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It's actually worse than that. I did a real world test some years ago, on a MC trip from New England to Texas. With no fuel gauge, I have to keep track of my mileage so that I know when to refuel...if I wait for the low fuel light to come on I could be much further from a gas station without adequate gas to get there. Long story short, I started on straight gas and as I went west I encountered increasingly higher ethanol mixtures- 5% to 10% to 15%, and as the ethanol increased my mileage decreased...significantly. When I did the math, it showed that I was using *more* gasoline with ethanol mixtures, than I would have used running straight gas.
Then you have to add in the diesel fuel used to plant, tend and harvest the corn. After that, you have to add in the fuel used to mash and ferment the corn, and *then* you have to add in the fuel used to distill the fermented product into a concentration high enough to burn. The whole thing is a massive fraud that costs us much more than the alleged 'benefit'.
And, to add insult to injury, corn being diverted to ethanol production reduces the supply available for food production, which raises the price and in turn increases food costs.
You make several good points. To put the gas mileage thing in better prospective: Harley claimed my '98 would get 42mpg--and that's just about what I used to get while running the recommended 20W50 oil for lubrication. I started adding Z-Max oil treatment and now get 50mpg due to the improved friction factor. It runs about 10deg cooler now.
Everybody knows rural populations have been falling steadily for 70 yrs. A modern combine can harvest 900 bu of corn per hour. It used to take a man all day to harvest 100 bu- ie- the Diesel powered machine does the work of 270 men. What do you think corn would cost if we had to return to hand-picking by men earning minimum wage-$15/hr? And where would they come from?..But I guess that would solve our obesity problem.
Ag economists from UofI determined ~15y/a when corn was ~$2.50/bu (now ~$3.75/bu) that the ethanol mandate added ~25cents/bu to the price. About 1/3rd of our crop now goes into ethanol for fuel. The increased demand was met by increased production-- exports and industrial use has remained the same, while less is being used for feed....We have plenty of potential for even further expansion. Agronomists tell us that American yield could be increased by 25% if all farmers would simply use drain tiles more widely.
Yes, a major rate limiting step in food production is the availability of biologically active Nitrogen. While N2 makes up 70% of our atmosphere, O2 makes up 21%--so our atmosphere is an "oxidizing" one--any free NH3 is quickly converted to N2 + H2O....To get N into a useable form, it must be "fixed" by nitrogen-fixing bacteria (clever name) in the soil (most efficiently located in nodules growing on the roots of legumes and a few other types of plants). They make NH3 which is then turned by nitrifying bacteria to nitrous acid and that into nitric acid, which can be absorbed and used by plants.
Animals then eat the plants and use the N. They re-cycle it by turning it into urea in the liver and then excrete it in the urine. Once excreted, the urea quickly degrades to NH3, a very volatile substance, so it doesn't remain in the soil very long.
There is very little N in manure. My hoses' manure only tests out as "adequate" on those cheapo test kits-- ie-- not any better than the soil it came out of, so it's use as fertilizer is really limited ( Cf- your high school algebra "mixing problems"). ...Use of manure can only increase the N content of soil if you bring in "outside" manure. If you do that, you can increase the N in that field, but decrease the N in the source pasture. That's the chemical equivalent of energy's 2nd Law. BTW- the reason chicken manure is so good is cuz they excrete both GI waste & renal waste thru the common cloaca- ie - it's really low N manure + hi N urine.
The Treehuggers always whine about "sustainable Ag." In reality, only hi tech, industrial ag is sustainable (at least as long as the sun shines or lava is hot)….Just look at the Dust Bowl experience (basically organic farming) the depletion of the Fertile Crescent & N.Africa early in human history or early American pioneers who quickly farmed out their plots and had to keep moving west.
Some simple math: prior to WW II, all farming was "organic" and a good yield of corn was 50 bu/ac. Today any farmer in IA who doesn't get 175 bu/ac hangs his head in shame. Many reasons for the increase, but the Haber process is the main one.... Even crop rotation (corn & beans, a legume) won't give you enough N for sustained yields.
