If you have been paying attention to the news, you will have noticed the undercurrent of concern over the rise of food and commodity prices. One report by Oxfam International, an aid agency, suggests that the price of food may more than double in the next 20 years. “The food system is buckling under intense pressure from climate change, ecological degradation, population growth, rising energy prices, rising demand for meat and dairy products, and competition for land from biofuels, industry, and urbanization,” Oxfam said in its report “Growing a Better Future.”
The factors Oxfam lists are all undoubtedly relevant. Climate change has always been a factor in agriculture. For people who have never lived in a rural environment, it's easy to believe that the climate is a static system in which the seasons repeat with a dull regularity, each year like the one before, but that's never the case. Growing up on the farm, I remember my dad telling me about the hot and dry years of the early 1950's, and I remember some pretty wet years in the early 1970's.
Population growth creates a demand for farm products, and also creates competition for energy resources that drives up the price of fuel needed to operate the farms. In that respect these two factors can offset each other, as an increased demand can drive up prices and provide funds needed to pay higher operating costs. On the other hand, ecological degradation is a factor which may come into play in a differnent sense than that which is widely taught in schools. In the 1960's, chemicals were widely introduced into farming and laid the groundwork necessary for the transition which occurred in the 1980's. Before the 1980's, farms were small and labor-intensive family operations. Even with the advent of mechanization, many trips over the fields were needed to plow, disk (twice), harrow, plant, hoe (twice), cultivate (as many as four times) and harvest a crop. The small farmer of that era typically kept some combination of cows, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, geese, and the like, some of which were taken once or twice a year to be sold for slaughter. These all had to be tended at least twice a day. Also, the feedlots had to be cleaned regularly, a process which fertilized the land.
The large industrial agribusiness operations of today typically operate in a totally different manner. Grain operators produce only grain crops, planting a 70 or 80 foot wide stripe in one pass, applying insecticide and herbicide for pest and weed control, with no tillage needed. While there may be an additional application of chemicals before harvest, that is all the fieldwork that some operators will perform. This process is very efficient, of course, and it does reduce soil erosion. Livestock operations meanwhile focus only on the production of a meat product. Feedlots produce, for example, thousands of head of beef contracted to processing companies. These feedlots also produce unpleasant odors and tons of waste product, which is the ecological degradation that often comes to mind. These operations also require fleets of trucks to supply grain for the livestock.
The ecological degradation I fear is more subtle. In the small farms of yesteryear, animal waste was applied to the land in a rotation which covered all the crop and pastureland every few years. Until the late 1960's, with the advent of chemical farming, I do not recall ever hearing about dangerous concentrations in groundwater or runoff. The concentration was very low and provided a beneficial return of fertilizer and trace elements to the land, and the odor dissipated very quickly. Although many people believe trace elements are a necessary component of foodstuffs, modern agribusiness does not provide this return of trace elements. The natural fertilizer which the small farmer used is concentrated at the large feedlot where it is a nuisance rather than a benefit. Trace elements are typically not considered, so the land becomes depleted of these. Modern agribusiness treats land as a production machine: inputs in, crop out. Fertilizer is provided only in terms of the chemicals N, P, and K needed to produce a specific crop. Treating the land as a machine system may lead to a long term degradation in the quality and richness of the soil.
Oxfam's report notes that the rate of growth of food production has been cut in half in the past few years. This is a result, oddly enough, of the intersection of the demand for efficiency in farm operations and the reality of farms. Farms, in most areas, are broken up into fields of various sizes and shapes, not because it is most convenient, but because the lay of the land demands it. In addition to property lines and roadways, there are rivers, streams, ditches, hills, swales, ledges, and tree lines. Depending on the area, arable tracts might be as small as one or two acres. An 80 foot wide machine can't really even be used in such a small tract. Such machines have to be unfolded from road transport configuration to be used, and refolded after use, and that process takes longer than the time to work small fields. These machines cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and efficiency demands that they be used in larger fields to minimize time waste, so the small fields are abandoned. If you look at the land as you drive through, for example, eastern Kansas, or Missouri, or any area which has had smaller farms, you can see for yourself that fields are being abandoned to brush and trees. In the days of horse-powered farming and early mechanization, a farmer might work a strip up to 8 feet wide, or as little as 12 to 14 inches. It might take half a day to plow that small field, but it would be put into production, whereas today it is not. So the consequence of improved efficiency results in fewer acres used, and the any increase in the rate of production per acre begins to be offset as acreage is abandoned.
Another component of the agribusiness system is vertical integration. Vertical integration simply means that the business controls everything from plow to plate. As food-producing corporations gain more influence in agribusiness, a major change in emphasis can be seen. The older, traditional free enterprise system included thousands of small farms, each maximizing its production to bring home the maximum income. The free enterprise system (unlike the communist system, which produced only starvation) tended to produce a bonanza of food, so much so that the government stepped in to "help" in the 1960's, with payments to farmers to take land out of production because there was an oversupply and prices were low. Corporations are in business to make money, however. They will seek to maximize their profit, and with vertical integration, a corporation can control the market and minimize competition to ensure profitability. They will do this by producing the optimum amount of food to be sold at the optimum price, and there are formulas to calculate this. "Optimum" definitely does not mean an oversupply with low consumer prices. It will mean that amount of food which will sell at the highest price that most (but not all) people can pay.
While there will continue to be small farms, these will become "boutique" operations specializing in higher quality and higher prices to compete with the megafarms. And heaven help us if the government steps in. The government managed the farms in the USSR and just about starved their people to death, as no one was actually accountable for or profited from food production. In short, expect food prices to rise while quantity and quality decrease.
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