On a comment in a @cstross thread earlier today re: evidence of agricultural collapse, I said we were already in agricultural collapse, and someone (foolishly) asked me to expand on that… it got long and ranty so I’m pulling it out and giving it its own thread.
Caveats: I am not an expert, just a farmer. I’m from the US so this will be US centric. We have a dairy, so dairy and animal ag may make a disproportionate appearance.
In fact efficiency is usually the OPPOSITE of stable. An efficient system matches itself tightly to very specific and specialized conditions so as to maximize gain. The price is reduced flexibility. The more efficient the system, the worse it breaks when conditions shift.
Agriculture is in the middle of some seismic shifts.
Next: pests. Monoculture isn’t just efficient for us: it’s SUPER convenient for bugs. Agriculture depends on pesticides and antibiotics to keep losses down, but resistance to both is increasing more rapidly than new chemicals/drugs can be produced.
Again: it’s going to get worse. Most pests like heat almost as much as they like conveniently concentrated food sources. Conservative estimates suggest we will see a 10% increase in pest losses PER DEGREE CELCIUS of climate warming.
So… yes. Industrialized agriculture is in crisis — is in the early days of collapse. It’s rising prices and occasional shortages right now, but those are the ominous creaks before the roof falls in. I very much fear I will see famine in the US within my lifetime.
End rant! Thanks for sticking it y’all. Back to talking about sff books and my garden now. :)
Thanks, that was really interesting. I am not an expert in agriculture but I am a professional in food logistics, and yeah, this absolutely checks out.
The concentration of the vegetable industry is especially something I think will have far-reaching consequences. It's all very well to have vegetables come from the Netherlands and southern Spain, but when those areas get hit by weather or other disruption, it means there are fewer other areas to pick up the load.
And, of course, heat also affects people. Agriculture is not typically a career one has the option to pursue from the comfort of one’s air-conditioned office (unless you’re not so much a farmer as a neo-feudal landowner… but that’s a different rant.) It’s once again a problem that’s going to get bigger — particularly in places like Texas and California, which have been so attractive for “efficient” agriculture in part because of their “efficient” (cheap, illegal) work force.
Antibiotics are in an even uglier place, with resistance rates also rising and disease zones expanding in the heat. The extra fun there being we don’t just need antibiotics to secure our food supply. We kinda need those for PEOPLE.
@katfeete@cstross don't forget predictable weather. "efficient" farmers rely on 6-12 month weather forecasts when planting, and dropping the reliability of those means the wrong thing gets planted at the wrong time so you get reduced yield (can be zero).
There are also "market forecasts", where farmers guess prices but often also pre-sell crops. A presold crop that doesn't exist due to the aforementioned bad weather forecast costs the farmer a lot of money (see: Gamestop)
@moz@katfeete@cstross Consider the assumptions built into the risk calculations of the financial institutions providing capital to agricultural activities. As those stop being accurate, the probability of profitably lending to the agricultural sector diminishes to zero.
And like insurance, you get a complete withdrawal from lines of business that are impossible to do profitably. So it's possible to have agricultural collapse for purely financial reasons. (Upstate NY dairy, frex.)
@graydon@moz@katfeete "As those stop being accurate, the probability of profitably lending to the agricultural sector diminishes to zero. And like insurance, you get a complete withdrawal from lines of business that are impossible to do profitably."
Or: you get a state of emergency, nationalization policies, and a war footing (i.e. profit/loss goes out the window: the new calculus is survival/extinction) replacing capitalism-as-usual. NB: it's a revolution, and revolutions get bloody, fast.
@cstross@moz@katfeete COVID has convinced me that the people inside the apparatus of the civil power literally can't think of non-commercial, non-capitalist mechanisms for doing anything. Direct production isn't a thought they can have.
So, yes, historical examples abound, but I don't think we're going to get anything of the sort. And I don't think we can get a revolution, because the means of information transmission necessary to a revolution have been choked with shit.
@cstross@moz@katfeete I think a lot of the scale of reaction to Occupy was because we might have had a revolution then, if anyone could have articulated the necessity and got past the legitimacy=nonviolence nonsense.
So while I agree that revolutions tend bloody, I think this one is going to be structurally novel and centre on novel means of production and be decided by the scale of the communities each novel means of food production is able to create and support.
@graydon@moz@katfeete On the post-Occupy thing, I suspect losing David Graeber before his time was potentially a huge setback. Can't have a viable revolution without a program, can't have a program without analysing what's wrong with the ancien regime first.
@graydon@cstross@moz@katfeete in the US, it’s not just that—a combination of the filibuster and propaganda (I know people who think COVID is a hoax) have almost completely destroyed the US’s capacity for collective action to solve problems (and I think that’s on purpose)
Annnnd then there’s heat. A huge part of the world’s agriculture is in places that are vulnerable to the effects of global warming and the US is no exception. The overlap between states with the most climate risk and those with the most agriculture is UNCOMFORTABLY HIGH.
The recent wildfires in Texas have killed 7-10k cattle; I could name easily ten other climate change events in the past ten years that have devastated crops or animals.
The first and worst is water. Chasing “efficiency” pushed much of US agriculture to areas with fragile water supplies. About 30% of US food is produced on the back of the Ogallala aquifer, which, at current depletion rates, MIGHT last until 2100. A problem! But worse… due to global warming and reduced snowmelt, the Colorado, which among other things supplies water for 90% of the US winter vegetable supply, is in crisis NOW.
People are already paying for this in stores. It will not get better.
@coldclimate Oh, I have not — in fact I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of the last year just binging on comfortable mid century mysteries or rereading Pritchett because GODDAMIT STUPID REALITY — but it looks amazing. Wishlisted for when I’m better able to appreciate it.
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