“So all this wailing, sackcloth and ashes nonsense about our “turning our food into fuel” is nothing new. “
So horses don’t eat if men don’t ride them? Food for horses is not “fuel”, I don’t care if people do ride them. If people didn’t, the horses would STILL require food. Additionally, It’s a safe bet there are more cars in New York State alone than there were ridden horses is the entire US in the 1850’s.
You may eat alfalfa and hay but I’d wager 99+% of the world’s human population does not. A sad excuse of a straw man argument, really.
You’ve completely lost sight of the facts, and quite frankly, your response is the literary equivalent of an out-of-body experience.
I have to tell you and the assembled malthusians that as a farmer, the nonsense I see spouted here on FR about ag, bio-fuels and other aspects of American farming sound every bit as nonsensical as the ravings of liberals. I expect better from conservatives.
Back to the beginning:
What I’m stating is the facts: In the US, before we replaced horses with tractors, automobiles and trucks, the total portfolio of US croplands had a huge component that was devoted to feeding horses, not people. The horses were used for most all the things that we now use oil-based fuels (eg, gasoline and diesel). I’ve got agronomic books from the turn of the 19th/20th century that detail just how much hay was grown for horses, and not just riding horses, but draft horses used for transport, farming, horse-powered machinery, etc. were in production, in what crops, etc.
In short, it was a HUGE amount of land that was growing crops that produced crops for a non-human ultimate use. It was the “fuel” of the day. Never mind the issues of whether the horse stopped eating when you weren’t using him. That’s a non-issue here. The central issue for horses back then was this: No hay, no horses, no horse, very little moved - whether goods or people. Simple as that. The rail system was the long-haul transport mechanism, and then to get anything from the train to you and your business was horses. Farming was done with horses.
With the introduction of the internal combustion engine and vehicles, cars, trucks, etc, farmers also converted from horse/hay power to tractor/oil power, and two things happened to the American ag sector:
1. That cropland previously in hay/forage production was converted to either a) human end-use crop production or b) allowed to revert to nature. This conversion was partly responsible for leading to the over-production of ag commodities that caused commodity prices to collapse, which then brought about the FDR administration’s mucking about with production quotas and price supports. For people who continue to wail about ag subsidies, there’s one of the historical reasons: conversion of ag land away from horse food to people food. We had too much people food, prices dropped, the government stepped in, and hasn’t stepped back out since.
2. Labor requirements were radically reduced on the farm. Before WWII, about 25% of the US population worked on a farm in some way. Today, less than 2% of the US population works in the ag sector in any way (and I’m counting remote connections to ag in this 2% — actual “work on the farm” labor is a very small portion of the whole US population).
This malthusian wailing that we’re “burning our food” is typical of so much city-slicker ignorance of what actually happens in farming that I read here on FR. We’ve used farmland for growing crops that were not human food before, and were effectively the “fuel” of their day. What we’re seeing with bio-fuel production is NOTHING NEW. We’ve “been there, done that” before.
The number of cars or horses at any given time is another non-issue. What is at issue is the number of acres and the percentage of US cropland that is devoted to non-human cropping.
In 1915, the amount of of US cropland devoted to feeding horses peaked at about 93 million acres. 79 million acres were used to feed horses on farms, about 14 million acres were devoted to feeding non-farming horses.
In addition to cropland devoted to haying (the above 93 million acres), there were about 80 million acres used for pasture, and a large component of the animals on those pastures were farm horses. In 1915, farm horse numbers peaked about 23 million head. That’s just horses on farms, not horses in hauling teams, individual horses, etc. Total US horse numbers peaked just about 1916/1917, at about 27 million head. It takes a huge base of land to feed that many horses.
As farmers converted from horse power to tractor power, the US cropland base was increased by that 79 million acres being converted from hay to other crops. That’s about two-thirds of the total cropland harvested in 1920 in what was the Louisiana Purchase. I throw that in to help you look at a map and get your head around “what is 79 million acres?”
Want to put that 79 million acres into modern perspective? US farmers stated an intention to plant 90 million acres in corn this year. As recently as 2006, actual harvested corn acres were about 79 million, “for all purposes” (so that includes table as well as field corn). Recent stats show total US farmland at about 930+ million acres, about 434 million of that is cropland, 395 million acres of pasture area. 2007 planting intentions were for about 90 million acres of corn.
Going back to the total cropland used to feed horses in 1915 — what was that number again — both on and off farm horses?
93 million acres.
So there you go: about 100 years ago, the entire acreage that is today in corn was used for feeding horses.