Last Straw

Mon­biot on peak oil and food pro­duc­tion:

If the whis­tleblowers are right, we should be stock­pil­ing … If we are taken by sur­prise, if we have failed to replace oil before the sup­ply peaks then crashes, the global eco­nomy is stuffed. But noth­ing the whistle-blowers said has scared me as much as the con­ver­sa­tion I had last week with a Pem­broke­shire farmer.

Wyn Evans, who runs a mixed farm of 170 acres, has been try­ing to reduce his depend­ency on fossil fuels since 1977. He has installed an anaer­obic digester, a wind tur­bine, solar pan­els and a ground-sourced heat pump. He has sought wherever pos­sible to replace diesel with his own elec­tri­city. Instead of using his tractor to spread slurry, he pumps it from the digester on to nearby fields. He’s replaced his tractor-driven irrig­a­tion sys­tem with an elec­tric one, and set up a new sys­tem for dry­ing hay indoors, which means he has to turn it in the field only once. Whatever else he does is likely to pro­duce smal­ler sav­ings. But these innov­a­tions have reduced his use of diesel by only around 25%.

We prac­tic­ally eat oil.