Farm Economics
Helping Farmers
Published May 12, 2009 @ 08:30PM PT
And I only mean the title somewhat ironically.
First, there's good news about Pigford Remedy Claims Act, which the Obama administration will finally put some budgetary muscle behind.
The Pigford Act is based on a class action case that successfully proved in court that the federal government farm programs had been systematically discriminating against Black farmers. As Eddie Gehman Kohan writes at Civil Eats, this is a two-fer: doing the right thing and helping a group of farmers who usually have smaller farms.
But then with the other hand, the Obama administration is going to be actively promoting biotech. As Tom Laskawy writes, not only is biotech part and parcel of encouraging the use of toxic pesticides, it costs more while delivering very little:
... But while I’m not willing to overlook Vilsack’s presentation of the false choice of GM seeds as key to food security, I would hope that he’s serious about bringing what he referred to as “agricultural science” front and center. Because if he does, he’ll see that perhaps, at last, the research tide has turned against GM seeds. Most notably the Union of Concerned Scientists just released an analysis of 20 years’ worth of scientific research designed to determine the extent to which GM seeds have improved overall crop yields. The answer? Only one GM crop—Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready corn—has shown ANY yield increase. And it has managed a mere 3-4% total increase over 13 years. That’s it, folks. No huge jumps in productivity. No magic seeds.
... Unlike the US, the UN understands all this, which is why they released a report declaring that organic techniques are ideal for answering the developing world’s agricultural needs. In fact, adopting the basic organic techniques of composting, mulching, and crop rotation could double or even quadruple current yields in Africa. Take that, Monsanto!
Of course, organic practices aren’t patented. There are no license fees or expensive supplies. No flying in compost from Iowa or manure from North Carolina. Just education and investment in “human capital.” ...
And consider the toll of pesticide-based agriculture:
... research by one of the most respected medical institutes in India recently found that farming villages using large amounts of pesticides have significantly higher rates of cancer than villages that use less of the chemicals.
... Singh says he noticed one of the first troubling clues in the late 1980s and early '90s: Peacocks — India's national bird — disappeared from the fields. Over the years, seven people in his family got cancer — and three of them died. People in Jajjal and surrounding villages got cancer, too.
Singh says he saw that many fellow farmers were overusing pesticides and not handling the toxic chemicals safely. ...
Someone promoting pesticide use might zero in on the fact that the farmers were handling these chemicals improperly. They might point out that taking illiterate subsistence farmers out of the equation and modernizing farming, industrializing it, would solve that.
But look, these increases in cancer and other diseases are seen in farm country in the US, where the literacy rate is somewhere around 99 percent and farming is a highly capitalized industry.
It's a question of how fast farmers are being exposed to carcinogens and neurotoxins that by and large don't degrade and are being sprayed on food that the farmers and everyone else eats. This stuff doesn't break down into plain water, it often accumulates in the bodies of the people and animals who eat it.
If high doses of pesticide are bad for you, well, wait a while and you'll get one. Just keep eating. Wait a few generations until all the living things on the planet are saturated in them, and we'll all be getting the exposure rates of these villages in rural India. I hate to think how toxic the fish population will be, and fully expect that my grandkids will end up being raised to think of all fish as poisonous if we keep doing what we're doing.
While it is possible for people to decrease the activity of unhealthful genes through lifestyle changes, even cancer-promoting genes, when you can end up with teenagers and 20-somethings with deadly cancers that weren't seen in their families 100 years ago, there's a problem that goes beyond lifestyle. There's a problem that goes beyond diet.
If we want to really help farmers, lets stop encouraging them to use expensive, unnecessary technology that can give their families cancer. Let's build up their knowledge repertoire and the range of crops they can earn a living by selling. Let's stop paying lip service to the vital work they do and actually incentivize them to have a safe workplace.
Branding Food As Politics
Published May 12, 2009 @ 12:02AM PT
When I was at the Brooklyn Food Conference, one of the things that came up briefly was the importance of branding.
