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I recently had a discussion with one of my friends who farms in the South Carolina lowcountry about the future of the farming industry. In a smart move, he downsized his farm to create a more efficient, more profitable farm. And though he was tempted to take the bait of oil companies who wanted to turn thousands of acres into corn-based oil producing machines, he resisted.

It's conversations like these that give me hope that not everyone in America full of greed and has put the American dream above Americans. As we talked, my suspicions about the future of agriculture in the U.S. were confirmed: agriculture's future is found in the local-based systems of the past. Some of his peers are only selling grass-fed beef and other organic products within the state.

If you're thinking about investing in long-term ventures, you might want to consider James Howard Kunstler's ideas in his book The Long Emergency:

"The salient fact about life in the decades ahead is that it will become increasingly and intensely local and smaller in scale. It will do so steadily and by degrees as the amount of available cheap energy decreases and the global contest for it becomes more intense. The scale of all human enterprises will contract with the energy supply. We will be compelled by the circumstances of the Long Emergency to conduct the activities of daily life on a smaller scale, whether we like it or not, and the only intelligent course of action is to prepare for it. The downscaling of America is the single most important task facing the American people. As energy supplies decline, the complexity of human enterprise will also decline in all fields, and the most technologically complex systems will be ones most subject to dysfunction and collapse—including national and state governments. Complex systems based on far-flung resource supply chains and long-range transport will be especially vulnerable. Producing food will become a problem of supreme urgency.

"The U.S. economy of the decades to come will center on farming, not high-tech, or “information,” or “services,” or space travel, or tourism, or finance. All other activities will be secondary to food production, which will require much more human labor. Places that are unsuited for local farming will obviously suffer, and I will discuss this later in the chapter. To put it simply, Americans have been eating oil and natural gas for the past century, at an ever-accelerating pace. Without the massive “inputs” of cheap gasoline and diesel fuel for machines irrigation, and trucking, or petroleum-based herbicides and pesticides, or fertilizers made out of natural gas, Americans will be compelled to radically reorganize the way food is produced, or starve."