Wasted Energy in Food Production

There is an interesting interplay between the energy it takes to grow food, and the process in which food gets to people who actually eat it. For just one calorie of energy used in growing food, five more are needed to process it, store it, and distribute it. The reason there is such an imbalance has resulted from the industrialization of food, which is part of a cycle between oil production, food production, and population levels.

Once oil production increased, food production could increase because machines are much more efficient than human labour. As a result of food production increasing, this leads to a rise in population levels. With a rise in population, more food would need to be produced, followed by more oil production to provide energy to grow the food. This shows how reliant our system of food production is on the oil and gas sector, which leads to the thought that if there are oil shortages, our high use of energy for food would easily cause food prices to soar.

Where is all this energy used in the food industry? As mentioned before, a lot more energy is used in the storage, packaging, and distribution of food than actually growing it. Fuel is needed to run machines in factories for processing foods, energy to refrigerate foods to store them, and the fuel needed for transportation all add up. All of these factors in the food processing system are needed because of the way that cities are set up, and the need to bring food from far distances into cities.

So what happens if oil runs out, or even an oil shortage shoots food prices high up? Is there a way to fix this kind of problem before it actually happens? There are probably many separate and distinct solutions, but all of them must have some kind of relationship to the planning of a city and its surrounding areas.


Arranging a city, whether fully developed or still developing, to accommodate some kind of urban farming, would greatly save in the energy used after food is grown. If food is more localized, there is less need for processing, storage, and transportation. One solution could be urban greenhouses, as the concept by Plantagon proposes an energy-efficient greenhouse to control food production within a city, making enough revenue to sustain itself.

Another solution might be to re-examine how cities brought in food before there was such a reliance on transportation. The answer could also lie in keeping small cities the size they are, which creates a small unit that could potentially sustain itself in food production, and energy production, providing that alternative energy sources become more economically viable. These are a few possible answers, but each and every city, town, slum, and suburb would have to rely on some basic principles of these problems to come up with a satisfying local solution.

- Desiree Geib

Bibliography:

Church, Norman. "Why Our Food is so Dependent on Oil". April 1, 2005. http://www.energybulletin.net/node/5045. (Accessed November 1, 2009).

Lester, Paul. "Plantagon Urban Greenhouse Concept". July 20, 2009. http://www.gizmag.com/plantagon-vertical-farm/12267/. (Accessed November 1, 2009).

Steel, Carolyn. "How Food Shapes Our Cities". July 2009. http://www.ted.com/talks/carolyn_steel_how_food_shapes_our_cities.html. (Accessed October 31, 2009)

Tumber, Catherine. "Small, Green, and Good: the role of neglected cities in a sustainable future". April 2009. http://bostonreview.net/BR34.2/tumber.php. (Accessed November 2, 2009).

The Cattle Crisis - Brazil

The cattle industry cannot keep up with the rising, global demand for quality produce. It is a matter of production inefficiency: the means cannot keep pace and profit at the same time. However, Brazil, among other major suppliers, cannot afford falling behind said pace, hence government subsidies. This becomes a problem for the subsistent locals when they can no longer compete with subsidized imports, an issue of free trade arises.

The practice is subsidized because it is inefficient, with the expense of capital secondary to the expense of the environment:

Cattle ranching is the primary driver of deforestation in Earth's largest rainforest, the Brazilian Amazon.¹

The research shows that more than 38,600 square miles has been cleared for pasture since 1996, bringing the total area occupied by cattle ranches in the Brazilian Amazon to 214,000 square miles, an area larger than France.²

Environmental issues of deforestation aside, it is a matter of inefficient and unsustainable land usage:

…the soil that is cleared in slash and burn is left infertile, the nutrients in the soil are quickly absorbed by surrounding organisms. The farmers must move on sometimes to other areas and repeat this process and worthy land and trees become scarce. For farmers in places like Brazil, slash and burn methods are the only way to effectively clear land of parasites and unwanted organisms; chemical means contaminate water and soil and farmers continue to turn to slashing and burning.³

Reasons why the cattle industry thrives in Brazil:

INTEREST RATES—Rainforest lands are often used for land speculation purposes. When real pasture land prices exceed real forest land prices, land clearing is a good hedge against inflation. At times of high inflation, the appreciation of cattle prices and the stream of services (milk) they provide may outpace the interest rate earned on money left in the bank.

LAND TENURE LAWS—In Brazil, colonists and developers can gain title to Amazon lands by simply clearing forest and placing a few head of cattle on the land. As an additional benefit, cattle are a low-risk investment relative to cash crops which are subject to wild price swings and pest infestations. Essentially cattle are a vehicle for land ownership in the Amazon.⁴

Brazil has become the world’s largest exporter of beef, and a major supplier of leather. The demand is global: beef to fast food chains expanding internationally and leather to global brands like Adidas, Nike, Reebok, and Timberland.

Greenpeace Forest Campaigner Lindsey Allen: “To be true climate leaders, Nike, Adidas, Timberland and other brands must help protect the Amazon and our climate by refusing to buy leather from deforestation. In the fight against climate change, every step counts.”⁵

The problem is that Brazil’s economy depends heavily on its Amazon exploits:

Brazilian deforestation is strongly correlated to the economic health of the country: the decline in deforestation from 1988-1991 nicely matched the economic slowdown during the same period, while the rocketing rate of deforestation from 1993-1998 paralleled Brazil's period of rapid economic growth.⁶

Therefore, any solution must take this economy into consideration. According to Roberto Smeraldi, (Amigos da Terra, Activist group) one such solution “involves improving the productivity of cattle ranching, thereby allowing forest to recover without sacrificing jobs or income.”⁷ Increasing productivity would allow for a reduction in pasture size.

