Back to the land

Following is a very worthwhile post from Freakonomics.

Although not clearly addressed in the post, it is again bringing into focus the difference between what is efficient and what is sustainable.  They are not the same thing.  Sustainable production of any sort should have built in redundancies that will tend to mitigate against maximizing output.

Local production is all about having lots of litte (redundant) sources of supply so that you are not putting all your eggs in one basket - so to speak.  I think that is an extremely worthwhile goal, but I also think we should stop kiddding ourselves into thinking there is no cost associated with it.

One possible trade off they did not seem to mention was to add more labor into the equation to trade off against lower inputs in other areas.  I suspect that this can be done.  If I had to point at an example I would suggest that the various small homestead farms (see all my blog links) probably have more output per area than the mass production facilities.   But they are not likely to be people efficient compared to the factory-food producers.  Some of the early agrarian societies produced a lot of food, they just didn't produce a lot of net food:  the people farming it ate it all up.

So one way to support our large population might be form more of us to go back to the land.  If food had more labor inputs involved the increased cost of food would certainly be an imputes to at least more urban gardening.  Of course going back to the land with an aging population is not easy.

The Inefficiency of Local Food
Steve Secton Freakonomics 14 November 2011 (hat tip: Big Picture)

Two members of Congress earlier this month introduced legislation advancing a food reform movement promising to help resolve the great environmental and nutritional problems of the early 21^st century. The intent is to remake the agricultural landscape to look more like it did decades ago. But unless the most basic laws of economics cease to hold, the smallholder farming future envisioned by the local farming movement could jeopardize natural habitat and climate change mitigation efforts, while also endangering a tenuous and temporary victory in the battle against human hunger...

In order to maintain current output levels for 40 major field crops and vegetables, a locavore-like production system would require an additional 60 million acres of cropland, 2.7 million tons more fertilizer, and 50 million pounds more chemicals. The land-use changes and increases in demand for carbon-intensive inputs would have profound impacts on the carbon footprint of our food, destroy habitat and worsen environmental pollution.

In order to maintain current output levels for 40 major field crops and vegetables, a locavore-like production system would require an additional 60 million acres of cropland, 2.7 million tons more fertilizer, and 50 million pounds more chemicals. The land-use changes and increases in demand for carbon-intensive inputs would have profound impacts on the carbon footprint of our food, destroy habitat and worsen environmental pollution.

(blogger is being uncooperative: thus the unusual quote format above)


As a secondary note, the blog post mentions that it is not particularly clear that local production is particularly green.  To the extent that green is equated with the efficient use of resources, that is a reasonable point.

Of course Wired has an article on this little guy (gal?) that might help as well:

Agricultural Droid (see article)

end of the road Round Up

An interesting video from GM Crops: Farmer to Farmer (ht: NC) that discusses the various problems that farmers are having with Round Up  (glyphosate).

Michael Hart, a conventional livestock family farmer, has been farming in Cornwall for nearly thirty years and has actively campaigned on behalf of family farmers for over fifteen years, travelling extensively in Europe, India, Canada and the USA.

In this short documentary he investigates the reality of farming genetically modified crops in the USA ten years after their introduction. He travels across the US interviewing farmers and other specialists about their experiences of growing GM

video link.

One of the points made frequently is that there is a very limited availability of alternative methods because the potential profits of the Round Up method squeezed out the research and development on the older methods.  The public Land Grant Universities have pretty much captured by big Ag and work for them.

The monopolistic practises are about what you have come to expect from a crony-capitalist systems that does its best to give as many advantages as possible to the large politically connected corporations.  You don't get much bigger than the agri-business corporations.

P&G and the hourglass economy

When trying to find out the real truth on matters it is often helpful to see how people actually invest and spend money.  Of course as our recent financial and real estate bubbles indicate, they are not perfect barometers.  But talk is talk, and the phrase "put your money where your mouth is" is one generally well understood.

In this case we are looking at the behaviour of large United States companies catering to our consumer economy. 

As Middle Class Shrinks, Procter & Gamble Aims High and Low

Ellen Byron, Wall Street Journal, 12 September 2011

For generations, Procter & Gamble Co.'s (P&G) growth strategy was focused on developing household staples for the vast American middle class.

