Prepare for Peak Oil: Raise Small-Scale Grain Locally
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With the cost of grain rising, America is getting hit right in the bread basket.
Considering that probably at least 2,000 food miles go into a loaf of bread before it ever reaches your table, and that the price of organic grain has doubled in the past six months, the logical conclusion is that more grain needs to be grown locally, turned into bread locally (preferably at the same farm), and sold locally. It would stimulate the local economy, aid the transition to post-peak oil resilience, and cut down on CO2 emissions.
From Vermont Commons:
Most remedies to declining fossil fuel availability seem to assume that we will more or less live as we have been living, consume as we’ve been consuming. Common sense and observation of the world around us should warn us against placing too much faith in such assurances. The bottom line is, in our future, there will simply be less fuel, less travel, less stuff, less energy.
Our primary challenge as a culture and as a people will be to unify to create a society capable of functioning under these constraints. I feel that Vermont is among the best places in the nation to undertake this challenge, that the physical makeup of the place we live in and our cultural makeup put us well ahead of the national curve.
I believe the lynchpin to thriving in a post-peak world will be grain. I am talking about grain for eating, not making into biofuel. Grain fills bellies of people, chickens, pigs, and, from time to time, can supplement the grass-based diets of horses, cows, sheep, and other ruminants. Grain is a proven powerhouse for an agrarian economy. Before coal, before oil, grain fed the bodies of workers who got the job done with their muscles, and helped feed the hard-working animals who carried the loads. If we as a people can get over the inexorable fact that in the future we will have to get work done by hand, back and hoof to a much greater extent, there will be hope.
If I had to name two additional resources we will need in place, those would be grass and wood. But in Vermont, we already have active stewardship of our pastures and woodlands. The grain is still neglected, but it is right at hand, ready to take its former place in our lives and on our tables.
Grain is not a simple silver-bullet solution to peak oil, but is a potential part of the complex, cooperative response that will be required of us. Grain culture cannot thrive without community. And it cannot thrive for long absent a diversified, ecological approach to agriculture.
Here at our farm in the town of Ferrisburgh, just outside the village of Vergennes, Vermont, we are engaged in an experiment of sorts, attempting to bring local wheat back to nearby tables using antiquated machinery and a large wood-fired oven. Ours is a new operation, and our journey thus far (open one year to date) has not been free of pitfalls, yet I think that there is promise enough in this model that others might care to duplicate or adapt it.
I would offer our example up as a counterpoint to the technological-fix type of approaches to current problems. Significantly, our approach has essentially nothing new in it. It is just our combination of elements that is somewhat novel. Those who are ready to accept that sometimes the way forward is backward may be intrigued.
Quite simply, our grain operation is everything the mass-market system is not: small scale, diversified, vertically-integrated, and local in scope.
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