Peak oil is so last year. Now we can worry about peak everything: peak food, peak soil, peak fertilizer, even peak bees.
Then there’s peak fertilizer, or more precisely peak phosphate rock. Phosphorus is a critical ingredient of fertilizer, and it is the eightfold increase in the use of fertilizers that has enabled us to triple food production worldwide from about the same area of land in the past 60 years.
At the moment we are mining about 200 million tonnes of phosphate rock a year, and the global reserve that could be mined at a reasonable cost with current technology is estimated at about 16 billion tonnes. At the current level of production it won’t run out entirely for 80 years, but the increasing demand for fertilizers to feed the growing population means that phosphate production is rising fast.
As with peak oil, the really important date is not when there are no economically viable phosphate rock reserves left, but when production starts to fall. Peak phosphate is currently no more than 40 years away — or much less, if fertilizer use continues to grow. After that, it’s back to organic fertilizers, which mainly means the urine and feces of 10 billion or 12 billion human beings and their domesticated animals. Good luck with that.
Peak soil is a trickier notion, but it derives from the more concrete concept that we are “mining” the soil: degrading and exhausting it by growing single-crop “monocultures,” using too much fertilizer and irrigating too enthusiastically, all in the name of higher crop yields.
“We know far more about the amount of oil there is globally and how long those stocks will last than we know about how much soil there is,” said John Crawford, director of the sustainable systems program in Rothamsted Research in England. “Under business as usual, the current soils that are in agricultural production will yield about 30 per cent less … by around 2050.”
The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 25 per cent of the world’s soils that are currently under cultivation are severely degraded, and another eight per cent moderately degraded. (Even “moderately degraded” soil has lost half its capacity to store water.) And the only way to access new, undamaged soil is to deforest the rest of the planet.
All of which brings us to the issue of peak food. And here the concept of “peak” undergoes a subtle modification, because it no longer means “maximum production, after which yields start to fall.” It just means “the point at which the growth in production stops accelerating”: it’s the peak rate of growth, not actual peak production. But even that is quite ominous, if you think about it.
During the latter part of the 20th century, food production grew at around 3.5 per cent per year, comfortably ahead of population growth, but the dramatic rise in crop yields was due to new inputs of fertilizers and pesticides, much more irrigation, and new “green revolution” crop varieties. Now those one-time improvements have largely run their course, and global food production is rising at only 1.5 percent a year.
Population growth has slowed too, so we’re still more or less keeping up with demand, but there are signs that food production in many areas is running up against what researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in a report last year called “a biophysical yield ceiling for the crop in question.” Production of the food in question stops rising, then may even fall — and extra investment often doesn’t help.
The peak in this context is an early warning that there will eventually be a complete cessation of growth, possibly followed by an absolute decline. Peak maize happened in 1985, peak rice and wild fish in 1988, peak dairy in 1989, peak eggs in 1993, and peak meat in 1996. (The numbers come from a recent report by scientists at Yale, Michigan State University and the Helmholtz Centre in Germany in the journal Ecology and Society).
More recent peaks were vegetables in 2000, milk and wheat in 2004, poultry in 2006 and soya bean in 2009. Indeed, 16 of the 21 foods examined in the Ecology and Society report have already peaked, and production levels have actually flattened out for key regions amounting to 33 per cent of global rice and 27 per cent of global wheat production.
So we are already in trouble, and it will get worse even before climate change gets bad. There are still some quick fixes available, notably by cutting down on waste: more than a third of the food that is grown for human consumption never gets eaten.
But unless we come up with some new magic bullets, things will be getting fairly grim on the food front by the 2030s.
paulo1 on Sat, 7th Feb 2015 8:18 am
Saw Gynne Dyer give a speech at a local high school I worked at. It was during the time of the Iraq war. I asked hime if he thought the war was about oil and future oil supplies? He resonded that it was not, that it was about the political aspirations of the Bush neo-cons who actaully thought they were improving the world.
He was full of shit then, and is still up to the brim. Long before ‘peak food’ hits the table, (pun intended), the decline in affordable oil will tighten the screws on decline and hasten a new way of living including how we grow our food and what we permit to be wasted.
In our house we waste 0% food. It can be done at all steps of production and sales if so required. Economics and affordability will show us the way.
In our house spoiled food goes to chickens in addition to scraps. Trimmed and dodgy vegetables also head their way. All manner of scraps inculding tea bags and coffee grounds head for the compost piles if unsuitable for chickens. If I had a grocery store connection or a friend with a restaurant I would raise pigs. It is all a matter of scale and necessity, and in a downturn necessity and hunger trumps convenience and waste.
Davy on Sat, 7th Feb 2015 9:16 am
Paulo, my approach also to food and 100% utilization. It has been a challenge with the woman and kids. Not that they waste that much but they are not obsessed like me. There is a medium I know is acceptable. Good post Paulo.
ghung on Sat, 7th Feb 2015 10:14 am
While I certainly agree that industrial agriculture is in trouble and that feeding 7+ billion humans sustainably will be virtually impossible using current methods (or any method for that matter), I’ve lowered ‘peak honey bees’ and peak phosphates on my list of concerns, locally. I brought peak phosphate up in a course I took recently, and the instructor, a quite capable and realistic FSA agent, pulled some data out of his hat; soil samples from a nationwide grouping going back 20 years. Seems that phosphates aren’t depleted as rapidly as other nutrients, and a majority of phosphate can be returned to the soil if the plant waste matter is reincorporated. Virtually all soil samples show that phosphates have been over-applied. My own soil samples (done later) also indicated that our farm has an abundance of phosphate. For most crops, I shouldn’t need to apply phosphates for years, if ever, if managed well. Nitrogen and potassium were either borderline or OK. The main thing they recommended we apply was lime, since our soil acidity has dropped significantly, likely due to acid rain and sulphur from burning coal. That said, I keep a stockpile of NPK in the shed. I got 30 bags (17-17-17) in a going-out-of-business sale a couple of years ago for $5/bag. That’s enough to meet our personal needs for at least a couple of decades. May be worth something in trade or barter as well.
As for honey bees (non-native) we’ve had a die-off over the last ten or more years, and native pollinators moved right in and have done a fine job, some I’m not sure I ever noticed before. In other words, yields of insect-pollinated varieties seem unaffected by a loss of honey bees in my area. After several years of seeing few or no honey bees, last year they returned somewhat. Seems we have at least one wild colony nearby. We used to keep bees, and may again, (the bee keeper across the ridge gave up), but any worries I’ve had about providing non-native pollinators on the place are on hold, for now at least.
If honey prices continue to rise, I may get back into bee keeping since we can produce a fine crop of sourwood honey; highly sought after when in season. Having the wax may also prove beneficial in trying times.
Makati1 on Sat, 7th Feb 2015 7:43 pm
Ghung, we are exporting all of our minerals to the oceans of the world. How much actually gets recycled today? Some farms still spread manure, if they raise animals, but most are seed crops using commercial NPK and then canning it, selling it, eating it, and then it goes into the rivers/oceans by way of treatment plants. (About 80% of the UFSA population are hooked to commercial sewage systems shipping nutrients, vitamins and minerals out to sea and poisoning that food source.)
Yes, we have reached peaks in most of the resources we need to survive as a species. So, buckle up and don’t promise your grand kids a life they will never have.