Another Look at our Food System

By Eric Rempel

A hundred years ago, the food consumed in southeastern Manitoba was grown locally, and the main input going into the growing of that food was local labour. Land was not considered a scarce resource at that time, so it was not expensive. The machinery used was elementary and simple. It did not cost much. Draft horses consumed on farm inputs, mostly labour. And horses reproduce themselves. Fertilizers and other agricultural chemicals were not known, so the only consumable input used was seed, and even that often had been saved by the farmer from the previous year. Meat consumed was grown and processed locally.

That is not the way we do things today. Not much of the food consumed here is grown or processed locally. Some of the vegetables we eat are Manitoba's Peak of the Market, but most are not. The majority of the fruit we consume is grown thousands of miles from here. Beef and pork come from the abattoirs in Alberta or further away.

Land has become very expensive. New frontiers in farming are no longer opening up. Furthermore, investors are beginning to see value in land as an investment. They are purchasing land, and this is contributing to increased land prices.

Expensive machinery is essential to contemporary farming, from the four-wheel-drive tractor to the up-to-date no-till planter.

Modern food production is basically input driven. That is, the contemporary food producer seeks to optimize plant nutrition, minimize insect and disease stress and eliminate weed competition. This is all done through the judicious use of chemicals. Seed varieties are then developed that will best respond to these idealized conditions. Often this seed is either hybrid or developed through GMO technology. This means that in order to maximize yields, the farmer needs to can get new seed every year from the seed supplier.

These changes have all occurred because it makes sense economically. Using modern technology, we are able to put food on the table at the lowest possible cost. Mostly we have been able to lower the cost of food production by reducing the amount of labour needed to produce the food.

I don't have access to exact figures, but a hundred years ago I estimate that 95% of the input into the food  being consumed was labour. Today, my guess is that a mere 15 or 20% of the input into the food we produce is labour.

It would be nice to think that this reduction in labour input is the result of greater efficiency, and because it is pleasant to think that, many of us do. But it is not true! Human energy has simply been replaced with other forms of energy – mostly fossil energy. This is not energy efficiency. It is input substitution.

A wheel increases efficiency. The same load can be moved with less energy  by loading it on a wheel than by loading it on shoulders or skids. Developing a plant variety with increased disease resistance increases efficiency, because with the same expenditure of energy results in higher yields.

Shifting the energy demand from humans to oil, which is in limited supply, results in cheaper food – in the short term – on the long run, it is suicide.