It just won't die...  

The Corporate Farming Myth seems indestructible by hard data or even reason.  I was reading about how ag singles groups are shrinking and came across this paragraph:

Single farmers face an especially difficult task finding others like them. In recent years, many farm families have sold out to corporations and moved away; the rural population has been gravitating to the cities, leaving small towns to wither, cafes to close, social organizations to decline. Meeting people is harder than ever. [More][My emphasis]

Somewhere along the line the concept of large farms merged with corporate. Simply put, big must mean non-family. But this is exactly what isn't happening.

Most U.S. farms—98 percent in 2007—are family operations, and even the largest farms are predominantly family run. Large-scale family farms and nonfamily farms account for 12 percent of U.S farms but 84 percent of the value of production. In contrast, small family farms make up most of the U.S. farm count but produce a modest share of farm output. Small farms are less profitable than large-scale farms, on average, and their operator households tend to rely on off-farm income for their livelihood. Generally speaking, farm operator households cannot be characterized as low-income when both farm and off-farm income are considered. Nevertheless, limited-resource farms still exist and account for 3 to 12 percent of family farms, depending on how “limited-resource” is defined.[More]

I think what has happened is farms have been conflated with what most of us would call agribusiness. An amazing number of people I have met think ADM and Monsanto run and even own farms. They also assume large operations have deep operational ties with those links in our chain. 

How did this occur? One contributing factor, I think has been our profession's reluctance to be seen as anything other than an agrarian, diversified and nostalgic businesses. We were perhaps rightly afraid of losing public sympathy by showing enormous operations without any puppies or duckies and children bottle feeding calves.

That has changed somewhat, but we are still pretty shy about embracing the large operation as our stereotype. And we are horrified at the idea Joe Taxpayer might discover how freakin' much money we have been making.

This may prove a tactical mistake, as the above article suggest. The connection between "big" and "corporate" is now pretty well fixed in the public mind and being exploited by small farm proponents from local food to organic. The sympathy ploy may have lost its effectiveness.

No too hard...

To see the real threat to agrarian farming: robots that can match human judgment, like picking only the ripe fruit.

Given enough time, however, it will make economic sense to pick berries with robots rather than humans. The history of industrial agriculture teaches us that if a worker can be replaced by a machine, they will be. Yet despite the obvious disruptions this causes in employment, I think the eventual move towards robotic agriculture is a vital one. We are still fighting global hunger, and anything that can increase our productivity and efficiency in agriculture is likely a valuable step towards solving that grand challenge. The strawberry robot is a relatively small development, but it’s a good one. [More]

[via mr]

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.

Answers that work...

But few like.  I have been asked over the past few years by young people wanting to get into agriculture how to "get a chance".  For their most part, I have found their expectations to be wildly impractical (who gives a 21-year old their own company straight out of school?), but we seldom phrase it in those terms. My answer has been as truthful as I can be, but as diplomatic as possible.  It also seems to be not too far from what is happening.

First, if they want to be in industrial agriculture, I advise them to pick their parents very carefully. It seems clear to me there are vanishing small odds of becoming say, a 1500-acre corn-soy farmer from scratch without 1) a very long-shot benefactor or 2) a parent handing over acres. I am not saying it can't be done, but that the probability is similar to making the NBA.

One of the choices that are available is to join a large operation as an employee.  In fact, this option no longer looks as "second rate" as it used to.  Consider doctors:

But an increasing share of young physicians, burdened by medical school debts and seeking regular hours, are deciding against opening private practices. Instead, they are accepting salaries at hospitals and health systems. And a growing number of older doctors — facing rising costs and fearing they will not be able to recruit junior partners — are selling their practices and moving into salaried jobs, too.

As recently as 2005, more than two-thirds of medical practices were physician-owned — a share that had been relatively constant for many years, the Medical Group Management Association says. But within three years, that share dropped below 50 percent, and analysts say the slide has continued.

For patients, the transformation in medicine is a mixed blessing. Ideally, bigger health care organizations can provide better, more coordinated care. But the intimacy of longstanding doctor-patient relationships may be going the way of the house call.

And for all the vaunted efficiencies of health care organizations, there are signs that the trend toward them is actually a big factor in the rising cost of private health insurance. In much of the country, health systems are known by another name: monopolies.

