Squeezing the Oil out of our Food Supply

I’m breaking form in this blog post to bring you something “off topic” which I found fascinating.

This is a summary if an interview I heard on NPR’s
Fresh Air with Michael Pollan. 

Michael Pollan talked about the need to change our agricultural policies if we wanted to solve our oil dependency, environmental issues, healthcare issues, and economic crisis.

First the back drop (things we know):

• Our farmers are subsidized to mass produce corn and soy – ingredients for highly processed, unhealthy, non-food, vs. real food.
• If farmers accept the subsidies they are forbidden from growing anything else, and are unable to raise animals.
• This subsidized large scale commercial farming uses fossil fuel in two key ways:  fertilization and pest control.

Some of the key points (things I didn’t know!):

• It takes 1 gallon of fossil fuels to grow and produce 1.2 gallons of ethanol.  I knew it was inefficient but – wow!
• 30-40% of the recent increases in food prices come from diverting corn from the food supply to produce ethanol.
• Traditional farms with crops AND livestock don’t exist in combination much any more because of these subsidies – so the large farms need fossil fuel based fertilizer to grow crops, instead of using solar energy (sunshine), and natural fertilizer (from livestock).
• Also because of this, now animals are raised on giant feed lots instead of farms, so even more fossil fuels are needed to transport and/or process their waste.
• (Alternatively, Michael Pollan gave an example in Argentina where a farmer was able to do a rotation and raise cattle for 5 years on the land, and then grow crops on that land for 3 years with NO additional fertilizer.)
• Crop rotations impossible in the subsidized, single crop farms, also have proven to dramatically reduce or eliminate the need for pesticides (Apparently, the pests get confused and don’t show up if you alter the crops.)
• We are no longer using solar energy to grow food.  It’s too slow, we prefer the fertilizer. And because of the subsidies, we have farm land sitting unused for months out of the year “wasting solar energy.”
• Food Miles: We raise chickens in the US and ship them to China to be cut up and packaged and then ship them back here to eat them.

Green Jobs

He closed in saying that for all the talk and interest in green jobs, the most sophisticated and important green jobs of the future are farming real food without fossil fuels!

More Info

I certainly have not done justice to the topic. 

If you are interested you can find Michael Pollan’s Open Letter to the Next President on this topic which was recently  published in New York Magazine. 

or listen to his interview on NPR

Great Stuff

I have created a new Category in my blog that I have titled simply “Great Stuff”, and I over time I will put links to a variety of things such as this here.