Guest Post by Ol’ Remus
Essays are like grand juries, there’s no cross examination or exculpating facts. So it is with the current alarms about bad planting weather and a global famine. Writers like to cite big numbers, but how significant is the loss of, say, a million acres of row crops, for instance? Is it a national calamity or a manageable excursion? How about five million acres?
How many productive acres are lost to weather in an average year? How much of that acreage would have produced an unwanted surplus? Are the numbers reliable or are they as manipulated as the employment numbers? How close are the afflicted farmers to the crop insurance breakpoint? Is DC still paying farmers not to grow food? How much are we giving away as foreign aid?
Then there are the readers of such essays. I’m an unreasoning paranoid about food and I’m not alone in this. Some essays seem calculated to rattle me, or it could be the writer is more paranoid about food than I am. Either way I’m left wanting to take a tin can and go looking for edible roots or some esoteric berry that kept the early trappers alive … or a “manager’s special” at the supermarket, so six months hence I can snicker at articles for the unprepared: “Twelve Surprising Edibles in Your House Right Now—leather upholstery isn’t all there is”.
There’s bad news from elsewhere on the planet. Here are the commonly cited doomer facts about east Asia, from
Chriss Street at American Thinker:
• China’s food supply is being imperiled as new reports warn that up to 50 percent of China’s 440 million pigs are now at risk from African Swine Fever infection.
• The African Swine Fever has jumped the Chinese border to over 52 cities in Vietnam, leading to the culling of more than 2 million pigs.
• The Fall Armyworm has spread to 220,000 acres in Southern China, ruining primarily corn and some sugarcane crops.
Meanwhile, back in the USA, I understand seriously delayed planting can’t be made up by even the best of weather, but no, African Swine Fever in China and a bad start to the growing season in midwestern US is not a global food disaster. Yet. The most we can say is the food supply will be smaller. How much smaller can’t yet be known but we’re getting some good indications. For one instance, the Chicago Tribune reports “less than half the normal amount of corn has been planted in Illinois”:
Illinois, the nation’s second-largest producer of corn, is off to the slowest start to a planting season on record, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As of June 2, Illinois farmers have only been able to sow corn seed in 45% of the acreage dedicated to the crop, 53% below the five-year average. Of the seeds that have been laid, only 32% have emerged, a 59% decline compared with the past five years.
In the worst case, next year could be a repeat of—let’s call it The Mud Bowl. The reason is simple, cool air can’t hold as much water as warm air, so it rains instead of passing over. The undoctored numbers say there’s been global cooling for the last couple of decades.
This is showing up in other ways too. The climate site Watts Up With That has posted an article,
Charles Smith at Of Two Minds sees an up side if food production becomes a long term priority.
This wonderfulness could happen in a few years but there’s no long term without the short term. Expect spot shortages and rising prices. Be aware of interrelations and plan ahead, corn and alfalfa prices will have knock-on effects for dairy and beef for instance. The slaughter of hundreds of millions of pigs in Asia means they’ll be importing pork at almost any price from every source in the world. At best it means high prices.
Stay alert, watch for a serious general food scarcity. Develop local sourcing and self-sourcing. Put back a generous stock of long term, high calorie foods. If it all tanks from here, those with an insufficient larder will learn “food first” the hard way, along about January.
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I wonder how much of the midwest flooding is due to geoengineering?
Five years ago, I bought 11 acres in a pristine Cascadia valley bottom, with two-year-round creeks emptying into a 4-acre wetland, spilling into one crystal clear creek that joins a river ¼ mile away.
There’s no industry, agriculture crops, or anything else that could potentially affect the environment. There are no cell towers on any of the surrounding ridges. The only phones that work are land lines.
When I bought it, the wetland teemed with insects, birds, fish and frogs. A week ago, I laid on my back on a bed of moss and lichen that covered a 6 foot-diameter old-growth log felled over the mouth of the creek that leaves the wetland. It was late afternoon, an hour from dusk. I didn’t move for a half hour. Not one insect flew by me or crawled over me. I saw no birds except a neighbor’s ducks and geese on the far edge of the wetland. No fish roiled the glass-smooth water. Not one frog or cricket was heard.
