Industrial agriculure is an industry with a huge challenge to become more sustainable. Currently, it is totally dependent on cheap fossil fuel, oil. A typical figure is that 10 kJ of energy from oil is required to produce 1 kJ of food energy. The oil is needed to produce pesticides and fertilizers, to run green houses and to run all kinds of machinery and a complex chain of logistics. That is a terribly low yield and it really illustrates the challenge ahead.
And this is only talking about the energy challenge. The challenges when it comes to maintaining biodiversity, of reducing environmental impact on water, soil, and climate are of equally great dimensions.
Looking at the oil dependence, the following is needed:
- The efficiency in the energy conversion need to be significantly increased
- The dependency on oil need to be shifted to renewable sources, through intermediaries like electricity.
You may argue that ecological agriculture, and near-produced agricutural products are the solutions. It is true that the oil dependence in ecological farming is much lower, and ecological farming also has many other environmental benefits. But a drawback of ecological farming is that the yield per land area is much lower than with traditional industrialised farming. Given the growing world population and the food shortage we have seen his year, this is a very significant limitation.
We need to look for solutions and innovations which optimises yield without sacrificing environment and healh and still reduce the oil dependence.
We have actually seen quite a few solutions of this kind. But they have not been developed here, but rather for extremely decentralised and rural situations in countries like Bangladesh where Grameen Shakti have developed both solar cell driven and biogas driven systems for rural small scale agriculture. Check it out, it is really exciting.
The big Q is when we will see the revolutionary green solutions for more industrialised large-scale agriculture…