As long as we can put energy into the Haber process at a price low enough to keep the economics of supply/demand viable, there won't be a problem....But I wouldn't worry about it anyway-- our national debt will be the factor that brings down The World Order and cause a major Die-Off long before we run out of petroleum (either that or an Invasion by Zombies)-- not that I'm a pessimist or anything like that
BTW- in case you didn't realize it-- Hubbert's Pimple (Peak Oil) is a graph of the derivative of the logistic equation-- that well known sigmoid shaped growth function graph. The peak of the pimple corresponds to the inflection point of the growth curve.
Except the soil organic matter is being depleted by modern chemical-reliant agriculture. When I was working on my master's degree a few years ago the subject was covered well in my soils courses. An example of one study that has picked up on the problem: https://news.aces.illinois.edu/news/...organic-carbon
The point of adding manure isn't simply to provide nitrogen but to build up and maintain the organic matter. It's not accurate to call the current industrialized agriculture sustainable as it's in fact more damaging to the soil than past practices. The various nutrients we need too which are not regularly added to the soil chemically are absent making the resulting food less nutritious. https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...utrition-loss/
It's not really fair to say that because of failures in the past organic agriculture is a bad idea. Information was not readily available in the 1920's and earlier that would have vastly improved their success and reduced the loss of soil. Basic things like contour tilling were unknown to most farmers a century ago. Farmers learned what they knew from their parents, information based on scientific study was not readily available to most of them. Improved well drilling would have solved the water problems too that were a big part of the problems in the dust bowls.
You can claim all you want that we have a limitless supply of oil but that simply is not possible in a world of finite resources. We're using oil faster than the earth creates it. Which is why we're looking at the most difficult to use oil sources now. Tar sands, shale oil, and fracking to extract the last drops from wells long since abandoned. We will also have to destroy a significant area of land permanently to get all of this oil. At what point will you recognize that rendering land uninhabitable long term for short term gains is not sustainable?
I really don't see a return to more people being involved in agriculture as a bad thing. It will be the salvation of declining rural areas that have tried to adapt to urban economic models when farming was lost yet found poverty instead.
^^^ I appreciate your criticism, but the fact remains, we can't feed our present & growing population on organic methods. An untouched, natural biome is a closed system-- all nutrients are locally re-cycled, including natural degradation of spent organisms....But for humans, we raise the crops in one location, move it to the population centers, don't re-cycle most of the human waste and sequester most of the eventual dead bodies. None of those nutrients return to the soil from whence (whence?)* they came.
Manure only represents a portion of nutrients consumed. Most of the nutrients are carried away with the crop. You can't build up nutrient content with manure unless you decrease it somewhere else....Texture of manure is much more important to soil health than nutrient content. It's the fad lately to talk about soil "carbon content." It's not the carbon that's important-- it's the fibrous nature of biological debris that improves growing conditions (aeration & facilitated nutrient absorption).
Modern ag is a vicious cycle-- now that we've started it, we can't stop, but we can keep going as long as we can produce the nutrients artificially.
True, fossil fuels are ultimately a finite commodity, but they're telling us that we have stores at least enough for 3-600 yrs. How many future generations are we to be concerned about without endangering our ability to last that long? How many chess moves do you anticipate when playing? 2? 3? Why not 12?...Maybe they'll finally find the secret to cold fusion or develop that improved battery they've been seeking for so long in the next six centuries.
I have been told many times that through all recorded human history, up to WWII, it took roughly 40% of all human productivity to produce the food required to sustain our population.
Today less than 1% of our population works in Ag. Obviously, that includes farmers, but it also includes petroleum engineers, chemists, 'food factory' workers, truck drivers, grocery store employees, and restaurant workers.
Clearly, today's small-scale organic farms are not scaled properly to 'feed the world' of today.
