Pesticides are high value products and the cost of feedstock is not necessarily the most important item.

Transport - we know how to organize that differently - it's a tougher nut to crack to make it happen, but it's not possible.

Wind power

If food prices were to double (or wages were to fall 50%) it would make sense.

We use fixed beds. It is in some ways ideal for small spaces - no tilling (except when we dig up root vegetables). Adding chickens (which we are thinking of doing) should increase productivity by creating chicken tractors.

We are using hoop houses (very small green houses) to grow early crops on a portion of our garden. We are Canadian 5b or I believe 4b US for climate zones with excellent snow fall coverage.

We are currently selling spinach grown under a hoop house planted in the fall. Our last frost date is May 15. We expect to sell spinach perhaps to as late as June 15. We will then be planting our main crop.

We are picking leaves and packaging them and earning slightly below - minimum wage with options for labour saving devices.

First harvest 11.5 kg or .01268 ton (short or US)

area (including pathways) 360 sq feet planted 126 sq feet pathways Acres: .01116

# of pickings - probably 8 - using 5-9 we get yields of: 5.7 - 10.2 tons per acre - comparing to commercial plantings of spinach 8-10 ton/acre from what I could quickly find on the web. (someone may wish to check my math)

Now this particular example uses oil products - plastic sheet over the beds in particular. Without them, perhaps the harvest would be 1/10. It would be partially possible to substitute straight cloth I think for a slightly increased yield. Cold frames with glass would be problematic - a lot more work, but would almost certainly increase yield beyond our 5.7 - 10.2 tons per acre. There are other hidden sources of oil products, but these are easily replaceable with wood - at an increased cost and slightly decreased convenience.

In the regular growing season I would suspect that we compete with the yield of large scale commercial farms as well.

I don't see decreased yields from killing oil based large farms. I think that the yields farms get now should be sustainable even on the back yard scale.

Paris, before the automobile fed itself and shipped food to London. (Eliot Colman - 4 season gardening). Cuba is repeating the experiment with organoponico's. Havana has a population of 2M. It has a series of vegetable markets throughout the city.

The problem is to keep soil fertility up. I don't know if composting is going to provide enough nutrients. Paris provided its local farming industry with horse manure - enough that composting manure heated green houses for all season vegetables and super fertile soil. If I remember right it was in the order of 100 tons per acre. I am sure that Cuba's organoponico's have nothing like this level of fertilizer.

We really don't have a good handle on maintaining soil fertility yet. We are performing a 4 year crop rotation. Perhaps some day we may need to increase that to 5 with 1 year plowing green manure under.

Pesticides are also highly overrated in necessity. At one time people sifted out the moths from their flour.

Insects happen. We trap slugs and snails using beer, and we eat damaged leaves. Small worms live in or cauliflower. Life is tough. In any case most come out if you soak in salt water before cooking - the rest come out when you cook. Think of it as added protein. We hand pick Colorado potato Beatles and asparagus beetles. We experimented with predatory nematodes for cut worms - but cardboard collars (any other substance would work as well) work to mostly keep them out of new peppers, melons and tomatoes. With insects, when things get really tough we have been known to break down and spray with dish-washing detergent, but mostly we have learned to live with insects and their damage.

One additional advantage of smaller agriculture would probably be the implementation of land races - crops evolved to grow in the particular climate and soil of the farm, with genetic diversity kept deliberately high to handle fluctuations without wiping out entire harvests. We are considering implementing a land race for spinach, but we are too small for using it as a general strategy. Rather than shipping melons from where they grow best, we would have to grow melons locally that can handle the climate. Right now local melons can not compete with melons from 4,000 km away, but that does not mean that you can't have them locally.

And another advantage would be perfectly edible crops that do not store or transport well. Locally, Claytonia (Miner's Lettuce) is the first winter green available with the possible exception of water cress. It just doesn't have a long shelf life. In the fruit section we are trying to grow Paw Paws 1/2 zone outside of their northern range. The problem with Paw Paws is again their shelf life.

I don't see starvation from lack of oil, and the need to grow food locally. I do see a change in the pricing of food and what is available, when it is available and possibly its "quality". You may be converting your city backyard to agriculture - either personally or through an organization that rents your yard for food. (It is already happening.) In the winter fresh food will not be as plentiful. Things like potatoes, leaks, turnips, rutabegas, celerac, squash (some of which can store for up to 2 years) and so forth will become much more common. Fresh greens like claytonia may become much more common. Dried vegetables like tomatoes will also be more common. Fresh zucchini? Perhaps for the 1%. But you don't have to go hungry or be malnourished on a local diet even in Canada 5b, you just have to eat differently. Even a city of 2M should be able to maintain itself from local food. Space will have to be utilized differently. Our obsession with roads will have to change. The changing of infrastructure will hurt - alot, but it can be done, and people should not have to starve - though, as with Cuba, the transition time may be deadly. In Cuba it represented one meal a day lost.

_{aspiring to genteel poverty}

I just don't see the eating local, expensive food model really taking off except for elite niche consumers who dig that.  Scarcity pressures are much more likely to expand the global supply chains of food than keep things local because it makes more efficient use of technologies in different parts of the world, even if fuel costs increase.

Anyway, we are back to long forgotten frontiers:

21st century chain gangs [Salon.com]

In these years, the system of leasing out convicts to private enterprise was reborn.  This was a perverse triumph for the law of supply and demand in an era infatuated with the charms of the free market.  On the supply side, the U.S. holds captive 25 percent of all the prisoners on the planet: 2.3 million people.  It has the highest incarceration rate in the world as well, a figure that began skyrocketing in 1980 as Ronald Reagan became president.  As for the demand for labor, since the 1970s American industrial corporations have found it increasingly unprofitable to invest in domestic production.  Instead, they have sought out the hundreds of millions of people abroad who are willing to, or can be pressed into, working for far less than American workers.

As a consequence, those back home -- disproportionately African-American workers -- who found themselves living in economic exile, scrabbling to get by,  began showing up in similarly disproportionate numbers in the country's rapidly expanding prison archipelago. It didn't take long for corporate America to come to view this as another potential foreign country, full of cheap and subservient labor -- and better yet, close by.

What began in the 1970s as an end run around the laws prohibiting convict leasing by private interests has now become an industrial sector in its own right, employing more people than any Fortune 500 corporation and operating in 37 states.  

So all this shit out of the IMF seems to me to be beside the point. It seems an advert for private pension funds. Give us whatever savings you have left so we can shaft you some more. Maybe when there's nothing left of you the elite can harvest the trace elements in your body.

Sounds like the present systems bandied about by the postnosticators.

Align culture with our nature.

There's nothing wrong with spending more of our resources on old people when there are more old people alive...

Wind power

So approximately the total factor productivity growth the world enjoyed in pre-industrial times.

It's more than a rounding error, but not by much.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.