thirty-eight OECD countries plus Russia and China to be the richer or more ‘developed’ countries. These countries together account for 36 percent of the world’s population, while using 67 percent of its fossil fuel supply, 91 percent of its nuclear supply, 67 percent of its hydro supply and 76 percent of its renewable supply.
The corollary of this is that the poorer countries, which host 64 percent of the global population, get the benefit of 31 percent of the global energy supply. And 91 percent of their supply is based on fossils.
There is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a sunny interpretation of this – inevitably, it’s the rich countries that have the luxury of transitioning first, but hopefully the poorer countries will eventually catch up. So, don’t give up on transition – it’s coming soon! Or soonish.
One problem with that narrative is that by and large the rich countries aren’t in fact transitioning. The USA is the worst offender in this regard, having added 1.68 exajoules of fossil energy to its supply in 2024-5 and only 0.16 to its renewables and hydro. Some other individual countries show a slight transitioning trend – like the UK, for example (-0.07 EJ fossils and +0.04 renewables/hydro). But they need to be doing a lot better than that to effect real transition. Meanwhile look at the pushback poor old Ed Milliband gets for his weird behaviour – eating bacon sandwiches oddly and aiming for net zero emissions.
Another problem with that narrative is that it assumes there’s some natural progression from rich country to poor country transition. I don’t see much reason to make that assumption. It’s clearly not the case when it comes to nuclear power, which is basically a rich country toy without wider applicability. If that wasn’t obvious before the Iran war, it surely is now. Another fly in the nuclear ointment is, ironically, the problem with outages due to extreme weather, not to mention longer term ones like sea level rise.
Talking of the Iran war, I guess next year we’ll see a downturn in fossils because of it. The interesting thing is that in theory this is more a fossils-specific downturn than a general economic one, potentially offering a chance for renewables to step up. Although no doubt the general economic effects will create too much noise to determine the consequences in the figures. The bigger question is what happens to fossils supply when (if?) the war is over.
Anyway, in contrast to nuclear, renewables could in theory be more easily rolled out to poorer countries, but by and large that’s not happening – or at least not as fast as in the richer countries. India is the exception, losing 0.08 exajoules of fossil fuel supplies from 2024-25 and adding 0.29 exajoules of renewables. The rest of the poorer countries added 2.5 exajoules of fossil fuels and only 0.39 exajoules of renewables.
There are various reasons for this. The prohibitive cost of raising upfront finance for renewables in the poorer countries relative to the richer ones seems to be a major one. The unwillingness of the poorer countries to attempt transition in the face of the richer countries’ failure to do so is another. It’s hard to see the dial shifting on that 91 percent without major direct support for transition from the rich countries to the poor countries, and that’s not happening.
All in all, things are starting to feel warmer outside the human handcart as we trundle downhill – and not in a good way.
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It might be a good idea to focus on China. In the current crisis they are helping out their allies. They can do this because: 1) their “transition” is further along and 2) they are able to absorb the fossil fuel shock with fewer deleterious effects than the US, UK, and EU. The key paradigm shift seems to be China’s long-term planning vs. the short-term profitizing of the West. Others may have differing opinions.
Just to follow up with some more EI figures, China is the biggest global energy user with a supply of 162 EJ, with the USA in second place at 94 EJ and India a distant third at 39.
The breakdown of energy supply in the US and China is as follows (all in exajoules):
China/USA
Oil 34/36
Gas 16/33
Coal 92/9
Nuclear 5/9
Hydro 5/1
Renewables 10/6
China has the highest carbon dioxide emissions from energy at 11,220 million tonnes, followed by the USA at 7755 million tonnes. The global figure is 35,806 million tonnes
The differences in *per capita* energy numbers can of course tell a different story than the impressions from just looking at the total energy numbers within a country’s borders.
Chris gave the following breakdown of energy supply in the USA and China (all in exajoules) along with some CO2 emissions numbers, and below it are the corresponding figures per capita (approx.):
China/USA
TOTAL 162/94 (exajoules)
Oil 34/36
Gas 16/33
Coal 92/9
Nuclear 5/9
Hydro 5/1
Renewables 10/6
CO2 emissions from energy (Btonnes) 11.2 / 7.8
China/USA
PER CAPITA (exajoules per Billion people)
TOTAL 116/275
Oil 24/105
Gas 11/96
Coal 66/26
Nuclear 4/26
Hydro 4/3
Renewables 7/18
CO2 emissions from energy (tonnes per person) 8/23
From these numbers, on a per capita basis, the amount of renewable energy in the USA is about 2.6 times the amount of renewable energy in China.
But even with 2.6 times the amount of renewable energy compared to China (per capita), the USA still has higher CO2 emissions from energy, about 2.9 times the emissions in China (per capita).
I was gonna make the same point but hadn’t got around to it. For some perspective, 15 years ago China’s ratio of energy use/capita to the US was 1:6, so they have certainly escalated their energy use.
China has a aging /falling population , much of the heavy work is done by machines instead of labourers . ( I would love one of their mini tractors )
Every KW generated has someone ready to use it. Wonder where it goes , over the last decade every incandescent light bulb in the USA has been replaced by a LED yet more electricity is being used .
Thanks Chris! It’s good to see the numbers. Sorry that you couldn’t get your graph to print.
Did you try a screenshot of Excel to make a jpg?
I did a little thought experiment to test the idea of a fully renewable PV factory – manufacturing photovoltaic panels using only photovoltaic derived electricity.
You’d need entirely electric silicon processing, which may exist already, but you’d also need fully electric mining and transport infrastructure – and for the long term, you’d need the ability to make new mining and transport vehicles (along with a huge number of batteries) using only electricity.
A very tall order, seems to me. Is it even possible to make modern truck tires without petroleum?
So, if what cannot be sustained stops, I can’t help wondering how this shakes out in the longer term. As do we all, no doubt.
Thanks.
An energy transition is unlikely to happen. The energy resources for building out a new energy system have to come from the sources available, which are now mostly fossil fuels. But fossil fuel production is nearing its peak, particularly for oil, and there won’t be much to spare for building renewables. This is the “energy trap” that Tom Murphy described in 2011.
In any case, an energy transition would only affect one of the planetary boundaries that have been crossed (CO2 emissions). There are at least six others that wouldn’t be helped by running the world solely on non-carbon electricity.
Environmental Impact = Population X Affluence X Technological Efficiency and the really big drivers of impact are population and affluence, both of which need to be reduced by a couple orders of magnitude. But all the incentives are for both population and affluence to grow, so it’s likely that only economic collapse will do the reducing.
I’m an optimist, so I’m hoping for collapse in the near future. Maybe the effects of the Hormuz closure will be the tipping point. One can only hope.
http://www.politico.eu/article/eu-livestock-strategy-food-security-climate-policy/
And in other news .
I posted this in the previous thread .
