One good thing about the current food shortage: it may increase people's awareness of how their food is grown. This story offers some good details about artificial nitrogen fertilizer, which is one of the primary ingredients of cheap food.
There is clearly a pro-artificial fertilizer bent to this article, although they interview a few people who point out the damaging effects that it has on water quality and fish. What is not clearly outlined, though, is this: a world of scarce fossil fuel will also be a world of scarcer food.
Although the article pooh-poohs (pun) the use of manure as a fertilizer, the truth is that animal waste in the U.S. is a tremendously underutilized resource. In the last 30 years, farmers have gotten away from using manure as fertilizer because it was far cheaper to use artificial stuff. The problem is not so much that you need to use alot of manure -- we generate millions of tons of it as a waste product of livestock farming. It's just that it costs more to haul and spread a ton of manure than it does to haul and spread 100 lbs. of artificial fertilizer. With the cost of the concentrated material rising, it is improving the economics of using manure. All in all, that's a good thing, because right now alot of manure is simply dumped into "lagoons" where it ends up polluting ground and surface water, adding to the problems caused by overuse of artificial fertilizer. Spreading it out over many acres, when done properly, results in far less pollution.
Eventually, the world is going to have to find a way to use every bit of manure produced by every domesticated animal on the planet, as well as the manure of the end users of those animals -- human beings. In a post-fossil fuel economy, human waste will be an incredibly valuable resource for energy production and fertilizer, and future generations will shake their heads in disbelief that for a hundred years we treated it as a waste product instead.
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