Another Quick Update

Yet another month flown by! I wont bother making excuses for not posting, they're the same as the usual ones ;-)

I've calmed down since my water crisis, and essentially given up on the idea of having a lot of massive dams, at least for the moment. We've decided we'll have a single large dam to the capacity of our maximum harvestable right, situated at the bottom of hill, where three gullies feed into one. It's a nice spot for a dam.

The rest of our water needs we will handle through swales/contour banks. This will help prevent erosion on our very steep block, as well as ensuring any water that does fall takes the long way round on it's journey to the creek. If we can maximise the work it does then we'll be as well off as if we stored it in the first place.

We're still tossing up a lot of ideas for cropping, nothing has been settled yet. Having our water plans sorted out (sort of) allows us to make some more serious decisions, at least with respect to dumping some ideas. We wont be growing a commercial crop of hazelnuts for one, though we may still have a crack at some olives.

We're also toying with the idea of a bit of herbage. The DW really loves herbs, and so do I, so I think they'd be perfect given our inclinations. We will of course have to do a lot of market research before we move in that direction, but it allows an avenue of diversity. One of our axioms for this adventure is "not all of our eggs in one basket".

Part of our building process involves putting in a 5m or bigger stock grid on the council road (it's not theirs yet, and they may be sent the bill for it before they can have it, lol!) and we've been covered a lot of suppliers for prices. Thankfully we found a relatively local supplier who has them for half the price we've been quoted to date, so that is a bit of good news. I just hope we can take advantage of it before steel prices shoot through the roof.

Our other option is of course to convince the landowner on the other side of the council road that it is more economical to fence his paddock off, even though he loses a scrap of grazing land (that belongs to council anyway). This option is half the price of the lowest priced grids.

The new farm is generally on hold until we get the current farmlet officially on the market (it's sort of on there now, but not properly). We're working through the painting, and have finished off the tiling, so it's slowly getting there. One of the major hurdles will be when we want to move all our accumulated resources out to the new place. Storage there is currently nil, so we're going to need to implement some solutions for that. We have contemplated containers, and may end up going that route, they're almost as economical as a shed (floorspace per dollar wise) without the construction headaches.

So many up in the air plans can get confusing and cause an undue amount of stress. Thankfully it's the weekend now and we're planning a campfire out the back tonight (in fact I think it's already lit!). Sausages, coleslaw and fire-taters, with toasted marshmallows for desert. A great way to wind down from the working week before getting into the working (but infinitely more satisfying) weekend.

Water Complexity Crisis

Over the last few weeks I've been investigating possibilities for our new block of land. We intend to run some form of commercial operation on it, most likely one or more tree crops. We don't like to put all of our eggs in one basket so spreading across a couple of different crops will meet the goal of resiliency (in addition to the myriad other subsystems we intend to implement for our own use.)

One of the first concerns was irrigation. The region is reasonably well watered with an annual rainfall around 800mm per annum. Certainly not coastal, but good enough. In planning such an enterprise a person generally tries to consider worst case scenarios, and in this instance we're looking at how we would survive a total drought for a year or more.

The answer to this is by having stored water on hand to irrigate the trees. If we can get them through the drought period, even without returning a crop, then we live to try another day.

A landowner has a right to harvest a certain amount of water on their land, known as their "harvestable right", which is set as a proportion of the annual rainfall in an area. Our factor is 0.08, which is 0.01% of the average rainfall or thereabouts (though I am sure there is some much more arcane way of working this out used by the folks in power.) To calculate the size of dams allowed on the property from this, one multiplies the factor by the land size in hectares to arrive at the number of megalitres of storage allowed.

So for our modest estate we come up with a figure of 2.24ML. This is deemed to be sufficient for domestic and stock watering, which seems fair enough.

The real problems arise when you need to consider irrigating a crop. Based on our scenarios we would need somewhere in the vicinity of 10ML to survive a total drought in reasonable condition if we were to plant just 1ha of a tree crop such as olives. If we give up the desire to get a crop off in drought years and irrigate only to keep the trees alive then this could be reduced to 4ML, perhaps.

