Natural Systems Agriculture Field day

I attended the Ecological and Organic Farming Systems Field Day at Carman last Monday. As in previous years, the plots and the work we were shown was most impressive. In introducing the day, Dr. Martin Entz informed us that their work indicates they can produce field crops using 37% of the fossil energy needed in conventional farming. The 150 guests there spent the rest of the day seeing how the research team goes about achieving this remarkable efficiency.

This reported efficiency is astonishing for two very different reasons.

It is astonishing that, given this efficiency, only very few people produce food in this way. Why don’t they? Because current economics does not reward this efficiency. The current fossil energy price is artificial. True, the price is determined by free market forces. In that sense it is the free market price, but that price only includes the cost of extracting the oil, and does not even include all of those costs. Furthermore, that price includes no compensation to future generations who will not have access to this precious resource because it will be gone. Whatever that compensation ought to be, whether it is high or low, it is never included in the market price of fossil energy. The market price of fossil energy is artificially low. Because of this low market price, it currently makes economic sense to use fossil energy extravagantly, in the production of our food.

But the number is also astonishing because it shows what is possible when good science is applied to a problem. In conventional agriculture, the posed challenge is, maximize net economic return by managing fertility, weed control, pest control and genetics. Prodigious amounts of research dollars have been and are being devoted to addressing the challenge defined in this way, and the results have been truly impressive.

The Natural Systems Farming research team has redefined the challenge. Their focus is not on economic return, but on return to energy. Prior to the fossil era, prior to this era when fossil fuel has been readily available, the food production challenge has always been that: how to get the necessary food, while expending the minimal amount of energy. What was lacking prior to the fossil era, was the application of the scientific method, and world wide communications.

When my grandfather farmed with horses, he was very aware of energy in and energy out. There was no cheap energy. His tools to enhance fertility were summerfallow, alfalfa, sweet clover, and to a limited extent, barnyard manure. The Carman researchers, today, are able to choose for some twenty different potentially useful green manure crops. My grandfather was very limited in the tools he had available. Today many more tools are available to both researcher and farmer.

The work done at Carman needs to be nurtured. Input manufacturers will not do this research, because it does not result in a return for them. Such research needs to be and only will be funded by a forward thinking government.

By Eric Rempel

Measuring Wellbeing

Last week I lamented the continuing emphasis on GNP and growth, not only by our governments at all levels, but also within our news media. The media is educating us in the inadequacy of GNP as a measure of our wellbeing, and then that same media floods us with information about GNP as if that is the only measurable indicator of wellbeing.

As long as we focus on GNP, our concern will be the amount of money changing hands each quarter, not the actual well-being delivered by the economy. Taking seriously a different way of measuring wellbeing is crucial to establishing a sane, sustainable, steady state economy.

The unlikely country of Bhutan, a kingdom in the Himalayas with a population about that of Winnipeg, is giving world leadership in the development of a “Gross National Happiness” indicator. By the standard measurements of wealth, Bhutan is not a rich country. In terms of GNP per capita, Bhutan is ranked 130 in the world. But they have established as a national goal, to become happy, rather than to become rich. As early as 2007, Business Week ranked Bhutan as the happiest country in Asia, and the eighth happiest in the world.

At a recent UN conference, the Prime Minister of Bhutan observed that GDP growth is killing the planet, destroying our future, and making humanity less equitable and, on the whole, more miserable. I think he’s right.

Any attempt to measure happiness will, without a doubt, draw the skeptical response that any such measure must, by its nature, be subjective. While this is true, the implied inference that such a measurement is then unreliable and of little value needs to be challenged. If we limit our pursuits to the attainment of indicators that are easily measured (economic growth), we are doomed to pursue that which is unattainable: perpetual growth.

Remember, if you hang your laundry out to dry, letting the sun and wind do the drying, you do not contribute to GNP. But if you throw it in the dryer and use electricity, you give the GNP a nudge upward. If one parent stays home to care for children, the GNP index is not happy. If both parents take a job and place their children in daycare, the GNP smiles.

