A fresh jar of salsa is great. Without dirtying a bowl, you can dip chips right in and get lots of hearty and tomato-y goodness. Of course, eventually the amount of salsa decreases, and you get to the point where you are trying to maneuver your hand through the mouth of the jar to get to the good stuff. Although there is some salsa left, all the easy-to-get stuff is now in your stomach.
So is the deal with oil. While with salsa you can tip the jar to the side to get the salsa out or put it into a bowl, the earth is a little more difficult to deal with. We have gotten all the cheap and easy-to-get oil, but our appetite continues to be insatiable.
Oil (as of Friday) costs $126 per barrel, more than double what it cost at this same time last year, and $3.61 (on average) per gallon of gasoline according to the Energy Information Administration. Although these prices for oil immediately make the trip to the gas station dreadful, personal drivers aren’t the only ones suffering behind the wheel. Farms also rely on oil to power tractors and other farm equipment to harvest their crops more efficiently.
A solution is to rid ourselves of some of these burdensome devices and opt for a more hands-on approach — literally. We rely on these machines to do the job efficiently, yet these machines have displaced people for decades whose jobs were lost to technology. Perhaps it’s time to put the fancy gizmos away and get our hands dirty again.
By hiring people to do the work of machines, jobs are created and money is saved, considering the U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts an increase in fuel and oil expenses of $1.6 billion in 2008 for farms. Although industrialization eases the process of taking care of crops, it also puts a burden on the environment by relying on diesel fuel-powered machines, pesticides and fertilizer (both use oil to be produced) to get the job done.
According to The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, going back to using horses instead of machines could save farmers with a 160-acre farm anywhere between $10,000 and $50,000 on fuel costs. Whether horses or humans, replacing machines could prove beneficial for many of the 77,000 average-sized farms in Ohio, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Of course, the use of pesticides and fertilizers is questionable around people and animals alike if they have chemicals that could pose a hazard. All the more reason to research natural alternatives because the benefit would be two-fold: Save oil by not using pesticides, fertilizer or a lot of farm equipment, plus create jobs for people with safer work environments.
Reduce the use of oil, reduce the dependence on it and invest those funds in workers. Instead of giving money to the oil companies that just get richer and richer, give it to people who need it and will circulate it back into the economy. If every one of those farms cut oil use and saved $10,000 each year, that would amount to more than $770 million in savings that could be allocated elsewhere.
The U.S. Department of Labor reported its fourth consecutive month of job losses for April, and getting people to work on local farms to take the space of these gas-guzzling machines hits two birds with one stone. Farmers need an incentive to grow a variety of crops that would limit how much we import (another oil saving technique) instead of growing simply one cash-yielding crop like wheat or corn (which have uses besides just feeding people).
Drastic cuts in oil use need to be made, and it’s unreasonable to expect that a society so reliant on this fossil fuel can simply switch its way of life overnight. However, immediate action should be taken wherever possible, even if it means abandoning the technology we have worked to perfect in exchange for good ol’ manual labor. For a country with about 4.5 percent of the world’s population, consuming one-quarter of the oil produced in the world is just a tad extensive — and now we’re seeing the consequences.
Unemployment is up, food and oil prices are rising — our economy is strained and being stretched in every direction, trying to maintain some kind of balance. Instead of working within the oil-powered system, we need to think outside of the box, which just might include revisiting an old way of life for a little bit. Perhaps scraping for the last bit of tomatoes and peppers isn’t worth it; either find some guacamole or cheese or just enjoy the classic, plain old crispy chip by itself while leaving the salsa behind.
Cathy Wilson is a junior journalism major and a copy editor for The Post. Send her an e-mail at cw224805@ohiou.edu.
