Whats the price of hunger?

disclaimer

posted for worldwithoutoil.org, gas is not really 4.50 a gallon, not yet anyway. the rest is sadly true.

My, my, my, America, $4.50 a gallon and people are up in arms. Seems prices like that have existed elsewhere in the world for quite a while and it didn’t bother you.

Official rate for fuel in B-dad was roughly $4.00 a gallon a few weeks ago, up to 3 times that on the black market, and this in a country with income levels between $50 a month on the low end to $1000 dollars on the high end. I don’t want to make a guess as to what black market prices are now. Officially no prices have changed but that isn’t necessarily an indicator of anything.

Public transit is non-existent, distances are just as great as in any other city, and electricity is only reliably available if you have your own private generator, so what the locals are going to do now is beyond me. In addition most food is imported and local agriculture is heavily dependent on fertilizers and pumped water. Feeding time will soon get more interesting.

In 2004 there were supply shortages even in the Green Zone and outside in the Red we saw gas lines at the few stations in town easily 2 miles long. Part of that was due to the influx of more cars from neighboring countries. Once Saddam was gone his old provisions limiting the number of personally owned vehicles was ignored, and Iraqis joined the rest of the world in the Hydrocarbon Follies. Who could blame them, sitting on top of some of the largest remaining proven reserves in thinking that the ride would last forever. I remember there was talk of preparing for gas riots in town back then, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to get ready again.

On my trip through town today I saw less cars on the road. That’s good and bad, good because we don’t get stuck in traffic jams and made into sitting targets, bad because with less cars on the road now everyone driving is either, security companies, Joe, or rich Iraqis, and therefore worth taking a poke at anyway.

So woe is you America. But when you get done sobbing into your hankie think a little farther down the road.

Freezes in the Midwest took out most of the winter wheat crop this year. That means in order to have any harvest farmers are going to have to reseed with spring wheat. Do you have any idea what this means? An average single large scale crop field is one section, 640 acres, one square mile, many, many square feet (5280x5280, you do the math). The minimal number of passes over a field possible with the latest equipment is one. That’s without spraying any of the petrochemical herbicide, pesticide, or fungicide necessary to maintain a decent yield and utilizing an air drill seeder to plug it straight into the ground along with the fertilizer. One pass on a very large tractor, sucking down a large quantity of diesel, to generate the horsepower necessary to pull a toolbar 40ft wide against soil resistance, until every foot of that square mile is covered. That’s just one field.

Not everyone has the latest equipment so now let’s up that to 5 passes minimum for putting the crop in the ground. Plow, disc, disc, fertilize, seed. One pass spray and we get to sit back and think about bread, right? Wrong.

Want good yields? Dryland wheat farming isn’t generally as high a yield as irrigated. Only certain places do it well, hence the use of winter wheat with its more developed root systems to pull up more subsoil moisture. In the Midwest the “Breadbasket of America” the main water source is far below the surface in the Ogallala reservoir. Water from the Ogallala isn’t however artesian. Usually propane driven pumps bring it to the surface. That’s going to have to be periodically done all summer long depending on how the weather plays out.

Onward to harvest. Combines don’t run on perpetual motion and every square foot gets covered again just picking the stuff up. Grain trucks have to come out so the combine can dump its hopper out after however many bushels it takes to reach full. 50-60 bushel an acre, around 350 bushel hopper capacity, one acre equal to 330ft by 132ft (one man, one horse, one plow, one day = one acre), usually 4-5 hopper loads before grain truck is full, truck leaving and returning to a fixed point (silo) and rendezvousing with combine over various spots on one square mile, blah, blah, blah.

Can someone do the math?

Diesel used in combines and tractors isn’t road taxed and is cheaper, but that used in the grain trucks is. Moving the wheat from silo to central points for movement to processing plants is another bite. Sometimes its trains, sometimes its barges, all of it uses energy. Turning it into flour, processing it into bread, delivering it to your store, someone’s got to cover the cost of all this. This year a loaf of bread is going to come complete with all this added cost tacked on.

If you can find it in the stores. 

If you can afford it.

And you thought $4.50 a gallon of gas was bad.