There are some approaches worth considering, though none solely practicable as of yet.

One possibility is to condition cattle into grazing sustainable alternatives: here is research into the conditioning process and a proposition of snakeweed as the substitute, http://jas.fass.org/cgi/content/full/82/10/3100.

Also potentially an option is turning to genetics technology, which has already involved itself in the cattle industry: improving the Brazilian breed for ‘mass production’ through in vitro fertilization and cloning. Changing grazing habits and needs by breed and genetic modification is the concept, perhaps using miniature breeds and their high density capacity for some direction. Of course, miniature-breed ranching using rotational grazing systems already exist sustainably, but only as an option for a subsistence setting; dispersing the industry is a global solution, but not viable from Brazil’s economic perspective.

The bottom line is that as industry develops, overconcentration becomes not just an environmental issue, but an urban issue in poor land usage. The optimal solution would maximize production efficiency and minimize resource waste.

-Nathan Tung

Sources:

· ¹ Butler, Rhett. "Beef drives 80% of Amazon deforestation,” mongabay.com (2009), http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0129-brazil.html. (accessed November 1, 2009).

· ^2,4,6 Butler, Rhett. "Amazon Destruction: Why is the rainforest being destroyed in Brazil?;” The Amazon (2009), http://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/amazon_destruction.html. (accessed November 1, 2009).

· ³ Stock, Jocelyn. "The Choice: Doomsday or Arbor Day," http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/society/deforestation.htm (accessed November 1, 2009).

· ⁵ Beltra, Daniel. "Top name brands implicated in Amazon destruction,” Greenpeace (2009), http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/slaughtering-the-amazon. (accessed November 1, 2009).

· ⁷ Butler, Rhett. "Activists target Brazil's largest driver of deforestation: cattle ranching,” mongabay.com (2009), http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0908-smeraldi.html. (accessed November 1, 2009).

· Consulate General of Brazil. “Technology and Tailored Cows in Brazil” http://www.brazilianconsulate.org.hk/docs/7-Technology%20and%20Tailored%20Cows%20in%20Brazil.pdf (accessed November 1, 2009).

· Greenpeace Brazil. “Amazon Cattle Footprint,” Greenpeace (2009), http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/amazon-cattle-footprint-mato.pdf (accessed November 1, 2009).

· Journal of Animal Breeding & Genetics; Apr2006, Vol. 123 Issue 2, p97-104, 8p, 9 charts

Image Sources:

· Butler, Rhett. "Amazon Destruction: Why is the rainforest being destroyed in Brazil?;” The Amazon (2009), http://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/amazon_destruction.html. (accessed November 1, 2009).

· Greenpeace Brazil. “Amazon Cattle Footprint,” Greenpeace (2009), http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/amazon-cattle-footprint-mato.pdf (accessed November 1, 2009).

Buy Local?

The local food movement has been growing rapidly around the world. 100-Mile Challenge is a television show featuring families challenging themselves to only eat foods that were grown and produced within a 100-mile radius of their home. The "Buy Ontario" campaign of the provincial government encourages Ontario's consumers to buy seasonal, locally-grown food in order to support Ontario farmers. Similarly, "Savour Ontario" is another part of the same strategy that promotes fine restaurants that serve locally grown and produced foods. Restaurants that join the program clearly identify menu items to allow patrons to choose local foods. However, this focus on the distance food travels from the producer to the consumer is misleading; perhaps "buy local" advocates are aiming at the wrong stretch of the road.


Food distribution is a multi-faceted system involving transportation and infrastructure, as well as storage and often refrigeration. Various statistics indicate that roughly 15% to 20% of total greenhouse gas emissions can be accounted for by food production and distribution. Within that amount, one study shows that 83% is created during food production, 11% during transport, and only 4% during transport from producers to consumers. (Weber 2008) What this indicates is that when considering the transportation of food, much of the greenhouse gas emissions are generated by the production and not the final step of delivery.


Still, the distance food travels from farm to plate is not an accurate indication of the impact its production has on the environment(DeWeerdt 2008), even the simple amount of greenhouse gas emissions. The transportation and production methods are far more telling: trains are several times more efficient than trucks and open field farms use minimal energy when compared to heated greenhouses. Even further, the energy used to heat the greenhouses could come from renewable sources or from coal-burning power plants. A distance-based local food movement may not be realistic in and around large urban centres simply because farmland has already been pushed away from the cities. Another overlooked aspect is so-called "upstream" transportation creating greenhouse gases, i.e. transportation of supplies like fertilizer to farms.





If the 100-mile approach isn't the right direction, the local food movement still has weight, bringing the farmer and the consumer closer in more than measurable distances. The advantage in efficiency of rail transport over diesel-burning trucks could outweigh the benefits of eating food from a 100-mile radius if the locally-grown food uses high volumes of fertilizer and a warm and humid greenhouse situated in the snowbelt. It may be more pertinent to aim for eating local foods that are in season, or focusing on choosing cleaner transportation methods or improving existing methods.

Sources
Weber, Christopher L. and H. Scott Matthews. 2008. Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States. Environmental Science and Technology 42, no. 10. (April 16), http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es702969f

DeWeerdt, Sarah. 2008. Is Local Food Better? Worldwatch Institute. http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6064
- Stanley Sun