I'm someone who reads heavily footnoted 1000-page history books just for fun: I think the subject is fascinating. But the common tendency of so many people to feel nostalgic for the past is very puzzling to me. Here's one example: Megan of From the Archives just wrote several posts on her love of small-scale, local and organic family farms, and how we should switch to growing all crops in this way. But the thing is, everything was grown this way until very recently and it sucked: most people had to spend half to two-thirds of their income on food, had nutritional deficiencies since the food they could afford to buy was monotonous and insufficient (which caused stunted height, deformities, reduced intelligence and lower life expectancy), and spent most of their waking hours engaged in extremely hard menial labor.
Mechanized large-scale farming has resulted in vastly increased crop yields (and since food is more plentiful, it is much cheaper). This means that Americans now spend less than 10% of their income on food, while eating enough to have a widespread obesity problem. And eating non-locally produced food also means that Americans can eat fresh vegetables and fruit in the winter, instead of months of gruel and meat (if you could afford meat). Farming with machines means that pregnant women are no longer hitched to plows for 12-hour days under the hot sun (yes, this used to be the case in Europe!). We all eat more, eat better, have less physical problems and have more money to spend on other things because of industrial farming.
A return to previous farming techniques, as Megan desires, will result in decreased food choice and much higher food prices. Let's say food prices doubled, which considering the price of organic food (often not even grown by small-scale family farmers, meaning a full-scale change would likely be even more expensive) relative to regular food seems reasonable. For the average American, about 18% of their income will now go on food: a hardship, perhaps, but certainly feasible (you didn't really need cable, did you?). But for the poorest Americans, who now spend 38% of their income of food, and would have to spend 76% to get the same quantity, this would be disastrous.
If people want to be Luddites, they should realize that the human costs of their beliefs are incredibly high, and will be paid by the most vulnerable.
Really?! This is a very late comment, but I don't think the industrialization of our food system has unilaterally brought blessings on our society... I wouldn't argue that we could feasibly return to 100% small-scale agriculture, especially in the northern US, but to some extent there has been a large shift just toward that. I come at this from the perspective of someone who worked on a small organic farm and also from living in an agrarian highlands community in Guatemala, where topography renders the use of heavy machinery nearly impossible and the people plant an incredible quantity of territory by hand... First, in both situations I've had access to a higher variety of vegetables and more cheaply than in the supermarket in the US. What industrialized agriculture in the US has given me is access to a wide variety of cheap, nutritionally void processed foods based on corn and soy and likely to make me a statistic of rising obesity in our country. Second, it's true the small-scale farmer works physically hard but he's also less likely to be in better physical shape, far from being stunted by his labors. Being a farmer is highly stressful if one is in commodities and trying to compete in a global marketplace, but the physical labor is the least of the stress involved, with most workdays being 5-7 hours long, which leaves a solid half of their other hours for family time or recreational pursuits. Historically life expectancy in my Guatemalan town has been pulled down by poor access to health care as well as a long civil war, and not the agrarian lifestyle itself ... Third, the idea that small-scale farming is a return to the dark ages is a myth propagated by Mother Culture (e.g. the United Corn Growers Association) through whispers in our ears. Industrialized agriculture does not represent a linear step "forward" from which we can only go "backward". Industrialized agriculture solves the issue of food scarcity and allows for highly specialized career development but presents plenty of its own issues not least of which pollution due to the breaking of the closed ecological systems of small farms, and now-decreasing life expectancies for our quasi-sedentary US population which is more than ever predisposed to obesity and its attendant complications. I definitely see small-scale farming as part of the solution. Check out the Omnivore's Dilemma for a well-researched and much better-developed argument on this.
ReplyDeleteI agree that industrialized farming is not without its defects (in particular, the overuse of pesticides and consequent environmental pollution). Also, because it is based around the use of very expensive heavy machinery, it tends to drive all food production into the hands of a few behemoth corporations (and makes the food supply dependent on oil). There's certainly many changes that should be made (and buying from small local farms is a great start).
ReplyDeleteBut I do think it's better than the alternative of traditional subsistence farming.
I think it's important to remember that a small organic farm in modern day Guatemala is NOT the same as a farm in the Middle Ages. First of all, selective breeding (pre-modern genetic engineering in other words) has made the yield of our seeds/crops much higher. Secondly, thanks to chemical engineering, fertilizer is now widely available (the lack of fertilizer used to be a huge problem and dramatically depressed crop yield, even as recently as the mid-twentieth century in certain parts of the world). Even if an organic farm does not use chemically produced fertilizer, the fertilizers they do use (like rock phosphate) are mined/transported using modern technology which greatly reduces their costs. Also, manure is cheaper than it otherwise would be because 1. animals (mostly fed with food produced via mechanized agriculture) are far more plentiful and 2. there is less competition to buy manure, since most farmers use the factory-produced version. When you realize that human waste used to be a valuable product, collected weekly for high prices, and now this is not the case anywhere (even in rural Guatemala), you see that fertilizer is much more plentiful.
Physical labor in farming varies a lot depending on the season, climate and type of crop being grown. In a tropical place like Guatemala, it tends to be easier to grow stuff. I suggest reading The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball for an accurate picture of how much work is involved (she owns a small-scale organic, non-mechanized farm in NY).
Stunting in Guatemala IS a huge problem (see here for some information: http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNACX563.pdf). Stunting is caused by malnutrition, usually because while food is available, people are too poor to afford it. Thus, anything which affects the price of food is going to directly affect stunting. Cheap food=less malnutrition.
Thanks for the book recommendation: I am definitely planning on reading it in the near future, and hopefully will post a review once I finish.
Also, thanks for your comment. I love hearing other people's perspectives.
I read The Omnivore's Dilemma: you can read my review here: http://opinionationblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/omnivores-dilemma.html
ReplyDeleteI am SO not smart enough to enter this conversation...but very glad to read the post and the comments :) Thanks for taking me back to the beginning!
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