Ecology and sustainability in food production

This is certainly a huge topic in itself and in this posting I’ll just try to outline my basic views. 

 What are the gravest ecological problems linked to food production? I think we should consider at least the following in no particular order: 

• agriculture is too oil-driven 
• depletion and destruction of soil 
• chemicalisation of food production 
• nutrition leak into the environment 
• loss of biodiversity in the food system 
• loss of biodiversity in the nature affected by food production
• gmo’s
• logistics  

Ok, so we have more material there than just for one posting. Let’s start with oil and come to the other topics at a later point. 

There has been a lot of talk of peak-oil in recent times. We are finding less and less of new sources of oil while the global consumption is still increasing. This is a problem for the whole society and specifically for food production which is highly dependent on oil. The biggest driver of ”efficient” modern agriculture is nitrogen fertilizers which usually give the biggest increases in yield. Nitrogen is available in abundance in the atmosphere as nitrogen gas N2 but it requires a lot of energy to bind it into ammonium and nitrate that are usable to plants. If I recall correctly it requires 1,5 kg of oil to bind 1 kg of nitrogen from the atmosphere. The two other main components of fertilizers: kalium and phosphorus are mined and also require huge amounts of energy to be transformed into easily soluble chemical fertilizers. So running modern agriculture requires huge amounts of energy. 

Some might say that peak-oil is not here yet, but that is beside the point. I am a believer in Gaia, the story of the geological evolution of earth. To make it short, earth was not like this bilions of years ago - which is pretty obvious. The evolution of earth required going through several processes that transformed the atmosphere and earth itself and thereby enabled the next form of life to evolve. One part of the evolution was binding excess carbondioxide away from the atmosphere actually stockpiling it under layers of earth in the form of coal, oil and gas. These were amazing processes that took millions of years and that made the life-forms as we know them now possible. Now man-kind is doing its best to reverse the process and put the deposited coal back into the atmosphere as carbondioxide. We have all heard what the problems are. Our oil-driven socielty and our oil-driven agriculture as a part of it is impossible to sustain. The fossil energy sources must be left in the earth if we want to avoid serious consequences. 

What are the alternatives? One is obvious: nitrogen binding by the plants themselves - or to be more precise by the symbiotic bacteria in the root system in many species of plants. The best known are the leguminous plants like clover, alfa-alfa, beans, peas etc. And there are many others including many species of trees. This is of course an integral part of organic farming. You need to have a crop rotation that includes nitrogen binding plants. In the temperate region - like in Finland -  you would usually use red clover or - a little more south - alfa-alfa, which are extremely efficient nitrogen binders. How do they do it? They -as all plants - use photosynthesis thereby binding solar energy into sugars, part of which they ”give” to the nitrogen-binding bacteria in their root-system in exchange for soluble nitrogen. So biological nitrogen fixation is solar energy! On a very local level! Instead of using fossil energy to bind nitrogen we should use biological nitrogen fixation.  

Of course there are other parts of the food system that currently also use fossil fuels. Tractors and other machinery, drying grain, cooling and freezing etc. In the old times horse-power was literally produced with hay and oats - i.e. feeding horses which were used as the dragging-power on farms. In a country like Finland it was a huge proportion of the acreage that was used to feed horses (1/4 of the field area?). So does it make sense to produce oil by growing rapeseed with chemical fertilizers? I don't think so. Probably you use more energy producing the rapeseed oil than you get. The gross energy production in conventional farming might be bigger than in organic but there is no net energy produced whatsoever. It is only possible because of agricultural subsidies. How does it work for producing ethanol from corn in more favorable farming conditions, I don't know? I doubt if there is any net energy produced even there. Correct me if I am wrong.

I'm just writing what is my understanding at the moment. If I would have to check all the details I wouldn't write anything. So if something is not correct please comment. 

General ideas

Ok, so I have been thinking of this for a few days without doing anything. Quite a big topic. I'll cover some basic thoughts in the following:

Language: I suppose in these global times it is going to be English. It's not my mother tongue so you'll have to excuse me for misusing the language. Of course the anglophones need to understand that there are a lot of other languages out there and not all relevant discussions are in English. I hope people from all languages can participate and I apologize for not choosing your language (well - I'm not writing in Finnish either).

Knowledge base: I am an agronomist by education but most of my career I have been an entrepreneur in the organic food business, lately mostly in international trade. So I am by no means the best expert to tackle the problems in question. But my background should mean that I can avoid crude misconceptions about food production and my business background should mean that I understand also some of the manufacturing  and business part of food. I have no experience at all about food production in developing countries but I have been interested in that topic since the times I studied agronomy and followed related subjects keenly. Anyway, food production in Finland represents an other extreme compared to conditions in the tropics. Also politics is not a strong area for me although this topic is highly political.

I have given this quite a lot of thought over the years and I have tried to follow some of the discussions: But certainly I must be unaware of a lot of ongoing discussions and research. I hope to spur more discussion as I go - part of it on this site - and to learn more. I will try to follow a philosophy of just writing what I think is true and correcting the facts later. The scope is simply so wide that I cannot check all the facts. Of course I might get it wrong but hopefully I will be corrected.

Organics: I have a background in organics so I certainly am somewhat biased but I am by no means claiming that organics as we know it today is the solution to global food crises. I became interested in biodynamics and organics already in the late 1970's before my studies and my main interest as a youngster was in the holistic way of thinking, ecology and ethics. I was not that interested in health apart from thinking that it is crazy to think that eating pesticide residues and additives is good for you.

I'll cover my basic thoughts on ecology and sustainability in the next posting and ethics and health in following after that.

Guest Book

This is the Guest Book for this site. You can post here any general comments or messages that are not directly linked to a specific posting - or just say hello.

Thank you for your feed-back!

This is the first post

please comment on the idea!