The End of Cheap Food

Global food production rests on soil and rain. Robots don’t change that.

Of all the modern-day miracles, the least appreciated is the incredible abundance of low cost food in the U.S. and other developed countries. The era of cheap food is ending, for a variety of mutually reinforcing reasons.

We’ve become so dependent on industrial-scale agriculture fueled by diesel that we’ve forgotten that when it comes to producing food, “every little bit helps”–even small backyards / greenhouses can provide meaningful quantities of food and satisfaction.

Virtually every temperate terroir/micro-climate is suitable for raising some plants, herbs, trees and animals. (Terroir includes everything about a specific place: the soil type, the climate variations, sun exposure, the bacteria in the soil, everything.)

We’ve forgotten that cities once raised much of the food consumed by residents within the city limits. Small plots of land, rooftop gardens, backyard chicken coops, etc. can add up when they are encouraged rather than discouraged.

Let’s start with how disconnected the vast majority of us are from the production of the cheap food we take for granted. A great many people know virtually nothing about how food is grown, raised, harvested / slaughtered, processed and packaged.

Highly educated people cannot recognize a green bean plant because they’ve never seen one. They know nothing about soil or industrial farming. They’ve never seen the animals they eat up close or cared for any of the animals humans have tended for their milk, eggs and flesh for millennia.

Most of us take the industrial scale of agriculture and the resulting abundance and low cost for granted, as if it was a kind of birthright rather than a brief period of reckless consumption of resources that cannot be replaced.

Small-scale agriculture is financially difficult because it is competing with global industrial agriculture powered by hydrocarbons and low-cost overseas labor.

That said, it is possible to develop a niche product with local support by consumers and businesses. This is the Half-X, Half-Farmer model I’ve written about for years: if the household has at least one part-time gig that pays a decent wage, the household can pursue a less financially rewarding niche in agriculture/animal husbandry. Degrowth Solutions: Half-Farmer, Half-X (July 19, 2014)

Industrial agriculture includes many elements few fully understand. The shipping of fruit thousands of miles via air freight is a function of 1) absurdly cheap jet fuel and 2) global tourism, which fills airliners with passengers who subsidize the air cargo stored beneath their feet.

When global tourism dried up in the Covid lockdown, so did air cargo capacity.

I have to laugh when I read another article about some new agricultural robot that will replace human labor, as if human labor were the key cost in industrial agriculture. (Hydrocarbons, fertilizer, transport, compliance costs, land leases and taxes are all major costs.)

Left unsaid is the reliance of industrial agriculture on soil, fresh-water aquifers and rain. Irrigation is the result of rain/snow somewhere upstream.

Once the soil and aquifers are depleted and the rain become erratic, the robot will be tooling around a barren field, regardless of whatever whiz-bang sensors and other gear it carries.

Global food production rests on soil and rain. Robots don’t change that. What few of us who rely on industrial agriculture understand is that it depletes soil and drains aquifers by its very nature, and these resources cannot be replaced with technology. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.

Soil can be rebuilt but it can’t be rebuilt by industrial agricultural methods–diesel-powered tractors and fertilizers derived from natural gas.

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