Food and Energy Sovereignty: Does it Matter?
This post is probably going to be a controversial one - but since Wednesday was Global Energy Independence Day, I thought a Factual Friday highlighting some of the connections between energy independence and agriculture might be particularly fitting.
I’ll start by saying I originally began drafting this on Monday.
Today is Friday - just a day after we had some pretty devastating weather here in the Northeast. Hurricane Beryl admittedly had more intense, long lasting consequences in other parts of the world, but its effects were certainly felt in New York.
There were at least two tornadoes (one of which was an EF-1 in Chautauqua County) and intense flooding - some parts of the Adirondacks received five inches of rain. Some towns in Vermont received more than seven.
Ironically, this was exactly one year to the day from last year’s devastating floods, which caused more than $2.2 billion in damage.
What does this have to do with agriculture? Turns out, a whole lot. And it turns out, we’re not as helpless as we seem against these storms, which seem to be just getting worse and worse.
When we think about implementing renewables, we need to take a broader approach. We need to, quite literally, pull our heads out of our asses and think about how what we do impacts the larger community.
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What Exactly is Energy Sovereignty?
Here in the US, at least the continental US, we're somewhat spoiled by low energy rates (don’t come at me with examples of how high your NYSEG bills are - I get that prices are going up - but when you look at examples from other parts of the world…trust me, they could be worse).
In the continental US, we're spoiled by convenience, and by an abundance of land area. We rely heavily on our established systems.
But what happens when those systems fail?
Our hurricanes are getting worse. In 2017, Hurricane Irma heavily damaged the island of Barbuda in the Caribbean. Nobody can live there. It was once a tourism hotspot.
“Negative externalities” are the costs of doing business that can’t be factored into a mathematical equation about how much things cost and why. When it comes to fossil fuels, we’re starting to see those negative externalities come to light.
And it’s not just about pollution. It’s about how they create a false sense of security on the grids and the systems and the policies that hold our lives together.
In Hawaii, electricity rates are close to 50 cents per kilowatt hour. In New York, even at the highest rates, prices are less than half of that. So in places like Hawaii, it makes sense to turn to renewables to help alleviate reliance on expensive and unreliable systems.
It’s really only in the continental US where we have such a distaste for renewables. Our power plants here are cheap and generate cheap fuel because they were built many years ago and aren’t incurring new construction costs. But let’s not forget that they still require inputs - fuel.
Sure, solar and wind do, too. And while you’re still going to be paying maintenance and upkeep costs (which people always tend to point out with these but forget are still integral components of the ledger for fossil fuel operations, too), the inputs are free.
And sure, they don’t last forever.
The average economic lifespan of a coal fired power plant is 46 years. Solar panels are “only” warrantied to 30 years in most cases - meaning they’re expected to still be producing at least 80% of the original capacity in 30 years - and most folks I’ve talked to have indicated that they expect them to go much longer than that. And the components, minus the silicon wafers (for now - research is underway on how to recycle these, too), can all be recycled after they’ve “expired”.
Rethinking What “Community” Means
We tend to be more okay with the idea of fossil fuel production because it’s out of sight and out of mind. If it’s not in my community? Then it’s A-OK.
But I’ve noticed that what we define as “community” tends to differ. A lot.
Is your community your family? Your friends? Your church? Your school?
Is it your state? People who vote along the same party lines? Your fellow American? Your fellow human?
It might sound like I’m splitting hairs here, but we need to have a hard conversation about this. Because when we talk about renewables, in particular, everybody wants to know who they’re benefitting.
So many people complain about wind and solar because the local land is getting used up so other people can get power - people outside of their “communities.”
I certainly understand the frustration. But where is the land coming from to generate the fuel you use now? Because I promise you that it’s not being generated by fairies in a hidden corner of the world where nobody has to look at it.
Renewables offer us the opportunity to bring energy back into our own communities. Many of the solar projects (if not most) that have been installed in my county are community solar projects, meaning the energy is staying local.
And even if it wasn’t. It’s feeding other Americans. It’s staying domestic. We’re not relying on imported fuels. We’re relying on our fellow Americans.
That matters, doesn’t it?
We just can’t keep relying on the way things have always been. The time is now to build stronger, and more climate-resilient, communities. In whichever ways make sense for those communities. And “community” can mean so many different things.
Through energy independence, too, we can promote food independence.
What is “Food Sovereignty”?
We don’t talk nearly enough about the issue of food sovereignty, although I’ve hinted at it in many of my posts. Much of our population - 83% - now lives in urban areas, up from 64% in 1950. We import roughly 195 billion USD in food each year.
Some of that’s out of necessity. There aren’t many places here where you can grow bananas or pineapples.
But why are we importing 280 million pounds of lamb and only producing 131 million?
It’s all about economics. The US dollar is stronger than in many of the places from which we import our food, and the food we’re importing tends to be produced at scale and with looser labor and industry regulations. Production costs are, quite simply, lower - so the New Zealand lamb we’re importing is cheaper than the stuff we can produce domestically.
The laws governing agriculture in the US are set up to accommodate large farms, not small ones. If you want to be successful, you’ve got to be big.
But what happens when our systems collapse? COVID-19 showed us just how problematic our systems are. It showed us how badly we need to close the loop.
When we saw farmers dumping milk and euthanizing pigs during the pandemic, it wasn’t because there wasn’t a market for their products. People were literally starving. Food subsidies from the government shot through the roof. Many communities still haven’t fully recovered.
The problem was that we were relying on a global food system that completely collapsed under the strain of the crisis. Our world is supposedly more connected than ever before - yet also more disconnected.
The American Farm Bureau Federation estimates that fewer than 6% of all American farms sell food locally.
That’s not calling out the farmer. We can’t afford to sell food locally because local consumers often can’t afford to buy it. This is a much larger problem than we can handle individually.
It requires a community approach. We need to think holistically about where our food is coming from. We need to think about bringing everything - including our energy - back to a local level.
How Agri-Energy Can Help
Agri-energy, as I’ve referred to it, or the blending of renewables with agriculture, presents an opportunity for us to bring both back down to the local level. Farmers gain access to land that they previously couldn’t afford. Because of this, they can offer their products locally and close the loop. Families have access to food that’s unaffected by what’s going on in the rest of the world, not the war in Ukraine, not hurricanes in the Caribbean, nothing.
And solar companies are more willing than ever before to get creative. It’s no longer just about sheep. I’ve spoken to producers raising everything from dairy cows to beef cows to hay to vanilla to blueberries to honey to pigs to clipped wing poultry on solar. It can be done. We just need to stop saying, “this will never work.”
In an interview, I was recently told, “give a problem to a farmer and he’ll figure it out.”
I do believe that, together, we can figure this out - but only if we start thinking about the big picture.
