F.A. Farm

The following is an email I just sent to Amanda Little, who had a very good article in theNew York Timestoday, March 9, 2011. It's about time that someone else got on board with a metric that crosses all platforms. I have been quite disappointed over the years at the lack of comprehension and intellectual dishonesty of mainstream economists, who should be doing the heavy lifting on this subject. They leave it up to a farmer to do the grunt work - as usual! At least we now have a journalist who gets it. Here is a link to the article if you want to read it:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/opinion/09Little.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

Amanda - I read your article in today'sNew York Times(March 9, 2011) with some pleasure. It's about time this idea gets a wider audience! I have been flogging this very idea for several years now and I am writing to give you the nuts and bolts so you can take it to the next level.

I am a sustainable farmer up here in the farthest northwest corner of the continental United States. I have been working on what I call thedual-track sustainable modelfor the last six years. Several years ago I developedinput/output analysisto measure how sustainable I really am. If you want to do science and you want to convince people, you have be able toquantifysustainability and you need ametric that crosses all platforms. The calorie is ideal because we can compare energy in gas, diesel, human labor, even horse labor inputs versus the output in food produced. [Sidebar: We really mean kilocalorie orCalorie when we say "calorie" but everyone gets this by now.] The calorie is something we all know about and is easily convertible from joules, kilowatts, horsepower, or BTUs. As you say in your article, we are used to seeing it on food anyway. Nerdboy questions about the small difference in relative heat needed to raise a kilo of water 1 degree centigrade from 15 degrees to 16 degrees versus 16 degrees to 17 degrees are easily swept away in the rounding factor when doing conversions. More difficult are questions about kilowatts vs. kilowatt hours, but this is not really a problem either, since we are talking about absolute amounts of thermodynamic energy and it makes little difference whether my gas use is done in an hour or two hours when I am tilling a field. The variance is just my time, which I account for separately.

Currently I use human labor and a small amount of gasoline in my tillers to produce quite a bit of food on small acreage (1-2 acres). I have tested my model for several years and I also corroborated it on the food bank farm I manage in Lynden, Washington last year. Here is an article on the food bank farm, community gardens and our new farmers market:http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2011/03/07/1896937/lynden-blooming-with-community.html(By the way, this is the third farmers market I have helped start since 2006 - another key to sustainability.)

Here is how it works.I keep track of all the gas used for my tillers (I don't have a tractor as tractors are unsustainable.) Each gallon of gas is equivalent to 31,000 calories (checkable on the web). By the way, each gallon of diesel is equivalent to 35,000 calories. I calculate my labor at 125 calories per hour. This is a compromise figure based on a 2500 calorie a day diet. Even though men need 2500 to thrive (not just survive) and women need 2000 on average, I default to 2500 to be conservative in my calculations. Since a human expends about 500 calories in an 8-hour sleep period, that leaves 16 hours per day of activity. Now as you well know, most people don't grunt and strain and spend a lot of calories on their work in bursts of speed and then engage in down times of exhaustion. Most people, including farmers, are busy doing things all day long at their workplace. This leaves them with energy to do things after work, whether it is just cooking supper and watching TV until bedtime or going out dancing or visiting or what have you. People also spend as much energy on their days off as they do during their workweek. All in all, dividing the 2000 calories left over after subtracting 500 from 2500 and apportioning it over the 16 hours of activity makes good sense. This means that we can average our labor use in farming at125 calories per hour(2000 / 16 = 125).

Now we can compute our inputs. In 2010, I put in 2000 hours on my farm for a total of 250,000 calories (this does not include 1000 hours on the food bank farm and other community-oriented activities). I used 17.25 gallons of gas for growing food, which calculates to 534,750 calories. There were no other inputs. Myinputtotal for 2010 was thus784,750 calories. With this quantity of gasoline and human energy Iproduced 1,705,537 calorieson 1.12 acres. This is a positive ratio of 2.17.In other words, I produced 2.17 calories of food for every calorie of energy I used to grow that food in 2010.If you accept the metric that industrial agriculture uses 10 calories of fossil fuel to produce 1 calorie of food (a negative ratio since more energy goes into production than is actually produced), this means I am over20 times more efficientthan industrial agriculture. Obviously, this type of small-scale agriculture is truly sustainable.