Think about going out of town and needing to buy something. Maybe food, maybe something else. You look for the name of a store or restaurant chain that you know. Say you don't find one you recognize, but you go into a place that looks like they'll have what you need. Do you find yourself looking first for a familiar brand or dish before you'll start evaluating the alternatives?
If you're like most people, including me, the answer is probably yes. And why?
First, it isn't anything to be ashamed of. We have a lot of things on our minds at any given time. The world is full of choices and interesting stimuli; so much of it in fact that our brains use up a good few neurons suppressing much of our conscious awareness of non-essential information.
4 Reasons Why 'Modern' Agriculture Is Bad For You
Published May 07, 2009 @ 10:35AM PT
The agribusiness and crop chemical companies are enamored of the word "sustainability" these days because, I guess, they think it's a magic word that can wipe the slate clean.
I just don't think anything can be considered sustainable that has such obviously bad effects on our health, and the health of the world around us. Swine flu's all the rage these days, but industrial agriculture didn't start being bad for us just this year.
So here are four of the negative effects of industrial agriculture on the well-being of people and the ecosystems we depend on, things that I don't think we can afford to keep doing in the long-term:
Genital feminization of male humans and animals: This one always gets them where it hurts, but the industrial pesticides used in agriculture are among the class of chemicals that mimics or stimulates estrogenic activity in the body and are linked, or suspected of being linked, to decreased sperm counts and genital abnormalities in male animals up and down the food chain.
Herbicides linked to cancer, neurological disorders: Nanaimo, British Columbia, has recently banned the use of herbicides on residential lawns based on the growing body of evidence that they're linked to a host of cancers, reproductive problems, respiratory illness and neurological effects from learning disorders to full-blown Parkinson's disease. The herbicides used on lawns are often just repackaged versions of the same chemicals, like Roundup, sold in bulk to farmers.
Antibiotics fed to livestock have created antibiotic-resistant bacteria: Called MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, these difficult to treat infections commonly only attack people with compromised immune systems and were once more commonly associated with hospital environments. They don't seem to have developed forms that are very easily transmissible, but they keep showing up in farm environments where low-dose antibiotics are used as growth promoters and infection preventives.
Plants absorb antibiotics from soil amendments: If you use manure from an animal that's been given lots of antibiotics as a plant fertilizer, the plants will incorporate those antibiotics into their tissue. Even people who eat organic food, even people who have a totally vegan diet, can thus get our livestock antibiotics passed on to them in low, irregular doses - just about the worst possible way to take antibiotics. The genes that confer antibiotic resistance in bacteria don't necessarily help them survive any better in the environment at large; which is why penicillin has become useful again, because the resistance genes faded from the active bacterial population after it fell into disuse. Maintaining regular exposure of bacterial populations to antibiotics puts positive selection pressure on antibiotic resistance genes.
And these are just a few of the lowlights of factory farm and livestock production. I could go on.
Sustainability very specifically means something we can afford to keep doing for the forseeable future, but this ... How much more poison can the living things on this planet, including us, take? How much more endocrine system damage, how many more birth defects, can be incurred without risking the most basic means of continuing animal life on Earth? How many more superbug evolutions can we encourage without setting off a global pandemic that our rapid international travel can spread around the entire planet in days?
Any single one of these practices poses serious health threats if continued, in fact, poses serious health threats now. Is becoming steadily sicker and weaker as a population a sustainable proposition? Is our food going to literally kill us, and not just because of the diabetes and heart disease?
Truly sustainable agriculture needs to take into account not only issues such as phosphorus scarcity, but the injury limits on the health reserves of living beings.
What Sustainability Means
Published May 04, 2009 @ 03:18PM PT
As Michael Pollan and many other people have repeatedly said, sustainability refers to things that can go on for a very long time. (The temptation to say forever is strong, but look, even the sun is going to burn out eventually.)
Sustainable practices are ones that can continue for the forseeable future without diminshment, at the least.
The official definition is more of an economic argument about not disadvantaging the future for the sake of the present, nor disadvantaging those in the present for the future. Yet the economy exists within the context of the environment and its capacity to support life; which should be obvious, but apparently isn't to everyone.
