APPGOPO and Soil Association

[mobbsey]

For those of you who went to the APPGOPO meeting the other day, is it me or did the talk given by Gundula Azeez not really relate to the gravity of the information in the slides? (listen to http://www.appgopo.org.uk/events/06_110 ... aazeez.mp3 and see http://www.appgopo.org.uk/events/07_250 ... aazeez.ppt)

The idea that we can avoid the problems with food supply by switching to organic production can't, in my view, be substantiated given the wider effects of declining energy supplies (e.g., related to the question that I asked, that thew alternatives have a lower net energy and so the level of decline has to be assessed as an exponential, not a linear, trend). Instead we have to re-evaluate the whole system of food production, processing and supply, moving not to more "local" production but to more "personal" production.

Any other comments? (or am I just being overly critical?)

[biffvernon]

moving not to more "local" production but to more "personal" production.

Can you expand on that, please?

[emordnilap]

mobbsey: the first link doesn't work and the second! Please don't soil (hah) my screen posting Microsoft-type links!

[Adam1]

My impression is that the Soil Association are still transitioning their thinking. You've got Patrick Holden who definitely gets it and who is actively trying to change the S.A. but the new ideas are probably still filtering through the organisation.

[fifthcolumn]

personal vs local.

Well not to be facetious or anything but let me guess which one uses more energy?
A. Driving to Tesco's to buy some onions from south africa
OR
B. Walking out to the garden and pulling some out of the soil.

Of course it will work.
The question is: will it feed us completely, given that we have a population 11X bigger than the pre-industrial pop?

Not likely.
We will STILL need to import loads of food or else we will be eating our sizeable population of OAPs.

[kenneal - lagger]

There will have to be a lot more personal production because we will need more manpower (sorry person power) to produce the food organically and without fossil fuel power. There will be a lot of people looking for new jobs as the old fossil fuel powered jobs go, so more people will be available to grow food manually. Also those who have lost their jobs won't have the money to buy their food as it will be more expensive than now, as current trends show. Mobbsey is right.

Tim Lang was getting very hot under the collar about lack of preparation by the government. When someone of his stature gets that worried you know something is up.

I wrote his words down and he said"It is very, very, very serious indeed. This is the big one!"

[chubbygristle]

manpower (sorry person power)

ahh don't be sorry there are still people about who can cope wih the term 'man' appearing in it's generic form to mean person. I still refer to policemen and firemen as policemen and firemen (regardless of gender)...

However I'd like to see the term organic dropped (as in organic food) to be superseded with the term sustainable food. I was reading an article on corporate watch a while back <pauses to 'google' a url for it... ahh there we are...>

http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=3066

Organic farms have historically been small, family-run mixed farms producing for local markets, but this story is starting to change as conventional agribusiness and the supermarkets move in. Organic shops, too, are expanding, or being bought up, and increasingly resembling their non-organic counterparts.

The fact that you can get 'organic' food in tesco has completely debased the concept. Anyone who tells you that there is anything environmentally sound about buying organic at a supermarket needs.. er.. correcting

I am not surprised Tim Lang is worried. He should sit on a bus round here and listen to the 'right on', pseudo middle classes outraged about not being able to find an organic chicken in Tesco to feed to little Jimmy. He'd be spitting feathers then! boom boom

[biffvernon]

One view of what 'organic' food production means is farming without inputs of artificial fertilizers and pesticides. That this approach has been adopted by large scale farming and the corporate food distribution sector might be regarded as a success.

If 'organic' means looking like the picture on the cover of a John Seymour book (or my back garden), then there is a risk that organic farming will remain a niche hobby.

Farming Today This Week, http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/farmingtoday/ had a discussion about the future of farming with Robin Maynard, of the Soil Association, Professor Les Firbank from the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research, and Dr Anders Samberg from the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute.

[RenewableCandy]

The fact that you can get 'organic' food in tesco has completely debased the concept.

Errr yes, and no, minister. After all if instead of looking at that food's destination (namely, a large uninspiring building hundreds of miles from where it was produced) you look att he food's origin (the place where it was produced) you see living soil on uncontaminated (by pesticides and whatever) land, rather than land which is in one way or another, erm, knackered and inert (I hope I'm saying this understandably).

