Do we love our machines more than our children?

by Tony McQuail of Lucknow, ON

Our current problems stem from our failure to understand and accept that we are biological organisms on a finite planet. We experienced a brief moment in history when we were able to step outside those constraints and that has coloured our assumptions of what is real and what is normal. In a century we have burned through millions of years worth of accumulated biomass in the form of fossil fuels. Our beliefs in economic growth and mechanical progress rest on this conflagration. It seems intuitively obvious to me that we cannot sustain these levels of energy use with annually renewable sources. But what seems obvious to me seems to be missed in most of the discussions of how to address climate change, peak oil, and environmental degradation. Our society has a passion for technofix fantasies that are held out as allowing us to continue on our present trajectory. Don’t believe them.

I’ve been a farmer for nearly forty years; I’ve been interested in renewable energy for all of them. In the 70s we built a passive solar home; and we put up the first modern interconnected wind generator on the Ontario Hydro grid in 1978. We were using photovoltaic panels to run electric fencers more than twenty years ago, and currently use them to run our livestock water and garden irrigation in the summer. We formed a co-op with other farmers and tried to make an ethanol still, but were unsuccessful. A team of horses provide farm power; they run on homegrown renewable fuel, and have helped us farm organically since 1976.

In the early 70s, while continuing to farm, I enrolled in the environmental studies program at the University of Waterloo. I was interested in Agriculture and looked at the research on energy productivity of different systems. Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) or Net Energy Productivity, is the ratio of energy that comes out of a system divided by the energy put into it. What was fascinating was comparing pre-industrial with the industrial agriculture and food systems. Pre-industrial systems showed an EROEI of five to fifty. That is to say that for every unit of energy put into the system between five and fifty units came out. In pre-industrial agriculture, that energy was human labour, draft animals, tools, and seeds saved from previous crops. The high end of the scale was an intensively managed and layered system, like paddy rice. The low end was simple subsistence agriculture – but to me the interesting thing was that agriculture systems did not go lower than five units out per unit in. My guess is that an agricultural system that produced less than five units literally “starved out”; it didn’t yield enough surplus energy to have a reserve for bad harvests or to raise the next generation.

Industrial agriculture with its fertilizers, pesticides, diesel fuel, big machines, transport, processing and distribution networks, has an EROEI of zero point one. In other words ten units of energy are used in the system to get one unit of energy to the table. Industrial Agriculture is a system for converting petroleum into food in an extremely wasteful fashion. Unfortunately, what we have done with industrial agriculture has been echoed across our whole economy, where we have redesigned our activities to use ever-greater amounts of energy, as we replace labour with fossil fuels. When we first started this substitution the EROEI of petroleum was impressive. Early oil wells often produced over one hundred units of energy for every unit spent in drilling. They were the easy oil wells to get to. Today’s light crude is returning between six to eight units for every unit in. The Tar sands may be getting down to one out for one in, if you count all the hidden subsidies. As EROEI decreases, environmental impact increases and the driver of our past one hundred years of economic growth collapses. Without a high EROEI the rate of growth economists believe necessary for a healthy economy is impossible. Trying to achieve those rates of growth with low EROEI energy systems will be incredibly destructive and counter productive.

The reason is the “compost conundrum”. We’ve all heard of the greenhouse effect, but I’d like to offer an additional phrase to help us grapple with the challenges ahead. We actually have a green house on our farm. I understand that CO2 acts like glazing helping to hold radiant heat inside the earth’s atmosphere. But I also think that if I took all the biomass that I grew in the green house over the course of the summer, and torched it inside the greenhouse some night, the green house would still experience a sudden rise in temperature – even if there was no sunlight. Our burning of the fossil fuels is taking the biomass accumulated by millions of years of photosynthesis and burning it in the geological equivalent of a night. So I’m concerned that we not get so focused on CO2 that we loose track of the cause of the problem, which is our intensity and scale of energy use. CO2 sequestration and carbon credits attack the symptom but not the root cause of our problems, and delay our addressing the real issue.

As an organic farmer I make compost piles. These heat up, not because of sunlight, but because of the rapid increase of microbial populations within the compost pile, and the heat buildup from their metabolic activity. They are oxidizing carbohydrates within the compost pile and generating heat from the rapidity of their growth.

When one unit of input energy produced five to fifty units of food, our food really only contributed a fraction over one unit of waste heat to the biosphere, for each unit of food we ate. Once we started eating food produced in the industrial system, each unit of food eaten contributed, eleven units of waste heat – one for the food eaten and ten for the energy used to grow it. If we look at human population it is on a J curve similar to the increase in microbes in a compost pile. If we add in the additional energy we humans now use over and above the energy value of our food, we see an incredible increase in our energy use and waste heat generation. A modern North American probably produces one hundred times as much waste heat from their machines as from their body heat. We’ve figured out how to turbo-charge our compost pile.

