The new farming frontier...

The organic advantage - how big is it? Or does it exist at all? In this week's Time, the inescapable Dr. Sanjay Gupta offers some remarkably reasonable comments about eating organic.

The evidence of nutritional advantages is almost as thin. Never mind the idea that organically grown foods fairly burst with vitamins that modern farming techniques drain out of crops. To date most studies have either shown no difference between organic and conventional produce or found very small pluses in the organic column, such as slightly higher levels of vitamin C or other antioxidants. [More]

Such advice is now common, as scientists and science reporters adhere to the scientific method that has carried us to the level of abundance we now enjoy. Nonetheless, the organic sector is growing vigorously thanks to consumer preferences and I for one welcome it.

Organic production is part of a bustling agrarian sector of agriculture that delivers a process (free-range, organic, grass-fed, cage-free, etc.) with a product (meat, eggs, etc.) is a legitimate market response to consumer demand. Farmers have no inherent right to say what the eating public should have to buy.

The agrarian sector, like all emerging industries does have some regrettable baggage. Extravagant claims of non-existent nutritional advantages, for example:

On the question of grain- versus grass-fed cows, some suggest that pasture-fed cows may produce milk that contains more conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a special type of fat that may protect against cancer and other health problems. But Michael Pariza, professor of food microbiology and toxicology at the University of Wisconsin, and a leading expert on CLA in dairy products, says grass feeding by itself does not assure increased CLA. He and Bauman both note that cows fed mixed grains with soybeans or other additions can produce milk that has higher CLA levels than milk from grass-fed cows. This may lead you to spend less on milk and more on fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish and other healthful foods. [More]

Agrarians have also found a way to tap into the strong animal welfare feelings that I think are overlapping our enormous pet industry. One of the latest battles is for cage-free eggs.

The eggs, from chickens raised in large, open barns instead of stacks of small wire cages, have become the latest addition to menus at universities, hotel chains like Omni and cafeterias at companies like Google. The Whole Foods supermarket chain sells nothing else, and even Burger King is getting in on the trend.

All that demand has meant a rush on cage-free eggs and headaches in corporate kitchens as big buyers learn there may not be enough to go around. [More]

Industrial producers like myself have been trying to write off these developments as consumer fads, but I think they are woven into the cultural shifts made possible by abundance and the differences in values of Boomers and succeeding generations. We also have struggles with a larger issue: agrarians are boldly snatching our outdated "family farm" image which we flog in the halls of Congress to attract subsidy support.

The growing divide between agrarian and industrial producers no longer alarms me. In fact, heated opposition to the agrarian movement is the last thing industrial ag should be spending time on. The market is sorting this one out as we speak.

Besides, the agrarian sector is an appropriate answer for the handful of products that lend themselves to selling the process - seasonal fruit/vegetables, large-purchase (halves, for example) meats, etc. It is also a good answer for ag topography that does not lend itself to large scale production, such as rolling/wooded terrain or near urban areas.

We have seen new business models emerge over the last decade for dozens of industries including travel, advertising, and publishing—all relying heavily on technology-based improvements in productivity and changes in distribution associated with the Internet.

Now we may be seeing the emergence of a new business model for small farms, which have lagged the transformation of other industries and continued to rely heavily on commodity pricing and middlemen distributors.

At the forefront of this revolution is the 10-employee, $700,000-a-year Polyface Farm, a 550-acre producer of beef, chickens, and pork in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. A family farm run by its second generation owner, Joel Salatin, Polyface is thriving thanks to a combination of innovative use of technology to encourage livestock mobility, and streamlined distribution to bypass middlemen and instead sell products directly to consumers. [More]

This new business model also is labor intensive while industrial ag is shedding jobs via technology. For young people aspiring to a rural lifestyle the agrarian model seems more realistic than hoping to rent 1100 acres someday away from guys like me.

And as for the concern that agrarian producers could hijack our farm payments - I think industrial ag has put that idea to rest. When agrarians can't get Reps. Pelosi or Sen. Feinstein to support them, it indicates they got nothin'.

The scary part is agrarians may learn to succeed despite government, not because of it. Now those will be competitors!

Reach your own conclusions....

Or maybe any conclusion at all, it seems. Efforts by the Indiana State Department of Agriculture to increase hog production in Jay and Randolph counties are "buttressed" by a study performed by Ball State.

Livestock farms contribute more than $4 billion to Indiana’s economy each year, and that amount is growing by more than 5 percent annually. The prospects for long-term growth in livestock farms are very strong. Ball State University’s Office of Building Better Communities recently completed an analysis for two rural Indiana counties which showed that growth in the hog sector will contribute more than $100 million in total output to those local economies and contribute more than 2,300 jobs. [More]

[Long time readers will note I have not linked to the actual report - I can't find it, and everybody who refers to it fails to link it too. This is not only frustrating, it raises caution flags for me.]

Oddly enough, the same report offers ammunition for opponents as well.

An opponent of big livestock farms says a Ball State University study of the hog industry in two Indiana counties offers proof that the sprawling farms bring very little economic impact to surrounding areas.

Bill Weida, an economist for GRACE Family Farm Project, said Ball State's analysis of hog farms in Jay and Randolph counties shows that the pork industry in those counties "is creating so little economic activity that it's almost irrelevant." [More]

Not that industrial ag opponents are much better, mind you. They like to point out how much more wonderfully inefficient small operations are adding more jobs per unit of output, as if this was a good thing.

Let me try to light a candle here. State ag departments are habitual cheerleaders for anything agricultural and in my opinion write some of the the most one-sided news releases of any government branch.

An illustration of my point:

Fact: Agriculture is the driving force in most of Indiana’s rural economies. For every $1
of property taxes paid by agricultural land/farms, $0.40 is used in local services
(American Farmland Trust). Also, a survey by the Indiana Soybean Alliance found that
an 8,000 head swine facility generates $17,000 annually in property taxes and will
produce $40,000 in valuable organic crop nutrients. [More]

Citing such numbers without context implies an importance that cannot be verified. It is poor journalism, since readers cannot decide for themselves if this is the best of choices. In the above citation, for example, why not list what some other economic entities pay in taxes, like a motel, or factory, or housing development. Is it more? Less? By how much?

Most ag administrators seem unfamiliar with commerce departments since they apparently don't care about other forms of business. This is a shame, since the bean counters do numbers for a living.

Consider the opening remark: "Agriculture is the driving force..." What exactly does that mean? Given these numbers from the people who are in charge of counting the dollars in the economy - US Dept Of Commerce (DOC) - this strikes me as an incredible stretch. The real numbers for IN:

2006 State Gross Domestic Product (value of all economic activity) $249B
2006 Contribution by Ag (farms, forests, fish, hunting) $ 2B
Source: BEA

The difference in the figures from the ISDA and DOC has to do with value added, not simply gross sales, which can be very misleading. If ag can use gross receipts then other industries can inflate their numbers as well. Economists prefer value-added to describe how much wealth is really contributed to the economy.

