Part 1: Food vs. Fuel for Thought
Over dinner with friends a few weeks ago, the conversation turned to a socio-political topic and quickly became heated. As my friend’s opinion was the opposite of mine, we both started using hypothetical situations to support our respective positions. As neither of us is running for office, we actually listened to and considered each other’s arguments. Within a very short time, we realized that we could both define the poles of our opinions, the situations where we agreed the other’s hypothetical was “not right.” We were unable, however, to find the line in the middle, the hypothetical that satisfied both of our senses of “right.” I’m sure it is there, sure that the middle exists, but we didn’t find it before the rest of our dinner companions requested a topic change.
I can almost guarantee any conversation about the sustainable use of forest resources for energy will end similarly. In these conversations, sustainability and biological diversity get tangled up, as do sustainability and personal property rights. Add in the modifier economical (as in economical sustainability) and you get instant quagmire. And, yet, as the world struggles to find ways to adapt to a carbon-constrained future, these tough issues will be addressed, and the inevitable unintended consequences will be felt. As that global conversation begins, let’s examine some of the issues.
Food versus Energy
I think most people, if forced to choose just one, would choose eating over air conditioning. The idea of the conversion of crop land to energy crops* on a scale that would create global food shortages is something most people oppose. How, then, do we ensure crop land isn’t converted? Do we take away a landowner’s monetary incentive by restricting the source of feedstock used by a renewable energy facility to sources that were not previously cropland? Will renewable energy facilities be responsible for verifying the land use patterns for land within their procurement basins?
Let’s look at the issues that will need to be addressed if we pursue this last question. A modestly-sized wood consuming energy facility will have an average procurement distance of 35 miles (an outside procurement zone boundary of 70 miles). That is almost 10,000,000 acres. If we assume that a conservative 25% of those acres are crop acres and knowing that the US average farm size, according the National Agricultural Statistics Service, is 418 acres, then our hypothetical energy facility would be on the hook to monitor the land use patterns of approximately 6,250 farms.
If the prospect of monitoring on this scale isn’t daunting enough, we now come to the hard part – determining what constitutes conversion. Best practices for row crop production include crop rotation. A typical 418 acre farm probably has at least two crops planted in any given year. If this year it is cotton and peanuts and next year it is peanuts and miscanthus, does this constitute conversion? Is cotton considered a food crop? Some part of the plant can be used for animal feed--does that count? Do any crops used for animal feed count? If, after a two-year drought or the second 100-year flood in a decade, the farm puts in a no-fertilizer, no-pesticide grass crop to pelletize for energy, is that considered conversion? Or is it considered survival? Isn’t the best way to sustain farms to sustain the people who own them?
Is it possible to ensure land use pattern stability by restricting feedstock used by renewable energy facilities to ones not grown on land that once was cropland, thereby removing monetary incentives for landowners to switch crops?
What happens, as it did about a decade ago, when a hurricane blows in a virus that attacks soybeans, and no treatment exists for several years?
What happens when the farm is sold? Or not sold but converted to forest?
What happens when commodity prices fall?
What if the crop acres inside our hypothetical facility's 70 mile procurement area decrease, but crop acres nationally stay the same?
Feel how slippery this slope has gotten?
This is just a brief survey of the very difficult questions that we must answer before we can find that line in the middle that my friend and I could not during dinner a few weeks ago. A strategy for getting there would certainly require that we understand how we will determine the success of such policies before implementing them. Pardon the terrible pun, but we shouldn't bite off more than we can chew. So let's not put a restriction on the emerging wood renewable energy market before we can agree on what effects on the environment we want to measure, over what time period, and how we will measure them.
Note: This is the first in a series of blog posts on sustainability. In my next post, I’ll tackle the issues surrounding biological diversity and sustainability.
Forest2Market: July 14, 2023