All of this seems fair enough, we'd be quite willing to pay for the privilege of being able to trap extra water falling from the sky (even though this irks a part of me) but the problem is, how?

It might seem as simple as paying the appropriate licences and getting on with the job, but sadly, no, it's not that easy. It's actually so difficult that even the people in the government department in charge of all this stuff cannot explain it clearly.

They start out with "You need to buy a water allocation from someone else." and that's where the flow of useful & sensible information seems to end.

So I ask "Are we buying part of their harvestable right?" and the answer to that is "no".

It seems harvestable rights are immutable, inalienable, untradeable.

So I ask the next dumb question: "Where does the water for the water allocations come from then, if everyone has only got 'harvestable rights' that cannot be traded?"

From what I could discern there are people out there who somehow have a water allocation beyond their "harvestable right". I have no idea how they would have gained this allocation given that the system apparently cannot create new water allocations, but I guess that's just one of the mysteries of bureaucracy that we just need to accept.

If I wish to get my enterprise secure with respect to water I need to find someone who has water and who wants to sell it. The trouble is a quick check on the government register of water allocation sales shows not a single one in the last two years in our catchment. A search on a national water trading website shows that there are currently none for sale either, so at the moment I've reached a dead end. I'll check in with a few stock and station agents in the region to see what they know, so all might not be lost, but with the mines purchasing water left, right and center, I don't hold out much hope.

There are of course other ways to skin a cat, and we will proceed with our primary course of action which is storing water in the soil itself, but we will be operating without the backup of dam-based storage for the times when the soil goes crispy. I guess that way we're not taking all of the excitement and risk out of the enterprise!

Ooops

I'd like to apologise to anyone who still stops by to see if anything has changed! It's been an awfully long time since I put up a post.

A lot has happened in the months since the end of January. A lot is still happening, so this is just a short note to let you know I still exist, and will attempt to resume something like normal service soon.

We have our new block of land, and have been getting it ready to have some animals agisted on it. We've also got the repayments on it, and interest rates have gone from 7.8% to 8.5% in the few months from November last year. Amazing stuff!

We've got our current liferaft (the Flood Street Farmlet of course) informally on the market now. I say informally as it's not being put with any agents at the moment, and is offered at reduced cost as we haven't finished things like painting, tiling etc so it doesn't look as good as it will shortly. Still, if somebody wants it now they're welcome to it :-)

It seems things are heating up across the world with respect to peak oil, peak everything, and the general crisis of civilisation. Some recent blogs by folks far more dedicated than I can hope to be at the moment. Of course they also have a lot of very intelligent and scary things to say!

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/04/business-as-usual.html

And, if you're getting the feeling that you're in the midst of history in the making:

http://sharonastyk.com/2008/04/22/we-regret-to-inform-you/


Take care, and I promise to write something a bit more substantial soon!!

How Relocalisation May Work

In the last week there has been a flurry of activity over at The Oil Drum on the subject of relocalisation. It began with an essay by Stuart Staniford, titled The Fallacy Of Reversibility which looked at the future prospects for relocalisation. There was a followup piece analysing this essay, mainly aimed at pointing out the holes, called Is Relocalisation Doomed by Sharon Astyk. Green With A Gun has also made some important points on the issue, and certainly a lot easier to follow.

There are now hundreds of comments on the articles, arguing to and fro about their merits and the general future of relocalisation and/or society. It's a lot to wade through, and as with all such commenting, there will never be a consensus. I'm setting out here to put together my thoughts on the matter. These thoughts have kept me awake for the last night or two (or three) so hopefully by setting them down I might get a peaceful night's rest. It is not a quantitative analysis, more a discussion on probable mechanisms that would influence a change in social behaviour to bring about something resembling relocalisation.

