In the BBC documentary “A farm for the future” it is discussed about the oil shortage that will occur in our very near future. Today, the way we are living are incredibly depending on oil and the way this will effect us mostly is that the food prices will go up very fast when the oil is disapearing. Not only are oil used for transportation of all kind of food today, but it is also used in the fertilizers when farming and of course also by the farmers machines.
A friend of mine in Gran Canaria have an organic farm, which is one of the possible solutions to this problem with todays technology. This is also brought up in the BBC documentary, where a few examples of organic farms is shown. These farms looks more like wild forest then designed agriculture, but the production can still be the same or even more then the today standard farm. Another positive thing is that these farms needs much less work from the farmer then a normal farm. If you want to learn more and experience an organic farm for yourself, visit the WWOOF web site which helps you find an organic farm to volunteer on.
Regarding the farmer machines, Marcin Jakubowski is working on Open Sourcing these machines along with all the other machines needed for a basic civilization. This hopefully means that the machines will become both more effective and economical. Of course this will create a negative effect for the today producers of these machines, but hopefully they will be able to find their own target group and not be affected to much. To learn more about the Open Source machines for the future civilization, listen to his speech at TED Talks.
Also NASA is working on personal transport helicopters, both for a single person or for transporting goods to and from us without the need of a driver. This will make it less necessary to live near the sources of the goods/customers and also minimize transport need.
Hopefully all the technology needed will be ready at the same time the results of the oil shortage will be visible to the public.
