MarkAgriculture used to produce excess energy. Modern food supply chains run as an unstainable agriculture energy sink. And it is a huge sink.
What do you make of this graph from a fascinating book ‘The Future is Rural” by biologist and farmer Jason Bradford that tells the story of food production in the US in the currency of energy.
Start on the right side of the graph with the food energy output per year as food consumed by the human population of the world, 1.1 Quads.
Now compare that to the energy used to generate that food energy eaten—it takes 14.2 Quads to grow, store, deliver, sell and cook the food eaten.
Quads where a Quad is 1,000 trillion BTUs and one BTU is the heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit.
This ratio is not sustainable.
Recall that the logic of the invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago was that it generated an energy surplus, enough food energy to get people through lean times and seasonal shortages of game and forage. The energy surplus allowed people to stay put with a division of labour and create complex societies.
Modern food supply systems are the opposite. They create a colossal agriculture energy sink.
Here is how Jason Bradford summarised the numbers in the graph.
This ratio is not sustainable.
Recall that the logic of the invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago was that it generated an energy surplus, enough food energy to get people through lean times and seasonal shortages of game and forage. The energy surplus allowed people to stay put with a division of labour and create complex societies.
Modern food supply systems are the opposite. They create a colossal agriculture energy sink.
Here is how Jason Bradford summarised the numbers in the graph.
The modern food system runs a large energy deficit and so do most farms. Our energy-sink food system is an aberration that will eventually appear as a blip in human history, and we will require our farms to run an energy surplus to avoid starvation.
Jason Bradford
Why is the agricultural energy sink a blip?
Because the energy sunk into the production, processing, packaging, distribution, and waste of food comes from fossil fuels—an army of energy slaves that we dig up and pump out of the ground for the tiny cost of extraction.
And that energy source is about to run out in the case of oil, whilst coal and gas we should not burn or risk massive climate shifts.
We are lounging in a gluttonous age of cheap energy and cheap food unprecedented in human history and converting the gift into people.
This is neither good nor bad; it is just ecology.
Give any organism excess resources without controls, and the population will expand at the maximum reproductive rate.
Humans use fossil fuel energy to create a food excess that we convert into more humans; some 6 billion more, since oil became the primary power source. Growth is what nature does with an energy source. It uses the power to defy entropy and make more.
Humans are no different to all other organisms in this basic biology—we make more. Our exception is the ability to capture and use exogenous energy (energy from outside ourselves) and apply that energy through technology to change the environment to our benefit.
And we do something else that is different.
We are energy blind.
The market delivers the agricultural energy sink
Nobody can do business at a loss, so the push for profit encourages efficiency. Such is the claim of industrial agriculture and the supply chain that maintains it—big fields sown with monoculture crops.
If this claim is valid, how can the food supply system use 13x more energy than gets eaten?
We are told that the market is efficient, but the food supply systems only function because of the cheap energy from fossil fuels. The food supply chain is blind to the true energy cost needed to function—food systems are energy-blind.
In other words, the profits that accrue to the businesses in the food supply chain are subsidised by ancient energy—the hard work of plants and animals millions of years ago.
And this is how we determine efficiency for all businesses. We measure their efficiency in profit to shareholders and are blind to their energy efficiency. The only time energy is considered is when a company has a high operation cost, so a few lights are converted to LEDs.
Most businesses are assessed as efficient from a profit perspective rather than from collective energy use. Capitalism chooses to be blind to its energy use.
What humans do differently from nature is that nature is energy efficient—modern humans are not.
Don’t blame the farmers.
Food production, the base of the supply chain that comes from the efforts of farmers, uses just shy of 2 Quads for the 1.1 Quads eaten.
Not an ideal net efficiency, but it is out of the park compared to the 12.2 Quads needed to make the food energy available to the household or the 0.7 Quads of food waste at the table.
Tempting as it is to blame the farmers, they are not the problem.
The real problem and the opportunity for substantial energy savings is consumer behaviour—what we choose to eat, how we prepare our food and what we manage to waste. The dietary choice is one of the reasons we put sustainable diet in the sustainably FED trifecta.
But even the people are not to blame. Most of us consume what we can readily access. We eat the food we can afford, the food in the supermarket, and the food we can prepare easily after a long day at the office.
So if you want to blame someone, try the food supply chain operators or, more strictly, the people who let market mechanisms loose on our food systems.
And blame them for their energy blindness.
Energy-blind food supply chains
Food systems use energy in the production, storage, processing, packaging, distribution, consumption and disposal of food.
Jason Bradford’s graphic tells us that these energy inputs are 8x greater than the food energy consumed by people. And this has not mattered. Businesses in the supply chain accept energy bills as a cost of doing business, recoverable in the price of food at the checkout.
Smart companies look to energy efficiency to increase profit margins, but cheap energy’ availability means they are blind to the more significant energy consequences. The food supply chain works even with an 8:1 energy sink ratio.
And they will stay energy-blind.
If they opened their eyes, they would realise that the energy-intensive production and distribution systems are not sustainable and will collapse when the oil becomes scarce. Many will go out of business through whatever energy transition humans invent. No CEO would admit this existential risk to the company shareholders.
Better to keep all eyes shut.
Fortunately, farmers are better placed to cope. They can revert to less energy-intensive forms of production as the costs of inputs rise. Recall that the pre-industrial farming systems generated an energy surplus because nutrients and carbon were recycled, and energy inputs came from human and animal labour.
But can retro-agriculture grow enough food to meet the 22 trillion a day challenge?
What sustainably FED suggests
Mechanisation and globally traded commodities facilitated by fossil energy have steadily replaced human and animal labour and local markets in the industrial food system. Every step in the industrial food system requires energy and lots of it—a person eating a meal in the United States consumes only one kilocalorie of food for every 10 kilocalories spent getting that food to their plate.
It may be that a new energy source emerges that doesn’t pollute the planet. There is already a rush on renewables that need more resources than the planet can cough up just to build and maintain, and the technofix may lull some people to sleep.
Clean energy would be tremendous. Sustainable clean energy would be magnificent.
We don’t have either, not at scale.
And even if the miracle of fusion, hydrogen or some other clean source of cheap energy emerged at scale, the food supply chain faces other structural risks, not least the soil organic carbon debt and ultra-processed foods delivering an epidemic of metabolic illness.
Here is a suggestion.
Rather than tackling the food supply chain inefficiency and energy profligacy—the agriculture energy sink—how about addressing the food supply challenges through a sustainable diet?
Science source
Bradford, J., 2019. The Future is Rural: Food System Adaptations to the Great Simplification.
Hero image from photo by Nuril Fikriyah on Unsplash
Hey thanks for the review. Much appreciated.