Eating seems to outweigh climate or perhaps Europe is in such a mess that imports can’t be assured .
http://www.breitbart.com/europe/2026/07/09/net-zero-obsessed-britain-faces-down-unspoken-energy-crisis-amid-accusations-of-coverup/
So for the third time this summer the UK almost ran out of electricity , its summer by the way , where consumption is relatively low , no heat pumps / electric fires running or a large number of electric cars in use but the wind dropped and screwed up supply , here in TX the wind drops out every summer , its known as a heat dome , always happens but the fierce sun keeps the solar working , the UK regulators can’t say they did not know of the problem its happened here for over a decade , ercot happily puts it online . God help you in winter I hope you have plenty of candles and firewood Chris !
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Just having a little Princess Bride fun, but seriously, whenever “the transition” is discussed, I have to just let it go.
Further to what Joe said, there will be no transition the way the term is usually used. The transition will be to a much lower energy state, and if we are lucky, the grid and a few other aspects of the current built environment will last a generation or two. Oh sure, as a short term stop gap, we may expand solar and wind for a while, but it is a dead end.
The transition keeps implying solar and wind as the transition end point, but they only theoretically replace electricity, and are only dispatchable with enormous battery investment. Also, electricity is only about 20% of our energy consumption, and renewables ( actually, rebuildables) are only created with fossil fuels. No one is building solar or wind infrastructure with the electricity solely provided by solar and wind. Or extracting and processing the raw materials. The net energy just isn’t there.
If there is any rational stance to promote in the energy realm, it is to begin immediate transition to low or no energy means of living. Not gonna happen, so the transition will likely be an involuntary and chaotic period.
And as with so many things, it’s already happening, it’s just unevenly distributed.
This article kinda chimes with the debate on energy use.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/we-are-not-mining-with-renewable-104
Thanks for the comments.
Regarding per capita figures, perhaps it’s also useful to give a few historical ones in relation to global energy use. So, in 1965 global energy use was 45 GJ/capita. By 2011 it topped 70 GJ/capita for the first time. In 2025, it was 72.9 GJ/capita – the highest ever. Hence, this isn’t fundamentally being driven by population increase. But it is being driven by models of economic ‘development’, notably in China but also in the ‘developing’ countries, which have been largely based on fossil energy. There *is* another model of development – an agrarian populist one – but unfortunately it gets little but ridicule in mainstream debate.
I agree with the various commenters here that a transition out of fossils at anything approaching existing energy use isn’t going to happen and is impossible. I laid this out in more detail a while back, here: https://chrissmaje.com/2024/02/how-many-solar-panels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin-thoughts-on-the-eschatology-of-energy-transition/
@Steve C, not quite sure what you mean that I keep using that word and it doesn’t mean what I think it means. I agree with everything in your comment. Possibly there are a couple of sentences in my post above that could be taken to imply that I think a high-energy transition to renewables/rebuildables is feasible. It’s not easy cranking out all these words without the occasional lapse, but I will try to try harder!
Agree with Joe about the other planetary boundaries. Energy/climate of course is critical, but the message from the universe isn’t simply that we’re using the wrong energy source. Hence I try to emphasise in my writing the broader cultural/spiritual malaise of the modern world. Which gets me into trouble with a different crowd…
As discussed at some length here a few years back, I’m not a fan of the I=PAT equation, which I don’t think is really an equation, more a questionable historical hypothesis. This touches on the issue of overshoot, which I keep meaning to write about but have struggled to find the time. Will try harder on that front too…
Re Diogenes’ point about UK electrical energy shortages, yes a summer heatwave has pushed it to the brink. Yet the narrative is that we can replace ICE vehicles with EVs, solid fuel heating with heat pumps and even farmed food with electrically-energised food etc. Sheer insanity.
Thanks also for the graphics tip, Eric. I need to look into this – it’s usually worked in the past!
I reviewed the “some years back” post about I=PAT and I’m surprised that you weren’t convinced by the brilliance of the comments. : ) (I guess emojis can’t be pasted in here)
https://chrissmaje.com/2020/03/the-population-problem-problem/
Chris- Nah, I wasn’t poking at you, even if my wording was clumsy. I was more poking at the implicit definition of the word itself.
There will be an energy transition alright, but not the one that is commonly meant when it is used.
Rather than asking whether replacing all our current, profligate energy use with solar and wind (and maybe some hydro?) is going to happen, I wonder whether it might be fruitful to flip the question(s) around a bit…
With existing wind and solar infrastructure, how would our lives change if fossil fuels stopped tomorrow?
How might that change if we were to spend the next five years throwing all of our available fossil energy at:
1)building wind and solar
2) modifying transport and agriculture to get off fossil fuels (and shift to agrarian populist horticulture, for the avoidance of doubt!), and
3) a few “creature comforts” like medically useful plastics?
How does that change if we are looking at ten years of fossil fuels?
I am not arguing here that this kind of transition will actually happen; I’m a bit too cynical that we’re already so far down the route of circenses autem non panem that it’s best to keep one’s expectations extremely low. And given the difficulties of building electrical capacity, I am also clear that this would be a stopgap, a transitional measure that could ease the shock of crumbling and collapse. But I think it is an interesting thought experiment, a little closer to starting where we are than to the all-or-nothing false dichotomy of “the transition is happening, yay” Vs “if you look at the numbers there is no real transition here”. Challenging the first assertion with the second is important work (thank you, Chris!), but doesn’t leave individuals and households (let alone nation-states) with a clear path forward, and that lack of a clear path invites lazy accusations of doom-mongering, supporting mass death, etc etc from all the usual suspects.
On a household resilience level, solar panels, batteries and human-scale electrical tools are a huge help while trying to hold together modern urban obligations (like paying rent, commuting 6.5 miles each way to day jobs or voluntary work, and not having very much longer-term storage space for food) with part-time amateur subsistence horticulture (my yield this year is going to be poor because I was about six weeks behind and swamped with non-garden work during planting season, and when I go away to ordination training in mid-September the amount I have been doing will come as a shock to the other members of the household, though I think I can be back often enough that we don’t need to give up the allotment plots). I personally enjoy learning new practical skills, but I am glad not to be wholly reliant on them just yet. But in a situation where I am suddenly reliant on what I can grow and forage, rather than it being an enjoyable part of our household labour which helps keep grocery bills down, I will be very, very glad to have the electric secateurs, the battery strimmer, heck, even the USB-C rechargeable headlamp (and various small solar panels that will charge all kinds of usb gizmos); and if the grid disappeared tomorrow I would still be using all three. It’s not that I couldn’t survive without them, and of the three listed, the strimmer is the one I’d be least likely to replace (a sickle will do — though recommendations are welcome on what to look for in a good one, I have decided that the one I have, ordered from the internet sometimes during a lockdown in 2020, is not a wonderful tool!), but rather that the tools that make it possible for me to grow what I do now while also doing other work are the same tools that would allow me to grow on a larger or more intensive scale if I suddenly needed to spend all my time on growing for the sake of feeding my household and whoever in my wider network is willing and able to pitch in.
Meanwhile: a dear friend with some medical stuff going on probably only survived the late June heatwave because he has one of those portable single-hose air conditioners (I am looking into modification to a more efficient double-hose unit). I don’t personally know anyone who died in that heatwave, but I know people who do. The idea that tradeoffs between this kind of resource use and staying alive are something that happens somewhere else to other people is a dangerous one
I am reminded, yet again, of William Gibson’s assertion that the future is already here, just not evenly distributed.