Ducks in the Back 40
Published May 04, 2009 @ 01:54PM PT
Cresting one of the many rolling hills in central North Dakota, I came upon yet another large gray lake with the strong wind making waves, ducks near the shore feeding and telephone poles running through the middle.
Wait, double take. Telephone poles? What are they doing in the middle of a lake?
One of several telltale signs that somewhere under several feet of "lake" water is a wheat field that won't be plowed this year or a pasture that won't be grazed.
Like the rest of the country four weeks ago, I heard about the flooding that plagued North Dakota. The media attention focused on the Red River Valley and the cities of Fargo and Grand Forks, and since western parts of the Dakotas tend to be drier, I assumed that the rest of North Dakota wasn't especially wet. Especially not four weeks later.
I was wrong.
Most of the conversations I had while traveling around North Dakota to discuss health care reform started with talk of the floods. The couple who owned one hotel I stayed at said they've had water in their basement for 4 weeks and they had to build a 3 foot dyke of sand and metal behind their hotel to keep it from being inundated.
Valley City, home of Congressman Earl Pomeroy, had to ban flushing toilets when their sewer system overflowed. The city resorted to placing hundreds of portable toilets scattered around town, and business and restaurants shut down due to lack of sanitation. The rumored new crime is people stealing them to put in their garages so they don't have to walk outside to use the loo.
My trip took me to Fargo and Grand Forks, a small town called Northwood west of Grand Forks, then west to Bismarck via Fargo. There was a stretch of road outside of Fargo where the road is literally surrounded on all sides by water - which makes one very conscious about cautious driving. The "shore" was at least a half mile away on either side, and a flock of geese could be seen in the distance. The Red River in Grand Forks is still well outside its banks, to the point where stairway railings simply disappeared into the cloudy water.
The "prairie pothole" region is known for its small wetlands, but even the flattest farm fields looked damp and mucky at the least and at worst had standing water between the plowed rows. As I drove west, there were stretches of drier fields leading me to think that the flooding was over, only to see more as I crested another hill. North Dakota had a wet fall, so much so that in a few places I even saw corn standing in the field. The farmer had clearly hoped that spring would allow him to harvest, but with the heavy snow this winter and the wetness now, that corn is a total loss.
While one wet year cannot make the case that climate change is shifting farmers' ability to grow crops, North Dakota has had a whole lot of flooding in the last dozen years. However, I fear that a wetter North Dakota might be a permanent condition unless we all take some drastic action to reduce the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. It's just too bad they can't grow rice that far north.
Meanwhile, there's more rain the forecast.
(Photo credit: law_keven on Flickr.)
Measuring Land Use Carbon Flow
Published May 01, 2009 @ 07:26PM PT
A bipartisan group led by Senators Harkin and Grassley is questioning the EPA's ability to measure net carbon flow from land use changes:
... A bipartisan group of 12 U.S. Senators led by Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) called on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) not to propose regulations assuming that greater U.S. biofuels use would increase carbon dioxide emissions.
The senators argued the data and methods for calculating such “indirect land use changes” such as from forest or grassland to crops are not adequately developed, and thus should not be used in ways making it harder for ethanol and biodiesel to meet requirements of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 for reduced carbon emissions from advanced biofuels under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). ...
I'm confused. As I've understood it, a lot of farmers are pretty keen to sell carbon offsets, and one presumes that these would also be predicated on measuring the net carbon flow of land use changes. Perhaps from crops to grassland, for example.
If government scientists at regulatory agencies, and the suggestion is that it's a problem with the state of the science itself, are incapable of calculating net carbon outflow to a land ecosystem, why should they be capable of calculating net carbon inflow to a land ecosystem?
... [Tom Vilsack] also seemed to be echoing some of the comments by environmental groups and Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, his chief sponsor for the secretary’s position, during the 2008 farm bill debate.
Those groups and Harkin have argued that traditional farm program payments should be dismantled and replaced with “greener” conservation program payments that would reward producers for reducing the carbon footprint in the farming practices. Markets for trading “carbon credits” have already sprung up in some areas. ...