Instead of 0.001% of our population growing organic sustainable food, we will need somewhere close to 40% of our population producing food, if we are to drop petroleum-based fertilizers and synthetic herbicides from our tables.
I believe that we can feed ourselves using organic practices, but it is going to require a much larger percentage of our population doing it.
The real problem, as I see it, is will enough people focus themselves on becoming organic farmers fast enough, to meet this deadline.
Here in Maine, we have more farms each year, as the nationwide numbers have been dropping each year. Here in Maine farming is growing.
Maine has a few things that lends itself to this growing movement. We have surplus clean water, while most of the nation is in drought or 'water-stress'. You simply do not have enough water to spare for farming.
The legacy left behind by the hippy-communes of the 1960s has been 'Certified Organic' practice. Our regional certifier coined the idea in 1970, they have been training new farmers and collaborating to form new farms ever since.
As the age of dinosaurs is passed, so is the age of one farmer being able to produce enough food to feed 1,000 other people. Dinosaurs are gone. Anyone lamenting the loss of dinosaurs is left out of place, our planet can no longer afford to host a population of dinosaurs. It is time to kill any remaining dinosaurs and to crush their eggs.
^^^ I appreciate your criticism, but the fact remains, we can't feed our present & growing population on organic methods. An untouched, natural biome is a closed system-- all nutrients are locally re-cycled, including natural degradation of spent organisms....But for humans, we raise the crops in one location, move it to the population centers, don't re-cycle most of the human waste and sequester most of the eventual dead bodies. None of those nutrients return to the soil from whence (whence?)* they came.
Manure only represents a portion of nutrients consumed. Most of the nutrients are carried away with the crop. You can't build up nutrient content with manure unless you decrease it somewhere else....Texture of manure is much more important to soil health than nutrient content. It's the fad lately to talk about soil "carbon content." It's not the carbon that's important-- it's the fibrous nature of biological debris that improves growing conditions (aeration & facilitated nutrient absorption).
Modern ag is a vicious cycle-- now that we've started it, we can't stop, but we can keep going as long as we can produce the nutrients artificially.
True, fossil fuels are ultimately a finite commodity, but they're telling us that we have stores at least enough for 3-600 yrs. How many future generations are we to be concerned about without endangering our ability to last that long? How many chess moves do you anticipate when playing? 2? 3? Why not 12?...Maybe they'll finally find the secret to cold fusion or develop that improved battery they've been seeking for so long in the next six centuries.
*That's from an old Jack Benny routine.
Where are you getting numbers for 300-600 years worth of oil left? Coal I can believe on that timeline but not oil. BP's estimate was roughly 53 years left using proven reserves. Granted proven reserve figures can change with technology and skyrocketing prices in the future will make oil companies willing to develop the most expensive sources, but it should be a warning sign when we get to that point that the supply isn't going to meet demand much longer. A significant amount of the remaining oil is offshore which means substantial danger of spills (there will be spills, the only question is how bad) and given the stress the world's fisheries are under I don't think we can afford the risk of losing more of that for more oil.
I mean a 20 billion barrel oil find sounds impressive. Until you note the U.S. alone uses over 7 billion barrels a year. Sure it looks nice on paper that U.S. production is up but we're basically squeezing the last drops out of depleted wells with some new technology and when this production runs out our total production will be very low.
I think necessity will return us to organic farming. The global population of humans is an issue. It's well past the point of being sustainable. There's no way of getting around that unpleasant fact. When the oil runs low and the hits to agricultural production take place, there will be a lot of people starving.
We are already having to turn to the oceans for the minerals we need. This is not surprising, given how much soil erosion is taking place, plus the fact that we flush away our wastes, which travel via rivers out to sea.
