True, arable land would be available in greater amounts as we’ve already logged it off and leveled it down. Unfortunately much of the farm lands in use today require irrigation and that water is drawn from wells, often so deep that simple wind driven pumps could never pull it out of the ground the “Bread basket” would go back to being natural grass lands or outright desert. And let’s not even think about all those enormous cities in So. Cal. that are two days away from having no water at all or for that matter, food.
And then there are all the guns that are widely available. Going to be a whole lot of killing before the ammo runs out. And what happens when the power goes down and there are no controls available for nuclear power stations or petroleum refineries or chemical/pesticide plants, anybody remember Bhopal?
The fires that could result from a loss of power could prove cataclysmic, far worse than the loss of power itself as there would be no means to combat them.
True... irrigation is a two-edged sword that's gonna turn around to bite us one day (if you don't mind me mixing metaphors...) The simple fact is, WATER EVENTUALLY RUNS OUT. Irrigation has taken a HUGE leap over the last 20 years or so... it's expensive, but then it maximizes production on the available inputs, so a LOT of farmers have "taken the plunge" and jumped into drilling wells, installing pivots, and all of that. Thing is, while yields can increase substantially in the short term, with less risk from poor weather (drought is pretty much overcome by irrigation, but there's still tornadoes, hail, untimely freezes, excessively cold or hot weather, insect infestations, etc.), on the long term, irrigation causes at least as many problems as it solves...
For one thing, it is energy intensive-- it takes SUBSTANTIAL amounts of natural gas, petroleum fuels, and/or electricity to power well pumps and pivot irrigation equipment... pumping millions of gallons of water on a pivot-equipped field isn't cheap... PLUS, there's the fact that groundwater contains minerals and salts that are pumped out onto the fields with the water-- things rainwater does NOT have, and which rainwater leaches down deep into the subsoil or dissolves and washes away with runoff... over time, irrigation water will poison the land due to the trace amounts of salt it contains... year after year, this water is pumped on the fields, evaporates, and leaves the salt behind. It slowly builds up and eventually makes the soil too salty to support crops. The minerals in the water that are left behind also can cause toxicity to plants if they build up to certain thresholds, or nutrient imbalances, locking up much needed plant nutrients due to soil chemical interactions. Not only that, but the water also eventually runs out...
The "cheap gains" to be had will eventually run out too. Our area used to be one of the biggest cotton producing areas of the State, and it's dwindling more and more with each passing year. We get enough natural rainfall in most years to make a good or decent cotton crop, but we cannot compete with irrigated farmers in other, drier regions who have installed millions of dollars of irrigation equipment and can make huge yields with the same inputs. All this "excess production" just serves to keep the prices of crops cheap, which the consumer loves, but its ultimately self-defeating. While farmers pump millions of gallons of water that took hundreds of years to accumulate underground to produce cheap cotton and grain, we're going under around here and quitting crop production and switching the cheaper endeavors like grazing livestock... In a few decades it'll turn around, once the cheap water and cheap nutrients are gone...
The "green revolution" in agriculture, made possible in the 50's on with the advent and use of new techniques and technologies, like the widespread use of chemical fertilizers, chemical weed and insect control, development of better varieties and hybrids, etc... is also hit a plateau... the "easy gains" have all been made. Even genetic engineering, which has promised to "revolutionize agriculture" is becoming apparent that it's not the panacea that was promised... it creates as many problems as it solves, and resistance to the GMO trait "protections" by pest species is increasingly becoming a problem, making the "GMO option" useless for some pest problems, depending on the area, crop, and pest in question. Like antibiotic resistance, it's a problem that wasn't foreseen and is increasingly becoming a huge issue, as all the 'easy solutions' have already been discovered and implemented. The "low hanging fruit" is the first stuff picked, and all the "low hanging fruit", whether it be land, water, chemical or GMO solutions to problems, the easy stuff has all already been done or taken. It just gets HARDER from here, not easier...
