Since the beginning of the industrial revolution we have squeezed more and more yield out of the ground - and poured more and more dirty chemical into it.
Soil quality and pollution is a serious problem in almost any country. Plus climate change also has a strong influence on soil quality.
Our crops suck the nutrients out of the soil, it takes nature some time to ‘recharge’ the ground. We invented new way to speed up the process by using fertilizers - which include oil as one of it’s ingredient. So food production and oil are directly linked - not just for transportation.
This is taken from a great article from Dale Allen Pfeiffer:
In the United States, 400 gallons of oil equivalents are expended annually to feed each American (as of data provided in 1994).7 Agricultural energy consumption is broken down as follows:
- · 31% for the manufacture of inorganic fertilizer
- · 19% for the operation of field machinery
- · 16% for transportation
- · 13% for irrigation
- · 08% for raising livestock (not including livestock feed)
- · 05% for crop drying
- · 05% for pesticide production
- · 08% miscellaneous
The modern way of chemical farming seems unsustainable to many - organic farming is better for the soil to ‘recharge’ itself and yield better produce.
So we face a serious combination of problems here: lower soil quality calls for more fertilizers - which will increase production prices, oil is already expensive so more fertilizer means more oil will be needed for food production - which again raises global oil prices.
Feed me loads of oil! Feed me yummy soil!
A small side note: we also use loads of fertilizer to produce biofuels - so in a matter of speaking we put oil in the ground to grow oil. Sure we get more out of the ground than we put in - but it is still an odd mechanism.
Since oil is a finite resource we should seriously push and make organic farming mandatory. We need sustainable ways of producing HUGE amounts of food for all six billion of us.