The world is facing a triple crisis: climate change, Peak Oil and global resource depletion. These make it certain that there will be great changes to contend with in order to produce and deliver enough food to support the present world population on a balanced diet for everyone.

The global financial meltdown will play a critical role in future animal production strategies. The age of scarce and high-cost energy now dawns, and will be marked by the decline of oil and all that depends on it, including financial capital. These will bring about large changes in financial and political structures. Unless there is rationalization in our use of energy there seems to be little chance of continuing growth in industrialized or developing countries in the longer term.  Inexpensive oil allowed us to produce food cheaply - but this is bound to change as oil prices rise, creating the potential for major disruptions in food availability.

Peak oil will also affect other resources. For example high crop yields depend on inexpensive inputs such as nitrogen fertilizers manufactured from natural gas and phosphatic fertilizers mined from reserves whose supply has already passed its peak. The world now depends on extracting phosphate fertilizers from low grade rock phosphate using more and more energy. Irrigation water from aquifers and rivers is also depleted. High energy prices will affect the cost of pumping water for irrigation and will drive a return of vast areas of highly productive crop land to rain-fed farming, pasture or desert, leading to a major loss in food productivity. Soil erosion and fertilizer runoff are also major concerns and threaten us with lower crop yields. 

The dependency of the industrialized countries on imported oil has sparked headlong development of bio-fuel from sugar cane and maize, mainly in Brazil and the USA, along with bio diesel from plant oils, creating major cereal food /feed grain shortages. The expectation is that world cereal grain availability for livestock production will continue to be highly restricted, resulting in a significant decline in factory farming of livestock. The consequence of this is that herbivores are likely to be used more extensively, particularly ruminants and rabbits.

Global warming is also likely to have profound effects on global food production. Rising sea levels will undoubtedly remove large areas of fertile delta and weather patterns will change, leading to more intense drought and flood events. In areas such as South and Central Asia lack of synchrony of river flows (from glacial melt) with irrigation requirements may reduce multiple cropping areas. Warming also carries with it the risk of decreased crop production as rice yields decrease by 10% for every 1o C rise in night-time temperatures.

Resource depletion threatens the efforts of many countries to grow their economies and has the potential to lower world crop production by direct or various flow-on effects. The world is now entering a time where intensive animal production will become increasingly expensive as competition for food, feed and fuel intensifies.

All this means that livestock industries are likely to shift back to an extensive production model, exploiting pasture lands and a wide range of waste by-products of agriculture or biomass from land not used for crop or biofuel production. Since synthetic fibres are produced from fossil fuels, wool will make a comeback as synthetics prices increase (and Australia will regret allowing the national flock to decline to less than half its previous size). The high cost of fuel will also see a gradual return to animal power in agriculture in the developing countries.

Ruminants worldwide produce 80 million tonnes of methane and have been vilified for causing land degradation in recent times. However land degradation is the result of poor land management – not of livestock alone. As Alan Savory (the father of holistic farming) points out, holistic land management using large animals to harvest vegetation sustainably, without creating bare land, can lead to a massive soil carbon build-up which could help to reverse the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Savory makes some highly pertinent points about the role of large herbivores in combating global warming. He condemns the scathing reviews emanating from organizations such as Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (i.e. Grazing’s Long Shadow) and takes a completely opposite view. He suggests that the major cause of global warming began thousands of years ago, when settled agriculture began. He argues that while we have added to the global atmospheric gain in CO2 by burning millions of tonnes of fossil fuels, it has been the inability of the earth’s carbon sponges – the oceans and the soil – to accumulate carbon due to their depletion by human activity that has led to today’s high concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases.

For the Earth to sequester sufficient carbon it is essential to restore its living soils with ever increasing organic matter and the abundant life forms (both fauna and flora) that help produce and retain it. Small percentage increases in organic matter can store billions of tonnes of carbon safely and permanently over vast tracts of the Earth’s grazing lands. At the same time increasing soil organic matter will improve the soils structure, its ability to absorb and retain moisture, its fertility and ability to produce sufficient food. These will help minimize the impact, frequency and severity of droughts and floods.

All this depends on our taking far more seriously the role of grazing livestock and the world’s savannah grasslands as potential answers to climate change, resource scarcity and the need to feed ourselves into the future.

Ron Leng is Emeritus Professor at the University of New England.