Each year I add kelp meal from Icelandic sources to both my garden and to my livestock feed. By this method, our produce and meat will contain minerals such as copper, zinc, manganese, cobalt, iodine, and a score of other minerals that nearly all agricultural soils are now depleted in. They have just been 'farmed out' by preceding generations, with little more than NPK and some lime added back. That won't cut it. Organic material is valuable for soil tilth and water holding capacity, but otherwise lacks micronutrients.
IMO, soil mineral depletion is a far more important subject to address, as it is affecting human health NOW, not 50 to 100 years into the future. All food is not the same!
Where are you getting numbers for 300-600 years worth of oil left? Coal I can believe on that timeline but not oil. BP's estimate was roughly 53 years left using proven reserves. Granted proven reserve figures can change with technology and skyrocketing prices in the future will make oil companies willing to develop the most expensive sources, but it should be a warning sign when we get to that point that the supply isn't going to meet demand much longer. A significant amount of the remaining oil is offshore which means substantial danger of spills (there will be spills, the only question is how bad) and given the stress the world's fisheries are under I don't think we can afford the risk of losing more of that for more oil.
I mean a 20 billion barrel oil find sounds impressive. Until you note the U.S. alone uses over 7 billion barrels a year. Sure it looks nice on paper that U.S. production is up but we're basically squeezing the last drops out of depleted wells with some new technology and when this production runs out our total production will be very low.
I think necessity will return us to organic farming. The global population of humans is an issue. It's well past the point of being sustainable. There's no way of getting around that unpleasant fact. When the oil runs low and the hits to agricultural production take place, there will be a lot of people starving.
RE: fuel supply-- sorry if I said "oil reserves" (?) the 3-6 century supply includes NG. It's very easy to convert gas burning ICE to NG.
Population biologists tell us we can support 12 billion people. The population growth curve is sigmoid shaped and approaches a steady state (birth rate = death rate) at the carrying capacity-- estimated to be 12-14 billion.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nor'Eastah
We are already having to turn to the oceans for the minerals we need. This is not surprising, given how much soil erosion is taking place, plus the fact that we flush away our wastes, which travel via rivers out to sea.
Each year I add kelp meal from Icelandic sources to both my garden and to my livestock feed. By this method, our produce and meat will contain minerals such as copper, zinc, manganese, cobalt, iodine, and a score of other minerals that nearly all agricultural soils are now depleted in. They have just been 'farmed out' by preceding generations, with little more than NPK and some lime added back. That won't cut it. Organic material is valuable for soil tilth and water holding capacity, but otherwise lacks micronutrients.
IMO, soil mineral depletion is a far more important subject to address, as it is affecting human health NOW, not 50 to 100 years into the future. All food is not the same!
The problem with marine sources like kelp is that the oceans, over all, are deserts. To start harvesting kelp etc on a large scale will bring with it its own set of environmental problems.
Your statement about human health effects are simply not substantiated by any facts. While there is a differential level of nutrients in various foods produced in various ways that can be demonstrated in the lab under exacting analysis, it doesn't translate into any discernable health effects.
He theorized that the world was facing a massive famine.
A massive depopulation event is practically inevitable. Meteor, volcano but if I was betting man my money is on the super bug. Something as contagious as Ebola that is airborne and it's game over.
Previously when ever I have mentioned 'peak oil' on this forum, I have been amazed at how many trolls come out to shout me down.
The issue with peak oil/energy predictions is you are trying to predict a lot unknowns. For starters a lot of the data required is held as state secrets, e.g. outside of Saudi Arabia the health of their aged oil fields is unknown quantity. You do not know what technology is around the corner that will become feasible such as fracking and there is also new discoveries. the original peak oil prediction was for Texas and it was pretty accurate however a lot of those oil wells that were abandoned in 70's are now producing oil with newer technologies.
OP, you need to relax. There are all kinds of recources that we have to contiually find to keep the modern world. If we ran out of any of them, it would be castotophic. But they always find more, or some substitute.
This is where doom and gloom stories come from. The population bomb, global warming, ice ages, somehow, in spite of the sky being on the verge of falling, everything keeps going.
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