Michael I share your lack of optimism for our future. We moved to Tasmania to 'escape' life in the inner city and are now on our own small farm growing our own organic food, learning how to feed ourselves.

We've given up highly paid jobs in the IT sector to do this. People think we're mad, and I suppose life doesn't seem that different right this minute. However, it's the lack of foresight and the blind optimism that the general person on the street displays that worries me - in the face of so much evidence of our society slipping I cannot believe I still meet people who pump out child after child, who think the only successful life is to climb the corporate ladder at the expense of those around you, who spray their land with pesticides and fertilisers (whilst bitterly complaining about the growing cost of this method), or who think that 10 years down the track life will still be as it is now.

There are a number of peakniks around us, and even among them there are quibbles about who will get their way - husbands wanting ride-on lawnmowers or tractors, wives wanting a new car. In addition to 2 kids a few more kids would be nice too, to 'help on the farm later on'. What part of peak oil/food do these guys not get?

I think you can only start preparing if you truly understand and believe where the world is heading - and with the current media, it is hard for people to do that. Even with sufficient literature out there (Heinberg, Kunstler, Strahan, Campbell, etc etc) it is difficult truly get your head around it and ignore the current paradigm.

It's hard doing your own thing when the rest of the world thinks you're wrong or mad - but thinking everything will be ok, or 'the great technology god will save us' is the real mad thing. Unfortunately most people will only find out too late, and I would think the real mayhem will start then.

I was rather hoping this was going to get into what needs to happen in order to maintain food production in the face of declining oil availability. Unfortunately it did not. All the article really offered was the rather unhelpful “optimism is bad” mantra. As if somehow being pessimistic will somehow help solve problems.

It seems to me that there are things that can be done to assist agricultural production in the face of increasing cost of / reduction in availability of oil. It also seems to me that Australian agriculture, because of its lower dependence on oil compared with North America or Europe, is in a position to exploit these. No-till agriculture has massively reduced fuel use and has been widely adopted in Australia. One problem Australia will face is the tyranny of distance.

Michael, your comments about agricultural exports from Australia are muddled. The argument being had on the Agmates piece is about the monetary value of exports. This is rather different from the amount of foodstuffs. The latter being the important issue if you want to say Australia will not be producing sufficient food to feed itself. A quick trip to the ABS website told me that in 2006 Australia produced 42.5 million tons of grain crops and exported 24 million tons of them, or just over half. The same could be done for other sectors. An example is meat. Total supply (including imports) was 4.5 million tons. Exports were 1.8 million tons or about 40%.

Charger - others - sorry but the real problem with Australian farming has been a long-term decline in food prices in real terms, notwithstanding short term swings such as is occuring now. Farmers have been able to keep ahead of price declines by continuous improvements in real factor productivity. That productivity increase seems to have paused of late, which may be due to the hold-up in the next step of adopting genetically-modified foods. Some more work on this point would not go astray.
I wasted time reading that paper by Turner on the Club of Rome forecasts. No wonder the forecasts were panned at the time - they are so simplistic as to be useless. Turner's paper amounts to no more than noting that most things have gotten better (seems to be what it is saying) in the last few decades, and that the original forecasts said that things would get better in the those decades, therefore the bit about collapse around 2050 must be right. Bwhahahahahah! You can't be serious? The only point of any real interest is the assertion that we can calculate total reserves of resources. The resources industry abandoned all that long ago. The amount of available reserves of any resource varies according to price and exploration activity, and not much else. Sure there must be a limit - somewhere - but no one in the resources industry is looking for it. Better find another crisis..

Agronomist - thanks for the somewhat reassuring points on grain and meat exports - better than I thought but still nowhere near a 400% excess. As grain prices rise (due to increasing demand and decreasing supply) we will see grain-fed meat prices rise even faster. This will dampen meat demand and release more grain for human consumption (since a large proportion of our grain goes to meat production). Nevertheless, if you have a production capacity surplus what you do not want to do is to grow to the limits of that surplus. The surplus is a buffer/safety net against adverse conditions that reduce production (e.g. crop diease/climate change/oil decline).

You may be correct that Australian agriculture uses less oil than the US - e.g. per kg of food produced although I would really like to see some figures on this (and I often hear about minimum tillage when reading US articles). However, it is incorrect to believe that we are less dependent on oil if we use less per kg of food produced. Like the US and Europe, our ag machinery is still 100% dependent on oil (and fertilizer production is also very oil dependent). In fact, while it might seem counterintuitive, if we are using less oil per kg produced in our agriculture (but are still 100% dependent upon oil) then we are, in fact, MORE vulnerable to the effects of oil shortages/high oil prices since we are less able to make efficiency gains. (Inefficiency/waste is a buffer of spare capacity that can be tapped when necessary - there is nothing less vulnerable to resource shortages than a system operating at close to 100% efficiency!)

The importance of a buffer is borne out by the Irish Potato Famine of 1848. Most of the deaths and forced emigration occurred because a significant proportion of the population lived on land holdings that were too small to feed a family on anything but potatoes, so they had no alternatives when the late blight arrived. In any case, knowing that we export half our grain and 40% of our meat doesn't give me a lot of confidence for my children, given that at our current population growth rate of 1.9%, our population is set to double in a little over 36 years.

Curmudgeon,

Food production is not keeping up with population growth globally, at least according to the UN, which says that there are growing numbers of hungry people in both absolute and relative terms

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090619/ap_on_re_eu/eu_un_world_hunger

World grain production per person peaked in 1984. See

http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/Grain/2006_data.htm

You have seriously misrepresented Turner's paper, part of a pattern of denial in which any source that challenges your Cornucopian worldview is dismissed as somehow unreliable. Nowhere does he say that we are going to have a collapse by the middle of the century, just that what has happened to date more or less matches the original business-as-usual scenario that does end in this way. So far as nonrenewable resources are concerned, "the analysis here assumes that non-fuel materials will not create resource contraints", just the opposite of what you are attributing to him.

As Paul Krugman said in his June 28 New York Times column,

"But if you watched the debate on Friday [in the US Congress], you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial."

It still means Australia could potentially afford to double its population without being in danger of running out of food. Other problems are likely to occur, but lack of food will probably not strike first. In contrast, many other countries around the world simply don’t have this luxury. Any increase in population will further stress food supplies and indeed is inevitable, given the lack of opportunity and economic development these countries have.

My comments about oil use (or should I say liquid fuel use) are based on knowledge of agriculture in the US compared with Australia. There are few good figures as far as I know and it depends on what is counted; oil, natural gas or all energy use and whether you count transport of product, manufacturing of product and re-transport into the mix. Estimates from the range from 2 to 20% of all energy use. You might find something useful for Australia in here http://www.garnautreview.org.au/chp7.htm

The greatest fuel source for fertilizers at present comes from natural gas rather than oil. It is also possible to make them from coal http://business.theage.com.au/business/china-coal-deal-could-signal-thaw-in-relations-20090713-dius.html

Europe is unlikely to adopt no-till farming practices widely anytime soon. There are increasing legislative actions that will encourage continued tillage. What farmers will do instead is move to biodiesel made from palm oil imported from Indonesia and Malaysia. Australian farmers could potentially do the same.