There wasn’t one cloud in the sky, but it was hazed over with the dispersed ‘exhaust’ from jets flying high overhead. In my half-hour of waiting for signs of wetland life, I saw several more leaving their streaks above me. I’ve no doubt at all that whatever it is we are being sprayed with is a big negative for the entire planet. I’ve seen a total of three honey bees in the clover that covers my yard.
Stupid man, ignorant of Mother Nature’s dwindling patience with our heinous hazing, will never see the correlation between our willful despoiling and her angry response. Gaia is a sentient being, host to us all, and will not allow her shepherds to shit in their hat much longer.
Nobody is prepared for a pole inversion.
Are you prepared for a pole inversion?
I am more than willing to sell shares in a farm that has not be adversely affected by any of the above mentioned agricultural disasters.
Remember AIDS? Or Ebola, the first time, not this time?
Fear sells. Even NPR had a piece the other day about Progressives concerned over climate change turning into preppers- not bad preppers like those right winger survivalist types, but good ones who love progress.
All fear all the time.
I wouldnt say it’s time to be “afraid” just yet, but the ag situation does deserve attention and an appropriate level of concern. So much of our food supply has been foolishly linked to the Big Ag paradigm, that a disruption of this magnitude is going to cause some pain by later this year, guaranteed. Hopefully, this is a clarion-call for local food and more resilient food systems like what you operate. Lots more grass-fed meat instead of just grain into feed. Greenhouse production of food and big home gardens. Restorative agriculture instead of chemical dependence.
Yes, but several things to be concerned about are missing from this article…First, the nutritional content of food has declined over the years as topsoil has eroded and been depleted of many minerals..Topsoil depth in some areas of the US has declined 90%… The Scientific American ran an article on this years ago..Oranges, for example, have only 20% of the nutritional content they had 80 years ago..This could account for some of the IQ decline in the US and Europe…Second, the water aquifers in the US are in precipitous decline, and some areas in the Great Plains are already not farmable …Third, as African populations continue to explode, the mantra of America and Canada feeding the world will be pure suicide…Fourth, if temperatures continue to decline in this major Solar Minimum, crop yields will decline everywhere as growing seasons shorten…
Not sure who said it first, but “the cure for high prices is high prices”. If the damn government would just leave things alone, shortages would be short-lived and manageable. Instead, fedgov is turning a substantial portion of the corn crop into neoprene-eating ethanol and Trump’s tariff’s are putting a lot of farmer’s out of business. Those are just for starters. We easily spend two to three times as much as last year on groceries and we’ve been cutting back on “luxury” items.
Everything you said made sense except your last sentence. I buy most of our groceries. I know what things cost – almost to the penny. Prices are up 10% at most. Beef is up the most, but even that isn’t anywhere near a double.
I bought 4 pears and an avocado yesterday.. cost me $8.99.
Here in Mex that would be under $1
I’ve been calling for food shortages for a while now. Empires don’t do well during Solar Grand Minimums. I’m half killing myself gardening but at least I’ll be able to grow some food when it counts. I can even have a few chickens.
Dan ,hit it out of the park.If the governments of the world would just get out of the way. Food production would be so much better. Just ask Hardfarmer . Better yet I’m going through a Department of Defense security check so I really wish they get out of my way. Man they all ready know everything but want more.I don’t know what else I can give them. I probably should just say the Hell with it and put Stucky down as a reference.
Oh, you beat me to it.
And yet now Trump is pushing for 15% ethanol, so what little corn gets planted, will end up in our gas tanks. Way to “drain the swamp” while lining the pockets of the criminal corn cartel.
Producing Ethanol, and raising corn in general, is hard on the land and unproductive…The whole ethanol scam is very costly..
Not to mention BTU is way less than gasoline. So we get screwed 10 different ways. Scum politicians. You too trumpster. And 1800 gallons per pound to raise a beef to market age.
So we are running short on food and importing disease infected people and allowing them to wonder among the American population and our economic structure is about as convoluted as anything could get as it circles the drain !
We as a nation should be strictly enforcing border control with deadly force while stockpiling food for American citizens by improving our production and storage methods .
