The barn is the heart of the Womerlippi Farm, because that's where the fertilizer (manure and winter bedding) is concentrated and processed.
This is in response to Anders article below, but it's also part of the current thread on the food crisis, oil prices, climate change, and my own musings on civil emergencies that result from climate change, particularly extreme weather.
The primary question is, what is the most ecologically efficient way to grow food? That's at the root of the current local food craze. It's also the problem with our current fossil-energy intensive food systems in the west, which we are still exporting rapidly to the developing world -- a very dangerous thing to do, given the oil price crisis. And it will be the key future problem in sustaining human life in the coming world of rapid climate change and associated extreme weather events.
I'm reminded of the tough lesson I learned from my forestry school advisor, Al McQuillan, who had a back-to-the-lander farm in Montana way back in the first back-to-the-land movement in the 70s. When I asked him why he gave it up, his reply was that he realized that if there ever was a food crisis, and he had food, then he wouldn't keep it very long because guys with more guns would come take it away. This is of course what is happening now in Burma, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Darfur, other places where there is not enough food for market or social provisioning to work well or fairly.
That single brutal answer to an otherwise harmless question was probably what got me started on a policy career because then I realized that even as an otherwise somewhat isolationist back-to-the-lander, I needed to live in a functioning, fair, democratic society where civil rights and rule of law were respected.
So my primary academic problem is not food, nor even climate change, but the ethics and morality of society as it relates to political power, law, the economy and economic distribution, the police powers of the state, and of course the military. This is of course the focus of the book my Quaker Institute for the Future co-authors and I have coming out soon.
Ecologically efficient food systems are thus only part of the problem. But they are important.
Let's be clear what is meant by ecological efficiency. The ecological economics position states that the ultimate resource is low entropy matter-energy, which for the lay person means sunlight, its renewable energy derivatives such as wind, wave or hydro power (all driven by sunlight), or fossil fuels (stored sunlight from millions of years ago) or nuclear fuels (stored fusion energy retained from the pre-sunlight Big Bang, which is of course where sunlight comes from.
So, operationally, all effectively renewable energy on planet earth comes from sunlight. So we need an agriculture sponsored energetically from sunlight, in which fossil fuels are a minor input, or no input at all.
There's no reason to try terribly hard to cut fossil fuels out of agriculture completely -- that's probably more than purist and not realistic, since even the humble shovel has to be made from smelted iron called steel which requires coal. But we need upwards of 95% of the energy of the food we consume to be embodied from sunlight, and we need it to be current sunlight, not stored fossil sunlight. If we could do this, we would at least disassociate the food crisis from the oil price crisis, and contribute to reducing the climate crisis by creating a more resilient agriculture as well as reducing climate emissions from food.
So we need more sunlight and less fossil fuel in food.
Now we've figured that out, lets explore the "local" and "organic" food concepts.
Local food would indeed contribute to increasing the proportion of sunlight energy embodied in food versus fossil energy if it meant reducing fossil fuel inputs to food. For deciding if this is indeed occurring we would need a comparative energy audit of individual food production systems, farm-by-farm, because farmers use such unique systems that we can't really tell just by looking at a local food item if there is much fossil energy embodied in it or not. Maine tomatoes out-of-season are probably really embodied heat oil, given that the hoop houses need to be heated. Even local AND organic food could have a lot of fossil energy if the organic fertilizers and organic feed for organic livestock were trucked from the midwest. Which they often are, by the way. It's very hard to get organic fertilizer in industrial quantities from Maine, for instance. There are very few suppliers. And in the case of livestock farms, organic feed is expensive and not very easy to get from Maine.
Does this mean that both "local food" and "organic" are red herrings as far as policy is concerned, that neither one clearly helps. I tend to think so. Although helpful, neither label, if "local food" is a label, is a guarantee that food contains primarily embodied sunlight.
What would be a sufficient guarantee? That's not really my research problem, since I don't study agriculture per se. I study policy, and am particularly worried about society and agriculture in the coming climate crisis, and would more likely advocate, for instance, that we begin to stockpile fossil fuel and fossil-fuel derived fertilizer and seed in suitable places as a hedge against the societal instability that could result from a combined food, oil, and extreme weather crisis, than I would advocate abandoning the use of fossil fuel fertilizer and fossil farm fuel.
