Yesterday I wrote about our most famous literary individualist, Mr. John Galt, and an equally famous literary collectivist, Mr. Tom Joad. Both of these characters' stories were told with the Great Depression as a backdrop; Galt's in the context of explaining away the triggering events as being based on collectivism, while Joad's celebrates the need for collective human action in the face of corporatist depredations.
These two famous, fictional men are archetypes, useful for theoretical discussion, but the truth always lies somewhere between the extremes.
What year did biofuel production peak in the United States? Take a look at this graph. The top line is global wheat production per capita and the bottom is global wheat stocks at the end of season per capita. This data is most often seen with nothing but the yields and the prices – because it's Galtishly all about the money. This graph is a little different, as it takes the Joadish human component into account, scaling the production and stocks to an individual human scale.
The image doesn't scale well you and may want to examine the full sized version for details.
Take a close look at 2003 onward. See how the production and stock curves have a similar shape, but as wheat yields rises the end of season stocks are still sinking? There are two effects at work here, both related to ethanol. As biofuels production soared the wheat stocks sank - with less corn people ate more wheat, and as the prices soared more marginal wheat land was put into production.
So, can you pick out the peak biofuels production acreage year? 2002? 2006? We made 6.5 billion gallons in 2007 using 2.3 billion bushels of corn. Assuming an average of 154 bushels per acre that means about fifteen million out of a total of roughly eighty five million acres of corn were used, or 17% of our total crop lands.
And that is a pittance compared to the 33% of land once used for biofuel production, but you won't see the signal on that chart as its earliest data is 1960, forty five years after the peak.
The United States raised 36 million acres of oats and 75 million acres of hay out of a total of 330 million acres under cultivation in 1915. There were 21.5 million horses and the statistics are less clear for oxen, but they existed in comparable numbers. This was the all time peak amount of land dedicated for energy production rather than food.
We plowed, two rows at a time, with horses and oxen.
The disc of the era was pulled with a draft animal while the operator ballasted as well as controlled the machine.
Planting with a one horsepower implement also meant doing two rows at a time.
The grain was processed at the end of the season using horse power.
That 75 million acres of hay? It was cut, raked, and lifted into hay mows using horse power, too.
And if a car ran smoothly down a country road it did so because a team of horses had cleared the way.
What changed in 1915? There were two things the happened then that have made a dramatic difference in both agriculture and the total number of humans alive today.
Agriculture got automated. This 1930 iron tired John Deere is the oldest tractor in my photo collection. It would pull a four bottom plow where a team of horses could only handle a fraction of that mass.
This 1949 International Super M is an old friend and before it we had a 1939 International H. The H was a family heirloom, bought in the 1950s for the forty acres of ground my mother's parents farmed.
I spent a lot of days sweating in the sun behind this thing, stacking the hay bales as they came out the rear ramp. The round thing in front is a flywheel that stabilizes the machine's operation and the universal joint and attached rod are connected to the power take off shaft on the rear of the tractor. Three young men eager for a weekend out can bring in and put up a thousand fifty pound bales in a busy day. Pre-automation that was a much longer process and acreage was much, much higher than the five million acres of alfalfa we cultivate today. This was a big part of the dozen farmers displaced for every tractor operator we hear about in Grapes of Wrath.
Another fossil fuel based thing that happened in those years gets a lot less play was the synthesizing of nitrogen fertilizer. The human tragedy of the dust bowl years is part of our national memory but few recall the tragedy we avoided a generation before that thanks to the work of Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. The nitrate deposits of Chile were almost played out and fear of famine were very, very real. I think we're approaching another such time, but that's a topic for other diaries. My thought today is to talk about solutions to that, say the National Renewable Ammonia Architecture, and what that means for Messrs. Galt & Joad.
