Tag: sustainability

Sustainability and biofuel farming


James Gustave Speth has written a really important book on sustainability within a modern society. The book is called The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, and it’s an important contribution. One of the most fundamental conclusions that Speth arrives at is the idea that sustainability will require a truly profound transformation of how we think about a “good life,” and a rethinking of the kinds of material circumstances we might aspire to in order to create a world system that is genuinely sustainable.

One way we might try to pursue this line of thought is to consider whether gardens and local biofuel production might provide a basis for more sustainable human activity. Could we use more of our own time and labor to create some of the material necessities of our lives, and do so in a way that imposes a smaller footprint on the world’s energy and resource system?

David Blume was a guest on NPR’s Science Friday on August 15. Blume is the author of Alcohol Can Be a Gas!: Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century. Blume is an advocate for the idea that alcohol can be a large and ecologically positive component of our modern energy economy (website). And he believes that it is possible to imagine a more decentralized energy economy for the United States in which local producers and distillers satisfy a large percentage of the energy needs of a region.

Blume made an observation that I found intriguing: that the common wetland plant, the cattail, can be a fuel source for producing ethanol. (Here’s a news story on Blume’s comments about cattails on an earlier occasion.) Corn produces about 250-300 gallons of ethanol per acre, and it is estimated that cattails would produce something less than this. (Blume himself estimates that the yield of cattail ethanol production would be “many, many times” that of corn, and says that 7,000 gallons per acre is feasible. This seems unsupportable, given the potential yield of other biofuel crops.) But cattails also have ecological advantages: they soak up excess nutrients (e.g. agricultural fertilizer runoff or sewage waste plant effluent), and they require little cultivation. Here are a few news stories (story, story) with some interesting background.

So here’s the question: what would be involved in creating a community that is energy self-sufficient based on ethanol production? Could households grow their own fuels? What would the economics of a cooperative community-based distillery look like? How much land, labor, and money would be required for the household?

It should be noted that there is serious disagreement about the most basic features of the commercial ethanol economy: does ethanol production lead to a net gain in energy, or do the inputs into the cultivation and distilling processes exceed the energy content of the resulting volume of alcohol? Here’s a discussion at FuturePundit and a summary of the findings of a national expert, David Pimental from Cornell University. Here are the central conclusions of a recent study by Pimentel and Tad Patzek at UC-Berkeley:

Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell University and University of California- Berkeley study. “There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel,” says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. “These strategies are not sustainable.”

(Other studies reach a very different conclusion.  See a summary of studies on the energy balance of current ethanol production on this Oregon website.)

But still, let’s think it through a bit. The scenario I’m imagining is labor-intensive and local, so the costs of energy associated with mechanization and transportation are reduced or eliminated. Could we imagine a local energy economy based on crops and distillation that could be fitted into an otherwise acceptable lifestyle? (The analysis will begin to sound like Piero Sraffa’s exercise, Production of Commodities By Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory.)

A family’s energy budget might look something like this, estimated in gallons of ethanol:

  • transportation 800 gallons (10,000 miles)
  • cooking 300 gallons (365 days)
  • heating 1000 gallons (180 heating days)
  • illumination 100 gallons (365 days)
  • refrigeration 200 gallons

This adds up to 2,400 gallons of ethanol required for a year’s energy use. But we aren’t finished yet, because cultivation and distillation also have an energy cost, and this cost is a function of the volume of alcohol required. Let’s take a more optimistic estimate than that provided by Pimental above, and assume that the energy cost of distillation is 30%. (We’re working with a coop, after all!) To produce a gallon of ethanol we have to expend .3 gallons in the distillation process. And let’s assume that cultivation is done by hand without mechanization, but that the crop needs to be transported to the distillation facility at a 10% cost. (That is, I assume that the net transportation cost of transporting the thousands of pounds of feed crop to the processor is 10% of the net alcohol product of the crop.) These estimates imply that the household requires 4,000 gallons of alcohol.

Now assume that the alcohol yield of an acre of cattails is 250 gallons; this implies a fuel farm size of 16 acres. (It would be nice to extend the exercise to include a food garden as well; this is left for the reader! Here’s an interesting United Nations article from the 1980s on the economics of family gardening that can help get the analysis started.)

Now how many hours of labor time need to be devoted to cultivating and harvesting this crop? Evidently cattails don’t require much by way of fertilizers, irrigation, and pest control. But I’m sure there is some level of maintenance needed, and 16 acres is a large area. In fact, it represents a rectangular plot that is 200 feet by 3,500 feet — more than half a mile long. So let’s assume that basic maintenance of the cattail crop requires 2 hours a day of adult labor. The large investment of labor, however, occurs at the harvest. About 14,000 pounds of cattails will be harvested per acre, or 224,000 pounds for the farm over the course of the harvest. If we assume that an adult can harvest 200 pounds per hour, this represents 1,120 hours of harvest work. Let’s assume that harvesting can be spread out over a couple of four-week periods or 56 days; this implies 20 hours of adult labor per day during the harvest season. So it would take 10 hours a day, 7 days a week during the eight weeks of harvest season for two adults to harvest this volume of cattails. Two months of very hard work devoted to harvesting will eventually produce enough ethanol to support the household’s chief energy needs.

