The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [103]
Industrial agriculture is marvelously cost-effective, but also remarkably brittle. It depends on a perpetual inflow of chemical fertilizers to replace the nutrients that are stripped, as well as petrochemical inputs in the form of herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides to counteract the deleterious effects of soil sterilization and monocropping.
What is the difference between Wal-Mart and an industrial farming operation? Not very much, as it turns out. Both are extremely cost-effective, and both are desperately fragile. If anything disrupts the just-in-time delivery systems around which their methods of profitability are built, either operation will experience profound difficulties. If there’s a gap in the ability to deliver shipping containers from China to Wal-Mart’s operational distribution centers, wares rapidly vanish from the shelves. It may be a cost-effective way to do things, but it’s not robust; it’s fragile.
Similarly, if an industrial farming operation is deprived of the chemical inputs required to enforce growth in their crops, yields will almost immediately suffer and plummet. Various studies of the impact of fertilization have proven that anywhere from 40 percent to 100 percent gains in grain crop yields are dependent on the application of fertilizers.3 Sufficient supplies of fossil fuel products are essential to the success of both of these ventures.
Exporting Nutrients
The United States exports some 80 million tons of agricultural products each year (primarily grains), which represent a massive amount of water, as we’ll see in Chapter 21 (Parched), and vital nutrients that are harvested from the soils and shipped overseas. Without the nutrients being completely recycled back into the soils, the farmed soils quite rapidly become depleted of the vital elements that plants use to support their biological functions and growth.
One puzzle that you might have read about recently comes from the observation that plants grown and tested for their nutrient content some decades ago contained far more nutrients than plants harvested today. The quoted evidence below was assembled by Dr. Donald R. Davis and reveals the following patterns of depletion in food nutrition and soil nutrients:
In wheat and barley, protein concentrations declined by 30 to 50 percent between the years 1938 and 1990.
Likewise, a study of 45 corn varieties developed from 1920 to 2001, grown side by side, found that the concentrations of protein, oil and three amino acids have all declined in the newer varieties.
Six minerals have declined by 22 to 39 percent in 14 widely grown wheat varieties developed over the past 100 years.
Official U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) nutrient data shows that the calcium content of broccoli averaged 12.9 milligrams per gram of dry weight in 1950, but only 4.4 mg/g dry weight in 2003.4
There is no mystery to these results. If you constantly harvest minerals from the soil and then truck them away without replacing them, eventually the soil will become depleted and there will be less of those minerals available to plants. In this sense, then, many farmers are in fact “mining” the soils upon which their livelihoods depend. Without closing that loop somehow and getting those nutrients back into the soils in measures equal to the rates at which they’re harvested and transported away, the practice of farming on those soils is thoroughly unsustainable. Sooner or later, those soils will become utterly sterile, suitable only for the type of farming that uses massive amounts of energy (somewhere along the line) to transport and replace those nutrients by some other means. The bidding wars that broke out in 2010 for various fertilizer companies, such as the hostile pursuit of Potash Corporation by BHP Billiton, reveal the mounting interest in securing ownership of the best remaining sources of essential (and profitable) crop nutrients.5
The High (Energy) Cost of Low-Cost Fertilizers
The three key nutrients