Kathryn wrote “…a sickle will do — though recommendations are welcome on what to look for in a good one”.
In the UK I’d recommend getting a sickle from Simon Fairlie’s Scythe Shop, along with one of his 5-pound (cost) scythe sharpening stones.
https://thescytheshop.co.uk/price%20list.html
For those not familiar with sharpening this type of sickle (forged European-made), here’s how I do it. The stone should be kept wet while sharpening, using the curved narrow side of the stone to put a consistent bevel angle on the top (sticker side) of the sickle. The edge at the bottom side of the sickle should ideally be kept as flat as possible, not beveled, and the flat part of the stone is good for touching up this underneath part of the edge (removing any burr resulting from the sharpening of the top side).
https://onescytherevolution.com/index.html
and here is a good resource in the U.S.
I have both a scythe and a sickle, but need more practice with the scythe when harvesting grain.
@Kathryn
My solar food dehydrator is now complete. A design I got from the internet.
Works really well on my shed roof. Even tomatoes dry to a crisp after 3 days up there.
Great way to preserve food. Take up a lot less room onced dried.
(Also a bit of a revelation of how much of food is water and how little actual food/nutrients we need and consume to survive)
But I’ve come to realise that it, along with my stainless steel biochar retort are just “transition technologies” and won’t feature long term.
Both are products of the industrial age. The stainless steel mesh, stove paint, aluminium and polycabonate sheets, stainless steel barrels and pipe won’t be available in the future. The wooden frames are the only bits that would be replaceable in a SFF.
Even reforging steel from scrap would be on a small scale or we will burn through a lot of much needed woodland to make charcoal for the forge. A problem at the start of the industrial revolution. (Restrictions were imposed in The Forest of Dean to try and slow the deforestation.)
But we can only do what we can do in the here and now. So my dehydration frames and retort might be of some use to someone for sometime, going forward.
The transition to a SFF could only take a few years, or a few decades at the most, so anything that is useful for a few decades without industrial support or maintenance can be worth having. Anything made of durable materials, like glass, aluminum or stainless steel and doesn’t need a fossil fuel or electricity might be included in the “good to have” category.
The life off most buildings is determined by the roof, so durable roofs can help them stand for many decades or even centuries. Barns, sheds and residential structures will be some of the most valuable assets in a SFF. They should be built to last. Structural greenhouses (glass and aluminum would be best) will extend the growing season during their lifetime. They are a great transition structure. Just having a few extra glass panels to make wooden cold frames is a good idea.
As you imply, wood will be the only fuel available in a SFF, so appliances or equipment that use wood and last for a long time are good transition investments. A good wood cookstove will be a sought-after item. Everyone should have one. The same goes for household heaters.
Guns and ammo last for many decades. They will be essential for the transition and it will be a long time before the transition to bows and spears.
I’ve often wondered about useful household supplies that are now common, won’t be available in a SFF, but could last for decades if stored properly. The best three that I’ve come up with are aluminum foil, butane lighters and canning jar lids. Any others?
Decent boots and gloves are cheap now, last reasonably well if cared for, and will save you a world of pain if you’re stuck doing manual labour outdoors in poor weather, but they aren’t quite durable enough to count, I think.
Reading glasses are pretty useful, as are distance ones for that matter. I am at a point now where I sometimes need reading glasses to do my mending. That need would intensify in lower light levels, I think. A decent magnifying glass is nice to have.
If you’re doing much seed collection — especially if you’re eating grains — winnowing baskets and screens and sieves and the like come in very handy.
Canning jar lids get markedly less useful if your pressure canner stops sealing. (You can still hot water bath higher acid foods, though.) Airlocks for fermentation vessels are good to have. (I have some rhubarb wine on the go), though there are probably workarounds using clay.
I have a pretty good supply of various different types of sewing needles. Safety pins are kindof amazing too. Thread for sewing and mending is small and cheap and doesn’t make a noise and lasts ages; I also get through quite a lot of sashiko thread, and while I could spin that out of nettles if I had to, I don’t necessarily want to wait for the nettles to grow when it’s time to patch my jacket.
I quite like a good toothbrush. I suppose most are plastic now and so won’t last decades unless stored very carefully indeed.
This is not an exhaustive list!
Wonderful list!
No more steep declines in renewable power costs, according to data from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), an intergovernmental agency that “supports countries in their energy transitions… to accelerate the deployment of renewables-based energy transitions worldwide.”
www. irena. org/About
This month, IRENA released its report “Renewable power generation costs in 2025”, which has some interesting data amidst the cheerleading. In this report they admit that the steep declines in renewable power costs are over, although they call it “stabilising”:
“After more than a decade of steep declines, renewable power costs are stabilising.” The cost trends during the past three (or more) years have been fairly level or increasing [Figure S2, page 15].
“The global weighted-average levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) from solar photovoltaic (PV) was unchanged in 2025 compared to 2024, at USD 44 per megawatt hour (MWh).” The global averages include China’s costs, of course, but China “benefits from a structural cost advantage” compared to the rest of the world.
Outside of China, the 2025 rest-of-world average generation costs are higher for solar PV (23% higher without China), hydropower (13% higher without China), and onshore wind (55% higher without China)!
“These global averages were significantly influenced by China, which accounted for most new renewable capacity in 2025. That country also benefits from a structural cost advantage. If China is excluded, the global weighted-average LCOE was higher, year-on-year, at USD 55/MWh for solar PV (up 23%), USD 51/MWh for onshore wind (up 55%), and USD 70/MWh for hydropower (up 13%). If China is included, however, these figures become USD 44/MWh, USD 33/MWh and USD 62/MWh, respectively, for solar PV, onshore wind and hydropower (see Figure 1.2).” [page 23]
https://www.irena.org/Publications/2026/Jul/Renewable-Power-Generation-Costs-in-2025
“How might that change if we were to spend the next five years throwing all of our available fossil energy at:
1)building wind and solar
2) modifying transport and agriculture to get off fossil fuels (and shift to agrarian populist horticulture, for the avoidance of doubt!), and
3) a few “creature comforts” like medically useful plastics?”
Humanity would just run out of the basics faster , copper , iron ore , cement balsa wood inserts for windmills ,tires would all disappear very quickly , riding a bike to work would cease as there would be no job to go to . Collapse is coming and there is little we can do about it , speeding it up only shortens the time that thinking people have to prepare for it .
A group of people, wood resources for housing and warmth
Good stone resources for milling and cutting tools nearby
Adequate water for drinking and some agriculture,seeds, knowledge
Oaks for food, ocean access, fiber for nets
Not too cold, not too hot
Not too many people
No metals
No need for power
Too much to ask ?
We are going to get all of those, Bruce, except the “not too cold, not too hot” part.
The reason “we” will get them is that it will be impossible to live without them and dead people don’t possess anything.