With these systems, private insurers often have little negotiating power in setting rates — and the Congressional health care legislation makes little provision for altering this dynamic. If anything, the legislation contains provisions — including efforts to combine payments for certain kinds of medical care — that may further speed the decline of the private-practice doctor and the growth of Big Medicine.

The trend away from small private practices is driven by growing concerns over medical errors and changes in government payments to doctors. But an even bigger push may be coming from electronic health records. The computerized systems are expensive and time-consuming for doctors, and their substantial benefits to patient safety, quality of care and system efficiency accrue almost entirely to large organizations, not small ones. The economic stimulus plan Congress passed early last year included $20 billion to spur the introduction of electronic health records.

For older doctors, the change away from private practice can be wrenching, and they are often puzzled by younger doctors’ embrace of salaried positions.

“When I was young, you didn’t blink an eye at being on call all the time, going to the hospital, being up all night,” said Dr. Gordon Hughes, chairman of the board of trustees for the Indiana State Medical Association. “But the young people coming out of training now don’t want to do much call and don’t want the risk of buying into a practice, but they still want a good lifestyle and a big salary. You can’t have it both ways.” [More]

There is are many analogies between these two professions, so I think the attraction of working alone will fade as fewer and fewer farm children experience it, and more develop life values attuned to group work.

The other choice is agrarian ag. As the economy limps along, it seems to be looking better and better to beginners.

Some of those creative but unemployed young people are returning to the rural areas where they grew up. Once there, many start innovative businesses or rejoin family agricultural businesses. Other youngsters are choosing to stay home, with big cities no longer quite so alluring.

“A lot of young people are maybe going home and looking for room on the farm, but there’s not enough from traditional agriculture to support them. So they’re taking a certain acreage out of corn and soybean crops and going into specialty crops. We’re seeing new food crops, niche livestock, wineries, free-range chickens, boutique cheeses, a whole set of things on 10 acres where you can potentially generate enough income to support a family if you get a good niche going,” Macke says. [More]

I will be looking for early indicators of what health insurance changes will mean to all parts of rural employment.  But the boost it will give to the self-employed could be considerable, adding intense competitive pressure from single family farms for acres. In fact, solving the health insurance problem could at least slow the loss of solo operations perhaps.

Out of the industrial closet...

Slowly, it seems, more farmers are getting comfortable with their true identities as industrial producers.  Hiding behind an agrarian "cover" has become increasingly unmanageable in this age of unavoidable transparency.

Critics of “industrial farming” spend most of their time concerned with the processes by which food is raised. This is because the results of organic production are so, well, troublesome. With the subtraction of every “unnatural” additive, molds, fungus, and bugs increase. Since it is difficult to sell a religion with so many readily quantifiable bad results, the trusty family farmer has to be thrown into the breach, saving the whole organic movement by his saintly presence, chewing on his straw, plodding along, at one with his environment, his community, his neighborhood. Except that some of the largest farms in the country are organic—and are giant organizations dependent upon lots of hired stoop labor doing the most backbreaking of tasks in order to save the sensitive conscience of my fellow passenger the merest whiff of pesticide contamination. They do not spend much time talking about that at the Whole Foods store.
The most delicious irony is this: the parts of farming that are the most “industrial” are the most likely to be owned by the kind of family farmers that elicit such a positive response from the consumer. Corn farms are almost all owned and managed by small family farmers. But corn farmers salivate at the thought of one more biotech breakthrough, use vast amounts of energy to increase production, and raise large quantities of an indistinguishable commodity to sell to huge corporations that turn that corn into thousands of industrial products.

Most livestock is produced by family farms, and even the poultry industry, with its contracts and vertical integration, relies on family farms to contract for the production of the birds. Despite the obvious change in scale over time, family farms, like ours, still meet around the kitchen table, send their kids to the same small schools, sit in the same church pew, and belong to the same civic organizations our parents and grandparents did. We may be industrial by some definition, but not our own. Reality is messier than it appears in the book my tormentor was reading, and farming more complicated than a simple morality play. [More]

Because the change in our operations occurred over a lifetime, many of us still don't appreciate how sterile, artificial, and frankly "industrial" our farms appear to non-farm visitors.  We've all seen the vague disappointment in strangers' eyes when they look for something more picturesque than big machines, big bins and big sheds.

At the same time, agrarian enthusiasts are slowly beginning to do the math.  And that business model has its own problems.

