I look at the empty countryside around our farm in Cooke County, Texas, and can't help but wish it were as thick with people as when my grandparents made a living here. Until recently, though, the kindest name the rest of the world had for this wish was "nostalgia."
Back then, leaving the farm made sense. The economy was growing on an energy-dense broth of cheap fossil fuels. The energy in those fuels replaced that from the muscles of farm people and their animals. Today, one person can grow food for more than 100.
A century ago, almost 40 percent of the U.S. population worked on farms. But with industrialization, millions of farm folk, their labor cheapened, headed to the city for better wages. That tide continued until fewer than 2 million farmers - less than 1 percent of the country's population - remain today.
Now, though, the seemingly limitless reserves of petroleum that fueled the past century's exodus from the farm are about half gone. From here on, fossil fuels - and all the everyday essentials that depend on them, such as transportation and food - will grow increasingly costly.
Without some miraculous new energy source, muscle power could soon again be a cheaper alternative to fossil fuels for growing food. Blunt economic pragmatism seems set to out-shout nostalgia in the call to put more farmers on the land.
Just how many more farmers would it take to cure farming's fossil-fuel habit? Lots, according to farmer and writer Sharon Astyk and Oil Depletion Protocol author Richard Heinberg, both leading activists for facing up to life after world oil production peaks. They estimate that without cheap fossil fuels, we would need 50 million new farmers. That's one farmer for every two households in the United States.
This isn't a move-to-the-boonies-or-starve ultimatum. In fact, many people are ideally positioned to become farmers right where they are. It's the silver lining to suburban sprawl.
Suburbia occupies vast swaths of former prime U.S. farmland. NASA's ecological forecasting research group reports that the people living there water about 30 million acres of lawn, three times the land planted in irrigated corn.
Those lawns average somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of an acre. Authorities such as gardening guru John Jeavons and The Contrary Farmer author Gene Logsdon say that's ample land for growing a substantial portion of a family's food.