OK, maybe in "rural counties" ag is the big force. Let's check Jay and Randolph - the counties in question:

[Note: 2005 is the latest data on a county level]
Total local income Jay $525M Randolph $681M
Ag income $15M $11M

Some driving force. Psychologists have long know the power vision has over reason. The more visible something is the more important we believe it to be. Thus farms, which cover states like IN seem to be what the state is all about - when in the counties listed above the most important sources (by far) of economic activity are manufacturing and transfer payments (SS, Medicare, federal pensions).

This is one reason more economists are questioning the power of farm payments to make much difference in local economies, especially compared to other choices for development. In fact, real numbers have led me to conclude the most important economic legislation for rural America is a solution to Social Security.

Industrial food finds its voice...

The arguments against industrial ag, which I have already embraced have rippled up our value chain to the entire food sector. While I still hope for rapprochement of some kind in the not too distant future, at least we are marshaling some reasoned explanations as to why our system evolved this way and what is good about it. (And not everything is good, of course).

This debate has been moved forward by some thoughtful general media bloggers, and they remind us of why our food system looks like it does.

As a historian I cannot accept the account of the past implied by this movement: the sunny, rural days of yore contrasted with the gray industrial present. It gains credence not from scholarship but from evocative dichotomies: fresh and natural versus processed and preserved; local versus global; slow versus fast; artisanal and traditional versus urban and industrial; healthful versus contaminated. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to front.

That food should be fresh and natural has become an article of faith. It comes as something of a shock to realize that this is a latter-day creed.

For our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty. Natural often tasted bad. Fresh meat was rank and tough, fresh fruits inedibly sour, fresh vegetables bitter. Natural was unreliable. Fresh milk soured; eggs went rotten. Everywhere seasons of plenty were followed by seasons of hunger. Natural was also usually indigestible. Grains, which supplied 50 to 90 percent of the calories in most societies, have to be threshed, ground, and cooked to make them edible.
So to make food tasty, safe, digestible, and healthy, our forebears bred, ground, soaked, leached, curdled, fermented, and cooked naturally occurring plants and animals until they were literally beaten into submission. They created sweet oranges and juicy apples and non-bitter legumes, happily abandoning their more natural but less tasty ancestors. They built granaries, dried their meat and their fruit, salted and smoked their fish, curdled and fermented their dairy products, and cheerfully used additives and preservatives—sugar, salt, oil, vinegar, lye—to make edible foodstuffs.
Eating fresh, natural food was regarded with suspicion verging on horror; only the uncivilized, the poor, and the starving resorted to it. When the ancient Greeks took it as a sign of bad times if people were driven to eat greens and root vegetables, they were rehearsing common wisdom. Happiness was not a verdant Garden of Eden abounding in fresh fruits, but a securely locked storehouse jammed with preserved, processed foods. [More of an article all farmers should read]

This careful analysis is not saying local, artisinal food is a bad thing, but reminding us what we have is much better than the calorie chart at McDonald's suggests compared to just a few decades ago.

To be sure, I am not defending sugar and salt-laden prepared foods, nor unhelpful gorging habits, but like the writer I would suggest we have the infrastructure to make a truly healthy and efficient food system at hand.

Critics simply often fail to do the math required for recipes for 300 million, or they have philosophical axes to grind.  This includes the desire to shape what rural life should look like according to their dreams. I find this drive concerning enough to include it as a reason why farmers should sacrifice as much as possible to own, not rent land. Owners - not operators - will be the final line of defense for how we farm.

In fact, as more economists and political writers examine our food system they are led to similar conclusions, to the consternation of alternative agriculture proponents.

Apparently, the D.C. liberal-blog intelligentsia has stopped worrying and learned to love industrial food. A few weeks ago, Think Progress star blogger Matt Yglesias penned a paean to mediocre strip-mall chain restaurants, calling for "more Olive Gardens" and deeming the the faux-fancy steakhouse chain Capital Grille "excellent." So impressed is Yglesias by the food system that he would apparently like to model the education system after it!
And just Monday, Washington Post luminary Ezra Klein announced that "Industrial Farms Are the Future." The alternative food networks popping up everywhere present "no viable alternative" at all, Klein insists. We should all forget the farmers market and let Big Ag's diesel-gulping combines lead us forward. [More, also read the links]

For corn and soy farmers we need to keep in mind we are not in the food business so much as the energy business.  Our job is to capture solar energy in a way that can be converted into edible stuff efficiently. Our crops are designed and chosen to do this and our production system is propelled by the economics of this premise.



Those same raw ingredients could be converted into more healthful foods served in more socially positive ways. But even then the staggering advantages of industrial over agrarian production will ensure its dominance.

What we need a new and slightly clearer signals of how these calories need to be delivered to the market. And at the same time we need to join with others concerned about food to choose better alternatives for our own plates.

Self-promotion and self-regulation...

In an curious coincidence, the same conclusion is being reached in disparate corners of our economy.

First, in an round-robin of regret, some of my favorite econo-bloggers are admitting past mistakes and/or advice.

2)  I believed in the "Great Moderation".  That is, I believed that the Fed and prudent fiscal policy had, to a large extent, tamed the business cycle.  I did not believe that there was even a small risk of another Great Depression; I believed that the Fed could and would prevent the contagion from spreading.  Arguably they (and the Treasury) did, but I did not imagine anything close to that level of intervention being necessary.

3)  I believed regulators were smarter than they were.  In 2004, when the SEC decided to let the investment banks lever up to 30-to-1 instead of 12-to-1, because after all, the SEC had the tools to quickly identify and stop any contagion, I would have said they were probably right.  (I'm not sure I was aware of it).

4)  I believed bankers were smarter than they were.  Or rather, I believed the system was smarter than it was.  Individual bankers making idiotic mistakes?  Absolutely.  The occasional bank being brought low?  Sure--it happens pretty regularly, in fact.  But the whole banking system taking its entire balance sheet to the roulette table and laying it all down on a single bet? Ridiculous.  [More]

Here in agriculture we are looking a a small train wreck in the egg industry, and seeing one of the same failures in the system that we saw in banking: the reluctance to enforce professional standards of conduct within a profession.

Chris Clayton nails it.

These groups established by various producer organizations and allied industries to defend agriculture don't want to talk about how ag should respond to the recall and the large business at the center of the federal health probe and possible criminal investigation.

The recall focuses on two farm operations in Iowa, one of which is owned by Austin "Jack" DeCoster, 75, who has a long history of environmental and labor violations not just in Iowa, but in Maine and Ohio as well.

State and federal health officials have reported roughly 1,470 cases of salmonella illness since the spring. That suggests potentially 55,800 salmonella cases nationally because FDA officials told industry representatives in public hearings on the egg-quality rule last year that each reported salmonella case can have a multiplied factor of 38 unreported cases.

FDA officials cited earlier this week that the farms implicated in the recall, DeCoster's Wright County Farms and another farm, Hillandale Farms, showed "significant deviations" from how those farms should be operating and were clearly violating the egg-quality rule implemented by FDA in July. FDA officials cited large piles of manure and infestations of flies, maggots and rodents.

The report from the FDA on DeCoster's operation "speaks for itself," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a farmer as well, said Tuesday to reporters in a weekly call.