Think about it. When most of us imagine what a sustainable food economy might look like, chances are we picture a variation on something that already exists—such as organic farming, or a network of local farms and farmers markets, or urban pea patches—only on a much larger scale. The future of food, in other words, will be built from ideas and models that are familiar, relatively simple, and easily distilled into a buying decision: Look for the right label, and you're done.
But that's not the reality. Many of the familiar models don't work well on the scale required to feed billions of people. Or they focus too narrowly on one issue (salad greens that are organic but picked by exploited workers). Or they work only in limited circumstances. (A $4 heirloom tomato is hardly going to save the world.)
Such problems aren't exactly news. Organizations such as the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (which despite its namesake is a real leader in food reform) have long insisted that truly sustainable food must be not just ecologically benign, but also nutritious, produced without injustice, and affordable. And yet, because concepts like local or organic dominate the alternative food sector, there is little room left for alternative models, such as Fred Fleming's, that might begin to bridge the gap between where our food system is today and where it needs to be.

And how big is that gap? Using the definition of sustainability above, about 2 percent of the food purchased in the United States qualifies. Put another way, we're going to need not only new methods for producing food, but a whole new set of assumptions about what sustainability really means. [More]

Indeed even farmers markets have been invaded by commercial sentiments threatening to swing them completely over into "eatertainment".

Here's the underlying problem: In 1994, there were 1,755 farmers markets in the United States; by 2008, there were 4,685. In the big scheme of things, this is terrific news; it means Americans are learning to feed themselves properly. But not all parts of the country have seen commensurate explosions in the number of small-scale local organic farmers. And the driving force in opening a farmers market is less often the organic revolution than it is economic revitalization, maybe a local chamber of commerce hoping to tempt people back to Main Street on weekends. When either is true, that chamber of commerce might take the path of least resistance and give the market contract to one of many farmers market associations populated by commercial growers, who then dominate the booth space. Nothing wrong on the face of this, except that, lured by funky folding tables in a parking lot, the consumer ends up going out of his way to buy produce he could get, probably cheaper, at any supermarket. (In Oakland, some small farmers quit a market when they discovered other produce vendors doing just that.) Many market managers have their hearts in the right place, and do want to support local, sustainable agriculture. Perhaps they also know that without some cute local farmers, the market ain't gonna fly. But what if you're managing one of these markets, and the chamber complains that you're not bringing enough people downtown? Well, hey, okay, maybe it's time to bring in more entertainment—street performers, guys who can tie balloons into poodles. Maybe you reach out to some restaurants, too, asking them to set up burrito booths. They aren't required to use produce from local farmers—but you can charge them a lot more for a booth, which helps the bottom line. And now Saturday mornings are really jamming, crowds are gathering for the coffee and the banjo player, and some of your core vendors guess accurately that a lot of these folks are more interested in scented candles than in cauliflower. So they gradually switch their product mix, and that, in turn, encourages still more scented-candle buyers. [More]

We have arrived at our present food system by focusing on what customers want. It is not perfect, but it does offer immense efficiencies. Many of the criticisms of our food industry - especially as it impacts our health - may be valid.

But devising another system to get the job done will not be so easy.

Reality eventually overcomes all attempts at distortion. I don't think arguing about hyphenated-agriculture is necessary to defend our own work. The market is sorting this argument out.

[Thanks, Steve]

Animal agriculture all comes down...

To the essential fact of humans controlling the lives (and deaths) of animals.  There are important degrees of severity involved, but to expect to find a clever solution to the fundamental outcome of our predator/prey relationship is hardly rational.

But with Iberico production, even this trade-off is not as clear as it might seem. Iberico pigs actually spend the first nine months of their lives in confinement. Granted, it's not factory-farm confinement—they've got some room to move and all-natural feed to eat, nor are they docked or clipped. But the promoted benefits of free-range are absent—no sun, no freshly fallen acorns, no wallowing in big mud pits. While indoors, they're castrated, spayed, kept to a feeding schedule, administered antibiotics when sick, directed to eat and sleep in carefully chosen locations, and, just before the barn doors open to the freedom of la dehesa, mutilated with a nose ring.

