I’ve just been reading E.A. Wrigley‘s Energy and the English Industrial Revolution which I highly recommend if you are interested in the transformation wrought by fossil fuels.

In passing, he gives these figures for the labor involved in growing maize in Mexico ca 1940. A hectare is roughly the area inside an athletic track.

Cultivating a hectare of maize by hand.   1,140 man hours

Cultivating a hectare of maize with an ox. 380 man hours (plus 200 ox hours)

His figures come from Cornell entomologist turned agricultural economist, David Pimentel “Energy Flow in the Food System,” in Pimental and C.W. Hall, eds.,  Food and Energy Resources (London, 1984).

They reminded me that I have always been frustrated that the “food system” so often ignores what happens after the harvest.  So here’s my effort to get an order of magnitude figure of the relative work expended by men and women in putting tortillas on the table prior to oxen, mules, tractors and mills.

In 1970, maize yield per hectare was 1,194 kg ( INEGI, 1999 cited in “El maíz en México,” by Massieu Trigo and Lechuga Montenegro).  Assume that you needed 1 kg of maize per adult per day when it was providing 65% of the calories, allowing for seed corn and wastage in storage.  Assume a family of two adults and four others, say three children and an old person (probably low), with the four others needing 1/2 kg of maize a day.  Multiplying 4 kg by 365 days and dividing by 1,194 you find that a plot of 1.2 hectares was needed.  And that means 1,368 man hours to grow maize for the family.

Now what about turning all that maize into sometime you could put in your mouth.  Assume that it took about 5 hours a day to grind the maize for a family of six.  Add in time to collect firewood, de-grain the maize, haul the water to nixtamalize it, and shape and cook the tortillas.  Say another hour a day for this (a low estimate I think).

That means 2190 woman hours to turn maize into tortillas for the family.

That is to say, processing maize took more time than growing it even prior to animal power. Once the man had the help of an ox or a mule, the woman spent four to five times as much time processing and cooking as the man spent farming.

Given what hard work grinding is, I would guess the woman spent at least four times as much energy processing and cooking as the man spent farming.

These are just back of the envelope calculations. Does anyone have any corrections or modifications to make?  Or any pointers to studies on the  relative energy involved in farming versus processing and cooking?

Wikipedia has a short and clear article on agribusiness, contrasting two ways in which it is used. The first is neutral.

Within the agriculture industry, agribusiness is widely used simply as a convenient portmanteau of agriculture and business, referring to the range of activities and disciplines encompassed by modern food production.

The second is not.

Among critics of large-scale, industrialized, vertically integrated food production, the term agribusiness is used negatively, synonymous with corporate farming. As such, it is often contrasted with smaller family-owned farms.

Whether you use the neutral or the negative meaning of agribusiness, the fact is that British farming has been agribusiness for a long time, at least since the enclosures of the eighteenth century and in many cases back beyond that.

1% of the population owned 80% of British land in 1900, according to the fine historian Chris Bayly, I don’t know the current figures but my strong suspicion is that this hasn’t changed much. Maybe you could find out here.

This 1% did not actually farm, of course, nor did they manage their farms.  Their “home farm” of perhaps a thousand acres was run by a salaried manager and used for keeping their horses, developing specialty breeds, and providing nice vistas to be seen from their country house.

The estate agent managed the rest of the estate. His job was to collect rents that maintained the owner’s lifestyle. These estate agents played a key role in the industrial revolution which was largely funded (as it had to be) by the large landowners. Men like Thomas Davis, agent to the Marquess of Bath at Longleat, was up to his neck in schemes to find exploitable mineral resources (coal), build canals, put in hydraulic schemes  (water meadows, land drainage) to improve land productivity, use steam engines for agricultural tasks, etc etc.

The large tenant farmers worked large farms (1000 acres or more) and (until after World War II) employed large numbers of farm workers. I know a bit about this because my father’s family have been tenants on the Pembroke estate for a hundred years (perhaps longer but things get murky around World War I). They negotiated their leases every five, ten or twenty years with the estate agent.  Provided they paid their rent, these farmers chose how they farmed.  And need I say that the farming was a business.

