Why Big Ag Won’t Feed the World

[Mark Cowdrey]

http://food.theatlantic.com/sustainability/why-big-ag-wont-feed-the-world-1.php

[Mark Cowdrey]

Also:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/agriculture/farming/6828878/Britain-facing-food-crisis-as-worlds-soil-vanishes-in-60-years.html

[J-L]

It was an interesting read.
Every time I drive to the metropolitan area closest to me (Salt Lake City), I can’t get over the sheer mass of humanity there. I realize this is far from a large city like LA or NYC and their suburbs, but still it’s huge compared to where I live.
What I can’t wrap my mind around is feeding these folks with small gardens or truck farms. It SEEMS impossible on the face of it. I’m not saying it IS impossible though.
Driving through Nebraska this fall I couldn’t get over the huge amount of corn being produced by those farmers. Not living in farm country, maybe I’m easily impressed, but the fact is that they are growing huge yields on those farms. I don’t see how you can expect to replace that kind of productivity with some hoe’s and elbow grease.
Picking on agriculture’s use of fossil fuels seems silly, as does the cow fart issue. It seems silly in the face of the many millions of people firing up their cars daily for short commutes to work. Especially when mass transit could do much to help that. If/when oil becomes so extremely limited and expensive, I’d just as soon see it being burned making food rather than for something less productive for all.
Maybe I don’t see all the angles here. After all, I’m just a simple, small rancher.

[Stable-Man]

At some point oil fuel will be replaced with the “clean” hydrogen or something. The thing that I’m tied up in is this food needs to be shipped, either from America or Europe or someplace, to the countries that need food. These places are starving because they have too many people for their environments to support, so we import food to them which takes fuel. Yes, countries like the US produce enough food to feed many countries, but I think it’s important for these countries to sustain themselves. Influential sources are telling these people not to accept contraceptives so the starving is not going to decrease. For most of history population and food were in balance, but now it’s completely out of wack.

Anyway, smaller farms could produce the feed the world, also. There just need to be more farmers. America could attain the same amount of food without big ag but the fact is 2 million people are producing the food for over 300 million. A smaller farm leads to more intensive management so the need for roundup resistant crops etc. I have read old agriculture books that say over 200 bushels could be obtained with the old, opened pollinated corn if done a certain way…

[blue80]

Fact is, in many areas of the world such as Africa, family farmers could make a decent living -middle income- with a cow, few pigs, and ten acres of cropping with draft power, sold locally.

But I’ve spoken with missionaries firsthand who explain their frustrations when the west comes in with regular and even possibly unneccessary “food aid” deliveries, dumped at prices so cheap it puts the locals out of business; Our subsidies at work in a real way, helping our local farming communities while destroying communities a hemisphere away.
It gives another practical illustration of the “give a man a fish he’ll eat for a day…..teach a man to fish he’ll eat for a year….” reasoning. And also the repercussions for selfish behaviour, for when you don’t enable your neighbour, they may become reliant and the possibility for failure becomes more distinct.
But perhaps the joke is on us, for it is our factory farmers who have become reliant on subsidies to stay afloat. Hedging food products and dumping milk and growing grains without a market are going to bite us in the butt, if they haven’t already.

For me, it’s just more motivation to grow and eat responsibly. But the learning has to come first…

Kevin

[jac]

I have read that historically a lot of these countries that are now starving did have agriculture but then Britain and others came along with the “Empire” building and swept it all away and created a “monoculture” of tea, coffee, cotton or whatever with no regard for soil or fertility. The locals then became slaves to the big owners and when the empire left they were left with depleted soil.. South Africa is the flipside though.. Mugabee has the means to feed his country but chooses to destroy some of the best farm land on that continent!!!!
John

[Author]

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