Your basic English village circa 1800 ……
Yes, though maybe a bit earlier.
“Actaeon who saw the goddess naked among the leaves and
his hounds tore him
A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle
A drop from the oceans: who would have dreamed this
infinitely little too much.”
― Robinson Jeffers, The Selected Poetry
Thanks for the further comments. Much of interest there, and alas little time for me to respond, except to say (1) thanks to Steve C for the clarification, (2) thanks to Kathryn, Bruce & others for the thought experiments and the poetry and (3) Joe, maybe we can come back to the population debate and I=PAT sometime. I had a very quick skim through that OP & its comments. A lot of interesting points, but I’m still not a fan of that equation – among other things, I think there’s just too much intercorrelation between the supposedly independent variables PAT for it to make sense. Which is not to say that human population is not a problem … it’s just that I think it’s less clear what kind of problem it is than people often suppose.
between the supposedly independent variables PAT
They aren’t independent variables at all. They feed back on each other at all times. A systems dynamics flow chart would show arrows going in both directions between all three of them. It’s been a long time, but I think all three were part of the “Limits to Growth” model (affluence being “industrial production”).
Nonetheless, impact on the natural world is still the product of population and affluence as modified by technology.
We can consider I=PAt as just a mini-model of the ecosphere.
The biggest problem I see for the equation I=PAT is that the affluence (or consumption) component is actually the *average* or *per capita* consumption for the population being considered. So if the consumption levels are not homogeneous within that population (e.g., with wealth or income inequalities within a specific country, or between countries in the world), then much nuance is lost. The high-consumption segments of a population could effectively “get a pass” (free ride?) because the lower-consumption segments are bringing down the average.
Another problem to me is that, as written, the equation is oversimplified, because it should really express Impact as a *function* of P, A, and T, as in I=f(P,A,T), since the variables have interdependencies as mentioned already. Treating a complex function as a simple equation can give oversimplified results.
As an alternative to I=PAT, this study from 1995 (linked below) looked at I=HAT where H is the number of households, and A is per household (instead of per person). “The substantive justification for this lies in the fact that for many goods, such as automobile transport and residential energy consumption, there are significant economies of scale: for example, a household of four persons will consume far less than twice as much as a household consisting of two persons.”
The growth in energy consumption during the years 1970-1990 was examined for the “less developed regions” of the world compared to the “more developed regions”, using both the I=PAT and I=HAT equations.
With the I=PAT equation, the growth in population for the “more developed regions” accounted for 18.0 percent of the global increase in energy consumption (while the growth in population for the “less developed regions accounted for 15.1 percent of the global increase in energy consumption). [Table 7]
With the I=HAT equation, the growth in number of households for the “more developed regions” accounted for a much larger 41.1 percent of the global increase in energy consumption (while the growth in number of households for the “less developed regions” accounted for 17.2 percent of the global increase in energy consumption). [Table 7]
“Based on such accounting exercises, one could argue that Western behavioral patterns, in the form of a tendency toward increasingly nucleated living arrangements, are an important contributor to rising energy consumption”.
But there’s more to the story, because “an insight that emerges in the I=HAT framework is that the fertility decline which brings about deceleration in the rate of overall population growth, relieving pressure on the environment, contributes to population aging and the consequent rise in the proportion of the population in age groups characterized by high age-specific household headship rates, increasing pressure on the environment. Fertility decline will, of course, reduce the number of households 20 or 30 years hence, but in the longer run its impact on the number of households is limited by the age-structure change.”
So the situation seems more complicated than what the simple I=PAT equation might suggest.
Population, Households, and CO2 Emissions
F. Landis MacKellar, Wolfgang Lutz, Christopher Prinz and Anne Goujon
Population and Development Review
Vol. 21, No. 4 (Dec., 1995), pp. 849-865 (17 pages)
Published By: Wiley
https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/4459/1/RR-96-06.pdf
Thanks for that Steve, interesting. More on this anon, I hope.
What is the matter with the weather?
How come you don’t get any rain?
You search the sky for signs of life
But out on the prairie in your dried up corn
You never felt so weary and you’ve never been this torn
[Chorus]
You’re being weeded
You’re being weeded
You’re being weeded
You’re being weeded out
– Weeded Out by The Roches (1985) – on the Another World album
It is always nice to hear The Roches as I work in the garden. But the real “transition” is to leverage the drought and heat via human experimentation and controlling a few limited variables. I have some sweet corn in a plot that gets no irrigation. It looks pretty peaked, even though it was “knee high by the Fourth of July.” The goal here is to get at least one cob of seed corn for next year that is drought- and heat-selected. (One cob provides enough seed to grow our sweet corn consumption in a year.)
My labor is worth nothing, the organic fertilizer at planting was worth pennies, and the mulch was more expensive than the fertilizer and tiller gas cost. (Since I have money capital now, it is to my advantage to “transition it” into soil/seed capital for the future.) There is mulch on only some of it and this sets up another variable in the experiment. No fancy equations, no computer modeling, no online presence. The same thing the ancient ones did thousands of years ago. Their solution was to plant in clumps of 3-4 to ensure pollination. I do that sometimes but usually opt for the four-row method. This particular plot stresses the pollination function even more as there are plenty of bare spots in the seven rows I planted. One mitigating factor is that we do have plenty of wind, so I am using that to my advantage. Another controlled variable is that I did some line breeding on this plot, using multiple past years of seed. I did weed this plot, which I usually don’t do because my corn usually comes up fast and thick. There is another factor, that of my landrace usually grown under irrigation, so the genome has been selected under a different circumstance than the conditions it is growing under at present. But this too is a chance for DNA in the genome that has just been “going along to get along” to express itself. All of these limited control variables encourage flexibility. This is entirely opposite to focusing on pure heritage varieties that are consistent year-to-year. Again, something the ancient ones knew well. I always assume they knew more about what they were doing than we do today. After all, they were successful. The jury is still out on whether WE are successful.
The paradigm shift here is adapting to a complex system by focusing on a couple of controlled variables and letting the inherent greater flexibility of corn manifest itself.
Nice to see Jeffers and The Roches get a mention here! I loved the latter since I heard their harmonising on Hammond Song, on the radio years ago. And Jeffers self-built home in Carmel always inspired me – he used rocks hauled off the Californai coastline. Way to go.
This is sweet too – I’ve just come a cross it, seems like a good singalong-a-worksong For The World (Ed Askew):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zNu3DArfKo&list=RD_zNu3DArfKo&start_radio=1
Thanks for the great discussions here about seeds and other technologies for a small farm future. I wish this was the ‘transition’ discussion that we were having in wider society!
There will never be a transition, because rhis civilisation is built on a foundation of millions of years of stored sunlight, which if used directly as a flow via solar, etc, is bugger all in comparison.
Greenies will never accept this because it means questioning their sense of who they are. Bit like the second coming of Christ: you can never persuade a christian that ‘he’s dead mate, get over it, Attachment Wound Daddy is not coming home’, because it’s always in the future and cannot be disproven.