Now I am quite happy to see farming as a business.  I am quite happy to see corporations running farms (though not so happy when these are royal or aristocratic corporations) if it ensures the long term commitment necessary to good land management.

But what of all those who take a dim view of agribusiness, who want to get rid of corporations, who want small farms farmed by the owner, who see this as a way to social justice, who proudly call lots of one acre a farm, who want artisanal foodstuffs?

Surely they cannot contemplate the long tradition of agribusiness in Britain with equanimity? It’s quite at odds with the small family farm tradition (real or not) so cherished in American political thought. And surely they should be wary of one of the largest magnates of all, Prince Charles.

Prince Charles inherited 135,000 acres, much of it excellent land in the south and west of England.   His manager farms the Home Farm, the organic bit, 1000 acres where he in time-honored tradition raises rare breeds.

His tenants are not required to farm organically, without doubt use as much of the latest agricultural technology as they can afford, and accept farm subsidies. His estate agent Smiths Gore I presume collect the rents and handle the accounts.

Like corporate agribusiness, Prince Charles has integrated vertically by producing a line of food products,  Duchy Products. These he sells not in farmers’ markets but through the large grocery chain, Waitrose. (True, they pay some royalties  into his charity, but that is in trouble at the moment, having to bail out some land investments made by the Prince).  He advertises these industrially-produced foodstuffs by appeal to tradition (a technique pioneered by big wine in late nineteenth-century France).

In 2008, rents from tenant farmers (and presumably from sources such as The Oval cricket ground and holiday rentals in the Scilly Isles) provided him and his family with an income of $26.4 million.

So when I read rave reviews of Prince Charles at the Future of Food conference going on in Washington, D.C., I have to wonder.

Is Prince Charles’ decision to farm 1/135th of his land organically really so compelling?  How can his admirers, most of whom I suspect, distrust agribusiness (and by any standards, Charles’ landholdings have more in common with large corporate landholdings than small family farms), overlook the scale of his operation?

Because of a sneaking deference to royalty?  Because he claims as his own, standard British agricultural practice, such as dung spreading?

Whatever the reason, I find the deference amazing. Prince Charles is, in my view, agribusiness personified.

Prince Charles–Not Your Typical Radical – National Geographic Magazine.  Worth reading.

I don’t think there is any doubt about this.  Quite a few scholars, both English- and Spanish-speaking have looked at this.  Here’s just a start.

Irrigation and hydraulic technology from Moorish Spain.

Lots of this came over.  Scholars have a pretty good idea of indigenous irrigation techniques so that what was added from the Old World is pretty clear.

Among others, Thomas Glick of Boston University has studied this in Spain and Mexico. He is author of The Old World Background of the Irrigation System of San Antonio, Texas. El Paso, Texas Western Press, 1972. Spanish version, in Los cuadernos de Cauce 2000, No.15 (Madrid, 1988); also in Instituto de la Ingeniería de España, Obras hidráulicas prehispánicas y coloniales en América, I (Madrid, 1992), pp. 225–264. Irrigation and Hydraulic Technology: Medieval Spain and its Legacy. Aldershot, Variorum,1996.

From personal experience, you see the remains of norias (wheels to lift water) all over the place.

The whole of the northern edge of the Bajío region–a key agricultural region in colonial times because it supplied the wheat, mules, etc to the mining districts of Guanajuato and Zacatecas–is riddled with hydraulic works: stone channels and damns that you run across everywhere if you roam through the hills.

I wish I could find the notes from a seminar given by a researcher at the Colegio de Michoacán. Anyway, he described how first the Spanish managed to control the aguas mansas, the gentle waters, the waters that flow year round in the two major rivers (ha!) that flow down from the north, the Laja and the Lerma.  Then they tackled the aguas torrentiales (the torrential waters) because often much of the year’s rainfall occurs in two or three major downpours.  Among the techniques were moveable woven damns to divert the waters into holding areas, and the creation of huge holding areas acres in extent where the water went from one pen to another until all had evaporated, still keeping the ground moist enough for a second crop.