Rev_6:6 And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.
The agriculture situation is worse than the author describes… almost 1/3 of the corn crop this year wont get planted, or if they do manage to get it in the ground, bc it’s now 4 weeks too late in the season to get full photosynthesis production, it wont be worth hardly anything. Soybeans have a more forgiving window to get planted, but time is running out on them too, and the bean crop is only 50% in the ground. Our reliance on the “Big Ag” model is going to bite us in the butt very hard this year. Viva la Grand Solar Minimum, I guess.
Food shortages are a big problem in many countries now undergoing Collapse. In this edition of the Collapse Morning Wake-Up Call, Monsta & I discuss the problems in Sudan and Venezuela, among other things.
RE
Grand Solar Minimum. This ain’t new. Well, I guess it is in our blank slate, biology doesn’t matter, laws of nature don’t matter, free markets and limited government fix everything culture we live in. Good luck with that.
I don’t need no stinking corn. Not for meat, not for gas, not for nothing.
Commercial Corn production should be banned…raising sweet corn in your backyard is ok…
Growing livestock is often the worst use of land for maximizing food quantities. Losing pigs in China will not starve them, as pigs are inefficient as a source of food, compared to growing say grain. I suspect that imported grain is used to grow many of their pigs. Loss of imported grain would be a different matter, however. The flow on from issues in the US could be substantial.
That’s just not true. Livestock are an essential part of soil creation above and beyond their value for protein. CAFO’s (where feed is brought in from afar and waste is stored rather than turned into soils) are the problem.
It’s not the animals, it’s their management.
What part is not true? Any grain fed animal is fractionally as beneficial food-wise compared to just feeding the grain to humans. The pigs in China are fed soybeans in many instances, which is an inefficient use of soybeans as human food.
And there are other ways to improve soil other than by using animal manure.
Each step of conversion is increasingly less efficient. Sunlight to plant to animal to human is less efficient than sunlight to plant to human. It is self-evident.
Except:
1. you can’t grow grain in sufficient quantities to feed the world without massive industrial (oil) inputs
2. Animals are much better at converting plant biomass to useable energy and nutrients for humans than humans can.
Yes, the space needed is much greater for animal crops than for plant crops. But the susceptibility of humans to disease increases with both grain consumption and population density.
So the problem here is population overshoot exacerbated by cheap abundant and portable oil energy. Since that is over as well as the problem of this finely tuned global economy being susceptible to disruptions (solar forced climate change in this case).
The solution: don’t worry, nature has a cure for population overshoot.
Make sure you and yours are among “the fittest”. How is up to you.
Llpoh, Farmer is talking about how cows are used in a rotation to graze pastures. The management and timing is key: let the grass grow up a foot or 2, the cows mow it down (dont let them graze too much), and then move to another pasture and let it regrow. This system is amazing at how well it gets grasses to grow root-mass, and this in turn creates a lot of soil organic matter and stimulates an explosion of soil microorganisms, which are the key to releasing nutrients in soil. Now, Im not sure about Farmer’s specific protocalls for this, but many operations will also run chickens (or other critters) after the cows to spread manure and clean-up, thus adding more nutrients to the soil. But even just using cows alone can make marginal land highly productive in a relatively short period of time. The reason this works so well is it mimics nature’s way of using large herbivores in grasslands moving thru an area, chomping the grass down, then moving on quickly due to predator pressure. It’s what built the incredible soils in the Great Plains of North America, and it works very well in almost any environment that gets more than say 15-20″(ish) of rain per year, and can also be modified to more arid areas, as long as grass can be supported. Just alter the animal density and timing to compensate for the weather & climate.
Listen, I don’t want to show any disrespect, but you are either being contentious or you are simply uninformed.
There is nothing even remotely close to animal manure for increasing tilth, nothing. The great herds of animals are gone, we’ve replaced them with domesticated herds and their inputs are still essential to soil health. You know I oppose feeding ruminants grain and there are more than adequate wastes created by humans as a byproduct of their consumption to feed pigs without relying 100%on soybeans or corn. And when you talk about efficient transfer of energy from the Sun to humans you are going to lose about 99% of the population in terms of using that criteria for food choices. Just saying.