Now, P&G executives say many of its former middle-market shoppers are trading down to lower-priced goods—widening the pools of have and have-not consumers at the expense of the middle.

That's forced P&G, which estimates it has at least one product in 98% of American households, to fundamentally change the way it develops and sells its goods. For the first time in 38 years, for example, the company launched a new dish soap in the U.S. at a bargain price.

P&G's roll out of Gain dish soap says a lot about the health of the American middle class: The world's largest maker of consumer products is now betting that the squeeze on middle America will be long lasting.

In the wake of the worst recession in 50 years, there's little doubt that the American middle class—the 40% of households with annual incomes between $50,000 and $140,000 a year—is in distress. Even before the recession, incomes of American middle-class families weren't keeping up with inflation, especially with the rising costs of what are considered the essential ingredients of middle-class life—college education, health care and housing. In 2009, the income of the median family, the one smack in the middle of the middle, was lower, adjusted for inflation, than in 1998, the Census Bureau says.

The article goes on to note other companies making the change:  H.J. Heinz Company catering more to the lower end, Saks Inc going even more upscale.

It ends on this sobering note:

"This has been the most humbling aspect of our jobs," says Ms. Jackson. "The numbers of Middle America have been shrinking because people have been getting hurt so badly economically that they've been falling into lower income."

Collapse of Empires: Ancient Kingdom of Somolia

I used to do more of these.  Since it has been a while, I will restate the intent of the exercise. 

Collapse of large societies (I am using a loose definition of empire) is viewed as an unusual, rare, historical event.   It is not.   If you speak of a collapsed Empire, most people will immediately recall Rome.  If pressed many will know about the Romans, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, and Mayans.   If you start talking about them, they might concede that the Russian Empire, one  of the most powerful in world history, collapsed at a societal level twice in the twentieth century alone.  This type of list would greatly extend the historical incidence from the rare to at least the somewhat uncommon category.

But that does not even start the list.  There are many many empires out there that dominated their little corner of the globe, occasionally with a rival or two, but none-the-less had pretty much their say of what went on in what today would expand beyond a number of countries.

So the point of exercise is to illustrate that large dominant societies regularly collapse.  Further, that the collapse is so severe that they are either completely forgotten, or difficult to retrace.

History of Somalia, Wikipedia

Ancient pyramid structures, tombs, ruined cities and stone walls such as the Wargaade Wall littered in Somalia are evidence of an ancient sophisticated civilization that once thrived in the Somali peninsula.  The findings of archaeological excavations and research in Somalia show that this ancient civilization had had an ancient writing system that remains undeciphered and enjoyed a lucrative trading relationship with Ancient Egypt and Mycenean Greece since at least the second millennium BC, which supports the view of Somalia being the ancient Kingdom of Punt. The Puntites "traded not only in their own produce of incense, ebony and short-horned cattle, but also in goods from other neighbouring regions, including gold, ivory and animal skins.”  According to the temple reliefs at Deir el-Bahari, the Land of Punt was ruled at that time by King Parahu and Queen Ati.

I was originally going to call the Empire in Question- Punt – but there is too much argument about the location of Punt, to be sure of its exact location.  We know there was something in Somalia that collapsed, and maybe it was Punt.

And that brings up the second point of these collapses, not only are they frequent, but they are often very complete.  In a few cases, the Empires that collapsed interacted with people who lived on and were able to record their existence,  occasionally left sufficient remains that we can piece together their story through archeology.  But many other times all we have are some very impressive ruins, and no real story at all.  There was this cool place Punt.  The Egyptians knew about it.  Maybe it was in Somalia.   Not a lot to say for a culture that built pyramids and temples, and based on the recorded trading data, obviously dominated their section of the world commercially if not militarily.

Where is Punt, Nova

So elusive is the answer that, since the mid-19th century, a procession of scholars have, like erudite dart-throwers, stippled the map of the Red Sea area with their often strongly argued proposals for where Punt lay. (Refer to map below throughout this article.) Syria. Sinai. Southern Arabia. Eastern Sudan. Northern Ethiopia. Somalia. Kenya. Each was Punt, insists this or that Egyptologist. New papers continue to appear regularly that try to put this question to bed once and for all. So far, all have failed.

Egyptians traveling to Punt