It was a huge, and hugely labor-intensive system that survived until the beginning of the twentieth century and the advent of the small electric motor for pumping out groundwater.

And I recently went to a colonial hacienda in the Bajío, close to Irapuato, which had a system for collecting the waters from the huge areas of roof and running them through channels to irrigate the huerta (orchard/vegetable garden).  I assume most of these techniques were inspired by or directly copied from Moorish Spain.

By the way I see that Simon Fitzwilliam-Hall who runs the al-Filaha site is an expert on hydraulic technology so he probably knows far more about this than I do.

Continuation of the medieval Islam transfer of plants

Obviously the Spanish picked up and brought to New Spain many of the plants that the Iberian peninsula owed to Islam. Bless their hearts, these plants, now expected to live with wet summers and dry winters instead of dry summers and wet winters, adapted and thrived, citrus for example.  William Dunmire, Gardens of New Spain tracing the transfer of the technique of growing fruits in huertas from New Spain into what is now Texas, New Mexico, and California.

Sheep, Cattle, Horses and their Management

Not perhaps technically part of agronomy but very much part of the package that arrived, even if subsequently adapted to conditions in the Americas.  And of course with reverberations in the cowboy culture in what is now the US but was once part of New Spain.

____________

Finally well-known food activist Gary Nabhan has had a shot at in his thought-provoking Arab/American: Landscape, Culture, and Cuisine in Two Great Deserts (though I wish that he was a tad more precise and analytical in his claims).

Now here’s a terrific resource, a really reliable site dedicated to medieval Arabic manuals on farming produced all over the medieval Islamic world (see map above) .  You probably already know but the medieval Islamic states transformed agriculture from Spain to parts of India, from the Sahel to Sicily.

The purpose of the Filāḥa Texts Project is to publicise and elucidate the written works collectively known as the Kutub al-Filāḥa or ‘Books of Husbandry’ compiled by Arab, especially Andalusi, agronomists mainly between the 10th and 14th centuries (see Authors & Works). These systematic and detailed manuals of agriculture, horticulture and animal husbandry have been sadly neglected and remain largely unknown in the Anglophone world – apart from some of the Yemeni works they have never been translated into English.

via The Filāḥa Texts Project.

Edit.  Some more thoughts on this.  I think the title should really be “How Medieval Islam Transformed Food and How it Had to Transform Farming to get the Foodstuffs it Needed.”

Also, I had the pleasure of taking Expiración Garcia, mentioned on this site as one of the premier researchers in the area, to lunch last year when she was giving a series of seminars in the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico).  She is a meticulous researcher.  But neither I nor any of the other members of the seminar could persuade her to speculate on the clear transfer of much of this agronomy to Mexico.  Too bad, if understandable given it was her first visit, the need to be circumspect about this kind of research in Spain, time pressure, etc.

Thanks to Karen Reeds on the ASFS list for the tip.  And from there back to H-HISTGEOG@H-NET.MSU.EDU

In Hawaii, the question of native Hawaiian heritage has expanded from maintaining taro cultivation, the big topic in the 90s, to include hand pounding taro to make poi.  To all of you out there who suspect that a purple puree can’t be any good, my experiments pounding taro convinced me it is delicious.

This long article by Catherine Mariko Black on taro and poi debates in the Honolulu Weekly puts the emphasis on legalizing hand pounded poi (something that will surely happen given the politics of the islands). To me the problem now, as then, is how to make it economically viable. It’s something the activists are concerned about too.