It is interesting to note that following Bhutan’s lead, Britain's David Cameron, and France's Nicolas Sarkozy have become supporters of adding well-being to raw economic indicators. Australia, New Zealand, China, Italy, Japan and South Africa are some other countries that are considering measuring wellbeing as a way of informing policy.

Here we have the Canadian Index of Wellbeing. Data for this is being collected by a non-government group, which may be a good thing in that it makes it independent of political bias.

Unfortunately however, any reading of the federal omnibus budget bill now before the house must conclude that the only interest this federal government has, is in economic growth. This bias could be offset by greater enlightenment at the provincial or municipal level. But it is lacking there too.

Eric Rempel

Why the Continuing Emphasis on GNP?

It happened again last night. The national news reported “Canada's gross national product [GNP] grew at a 1.9 per cent annual pace in the first three months of the year, the same pace seen at the end of 2011.” So what does this tell us? Well it tells us that the total value of everything produced by enterprises in Canada grew by 1.9% annually. What it does not tell us is whether this growth was good or bad.

I find this discouraging! Discouraging because 30 years ago, in 1992, the same broadcaster, the CBC, first showed me how inadequate and potentially misleading reporting GNP is. 1992 was the year of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. If you don’t remember it, google for it. This was the first UN conference on the Environment and Development. The CBC, and other media covered it extensively. It was because of that conference and that reporting that conference, that many of us first realized the fragility of the environment we depend on, and the negative impact human activity is having on the very resources we depend on for life.

Specifically on the GNP, I came to realize that an oil spill off the coast of British Columbia does more to raise the GNP than the discovery of a new cure for cancer. We were told then, of the need for more meaningful indicators of well-being than GNP.

And much as been done to develop a new index. Best known is the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW). But it is hardly well known. It is ironical that the same media that covers and applauds the existence of this index, does not use it.

I find it discouraging that the media, in spite of giving us these stories about the need and development of better indicators of national well-being, continue to use GNP in their reporting as if it is the only indicator of our nation’s economic health with any value.

No doubt the GNP is easier to measure than the CIW. I suspect it is realistic to expect a report on GNP every quarter, whereas a quarterly report on CIW is probably not possible. Nevertheless, I think it is reasonable to expect a news item on GNP to include some comment on more meaningful context. For example “GNP rose slightly this month, but we don’t expect that to have an effect on the CIW because . . .” I think our news media is guilty of biased reporting whenever it reports on GNP and doesn’t place that in the context of wellbeing.

Somewhere within us, we all know that some growth is good, and some is not good. When reporting growth, the media has a responsibility to help us discern the likely effect that growth is having on our wellbeing. Were the media to do that, we all would be more critical, in a good sort of way, of any growth occurring around us. And were we all to have that critical capacity, it would affect the policies favoured by our politicians.

 Eric Rempel

Presenting the Steady State Economy

Addressing the economic and ecological problems of the 21st century

The human family is about to get a little bigger. According to the United Nations, the global population will reach seven billion this Halloween – on October 31, 2011. It would be too easy to say that the coincidental alignment of this milestone with Halloween should be cause for fear. We don’t need to be afraid of a few more babies; birthrates are even decreasing in some parts of the world. What we should be deeply concerned about is the likelihood that these babies will one day aspire to Western lifestyles at a time when the planet simply can’t handle any more materially opulent aspirations.

Our way of life in the West not only puts immense pressure on the environment, it has also become a catalyst for economic volatility on a scale we’ve never seen before. We have designed our economic system to – as economist Tim Jackson describes – “spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to create impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.” Unlike what most mainstream economists will tell you, that’s a recipe for disaster, not prosperity.

Take a moment to consider how the global economy is performing. Oil prices reached $113 a barrel earlier this year, contrasted with a low of $13 a barrel in 1999 (today they hover around $86). Stocks have seen unprecedented volatility; so too have the prices of grains and other essential foodstuffs. Major economies still haven’t fixed a broken financial system that inflates the prices of assets (such as mortgages) and permits a wasteful kind of “gambling” with legitimately earned money. If investment banking was working properly it would be facilitating much-needed investment in green infrastructure, not phony new financial products that consume rather than produce capital.