But what I do notice, since I'm a hobby farmer as well as a policy wonk, is that you can't beat a big manure pile, properly turned, as energy-efficient fertilizer. And that the easiest way to turn my manure pile is not with my tractor, but with pigs and chickens. I notice how much better the soil is in our third summer on this farm than it was in our first. This is largely because we already turned several tons of composted animal bedding into the soil, never mind the winter rye.
I also notice how cheap hay is in Maine, and how easy it is to get at prices like $1.75 a square bale (if you're willing to pick it off the field and sling it yourself), or $25 a round bale (for Farmer Ward's stuff that the sheep love -- they can't eat enough of it).
Aimee and I, although MOFGA members, don't run a local food farm, nor an organic one. I used a little fossil-fuel derived industrial fertilizer to kick-start in-soil decomposition on our garden plot. And we buy imported grain feeds to supplement the local hay and grass the sheep eat. The pigs and chickens both get a grain subsidy. The tractor consumes about 30-40 gallons of diesel a year.
So the question is, how ecologically efficient is all this in combination?
This is a chicken-egg problem, so I'm not sure where to start. Try the garden. The garden gets the composted manure, about two tons a year, and to spread that around and turn it in takes about three to four gallons of diesel run through a 12-horse Kubota "pocket" tractor.
The composted manure came from the sheep's winter bedding, and is primarily poop, urine, and waste hay, which took a little tractor fuel and gas to get to the barn. The chickens have worked it over already, but most of the energy comes from the sunlight in the hay, which is a bulk local crop, and generally locally fertilized even when grown conventionally. The sheep eat the hay and what they waste becomes their bedding. We get the hay from farmers within 5-25 miles, depending on price, quality, and quantity.
Conventional farmers around here keep their hayfields fertile, if they bother about it at all, by occasionally "seeding through" with clover, and by rotating forage crops every six or so years with corn-silage, usually growing the flint corn after a good spread of lime, liquid dairy manure, and sewage sludge, mostly the first two. While the sewage sludge is nasty stuff, it has to go somewhere, and it is a local and energy-efficient fertilizer, and the least used fertilizer compared to clover and manure, and so not very much of it finds its way into the hay that is generally sold off the farm around here. So I think hay grown here in Waldo County is a pretty efficient basis for the farm energy budget and thus fertility. The sheep flock helps process and concentrate the energy in the hay as three-to four tons of fertilizer, more than we need, and also produce about 150-200 pounds of very good meat, which requires a subsidy of about 30 bags or 1500 pounds of commercial processed grain-and-alfafa feed. The embodied fossil energy in that feed is reflected in the increased price recently -- it has almost doubled in price.
The pigs are more efficient converters of grain to meat, doing about 30% to the sheep's 10%. They also eat kitchen waste, orchard waste, chicken poop, and garden waste, as well as helping to process and concentrate the sheep bedding. Two pigs will produce about 300 pounds of meat for about 20-30 sacks of grain and all the kitchen waste and orchard waste we can give them. (Pigs love apples. So do sheep.)
Chickens eat bugs, grass, and a little grain, about 5-8 bags a year.
If you think about it, then, our farm is run primarily on hay, secondarily on about 70 bags of imported grain, and thirdly on about 30 gallons of tractor fuel. It grows about 450 pounds of premium meat, about 150 dozen eggs, and we hope and expect this year to get over 1,000 pounds of herbs and veggies and 2-300 pounds of apples. Is this particularly ecologically efficient? Probably not particularly, as farms go. It is likely no better and no worse than most farms. But it's probably much, much more efficient than buying food from the supermarket. It also produces 90% of our winter fuel, as we are cutting firewood from the same land we use to raise sheep. That's a great efficiency there, easily equivalent to 1,000 gallons of heat oil. I have an idea to use sheep fleece, of which we get several hundred pounds, as household insulation, but we currently get yarn instead. Add these to the energy budget on the "black" side of the balance sheet, and we're definitely way ahead.
What do we need to work on? I think the main remaining inefficiency turns out to be the grain subsidy as currently contrived. It has a big embodied fossil fuel component. We use bagged feed, primarily corn-and-alfafa mixes that come from Blue Seed Feeds.
I think I need to find a way to buy and store a much more local grain in bulk to feed to sheep and pigs and chickens. At that point, I'd say we have it down and would be as about efficient as we could get without driving ourselves crazy trying to be pure.
Those of you who know me know just how unlikely it is I'd ever do that.
We're going to get this thing figured out
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