Practitioners like Anthony maintain that the starchier taro they need to make pai ‘ai [here meaning hand pounded taro] is different from the taro poi millers usually use and is sometimes more labor intensive for the farmer to grow. That’s why he and others have begun to pay double, or even triple, taro’s going price of about 60 cents a pound. It’s also why he can sell his hand-pounded pai ‘ai for $10 to $15 a pound, two to three times more than conventional poi.

Anthony puts great emphasis on the economic health behind this issue.

“My number one question to the kupuna has always been, ‘What do we need most in Hawaii?’ And they all say we need more taro farmers. So I looked at the numbers and at the current farm gate price for taro, which is what the poi mills are paying. I’d have to grow 100,000 pounds of taro to make $60,000 a year. But if I sustainably farm and pound my own taro, I can make $70,000 by selling just 7,000 pounds per year, and all I need is one acre. So the real question is, if we want more taro farmers, we need to figure out how they’re going to make enough money to feed their families.” (My emphasis).

Now I entirely agree that it is important to attend to the economics of any kind of farming.  But this is fairly astonishing.

Here’s a quote from a piece I wrote earlier on poi.

The cost of poi in Hawaii is soaring.  Compare these prices

20 lbs rice go for $8.oo-10.00

3.5 pound bag of poi at Costco $15.00

3oz powdered poi including shipping to mainland $22.00 (with water this makes 13.5 oz poi)

Now you do add water to the plastic bags of poi so that the eating weight goes up but not as much as the weight of rice when cooked.

Bottom line: poi is about 8 times as expensive as rice.  Ergo.  Hawaiians eat rice except on special occasions.

That means that if Anthony can sell his product for $10 to $15 a pound, it makes poi twenty four times as expensive as rice.

If I remember correctly, when Hawaiians subsisted on poi with a few seasonings such as fish or limu (seaweed), they needed 4 to 5 lbs a day (which would be about right because if you subsist on bread which is much drier and hence lighter you need about 2 lbs a day).  That would be $40 to $60 a day for your basic foodstuff or $18,000 a year.

Or, looked at another way, Anthony is reckoning on making about $70,000 a year from one acre.    Of course, I assume he is not counting as one of his costs the price of land which in Hawaii runs from $15,000 an acre (presumably this is dry leeward land no good for taro) to $500,000 an acre.  Presumably he can get land set aside for Native Hawaiians.  If I am calculating right, that means a return of somewhere between 300% and 14%.

Here, for comparison is a quote on returns in South Dakota (simply because it was the first I ran across).

The net rate of return is a return to agricultural land ownership after deducting property taxes and other land ownership expenses. Appraisers refer to the current annual net rate of returns as the market- derived capitalization rate. Average net rates of return for 2010 varied from 3.9% for non-irrigated cropland to 3.6% for hayland and 2.7% for rangeland, and averaged 3.2% for all-agricultural land. This is the fifth consecutive year that average net rates of return were below 4.0% for all- agricultural land, compared to an average of 5.4% during the 1990s and 4.4% from 2000 to 2005. The practical range of net rates of return to land for 2010 reported by respondents varies from 2.0% to 7.0% for cropland, from 1.0% to 6.5% for hayland, and 1.0% to 5.0% for rangeland. The median net rate of return was 3.5% for cropland and 3.0% for hayland and rangeland.

It would not be the first time that what was once a staple becomes a luxury. Maintaining culinary heritage comes at a price.  Not a bad thing.  It reminds us of the huge cost of land and, before farming and processing was mechanized, of human time.  But it does mean that poi will be a luxury not a staple.

Again thanks to Robyn Eckhardt of Eating Asia for the link.

As the chart below shows, while it’s true the largest dollar amount of farm subsidies go to the largest farms (as you would expect, since subsidies are typically tied directly to production, and production is tied directly to gross sales), looking at the microeconomic effects of subsidies on individual farms should correctly lead you to an entirely different conclusion.

