The Future of Food: A Numbers Game

I read today a blog post from Britain about a farm that is trying to wean itself from oil -- petroleum -- as a sign to other world farmers that it can be done, though not easily.

Which is nice, I suppose. Go for it. Humankind was farming long before Jed's bubbling crude came along.

But what really struck me in the entry was this statement:

A return to manual labour on farms seems unlikely. Most British farmers don't have the physical strength for one simple reason - their average age is 60. And there are only 150,000 left. As an industry, British farming has effectively been left to die.

If this is true, and I have no reason to disbelieve it, the lovers of eating in Great Britain had better hope that we are not at peak oil and that someone comes along to replace those 150,000 farmers. That is a very fragile thread upon which to dangle the food supply of a nation. Any major disruption in shipping (which could come with diminished oil supplies, war, or natural disaster) would leave people scrambling for sharply reduced inventories.

It gets me to thinking about the FFA creed I recited, lo those many years ago, that began, "I believe in the future of farming, with a faith born not of words but of deeds ..." Except that I left the farm as fast as I could right out of high school, as did most of my FFA-trained schoolmates. Words, not deeds. Now I believe that there needs to be a future for farming, and it had better not just be words.

Things may not be quite as dire here in America, but not by much.