CAPITALIST AGRICULTURE

It is grown by solar energy, supplemented only by muscle energy of man and beast in most of the world; in the US, more than anywhere else, it is supplemented by fuel energy-petroleum products, electricity, the chemical energy in fertilizer, and other man-converted energy.

A civilization, as most historians understand it, starts at the point when a society becomes so productive that significant numbers of its members are freed from food production for other occupations. By contrast, nomads, hunters, subsistence farmers and members of hippie communes can feed only themselves and perhaps their immediate family dependents.

This is interesting because it provides us with a quantitative measure of the state of a civilization (in the very primitive sense of the word) the number of people who are fed by one agricultural worker.

Soviet agriculture is thus nearer to Neanderthal than to Nebraska, and the reason transpires very clearly from another statistic: After the kolkhozniki return home from the communal fields to tend their own tiny patches of land, they produce 40% of the country's agricultural product on 3..9% of the farmed land.

But technically speaking, the prime reason is energy; the agricultures that feed most of the world (US, Canada Australia, New Zealand) are all energy-intensive.

No less than 16.5% of the US energy consumption goes into the total food system, though of that only 18% (or less than 3% of the total) is used up in actual production agriculture; the rest goes for food processing (33%), transportation (3%), wholesale and retail trade (16%) and home preparation (30%) - that's right, home preparation uses almost double the energy of production agriculture!

(This seems to be another example of how decentralized energy conversion tends to be inefficient.)

Some other statistics: The food system requires 8 times as much fuel energy as is contained in the food produced (but then, we don't judge food by its energy we pay extra money for low calory food); half of the energy used by the food system in 1970 was liquid petroleum fuel (mainly diesel oil and LP gas), natural gas amounted to 30%, and electricity only to 14% about half the average over the entire economy.

In production agriculture itself, by far the biggest energy input is fertilizer, using up more than twice as much as the next biggest item irrigation. Then come (in that order) harvesting, preplanting, farm pickup, crop drying, pesticide production, farm truck, farm auto, frost protection, planting, and the others down to miscellaneous" (which is still a little bigger than "electrical overhead."

[More: Energy base in Agriculture, Report no. 68, Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, lowa State Univ., Ames, Ia., August 1977.]

Before we go on to some other points of energy and food production, let's briefly go back into history once more: Were the stunning successes of capitalist agricultural mass production not paid for by the horrors of the Industrial Revolution?

No. For one thing, marty of the horrors in the history books are untrue or at least untypical; but more important, where had the workers who worked long hours for low wages in early l9th century European factories come from? From the landless "surplus" population that had hitherto simply starved to death, the "agricultural proletariat" that now had a hard life instead of no life at all. For more on this point see Capitalism and the Historians, ed. by Nobel Prize winner F. A . Hayek, U . of Chicago Press, 1974 ($2.95).