O.K. this a LOOOONG post but I need to get it off my chest. I welcome any input on my opinion, whether you agree or disagree with what I have to say.
I'm pretty sure someone already put this up but I could not find it so here it is again -an ag bashing piece from Time magazine.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1917458,00.html
Stuff like this just makes my blood boil but yet in some strange ways, there are a few things in it that are similar to the cumulative outcome in my thinking over the past decade or more.
The thing that makes me really angry about articles like this is that the writers, who usually claim a morally superior position and attitude (who does that bring to mind?), NEVER put the true responsibility for the "development" of our modern practices where it rightfully belongs.
The usual named "culprit" is the greedy farmer/producer cum industrialist who does what he/she does for the dirty word "profit" We are accused of raping or mining the soil or environment and natural resources solely for the purpose of lining our pockets. And we don't care how much we "abuse" the livestock or land in our unbridled efforts to Make More Money.
I have yet to see the wealth that we are to be piling up as a result of our lascivious efforts.
I have seen family members take the popular position of ag bashing and they have learned that if they hold those "unstable" views, they damn well better be careful about how they express them around me or they will get told where to get off pretty quickly.
I have absolutely no patience for those bleeding heart tree hugger types that have had their heads pumped full in school or by the MSM as to the evils of modern agriculture.
And then, I review my thought patterns over the last 10 or 15 years about the state of agriculture and the direction it has taken.
I will openly state that I do not like what I see. Both on the farm, field and on the grocery shelf.
On both the economic front and the production-related side.
When I see the perennial degradation of financial margins and then also of the soil and environment, I am forced to think that something is indeed wrong.
At one time, the average family farm was the rock solid basis for all communities. Neighbours cooperated in their attempts to raise food and life's work, grief and joys were shared by most within a town's reach.
The money was generated locally and spent locally. Food safety scares, if there were any, were local and easily contained. Today, a contaminated batch of food can be disbursed across the nation in hours, affecting milli0ons of people.
The fields were smaller and usually formed around the natural layout and very local soil type and characteristics, allowing the best utilization of the land according to its drainage and productive capability.
Continual crop rotation, usually having several consecutive years of hay and legumes and application of manure, limited the amount of soil exposure to the elements that cause erosion. We farmers all know the importance of soil aggregate size and how it contributes to moisture retention and soil stability.
Without even knowing what they were doing, farmers from the past had the best, healthiest soil ever as a result of their old-fashioned methods.
But machinery kept getting bigger and more "efficient", reducing the need for physical labour, consequently sending more and more people to the towns to work in less agriculturally related jobs. Jobs that were cleaner and proffered a paycheck at the end of the week.
I am describing in a few paragraphs a phenomenon that took place over a period of a hundred years or more.
Instead of these displaced being active food producers, they became consumers.
Consumers who began to develop a constantly growing craving for better, sweeter, more refined foods. And at lower prices, hence the eventual rise of the big box stores. Stores that have so much buying power that they could dictate to the ever-dwindling number of processors how much they were going to pay for the goods that they would stock on their shelves.
And the penny pinching consumers love it because the less they had to pay for food, the more they had to spend on the frills -SUV's, big screen tv, cottage . . . . . the list goes on. In a direct way, cheap food has contributed to one of the strongest consumer societies in the history of the world.
But because of the steadily increasing productive capacity of the farmer, he was able to individually control more land than before. But the result of those increasing holdings, the farmer needed to treat huge blocks of land in a uniform fashion, thus totally failing to give the various features of a particular block of land the attention it needed to maintain its unique productive integrity.
Hence, we see some of the more sensitive land in our area undergoing some EXTREME and unhealthy changes, most notably erosion , as can be expected when our lighter soils are overworked, both seasonally and over the long term.
Another sight that just does not make sense is that of liquid hauling tankers moving hog and cattle manure as much as twenty miles from source for spreading on farms which had all the farm buildings removed by their absentee owners or cash renters. This manure is coming from mostly unprofitable mega barns that were constructed to capitalize on "economy of scale". What a joke, as many of those barns will likely be empty within a few years, victims of their own efficient success. They "efficiented" themselves right out of business!