Sociopaths will continue to sell stuff that people with Asperger’s have made to narcissists until it goes Pop, then everyone will blame you, Chris, for being a nazi-adjacent Linkola-alike or something, minus the fish, coz there’s none left.
Every cloud has a silver lining though: my Anthropocene Orchard is looking good in rhis heatwavemegadrought. Can’t wait for those avocados.
Just wanted to apologise. I was sat in my van eating a sandwich, the cucumber had just slid out onto my lap due to a lack of pickle, I was hot, bored, and needed to vent my frustration. You simply cannot make a sandwich using low-friction ingredients without a suitable binder.
This is not a metaphor, and has no hidden meaning.
I watched last night a report ( Neil Oliver ) that stated they are going to build a wind farm with blades higher tnan the eifel tower , near to Bass Rock the home to the worlds largest colony of Gannets , the area is SSSI in the firth of fourth , the reason is a AI server farm built a few miles inland , that also couples to a earlier report of turning loch Ness into a pumped hydro reservoir .
Electricity matters Birds don’t !.
The Norwegians have found a trick to reduce bird strikes by wind turbines. They painted one of the blades black. It breaks up the visual pattern of the blades. It’s apparently 70% effective.
I hope they have some kill switches on those data centres, both to kill rogue AI’s and cut them out of the electrical grid when the next winter donkeyfart occurs over northern Europe.
Good idea if it works , round here the ground is littered with buzzard corpses , hawks raptors of all breeds coming for the corpses of the unlucky that don’t dodge the blades , during the migration in spring and fall all kinds of migrant birds are under those bird mashers . many are protected species , shoot one its jail time , mash one its blind eye time .
The AI bubble will either pop or deflate because it is built on a false premise of free service. Companies cannot afford to pay for it. Oops. If the balloon pops with a single pin prick, it will implode. If the person(s) holding the balloon closed lets go, the balloon will zip around all over the place. If your head is close to the ground, you will be impacted very little.
If I can add to tools for doomsday. A good digging hoe and a Dutch hoe. I did all my ground preparation on the allotment this year with these two tools. Buy the best quality you can for the quality steel, plus a stone to sharpen them. I would also add a 1.2 metre section of 50mm waste pipe. It’s a great aid in direct planting of seed. Make a divot with the hoe, drop the seeds down the pipe, cover with soil using the hoe. No bending required! I direct sowed all my plants on the allotment bar two courgettes this year. I would also recommend stocking up on quality string.
If you can access coppice or pollards for firewood and have a stove, obtain a good quality billhook (old ones have better steel than a lot of modern ones) and a modern pruning saw, expensive but worth it. They are very sharp and ideal for cutting coppice and pollards for firewood. However they do dull eventually. I would go through one a winter for all my firewood needs. They are not sharpenable, so have to be replaced, so I advise getting at least one spare blade.
Otherwise I stock up on grains, rolled oats and rice, as allotment space is restricted. Though I do grow popcorn. The above grains need minimal processing to make palatable. Dry beans I grow lots of. Winter brassica’s at home for vitamin c and root vegetables for the winter days casseroles.
The UK is already into population contraction (excluding in migration) . As this proceeds there is going to be a lot of surplus used goods available, at least half a million homes will be cleared in the next decade. I’m helping a neighbour with a house clearance at present (a lady who died at 92) and the shear quantity of usable stuff! We are getting as much of it to various charities as we can, but two van loads have gone to the tip (recycling centre) and there are two more to go.
The trick in the early years of the great contraction will be getting through the winters. Having heat and good quality food to avoid winter illnesses, especially for the elderly, but also for the very young. For the early years of the great contraction there will plenty of used goods available, though a lot will be tat. Ten years out will be the testing time for what can be sustained for the longer term as industrial production winds down and craft production replaces what it can.
at least half a million homes will be cleared in the next decade.
Most of these homes will be in cities, of course, but some of them will be in places where people can use them as farmhouses.
For example, right now there are three houses in my area in which the elderly inhabitants died and the heirs just kept land and house empty. No one can live in them because someone owns them, but when the force of law falters, people will just move in.
I’ve mentioned it before, but this is why I think McMansions on country estates are a great investment in a SFF. They will be able to house multiple families and become de facto village centers of a small farming community.
PS I would add a single handle (“one man”) crosscut saw to the list. Add in files for sharpening. While a file can be made by a blacksmith, current prices of industrially produced files are very low in comparison to what they would be from a blacksmith in times of urgent need.
In general, all kinds of manual firewood processing tools (axes, mauls, wedges, sledgehammers, etc) will be very useful in the future. They can all be made by a blacksmith, but since they also last for many decades, it might be wise to stock up now and beat the rush.
That said, I do love my electric-hydraulic wood splitter. It’s fifteen years old and has needed zero maintenance in that time. It will last at least as long as my off-grid power system.
I’ve been stocking up on sea salt for vegetable fermentation. It’s cheap at the moment.
With files I would buy new the best quality I could afford. I have had given to me over the years many files that are worthless. A worn out file looks the same as a new one to the inexperienced eye who were passing onto me they’re dad’s old tools. The goes for a lot of new files, a lot of cheap rubbish has been produced in recent years. Plus I have noticed old tool boxes seem to collect old used files for no reason. When I have a worn out file I get rid of it the next time I pass the scrap merchant, luckily for me he’s only a mile away.
I definitely second the length of rigid pipe for direct sowing seeds, it beats the pants off bending over, plastic pipe is very cheap now but very much something that is industrially manufactured.
Of course, with larger seeds on a day without wind you can just drop them from your hand into the ground if you have good aim. And I find smaller seeds sometimes get stuck in the tube (which is inevitably full of cobwebs and the like).
@Philip
The 50mm tube idea is pure genius.
Saves all that bending over, which at my age is becoming more of an issue:)
Could use bamboo if human-made tubing gets hard to come by.
What about strapping the tube to the hoe? Can all be done in one action.
Hi John
Good idea strapping the hoe and tube together. Saves bending down to change over tools. I usually do a row of divots, then drop the seeds down the tube and change to the hoe to cover the seeds. I have found an alternative system in that you use a child to wield the tube and plant the seed. Works until the child gets bored!
A waste coat with pockets is handy to hold the seeds while planting.
Carol Deppe in one of her books describes a system with several tubes strapped together somehow, such that you can adjust the distance between them at the bottom, and plant five seeds in one go at a specific spacing. Which sounds great, but honestly just the one tube is still really useful.
@Philip
Yes, children can be unreliable 🙂
How about a hoe with a hollow handle?!
I can sense another project developing!
Looks like the UK is going to get a little forced transition.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/07/19/heat-pump-households-face-winter-warmth-rationing/
In response to discussions on digging hoes and sowing seeds, I’m curious to hear John Adams’s report on the talk by Simon Lewis on hoe farming.
@Frank.
Went to two of Samuel’s talks at The Green Scythe Fair.
He’s an interesting fella. Quite eccentric.
I asked a few questions but was aware of hogging the debate too much, which can be my way!
He talked a lot about his place in Brittany.
Can’t remember the actual numbers but he said he had far more land than he needed or keep on top of. Has it as a barrier/buffer between him and his commercial farming neighbours.