To begin, Stuart approaches the subject of whether relocalisation will result from peak oil from the perspective of the supplier. This, I think, is a major flaw in his analysis. Any change does not proceed from one element of a relationship alone, but is the result of the changes in both sides. Supplier and consumer are intimately linked in the case of food supply, and by only looking at the supply side of the equation we are missing at least half of the case.

Boiled down, Stuart is asking "will industrial agriculture become unprofitable due to peak oil?" and unfortunately this is missing the heart of the matter. It's not whether industrial agriculture will be profitable or not that tells us whether relocalisation will work post-peak oil.

The first question should be "what is relocalisation?". This will give us a basis that will allow us to consider the situation in the correct light.

To my mind relocalisation is about sourcing your goods and services in the local economy. An adjunct to that is that the local economy must step up to the plate and supply more goods and services to meet the demands of local consumers. That's it in a nutshell. Keep in mind that supplier and consumer are always intimately linked, one accepts feedback from the other and vice versa.

Nothing in that description implies the continuance or otherwise of industrial agriculture. There is also nothing in it that says industrialised agriculture cannot be used locally. We must insert a caveat, that obviously fuel and parts for the maintenance of machinery are generally not locally available commodities, but a profitable enterprise should be able to deal with those issues.

Relocalisation is more about the spatial relationship with sources of goods than the sources themselves. Sure other issues can be brought into it, such as of ethical production, but these are sideline issues to the central issue of distance. I'm not sure whether it fits the purist relocalisation philosophy, but I believe trade over distance will continue to a degree even in a relocalised area, but that trade wont be in the goods required for our day-to-day survival.

Whilst relocalisation covers things other than food, the focus here is on food, due to the critical part it plays in our continued existence. I believe the ideas expressed for food can be applied to other things with some consideration.

I do appreciate that Stuart was most likely approaching the issue in the fashion he did in order to prove that whilst there was broadscale industrial agriculture there was no impetus for suppliers to turn to any other model of production, but I personally see this as playing around the fringes of the true issues that need to be considered. It's not about whether the supplier needs to turn to some new model of production, but about whether the consumer needs to.

I will touch briefly on a related issue for a moment. There is a lot of talk about calls for large proportions of the population to return to producing their own food as a part of the relocalisation ethos. In Stuart's essay it seemed to be assumed that this would be enacted by a movement of people into the workforce of existing farms, that there would be some economic spur that would drive the farmer to take on physical labourers in place of machinery. I think this is also a misunderstanding of relocalisation. Such a thing would not come to pass at least until it cost more to run machinery than it did to hire labour. Whilst that state of affairs is entirely possible, as Stuart was able to prove it's not likely for some time to come, at least not from a purely economic standpoint in relation to the farmer's bottom line.

Let us consider the consumer, strangely absent from Stuart's analysis, yet central to the reasoning behind relocalisation as a mitigation strategy for peak oil.

Relocalisation is currently a voluntary exercise. It is an activity undertaken by people and communities as a form of insurance. Why insurance? By patronising local suppliers, demand will increase supply, according to economic theory. With an abundance of local suppliers a community or region becomes insulated against shocks to the industrialised mechanisms of goods supply.

I feel this is one of the core paradigms of the relocalisation movement. Forseeing disruptions to stretched supply chains (often global in extent) localities hope to minimise the impact of such disruptions on their daily lives, and therefore upon their chances of continued existence.

The push for relocalisation is not going to come from the bottom line of the grower, but from the consumer. Whilst we have abundant transport fuels to run the current networks everything is okay. As soon as supply declines to any great extent then trouble begins. It does not matter whether a farm in the U.S. is economically viable post-peak oil if the people reliant on it's produce are half a world away in Australia and the goods never arrive because the transport company is unable to purchase fuel.

This highlights the fact that one of the primary motivators is going to be the cost and availability of transport. The cost of getting the goods to market, where this remains possible. Farm gate prices will have an influence on the final price, but these are compounded along with the cost of transport, and the overheads and operating profit of the end marketers, to give a final price. As this goes up, so the affordability of the food decreases.