I talk fairly regularly with Bryan Lutter, a South Dakota based agronomist, farmer, tinkerer ... and a self proclaimed Libertarian. He was the source of the information on biofuel acres and he has a lot to say about how the decline of rural America was driven by fossil fuel use in the 20th century. I got quite lucky today, because as I started writing this paragraph my phone rang with a South Dakota number and it was him.
I shared with him what I had done on this diary and he had a bit of a story to tell about how his own views have changed over the years.
Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1993, filling the stratosphere with particulates, lowering global temperatures, and bringing an unexpected boon to the Dakota drylands; regular rainfall. Dryland corn had traditionally been grown at about 16,000 stalks per acre but the moisture anomaly meant they could plant the same 28,000 stalks per acre their neighbors in Minnesota and Iowa did. This was great ... until the dust settled and the naturally dryer weather returned. I won't wallow in the agronomical details; Bryan's belief that nature had been bested by technology was one that was "beaten out of him by Mother Nature". He lost it all, worked for a period of time as a loan officer in a large Midwestern city, and then crept back to the family farming business, humbled by the experience.
I don't really do a good job of capturing what it's like to talk to Bryan. If I say something that gets him started it's like a special comment from Keith Olbermann – he has facts, figures, conclusions and they just come rolling right out. Some of my best diaries have come after a chat with him. Today he was on fire, dropping killer quotes every other minute as we talked about farming, food, and the connection to energy markets.
You get a room full of Friedman free market economists and I guarantee you those guys have never sat through an ecology class, or if they did they were the ones that got a C- by looking over my shoulder during the tests. They just don't get it – Mother Nature is in charge, not the market. They have even less of a grasp of geology; peak oil isn't an if, it's a when, and that when is either right in front of us or just behind us.
I think Bryan isn't quite the Libertarian he makes himself out to be. He has recovered enough financially that he bought an apartment building and the reason behind his call is that he was collecting the bits he needed for a passive solar system and wanted to share the details. He is very Libertarian in moments: "I don't like the word landlord. I don't think that lord ought to be in there". Then he goes all Tom Joad on me, talking about how his care for the energy efficiency and overall upkeep of his building keeps "his people" safe. He frets over their energy bills and he and I have discussed several schemes to lower the cost for those living in his building. I guess it isn't all altruism – he tells me he gets the pick of the town's renters because he does things like this passive solar installation.
And I'm still a ferocious capitalist when provoked, and the country's ammonia market does just that. After talking about passive solar, the local economy, farming, and the banking mess we turned our attention to a mutual profit motive. South Dakota has a marvelous hydroelectric resource in the Oahe dam, there is a growing wind pool to allow for deferral of hydroelectric production which will conserve water in the region, and a market that is massive in contrast to the typical renewable ammonia plant is close at hand. Bryan has laid off a bit on herding cows and stared herding local business leaders; we're going to get a company together, do the planning, and then see if we can't free a South Dakota county from dirty, imported ammonia.
We talk dollars and depreciation associated with the plant, but there is always a strong component of job creation. Both of us are rural creatures and we've watched our home towns wither as manufacturing jobs slipped away in the 1970s and 1980s, leaving only the agriculture, and Wall Street would have offshored that, too, if they could have dreamed up a means to do so.
Bryan resolved his corn density problem in an interesting fashion. He'd heard of a fellow living in a nursing home who'd had an invention in the area and went to see him. The man, long since retired, had planted densely by the standards of his time and he watched the rain carefully. If a dry July was Mother Nature's mood for the year he would take a cultivator he'd modified for a run through the field, killing about a third of the crop to ensure the other two thirds had the moisture it needed to mature properly. He's gone back to the normal dryland density and they're looking into building a larger version of the old fellow's corn culler.
The old ones, the ones who farmed before we had GMO seed and all these fancy chemicals, they knew how to get along with Mother Nature. I shot that marvelous collection of horse drawn farm machinery right after the owner died. I wasn't there for the auction but I'm told most of it was sold as scrap iron. I wonder if we'll be regretting a move like that in a couple of years; we might just need to draw upon the old ways of doing things.