My simple argument is, the more of this living, useful land that there is among our 75%-of-60M acres of farmland, the better! If for now the produce goes to tescos, that's too bad, BUT the land at least is being restored to health. Replacing tesco's etc (including their massive distribution set-up) can in all probability be done much more quickly than bringing 45M acres of land back to life.

[kenneal - lagger]

I posted this on the Farming today blog:-

We must consume less of all things in the future if we are to combat global warming, and Peal Oil will force us to consume less oil. We also require less of us to do the consuming. This isn't a problem & was being achieved in the developed world, where population was dropping, purely by education, especially of women. The requirement for economic growth has meant that our government has ensured immigration to bolster economic growth.

Multi storey farms are an idea based on the technofix. The problem with technofixes is that they usually require energy and that is one thing we will be short of. The amount of energy required to move all the water and nutrients for growing up several storeys is immense as is the energy required to build the things in the first place. Peak oil, again, will stop this.

Growing biofuels to replace the oil we use at the moment is impossible, even if we stop eating! The land isn't available. We just have to drastically cut the amount we move around. The amount of food & biofuels we can produce will be constrained by the availability of water and phosphorus as well as land & oil.

Chemical farming will be constrained by the availability of oil and, more importantly, gas, from which nitrogen fertilisers,herbicides & pesticides are made. There is shortage of fertiliser developing already and more of the stuff is being manufactured in the oil rich countries of the world who have the raw materials. We will not be able to afford it soon, as our oil and gas run out. Organic farming will become a matter of necessity.

We are in a period of huge change bought about by the decline in oil & gas availability. We will need to rethink our entire way of life in relation to the decline in energy availability and the way we use it.

[mobbsey]

Sorry, got distracted for a couple of days by some paid work!

moving not to more "local" production but to more "personal" production.

Can you expand on that, please?

I've got a lot on this in the "Less" book which I'm currently trying to finish up for publication, but I'll pre-empt myself:

Much of the talk of "local" food centres on obtaining fruit and veg grown on farms nearer to where you live. However, by and large, those sources are still producing/processing the food using the same intensive means as the food that was grown further away. Organic production can even be slightly more energy dense because the cropping level is slightly lower from the same area of land. Whilst the transport component of our food supply is significant (most studies put it at around a fifth ? a little less than the quarter created by cooking/refrigeration and wastage of food in the home) it's the processing, packaging and cultivation that make up the bulk of the energy use in the food supply.

'Food miles' is an example of the problems created when we focus on only one aspect of the food supply (e.g., http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... icalliving). It's the same type of problem created by the over-emphasis on electricity producing renewable energy systems even though electricity is just less than one-fifth of total energy consumption, and represents only about a third of carbon emissions -- ultimately the strategy doesn't deliver on the goal!

In the sense of the wider peak energy context, we have to focus on where the greatest energy is expended in the whole supply chain -- food security and peak oil/gas are related to the whole supply chain not just the transport. As I noted at the meeting, looking at the problem in terms of ecological energetics, any species that get less energy from its food supply than it expends from producing it will ultimately go extinct. Within the human system there are wide variations in the energy density of food supply (e.g. in Sweden, life-cycle studies of food supply have put the variation as wide as 2 calories/calorie of food in rural areas to 8 calories/calorie in Goteborg). Curiously the most efficient form of food supply -- subsistence farming -- is the one type of farming that is frowned upon by the global economic system (because if you are 'subsistent' you are not a 'consumer') and the development of cash crops/agricultural development generally invariably pushes the subsistent off their land (and in the modern farming context, which Tim Lang confirmed at the meeting when he echoed my point, the most efficient and profitable part of any farm is the farmer's own private vegetable garden, not his main crop!).