This leads us to the second factor that needs to be considered when trying to understand what may push people to relocalisation, spending power. Let's consider a "case study" to illustrate some points.

A consumer earns $800 per week working. Of that $800, $200 goes to driving 40km into the nearest town to work on a daily basis. A further $300 is spent on food for the family and the rest goes on mortgage/rent, and sundry other expenses.

As the price of food increases due to the increasing input costs (fundamentally, fuel), we will have inflation (if I understand economic theory correctly!) and the standard approach to combatting inflation is to raise interest rates. So as food costs increase and mortgage/rent payments increase.

Our hypothetical consumer does not want to give up her job, so cutting back on fuel use is not an option. Due to the troubled housing market, moving is not an immediate option. The non-essential sundry expenses go first, and then the budget of food needs to be trimmed. Over time this happens again and again. No more chocolate biscuits, then no more biscuits at all. No more pre-packaged meals. No more soft drink. Before too long the consumer is at a point where they are forced to buy raw foods (if they know of such things, perhaps they have starved for lack of 2 minute noodles by this time) and create their own meals.

The essential message (if sense prevails) is that the consumer gradually moves to a state of producing meals from raw foods. They are now caught between a rock and a hard place. Further increases in price cannot be dealt with by making the diet more raw, they can only be dealt with by reducing the amount of food available.

Now of course there are a multitude of humans, and every one will have a different response to such a situation. Perhaps they turn to charity, move in with relatives, etc. Some though, will have thought ahead and now be growing some proportion of their own food, likely to be mostly vegetables. So begins one aspect of forced relocalisation. Not forced in the sense that everyone will be required to do it by some authority, but forced in that there is an outside factor or influence driving people to it.

The final element of relocalisation to be considered (here at least) is that of the source of food. Currently the majority of people shop in big chain supermarkets. The buying power of these organisations means that food can be brought to the consumer at a price that is often lower than the input costs to the producer. I am personally acquainted with horticulturalists who have left the industry due to the fact that they were getting paid less for their produce than it cost them to grow it.

Now many people would argue that this is a push toward economies of scale, that larger farms will take the place of these smaller, family run enterprises, and one of the central assertions of Stuart's piece is that such large farms will remain profitable throughout.

It is already a fact that our local farmer's market is cheaper than the local supermarket (when I say local, both are 45km away from the village where we reside) The farmer's market is well supported, but only occurs fortnightly.

Again, talking of sensible choices, as fuel prices rise, and following them food prices, we should still see a difference between these two means of obtaining food. Word would get around as people began to search for cheaper sources of food. Patronage at the market would increase, local growers currently supplying to the central markets would hear of this and change the way they do business, moving to sell through the markets. The markets may then run weekly, or daily even, as demand from the consumer spurs the suppliers on.

The cheaper prices at the market still generally mean that the supplier is getting more than when selling to the wholesale market, as long as the farmer is willing to go to such lengths. I imagine that other forms of market selling will come about, such as local agent systems where the fellow who enjoys the hurley burley of the markets collects produce from a group of more socially reticent suppliers and takes it along weekly or daily.

And so relocalisation would come about through the forces applied upon the consumer by the system, and then applied by the consumer back onto the system. As budgets are squeezed by increasing prices consumers move from the ease of driving to the nearest supermarket for pre-packaged meals to sourcing rawer foods closer to home in an attempt to maintain their existence. To be sure this will not happen as a rule, and not be across the board, but it is a mechanism that will result in relocalisation without conscious intent.

As indicated in the beginning, this is a consideration of hypothetical mechanisms that could drive relocalisation, an attempt to look at the factors that were missed in Stuart's essay. It lacks numerical backing, and also suffers for the fact that humans are, if nothing else, an unpredictable species. Still, if the chains of cause and effect outlined here are logically consistent, then it is certainly a possibility, though whether it is a probability remains to be seen. If ever I get a holiday again I may try to put some numbers to it.