His two main tools were a hoe and a billhook. (He did mention two others but I can’t remember what they were)
The billhook was for coppicing/pollarding. Doesn’t need a chainsaw as he doesn’t let the trunks/branches get too thick..
He plants rye in a 700 square metre field. It takes him two leisurely half days to hoe it all over ready for planting. Plants in rows rather than broadcasting.
I can’t remember the exact yield in kilos but it’s enough to keep him, his sister and father in rye bread for a whole year.
The rye stems he uses to thatch his buildings.
Not a big fan of wheat. He doesn’t think it is suited to his climate, or northern Europe in general. Believes that it’s a throwback to the Romans introducing it to their conquered lands.
He has to pay land taxes so is still in the wider market economy and has to generate money. Hence the books etc.
He/they are self sufficient in food.
He was asked about the hunger gap. He didn’t see it as a problem as he is quite happy to eat just beans and rye bread for a couple of months.
On slugs, he was quite philosophical. He said if you want birds in your garden then you need slugs. And the birds attract the bigger raptors which he also likes to see.
I got the sense that he wasn’t living in grinding poverty and actually enjoyed the work. Was very fond of his farm and didn’t really want to be anywhere else. Joke about the ordeal of getting to The Green Scythe Fair.
He said people are scared of manual work and the idea of hoeing a field but will spend a lot of money on a gym membership! He doesn’t need the gym. Gets all the excersise he needs working the land.
He runs free workshops on the farm. In another life. I would like to go and visit and pick his brains some more.
In the meantime, I think I might read his dad’s book again.
On a slight tangent. Went to the Isles of Scilly earlier in the summer. First time.
I noticed that the fields were small and surround by trees/hedges. Sounded very similar to the plots in Brittany.
Sickle and scythe were the other two tools!
Thanks John. Of course it was Samuel Lewis! Interesting that he prefers to grow rye to wheat.
He said he had tried wheat but couldn’t get it to work in his locale.
He was an interesting guy to talk to. Could have spent the whole afternoon firing questions at him.
The overall impression that I took from it was that supplying oneself with food isn’t the grinding chore that I was lead to believe.
I guess the problem arises when you are having to max out on your time and labour to provide a surplus for the “powers that be”. Either through taxes or direct exploration.
That’s when things get uncomfortable!!!!!
Yes, and the “powers that be” get ever more inventive in ways to extract wealth from the peasantry.
Church tithes of one tenth of a peasants produce originally only referred to grain. By the end of the middle ages, the church wanted a tenth of many other items that peasants produced; animals, yarn, beans, cloth, firewood, and if you please payment in cash preferred. The abuse of the tithe system certainly contributed to the reformation, though it also pushed the development of markets as the peasant needed more and more cash, much like hut taxes did in the African colonies if the European empires.
Landlords also got in on the act. In the middle ages in England if a peasant died his heirs had to pay the landlord a tax for the the landlords “loss”! This tax hit very hard in the years of the black death, with peasant households often suffering two or more deaths in a year of the head of the household. In eastern Europe landlords charged a tax when a peasant married a daughter off. Again it was to recompensate the landlord for his “loss”!
The level of taxes for future peasants will depend on various factors, chief of which will be how much of a market economy survives and how remote the landlord/government is. If there is no market and the landlord is just down the road payment in kind will be the norm. Payment of religious taxes I don’t see happening for awhile largely due to the collapse of organised religion in Western societies.
What I could see happening if anybody in authority, either large landowners of government has the sense to do so is a hybrid system of land use. Part of a village’s land going for commercial farming part for peasant subsistence. For the peasant they have a plot of land for a home, vegetables, fruit and small livestock, either owned by the peasant or rented to him/her at a nominal rent (the point is not to make money out of the peasant but to keep them on the land). Tied to the peasants holding would be the right to farm X part of communal grain fields, cut x firewood from communal woodland and to graze X number of livestock on the common. The rest of the land would be farmed commercially, though with much more labour using working horses. However, pre-tractor farming had spikes in labour demands at sheep shearing and harvest which had to bring in off farm paid labour usually from the local village, which is where our subsistence peasant comes in. You need to keep the labour on the land if you want to keep commercial farming going to feed the cities post tractor. I can add that there will also be seasonal winter labour demand for coppice workers to supply wood for charcoal burning, which will be needed in a world post coke which is derived from the better qualities of coal. And much manufacturing will be craft work carried out by village folk when garden, farm and forest do not need their attention first.
What I have described above was the village economy of England from the late middle ages to the late nineteenth century with commercial farming becoming more and more dominant as enclosures and market expansion as cities grew. That was not a perfect system. Rural England was mostly in depression from the mid nineteenth century until after WW2 due to cheap grain, meat, and wool coming from north America and Australia. Plus the farmers and landlords always had the whip hand on jobs, pay and housing. My grandfather was a farm labourer in the thirties and forties, my father remembers moving home ten times before he was fourteen years old when he went for an apprenticeship. His mother had a bad habit of falling out with the farmers wife or the lady of the big house. Also you would only be hired at most for a year at a time then, sometimes only for a season.
Gareth and Samuel Lewis’s with a couple of acres ( they have more but the core of there rotation is two acres. My own experience is that they are correct in there system, though I did things somewhat differently from them), the peasant would also be self-sufficient in grain and wood. They don’t keep large livestock, so a common to pasture for some livestock could be added for our prospective peasant. With a high level of self-sufficiency why would the peasant work for the farmer? The Lewis’s peasant has free time, and cash is useful, plus sheep shearing and harvest were very communal village affairs with men and women working as teams going to each farm in turn, plus a lot of drinking!
As for cash being useful we cannot expect the state (UK) will continue to pay for schooling and health care in the future (already not the case, or nearly so in the USA). Add in that traditionally (pre 20th century) the first year of an apprentice’s bed and board was paid for by the apprentice’s parents.
Well that is enough of my ramblings for now, it is Chris’s blog not mine after all.
If may be worth noting that the serfdom system that you describe replaced outright chattel slavery (under the Anglo-Saxons), which had been around since at least Roman times and probably before then.
The system I’m describing is mostly post serfdom. The start of the enclosures in the middle ages broke the connection between land and labour, with serfdom nearly extinct by 1500 and ended by royal proclamation in 1574. With the expansion of markets landlords preferred payment in cash than by labour, with richer peasants buying themselves out of serfdom.
With the enclosures and the expansion of commercial farming the village common grazing land usually persisted as it was usually the poorest land in the parish and therefore of less interest to the landlords to enclose. It also gave the villagers some subsistence when agricultural work dried up either seasonally or due to agricultural depression. Not unrelated it reduced the demand for parish poor relief, which landlords were expected to contribute to. The right to graze animals and collect firewood and furze for fuel was usually allocated to a village house or sometimes a field. If you occupied the house you had the allocation. The size of the allocation varied from house to house being whatever had come down from the past. The common also provided another resource, housing, the tradition being that if you could get a roof over a structure in a day you could live in it thereafter at six pence a years rent. This is why a common that is some distance from the main village of a parish will have a row of cottages along a lane bordering the common, or cottages scattered around the commons edge. It was not unknown for what was a pigsty to turn into a two room cottage within a year. Tied farm cottages would usually have a large garden in which some grain was grown to aid subsistence. Of further subsistence was the right of gleaning, with the wives and children of the farm labourers and help hired for the harvest gathered spilt grain from the grain fields after the harvest.
