Choices farmers have to make, you chose

[patandchickens]

Now back to the question asked as they are the only real answers ag has.

They're the only real answers because they're the only QUESTIONS that Western (largely meaning, American) big agriculture has been ASKING for the past 50 or 60 years.

If you assume that the solution has to look like <such-and-such>, then yes, that's the only solution you're likely to see. (I don't mean you personally)

IMO, the Green Revolution was a catastrophically bad development, in terms of its effects on the world (arguably maybe worse than the invention of nuclear weapons even, as there is some chance that those *won't* be used).

It sure seemed like a very good idea at the time, obviously. Look, ways to get so much higher yields! Let's get *everyone* to do it! But with the advantage now of being able to see what has happened, whoa nelly did that ever not work out. We ended up with many MORE starving people than there were before, and more susceptibility to major continent- or worldwide famines, and way less ability (yet more pressure) to do anything about it.

The analyses I've ever seen have been that the world has no shortage of food being GROWN. The problem is that vast amounts go to waste (either actual waste, or 'waste' in the sense of overfeeding those who don't need it rather than being distributed so that everyone can have 'enough').

Nobody (that I know of) is saying that *farmers* are the problem, per se. The problem is the whole system that has emerged, all its parts interrelated, each part of the reason why the other parts are the way they are now:

-- Americans expect dirt-cheap food. Why? Because it got somewhat cheaper than it had historically been, and they got used to spending a higher fraction of income on luxuries, and that sparked massive growth in the "ways to get people to spend their money on your basically unnecessary product" sector of the economy, and now people feel they somehow "can't" spend more on food because it would mean cancelling the cable package and only buying a couple items of clothing per year; and honestly if everyone DID start putting, say, 20-30% of their income into food, it would cause massive economic chaos because an awful high percentage of the population is currently dependant for their *jobs* on the basically-unnecessary-products sector.

-- Americans (much of the world, actually) now expects all food items to be available all the time, and looking like a magazine photo, and to base their daily meals on what they feel like eating rather than on what is realistically available.

-- because corn and soy (and to an, I think, lesser extent also wheat) CAN easily be produced in jimungous huge amounts if one wants, at least in the short term i.e. less than a century or so, industry has thunk up ways to create giant pervasive demand for these things by using them for nonfood products, or as ingredients that food does not actually NEED (e.g. corn syrup). The more things you can get people wantin' your product for, the more of your product you can sell, simple economics. Unfortunately the result is that a lot of things that really *needn't* depend on corn or soy, and in many cases probably *shouldn't*, DO, meaning it is extra hard to change the situation.

-- Too many people - including, if you will pardon me, many farmers themselves - have by now plain ol' FORGOTTEN that the "big oil-dependant vast monocultures of just a few crops" model is by no means the only possible way to construct a successful agricultural base for a society. (I don't mean just corn-wheat-soy, btw, as similar though smaller-scale and more-regional situations exist with various vegetable crops). The Mennonites generally do real well, especially if you look at success as not so much "how much can you produce in your best year" but "how bad is your worst year". Many traditional farming systems all over the world really worked pretty well too, in all various ways, again with the emphasis being on bombproofness rather than on best-case yield. As Rosalind says, other technologies such as hydroponics are valuable too, obviously not for soybeans but really the country does not NEED to depend heavily on soy (it *chooses* to, but that is a choice not necessity)

-- And, as in anything where there are politics, personal reputations, lifelong habits of advocacy, and (most of all) JUMBO HUGE amounts of corporate money involved... the situation is just really not easy to change. Thus, when attempts to do things differently are made, and even in many cases *work*, people would still rather (for all sorts of reasons) just sit back and say No, You Can't Possibly Do It That Way, rather than grasp the precariousness of the current state of the world and TRY.

Farmers are no more the problem than any of the rest of us. They are *part* of it, but by now it is completely NOT a finger-pointing situation, and I do not think it is sensible or even POSSIBLE to try to tease out who causes what. The point is, the entire system is just untenable, causing lots of problems in the short term and unsustainable in the long run *anyhow*.

Honestly I haven't the faintest clue what a sweeping, efficient solution would be; I don't think there is one.

I think the best anyone can do is to put their money where their principles and common-sense are, and support more sustainably grown stuff (both in terms of how things are grown, where things are grown, and WHAT is grown), and get it further through all our thick heads (myself included) that just because things have been one way all our lives does not mean that we can afford to try to make it STAY that way.

JMHO,

Pat

 

[patandchickens]

Why do you think traditionally non-corn/soybean areas are now growing corn/soybeans.....because the other crops didn't pay.

Because corn and soybeans are heavily subsidized.

No, they aren't......corn has a LOAN value of $1.98..that's it. Common misconception. Most government Ag $$ goes to welfare and schools.

For some reason you seem to be misunderstanding the point here.

The point isn't how the money for crop subsidies compares to OTHER gov't expenditures, ag-related or otherwise. That is irrelevant to the argument.

The point is that agricultural subsidies, of several sorts, artificially lower (usually) the market price of a commodity such as corn or whatever, greatly changing the economics of farming and altering the equation of "what crop(s) does it make sense for you to grow?"

First, the original (I think?) reason for subsidy programs was to stabilize prices. By guaranteeing a certain minimum price, and by using subsidies as a tool to control how much acreage of <particular crop> are planted per year, you get less variation in commodity price between years. This is sort of good for farmers, in that it is a buffer against really bad years. Mostly however what it is good for is those people (and companies, !!) who are buying (also, in many cases, reselling) those commodities, because it eliminates a great source of peril and uncertainty.

A second "benefit" of subsidies that artifically control the price of a commodity is that they help to reduce or minimize the potential for foreign competition in the country where the subsidized crops are being grown, and in many cases can make that country actually *better* able to outcompete foreign growers in their OWN (i.e. foreign) countries. This ensures a wider market for the commodity, i.e. ya can sell more of it and make more money.

The problem is that, from a farmer's (and large corporate agribiz) viewpoint, once you have commodity prices being messed 'round with this way, it only makes ECONOMIC SENSE to base your decisions on those rules.

Thus, if the US Gov't is willing to spend taxpayer money to keep the price of milk or corn Real Low, the margin for the farmer kind of disappears and it is only economically viable TO produce in very large-scale ways, which in turn *are* very low-margin and inflexible and thus require subsidies to continue in order for those systems to continue to exist.

Also, by using gov't payouts to remove some of the risk and uncertainty inherent in farming, it also removes any much incentive to use OTHER means of minimizing risk and uncertainty, i.e. growing a variety of different things, growing varieties less-apt to fail utterly in bad years, and growing a mixture of varieties so that *something* is more apt to do well in any given year.

So the various mechanisms that the government uses to control the am't of <particular crop> planted, and its price when harvested, actually do have MAJOR effects on how it makes sense to farm.

Much of what is taken for granted as good and necessary these days is really artificial ARTEFACT of those programs.


Pat, whose parents were both USDA research chemists

 

[ninnymary]

Your yard is even smaller than mine! I have .167th of an acre. Interesting challenges doing things very small scale.

O.K. Mine is so small I can't even measure it!

 

[wifezilla]

many farmers themselves - have by now plain ol' FORGOTTEN that the "big oil-dependant vast monocultures of just a few crops" model is by no means the only possible way to construct a successful agricultural base for a society.

The point isn't how the money for crop subsidies compares to OTHER gov't expenditures, ag-related or otherwise. That is irrelevant to the argument.

The point is that agricultural subsidies, of several sorts, artificially lower (usually) the market price of a commodity such as corn or whatever, greatly changing the economics of farming and altering the equation of "what crop(s) does it make sense for you to grow?"

Exactly. Thank you

Here is an interesting case study on subsidies...

"Thanks to federal protection of the domestic sugar industry, ethanol subsidies, subsidized grain exports, and various other programs, ADM has cost the American economy billions of dollars since 1980 and has indirectly cost Americans tens of billions of dollars in higher prices and higher taxes over that same period. At least 43 percent of ADM's annual profits are from products heavily subsidized or protected by the American government. Moreover, every $1 of profits earned by ADM's corn sweetener operation costs consumers $10, and every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30"

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-241.html

 

[wifezilla]

Mine is so small I can't even measure it!

 

[Beekissed]

Good ol' Pat! Can always count on you for an intelligent discourse full of facts.

Me? I would say that grandiose feelings that I "have to feed the masses" and the need to have a "livable income" from doing so seems like a lot of rationalization for the use of agribiz methods to do so.

Cheap food? Yes, it may be cheap....and it promptly contributes to the rising health crisis in this nation. Perception is everything and this food does not come cheap, any way you look at it.

Anyhoo, this is a topic that can go round and round. The facts remain that, if these farmers weren't making any money to farm monoculture crops using GM seed, they would just stop doing that and try something else.

Yes, they are making good profits on their "cheap food for the masses" techniques. No, they wouldn't make as much if they were to farm responsibly. Bottom line? Money.

 

[wifezilla]

Interesting interview with Joel Salatin...

"Food, Inc suggests some shocking links between big government and big business in the food industry, along with some appalling statistics. For instance, in the 1970s, the top five beef packers controlled 25% of the market; now the top four control more than 80% meaning that if ever meat is tainted by bacteria or chemicals it has the potential to reach vast numbers of people; in 1972, 50,000 food safety inspections were conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration, and three decades later that number had gone down to 9,164; 70% of all processed foods have some genetically modified ingredient; in 2007, E coli from food affected 73,000 Americans something the film correlates directly with the increase in consumption of processed foods and the scale and cleanliness of the country's huge industrial slaughterhouses. But beyond the statistics, the sheer sight of carcasses being dunked in ammonia, endlessly and mechanically, would make any meat eater want to stop eating meat. The very banality of it the fact that we could, the filmmakers suggest, change the world with every bite yet somehow refuse to is horrifying."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/31/food-industry-environment

 

[seedcorn]

OK, can we stay on point?

$1.98 farm loan did not lower/raise corn prices as NO FARMER would grow corn for $1.98, it's so below production costs. To suggest that is beyond funny.

Every country in the world controls the food supply. Every country keeps it cheap so the masses can eat. Let the masses go unfed, you can't own enough weapons. Only the elitest think that the masses should go unfed. (this is another argument for another thread).

They're the only real answers because they're the only QUESTIONS that Western (largely meaning, American) big agriculture has been ASKING for the past 50 or 60 years.

This is so condescending. You think farmers aren't always looking for alternatives? People not in Ag, consider us stupid dirt farmers, too stupid to even understand the question. I wish EVERY person was forced to work one year with a farmer, put together a cash flow, have to make payroll, pay bills and produce a crop. Meanwhile you have those not in ag telling us how to do our job (with no knowledge how to grow anything outside of a few pansies) and government redoing our economics every year so decisions made today may be wrong tomorrow.

Farmers are faced (being blamed for) with environmental laws/regs. Ag is now tracing back all the chemicals being found in streams, rivers, lakes, oceans, guess where they lead to? John Q citizen as he uses too much of everything in his garden, yard, etc which then goes to run off. Farmers are regulated how much manure they can apply per acre.......do any of you have any idea what your levels are in your gardens? Guess what, when it rains, it is washed into ground water.

 

[vfem]

OK, can we stay on point?

$1.98 farm loan did not lower corn prices as NO FARMER would grow corn for $1.98, it's so below production costs. To suggest that is beyond funny.

Every country in the world controls the food supply. Every country keeps it cheap so the masses can eat. Let the masses go unfed, you can't own enough weapons. Only the elitest think that the masses should go unfed. (this is another argument for another thread).

They're the only real answers because they're the only QUESTIONS that Western (largely meaning, American) big agriculture has been ASKING for the past 50 or 60 years.

This is so condescending. You think farmers aren't always looking for alternatives? People not in Ag, consider us stupid dirt farmers, too stupid to even understand the question. I wish EVERY person was forced to work one year with a farmer, put together a cash flow, have to make payroll, pay bills and produce a crop. Meanwhile you have those not in ag telling us how to do our job (with no knowledge how to grow anything outside of a few pansies) and government redoing our economics every year so decisions made today may be wrong tomorrow.

Farmers are faced (being blamed for) with environmental laws/regs. Ag is now tracing back all the chemicals being found in streams, rivers, lakes, oceans, guess where they lead to? John Q citizen as he uses too much of everything in his garden, yard, etc which then goes to run off. Farmers are regulated how much manure they can apply per acre.......do any of you have any idea what your levels are in your gardens? Guess what, when it rains, it is washed into ground water.

I think she meant it in the sense of such DEPARTMENTS in government and not the individual farmers or unions. Think of it as, the government determines what gets written down and discussed through newspapers globally. The farmers voices don't carry the same.

Either way, things are not working... I think it should be a global effort at this point and there should be a WORLD organization of farmers at this point WITHOUT government control on decisions. Once a vote a reached by the people who feed the world, the world has to try thing their way and the governments should let the funds be controlled how the industry wants to move.

That said, the people get the final votes on how far the industry has to go. Like additional collected taxes to be passed down as rebates to the small farmer who tackles less orthodox crops...

Of course, this is by no means perfect... its just shifting the say so around in a more global control, which I think is important rather then letting the finacial key holders determine price.

 

[gardengrower]

i totally agree with seedcorn on this one