Reader Comments
Did any of those 77,000 Ohio farmers offer you their opinion? Saving thousands on fuel sounds great, but what about the reduction in crop yields? Horses aren't cost-free, either - they require substantial time and money for care and upkeep. Veterinary bills alone could negate the "savings" of de-mechanization. While job creation is a worthy goal, it puts additional burdens on farmers to located, contract, and pay for labor. It would take hundreds of workers to replace farm machinery - providing a living wage for a small army would sink a farmer quickly.
There are certainly good reasons to reduce our dependency on oil, but it seems unfair to urge our already-beleaguered farmers to further complicate their lives.
I can tell you were not raised on a farm, nor have you probably ever visited one, because you make the assertion that farmers should go back to using horsepower, and should hire more workers to make up for the loss in efficiency. I was born and raised on a farm, and I can assure you that if you were to read your column to a farmer, you would get laughed at. Let me explain why.
I'm assuming here that you have at least taken an introductory course in economics, but in case you haven't, I will give you a short lesson that will inform you as to why this is an unworkable solution. Technology such as gas-powered tractors is what is known as a force-multiplier.
Let's say I have to plow a field. Using a tractor to plow the field is more efficient than using a horse, or using a farm worker. That is to say, less resources (money, time, energy, etc.) go into using a tractor for plowing than would go into using a horse for the same work. Similarly, a horse is more efficient than a worker, in terms of the amount of resources that go into have a man pull the plow. This is what technology does: increases efficiency by "multiplying" the user's energy, so that "less" can do "more" in the same amount of time.
Also, in terms of physics, using a horse to do farm work is inefficient. Gas is so much more energy-dense than hay and feed. This means that more work (using the physics definition of "work") can be extracted from gas, as compared to hay and feed.
What you fail to realize, Cathy, is that horsepower is not some exotic form of free energy. In your column, you make it sound like that, but it's not like that here in reality-land. Horses are living animals that require food, shelter, veterinary visits, and so on. I would be willing to bet that using a horse for modern agriculture would be much more expensive than if farmers were to continue using modern technology.
On a worldwide scale, your little plan would be disastrous if farmers were to implement it (no pun intended). Because of the relative energy inefficiency of the horse-powered farm, crop yields would sharply drop across the board. This would cause food prices to increase, in response to the decrease in food supply. Probably, starvation rates would increase across the board as well. The fact that gas-powered tractors offer more "bang for the buck", both economically and physically speaking, is unavoidable. There is a very good reason why farmers today use gas-powered tools like the tractor, and an equally good reason why using horsepower and manpower to replace gas power is not viable.
Returning to medieval levels of technology may place less strain on the world's oil reserves. However, unless the human race is willing to return to medieval levels of population and civilization, our answer does not lay in the way of agrarianism. Technology is a double-edged sword; it is both the answer and the problem. In many of your columns, it seems, you forget this. Next time, I hope you remember this when you get the urge to propose pie-in-the-sky dreams such as this in the name of making the world better.
I usually appreciate Cathy's columns, but this is laughable. She comes across as a typical upper-crust college liberal who has absolutely no understanding of the needs of blue-collar people who work in fields or operate machinery for a living.
Not that she is. But that's what she sounds like here.
Ann Coulter quote time!
"Rich liberals haven't the foggiest idea how the industrial world works. They're already comfortably ensconced in their beachfront estates, which they expect to be unaffected by their negative growth prescriptions for the rest of us."
Good in theory, like Communism and roommates.
Here's a better way to help both the environment, the economy, and reduce our dependence on oil: Americans should quit being so fucking greedy. I'm not counting myself out, just saying.
http://www.mindfully.org/Sustainability/Americans-Consume-24percent.htm
If we cut back on just 10% of our consumption (in all areas) we could make drastic changes. Little stuff. Think... Lisa Simpson energy-saving statistics kind of stuff.
http://www.energy.ca.gov/gasoline/whats_in_barrel_oil.html
Auto gas makes up for about 50% of a barrel of oil. Carpool. Ride a bike. Push your city to improve public transit. Buy a hybrid.
Or a horse. Whatever.
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