Grassley said the recall and reports about the conditions have been difficult for Iowans to accept, "particularly for people who live in Wright County." Grassley said he was at a Farmers Union meeting where producers expressed their worries about the problems.

"When consumers don't have confidence in their food supply, even if that lack of confidence comes from one product, in this case eggs, it still has an impact on all of agriculture and if consumers don't have confidence it's going to hurt the income of farm families," he said. 

While lawmakers such as Grassley are becoming more vocal, the groups created within agriculture to address perceptions about agriculture are shying away from talking about the DeCoster fiasco.[More]

(Sen. Grassley's concern for consumers who actually ate the cotmainated eggs is remarkably muted, while his pity for other producers obviously keeps him up at night. That alone says volumes about how ag and its outspoken proponents prioritize.)

Although he beat me to it, Chris admirably points out that ag cheerleaders are seem to be little more than spinmeisters trying to use distraction to avoid tackling the hard problems.

This is the "safest" food in the world we're always bragging about?  DeCoster has been a bad actor for years and our industry was OK with it, until they really screwed up. One wonders what it would take for some to admit industrial ag could use some improvement.

To be fair (or try) mistake admission is now a signal for piling on. And lawsuits.  But without the willingness to own up and redress errors - and call them out in our professional community - we are hardly more than tribes with the same occupation.

Correcting that won't happen from within.  Since the Industrial Revolution, it has been shown that banks, egg-farms, unions, lawyers, medicine, etc. just can't seem to overcome solidarity to enforce discipline.  That's why we reluctantly end up with enforcement from outside.

Ideally, I would like to see this regulation via an industry-financed independent third party (oxymoron alert), such as licensing boards or auditors.  But having learned from Enron that even those setups are susceptible to influence if not outright subversion, the task almost always fall to government. 

Plus it gives another reason to hate the bureaucracies we build. 

My guess is ag organizations' likely strategy is to depend on the news cycle to bury this and help the public move on.  It's not like Fox News will be running constant stories on it, after all.  This one is really, really hard to link to Obama - although given enough time...

Talking the talk about how great we in ag are should require some effort to make sure we are great or aspire to greatness.  That includes taking responsibility for the mistakes we make collectively.  So far in this sad story, we are professionally AWOL.

The new Farmer Market...

I used to get upset when I read articles like this one from sober university professors about how I should analyze risk in the cash rent market.

Farm Management Specialist Gary Schnitkey at the University of Illinois has completed a thorough study of how to quantify those market risks, to guide farmers and landowners toward the type of lease that will be fair to both owner and operator and allow both sides to share in the premium prices offered by the market. In his latest newsletter Schnitkey says today’s high commodity prices will be offset by higher production costs and lower government support payments. As a result, farmers will have to find a way to retain a larger share of the revenue stream to protect against the risks of the marketplace and the higher cash rent agreements that will have to be paid out. [More]

Now I simply chuckle. Take a look at the spreadsheet. Note there are no entries for factors like:

• the farm is also your home
• Moody Farms is bidding on it
• you farm on 2 (or 3 or 4) sides of the property, making one larger efficient tract
• it represents 18% of your farm income
  
• without it you will have to leave farming
• you have farmed it for 40 years
• your mailbox sits on it
• you compete by blind sealed bid without negotiation
• your operating time frame is generations, not years
• landowners who don't know or care what is "fair"
  

While thoughtful and certainly well-meaning, dispassionate academic number crunching by disinterested economists only goes so far. Economists might be surprised by how much of this type of work many of us already do. We know we are adding risk and pushing the envelope, but unlike advisers we also know first-hand the consequences of winning - and especially losing - the land.

The analysis is also constrained by the data source. FBFM data may not be representative of industrial ag, since very few large operations use the service and share their numbers. In short, economists could be pooling their ignorance.

In some sense, these types of models are therefore simply incomplete - dealing data that is easily accessible and manipulable. Truly useful economic analyses would find ways to quantify the above factors, and indeed that is where cutting edge economic work is going.

I have an idea that might help. Let's eliminate tenure and pay ag economists by the classroom hour or research paper. They would bid for their classes every 2-3 years against all comers, including foreign grad students willing to work for much less and competitors from other colleges.

Then let's see how much risk they accept as reasonable. While this seems caustic, what all these clever spreadsheets ignore is how our brain reacts to risks. Research indicates it is not simply controlled by our rational prefrontal cortex. In fact, we decide it with our emotions and justify it later. And unless the risk is actually real for you, it is unlikely you will understand how such decisions are really made - and more importantly, made to work.

Such analyses are not useless of course, but they only represent the first step in deciding. It has also been my experience that those who focus on the current numbers don't hang around long in the cash rent market. They may have been correct in economists' eyes, but they aren't farming.

Industrial agriculture is outgrowing many ag economics texts, I believe, for the same reason it is commanding the bulk of farm assets and outputs. The practitioners have devised ways to address factors like these and blow careful conventional thinkers out of the water.

[via Farmgate]

And your proof is?...

The furor over the Food Safety Modernization Act is rapidly devolving to another "big-government is coming" debate which strikes me as a clever way for opponents to avoid the real issue: making food safer.  One large faction in a permanent state of outrage is somewhat strangely, the "small food" group, who wail about the likely end of gardens and farmer's markets.

The panics over salmonella, E. Coli and unsafe foodstuffs from China have heightened the prospects that Congress will enact a measure known as H.R. 875, the “Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009″. Should the measure in its current form become law, “food establishments”, which to quote Patrick at Popehat “means anyone selling or storing food of any type for transmission to third parties via the act of commerce”*, will have to register with a new federal regulatory agency, submit to federal inspections, and, perhaps most significant, keep “copious records of sales and shipment by lot and label”. Penalties for infractions will be very, very steep.
What could possibly go wrong?

The answer, it seems, is “plenty”. Patrick, and the other writers linked just above, warn that the law may drive out of business local farmers and artisanal, small-scale producers of berries, herbs, cheese, and countless other wares, even when there is in fact nothing unsafe in their methods of production. Many informal makers of ethnically or culturally distinctive food items will go off-books or simply fall by the wayside, overwhelmed by the reporting and batch-tracking paperwork. Many foreign producers who ship in less-than-mass quantities will give up on the U.S. market rather than try to comply with challenging standards that differ drastically from those imposed by European markets or their own countries of origin, which in turn will mean that many interesting and safe specialty foods will simply no longer be available for purchase, at least legally. [My emphasis][More]

The highlighted phrase contains essentially the entirety of their counter argument, which boils down to this: because we say so (and we're cute).  There is no significant body of evidence showing farmer-direct sales are less risky than industrial produce, nor, as we saw with peanuts, can we say the organic label speaks to any assurance of safety.  Plus we all should have a few suspicions where those farmer-market veggies come from.

In short, opponenents of FSMA (HR875) are simply demanding we accept their word about, well, everything they say.  

I'd just as soon all food products sold meet the same standards.  If it's too hard for small producers the comply, then by all means kill the legislation - in its entirety.  The problem here is the body politic will have to make a reasoned determination about how much food contamination we will accept.  If it is zero, then FMSA is the required response by government.