In 2009, my best year for production, I used 1,064,750 calories to produce 3,789,138 calories of food. The inputs came from 22.25 gallons of gasoline and 3000 hours of labor.The ratio of 2009 was thus 3.56 calories of food for every calorie of energy I used to grow that food.This was over35 times more efficientthan industrial agriculture. The difference between 2009 and 2010 was the crappy weather, something we need to take into account and prepare for, by the way.

As for measuring outputs, this requires rigorous weighing and measuring of yields. This is not difficult - you just have to do it with every pound of potatoes, green beans, kale, etc. To calculate calories per pound (or pints in the case of raspberries and cherry tomatoes) I usehttp://caloriecount.about.com/. Using the same source for all your food calorie values is important and this site is the best one I have found. If you want to check it, you don't have to sign in - just type in a food in the search box on the first webpage. You will get a plethora of choices and I usually go to the whole food selection. The amounts used vary, so you will have to convert from grams to pounds. Just remember there are 454 grams in a pound. After all this calculation, I can total up my calories produced based on yield and the calories per pound. This also gives me surprising results, such as an average calorie per pound for diversified small-scale agriculture, with over 80 varieties of produce, grain and dry beans, of 230-242 calories per pound. These kinds of metrics also allow you to calculate a calorie-based price for your produce, which I have done. For example, if you paid a small-scale sustainable farmer only 1 cent per calorie and he/she produced 15,000 pounds of food at 230 calories per pound, the farmer would make $34,500 for his/her work. This would be a living wage for most farmers, given the capital costs of production at around $3-4,000 for this amount of food. There are plenty of ways to go with this kind of calculation and using the calorie method. You can even incorporate horse labor at 12,000 calories a day needed to maintain a draft horse and 15,000 calories a day if you are working the horse hard.

One last calculation: If we accept that most food in the US travels 1500 miles from farm to table on a semi that gets 5 miles per gallon of diesel fuel, we can compare the calorie load - just for transport - to buying direct from a farmer at a farmers market. We can also put a cork in the intellectually dishonest economists who say transport on a large truck from California is more energy efficient than buying at a local farmers market. So . . . if you have 40,000 pounds on your semi that travels 1500 miles and uses 300 gallons of diesel at 35,000 calories per gallon, your carbon load is 263 calories per pound. If you overload the truck and put 50,000 pounds on it, the calorie load is 210. This compares unfavorably with me going to my closest farmers markets in Ferndale (6 miles roundtrip) or Bellingham (25 miles roundtrip). My little truck carries 500 pounds of produce (at least!) and gets 18 miles to the gallon. At 31,000 calories per gallon of gasoline, my calorie load to the Ferndale Farmers Market is 21 calories per pound and to the Bellingham Farmers Market it is 86 calories per pound. So . . . 210-263 transport calories per pound for food at your local supermarket vs. 21-86 transport calories per pound at a local farmers market. Quite a difference and it is important to note that the closer the farmers market, the more energy efficient the produce is. If the farmer is using truly sustainable methods (i.e. no tractor and lots of hand labor) in production, the difference in energy footprint is staggering.

When we calculate calories per pound for local vs. long-haul transport, we can also see where the cutoff point is where selling to a far-off farmers market becomes as energy intensive as long-haul transport on overloaded semi-trailers. For instance, there is a local organic farm here in Whatcom County that sells most of their produce to metro farmers markets in Seattle. Their truck gets 15 miles to the gallon of gasoline and carries 3,000 pounds of food. Their roundtrip distance is 300 miles to the markets and back, so 20 gallons of gasoline are used. If we use calorie calculation, we can see that this farm has a calorie load of 207 transport calories per pound. In other words, if you are selling to a farmers market 150 miles away, the energy footprint of your food is the same as the national average of food hauled 1500 miles on a semi. There will certainly be differences in the energy used to produce the food, which may offset the transport calorie load, but this would depend on how much fuel you use for tractors. Without hard data on fuel use from farms using tractors, I cannot make that calculation, but I suspect that even organic farms using tractors have high enough fuel usage that they are not sustainable. In other words, they are still benefiting from cheap oil, just like industrial agriculture.

I hope this has not been too dense for you, but I have been doing this for several years now, as well as blogging on my results, and I feel everyone has a responsibility to get up to speed on matter such as these, so I don't talk down to my audience. If you wish to contact me for further info, feel free. You can also read my blogs on Local Harvest athttp://www.localharvest.org/blog/15945/or on Blogspot athttp://fullattention.blogspot.com/. Keep up the good work and all the best to you.