Energy, Diminishing Returns and the Future of Food

The potentials of Siberian farmlands are vastly overrated, and their risks are dangerously understated. Though the future of agriculture must adapt to overcome the challenges of climate change and avoid famine, our savior does not lie in the far north.

Recent years have seen rising interest in community-scale grain growing. Part food security experiments, part community art projects, part research initiatives that could just turn out to be vital to our food future,

My main purpose in the book was only to suggest that a small farm future is pretty much a given, and whether that future proves attractive or ugly is collectively down to us and our successors.

Members of Congress have begun drafting the 2023 “Farm Bill,” and they’ll be wrangling over it through most of the year. This legislation, passed into law anew every fifth year or so since the 1930s, has had far-reaching influence on food and farming in the United States.