The Rural Voice, 2005-04, Page 10"Our experience
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6 THE RURAL VOICE
Keith Roulston
Back to the basics
Keith
Roulston is
editor and
publisher of
The Rural
Voice. He
lives near
Bluth, ON.
Sometimes something that people
say sticks in your memory. I still
remember a remark by the late H.
Gordon Green in one of his radio
columns that must have been made
30 years ago.
The sage Green remarked that
there was so much pride in the "effic-
iency" of modern farming but when
he compared what he was seeing
then, with the farming of his youth,
he wondered. He noted that in his
boyhood the only energy imported to
his farm was a little oil for the lamp.
Everything that was sold from that
farm was a net gain in energy captur-
ed from the sun, the earth and the rain.
How much energy gain was there in
modern farming, he wondered?
Well, in Feeding the Future Stuart
Laidlaw provides an answer. He says
that in 1940 the average American
farm (and I'd guess the same was true
here) produced 2.3 calories of food
energy for every calorie of fossil fuel
energy it used while today, three
calories of fossil fuel are used for
every calorie of food produced. Are
these figures accurate? I don't know
for sure. Looking at how the
efficiency of modern farm production
has been accomplished, however,
they have at least a ring of truth.
Besides the obvious changes like
the use of powerful diesel engines to
power just about every piece of
equipment on the farm, the use of
chemical fertilizers and the intense
use of electricity, just look at the way
we raise livestock, particularly cattle.
Once cattle were one of the most
efficient mechanisms for creating
energy. Sunshine and rain produced
grass that cattle could eat though
humans couldn't. The cattle grew on
the grass and we then ate their meat
or their milk for energy. It was nearly
a 100 per cent net energy gain.
By the way we measure efficiency
today, however, this isn't efficient.
Now we keep the cattle in a barn or
feedlot and bring the feed to them.
We tailor their diets for the fastest
gain or to produce every last ounce of
milk they're capable of. Grass isn't
good enough so we truck in corn for
finishing cattle.
Laidlaw claims it takes eight kg.
of corn to produce one kg. of beef.
All that corn has to be planted,
fertilized, sprayed, harvested, dried,
ground and hauled to the feedlot. In
the end, it takes 1,035 litres of fuel to
get a steer to market and 35 calories
of fossil fuel energy to create one
calorie of beef, according to Laidlaw.
I'm not going to argue for, or
against, the accuracy of these figures.
I do know that efficiency is a factor
of what you choose to measure. If we
measured energy instead of dollars,
we'd get a totally different view of
what is efficient. If we ever get a real
energy crisis, we will measure energy
and then our current way of farming
might not look so good.
What fascinates me is that as the
energy inputs into agriculture grew,
as food production became less
energy-efficient, farm incomes fell.
The traditional explanation would be
that as they used more inputs, farmers
produced more, so we needed fewer
farmers, which meant each farmer
had to produce more and a vicious
circle started. While that's obvious, I
keep coming back too those figures
about the net creation of energy.
Doesn't it make sense that if food
production is really the creation of
energy for people, then if farmers are
producing less net energy — in fact
negative energy — they'd be
rewarded less?
Sometimes we do things a certain
way. We tinker now and then but we
never really look at the basics of what
we're doing. Maybe it's time to re-
examine food and farming from the
ground up — the equivalent of zero -
based budgeting. Maybe we need to
question if a food system that uses
more energy than it creates really
works. And if farmers were net
producers of energy, would they be
rewarded more?0