For 2007 (the most current statistics) farms that received government payments and grossed less than $25,000 per year — that is, the small, part-time darlings of the authentic farming movement for which the Times Food Section reserves its most lavish praise — took in an average 75 percent of the value of the crops they raised in the form of government subsidies. For the smallest farms — those grossing less than $1,000 yearly — the percentage skyrockets to nearly 300 percent. In other words: The smallest farms that took payments from the federal government earned three times more in subsidies than the typical farmer in the size category earned in crop sales.

Compare that to farms grossing more than a million dollars annually. Farms taking government payments in that size group received two pennies in government aid for every dollar the average farm earned from crop sales. And in the largest, giant corporate farm category, that government largesse falls to less than half a percent of gross sales.

A few comments.

1.  I am assuming that Mike Smith has his arithmetic right.  And his graph is obviously only for farms that receive subsidies.  It does not address the concern that many small farms do not get subsidies.  It does however suggest that subsidizing small farms is a pricey business.  And given the lack of economies of scale that is not too surprising.  What is surprising to me is the huge differential between large and small subsidized farms in terms of proportion of subsidy to market value of the food produced.

2.  I am strongly of the opinion that we need to seriously consider the economics of small farms before we endorse them. They have rarely been the source of food for large urban populations–and that’s what we have today–and there is surely a reason for that.

A suggestion for starters.  Land is expensive, especially around cities. A farmer needs to be able to make enough to pay for that land or to offset the loss of income from investing his money elsewhere if he already owns it.  And he or she needs to be able to make enough to live and put the kids through college. That is, the small farms in this example don’t come close to meeting these criteria.

And it’s very hard to see how you could  on a small acreage unless you have a very high-value specialty crop.  And we can’t live on high-value specialty crops alone.

3.  And if you are tempted to write Mike Smith off as part of the agricultural establishment, well, isn’t it worth considering that those of us who have grown up in cities might learn something from those who have who know farming economics first hand.  No reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

‘Development began in the mid-1980s, at the beginning of the revolution in biotech foods. A Swedish farmers’ cooperative, Lyckeby, one of Europe’s biggest starch producers, was searching for potatoes with high starch content to supply the starches it sells for manufacturing paper, textile finishes, glues and other products. “Genetic engineering was first emerging,” said Kristofer Vamling, 51, managing director of Plant Science Sweden, a company that grew out of the original research efforts. “We thought this could perhaps be something for the new engineering.”

Interesting story for a couple of reasons.

First, this (and the introduction of GM papaya in Hawaii) suggests that in Europe and the US, GM’s way in may well be via crops with small markets or crops with non-food markets.

Second, it’s a useful reminder that many crops, even ones we usually associate with food, and much farming is for non-food uses.  Starch was much sought after for all kinds of technologies from at least the time of the Han and Roman Empires, and cereals and roots were grown to provide it.   Olive oil was Europe’s best industrial lubricant for thousands of years until displaced by modern lubricants.  Interesting to speculate on how this affected plant breeding and processing methods.

More on the GM potato in the NY Times.  More on GM papaya here. More on olive oil history here.

And who knew that Sweden was such an important producer of starch?  Certainly not me.

It’s a brown tomato.  It came in a plastic box with half a dozen confreres at my local Wal-Mart in Mexico City.  Inside it’s still brownish.  Tastes fine.  Disconcerting, a bit.  It was new to me.

But here’s the back story on the demand for these tomatoes from the Wall Street Journal. (Thanks to Sonia Banuelos on FB for the link).

And what’s it doing in Mexico City?  Well on the plastic box, where it’s described as the kumato, the “simply unique BROWN tomato” we learn that its a product of Mexico, thanks to Sunset Produce, Kingsville, Ontario.

Go to their website and you see mini kumatos on the front page.  And you learn that this four-generation family business has 1400 acres of vegetables (many organic) under glass.  Do you know how much that is?  It’s about 2.3 miles by one mile, perhaps more.

Not all in one place, of course.  Besides Canada, they are in the US, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Guatamala, Nicaragua, and Panama, and, of course, Mexico.  And in Mexico their distribution center is in Irapuato, in my former home state, Guanajuato.  Big, big farming there. Big foreign investment.