The simplest way to take the bulk of this energy out of the food chain is to move cultivation and processing closer to the consumer -- we "personalise" rather than "localise". There are all sorts of ways to do this (e.g. in Teeside http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... 6/cityfood, or in Hackney http://www.btinternet.com/~grow.communities/, and some of the community supported agriculture schemes where the consumers spend their own time working on the farm, andsome of the other initiatives noted in the replies above). Some of the most energy dense foods, such as fresh salad and herbs (they are lightweight, contain not a lot of calories, but use large amounts of packaging and are often flown or produced in greenhouses) which can easily be grown in pots and window boxes -- just about everyone can do that (add sprouting seeds to provide winter greens and you're really eating into the energy bill). Some of the lowest density foods (high calories to production energy ratio foods) are most of the carbohydrate staples ? cereals, potatoes, rice, etc. Producing these at the local scale doesn't make much sense. What is in between is what is in between is what is "negotiable" depending upon local conditions and the individuals own skills/willingness to learn new skills. This is where people's preferences can determine how low they can force their food energy costs.

Even though allotments are over-subscribed across the UK, we're still losing allotments, and private gardens, in the name of more ecologically sound "brownfield" development -- that's just looney! (arguably the food lost from an allotment when it's built on costs less energy to produce than the food production lost from the greenfields which might have otherwise been used). But beyond allotments and formal gardens, there is a lot of space for urban food cultivation on the areas councils currently manage as parks. Instead of the (in some cases, very expenses) plants and shrubs we cover our undeveloped public spaces with we could instead plant perennial food crops (as highlighted by Tim Lang in his talk, the UK produces only about 10% of its fresh fruit).

But "personalisation" isn't just about cultivation. Production/processing is a significant part. The food energy ratio is, in somewhere like urban London, about 10 calories for each calorie of food intake. However, some of the figures I've seen put the ratio at 20 or 30 calories per calorie for 'fast food' or eating out (mainly because many of the manual processing done in the home is predominantly replaced, wastefully, with machine processing to reduce labour costs). Even in the home, it's the growth in the convenience foods that have arisen since the advent of supermarket shopping that are driving energy consumption in the food chain (OK, ready meals are an obvious target, but packaging is a significant proportion of the energy of most supermarket-bought foods). Getting people cooking more food from raw ingredients, and entertaining/cooking for each other (e.g. throwing their own riotous parties instead of partying at gastro-pubs) is a means by which we can eat into the processing side.

The whole "local food" trend is really just a repackaging of the larger consumerist trend of the last 50 years to meet a more ethical demand in the market place. It doesn't change the problems of the underlying system, it just serves to make those problems a little less stark/more obscure. If we really want food security it doesn't come from "localisation", but from fostering a culture of "personalisation"; we grow a small proportion of our total consumption, perhaps work within communities to obtain a little more, but more importantly we prepare what we eat ourselves. This reduces transport, but it reduces the more significant components of cultivation, processing and packaging.

Comments?

You might be interested to know that the "Less is a Four Letter Word" strand of the Energy Beyond Oil Project is complete, hence why we're finalising the book. In September we'll be launching the new theme of "food" -- we're still working on a title to the project, perhaps "Liberation Gastronomy".

[mobbsey]

mobbsey: the first link doesn't work and the second!

Yeah (it seems my "save link as" mouse click produced a "file not found" page!).

I've emailed Neil about it, so hopefully it'll get put right soon.

[JohnB]

Comments?

That makes total sense to me. The big question is, how do you persuade everyone else? Are you doing any visioning in the book, like in The Transition Handbook? Like newspaper articles from the future about happy people whose lives were transformed by growing and preparing their own food?

You've got me thinking about growing salads in my van .

[kenneal - lagger]

I read an article earlier from the Sunday Telegraph from about a month ago knocking Fairtrade goods. The author said that Fairtrade encouraged inefficiency because instead of 500 people growing a given amount of Fairtrade food five people and a machine could do it.

That means that 495 people could be made unemployed in an area where unemployment was probably very high and the cost of the machine would be taken out of the local economy and put into a Western economy. The article was written by a Mr Alex Singleton, who is a founder of the Globalisation Institute. 'Nuff said.

[JohnB]

The Food Programme on Radio 4 today, repeated tomorrow, was about rice, and the big problems massive price increases and shortages are causing for half the worlds population. The WTO was partly blamed. Imported rice is also taking over from locally grown grains in Africa. Some countries depend on imports from countries that are banning exports because they don't have enough for themselves.