A far better standard, in my opinion, would be along the ALARA principle from the nuclear power industry (as low as reasonably achievable).  This idea doesn't have a prayer, and partly because small growers point to every recall as proof industrial ag is killing consumers. 

Welcome to the club.  What they forget that while total cases for industrial problems are huge, the per volume incidence of contamination is probably not any different for their products.  At a minimum, we don't know.  FMSA will fill that void with some hard data, and maybe some fear is showing about how that data might trend.

Another possibility is the concern in the litigation industry that certified procedures will allow industrial producers some relief from litigation over food contamination.  Being able to demonstrate scupulous adherence to a uniform food safety regimine would be powerful legal defense against over-the-top jury awards and etheir equally enormous lawyer fees. In fairness, from the first link above, a complicated regulation might also be good for the litigation business, just like complicated financial regulation. At any rate, attorneys have several dogs in this fight.

All across the food industry, from NAIS to FSMA a strong backlash, fueled by rhetoric from pseudo-libertarians is seeking to counter the growing tide of consumer concern about food safety. Their view of the trade-off is certainly valid, but they offer little more than self-defined "expertise" to exempt their commerce from any other approach to improving food safety.

How did I miss this?...

Earlier this month, Ronald Bailey, writing in Reason, took on food-faddists brilliantly.

Reading Kingsolver, one could also conclude that pesticides were created by giant chemical companies whose sole aim was to cause cancer. But even the American Cancer Society agrees that there is "no evidence that residues of pesticides and herbicides at the low doses found in foods increase the risk of cancer." Studies also show that eliminating pesticides could cut corn yields by 30 percent, rice by 57 percent, soybeans by 37 percent, and wheat by 24 percent. Again, that would mean that a lot more of nature would have to be plowed up to maintain the food supply at current levels.

Family farms are not declining because of some conspiracy by industrial ag giants. Actually, what happened is that farmers became so productive that we needed fewer of them. In 1950, 15 percent of Americans lived on farms. Today only 1 percent of us live on farms. The meantime, the output of staples like wheat and corn nearly tripled, while vegetables nearly quadrupled. And the amount of land devoted to crops fell slightly. This dramatically increased agricultural productivity liberated many like me from farm labor so that we could do other work.

He also raises another point that I believe is crucial to maintaining a civil debate on food-growing.

I have nothing against farmers markets. In fact, I take it that the country is becoming so wealthy that people can now make a decent living from labor-intensive activities like organic farming. But this kind of farming is essentially an artisanal activity much like basket weaving, potting, and wood working. My wife and I go every week to the local farmers market off Water Street in Charlottesville, VA, or if we're out of town, we go to the one at Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. I am very glad that people want to spend their lives raising tasty Mortgage Lifter tomatoes and Albemarle Pippin apples. And I am also very glad that I don't have to.

The growing recognition of market-defined sectors in agriculture allows producers and consumers alike to not criticize apples for being unlike oranges. The agrarian sector described above serves the market that demands products and process. Farmers like me - whom I label "industrial" - grow products using the most effective methods I can while meeting all safety and responsibility rules mandated.

There is no need for friction between these sectors. Agrarians cannot begin to supply my customers and vice-versa. The specialization trajectories we are tracking allows all of us to deliver to the market values we are good at supplying. I bring large amounts of energy from the fields to be converted into food via animals or fuel via ethanol. Agrarians bring pedigreed foodstuffs, raised in ways some consumers appreciate and pay for.

Neither of us has to be wrong. And the market for land will allocate that fundamental resource efficiently if we let it. So let "foodists"pursue their passion and discover why we grow stuff the way we do. Indeed, they may find ways we can add value to our industrial output, or more likely, find that industrial techniques can be adopted even for process-sensitive products.

Regardless, the future for both sectors is promising. Internecine squabbling only wastes time and effort better spent satisfying our customers.

Small vs. big, etc, Round 27...

The continuing friction between agrarian and industrial agriculture will be in full view today and a major food safety bill comes up for cloture.  It is laden with intricate detailed controversies, but has become another rallying cry for both sides to try to avoid the hard work of compromise. These days leaders don't get much credit for getting things done, and proponents on both sides understand the highest accomplishment is unbending confrontation.

"This is an important test to see if Democrats and Republican senators representing farm states will stand up for small farmers or cave to special interests and agribusiness," said Dave Murphy, founder and executive director of the organization.  "It could be the first lesson the food movement gets on how the new Congress will respond during the 2012 Farm Bill."

"The behind-the-scenes efforts to kill any provisions that protect family farmers from burdensome regulations has been intense, but efforts by real farm groups and sustainable ag organizations may have turned the tide," added Murphy.

As Food Safety News reported yesterday, large food and agriculture interest groups, including the American Meat Institute, the United Fresh Produce Association, and the United Egg Producers, sent a letter to committee staff Monday asking that the Tester amendment be excluded from the bill.

Popular authors and food policy gurus, Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan, issued a joint statement Tuesday, through Tester's office, stating their support of the senator's amendment and the food safety legislation. 

"S 510 is the most important food safety legislation in a generation," they said. "The Tester amendment will make it even more effective, strengthening food safety rules while protecting small farmers and producers.  We both think this is the right thing to do." [More]

For a deeper analysis on specific points, Grist has assembled a good discussion that illuminates many aspects of this legislation. Like all laws, there is something for everyone to carp about, but the greater underlying theme I get is the ongoing grievance from the agrarian community about the excessive aid and regulatory favoritism channeled to industrial ag.

At first blush, this would not seem to be a big deal to corn/soy guys like me, but what I think is worth watching is how much support the agrarian lobby has picked up recently (or not).  If they able to add the Tester amendment exempting small farms from many rules, it would be a sign, I believe that agrarian interests will have more say in future legislation, like the 2012 Farm Bill.

Of course, that debate may be pretty small change - literally. But the effect of small/big fights can also be seen paying out more powerfully in the regulatory arena.  Consider the ongoing slugfest, that the new GIPSA rules have triggered.

These and other examples of the oddly (and unnecessarily, IMHO)  aggressive attacks between two segments of our tiny sector further illustrate the pointless harping about agriculture "speaking with one voice."  That has never happened and now is even further from reality.

We continue to fracture into specialty producers serving narrow markets. on any given economic or regulatory issue, we will reliably line up with pour own interests regardless what other "farmers" want. That's because we all think we are the real American agriculture.

In short there ain't no "us" in farming - there is only "me".  I don't think this is good, but it is good to keep in mind.

How agrarian ag might work...

If you read my book review from last night, you might find this counterpoint interesting. By linking two seemingly unrelated events - $100 oil and Castro stepping down - one can construct a scenario that would make a return to agrarian farming a dominant part of our industry.

19 February 2008 was an historic day. For the first time in history, the price of oil at the close of the U.S. markets sat above $100. Ok, it was by only a penny, but that penny was probably the most significant penny anyone's see in years. And when you consider that in 2006 the U.S. consumed just over 20 million barrels of oil everyday, those pennies start to add up pretty quickly. The other major news event of the day was of course the announcement by Fidel Castro that he will step down from his top position in Cuba after nearly 50 years. The announcement received wide attention, but after years of frail health the news was not as surprising as it would have been not so long ago. Two events, forecasted for years, finally came to fruition. At first blush, the two seem utterly distinct, totally separate and unrelated events. It is true there is no causal relationship (unless someone knows something I don't), but there is a more subtle, deeper connection between the two.

