Making farmers cool again

Farming has become an occupation and cultural force of the past. Michael Pollan’s talk promoted the premise — and hope — that farming can become an occupation and force of the future. In the past century American farmers were given the assignment to produce lots of calories cheaply, and they did. They became the most productive humans on earth. A single farmer in Iowa could feed 150 of his neighbors. That is a true modern miracle. “American farmers are incredibly inventive, innovative, and accomplished. They can do whatever we ask them, we just need to give them a new set of requirements.”

This is complete nonsense. Any real engagement with data reveals that farming is an occupation and cultural force of the present in spades. Just consider the political head lock that farming states have on airy-fairy urban fantasies such as climate control legislation - where Democrat congressmen from farming states vow to block any such efforts that do not support ethanol and so farming subsidies - or their traditional control of the budget and much trade legislation for similar reasons.

The benefit of a reformed food system, besides better food, better environment and less climate shock, is better health and the savings of trillions of dollars. Four out of five chronic diseases are diet-related. Three quarters of medical spending goes to preventable chronic disease. Pollan says we cannot have a healthy population, without a healthy diet. The news is that we are learning that we cannot have a healthy diet without a healthy agriculture. And right now, farming is sick.

Farming is not sick, urban culture is sick. Farmers produce copious amounts of healthful food which gets turned into twinkies because that's what people like. What's worse, people don't burn the calories they eat since they live sedentary lives.

Right now it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel to manufacture 1 calorie of food on average, and 55 calories to produce 1 calorie of beef.

It's takes zero calories of fossil fuel to produce beef. If this was not the case there would never have been any beef.

If any industry should be solar-based it should be food, which was the “original solar economy.” Instead, right now “we are eating oil.”

Nothing in farming requires oil. That it is used is a function of its cost. It's the cheapest way to get the needed energy - mostly hydrogen - to do modern farming. When fossil fuels are no longer cheap then the hydrogen will be derived from other sources. The issue is economics. If, for example, we had a large nuclear energy sector then we'd get the hydrogen from water, and use it to make every sort of fuel and chemical required to farm as we do now. Enhanced geothermal systems could do the same.

Cheap oil and farm policies subsidize the 5 main crops (and only those crops), upon which the rest of our cheap food system is based. These main crops are planted as monocultures, which require cheap pesticides and fertilizers and produce wastes that are all problems in themselves. Pollan’s solution is not to dismantle the food system but to redirect it. Because of the long-term planning and learning that stewarding land requires, he believes subsidies of some type are essential for agriculture. Agriculture, he stated, should not be a freemarket. By picking the proper incentives we can re-localize, re-solarize, and revive the healing power of balanced farms and wholesome gardens.

I'm sure thus sort of nonsense appeals to urban authoritarians with gardening mentalities, but if implemented on a large scale would result in the destruction of agriculture and mass starvation. It won't happen of course, and that's not the real objective. This sort of over the top hype is political rent seeking trying to get some of those huge farm subsidies directed to the small but vocal constituency that buys this kind of mindless crap.

Governments should reward farmers for diversifying away from monocultures.

Governments should do things that they are good at, and micro-management of industry and agriculture is not one of them. When governments pick winners it starts a free-for-all attracting rent seekers like dung draws flies. Policy shifts back and forth with no rhyme or reason. For farming this means that even more so than today farmers will farm the government more so than the land. Nothing that they do will make any agronomic sense and a couple of decades from now some opportunistic journalist like Pollan will be publishing a new round of mindless rants against that system.

They should be rewarded for growing cover crops with the benefit of reducing erosion. Rewarded for returning animals to the mix. Rewarded for the amount of carbon they sequester in soil. Rewarded for halting urban sprawl by keeping farmland intact. In fact farmland should find a similar status as wetlands; developers and communities get “credit” for retaining farmland. Farmers should be rewarded for localize food provision. If only 2% of government contracts for food (as in school lunch programs, or government-run hospitals) required that the food be produced within 100 miles, it would transform the food system.

Farmers do not need rewards to reduce erosion, do multi-species general farming, increase soil organic matter (carbon) or keep farms as farms rather than subdivisions. They already want to do these things but are hampered by existing government rules, regulations and subsidies which reward other things. To get a good ag sector stop the subsidies rather than increasing them. When farmers make a living from growing food and fiber rather than seeking government rents then all of the things suggested above become simple good business practice. At most the government has a role in funding research and information management that enables farmers to have high quality knowledge easily and cheaply available.

How might such change happen? Only if consumers and citizens demand it.

As if consumers and citizens actually know anything about farming. Why in the world would we want demagogues inflaming populist hordes who have no idea what they are chanting about but just enjoy street parties and a little venting about, well, whatever.

The major problem with his vision? He says there are simply not enough farmers. Only 1 million now feed the US and other people of the world. Many more people, many more college educated people, many more innovators and entrepreneurs, and many more backyard gardeners need to produce this new food system. Start in educational programs, such as one promoted by Alice Waters, where kids learn to grow food, cook, and eat smarter. “Make lunch an academic subject.” Follow the lead of Michelle Obama and make turning lawns into organic gardens fashionable, respectable.

This is idiotic. If you want an admirable food system then give children real education rather than propaganda. If they had any real knowledge of farming it would be fashionable and respectable. That it is not is a function of the failure of the education system to portray the nature of modern farming as it really is, and a residue of the antiquated culture war that sought to demonize rural people who had different values than soft handed urban activists. Pollan's nonsense is more of the same.

Only a small single digit percentage of food and fiber can be produced the way Pollan advocates. What he advocates is welfare for an unproductive segment of society. Real reform of the ag sector that stopped government meddling would result in far more of the type of food Pollan claims to want, but it would not be produced by urban escapees seeking a pseudo-rural lifestyle, it would be produced by real farmers.