I understand that slightly different things are being discussed. However, the underlying bodies of knowledge have a lot of overlap.
If agricultural carbon credits are to be a sound investment and, more importantly, to provide true added value to the goal of reducing global carbon emissions, the scientific models for describing land use changes and the physical/economic implications of their indirect impacts must be sound. If these are in truth poorly understood, then we're nowhere close to being able to credit farmers for increasing carbon sequestration in their farming practices.
Sen. Harkin is one of my favorite Senators and I rarely find myself disagreeing with him, but I don't really get where he's going with this line of reasoning.
Outsourcing Disease, Destruction
Published May 01, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
As linked to previously, wealthy countries whose own farmland is losing productivity are buying farmland in poor nations where the population may be illiterate and unaware of its rights when their governments approve selling their land out from under them.
Some of the countries have insisted that they'll hire locals, though industrial agriculture often explicitly employs fewer people, substituting fossil fuels and machinery for human labor. Some of them have promised to sell part of the crop locally, hopefully their will be jobs available for now-landless subsistence households that pay enough for them to buy a sufficiency of food.
Would it help if they promised to mitigate ecological damage? If industrial farming could really do that, countries practicing it probably wouldn't be so worried about losing farmland at home. I mean, it seems like it'd be less hassle to just take care of what you've got?
Would it help if they promised to be less polluting? Well, industrial agriculture needs a lot of chemicals in order to manage that prized workforce reduction. Biotech crops are notorious for having been most frequently engineered to tolerate pesticides, and for mainly being successful and a tremendous sales tool for chemicals like glyphosate, aka Roundup.
Do poor nations need their populations to have increased risks of birth defects during spraying season? I would submit that no one needs that.
Would it help if they promised to follow the highest standards of sanitary livestock practice? Well, look what a mess industrial livestock farming has made wherever it's been allowed. Let's take, say, hog farming.
The picture up at the top of this post is, obviously, of a family of pigs running around in a grass-covered pasture. To the immediate left is a picture of pigs in a confinement barn.
Which one of those lifestyles looks more sanitary for the pigs?
As it happens, the obvious answer is the correct one..
Factory farms are known breeding grounds for pathogens that regularly violate US environmental standards. So they've moved South, to countries where regulations are less stringent. Some bloggers are calling this the NAFTA flu, because NAFTA has a lot more to do with the spread of this farming method and its diseases than any pigs, as Robert Wallace writes at Farming Pathogens:
... There is, then, another reason why the ’swine flu’ tag fails. It detracts from an obvious point: pigs have very little to do with how influenza emerges. They didn’t organize themselves into cities of thousands of immuno-compromised pigs. They didn’t artificially select out the genetic variation that could have helped reduce the transmission rates at which the most virulent influenza strains spread. They weren’t organized into livestock ghettos alongside thousands of industrial poultry. They don’t ship themselves thousands of miles by truck, train or air. Pigs do not naturally fly.
The onus must be placed on the decisions we humans made to organize them this way. And when we say ‘we’, let’s be clear, we’re talking how agribusinesses have organized pigs and poultry.
Although considerable attention is being paid to the role of a particular company in the emergence of the new influenza, and rightfully so, we might better focus on the deregulation that allowed such porcinopolises to grow to the point that whole human communities are pushed off the land pigs now occupy. ...
As Wallace goes on to note, it was reported in Science that swine flus of the H1N1 variants got a jumpstart in their evolution in 1998, mixing with human flus in the hog barns of North Carolina. Ever since, they've been mutating like crazy, incorporating new strains and regularly tossing off new variants.
Should Smithfield's Granjas Carroll subsidiary not be directly to blame, this flu got its start in the livestock production model they've profited from and spread.
But ... this mess sounds like a good idea to keep exporting to even more countries. International officials think it'll be a win-win. Right, right.
And someday, pigs will fly.
(Photo credit: Grongar on Flickr and the Wikipedia Commons, via Answer.com's factory farming information page.)