How big is "big enough"? How efficient is "efficient enough"? The O/O of a nearby,very large dairy operation was complaining to me " . . . they are making us get so big nowadays . . ." to which I replied "When will you be big enough to decide for yourself what you should do?"
The answer seems to be - there is no such point in modern agriculture. If you are not growing, you are very soon swept aside by the charge led by ever increasing development of technology and its accompanying productive capability. All the while, we believe that the solution to low prices is to embrace greater productivity.
It has become a mad race to eventual oblivion for the majority of producers. The rate of attrition will only increase as technology enables fewer producers to control more land and production facilities.
And the price increases on the shelves seldom work their way back to the producer, because we have for too long tried to work within the market values established by a broken price discovery system. We cannot overcome poor prices by raising more of an undervalued commodity.
So, the current income crisis and unsustainable production practices in agriculture are the malignant confluence of stingy consumer spending habits, producer ego and greed and a lack of a competitive market for the foodstuffs that we produce. In far too many areas, we are NOT helping the soil and environment and bottom line with our resulting farming practices.
I have come to believe that the way we produce food today across all of our nations' breadbaskets is unsustainable, both economically and environmentally.
However, it is the WHOLE of society that is to blame for the state of modern agriculture as I perceive it.
The consumers want cheap food and we as producers have been foolish or short-sighted enough to try to give it to them. Because we were taught in college that efficiency was the ticket to success. Because we liked the toys that were developed to achieve the godlike status of efficiency.
Because we like the power trip that driving massive equipment gives us, or because we like to be seen in the crowd that boasts the most modern production facility.
Our local farm paper weekly sports many "Open House" announcements, a testimony to our insatiable appetite for the newest and the biggest of whatever technological toys are to be had.
Someone said it all started with the development of the steel moldboard plow. I think it started when people got too lazy to grow their own food.
To my way of thinking, the answer lies in smaller, not bigger. In micro production, not mega. In contentment with less, not ego-driven greed.
So now when I read an article like Time printed or hear someone criticize the way we farm, I tell them "THEN GROW YOUR OWN DAMN FOOD OR PAY THE PRICE" and between the look in my eye and my tone of voice, the criticism becomes decidedly less shrill.
If you read all of this you are one tough cookie.
I welcome your feedback.
I'm pretty sure someone already put this up but I could not find it so here it is again -an ag bashing piece from Time magazine.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1917458,00.html
Stuff like this just makes my blood boil but yet in some strange ways, there are a few things in it that are similar to the cumulative outcome in my thinking over the past decade or more.
The thing that makes me really angry about articles like this is that the writers, who usually claim a morally superior position and attitude (who does that bring to mind?), NEVER put the true responsibility for the "development" of our modern practices where it rightfully belongs.
The usual named "culprit" is the greedy farmer/producer cum industrialist who does what he/she does for the dirty word "profit" We are accused of raping or mining the soil or environment and natural resources solely for the purpose of lining our pockets. And we don't care how much we "abuse" the livestock or land in our unbridled efforts to Make More Money.
I have yet to see the wealth that we are to be piling up as a result of our lascivious efforts.
I have seen family members take the popular position of ag bashing and they have learned that if they hold those "unstable" views, they damn well better be careful about how they express them around me or they will get told where to get off pretty quickly.
I have absolutely no patience for those bleeding heart tree hugger types that have had their heads pumped full in school or by the MSM as to the evils of modern agriculture.
And then, I review my thought patterns over the last 10 or 15 years about the state of agriculture and the direction it has taken.
I will openly state that I do not like what I see. Both on the farm, field and on the grocery shelf.
On both the economic front and the production-related side.
When I see the perennial degradation of financial margins and then also of the soil and environment, I am forced to think that something is indeed wrong.
At one time, the average family farm was the rock solid basis for all communities. Neighbours cooperated in their attempts to raise food and life's work, grief and joys were shared by most within a town's reach.
The money was generated locally and spent locally. Food safety scares, if there were any, were local and easily contained. Today, a contaminated batch of food can be disbursed across the nation in hours, affecting milli0ons of people.
The fields were smaller and usually formed around the natural layout and very local soil type and characteristics, allowing the best utilization of the land according to its drainage and productive capability.
