Category Archives: Agriculture

Book review of Wrigley’s “Energy and the English Industrial revolution”

Posted on April 12, 2019 by

Preface. I’ve made a strong case in my book “When trucks stop running” and this energyskeptic website that we will eventually return to wood and a 14th century lifestyle after fossil fuels are depleted. So if you’re curious about what … Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Agriculture, Energy, Life Before Oil, Limits To Growth | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Book review of Dirt: the erosion of civilization

Posted on March 16, 2019 by

Preface. On average civilizations collapsed after 800 to 2,000 years because they’d destroyed their topsoil. Today, industrial agriculture is doing this far faster – in most of the United States half of the original topsoil is gone from the richest … Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Agriculture, Peak Food, Soil | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Book review of Underbug: an obsessive tale of termites and technology

Posted on February 23, 2019 by

Preface.  I read this book mainly to find out where “grassoline” stood. Scientists thought 10 years ago that we could recreate the termite biota system of digesting biomass to create biofuels.  But this appears to be far in the future … Continue reading →

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Muscle Power

Posted on February 5, 2019 by

Preface. Before fossil fuels, the energy to do work came from muscle power and the heat from burning biomass, mainly wood.  When I visited the Deutsches museum in Munich in 2017, I saw two animal treadmills: The first picture shows … Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Energy, Life Before Oil, Muscle Power, What to do | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Battling the Inland Sea, the history of why and how the levee system was built in California’s delta

Posted on July 7, 2018 by

[ When settlers first moved to farm the central valley, they found it was often flooded with water, not the “desert” people often claim California to be.  A vast swamp over 100 miles long of half a million acres of … Continue reading →

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From wood to fossil fueled civilizations — the greatest tragedy mankind will ever know

Posted on April 23, 2018 by

[ These are my notes from this book about how we went from an organic sustainable economy to a temporary fossil-fueled one.  It’s one of the few books I’ve found that explains what life was like before fossil fuels in … Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Experts, Life Before Oil, Supply Chains | Tagged , , , , , , | 7 Comments

How horses changed native cultures after 1492

Posted on April 2, 2018 by

[ This is a very brief overview of Peter Mitchel’s “Horse Nations”.  As oil and other fossils decline, will we will almost certainly return to using more horse “muscle power” as we did in the past. Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author … Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Agriculture, Muscle Power | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Book review of “1493 Uncovering the new world Columbus Created”

Posted on August 29, 2017 by

[ This book will be included in the “must read” category of my giant booklist when I get around to updating it. This book isn’t just about the past, the implications reverberate into the postcarbon future.  Will slavery return without … Continue reading →

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Chemical industrial farming is unsustainable. Why poison ourselves when pesticides don’t save more of our crops than in the past?

Posted on March 16, 2017 by

Pesticides, herbicides, and insecticides destroy soil, ecosystems, and a third of the crop is still lost to pests, just as in the many millennia of farming before chemicals. Preface. This is a book review of Dyer’s “Chasing the Red Queen”, … Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Agriculture, Biodiversity Loss, Chemicals, Overshoot, Pesticides, Soil | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Chemical industrial farming is unsustainable. Why poison ourselves when pesticides don’t save more of our crops than in the past?

After the harvest – protecting food from rats, mold, insects, fire, and bacteria

Posted on January 28, 2017 by

Preface. Post-harvest storage in the U.S. consists of gigantic gran elevators, some so huge they can store enough grain for most of the U.S. for weeks at a time.  These silos are highly energy-intensive and far apart, requiring legions of … Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Agriculture, Books, Peak Food | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments