Who's Going to Grow Organic Food for Our Kids?
So I want to be a farmer. Nothing fancy. A flock of sheep, some fields of hay, a few humble acres. I'm not ashamed to admit that it's a personal goal for my future workplace to be littered with feces. But what can I say? I'd rather be outside knee-deep in sheep excrement than indoors screen-deep in emails. If I can pull it off, in the next few years I plan on moving into the world of full-time sustainable farming.
I've always assumed there were lots of young folks like myself out there, milling about desk jobs, secretly wishing they could be out in a field with rams or snap peas. But recently I realized how alone I am in this dream. Sure, there are plenty of twenty-somethings that like their horses and don't mind collecting eggs from backyard flocks, but those of us who want to take our careers onto tractors aren't exactly common. Actually, we're a dying breed.
The deeper I get into the research the more I realize how crippling this could be for our local food situation. Small sustainable farms are disappearing from our hometowns, and so are the farmers.
You might balk at this statement. If you live in a rural area you might drive past a dozen small farms everyday on your way to work. I do too, but they aren't farmers who are making a living off their land and supplying co-ops and grocery stores with good food. They're small homesteads, hobby farms, or retirees who took a liking to dairy goats as entertaining lawn ornamentation. The actual food making small farm (grossing net profits under $250,000 a year) is becoming a white whale. Those farms are being replaced by industry giants. Operations so large in scale the animals and acres are larger than the population of most towns here in Vermont.
The small guys can't compete, and the quality suffers. You know the song, it's a sad one.
Another scary point to bring up to all you locavores out there is you might be running out of enablers. The people planting those heirloom tomatoes at your local farmer's market are getting older and older. The National Agricultural Statistical Service posts the average age of farmers in America is over 55 years old. A daunting thing to realize.
All of this might not be a big deal to the average consumer. But it should be, because growing safe food might be the single most important job in the world. And we need people to keep doing it. If no one wants to farm anymore, and the average current farmer has a AARP card, we're in big trouble.
I'm hopeful that the future farmers and ranchers of America will step up to the plate and keep providing organic meat, grains, and vegetables for the ever-growing green demographic. As the mainstream head turns towards weathervanes and away from feedlots - people might start to notice the growing scarcity of local organic foods. A scary thought, so let's do our best.
For more on one girl's agri-dreams, come to the farm: COLD ANTLER FARM
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Part of the problem is not how much can be grown, but how much can be stored. We know it's tomato season when all the neighbors are trying to get rid of excess tomatos. Or zuccini. Why isn't the excess preserved for the winter? Why aren't we making kraut and kim-chee and pickles? Filling up the root cellar? That's a part of the equation that's being missed.
Unfortunately, because most people are too lazy (even those who take the time to grow their own vegetables), and we've become too accustomed to this disposable society we live in--one where waste is acceptable.
Don't diss hobby farmers, or people who just focus on growing food for themselves. Commercial farming at any scale is an expensive and stressful proposition which leaves little time for anything else. I'm not surprised that most young people aren't interested in taking it up, but that doesn't mean nobody's interested in growing organic food, just that they have a much smaller, more individualistic project in mind.
In the latter days of the Soviet Union, it was backyard gardeners that grew as much as 90% of the nation's food supply, while the large and high-tech collective farms only provided imported grain. Ditto for the 'Victory Gardens' of WWII. I think something more like that - suburban lawns torn up and replaced with fruits and vegetables - is the future of sustainable agriculture, not a greenwashed recapitulation of the same old megscaled factory farm.
Apparently many of you are ignorant to agriculture, which is exactly what the elite wanted. Corporate agriculture is the equivalent of mining our soil to get rapid harvests. Topsoil is being lost, and it takes time to build topsoil. Fertilizer is now being spread over subsoil to facilitate corn-growing.
Organic agricultural methods (crop rotation, green manures, and the use of livestock) shows lower yields at first but they surpass yields per acre after the soil has become healthy, compared with mono-farms.
A single person can manage about two acres, and those two acres will bring in at least $8,000/acre a year, so $16,000. Two people can manage five acres reasonably well and more than double their income.
Meanwhile, you being a very small farmer of very productive land, will be able to offer your organic products at the same prices as supermarkets, and have people begging for it as a result
In short, take care of your soil, and it will take care of you. Good luck.
So you want to be a farmer. Good for you. Buy a piece of land and get to work. See if you can edge out a living. See how many single Moms on social security can afford the organic food you have to sell at a price twice as high as that in the non-organic section to make a living (no matter how hard).
Among the people I know the only ones who "need to have their organic food" are the ones making six figure salaries by being screen-deep in emails. That's a fact.
Me, I am more hoping that ALL kids in America can get a diet which contains ALL necessary nutrients and is not based on corn syrup. That's all I want. Call me a sell-out. I don't care about the Yuppie dream of all organic farming. I just want well fed kids and adults at a price they can afford even on social security. If at some point artificial chemicals were involved, so be it.
Even your modestly scaled down dream (compared to Ms. Woginrich's more idealistic one) will never happen until and unless Congress radically changes the farm subsidy structure. Currently, there are no appreciable farm subsidies for fresh fruits and vegetables. Instead, we have corn as the most heavily subsidized crop in the U.S., and the vast majority of that goes to animal feed--the rest for high fructose corn sweeteners and other additives of the type Pollan discusses in "The Omnivore's Dilemma."
We need to ramp down production of animal meats, and go back to a pre-WW II consumption level. No one is entitled to cheap beef at the cost of environmental degradation (e.g. the oceanic "dead zones" from nitrogen fertilizer run-off) and health (fresh fruits and vegetables being more expensive than non-nutritious products that derive from those heavily subsidized crops and are therefore cheaper).
If you want small farms, you'll need to pay much higher prices for food, not that there is anything wrong with that. You're losing small farms because they are not economical at the current price structure for food.
Corporate farming is no panacea, either. Farming is more art than science. Farmers over time, and family farmers over generations, get to know their land, how it works, how to work it, what happens in drought, what happens with too much rain, what crops work, what crops don't. Corporations will never have a clue.
Basically, Jenna is saying she wants to be Amish. That's attractive for some but not so much for others. I'm not sure our food future can be built on such retrograde agriculture unless we allow the banks to fail and stop all federal bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
You've identified another key issue in this debate: the relative unwillingness of Americans to spend a decent amount of income on food. Americans by and large believe they are entitled to "cheap" food. It's cliche, but you do "get what you pay for," and if you buy cheap, you're probably purchasing a lot of heavily processed foods that derive ultimately from high-fructose corn sweeteners, partially hydrogenated soy and/or vegetable oil, etc.
Fresh fruits and vegetables do cost more, certainly. Americans on the average only spend about 10% of their disposable income on food, compared to much higher percentages world-wide (and this is compared to "middle income" people world-wide and not those of subsistence-level ).
Many middle-income Americans seem to be able to shoe-horn flashy new Ipods, flatscreen television sets, Blackberries, etc. into their budgets--not to mention DVDs, trips to the movie theater, etc., but then claim they can't afford to eat healthfully.
Your comment was alright until you said Jenna wants to be Amish. She wrote this blog on a computer, does that tell you anything?
Look at it this way, if the price of oil gets above $200/barrel, a lot of us might be more Amish-like.
Sustainable farming = oxymoron. Well, at least with small farms. Get over it people, the family farm concept is as dead as most farmers are old. Large scale corporate farming is the only way farming will be done very soon. Why? Look at the costs. In 1966, the year before I was born, my grandfather purchased a brand new John Deer combine. He paid it off over two harvests. Today, on average a combine costs roughly $32,000 to $35,000 per year to own. No small farm (which, by the way, is a small business) is going to be able to afford to stay in business very soon. And the idea of small, organic farms is just not doable on a large scale, not when we have seven billion to feed.
Actually, small farms are the only way to have sustainable agriculture. The family farm concept will never be dead because some us will always want to grow our own fruits & vegetables and raise our own chickens, goats, etc.
While it's true there will soon be 7 billion people to feed, the oceans were supposed to be an unlimited resource for protein. Now we have predictions of total extinctions of some fish species because the oceans were greedily plundered by corporate fishing fleets. So now we should put all of our faith into corporate farms to do the right thing? Corporations that are planting bio-tech crops, applying petrochemical fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides and also heavily subsidized.
The idea of small, organic farms can be done on a large scale. Thomas Jefferson envisioned a vast utopia of small farms across the US. But we've let him down by paving over some of the best farmland to create a vast urban sprawl instead. Things are changing though, and I believe some of us will rise to the occasion, filling the void left by the retiring farmers. Maybe not enough to feed 7 billion people, but enough to feed ourselves and our neighbors.
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