For years I've listened to scientists and economists, one after another, pronounce that nothing can, nothing will be done to move our society past its addition to oil until said oil reached $100 a barrel. Well, that day has arrived. I'm just wondering what it will mean? Should I start preparing my landlady's roof for solar panels? Can I expect a new, faster, more efficient mass transit system to shuttle me around Philadelphia, to my family back in Latrobe, or to meetings and conferences around the country? Does this mean we Americans will have to finally face the fact that our current consumption habits are simply unsustainable, and that these higher costs will finally force us to reconsider our lifestyles? Is the new post-petroleum age upon us? [More]

Analyzing what happened to Cuban food production after the fall of the Soviet Union provides at least some insights into conditions that might force a rethinking of our industrial ag sector.

The American model of agriculture is pretty much what people mean when they talk about the Green Revolution: high-yielding crop varieties, planted in large monocultures, bathed in the nurturing flow of petrochemicals, often supported by government subsidy, designed to offer low-priced food in sufficient quantity to feed billions. Despite its friendly moniker, many environmentalists and development activists around the planet have grown to despair about everything the Green Revolution stands for. Like Pretty, they propose a lowercase greener counterrevolution: endlessly diverse, employing the insights of ecology instead of the brute force of chemistry, designed to feed people but also keep them on the land. And they have some allies even in the rich countries—that's who fills the stalls at the farmers' markets blooming across North America.

But those farmers' markets are still a minuscule leaf on the giant stalk of corporate agribusiness, and it's not clear that, for all the paeans to the savor of a local tomato, they'll ever amount to much more. Such efforts are easily co-opted—when organic produce started to take off, for instance, industrial growers soon took over much of the business, planting endless monoculture rows of organic lettuce that in every respect, save the lack of pesticides, mirrored all the flaws of conventional agriculture. (By some calculations, the average bite of organic food at your supermarket has traveled even farther than the 1,500-mile journey taken by the average bite of conventional produce.) That is to say, in a world where we're eager for the lowest possible price, it's extremely difficult to do anything unconventional on a scale large enough to matter.

And it might be just as hard in Cuba were Cuba free. I mean, would Salcines be able to pay sixty-four people to man his farm or would he have to replace most of them with chemicals? If he didn't, would his customers pay higher prices for his produce or would they prefer lower-cost lettuce arriving from California's Imperial Valley? Would he be able to hold on to his land or would there be some more profitable use for it? For that matter, would many people want to work on his farm if they had a real range of options? In a free political system, would the power of, say, pesticide suppliers endanger the government subsidy for producing predatory insects in local labs? Would Cuba not, in a matter of several growing seasons, look a lot like the rest of the world? Does an organopónico depend on a fixed ballot?

There's clearly something inherently destructive about an authoritarian society—it's soul-destroying, if nothing else. Although many of the Cubans I met were in some sense proud of having stood up to the Yanquis for four decades, Cuba was not an overwhelmingly happy place. Weary, I'd say. Waiting for a more normal place in the world. And poor, much too poor. Is it also possible, though, that there's something inherently destructive about a globalized free-market society—that the eternal race for efficiency, when raised to a planetary scale, damages the environment, and perhaps the community, and perhaps even the taste of a carrot? Is it possible that markets, at least for food, may work better when they're smaller and more isolated? The next few decades may be about answering that question. It's already been engaged in Europe, where people are really debating subsidies for small farmers, and whether or not they want the next, genetically modified, stage of the Green Revolution, and how much it's worth paying for Slow Food. It's been engaged in parts of the Third World, where in India peasants threw out the country's most aggressive free-marketeers in the last election, sensing that the shape of their lives was under assault. Not everyone is happy with the set of possibilities that the multinational corporate world provides. People are beginning to feel around for other choices. The world isn't going to look like Cuba—Cuba won't look like Cuba once Cubans have some say in the matter. But it may not necessarily look like Nebraska either. [More of an excellent article about Cuban agriculture]

Could such a combination of factors arise here? It is less unthinkable that it used to be. But the absolute drop-off in oil experienced by Cubans is unlikely to occur in the US. But even if it is more gradual, the agrarian portion of US ag could become the hot growing portion, capturing more and more market share.

Another reason to be glad I'm getting older - those types of changes are not that easy. And I think we'll need some younger minds and bodies to make such a shift.

The debate enlarges...

An interesting op-ed in the WaPo triggered a flurry of responses across the blogosphere.  It featured one of the more prominent discussions about industrial farming I have seen.

Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics.

Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking?

Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today.

...

Industrial meat production

The arguments against the cruelty of factory farming have certainly been around a long time; it was Jeremy Bentham, in the 18th century, who observed that, when it comes to the treatment of animals, the key question is not whether animals can reason but whether they can suffer. People who eat factory-farmed bacon or chicken rarely offer a moral justification for what they're doing. Instead, they try not to think about it too much, shying away from stomach-turning stories about what goes on in our industrial abattoirs.
Of the more than 90 million cattle in our country, at least 10 million at any time are packed into feedlots, saved from the inevitable diseases of overcrowding only by regular doses of antibiotics, surrounded by piles of their own feces, their nostrils filled with the smell of their own urine. Picture it -- and then imagine your grandchildren seeing that picture. In the European Union, many of the most inhumane conditions we allow are already illegal or -- like the sow stalls into which pregnant pigs are often crammed in the United States -- will be illegal soon. [More - and check out the poll results]

Conservative Ross Douthat adds his two cents.

But of course it’s just as likely that something I consider morally licit will be eventually be deemed immoral and inhumane — and in that spirit, I’ll speculate that a century or so hence, breakthroughs in laboratory-created meat substitutes will have put an end to the killing of animals in general (in factory farms and family farms alike), and worked a revolution in moral sentiments that makes my present belief in the moral acceptability of meat-eating seem hopelessly barbaric.
Note, though, that I’m envisioning a technological leap as the catalyst for this shift. It’s true that deterministic arguments can go too far, and that human agency matters enormously to moral change … but it’s still the case that technological and economic trends play an enormous role in determining which moral arguments gain ground, which achieve dominance, and which slip toward eccentricity. The cotton gin launched a thousand pro-slavery polemics. The birth control pill convinced millions of people that the old moral consensus on sex and marriage was outdated and even absurd. The idea of legal abortion became more popular as the procedure itself became safer — but then opposition to abortion stiffened as medical science gave us a clearer picture of life growing in the womb. The moral arguments for vegetarianism and veganism have gained ground in the contemporary West because subsisting on those diets is easier for modern Westerners than for many earlier peoples. [More]

But my favorite response is from economist Tyler Cowen.

