A view from the west

"America will not pass a cap-and-trade law in time for the global climate-change summit in Copenhagen next month. To understand why, it helps to ask a farmer. Take Bruce Wright, for example, who grows wheat and other crops on a couple of thousand acres near Bozeman, Montana. His family has tilled these fields for four generations." "He loves his job and the rural way of life. But he fears that higher energy prices will endanger both. But he cannot see how he could run his farm without cheap fossil fuels. He has no full-time employees, but owns about 20 vehicles."

http://www.enn.com/agriculture/article/40704

The knub of the problem is that of scale. Clearly there is no way to run a farm of a couple of thousand acres on one's own without a massive dependence on machinery and the fuel that drives that machinery. But it is a vicous cycle - as the famers have mechanised the rural jobs and population have dwindled, and without the labour force there is no choice but to further mechanise. The huge capital costs of the machinery can only be covered by cropping vast areas with it, and that drives a monoculture approach. These mega scale diversity deserts have no hope of relocalising and rescaling agriculture. It is why I keep emphasing to those that would listen that we in Jersey with our necessarily very small scale farming have an opportunity to get it right where others simply cannot follow. Small is beautiful.

Tags: agri-businesss, localisation

Amid all the stock market turmoil of the last couple of days, you may have missed the fact that the oIl price has had is biggest 3 day rise in a decade. I won't rehearse all the implications of that for so many aspects of our daily lives. But clearly if the US actions have broken the climate of fear that was damping down the economy (ie consumption and classical growth) , then the circle may have turned back towards increased growth, more consumption , more waste, more emissions, rising demand for oil etc etc. It seems even the threat of a 1929-32 stockmarket event is just not enough to warn us from the growth story.

As I have been telling people for 5 years or so now in our agri business world, food prices are driven by oil prices. Cheap food can only be had when either the oil price falls or the agri-business way of producing food is replaced. Peak oil clearly rules out any prospect of meaningful long term oil price drops, so we had better pay close attention to how we produce food. On the personal level your only real option in Jersey is to modify your diet. If we had more than one small private provision of allotments you could look to grow some of it yourself. In the UK a legal right for 6 rate payers to demand allotments is provided in the 1908 Allotments Act - can you imagine such a thing here?

Tags: agri-businesss, allotments, oil price rise

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A view from the west

Featuring food, fuel and the future in Jersey

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