We are not going to create a sustainable society by feeding our food to our machines. We are going to completely destabilize society if we plan to take the food out of the mouths of the poor to put into the tanks of SUV’s and Jet planes. We will also continue to destabilize the ecological life support systems of this planet. But we are reaching the point of “peak oil” or as Richard Hindberg has written “peak everything”. What can we do?

Well, the answer seems to me to be right under our noses. We need to redesign our economies and societies to run on the energy that goes into our mouths. And we need to remember how to produce that energy (call it food for ease of comprehension) in a manner that yields an EROEI of five or more. As a society we need to develop an ecological agriculture around and within our urban centres, where food is grown with a minimum of energy inputs and a maximum of ecological design. We need to redesign our cities to be walkable, bikeable, breathable, and livable. Most of the energy to make the city function should come from the food we eat. If we did this then we could likely use photovoltaics, wind generators, methane digesters, and convert some biomass into liquid fuels to provide the energy to run public transit and communications technologies, and even some tractors and combines in larger farm fields. And we could use our remaining petroleum far more carefully to bridge the gap between where we are today and where we need to be if we are to have a tomorrow.

We may love our machines – but they don’t love us. We need to remember that as we make choices. We need to love our children more than our machines.

If we don’t learn this there will be hell to pay. Most of the new technologies have dismal EROEI’s. When Petroleum had a 100/1 EROEI it meant that for one hundred units of CO2 released by burning that petroleum, only one unit of CO2 was released in producing it. With a technology that yields only four units per unit of input energy it means that twenty-five units of CO2 are going to be released in producing one hundred units of energy

What are the global warming implications of our high tech low EROEI plans to keep fueling our Machine Culture? The whole global warming debate seems to ignore the law of thermodynamics that states that all energy eventually ends up as waste heat. The more energy we use the more waste heat we dump into the Earth Ecosystem. The act of burning fossil fuels, the act of fissioning Uranium adds to the heat load of our planet. In the current climate desperate strategies for turning tar into liquid fuel, or beaming solar energy from space into our ecosystem to become waste heat, hardly seem like wise plans.

I would be much happier if the bright minds seeking techno fixes and the stacks of dollars funding them were focused on learning to live within the “solar power from space” that we get on an annual basis. For virtually all our species existence on the planet, we managed on the solar energy stored in our food. Stonehenge, the pyramids, and Tical were built with that energy. Redesigning our society to run on food that we grow ourselves may hold out far more hope for “Safe, Clean, Renewable Energy”, than high tech fantasies. The rhetoric reminds me of the past enthusiasm for Nuclear Fission, which bankrupted Ontario Hydro. We ratepayers are still paying for it with the “debt retirement charge” on every bill. We have yet to deal with fully decommissioning a plant or coming up with a permanent solution to high level radioactive fuel wastes. The environmental costs of that “energy too cheap to meter” fantasy, have been swept into the future.

Let us be careful not to commit vast quantities of our limited resources to high tech adventures that are likely to make matters worse, not better. We are more likely to survive and prosper if we return to being tool users and minimize our reliance and addiction to machines. We can set our personal and societal design criteria to rejoin the community of life on this planet. Rediscovering our own metabolic energy can be the key to our survival; it would address the causes of both the compost conundrum and the greenhouse effect.

Tony McQuail, Kitchener Monthly Meeting

(The McQuails are founding members of the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario)

post script

Fortunately we do not only rely on our leaders and well funded researchers to build our future. Each of us helps create the future every day by the actions we take and the choices we make. So while I am disappointed when I look at the lack of response from our political leaders and major research institutes I do not despair. Ronald Wright in his brilliant little book “A short history of progress” points out that the elites in any society are the last folks to accept and respond to a paradigm change or the warnings of collapse. The current structure serves them just fine thank you, they see no need to change.

But as I look around I see signs of change bubbling up from below. We attended that “Animal Power Field Days” in Tunbridge, Vermont this fall. It was encouraging to see old and young teamsters sharing their experiences and improving their knowledge of their craft. It was a delight to see so many teams of horses and yokes of oxen demonstrating field work and log handling. And it was exciting to see so much new equipment designed for draft animals, logging arches, manure spreaders, cultivators, plows, mowers and 3 point hitch carts. As the infrastructure of the petroleum era ages requiring massive taxpayer inputs to repair there is a whole new series of tools being built to serve the age of metabolic energy.

