$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'F')irst a little perspective on modern farming (pardon my 4th grade cyphers):
Field Corn has 2400 calories per pound x 2,000lb/ton x 4 ton/acre (
this example says 6 tons/acre on irrigated land in central california but we'll be conservative) = 19,200,000 cal/ac
/ 2000 cal/day/person = 9,600 person/days =
26 years worth of calories for one person from one acre of modern corn!According to the same paper it takes 28 gallons of diesel to farm that corn or just over 1 gallon per year to produce a year's worth of calories!
Somewhere else below it says it take 30 gallons of gasoline equivalent to make fertilizer for one acre of corn (I'm running out of time) so lets say that's 3 gallons of FFs per year per person plus another 3 gallons for milling and transport for a total of 6 gallons FF for a year's worth of calories.
That's less than 3 days of per/capita FF use in America, 5 in the rest of the OECD, outside the OECD it's about a month's worth of FF consumption. If you think my allocation of FFs is too low, double it, tripple it, raise it as much as you want.
THe net effect is modern farming is incredibly efficient and there is no real alternative at this level of population, I've heard all the claims that this guru or that one is 33 thousand times more efficient growing tomatoes in a 3x3 garden but the comparison is silly.
What will happen in the short term is the ethanol boondoggle wil reintroduce grass based protein. Today grassfed beef it is a niche market and hugely overpriced (in the US) but CAFO feeding of lightweight steers in grow-yards will largely go by the wayside and the finishing period wil get shorter and shorter as demand for ethanol here and food prices rise everywhere.
Consumption of dairy, eggs, pork raised on grain will fall and dairy and beef will be raised more and more on grass. Grazing of course reduces phosphate and potassium use by 98% in cattle because P&K is not volatile when "recycled".
So...
There is no reason to imagine that modern farming will ever go back to the scythe - we aren't going to forget how to make a grain drill and combine even if it's pulled by a team of oxen. Certainly we won't forget so soon to think land will be taken from the most productive use and returned to the least.
But, as pointed out above, protein
will return to grass and this will be the outlet for those eliminated from the 9-5 economy. Today I'd say there are hundreds of thousands of acres of small scale acreage suitable for grazing but not for large scale row cropping. Some may have become overgrown or are marginally usable for crops today and soon will be ruined for tilling. Today grass fed beef is not competitive with feedlot beef in quality but as corn is increasingly burned in ICEs the price will rise to a point it will again be the norm for the average guy. After all, he won't be eating feedlot raised beef fillet, he'll be eating hamburger -
on a good day.
ftp://ftp.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petro ... d_text.htmhttp://seekingalpha.com/article/210551- ... n-plummetshttp://coststudies.ucdavis.edu/files/CornSV2008.pdfhttp://green.autoblog.com/2007/03/01/mo ... logist-pu/http://phosphorusfutures.net/peak-phosphorushttp://www.waldeneffect.org/blog/Calori ... ous_foods/http://www.fapri.missouri.edu/outreach/ ... rsions.pdfhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fu ... gy_balancehttp://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourc ... fertilizer To bad you can't live on calories alone. How do you replace the topsoil lost by monoculture? Modern farming is no more viable than Fiat currencies in the long run.