If this is what a “growing economy” looks like in the 21st century, we should clearly be aiming for something better! It’s time to start being rational rather than dogmatic about the word “growth.” We need to shake ourselves out of collective denial and engineer an economy that is more practical, meaningful and truly prosperous. Recent global protests such as Occupy Wall Street represent an awakening economic consciousness and a backlash against the status quo. They are revealing the cracks of a deeply broken system. But they’re not yet specific and productive.

I invite you to join me in applying specific solutions to these problems by engineering a new economy with a firm foundation. Fostering economic degrowth towards a steady-state doesn’t mean recession; it means fostering a balanced, manageable level of resource flows. It doesn’t mean going back to the dark ages; it means a life more happily and meaningfully lived.

Using the power of entrepreneurship and innovation, we need to find common purpose in the realignment of our overarching social and economic goals — not toward yesterday’s notions of solidarity or neoliberalism — but towards pragmatic and meaningful capital maintenance for prosperity without growth.

Join us on October 27th at 7pm at the Eastman Education Centre to learn more about how we can engineer prosperity without growth.

by James Johnston of the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE)

So What About the Bio-diesel Mandate?

Since July 1^st we have had a national bio-diesel mandate. All diesel, whether for transportation, farming or home heating is to include 2% bio-diesel. This new mandate follows a Manitoba mandate already in place since 2009. One needs to wonder what problem our governments are trying to address with this mandate.

One might assume the problem is our dependence on fossil energy. If we can power our diesel engines with bio-diesel rather than fossil-diesel, that would seem to be progressive.

Wishful thinking, perhaps. We cannot reduce our dependence on fossil energy by merely tweaking with the supply. It does not make sense and it does not happen. Remember Jevon’s effect. We have written about this effect in previous columns. Technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. Human nature is such that a more efficient light bulb has the effect of encouraging people to use it more, resulting in the end in the greater use of electricity. Adding bio-diesel to available diesel will not result in a reduced consumption of fossil diesel. The bio-diesel mandate will not reduce our consumption of fossil fuel.

It might be thought that regardless of the effect on consumption, consuming bio-diesel is simply more responsible that consuming fossil diesel. Hence the mandate.

But that raises the ethical question. In a world where people are starving, is it morally right to use land that could be used for the production of food for people for the growing of fuel to feed our voracious appetite for energy?

What seems most plausible (however unlikely) is that the government wants to give support to Canada’s canola growers. In effect, a biodiesel mandate is a subsidy to all those involved in the biodiesel industry: farmers who grow canola, suppliers and processors. The mandate will increase the demand for biodiesel, thereby increasing the canola price. The Canadian Canola Growers Association readily acknowledges that this mandate will be good for them.

This is truly unfortunate. This mandate is good neither for the environment we call our home nor the Canadian economy.

This move is bad for the Canadian economy because subsidies distort. There are a host of technologies that could potentially reduce our dependence on fossil fuel. Biodiesel is one of them. By giving this subsidy to the canola industry, government is mitigating against other technologies.

It is by no means clear that the production of diesel from plants is energy efficient. Growing fuel crops takes energy. Fossil fuel is used to power the tractors, to manufacture the necessary fertilizer and to build the necessary equipment. Transforming canola oil to diesel takes energy. Some investigators have concluded that if everything is considered, more energy is used to produce the biodiesel than there is energy in the biodiesel.

However, the biggest deficiency in this new policy mandate is that it does nothing to reduce demand for energy. If we wish to offer a livable planet to our children, we need to find a satisfying way of living that requires less energy. That will only happen if, in addition to the moral incentive, there is also an economic incentive to change our lifestyle.

A simple carbon tax would not only encourage all of us to find ways of living using less energy, it would also stimulate a search for fossil fuel saving technologies.


Eric Rempel