The farmer drove a diesel-powered hay baler in a circuit around his field, followed by his son on a clattering machine that grabbed the bales with metal fingers.
Edward F. Stanfield, 77, and his son, Edward B. Stanfield, 49, have followed this oil-inspired choreography for decades on their 600-acre farm in the Randallstown area of Baltimore County.
Like farmers around the world, they grow their hay, corn and soybeans with petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides, harvest them with diesel combines, pack them with oil-based plastic and ship them in diesel trucks.
The mechanized "Green Revolution" the family joined after World War II created an explosion in food productivity that allowed global populations to multiply. But it also forged a dependence on oil that could now lead to a food crisis, a small but growing number of scholars and activists warn.
Dr. Brian Schwartz, co-director of the program on global sustainability and health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said governments should start planning for a worst-case scenario, with soaring oil prices disrupting food supplies, just as they plan for other possibilities like nuclear war and bioterrorism.
"We have an industrial model of food production that requires intense amounts of fossil fuels," Schwartz said. "Food is going to be a huge problem for us."
Dale Allen Pfeiffer, author of the recent book Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture, goes even further in his warnings. With global oil production soon sliding into decline, fuel prices might continue to skyrocket until the world's food system collapses, causing starvation, he wrote.
"Growing evidence indicates that world [oil and gas] production will peak around 2010, followed by an irreversible decline. The impact on our agricultural system could be catastrophic," he wrote. "Hunger could become commonplace in every corner of the world, including your own neighborhood."
Pfeiffer estimated that the U.S. population of about 300 million is roughly a third larger than can be fed with the gradually shrinking oil supply expected over the next half-century. As a comparison to the agricultural crisis the world faces today, he noted, "The black plague during the 14th century claimed approximately a third of the European population, plunging that continent into a darkness from which it took them nearly two centuries to emerge."