As responsible consumers, it's easy to decide to avoid factory-farmed pork. The hard part is what to make of the most acceptable alternative. Does free-range farming justify the mutilation that's often required to keep pigs outdoors? As an ethical matter, the question is open to endless debate. What the conscientious meat eater can take away from it is not so much a concrete answer as a more nuanced way to think about our food choices. In this age of deeply convincing attacks on factory farms, consumers must be careful not to immediately assume that every alternative to factory farming is as "all natural" or humane as its advocates will inevitably declare. The alternatives might require still more alternatives. [More]

Engineers are the poster-children for this problem, but as long as we consider moral end ethical teaching to be a egghead sideline of university educations, we will continue to be troubled by our choices and our society more than perhaps is necessary.

Spot the flaw...

In one of those esoteric-seeming arguments about why our world is the way it is, a recent "Good Eats" episode touched off a rollicking debate on Think Progress about hunting/gathering and farming.  Alton Brown alleges "man had shifted to ranching and farming as an alternative to hunting for food because hunting was time-consuming and labor-intensive."  And the debate took off:

Even modern-day hunter-gatherers, who in the nature of things don’t inhabit the most promising land, work shorter hours and enjoy happier lifestyles than do the poorest of modern-day subsistence farmers. The problem with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle wasn’t — and isn’t — that it’s too labor intensive, it’s that it was too land-intensive. A hunter-gatherer lifestyle can only support a small number of people on a given parcel of land. If people somewhere start engaging in a more settled lifestyle, what happens is that population density can go way up. That facilitates the division of labor and the creation of specialized warrior castes and so forth. Consequently, a settled society will probably be able to conquer a hunter-gatherer population and/or drive them off their land. Thus, once this quality-of-life-destroying innovation comes into being it tends to spread inexorably. The higher level of inequality agriculture permits allows some people to be better-off than any hunter-gatherer, but average living standards plummet even as pure quantity of people alive goes way up, a la Derek Parfit’s repugnant conclusion. It’s only with the coming of the industrial revolution that societies with higher average quality-of-life than those enjoyed by hunter-gatherers come into existence. And over time, that circle of beneficiaries of industrialization has tended to spread. [More - best stuff in the comments]

One commenter pointed out the necessary flaw in the positive picture of hunting/gathering: just how exactly such societies managed to keep their population low.  The answer was starvation, disease, and very low infant survival.  To be sure those who made it to adulthood may have had better lives and diets, but that's a survivor benefit, not a universal positive.

Sedentary (as in staying in one place - not couch-potatoing) agriculture raised populations by generating more and storable calories and raising survival rates. In fairness, it also made serfs and slaves a good idea until the industrial revolution drastically lowered labor requirements.

Regardless, we're past that now, we understand the costs of our food choices and instead of arguing which relatively miserable past was better, we should be applying our understanding to shaping an agricultural system that raises human well-being in better ways than simply available calories.

The fastest way to do this is via consumer decisions at the marketplace.  The fact this debate is occurring could be an indicator of slow changes in public views about our work.

Know where your food comes from (Part VII)...

One of the complaints frequently leveled at industrial agriculture is it obscures the origin of our food.

Maybe not.

The tainted lettuce that sickened 80 people in the Midwest in 2006 came from a Kern County farm located next to two dairies, state and federal authorities have found.

The lettuce, which was contaminated with E. coli bacteria, was grown at Wegis Ranch in Buttonwillow, according to a joint report by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration and the California Department of Public Health. The report was released Feb. 15.

The victims had all eaten at one of two Taco John's restaurants in Iowa and Minnesota in November and December 2006. Bacteria were found in the lettuce, and authorities were able to trace the produce to California.

From there, investigators focused on two possible locations of the contamination, and lab tests showed the exact strain of E. coli found in the lettuce matched samples found at Wegis Ranch as well as the nearby dairies. [More]

Technology is going to make sure that we know where everything comes from. It will be interesting to see how local all local food actually is when that occurs.

You can run, but you can't hide [in the produce section, anyway].

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.

Yeah - but can you make ethanol out of 'em?...

Tumbleweed farming.

Linda started her online business, the Prairie Tumbleweed Farm, as a joke. It was 1994 and she wanted to teach herself how to design a website. Since she lived on the prairie in southwest Kansas, where rolling tumbleweeds are sometimes the only dynamic feature of an endless flat horizon, she invented a farm that sold tumbleweeds, listing prices at $15 for a small one, $20 for a medium and $25 for large.

[via Marginal Revolution]

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