When a farmer has big tractors, sixty-foot-wide machinery, huge grain bins, and federal programs that support keeping that system running, it’s really hard to imagine another way to farm. These artificial interventions perpetuate twentieth-century agriculture and are constraining needed change to our North American food system. Part of the logic has been perpetuated by Farm Bill policy and programs including the renewable fuel standards that support corn for ethanol, and the land-grant university system, which relies in large part on funding from the commodity ag system, all state interventions that support otherwise nonviable operations. One might ask: Is a yield of only about half a billion tons of grain worth those cost? What logic drove us to expand beyond the heart of the Midwest onto more arid prairies, where irrigation was a requirement, and thus drain much of the Ogallala Aquifer, to grow cheap $2.00 corn when it might inherently be better stewarded as rangeland for cattle? This loss comes at a financial cost too, with the American economy losing roughly $37 billion in productivity annually from soil loss. In the United States alone, soil disappears ten times faster than it is naturally replenished, according to a Cornell study, at an estimated rate of nearly 1.7 billion tons of farmland alone per year. However, it also created a monoculture (arguably a biculture of corn and soy) that has resulted in soil organic matter depletion and inordinate water usage. The most significant landscape change to the Midwest in recent years is the disappearances of the fencerows themselves, and the resulting disappearance of animal agriculture from many of those landscapes.īutz’s and USDA legacy policy produced a lot of calories at a time when the world needed them. It’s not a metaphor to say that it has changed the landscape. Ethanol production, for instance, now consumes more that 25 percent of the crop. But a lot of that demand is unrelated to food. A quick glance across the US Midwest and also, but to a lesser extent, the Canadian prairies makes it evident that industrial agriculture, dominant by the 1970s, and continued today through the USDA and various Farm Bills, lends the state’s power to the privileging of commodity crops “fencerow to fencerow.” Earl Butz, the Nixon-era US secretary of agriculture, was the champion of that mandate, and since his time corn output has expanded widely as demand has increased. The regulations and policies pertaining to food and agriculture keep the food system of this century bound to the production model of the last century. Is not human creativity what helped bring about the bounty of the twentieth century? Are we, as image-bearers of the Creator, to deny this creativity? Should not more people collectively be able to bring more solutions and opportunity? But how? Why? What might the contours of a twenty-first-century agricultural system look like? Farming Like a State This thinking frequently assumes that people are the problem on earth and that we must curb population growth or be doomed. Some argue that we have passed “peak food” in recent decades and that it’s all downhill from here. Today, however, almost twenty years into the next century, it sometimes sounds like Henny Penny has the loudest voice. I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy when it comes to the future and our food supply.
These stories help keep thing in perspective: we live in blessed times, certainly here in North America, but also globally. I remember stories from my grandparents about how far they had to stretch a sack of potatoes and a few heads of cabbage in the 1920s, in the Depression, and during World War II. Is this a glimpse at “the fullness thereof” Psalm 24 declares? Maybe. It’s quite amazing if you think about it.
It is also hard to argue with the success it yielded in feeding (much of) the world in its time. The massive scale of this revolution has led some to call this the industrial agricultural system and it does have a lot of elements of industry. The green revolution, ever-bigger tractors and plows, nitrogen fertilizer, and plant-breeding advances all helped deliver the calories needed for the global population to grow from 2.5 to 6 billion. I’ve lived through one of the most amazing advances in food production, poverty elevation, health, and longevity in several millennia. I was born in the middle of the twentieth century.
Wh en you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.
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