A story in the Mexican newspaper Reforma on Thursday 13th May reports that Mexico is now the world leader in the export of fruits and vegetables (I need to check this).  But it is top in top in avocado, second in papaya, lime, chile, and peppers, third in mangoes, oranges and guavas, fourth in grapefruit and asparagus.  Fruit production has risen 17% in the last ten years, vegetables nearly 10%.

Mexican consumption has declined slightly from 180 kilos a year to 176 kilos.

So that’s the story of the brown tomato.  Want heirloom tomatoes.  Someone will provide them for you.

That’s an interesting question.  But in my opinion it is a mistake to tie it to discovering how to make bread or beer.  If you look at my original post, you will see no reference to farming.

Surely, some considerable mastery of grains has to precede grain farming by a significant period?  Why in the world would people go to all the trouble of farming grains if they did not already have techniques for turning them into food?

Onkel Bob’s response, I suspect would be turning grasses into food is easy.  To quote “grasses could be easily prepared without substantial effort. Just add fire.”

I like the phrase “just add fire” because that’s what our ancestors, who thought of fire as a thing, an element, that entered into chemical combinations, would have thought they were doing.

I’m not so happy about the “just” though.

What about the classic paper by Gordon Hillman of University College London where he studied contemporary Turkish ways of turning emmer wheat (that is a wheat typical of the early wheats in that it is enclosed in a hull) into bulgur (the form used in tabbouleh for example)?

Result.  From harvest to getting the wheat ready to process.  14 steps.

(Threshing, primary winnowing, coarse sieving, medium coarse sieving, storage, parching, pounding, secondary winnowing, medium coarse sieving, fine sieving, washing to semi-clean, storage, second fine sieving, hand sorting)

From ready to process to bulgur. Another 5 steps.

(Par-boiling, sun-drying, bran removal, winnowing, cracking, and sifting).

Although these numbers vary slightly depending on whether you count multiple sievings or winnowings as one or several steps, what food scientists call post-harvest processing is a tedious, meticulous, time-consuming, energy-consuming operation.

In the distant past people might have gone about this in a more rough and ready way.  But there’s nothing to suggest it was easy.

Soon.  A cook’s eye view of the grains.

_______________

No pdf for Hillman’s paper but here is the reference. Hillman, G. C. (1984) Traditional husbandry and processing of archaic cereals in modern times. Part I, the glume-wheats. Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 1, 114-152.

Dorian Fuller, also of University College London, does very interesting work on grain history.  I now discover he also has a blog.

Thanks to Fred James for this.

Mr Hurst has a distinguished career in farming and related industries, and besides has published in venues such as the Wilson Quarterly and the Wall Street Journal. And if you shudder at the idea of that the American Enterprise Institute published this, well with the likes of Michael Pollan sewing up the NY Times and no serious farming journalism out there . . .  Just give this a go.  It’s well written, smart, and to the point.  I loved every line.

To get you started.

[Michael Pollan´s] other grand idea is mandatory household composting, with the compost delivered to farmers free of charge. Why not? Compost is a valuable soil amendment, and if somebody else is paying to deliver it to my farm, then bring it on. But it will not do much to solve the nitrogen problem. Household compost has somewhere between 1 and 5 percent nitrogen, and not all that nitrogen is available to crops the first year. Presently, we are applying about 150 pounds of nitrogen per acre to corn, and crediting about 40 pounds per acre from the preceding years soybean crop. Let’s assume a 5 percent nitrogen rate, or about 100 pounds of nitrogen per ton of compost. That would require 3,000 pounds of compost per acre. Or about 150,000 tons for the corn raised in our county. The average truck carries about 20 tons. Picture 7,500 trucks traveling from New York City to our small county here in the Midwest, delivering compost. Five million truckloads to fertilize the country’s corn crop. Now, that would be a carbon footprint!

Read more here.

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