Ross Douthat considers the hoary question of which current practices we will someday condemn, linking also to Appiah, who raised it, and Will Wilkinson.  Prisons, factory farming, immigration barriers, and abortion are among the nominations.  I would suggest an alternate query, namely which practices currently considered to be outrageous will make a moral comeback in the court of public opinion.  Torture and loss of privacy -- in some of its forms at least -- already seem to be on the rise, at least in terms of their acceptability in the United States.
What kind of moral status will "probabilistically causing natural disasters" have in the future?  What status does it have now? 
With rising health care costs and tight budgets in many countries, can we not expect euthanasia to rise in moral popularity?  Will the principles for cutting off care force us to transparently embrace some ugly moral principle, or will the ugliness be our lack of transparency and arbitrariness on these matters?
Preemptive warfare feels unpopular, because Iraq and Afghanistan have gone poorly, and because there have no more major successful terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.  I predict the idea will make a comeback.  Robot and drone warfare may become even more commonplace, as will targeting at a distance and selective cyberwarfare.  Those practices don't have to be wrong, but they could lead us to be morally cavalier about fighting a destructive war, even more than we are today.  By the way, the French seem pretty happy about the recent U.S. intensification of drone warfare in Pakistan, which is directed at stopping an planned attack in Europe.  
Tolerance of gay individuals and alternative lifestyles is at a historic high.  I would not endorse a crude "regression toward the mean" hypothesis, but we should at least try it on for size.  That tolerance is as likely to fall back as to progress.
Won't targeted genetic tests make abortion more popular and less sanctioned?  Rural India is already full of ultrasound clinics.  Won't the possibility of discrimination on the basis of genes (not many will refuse to do it, or make use of the information, if only implicitly) make discrimination more acceptable altogether? [More]

Buried in these thoughtful speculations is somethin I think is very important.  Industrial agriculture in all its forms - such as my farm - will be publicly judged by animal agriculture practices. In other words, despite what other sectors of agriculture do to engender public supoport, we will be irrevocably linked to battery cages and gestation crates.

Grain producers are now reaping the result of hiding behind images of baby animals and failing to differentiate our work from both the past and other ag specializations, such as dairy, hogs, etc. As animal ag undergoes what appears to me intense scrutiny and reinvention to meet the consumer attitudes prevalent above, we will share in their disapprobation simply because big will be bad in and of itself.

This is not a new thought, but I think I see a hardening of public disapproval of even cheap protein and a dawn of significant consumer pushback and government regulation.  Those responses will spill over to field agriculture.

The important aspect of these posts is less what the opinions are, and more how easily opinions about "industrial agriculture" now spring to thought leaders' prose, compared to just a few months ago  This issue is not going away.

Or our way.

A battle we don't need...

Once I did the math, I realized the agrarian movement not only is not a competitor, it actually complements my industrial farm. As organic farms - or any other agrarian category - flourish, it suddenly becomes obvious to all that such producers can only fill a small portion of the food market. I'm not the only one to have this epiphany.

Can organic food feed the world? A recent study, published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems provides new data that suggests it can. However, I have some grave reservations about this prospect that are based on my experience as a scientist and my time living and working with real farmers in developing nations.

The authors of this study assume the major stumbling blocks to organic farming feeding the world are low crop yields and insufficient quantities of approved organic fertilisers. However, I have lived and worked in Bangladesh – as a professor of Cornell University, covering agricultural research and development – for the last 25 years, and I believe that even if these problems could be surmounted, using organic farming to feed the developing world remains a pipe dream. [More]

This should not be taken as dismissive of consumers who make choices for agrarian foods. Heck - Jan prefers some organic ingredients when it's more convenient or occasionally when it's the only choice. (I didn't actually know that - I just asked her now).

But behind the agrarian movement too often is a poorly disguised wistfulness for an imagined past that we could recreate if we only wished hard enough. The aversion to technology associated with agrarianism also means detailed economic analysis of its constraints tends to fall on deaf ears. Still, it is no justification to oppose the expansion of agrarian farms where they fit or to consider them a long-term threat to industrial agriculture.

Our main competitors in industrial ag are 1) each other and 2) other guys just like us all over the world. Any forward-thinking producer figures this out pretty fast or misses the cut one spring.

Not helping...

Sometimes folks who agree with you are your worst enemy.  Consider this otherwise sound post by Julie Gunlock on NRO (a right wing magazine).

Consider, also, her campaign for a White House vegetable garden. Waters has been badgering U.S. presidents about this vegetable garden for years. In 2000, she wrote a letter to Pres. Bill Clinton about the importance of a White House garden, saying: “I can think of no more powerful way to ground your legacy than to leave behind you a kitchen garden and the compost pile to nourish it.” Really? A garden and a compost pile? Grounding President Clinton’s legacy in compost? Did she think about how this sounds, alongside Clinton’s other goals, such as Middle East peace, a secure and nuclear-free Korean peninsula, health-care reform, and Russia’s peaceful transition to democracy?

In Alice Waters’s wonderland, all is made better with the growing of vegetables. But regular Americans know better. Many enjoy buying organic, visiting their local markets, and gardening, but they also know that the purpose of food is nourishment. America’s robust agricultural sector has made food cheaper and more plentiful not just for our nation’s citizens, but for the entire world. Environmentalists may dismiss big, industrial farms, but it is these largely American innovations that are helping feed the world, and keeping costs down for coupon clippers like me. [More]

Right now the right wing is writhing as they deal with the torture issue and I think the agony of that guilt that bleeds through into other policy arenas.  Oddly, one of the NRO top voices, Victor Davis Hanson (is he a poet or assassin?), is a former, if not current agrarian.



I agree in substance with Julie, but not tone.  Her condescension to one of America's top chefs during a massively popular upswing in cooking and food is simply stupid.  It also betrays, I think, a fear that industrial ag has gotten it all wrong, just like the financial markets did as the right cheered.


She should have more faith in the arithmetic and simply common sense. The food movement constitutes no threat to my farm, or at least, not one I can't rise to manage.  I expect industrial producers to be undergoing some consumer-prompted makeovers in the next decade, to be sure.


However, by disparaging the opinions of others in the field of expertise, we raise suspicions that we are not all that respecting of individual rights to choose.  Or individual rights in general.


But we have looped back to the torture problem, I see.  Which is what is keeps happening for the right.


Consider this comment on Julie's post:

At the beginning of her critique, she mentions all the areas of the country where agriculture is a large, visible part of daily life. First: there are only a handful of regions like this in the country (for every Iowa, there is a New Mexico). Second: these regions are known less for their embrace of conservative agriculture than they are for their agriculture-based economy. At the end of her article she praise large scale agriculture for how it “feeds the world” and provides herself and many other stay-at-home moms - I suppose - the ability to save money.
There is very little conservatism in that last statement. Basically, we are to reject the movement of our food culture to more locally-based (hopefully home-based) organic crop-centric recipes, complete with one’s own cooking, because it is nothing more than a bunch of high-brow cultural pessimists who want to stop feeding the world. Thus, we are to accept mass-produced, buy-in-bulk supercrap food products that are heavilty subsidized by taxpayers and terrible for your health.

And people wonder why conservatism is dying. [More]

And indeed, if conservatism is measured by Republican party affiliation (which I do not accept, but many do), the commenter is accurate.

Apocalypse Now delayed...