Continual crop rotation, usually having several consecutive years of hay and legumes and application of manure, limited the amount of soil exposure to the elements that cause erosion. We farmers all know the importance of soil aggregate size and how it contributes to moisture retention and soil stability.
Without even knowing what they were doing, farmers from the past had the best, healthiest soil ever as a result of their old-fashioned methods.
But machinery kept getting bigger and more "efficient", reducing the need for physical labour, consequently sending more and more people to the towns to work in less agriculturally related jobs. Jobs that were cleaner and proffered a paycheck at the end of the week.
I am describing in a few paragraphs a phenomenon that took place over a period of a hundred years or more.
Instead of these displaced being active food producers, they became consumers.
Consumers who began to develop a constantly growing craving for better, sweeter, more refined foods. And at lower prices, hence the eventual rise of the big box stores. Stores that have so much buying power that they could dictate to the ever-dwindling number of processors how much they were going to pay for the goods that they would stock on their shelves.
And the penny pinching consumers love it because the less they had to pay for food, the more they had to spend on the frills -SUV's, big screen tv, cottage . . . . . the list goes on. In a direct way, cheap food has contributed to one of the strongest consumer societies in the history of the world.
But because of the steadily increasing productive capacity of the farmer, he was able to individually control more land than before. But the result of those increasing holdings, the farmer needed to treat huge blocks of land in a uniform fashion, thus totally failing to give the various features of a particular block of land the attention it needed to maintain its unique productive integrity.
Hence, we see some of the more sensitive land in our area undergoing some EXTREME and unhealthy changes, most notably erosion , as can be expected when our lighter soils are overworked, both seasonally and over the long term.
Another sight that just does not make sense is that of liquid hauling tankers moving hog and cattle manure as much as twenty miles from source for spreading on farms which had all the farm buildings removed by their absentee owners or cash renters. This manure is coming from mostly unprofitable mega barns that were constructed to capitalize on "economy of scale". What a joke, as many of those barns will likely be empty within a few years, victims of their own efficient success. They "efficiented" themselves right out of business!
How big is "big enough"? How efficient is "efficient enough"? The O/O of a nearby,very large dairy operation was complaining to me " . . . they are making us get so big nowadays . . ." to which I replied "When will you be big enough to decide for yourself what you should do?"
The answer seems to be - there is no such point in modern agriculture. If you are not growing, you are very soon swept aside by the charge led by ever increasing development of technology and its accompanying productive capability. All the while, we believe that the solution to low prices is to embrace greater productivity.
It has become a mad race to eventual oblivion for the majority of producers. The rate of attrition will only increase as technology enables fewer producers to control more land and production facilities.
And the price increases on the shelves seldom work their way back to the producer, because we have for too long tried to work within the market values established by a broken price discovery system. We cannot overcome poor prices by raising more of an undervalued commodity.
So, the current income crisis and unsustainable production practices in agriculture are the malignant confluence of stingy consumer spending habits, producer ego and greed and a lack of a competitive market for the foodstuffs that we produce. In far too many areas, we are NOT helping the soil and environment and bottom line with our resulting farming practices.
I have come to believe that the way we produce food today across all of our nations' breadbaskets is unsustainable, both economically and environmentally.
However, it is the WHOLE of society that is to blame for the state of modern agriculture as I perceive it.
The consumers want cheap food and we as producers have been foolish or short-sighted enough to try to give it to them. Because we were taught in college that efficiency was the ticket to success. Because we liked the toys that were developed to achieve the godlike status of efficiency.
Because we like the power trip that driving massive equipment gives us, or because we like to be seen in the crowd that boasts the most modern production facility.
Our local farm paper weekly sports many "Open House" announcements, a testimony to our insatiable appetite for the newest and the biggest of whatever technological toys are to be had.
Someone said it all started with the development of the steel moldboard plow. I think it started when people got too lazy to grow their own food.
To my way of thinking, the answer lies in smaller, not bigger. In micro production, not mega. In contentment with less, not ego-driven greed.
So now when I read an article like Time printed or hear someone criticize the way we farm, I tell them "THEN GROW YOUR OWN DAMN FOOD OR PAY THE PRICE" and between the look in my eye and my tone of voice, the criticism becomes decidedly less shrill.
If you read all of this you are one tough cookie.
I welcome your feedback.