We are doing agriculture wrong. It isn’t about industrializing a natural process that makes it wrong, it’s doing it without regard to the consequences.
HSF – seriously, I understand you are committed to this stuff. But as I mentioned a while ago, I spent some time on large farms recently. Those folks are pretty up on what they do, with respect to maximizing output while minimizing damage. And no way in a gazillion years could cows be raised on that land as efficiently as they are growing oats, soybeans, legumes, etc. , with respect to caloric and protein output. It is not possible. The conversion factor from plant to animal means it is impossible. Also, these folks return huge amounts of plant material to the soil, minimally damage the soil, etc.
In the long run, as you say, maybe it is necessary to do it as you indicate. If so, then billions of people cannot be supported. There will be a die off. But if billions are to be fed, feeding them animal diets where the animals are fed grains is probably not going to be an option. It is simply too inefficient.
You are looking at small scale. Small scale given the world population is problematic.
Some land does not have the soil depth & rainfall needed for crops. Visiting a farm does not provide information that translated over to grazing land. The best use of grazing land is free range grazing, using rotation described above.
Some of the dust in the dust bowl was caused by people trying to convert grazing land to crop land.
It’s only a problem when farming is done by a fraction of the people. That’s where the problem is rooted. You cannot industrialize a natural system without a cascade of downstream effects, most of which are highly destructive. Efficiency in Nature is not ours to determine. Nature understands far more contingencies than we will ever dream of.
Me being contentious is always a possibility, too.
Agree, as long as you are not raising corn to feed them, which is what happens in commercial ag…Corn is a very destructive crop, and very inefficient…
Humans need and want animal protein, our bodies are engineered for it…But you don’t get the same calories, net, out of livestock that you would get from what they are fed…
Grains weren’t much of a factor in early American diet. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that grains were planted widely enough to become a significant part of anyone’s diet. Most ‘bread’ was cornbread and grain flour for biscuits and cakes was a luxury.
Human digestion/physiology isn’t geared for a lot of carbohydrates, which is the bulk of American land whale diet today. Roughage is entirely missing from most ‘refined food’ diets. The enzymes found in meat and fat are not found in plants.
The generations before mine relied on livestock, particularly pork, as salt or smoke-‘cured’ staples through the winter. Fat and meat were combined into pemmican by natives to supplement the roots, nuts and berries stored for winter. Animal fat was essential for survival. Animals hunted in winter have no fat. Our brains are 60% fat and animal fat is needed for developing brains. When I was a lad, farming/ranching families routinely gave the ‘breadfruits’ to their children for their superior nutritional content. Fat-heavy gravy came with every meal.
The arguments about caloric equivalents are silly. The ‘nutrients’ available from plants will never replace the proteins and animal fats needed for health if one exercises strenuously every day, as agrarian life requires. After two days of hard work clearing mountainous jungle in Mexico, my body is screaming for a rare steak, even with generous eggs and bacon breakfasts.
The average American cube-dweller who exerts no more effort than is required to breathe, can easily survive on GMO corn flakes until diabetes rots their feet.
Very well put.
Author: All your ‘snippets’ are anectodal shit – not facts, nothing to compare against historical averages and of course, alluding to the global warming hoax as the culprit. Of which, cardon dioxide is the guily party.
How about we (USA) stop the ethanol bullshit and grow crops for human/animal consumption? What could be more assinine than adding 10% ethanol to gasoline and then subsidize the cost at 30 cents per gallon – TAX PAYERs again on the hook.
If the ‘managed’ ecomony of the CHI-COMS – or elsewhere – fails they can import our surpluses.
We will all see when we go to buy food in the future. The solar minimum is going to be a game changer. The media is still pushing c02 as our problem.
GOOD! Food shortages are great. Look how great no food is working for https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-food/venezuelans-report-big-weight-losses-in-2017-as-hunger-hits-idUSKCN1G52HA
Think of the health care savings………
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/u-s-farms-are-facing-their-worst-crisis-in-a-generation-and-now-here-comes-another-monster-storm?mc_cid=3df4aed525&mc_eid=bca42eb64f