The average American consumer spends about 10 percent of his/her income on food these days, compared with close to 50 percent back in 1900, due to the efficiency of our modern agricultural system. That’s the equivalent of about 4 hours out of a 40-hour work week. Compare this to the many hours that a biointensive farmer must spend producing a subsistence diet (30 hours, or somewhat less with recent improvements).
A biointensive farmer cannot generate enough sales volume at current market prices to recover his/her labor costs and make a profit – except with some high-value specialty crops. This has been a major deterrent, and it is a principal reason why the biointensive method has been most successful with subsistence farms in various countries, or as a source of healthy food and extra income for people who have an off-the-farm job. Or with retirees! Where it can be especially helpful is with the many people who are living in more or less severe poverty, amounting to about 15 percent of the population in this country and even higher percentages in many other countries. Being able to reliably grow your own food on a small plot can literally be a life-saver.
However, poverty also represents a major obstacle to expanding biointensive food production. The system is relatively inexpensive, but it still requires land, and water, and seeds, and starter compost, and soil amendments, and tools, and related equipment like water hoses, shade cloths, and plastic covers for cold weather, not to mention training. It’s a very knowledge-intensive system. To create 10 million new biointensive farms with a front-end investment of, say, $200 each, the total cost could be $2 billion. Needless to say, the agricultural development programs at the United Nations, as well as in individual countries and private foundations, have overwhelmingly favored the cost efficiencies and productivity of conventional agriculture.
Food politics poses yet another obstacle. Jeavons and his many supporters favor open pollinated seeds and seed saving, contrary to the big seed companies. They oppose the use of Roundup and other toxic chemicals, in conflict with major chemical companies. And they distrust the new GMO plant seeds being developed in various laboratories. They even disparage our profligate meat-eating habits (and the cattle industry) as a wasteful use of fragile pasture land and a major source of methane – an especially potent greenhouse gas. Jeavons is obviously not welcome in some agribusiness circles or agricultural funding agencies.
However, it is becoming ever-more likely that we will eventually (and maybe much sooner) experience a tectonic shift in the economics of food production as the combination of climate disruption and resource depletion begins to wreak havoc. As we learned in Economics 101, scarcity tends to drive up prices until there is a new “equilibrium” point where the demand and supply curves intersect. In this case, though, we’re not talking about the price of “widgets” but about a commodity that has life and death consequences. Economic inflation is how the middle class becomes poor and how the poor starve to death.
This, in a nutshell, is the looming crisis that we will soon be facing in our global agricultural system – scarcities and skyrocketing prices. The number of hungry people around the world will increase rapidly as the cost of purchasing food rises in multiples from the present levels. And we will also very likely see many more examples of what is currently happening in Venezuela – hyperinflation that makes food unaffordable for a large swath of the population. The risk of mass-hunger and serious social conflict in many countries is very high. (In the U.S., for instance, a 2017 survey found that less than half of the population has even $1,000 saved up for emergencies and 39% have nothing at all.)
So, there is an urgent need to begin preparing now for a much more challenging, and more costly agricultural future. We need a new strategy for global food security. The tools that are available to us are two very different agricultural systems with different strengths and weaknesses, and this suggests using a two-pronged approach.
One element would consist of adapting and strengthening our industrial farming system, beyond what is already being done in various ways. Additional resources should be provided to help large-scale commercial farms become more sustainable -- shifting more of them over to no-till agriculture, installing low-flow drip irrigation systems, converting to organic food production, and developing new drought and heat-tolerant crops.
These things and more are detailed in earth scientist David Montgomery’s new book Growing a Revolution. Even more urgent is the need to create and maintain vast stores of emergency food. In 2017, it was estimated that world food reserves amounted to only a 74-day supply. This would not be enough even to survive something like a "year without a summer” following another major