When you look at your chart titled “Historical Crop Yield Progress…”, you get a visual sense of cheap energy and it’s technological impact on crop yields.

What will take a long time is seeing the back slope of industrial ag curves…and I don’t know that we’ll ever see the back slope being caused by the sheer depletion of soil/ecosystems but by Peak Resources dropping the economic activity.

If we could run cheap energy all the way through I still doubt the yields would run across a plateau indefinitely. All that excess yield is a direct measure of how much Na-K-Mg-Ca and C-H-N-O-P-S elements get sucked out of the soil year after year. On top of which is the narrowing vertical height of this botanical ecosystem (rising water tables and shrinking, nonexistence deciduous tree canopy), such that runoff is draining so much nutrients into valleys like the Mighty Miss and out to the ocean…

It doesn’t matter if organic farming is lower impact but not expandable, if that’s what we had always been running the human population would have taken longer to grow but agriculture would have still peaked and dropped back to levels of several thousand years ago…just a longer, more stretched out run of ag and fossil fuel consumption.

Industrial ag is just accelerating the reaction rate, this is all a chemical process, and one of the inputs is the limiting reagent (fossil fuels?), though it is not clear yet…

-Tom

Seems like there’s some interest in exploring other production models, among some farmers as well as consumers.

Of course I’ve a different take on things then you do.

It seems to me that you’ve got your ‘cart’ facing ’round the wrong way. The point is not to satiate the hunger of man by growing enough food to fill bellies; if we tried to do that we had better plan on ramping up exo-planet exploration and intergalactic colonization.

The problem is that man is an animal and one of the tenants of evolution is that geometric increases in population happen EVERY time there is an excess in food sources (read biologically extractable energy).

With increasing energy comes more people; of course this logarithmic increase will begin its second derivative flattening into an ‘S’ curve with an effective plateau (or more realistically in a biological system an oscillation about a point of ‘balanced’ constraints).

This point of balance (sometimes referred to as ‘red in tooth and nail’) is the heart of evolutionary theory. What jumps out at me from the above graphs is the stability (corn gives us some idea of the oscillation parameters for that resource within the graphs time frame) of preindustrial ‘productivity’.

After about 1935 the ‘explosion’ of fossil sunlight is obvious and of course very similar looking graphs for all of ‘industrial’ civilization products and trends could be made. The point is that without starting with the premise of ecology/biology/evolution in the context of man’s ‘fit’ on earth we will exhaust our available energy supplies in the form of more bodies.

In the pre-industrial time they too struggled to wring as much productivity from the soil as possible, however they were working with the same level of energy and materials as they had always had access to (animal-power, man-power, wind/water, and some instrument harder than earth be that steal, copper, or obsidian).

After the refinement of machines and chemistry (as applied to our food base) based on a ready supply of a new condensed form of energy, the fuse was lit. Going back ‘down’ to the yield that is constrained (like that word better than ‘balanced’ which has been hijacked by fuzzy, new-age-y types) by ‘surface’ (none fossil) inputs is the only way to diffuse the bomb.

Here’s to voluntary diffusing. (?)

Cheers

“Grow many vs few crops”: The diversity of crops that a farmer grows is driven by economics, risk mitigation, crop adaptability and market prices. The fact that growers in specific geographies grow certain crops has been driven by all those factors. Your desire for greater diversity by region runs into the face of grower economics/survival.

Clean energy production: totally a good thing, but remember that photovoltaic solar takes so much energy to manufacture that it isn’t carbon-positive for 20+ years.
“Minimize kill-all pesticides:” First of all, there were never any “kill all” pesticides and I have been intimately connected with the industry that has replaced most of the chemicals that could even be plausibly described that way. While some folks have spent their careers railing against pesticides, I and many of my colleagues have spent those same years discovering and developing vastly safer alternatives.

As for crop subsidies, I’m no supporter of the present or historic system. Have we “propped up” industries inappropriately? I’d say a qualified yes, but I don’t think that obviates individual responsibility for their diet.

World hunger is worse. Until recently one could blame it more on politics than on production. I know that we have been in an era of over-production in the developed world and dysfunctional distribution to poor people. It is just that this is changing already and will change much more if you look at demographic trends.

As for “urban food deserts” in urban settings, this is not an agricultural problem. These deserts will never be reversed by local production. That is absurd.
As for the Dead Zone – the best solution is no-till farming. There is really no better solution (by the way, it is not from pesticide runoff but from fertilizer runoff from the erosion that happens with tillage).
As for young people taking up farming. Why would anyone your age do that? Many are working on small Organic farms which is a great life experience, but it isn’t doing anything significant for the food supply. Considering how conventional agriculture has been demonized, why would anyone in your generation consider becoming a farmer? It isn’t that easy to do anyway. I certainly don’t have the answer for who is going to grow our crops in the future. Do you?