Preface. Jason Bradford is amazing: He taught ecology for a few years at Washington University in St. Louis, worked for the Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development at the Missouri Botanical Garden, and co-founded the Andes Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group (ABERG). After joining with the Post Carbon Institute in 2004 he shifted from academia to sustainable agriculture, had six months of training with Ecology Action (aka GrowBiointensive) in Willits, California, started the Willits Economic LocaLization and hosted The Reality Report radio show on KZYX in Mendocino County. In 2009 he moved to Corvallis, Oregon, as one of the founders of Farmland LP, a farmland management fund implementing organic and mixed crop and livestock systems. He now lives with his family outside of Corvallis on an organic farm.

Below is the Introduction of his book “The Future is Rural” followed by an older piece he wrote back in 2009.

The book “The Future is Rural” is available for “free” as a PDF if you join the mailing list at the Post Carbon Institute here: https://www.postcarbon.org/publications/the-future-is-rural/

You can listen to Bradford at my favorite podcast “Crazy Town”, subscribe or listen here: https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/

Organic Agriculture in the news:

2021 Rodale Enlists Cargill in Unlikely Alliance to Increase Organic Farmland. Rodale will help Cargill convert 50,000 acres of corn and soy to being organically grown

Eshel G (2021) Small-scale integrated farming systems can abate continental-scale nutrient leakage. PLOS Biology. Eshel calculated how adopting nitrogen-sparing agriculture in the USA could feed the country nutritiously and reduce nitrogen leakage into water supplies. He proposes to shift to small, mixed agricultural farms with the core 1.43-hectares an intensive cattle facility from which manure production supports crops for humans as well as livestock fodder.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Bradford J (2019) The Future is Rural. Food System Adaptations to the Great Simplification. Post Carbon Institute.

Introduction

Today’s economic globalization is the most extreme case of complex social organization in history—and the energetic and material basis for this complexity is waning.   Not only are concentrated raw resources becoming rarer, but previous investments in infrastructure (for example, ports) are in the process of decay and facing accelerating threats from climate change and social disruptions. 2 The collapse of complex societies is a historically common occurrence,3 but what we are facing now is at an unprecedented scale. Contrary to the forecasts of most demographers, urbanization will reverse course as globalization unwinds during the 21st century. The eventual decline in fossil hydrocarbon flows, and the inability of renewables to fully substitute, will create a deficiency of energy to power bloated urban agglomerations and require a shift of human populations back to the countryside. 4 In short, the future is rural.

Given the drastic changes that are unfolding, this report has four main aims:

• Understand how we got to a highly urbanized, globalized society and why a more rural, relocalized society is inevitable.
• Provide a framework (sustainability and resilience science) for how to think about our predicament and the changes that will need to occur.
• Review the most salient aspects of agronomy, soil science, and local food systems, including some of the schools of thought that are adapted to what’s in store.
• Offer a strategy and tactics to foster the transformation to a local, sustainable, resilient food system.

This report reviews society’s energy situation; explores the consequences for producing, transporting, storing, and consuming food; and provides essential information and potentially helpful advice to those working on reform and adaptation. It presents a difficult message. Our food system is at great risk from a problem most are not yet aware of, i.e., energy decline. Because the problem is energy, we can’t rely on just-in-time innovative technology, brilliant experts, and faceless farmers in some distant lands to deal with it. Instead, we must face the prospect that many of us will need to be more responsible for food security. People in highly urbanized and globally integrated countries like the U.S. will need to reruralize and relocalize human settlement and subsistence patterns over the coming decades to adapt to both the end of cheaply available fossil fuels and climate change.

These trends will require people to change the way they go about their lives, and the way their communities go about business. There is no more business as usual. The point is not to give you some sort of simple list of “50 things you should do to save the planet” or “the top 10 ways to grow food locally.” Instead, this report provides the broad context, key concepts, useful information, and ways of thinking that will help you and those around you understand and adapt to the coming changes.

To help digest the diverse material, the report is divided into five sections plus a set of concluding thoughts:

• Part One sets the broad context of how fossil hydrocarbons—coal, oil and natural gas—transformed civilization, how their overuse has us in a bind, and why renewable energy systems will fall short of most expectations.
• Part Two presents ways to think about how the world works from disciplines such as ecology, and highlights the difference between more prevalent, but outdated, mental models.
• Part Three reviews basic science on soils and agronomy, and introduces historical ways people have fed themselves.
• Part Four outlines some modern schools of thought on agrarian ways of living without fossil fuels.
• Part Five brings the knowledge contained in the report to bear on strategies and tactics to navigate the future. Although the report is written for a U.S. audience, much of the content is more widely applicable.

During the process of writing this report, thought leaders and practitioners were interviewed to capture their perspectives on some of the key questions that arise from considering the decline of fossil fuels, consequences for the food system, and how people can adapt. Excerpts from those interviews are given in the Appendix section “Other Voices,” and several of their quotes are inserted throughout the main text.

Globalization has become a culture, and the prospect of losing this culture is unsettling. Much good has arisen from the integration and movements of people and materials that have occurred in the era of globalization. But we will soon be forced to face the consequences of unsustainable levels of consumption and severe disruption of the biosphere. For the relatively wealthy, these consequences have been hidden by tools of finance and resources flows to power centers, while people with fewer means have been trampled in the process of assimilation. In the U.S., our food system is culturally bankrupt, mirroring and contributing to crises of health and the environment. We can rebuild the food system in ways that reflect energy, soil, and climate realities, seeking opportunities to recover elements of past cultures that inhabited the Earth with grace. Something new will arise, and in the evolution of what comes next, many may find what is often lacking in life today—the excitement of a profound challenge, meaning beyond the self, a deep sense of purpose, and commitment to place.

Bradford J (2009) Ecological Economics and the Food System. The oil drum: Campfire.