A Compassionate World

What’s oil got to do with the future of farming?

In a previous posting, I raised the possibility of dwindling oil reserves impacting on the way we farm. Well, a much-overlooked fact is that industrial agriculture is heavily dependent on cheap, plentiful oil. “Agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food” is the way Professor Bartlett from the University of Colorado once put it. Worldwide, vast amounts of oil and gas are used as raw materials and energy to manufacture fertilisers and pesticides. Lester Brown’s Earth Policy Institute, calculates that making fertiliser accounts for 20% or more of the energy used in agriculture, whilst a third goes on pesticide production, grain drying and operating farm facilities.

What’s this got to do with farm animals?

Well, intensively reared farm animals consume huge quantities of grain. What’s worse is that they act as protein factories in reverse. On average, to produce 1kg of animal protein takes nearly 6kg of grain and other plant proteins in the form of livestock feed. Whilst factory farms may appear to save land by cramming thousands of animals into small spaces, what cannot be ignored are the ‘ghost acres’ needed to grow the feed, usually oil-intensively.

The world’s grain harvest has tripled since 1950. As the Earth Policy Institute puts it, “new grain demand has been met primarily by raising land productivity through higher-yielding crop varieties in conjunction with more oil-intensive mechanisation, irrigation and fertilizer use”. A third of the world’s grain harvest is fed to livestock.

So, the bottom line is that factory farming is highly dependent on cheap fossil fuel energy, mainly because of the huge quantities of feedstuffs, particularly grain, it consumes. And with 60% of the cost of a chicken, for example, made up of feed, we can see that ‘cheap’ grain-fed meat relies on relatively low feed price, which in turn, relies on fertilisers and pesticides produced fossil fuel-intensively.

Most energy experts agree that the era of cheap or ‘easy’ oil is over. Estimates suggest that we have 10-20 years left in which to respond to declining supplies. Intensive agriculture uses much more energy than low-input farming. As the head of British company, Duchy Originals puts it, the day is coming when alternatives to intensive farming methods, with their reliance on oil, will have to be found.”

What is needed is an urgent move toward more humane and less energy-intensive farming methods. As a forthcoming report from Compassion argues, the future of the world’s food security increasingly rests on this simple truth.

This theme will be the focus of our Peter Roberts Memorial Lecture on 29th October this year. I will be deeply honoured to introduce Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, who will be delivering our lecture and addressing the question, how can we feed the world and protect the planet? You are warmly welcome to join us – click here to book your tickets.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 15:00 and is filed under Uncategorized and is tagged factory farming, lecture, oil. The entry was uploaded by Jon Worth (Webmanager). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.