As predatory opportunists try to whip up another crisis - this time it's water and of course the UN is the focal point of hysteria - agriculture is as usual fertile ground for the opportunists to plow. Agriculture relies on water as well as land and nutrients. In a sense water - along with air - is the major nutrient for agriculture.

This has been so since the dawn of agriculture. It is no accident that it developed in river delta areas and at the base of high mountains which had ever flowing rivers from snow melt even in the hottest and driest parts of the year. Water management has been a driver for the development of civilization as groups banded together to do massive water projects, inventing novel engineering hacks and new intellectual tools in the process, to bring water over long distances to crop fields. One of the more interesting historical themes is the advance and decline of some such hydraulic civilizations as they lost social cohesion or discovered that they had chosen to establish themselves in locations that couldn't bear the burden.

The current conflicts about water usage and systems development are more of the same thing that has been a central part of civilization for 10,000 years. Predatory opportunists seeking to exploit the conflicts have equally ancient provenance. The problems will not be solved, cannot be solved. We'll just have another round of power seeking and money grabs, or in some cases such as the UN and its stable of NGOs, both.

The pattern is much the same as we have been seeing with energy issues but is potentially an even plumper plum for the opportunists to pluck. Water is part of energy issues as well as food issues, most notably where they meet in bio-fuels. The predators are circling like vultures. Though farming is painted as a villain by water whingers since it requires such large amounts for irrigation, it gets a pass when the crop can be claimed as a bio-fuel source, even though it maintains the system of subsidies and heavy-metal industrial agriculture with its demand for petro-chemicals as well as water, and increases environmental pressures in every area - from pollution to biodiversity loss. Critics disparage bio-fuels as dirt burning but it is even more aptly described as water burning. Boosters will find this to be a pleasing thought on the assumption that water is abundant and cheap. They are wrong, as usual.

How can this be? The earth is covered in water, but it isn't sufficiently pure for land living animals and plants. It's salty, full of dissolved chemicals, the assumed home of life on the planet but that was long ago and things have changed. Still, there's plenty of water if only we had the energy to purify it. And so the water/energy issue comes full circle. If we are determined to seek energy from bio-fuels we would be far better off to grow the biomass with salty water in salty places rather than prime farm land. In time some predator may figure a way to exploit this fact.

In the end there is only one issue - energy. With energy and mass - ultimately the same thing in different states - we can manufacture the rest. Information is involved there somewhere but that's another post. In an earlier post Klaus Lackner, director of the Center for Sustainable Energy at the Earth Institute, was quoted as saying "Technology in general and energy at its base ultimately define the carrying capacity of the Earth for humans". This post is a partial unpacking of that very dense remark. It's truth is obvious to those who think large scale or long term, yet it escapes the "sustainability industry". What can sustainability possibly mean? Well, nothing, but it is used to refer to a quasi-religious world view that the state of this planet in this tiny slice of time is all that there is and all we should ever want. Whatever the sky-daddy has provided is all we can have, and all of our thoughts and behaviors ought to be focused on miserly use of this one off gift.

Some cracks in that foolish facade have become impossible to ignore. As the empty phrase "sustainable agriculture" has come to be used more often it has suffered increased scrutiny. That phrase is often code for "organic" but big ag is cashing in on that nonsensical idea too.

At one point, I expounded on the closed-nutrient cycle of old-school organic farming, contrasting it with what writer Michael Pollan deemed the "industrial-organic" way. In the old-school organic style, which relies on animals, farm wastes are recycled into the soil, providing all the nutrients necessary for the next harvest. The industrial-organic farmer, by contrast, imports his or her soil fertility -- just like the conventional farmer. The difference is that the organic farmer is likely shipping in composted manure from far-flung places, while the conventional grower is hauling in a processed petroleum product.

No one was happier about national organic standards than big biz since regulations are their meat, their method of dominating markets, seeking rents, and excluding competition. The duller sorts of minds are whingeing about attempts of big ag to "improve" the organic standard - claiming that they water them down - yet fail to grasp that they have been played . . . again, or that the whole idea of organic production and sustainable agriculture are fantasies completely dependent on the ability to twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope well enough to ignore salient information and confirm irrational biases.

