Land is our capital, and everything can be expressed in the space-time needed for the activity, in hectare-years of output to capture and store (solar) energy. This can be as food, as raw material, or as stored energy.
But it’s not only ‘raw materials’ that require land; social activities and hobbies also do. For instance, I once calculated how much land is needed to practice various sports and was surprised to find out that golf is particularly decadent in terms of land use. [See here the calculation [1].
Recently, I discovered that this is not even the top. I was studying labor energy and the role of energy in transportation before the industrial revolution, specifically the enormous role horses played in all economic activities. Paris, around 1900, had no less than 80,000 horses used for transporting people and goods. There were huge manure problems in the streets, which were practically unsustainable. A conference on this issue in 1898 in New York, attended by major cities, was canceled because no solutions were seen. A few years later, the car became popular and saved the cities. Well, saved them from the manure at least; they got other forms of pollution in return: exhaust fumes, fine dust, and also stench. But anyway, that aside, this led me to wonder how much land was needed to feed all these horses. And it turns out, it’s enormous! According to the Vereniging Eigen Paard (Association of Own Horse), a horse needs no less than 0.5 to 1 hectare of land for its feed, if everything has to come from that land (so no feed from elsewhere when it’s kept in a stable).[2] And I come across that figure more often.
That’s a huge surface! When Malthus published his essay An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 and predicted that humanity would hit the limits of food production with a growing population, he hadn’t even factored in the huge increase in horses. He did, however, foresee a rise in animal farming in general, particularly in meat production. As he wrote:[3]
“A fattened animal can, in some respects, be considered, in the language of the French economists, as an unproductive laborer: it has added nothing to the value of the raw materials it has consumed.”
Interesting! What he means is that the animal uses up many resources, which would have had more value if they were used directly as food for humans, as I understand it from the context. And how true is that! Indeed, the “unproductive” could not only be humans, but also animals, which drained surplus value…!
Horses also make an indirect appearance in the context of hobby horses: “Still, I can’t help but think that the current high demand for the best quality meat, and the amount of good land that is annually used to produce it, along with the large number of horses now kept for pleasure, are the main causes that have prevented the amount of food for people in the country from keeping pace with the generally increased fertility of the land.”
And he didn’t even account for, or foresee, the huge surge in horses that would occur in the following 100 years… Malthus might have been proven right much sooner if it hadn’t been for the breakthrough of the car, thanks to millions of years of stored biomass energy.
There were a huge number of horses in the century following Malthus, but how does it stand today? Has the car displaced horses? No, on the contrary. There are now even more in the Netherlands than back then: 450,000! Of which about 100,000 are on farms, but the rest are primarily for leisure…[4]
But that also means 450,000 hectares of land! Or 4,500 km², which is 15% of the Netherlands. Or a quarter of all our agricultural land! That’s like two football fields occupied by just one person with a horse! Those two football fields could also be used to grow 40 tons of potatoes…! [5] And then consider that only 0.2 hectares are available per person in the Netherlands… Even if it would be 0,5 ha per horse, it would be crazy.
The actual area used for horses in the Netherlands is unknown, as the majority of horses are kept on private plots (in addition to 6,600 horse farms, at least 1,000 of which are riding schools). Also, feed for horses not kept on their own property is not accounted for, as far as we can ascertain from WUR or CBS. But we can reasonably assume that the gross land use is about 1 hectare per horse. In any case, grassland, at 53%, already makes up by far the largest share of agricultural land, used for cows and horses.
That ‘horse land’ may not all be in the Netherlands; most horses are not kept outside in large fields year-round, but the feed must come from somewhere, and that same amount of land is likely used elsewhere.
Incredible. And if golf is already decadent, then horseback riding is tens of times more decadent in terms of land use. Malthus is probably turning in his grave…
A quarter of all agricultural land: imagine what you could do with all that…? Depending on what can grow, in terms of area, this is enough to provide biobased building materials for about 50,000 houses per year. And we will desperately need that land when we have to live off the land and the sun again without fossil fuels. Then golf courses and equestrian land will be the first to be freed, just as happened during the First World War, when all livestock was slaughtered to free up land for vegetables and potatoes. [6] We really need to move towards a land budget, start managing our capital wisely, and eliminate the worst excesses., [7] , managing our capital much better, and phase out the decadency.
[1] Golf: https://www.ronaldrovers.com/golf-the-decadence-in-our-use-of-space/
[2] Vereniging: (dutch)
[3] Malthus : https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Population
[4] 450000: (dutch) https://www.kennisbanksportenbewegen.nl/?file=7063&m=1467808613&action=file.download
[5] potatoes : https://www.ronaldrovers.com/eroi-and-land-use-of-potato-crop-a-pilot-12/
[6] NL during WW1: https://www.ronaldrovers.com/netherlands-during-ww1-an-island/
[7] landbudget: https://www.ronaldrovers.com/we-need-yearly-a-land-budgetting/