From time to time I check at The Oil Drum to see what thoughtful, but definitely pessimistic minds have to say about changes in our energy supplies and consumption patterns might mean in the future.  TOD has, of course, been as caught off-guard by the decline in oil use/price - ostensibly due to the recession - as oil producers.  And they are seriously starting to wonder when the demand will pick up.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries meeting in Angola on Tuesday was expected to keep supply steady because of concern any cut could push prices higher and threaten global economic recovery. But high inventories could force OPEC's hand early next year, before the second quarter when seasonal demand is typically at its lowest, PFC said. "OPEC could face the prospects of needing to undertake Herculean efforts to tighten up fundamentals in early 2010," PFC Energy said in the report.

"Most likely the organization would need to agree to substantial cuts -- of 1 million bpd or more from actual production -- in early 2010 in order to bring total inventories down to manageable levels." The oil price is close to the $75 per barrel top exporter Saudi Arabia and others have said is fair to both consumers and producers. Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi described the price as "perfect" earlier this month and has said there was no need for the group to change supply levels. [More]

The current oil supply situation is a vexation for Peak-Oilers who are scrambling to revise doomsday scenarios. Plus it is also changing the economic urgency of alternative agrarian ag systems, which fell into step with Peak-Oil predictions.  That body of growers may be larger than I imagine, and if the Census of Ag is of any relevance, may account for the growth in small farms.

At any rate, it is informative to consider how they are betting their operations on a fuel-deprived future.  Contrary to my admittedly vague pregnostications, these producers think the changeover to scarce resources will be swift.  I think it will trgger adjustments to make it a much slower phenomenon, as guys like me adapt to price signals on inputs.

Oddly the decline in petroleum production could mean tougher times for the ethanol business model, as the choice between food and fuel is reviewed in a much harsher light. Regardless, this comment is typical of the discourse among these growers.

I have no doubt that as energy supplies become very restricted that agriculture will be at the top of the rationing list. Especially Big AG as they will have to produce the vast volumes of grain that will be required to prevent mass famine. It will get harder and harder for them to succeed. Riding this wave just behind them will be people like me. Small farms, using little to no synthetic fertilizers or chemicals (those will be restricted to use by the Big Ag farms growing the bulk food). As agriculture evolves back to a more traditional structure the small farms will once again become diversified operations where they produce meats and grains as well as veggies and value added products. Over time the growing of veggies will slow and the growing of beans, grains and other staples will rise on the small operations. This will be as the energy costs rise. When energy costs rise the point will eventually be reached where the CAFO operations will no longer be financially viable. They only exist because we have access to very cheap energy and because the Govt subsidizes corn/soybean production. Much of your grocery store processed food also depends on this situation. In the future all of this will be washed away by rising energy costs and shortages. Thus the diversified small farms close to the population centers will dominate once again.

As energy supplies continue to shrink (long after you and I are gone) there will come a time that operations scaled like mine may pass too. Unless, we have manage to maintain some semblance of 'civilization' via these methods so that we can find clever ways to utilize alternative energies, maybe invent a few more efficient technologies, learn to live on less, etc we will not make it into the future. [More]

These guys are not radical wackos, as industrial producers often categorize them.  In fact, they have on the whole thought more profoundly about what they are doing than most of us in the other sector. Unfortunately, that does not necessarily guaranteee their ability to forecast the future of agriculture, and the last two years have upset most of their stronger apocalyptic announcements.

The could be right in the long run, but it will be a far longer run than most of us think.  And the brains involved in ag will not be idle in the meantime.

Another reason I am bearish...

On production agriculture employment. Ag is just sticking its toe in the pools of state-of-the-art technology. Frankly, the profits have never been there to make it pay, but now we can't bring these tools on board fast enough. And check out what they can do:



It's almost as creepy as this.

Don't get me wrong. I am very optimistic about agriculture - especially industrial ag - but I'm not kidding myself that it won't be one of the hardest professions to get into [and stay in].

Is this fight necessary?...

Several readers and friends have sent me links to the now-infamous-in-ag-circles article in the current issue of Time, "Getting Real About the High Cost of Cheap Food" by Bryan Walsh.  The introductory paragraphs should give you the gist.

Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon — circa 2009.

In addition, I gather some farm organizations are urging members to fire angry letters to Time expressing their outrage.

OK, that's one response.  But from my point of view, it's a mistake - possibly a big one.

In fairness, I suppose my reaction is somewhat disappointingly tame because I have been reading the food movement literature for years now, and this article is really nothing new.  I think many farm readers (or more likely, non-readers) simply had not run across these arguments yet because they are less interested in viewpoints outside agriculture.

So after following Pollan, et. al, and websites like The Atlantic Food Channel, I simply saw it as more of the same.  And I have not seen a huge effect on product movement in the interim.

With that disclaimer, I still think producers would be wise to think before choosing angry confrontation.

First, we need to make sure we understand the climate for public discourse right now. It's about emotion. Period. Take a look at town meetings or climate change debate or (ugh) political talk shows.  Is there any evidence carefully reasoned economic arguments will sway in the slightest people angry about keeping hog lagoons?  At the very least we should consider postponing this sqaubble until we're on the other side of health care reform, recession, and climate change.

And what pray tell are we going to respond to such articles with?  Read the words.  Like much of anti-industrial farm screeds they marshal facts and even more opinion from credible experts (with whom we disagree, but they still get to have a say, right?), much of which is plainly true: we do clip beaks and dock tails, we do keep sows in crates and calves in the dark - we can't really say we don't. 

We also need to count noses.  There are a few thousand of us industrial producers, many more agrarian producers who disagree with our practices and millions of consumers who love pets.  We'd better hope we don't push things to a vote.  Prop 2 should ring a bell.

It could be staunch public responses are the best answer to such legislative nightmares, but most folks I talk to in places like MI and OH where real work is being done prefer quiet negotiation to media wrangling to counter this threat.  Frankly, I think we are vastly overestimating our clout with the populace on this issue, and pushed too far, could sour support for all kinds of unrelated public sympathy.  For example, lots of exposure to industrial production may swicth a few votes on payment limits to aid more sympathetic figures like small farmers.

One really important problem agriculture hasn't faced up to is how different are our sensibilities compared to consumers.  While we moan about how people don't know where their food comes from, it seldom crosses our minds how many years of acclimation it took us to develop our detachment from killing animals for food.  Folks don't know where pork chops come from, and if you think you're going to make them comfortable with the facts in one clever ad or brief explanation you are sorely misled, I think.  Try it on one person just to see the depth of the problem.

But we are badly mistaken in agriculture if we think the cry "It keeps food cheap!" will silence such outcry.  Angry responses will only fire up the opposition even more, IMHO.  We can see that all around us.  The free-floating animosity in the air will likely produce a vastly disproportionate response, and rapid escalation that can only damage our bottom lines.

Most importantly, there is little indication the animal-rights/food conscience movements are much of an economic threat.  Sales of meat, for example are reeling not from a mass shift to veganism but drastically lower incomes and no exports.  Meanwhile we can't put hamburger out fast enough.  In fact, I suspect one reason we are seeing more vitriolic language assailing industrial production is the immense pressure other methods have fallen prey to.  From farmer markets to free-range chicken, hard pressed consumers are downshifting to low-priced products in droves.