In towns, villages and cities around the world local folks are reconnecting with their local food system and farmers. They are developing “Transition Town” Strategies for their communities. They are starting to grow their own gardens. They are sharing rides and equipment. They are putting solar panels on their roof tops. They are starting to act like energy and food security are too important to be left to oil companies and economists. So I would like to say thank you to home gardeners, draft horse clubs, the small manufacturers building wheel hoes and draft animal equipment, the little independent seed companies, the writers and publishers who keep the knowledge alive and available and the folks who help organize “Transition Town” activities in their communities. You are what give me hope for the future.

In the late 1970’s the Dean of the Ontario Agricultural College convened a discussion on renewable energy for the farm. I was one of the delegates. There were people talking about their work with ethanol, and bio-diesel and methane. Finally I spoke up. I told them that I was working with an on farm energy source

1- That ran on fuel that I could grow, harvest and process on my farm with existing equipment.

2- That the waste products from the combustion of this fuel could be used as a beneficial soil amendment and fertilizer.

3- That I was working with modular power units that could be coupled together to provide the amount of power required for the specific job.

4- The technology for producing the units is simple enough that they can be manufactured on the farm and that I had already produced several surplus to my needs which I had sold to other farmers.

5- That I was already doing much of my farm work with these units.

6- And that these units could be voice activated.

Well people were leaning forward with interest. Here was an on farm renewable energy technology currently being used on the farm. The dean had been leaning forward with as much interest as anyone and looking a bit perplexed because I was describing something he hadn’t heard of. Suddenly his eyes lit up with recognition and he said “your talking about work horses!” and I said “yes” and he and everyone else chuckled, lost interest and went back to talking of ethanol, and bio-diesel and methane. And I suspect that without any research help or encouragement, without significant extension support draft horses still account for more on farm renewable energy motive power on Ontario farms than methane, ethanol & bio-diesel combined. I doubt there is even the research done to document the amount of farm work done with horses by the Mennonites, Amish and oddities like myself.

My sense is that we are still a long way from having bio-diesel, methane, ethanol or hydrogen replacing diesel fuel on the farm. The net energy productivity of some of these must also be considered. Having produced over 50 colts that trace back to the original pair of mares we bought in the ‘70’s I am confident that not only are work horse a renewably fueled technology but that they are a self renewing technology. I was disappointed that people who were excited when it was dressed up in fancy jargon lost interest when it was revealed as a tried and true technology.

Fortunately, despite having lost 30 years of possible research into improved horse equipment and improved training techniques at most of our Agricultural colleges the work is happening at the grass roots level.

About 20 years later I attended a consultation on Agriculture and Greenhouse Gas Emissions. I sent the following comments to the consultation facilitator. “A sustainable society will make more use of ecological understanding and metabolic energy and be a lot less dependent (independent) of non-renewable fuels. Don’t laugh, Work horses have a small but significant place in Ontario Agriculture today. The Amish and Mennonites are the mainstay but there has also remained a group of other farmers who did their own economic analysis and kept using work horses at least for the things that a horse can do better than a tractor. The technology for using horses is still readily available across Ontario. One can get new harness, used and some new equipment, and tractor equipment can be modified to work with horses. I’ve experimented with a variety of renewable energy technologies and true horsepower is one of the more off the shelf, ready to use varieties. The GHG advantages of a power source that runs on home grown bio-fuels, encourages soil building sod crops in the rotation, produces a rich organic soil amendment and can be renewed by biologically manufacturing a replacement on the farm is, I suspect, pretty positive.” I never heard anything more from him.

Five years after that I did an impromptu presentation at the Terra Madre Gathering of Food Communities in Torino, Italy. I told about our experience designing a farm to run largely on human and animal metabolic energy and how I believed that to build a sustainable society we were going to have to look to metabolic energy for power where ever it could be used. That we needed to honour and support those using their own muscles or animal power on their farms. That we need to redesign our society so that most of what we do can be done with the energy that comes from the food we grow and eat. I was pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm of the response and by the moderator for the session who reminded the delegates that of the 1.5 billion people of the world who are food producers only 30 million have access to motorized equipment, 270 million have access to draft animals and the remaining 1.3 billion rely on their own muscles. I was encouraged to discover that there are other farmers and people concerned with how to develop a truly sustainable agriculture who are using or are interested in muscle power.

As horse, ox and mule farmers we can feel a little isolated and lonely in North America. It is good to remember that world wide we are part of the majority of farmers working with mind and muscle power to feed our families and communities. We have a lot to offer for a sustainable future for our grandchildren.