More cracks in the facade are examined at The Oil Drum in a post which starts by discussing the one referenced above.

I have long been wary about what Philpott calls "industrial organic" farming. In fact, most of the organic names you're probably familiar with are owned by huge companies that you may associate with poor agricultural practices: Cargill, Dean, Danone, ConAgra. Here's a fascinating chart that maps out all of the relationships between big food companies and their organic labels. . .

For the time being, the violations that these big-box organics producers seem to be committing have to do with some of the additives that they put in their foods, or how many cows are crammed into a single feedlot. But I see another concern, more related to peak oil. The real benefit of small organic outfits is that they're not big enough to distribute to large companies like Wal-Mart, so they end up focusing on more local markets. This solves two problems: (1) the food is produced without petroleum fertilizer, and (2) the food doesn't have to travel very far. (As we reported a long time ago, given the choice between local and organic, local often makes more sense.) As long as we continue to encourage centralized and mass-produced organics, we can be sure that they're going to be traveling thousands of miles to get to our kitchens.

They will in any event. Few places can produce food year-round and those wealthy enough to agitate about these things will never give up their green salads in December in Chicago or New York. While it is sensible for any number of reasons to patronize local growers and pay attention to their methods - get to know them and express appreciation for skilled and mindful craft - it can never be more than a fraction of total food consumption.

But that's not the only flaw in the fantasy.

It's likely that neither Wal-Mart nor Whole Foods will do much to encourage local agriculture or small farming, but in an odd twist, Wal-Mart, with its simple "More for Less" credo, might do far more to democratize the nation's food supply than Whole Foods. The organic-food movement is in danger of exacerbating the growing gap between rich and poor in this country by contributing to a two-tiered national food supply, with healthy food for the rich. Could Wal-Mart's populist strategy prove to be more "sustainable" than Whole Foods? Stranger things have happened.

Of course it is. They meet the problem head on and are doing it not only in wealthy nations but in developing nations too. When you go back to first principles without all the quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo the task for agriculture is to use as few inputs as possible to produce as many outputs as possible, the same as any other productive human activity. Using less land, water, imported fertility, imported pesticides, labor, machinery and energy is the requirement to produce a surplus of outputs above inputs. As it happens some of the practices that charm the organo-sustaino crowd fit this need too, but their sky-daddy inhibitions preclude some of the most effective techniques.

A lot of this confusion is based on misinformation. Some of the confusion is willful, more kaleidoscope work, but some may be honest ignorance. The construct "petroleum fertilizer" is nonsense. Petroleum is used for energy and feedstock for all sorts of chemical processes because it is abundant and cheap, not because it is required. Some countries use hydro-electric power for the energy source to produce fertilizer though they still use natural gas as a feedstock because it is available and has the four hydrogen atoms they cherish. They throw the carbon away. But hydrogen can be produced from water with more energy. It all comes down to energy and information. You could have a nuclear fertilizer plant that produced both nitrogen fertilizer and irrigation water from sea water, and perhaps its own uranium as well.

To make useful decisions about agriculture it is necessary to think on a large enough scale to deal with the global issue, and in a long enough time frame to consider the dynamics of the system since the need to produce will likely at least double in coming decades as population increases and development proceeds. The brain-dead notion of retreat into a fantasy world where current industrial methods - the best we know how to do at the moment - are replaced by historical methods that failed to provide for the world when they were current best practices will not be realized. No sensible or ethical people will entertain the ideas. It's a fantasy of wealth and indifference to humanity.

However, the day will come when we cease agriculture. Growing food is inherently wasteful and expensive. Killing things, even plants, is beastly. We are beasts but we aspire to rise above our origins and live without doing harm. In time we will directly synthesize our meat and potatoes or culture them in vats. Nothing that ever truly lived or had an independent existence will be killed and consumed. We will use techniques much like those of living things, at least at first until we become more nano-adept, but no lives will be taken.

This evolution will be fought every step of the way, like all progress, and some may be able to evade that future by retreating into Strossian virtual spaces to "live" without the restraints of physical reality. That's the only way the organo-sustaino crowd will ever achieve their heart's desire because their ideas are sheer nonsense. While we are waiting for the future we would be wise to be sensible in the present and do agriculture as effectively as we can.