Synergistic Cooperation in the Food System

Meeting basic food needs involves using photosynthesis to harvest solar energy over extensive areas. This work-intensive process can consume the majority of human productive capacity leaving only small amounts of this capacity to provide other features to which most societies aspire. There are systems of technology which can make food production more efficient in terms of human productive inputs. Because these technologies have high requirements for capital, energy and information they must be "grown" in place. This growing process is made more efficient by synergistic cooperation among many farm input, on-farm and post-farm sectors. Much of this growth and efficiency increase can be financed by having stable and rewarding prices for farm and food products. However, the information developments essential to this growth (food system research and extension) require special attention to their financing and organization. Basic Food Needs Despite the fact that we live in the midst of a very advanced technology, each calorie of the energy in the food which keeps each of us going comes only from solar radiation processed by photosynthesis. The solar radiation is of low and intermittent intensity and distributed over the Earth's surface. The photosynthesis process can convert, in practical terms, a maximum of about 1 percent of solar radiation into food energy in a form that humans can digest, though a more typical value is 0.1 percent. Human-organized agriculture has traditionally been able to produce 1000 kg of dry carbohydratebased food per hectare per year (enough for six persons) (Chancellor and Goss, 1976). In order to manage that agricultural hectare farmers have had to manage: 10,000 tonnes of water, 2,500 tonnes of soil and 10 to 100 tonnes of green crop. As a result, the human inputs involved in food production have required traditionally about 70 percent of the work capacity of the human population. In more favorable agricultural conditions this 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Third Forum of Science and Technology, State of Guanajuato, Mexico, November 25, 1998 2 The author is Professor Emeritus, Biological and Agricultural Engineering Dept., Univ. of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA, [email protected].