By Francis Koster

Our food supply is enormously dependent on energy for pesticides, fertilizer, processing, packaging and transportation. And in a rapidly growing world, this dependency will be a challenge.
I want you to mentally add 30 years to your age and/or imagine yourself in the year 2042. By then, the population of the Earth will have expanded from 7 billion people to 9 billion — equal to an additional 6.5 United States of Americas.
Think of the increased demand this will create for new supplies of food and energy. To those thoughts add the increased demand created by the improving standard of living of much of the world. For example, India and China currently have around one-third of the world’s entire population. Their average citizen uses less than one-tenth of the energy that a U.S. citizen uses. Per capita energy consumption in these emerging nations is expected to more than double in the next 20 years, resulting in enormous new demands for energy.
Add the energy needs of the growing population to the doubling of per capita energy consumption in nations like India and China, and you get a demand for the basic life support system of food and oil that is unsustainable using current known resources and technologies. As demand increases, you will also get a rapid rise in energy costs due to customers bidding for insufficient supplies.
As futurists, we can also examine the implications of shipping heavy food items like beef. While researching this issue, I was surprised to learn that due to the current economics of farming, most farmers or cattlemen who raise newborn calves are part-time farmers — they need “off farm employment” to survive. The part-time cattleman presides over the cows’ pregnancy and birth, then ships the calves off to someplace many miles away to be fattened up and then starts to tend to the mama cows to do it all over again. The “teenaged” cow at the feed lot is then fattened up and slaughtered, and some of the national output is shipped back to the local supermarket. This is a lot of tonnage to ship.
Can you see how rising energy costs for fertilizer, pesticides, transportation and packaging will impact food costs?
One reason local cattlemen ship their maturing beef far away is that the number of local slaughterhouses has fallen dramatically — down one-third in the past 20 years. As these local facilities vanish, the cattleman has to ship his cattle a great deal farther. The underlying use of energy increases, and local profitability is reduced.
Some communities have taken steps to solve this problem. One good example is found in Tacoma, Wash., where a group of local farmers called the Puget Sound Meat Producers Cooperative banded together and bought a 45-foot-long mobile meat processing trailer. It accommodates cattle, sheep, pigs and goats, handled by six part-time employees. The van travels around the region by appointment, making “house calls.” The business plan calls for investors to be repaid at a rate varying from 5 percent to 20 percent, depending on the volume of meat processed.
Another good example is found in Cabarrus County, where a unique public-private venture created a slaughterhouse adjacent to a family owned butcher shop. Due to become operational this spring, the venture will enable local farmers to increase their incomes while preserving local agriculture jobs.
And local slaughter houses are not just a “farmers market” scale operation. Major food companies that supply supermarkets can buy the local farmers’ product as well, because the new slaughterhouses produce sufficient volume, meet federal food handling standards and are under sanitary inspection daily when in operation. This opens up the market for farmers, who can sell their entire high end local product to one customer, eliminating overhead, and granting the supermarket customer a vacuum-sealed product that can truthfully bear the name “locally raised,” “grass fed” or “organic,” which command premium prices. Since 2008, the demand for such meat in North Carolina has stimulated a 400 percent increase in farmers who sell their meat locally.
It may feel like a leap to go from the population explosion and rising energy consumption in India and China to increasing the price of food on our plate, but the two are quite directly connected. As we look to the future, we can learn from communities that have shortened the distance from farm to fork, protected jobs and in effect have helped create a sort of food insurance policy for our families.
We can create the future we want for ourselves and our families if we have the determination to shape, rather than receive, our future.
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Francis P. Koster, Ed. D., lives in Kannapolis. For more information, visit his website: www.TheOptimisticFuturist.org.