The survival of commons post serfdom lasted until the coming of three changes; the tractor which did away with most farm labour, the colonisation of the rural villages by urban professionals which broke the connection between house and commoning rights, and industrial fertilisers which enabled even marginal land to be worth enclosing. Landlords would usually buy commoners out, or if he owned the cottage with the commoning rights would sell the cottage without the rights and subsumed the rights to himself.
With farmers now turning up at food banks we really need to rethink subsistence.
Sources: George Ewart Evans, William Cobbet.
Chattel slavery was officially ended in 1102 by Royal edict in London. Something the Normans did do for us, though it was rare by then. The catholic church had been issuing canon laws against selling a Christian into slavery since the 6th century. Unfortunately the church left a get out clause in that if you were a pagan you were fair game!
Hi John,
Thanks for the further information. I have thought there’s plenty of potential for wheat growing after reading about John Letts’s work with heritage varieties.
Varieties of veg which work for me to produce good food value for fairly small effort are:
Sarpo Mira potatoes, bred in Hungary for blight resistance, drought resistance and heavy yield.
Gramma Walters borlotti beans. Climbing beans with a slightly shorter season than other borlotti beans, so ensuring they dry off well for storing.
Judion Spanish runner beans grown for the large white beans, rather than the pod.
Oregon Homestead Sweetmeat squash from Carol Deppe.
I’m fortunate in using a growing plot outside our village, so am able to save seed from the Judion beans and the squash without too much risk of accidental crosses.
Thanks for the comments. No need to apologise for rambling here, Philip. Not rambling IMO – I’ll tell people if I think they err, and perhaps you all can do likewise for me! I like this site as a space for expansive conversation. I only wish more people would read such sites and see how inappropriate dismissive labels like ‘green nostalgia’ are for these kinds of conversations.
Regarding wheat, it certainly wasn’t introduced to Northern Europe by the Romans – in Britain, the incoming Neolithic farmers brought it here about 6,000 years ago. Interestingly, it seems they mostly stopped doing so after about 500 years, although they continued with barley to some extent. Then wheat growing picked up again in the Bronze Age.
We’ve found wheat grows quite well here in NE Somerset on a garden scale, although there are many lessons still to learn. Still, I’m in all in favour of people finding their own individual paths … I wouldn’t want to generalise it to ‘not a crop for northern Europe’, however.
What grows in your area is just old fashioned poor people food , Northern England its oat based , further south barley and wheat , east and its buck wheat based and here in the south its corn ( maize ) . then of course there is rice …..
Potatoes are a basic cool climate food , here its ” cow peas” .
Every peasant society has a basic bulk foodstuff , whatever it is in your area that is what you need to grow enough of to store through that hungry times of year .
For the hungry gap grains are best as I find stored root vegetables are far from there best by late spring, though potatoes store better but by late spring unless you have a cold store they want to sprout. I’m focusing on sweetcorn and popcorn as they give a greater yield of carbohydrate per unit area on an allotment scale. The sweetcorn is frozen and the popcorn dried. I’m also growing a tiny amount of flour maize, Carol Deppe’s Magic Manna flour corn variety, which I obtained many years ago. I grow it at home on a very small plot, I can’t grow it at the allotment due to crossing with the sweetcorns there. Inturn due to the small number of plants I grow the strain has not bread true, and I have a dramatic variety of colours, though smaller cobs. I am still experimenting with grinding for flour, but have not found a way that does not require multiple grindings at finer grades. I had to travel the M4 recently and the only fields that were green were those growing forage maize, which indicates to me that maize is somewhat drought tolerant, which as I’m in southeast England is a significant factor in the future. The droughts also rule out oats.
I’m badly gluten intolerant so the other grains excluding buckwheat are out and I have a severe potato allergy, though I grow some for my mother. I have grown buckwheat but found the yield low per unit area.
A bunus with the maize family is the large amount of carbon that can be reincorporated in the soil. I leave my sweetcorn standing after picking until spring, with very few weeds appearing over the winter, probably due to the additional light loss from the shade of the standing corn which makes bed preparation a lot easier the next crop.
William Cobbet recommended American corn to small holders in the early 18th century, so though maize can be an ecological disaster it can work well at the small scale.
I like your popcorn focus. It is one of my foci too. Popcorn has two main problems; lodging and kernel size. To fix the lodging problem, I double plant my rows. I have an Earthway seeder and so go up the row and then back down the same row. Doesn’t seem to bother the yield. As for kernel size, this is really a marketing problem. White popcorn has a better taste but yellow popcorn fluffs up more and so is preferred by movie theaters because you can get more popcorn to sell from fewer kernels. The movie theaters don’t care about the taste. I rather like yellow pop corn. Nevertheless, I have mixed together Cherokee Black, Strawberry, a multi-colored mixture I got locally and yellow popcorn I buy at the grocery store. Lately, I have been buying some from Amazon and I think it comes from Argentina. I mixed all these up in the past and now I plant the biggest kernels each year. Last year the rats got my crop but this year I hope to get another good crop. I also get transposon corn each year (both in the popcorn and the sweet corn) and I select for that. The idea is that transposons (jumping genes) are more flexible for climate variability. You can select on the phenotype because you can see the transposons by the stripes or blotches on the kernels. Here is a Nature paper on Barbara McClintock and her discovery of transposons.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/barbara-mcclintock-and-the-discovery-of-jumping-34083/
Thanks for the tips.
I grow a white popcorn originally from the local store, but it struggles a bit in my climate and a new mix coloured Indian type corn that does very well.
My climate is Mediterranean so maybe not relevant to growing conditions elsewhere but grains are easy to grow here. Winter wheat ripens too early in the spring when there is too much moisture and rust takes it all. So almost everything is planted late spring and requires some irrigation. Modern high yield wheat, two kinds of durum( hourani and modern) purple barley, and spelt all do well. I have produced 50lbs. of grains by hand with no machines to grow , harvest , thresh or winnow each of the last two years. Everything for this season is already harvested dried and stored.
Although I keep a small seed stock of spelt going I really have trouble dehulling it by hand. This is the first year I got some rye which was winter planted , dry land grown , and ripened when the rest of the grains were finishing. It has a very long growing season which helps evade spring rust issues but my yield was low. Milling tools and different sized sieves are important to utilizing production. Although I usually use a small electric stone mill I have experimented with hand pecking metates and manos to further my goal of zero machines and zero fuels. There are lots of things lost to time in recreating milling tools . Porifric rhyolite maintains a coarse surface in use and you really need that texture to cut the grains. If the metate or Mano gets too smooth it takes much longer to get flour. Even the porifric stones get smooth with enough use and require sharpening by pecking the surfaces with a quartzite hammerstone. Same hammerstones used to shape the rhyolite into metate.