Now what about the economics of the cooperative’s distillery? If we assume a cooperative involving 100 households of the scale just discussed, the distillery needs to process 22,400,000 pounds of material in order to produce 400,000 gallons of ethanol. The households will be farming an area of 1,600 acres of cattails — about three square miles. And the system will be supporting the energy needs of about 500 people. If we keep our assumption of a 30% ratio of input-to-output, this process will consume 120,000 gallons of ethanol. The coop members will need to fund the purchase and maintenance of the still and the labor costs associated with operation of the still. Perhaps it’s a labor coop too? In this case, each household will need to devote several hours a week to work in the distillery. And we might imagine that the coop would require a “tax” of some small percentage of the alcohol produced to cover maintenance and operating expenses. Here’s a research article from AGRIS that examines the costs of a small distillery of roughly this size. The conclusion is somewhat discouraging: “The analysis indicates that the distillery would not be profitable at current prices for corn and ethanol.” In other words, the cost of inputs and operation of the distillery exceed the value of the alcohol produced, according to this analysis. But this conclusion isn’t quite relevant to our scenario, because the raw materials are not purchased through the market and the product is not sold on the market. Nonetheless, the finding implies that there’s a shortfall somewhere; and it may well be that it is the unpaid labor of the fuel farmers that is where the shortfall occurs.

So here’s the upshot of this back-of-the-envelope calculation: it would be a major commitment of land and labor for a household or a village community to achieve energy self-sufficiency through cooperative-based ethanol distillation. And I’ve made an assumption I can’t justify: that the energy input to the distillation process is 30% of the energy content of the resulting quantity of ethanol. If that ratio is 60% instead of 30%, then the land and labor requirements for each household are greatly increased; and if the ratio approaches or exceeds 100%, then the whole idea falls apart. But even on these assumptions, the life style associated with this model sounds a lot closer to that of a peasant village in medieval France or traditional China than to that of a modern US citizen. It involves hard physical labor during several months of the year and a moderate level of labor effort during the remainder of the year. And if we imagine that the scenario is extended by incorporating a substantial amount of food gardening for family consumption, then the balance of necessary labor to free labor tips even further in the direction of the peasant economy.

The ethical consumer

As a rule, we know too little about the social and economic histories of the goods we consume. (Oddly enough, this is what Marx was referring to when he talked about the “fetishism of commodities”.) This is true of food — we consume coffee, tea, sugar, rice, or beef without thinking much about the conditions of human labor through which these goods were produced, or what fraction of the purchase price goes to the farmer or farm worker. And it is true of apparel and consumer goods such as toys or electronic gizmos — we don’t think too much about the factory conditions in which the products are made. We are distantly aware of “sweat shops” — but we don’t take the time to collect much information about what this means. And we certainly don’t know very much about the value stream through which the product passes, and the revenues generated for various parties along the way.

This is about the congealed history of the product. But we also don’t pay much attention to the future of the product — the consequences it will have after use. The social cost of recycling the AA batteries we use and the computer monitors; the ozone-depleting effects of the refrigeration we depend upon; the climate effects of the energy we consume — these all have major consequences that we recognize upon reflection. But we don’t look at the product and “see” the long-term consequences it represents, and we too rarely make consumption choices based upon those consequences.

And yet both features of a product need to be noticed and measured. How much exploitation and misery of distant farmers is congealed in the pound of coffee or the scoop of rice? Which seed and grain corporations have received what percentage of the total value of the finished product? Is the division of the final price among the producers and conveyers “fair”? Are we creating too much of an environmental deficit for the future by continuing to charge up all our cell phones and mp3 players? And how could we measure and compare products on the basis of criteria like these?

There is data to suggest that consumers in Europe and North America would differentiate among the products they purchase based on the “fairness” content and the “sustainability” content of the product — if this information were readily available. For example, a Eurobarometer study in the 1990s found that European consumers would pay a premium for fruits and vegetables labeled “fair trade”. (The amount they would pay varied significantly across countries, however!) (Visit the Eurobarometer website for a wide range of public opinion research on Europeans.)

We might imagine — literally imagine — a marketplace in which the social costs of a product are a part of what we examine when we consider a purchase. Like the list of ingredients on the can of soup, we might imagine each product labeled with basic information about its production history, the composition of the value stream, and the environmental costs of resource depletion and recycling that the product represents. And we might speculate that consumers would actually behave differently in the face of this kind of information.

This is the scenario that the Fair Trade movement in food is trying to create: a situation where consumers know more about the labor components of their choices and have some assurance that the primary producers and growers are receiving a fair share. And to judge from the visible successes of this movement in many places, consumers are willing to adjust their choices to bring about greater fairness.

So one wonders — what’s the next step? Is it possible that the resources of the internet might be a new way of leveraging consumer behavior in the direction of greater fairness and sustainability? Could we imagine a data service that allows the consumer to search for the product and see at a glance the “social accounting” that it represents? The possibility is tantalizing because of the exploding set of resources and tools that we possess to get a handle on the world’s data. And would this have the effect of further shaping our world in the direction of greater justice?