The modern "boom" in production agriculture, which has allowed yields to double and redouble again and again since the 1950's, is largely a product of the cheap availability of petroleum feedstocks. Nitrogen fertilizers are made from ammonia, produced from reacting nitrogen and hydrogen gas from natural gas. As energy prices have increased, and demand for natural gas for heating and electric generation has increased, it's pulling more and more natural gas from fertilizer production and such to those uses, since they can and will pay higher prices. That has driven the price of fertilizers through the ROOF in the last 20 years as we have to compete for natural gas with these other industries. The same is true of the petroleum feedstocks that go to make the various chemical pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides that make modern production agriculture viable. As the age of "cheap oil" ends, the age of "cheap, readily available food" will end with it. In the old days, farmers were thrilled to get a 40-50 bushel yield on, say, corn. Now if you're not getting 140 bushels or so you're losing money. It takes 200 bushel yields to make any real money... As input costs go up, the economics just keep getting worse. We used to be happy with 3/4 to a bale of cotton per acre. Now you have to make 1 1/2 bale to the acre just to break even! If you can't make 2- 2.5 bale to the acre cotton, you'd make more money working at WalMart! That's why we got out of crop production. With irrigation, it's possible to make up to around 4 bales to per acre... which is why we're seeing crop production shift to places that get tons of sun and usually not much severe weather, like west and north Texas and California and stuff... but those places are dry *because they don't get much rain*... IOW, they're using up all the groundwater, and it can't go on forever... once they use up 10,000 years worth of water over the next few decades, that land will end up as desert again until rainfall eventually recharges the aquifers... over hundreds or thousands of years...
That's why I just shake my head in amazement as I've seen places that USED to be the bastions of particular types of production supplanted by places that have some TEMPORARY economic advantage, but long term, it's not sustainable... For instance, Wisconsin used to be the "dairy capitol of the country" when I was a kid... the words "Wisconsin cheese" just went together like they were made that way. Now, Wisconsin is dwindling down year by year, and CALIFORNIA of all places is the new "dairy capitol"... California that is mostly desert unless they irrigate the h3ll out of it... What happens when that water is GONE?? Heck, like someone mentioned, a lot of California is only a few days from being out of water if the infrastructure quits... If there's a problem, the farmers will be the FIRST ones cut off... not the cities...
Anyway, it's one of those catch 22's of modern society... We farmers are constantly told we have to "double production in the next 30 years to feed the nine billion people that will be on the planet by 2050". I can tell you right now that ain't gonna happen. Like I said, all the easy pickens have been had, a long time ago. There are no technological miracles ready to be pulled out of the hat, and any that are will be transitory and temporary in nature... We can open up more land, but the BEST land has been taken long ago already-- all that remains is largely marginal or unsuited to large-scale high-yield production. Heck, input costs NOW, while we're still on the tail-end of the "cheap petroleum-driven agriculture bubble" of the last 60 years, is ALREADY forcing marginal and less productive land out of crop production-- the input costs are too high to make a profit on land only capable of producing marginal yields... This trend is going to INCREASE as input costs rise higher and higher as demand for petroleum and petroleum-derived materials increases over the coming decades, while at the same time the petroleum production peaks and tapers off, and gets increasingly expensive to produce (again, all the easy to drill oil has been drilled-- for instance, fracking was invented in the 1940's, but it wasn't economically justifiable to use until now, when the price of oil has risen enough to pay for the process and still make handsome profits... The price has risen due to a combination of increased demand and waning production, as the easily produced fields have been produced out, and the new fields being discovered or that weren't economically producible in decades past now are being fracked to produce petroleum and gas...)
Food and agriculture are going to follow a similar bell curve. You can expect food prices to rise dramatically and availability to, at best, only somewhat increase, and perhaps even decrease, at the same time demand will be going up... this will drive prices through the roof... Increasing demand in a static or declining production atmosphere for something everybody MUST have will create the conditions that force prices up. Cheap oil and gas created fertilizers and pesticides and better hybrids and plant breeding allowed yields to double or triple from 50 years ago... what was 50-60 bushel corn then is now 120-140. Doubling yields again to 240-300 bushels per acre, well, that's gonna require a MIRACLE, and I don't see any. Breeding, GMO's, fertilizers, pesticides... they're not gonna do it... The only thing that seems a "sure thing" is that there'll be nine billion mouths to feed in 2050... what they're gonna eat, who knows...
Later! OL JR