Photo by VickiMoore/FlickrCC
When the two of us talk about transforming agriculture into a more environmentally sustainable and humane, less industrialized system, we are often confronted with questions about how realistic and feasible that is.
In particular, many people express doubts about whether there are enough people willing to work the farms we envision. We reply that we believe that if consumers continue to show greater willingness to seek out and buy food from traditional (non-industrialized) farms, and if the government redirects some of its resources away from agribusiness and toward traditional farms, the prospect becomes much more doable.
The intellectual challenge implicit in traditional farming makes it a much more appealing profession.We also believe that the industrialization of farming is one of the main reasons that fewer of America's best and brightest have been attracted to the field in recent decades. The intellectual challenge and the direct connection to nature implicit in traditional farming make it a much more appealing profession.
Traditional farming is also more doable than industrial agriculture for new farmers because it requires little start-up capital. The new Census of Agriculture, recently released by the Agriculture Department, bears this out. It shows that the total number of U.S. farms actually increased by four percent from 2002 to 2007.
The fastest growth in farming has been in small, diversified, and organic farms that are not heavily capitalized. Many of these new farmers are women (whose ranks have risen by 30 percent since the last census) and non-white farmers.
All of this is good news for the farming's future. However, the census also reinforces the argument that government policy must urgently address the disappearing middle--those medium-sized farms with full-time, professional farmers--whose numbers continue to dwindle.
These people collectively hold the nation's knowledge of how to farm without chemicals, drugs, or expensive machinery. Government subsidies for agriculture should be geared toward making farming a viable full-time profession. Until it does, we will not have a truly sustainable food system.
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While I certainly have no objection to sustainable or organic farming (I am a strong conservationist), I do have to question the assumptions that you make concerning modern farming practices. Why is it assumed that herbicides, pesticides, and "drugs" are inherently bad? Were these management practices not created for a reason? In a truly organic production system, what is the solution to yield robbers like fungal blights or bacterial infections? Yes, there are a few natural remedies,but more often than not crop loss is the ultimate outcome. This may be sustainable at a "local" level, but it is not sustainable when we are faced with feeding billions of people world wide. I am all for "buy fresh" and "buy local" if it's available and if you can afford it, but it can never be a replacement for our current food supply system. A change in government agricultural policy will not change this reality. I can appreciate your point of view. Can you appreciate mine?
A midwestern farmer.
Surely it was believed that herbicides, pesticides, commercial fertilizers, and drugs used in agriculture were beneficial at the time they were developed. However, we are not "assuming" that they are harmful. They have proven themselves to be harmful. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, which is now larger the state of New Jersey and caused by ag chemicals and the alarming rate of antibiotic resistant bacteria found on grocercy store cuts of meat are just two examples but there are many, many more. An unsustainable food system cannot feed the world because it is destroying the very natural resources that are the basis of food production with each passing year.
I am a farmer, a "family" farmer raising bulk crops: corn, soybeans, wheat. I have no objections in principle concerning "sustainable" and "organic" agriculture, but I have a number of problems and questions about the actual production process.
First of all: definitions. What, in detail, is "sustainable" agriculture? What are the criteria for "organic" appellation for various crops? And what is the process, in detail, for raising various crops in a sustainable and/or organic manner , the process, from year-to-year land care, to spring land prep, to planting, nurturing, harvesting? (Sustainable and organic are often used together, interchangeably it often seems, but I think this is probably not true is it?)
Let's take one problem, one all us farmers must deal with: weeds. And grasses. How are they handled under these two systems? They must be destroyed, destroyed before planting can take place, continually controlled through the months as the crop is growing to maturity, otherwise the crop is choked out. By what method? Mechanical tillage (cultivation, plowing between rows as in the photo leading this article)? Cultivation must be done often, especially in a high-moisture growing season, up until it can no longer be done because the crop has grown too big and can out-compete late-season weeds and grasses. Lots of fuel for multiple cultivations, lots of labor.
For the weeds and grasses MUST be controlled. There are three ways to do this: herbicides, mechanical cultivation, or the hoe. Mechanical cultivation is fuel/equipment/labor intensive, while chopping with a hoe is massively labor intensive -- I know, because a tough part of my 50's childhood was spent chopping cotton. But it can be done, at least with weeds, if one has a lot of folks on what my father called "the ignorant end of a hoe handle". Let several rains in succession keep one out of the field though and it gets tough, and can be impossible with grasses that have become established. Just take a hoe and try to chop grass in your yard you doubt me. An extended rainy period can also severely limit timely mechanical cultivation during the season and render it marginally effective. Eventually both the crop and the weeds will grow too big to be cultivated at all.
Enough. I could go on and on. Will these methods produce the volume of food required? An especially important question: what of the long-term health of the soils under a sustainable and/or organic regime? Please don't think me hypercritical. It is just that there are problems I know well that I don't see addressed in the numerous articles praising sustainable and organic agriculture. For anyone interested in sustainable and organic agriculture these (and several other) problems must be addressed in detail AND SOLVED. Only then may we judge whether sustainable and organic agriculture is truly viable to feed the world's population. I suspect -- suspect, mind you -- it may be so for some crops, while certainly not for others. Comment?
I'm not a farmer. But I am a scientist, and I had the privilege to see Dr. Tyrone Hayes speak last year. His talk was so informative, and so horrifying, that I walked out thinking that NOTHING is safe anymore. I don't want to drink the water or eat any of the crops I buy locally in California.
What's the point in feeding the world's population, if we're harming our bodies and our planet in the process?
http://www.atrazinelovers.com/
To the previous post about Tyrone Hayes. His "science" has been debunked by industry as well as the EPA. None of his "findings" have been replicated in independent laboratories. I know the issues well and have seen all sides. Tyrone Hayes is a fear monger and is pushing an anti-agriculture agenda. If you truly are a scientist then you should be able to see through his agenda. I have considerable experience with the atrazine science and methodology. Know what you speak!