So controlling crop diseases like rust ( ergot ) and creating milling tools are parts of growing grains that are specific to where you live.
Correction , porphyritic rhyolite . Philip, try to sieve your flour before regrinding it. I try to seive out as much of the pericarp as I can to get higher quality flour when working with corn. You also might experiment with Nixtamal and creating masa. The cal ( lime ) dissolves the pericarp.
An article in the Guardian today (29 July 2026) and its value as an exercise in spin. Just a couple of examples.
[Start quote]
The latest study, published in Royal Society Open Science, involved Bartlett and colleagues examining data from UK poultry farms to calculate environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions, land use and types of pollution. They also looked at welfare indicators such as mortality and the number of hens needed to produce a given number of eggs.
“Then we did some some modelling to work out these environmental and welfare outcomes,” she said.
“We found an important trade-off,” Bartlett added. “It’s that, the types of farms that are generally regarded as being better for animal welfare, like organic and free-range, can actually require more birds to produce the same amount of eggs because they’re less less efficient and they can have higher environmental impacts.”
However, Bartlett said the research did not show the whole picture regarding factory farming. “Organic could come out better on pesticide toxicity, maybe biodiversity on farm as well,” she said.
[End quote]
PROBLEMS
“examining data from UK poultry farms” – biased sample and unclear on the mix
“welfare indicators such as mortality and the number of hens needed to produce a given number of eggs” – conflation of gross measures that mean different things
“Then we did some some modelling” – Hah! As if modeling is an accepted methodology that can never be challenged.
“the types of farms that are generally regarded as being better for animal welfare, like organic and free-range, can actually require more birds to produce the same amount of eggs because they’re less less efficient and they can have higher environmental impacts.” – What makes one mode more efficient than another? Is it an objective measure, like energy use, or some other measure, like more yield per human labor unit or chicken unit, or electricity per bird, etc.?
“Bartlett said the research did not show the whole picture” – Ya think?
I get sooooo tired of this kind of nonsense from the Guardian. It really is a terrible newspaper. I only look at it for the headlines which I can then research on other sites. If the New York Times wasn’t behind a paywall, I wouldn’t even bother with the Guardian.
This is just MY take on this story. I am not interested in arguments on my views. Take a look at the article yourself. You may find your own criticisms dovetail with mine. Or not.
I just published a scathing criticism of the Guardian article on my Substack. Here is a quote:
“It certainly does not rise to the level of countering the manipulation of the article throughout, with its specious data and specious assumptions and specious methodology and specious conclusions. . . . I can just see all the rightwing whackos using it to club organic growers in private, public and online discussions.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/29/organic-eggs-climate-caged-chickens-carbon-emissions-environment
From the article in The Guardian: “…the types of farms that are generally regarded as being better for animal welfare, like organic and free-range, ***can*** actually require more birds to produce the same amount of eggs because they’re less less efficient and they ***can*** have higher environmental impacts.”
The word “can” does some heavy lifting in that sentence. The Guardian could just write “they have higher environmental impacts” if it’s actually true.
Adding the word “can” implies that there are certain assumptions which will result in the model saying the environmental impact is higher. And other assumptions will presumably result in the environmental impacts being lower.
But what the gullible public takes away from such articles could simply be “they have higher environmental impacts” which is not what the article said.
I looked at the study details for the assumptions which could lead to higher impacts. Apparently, free-range chickens can eat more (per egg) than battery caged chickens, and the production of this increased amount of feed has its own environmental impacts. Also, if free-range chickens eat more, then they make more manure, and where the manure goes might have more impact.
“The main differences in environmental impact per kg of egg product are largely driven by feed production, feed consumption and manure management. Feed production is a major contributor to global warming potential; therefore, variations in feed intake and feed conversion efficiency help explain the lower impacts observed in intensive systems and the higher impacts associated with free‑range systems, where feed input per unit of egg output is greater. Feed use also contributes substantially to other environmental impact categories, because higher feed consumption increases nutrient intake and, consequently, excreta production, which in turn drives emissions linked to eutrophication and acidification. Manure management and housing are also important, as free‑range systems often exhibit greater NH3 volatilization and nutrient leaching owing to larger land areas and manure spreading practices.”
The environmental cost of welfare-driven policy changes in UK egg production Open Access
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.251830
To those who think that caging hens is a sensible response to the environmental costs of eggs, the same kind of environmental impact analysis can be applied to humans, too:
I’m sure that prisoners incarcerated in small cells have much less environmental impact than people who are unconfined and free to live and work where they want.
Feeding people who are suffering from famine has far more environmental impact from food production and waste management than just letting them die.
We could save a lot of resources wasted on health care by just eliminating it entirely. An added benefit would be a reduction in human population growth.
To really maximize environmental benefit, combine all three strategies – round up groups of people, confine them in small spaces, limit the amount of food and water provided and then eliminate care for any health consequences.
Environmental impact isn’t everything.
Hmmmm ,15 minute cities ?
Canada and other countries have stoped treating the terminal ill .
The pro abortion drug is found in most municipal water supply in the USA .
Don’t get me started on UK / EU farming .
I don’t think the hysteria about 15 minutes cities is warranted. It’s not an attempt to limit where people can go — just an attempt to not require people to drive for an hour to get to work, drive for half an hour to buy food,.drive for the three quarters of an hour to meet up with friends, drive for an hour to see the doctor, drive for half an hour to see a film, and so on. Much better if you can do all.of these things within a 15-minute walk, yes?
At their best, I even think 15 minute cities could localise at least some food, fibre and even fuel/energy production, making them an important stepping stone on the way to a small farm future. Of course, the nuance there is important; there’s a big difference between a 15-minute walk to your allotment with a stop off at a locally owned pub or café on the way back, and a 15-minute walk to a major supermarket with a stop at an international chain restaurant on the way back, and this nuance has a lot to do with whether 15-minute cities are even achievable on a sustainable basis.
Don’t be taken in by the scaremongering articles about 15-minute cities, though. They really aren’t an attempt to trap anyone anywhere.
I think Jonathan Swift had some similar proposals once upon a time.
Every cafco on the planet will rejoice the findings of this drivel . Every 5000 cow dairy using this drivel can claim they are saving the planet .
I don’t read the Guardian , any news source that begs for funding because it can’t sell its product to the public is wide open to outside financial influence ( depending on the size of the cheque )
Thanks for the further discussions. Yes, these ‘efficient CAFO’ studies are a nuisance – wrong questions, consumerist BAU assumptions, deckchairs on the Titanic. How to challenge them without being dismissed as a ‘green nostalgic’ is a perennial problem of mine. In historic farming systems, livestock were not deployed as mere maximisers of ‘egg product’ or its equivalent. But what did those old timers know, eh?
Agree with Walter and others on how terrible the Guardian is, or has become. The one time that I spoke face-to-face with a certain journalist from that publication, about ten years ago, he expressed his fears about how it was losing its radical edge. He’s still there of course, minus the radical edge…