Indeed, organic and other process-defined foods have fallen on hard times and are losing market share. Given this dollars and sense reality, what do we hope to gain in the marketplace with calling more attention to our methodology by allowing the media to egg us on into a public battle?  It's all downside from my perspective.

Indeed, the great risk here is a quasi-political mudfight that will encourage more vigilante video of slaughterhouses and manure handling.  If you have not grasped how tenuous the public ability to discriminate between food animals and companion animals, see the viewer comments on petting zoos from recent USFR shows.

Ag has caught on to the power of viral video. I know because the clip of a top EPA official having a beauty-pageant-question moment during her Congressional testimony on land use calculations for ethanol was forwarded to me by multiple sources.  Yet we still don't seem to grasp how silent video of many animal production practices could repulse the vast majority.  Folks, meat production is gross.  We're just de-sensitized.

In short, if we're not getting savaged at the meat counter, why not listen attentively and act with caution, rather than descend into yet another unwinnable name-calling hysteria.

Oddly, it would appear most people are able to exist with a wide disconnect between killing animals and eating steak.  Laying aside dietary issues for another time, I think allowing consumers some room to be ignorant about food production is a good thing.  With the nation on edge from a zillion other economic and social conflicts, much of that ill will could spill over to their grocery carts if we draw too much attention.

Shouting at a handful of detractors will only invite more scrutiny than our customers really want or we can withstand.

Listen to the critics, sort through and find their core angers, recognize the truths scattered within, and monitor their traction. But taking arms against a sea of troubles is not the answer.  Going to war with customers is a violation of rational marketing.

Well done...

The middle road is not untraveled, after all.

Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm signed a bill into law Monday that, according to the Humane Society of the United States, will extend "modest yet meaningful" protections to farm animals. A result of negotiations between animal welfare and agricultural groups, the law requires that certain farm animals have enough room to stand up and turn around and extend their limbs. It phases out veal crates for calves within three years, and battery cages for laying hens and gestation crates for breeding sows within ten years. [More]

My hat's off to the Michigan Farm Bureau, especially, for this exemplary effort.

Meanwhile, partisans of confrontation continue to flood the Intertubes with incendiary rhetoric that does little to solve this issue.

At the heart of the matter is an attempt to fool Ohio voters into thinking that members of the appointed board will be "family farmers." Brenda Hastings, the "farm" lady who appears in pro-Issue 2 ads appearing on television, is the co-owner of a 600-head Holstein dairy operation. Both she and her husband moved their dairy operation from California shortly after Proposition 2 passed there. The Hastings aspire to own a 1000-head herd, not your sustainable organic dairy operation. Nor do the Hastings represent the average "family farm," consisting of a husband-wife-children operation. According to Ohio Against Constitutional Takeover (ACT) http://www.ohioact.org, one of the biggest sources of misrepresentation and dishonesty is section 3 of Issue 2, which reads:

"This proposed amendment [to Section 1 of Article XIV of the Constitution of the State of Ohio] would [P]rovide that the board shall be comprised of thirteen Ohio residents including representatives of Ohio family farms, farming organizations, food safety experts, veterinarians, consumers, the dean of the agriculture department of an Ohio college or university and a county humane society representative."  [Source: spam from here]

By conflating NAIS with animal welfare, along with several other far-right agenda items, some in the farm community seek to redress a whole range of issues, primary of which, I think,  is how small farmers are being out-muscled in the marketplace by industrial producers.




They are right about that trend and also right about their numbers being much larger than ours.  But they are apparently unconcerned about how powerful the basic economics of industrial ag are, and how it is actually based in sound farm practices.


One of which is avoiding conflict with customers whenever possible.

Agristemic closure...

I have been following with amazement the Great Epistemic Closure Debate of 2010 that is raging in the political blogosphere. I won't begin the claim to have an accurate handle on the subtlety of the philosophy involved, so to set the stage, here is one pretty clear description:

There’s been a surprising amount of online commentary in the last few weeks that prominently uses the term “epistemic closure,” a term I’d never actually heard used in casual conversation before this year. It started with some posts by libertarian blogger Julian Sanchez, who was writing about the excommunication of David Frum from the conservative think tank AEI. Sanchez argued that this was part of a conservative move toward “epistemic closure,” meaning being unreceptive to facts that don’t fit into the pre-approved worldview:

One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!)  This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile.

This argument was taken up both by heterodox conservatives and by liberals, who agree with the claim that Frum and Bruce Bartlett and other conservative apostates have been making: that in the era of Fox News, conservatives have effectively created their own reality which cannot be violated by outside facts. [More]

I found this debate clarifying for several reasons. First, it helps me understand my own drift and now, outright flight from what passes for "conservative thought" currently. Not that I am justified in my position, just that I'm not the only person wondering what these people are thinking.

Most curious is the growing number of former stalwarts of conservative thought like Bruce Bartlett, David Frum, and now, apparently, Jim Manzi, with whom I have sometimes disagreed but always admired their thoughtful comments, who have been excommunicated from the right wing for thinking unapproved thoughts.  And then writing them down. (BTW, it occurs to me I cannot name a counterexample of a liberal thinkmeister being dropped from the club for drifting right. I guess there is some social security (heh) in being more liberal, if nothing else)

But more importantly, doesn't this closed information system ring a cowbell for any of us in farming? For the most part we listen to the same ag news sources which reiterate the same litany of "truths", such as:

• Farmers are the backbone of the nation
• Farmers deserve a different deal from the government as other citizens
• Current ag production is not only good, it is the best of all possible farms
• Farms producing the Sacred 7 Crops (corn, soy, wheat, rice, sugar, dairy, cotton) must be publicly funded.
• Farmers are just better than other Americans
• Farms are the best place to raise children
• Every farmer has a right to farm the way he* sees fit
• Farmer taxes are too high - even if they are less than others.
• Ethanol from corn is a brilliant idea, despite the mandates and subsidies needed to make it work.
• Farmers work harder than anyone else in the universe.

I could go on. But the point is - and I have heard it delicately phrased by people in the ag media - you don't contradict these dogma and live to tell the story.

This is the same type of information bubble that got us into the never-ending Iraq sandmire. And our own ag policy, I might add. By limiting the introduction of new information, or ruling out facts that are incompatible with our world view, we have contructed an insular and self-reinforcing reality that is rapidly sliding away from reality.

Just as has been illustrated well in the issue of epistemic closure, our own industrial parochialism will have to cope with a new information system. Say what you will about the blogosphere, but the absence of editors and publishers is remarkably empowering at the individual level.

More to the point, as I tried to illuminate earlier, the new media demands proof - not just assertion. One quick test for closure is the quality and breadth of the links in any blog post.  If they are simply others in the echo chamber (of which I am frequently guilty) then it is rapidly becoming obvious the opinions are likely the product of circular reasoning.

Agriculture, like everything else, is always at a crossroads. But we have never had so many choices of directions to move.  What a shame - and how professionally suicidal - it would be if we simply regurgitated popular bromides instead of engaging in real debate.


*Still not sure about female farmers