Every time I come in from my farm fields and tune into the news these days, the headline is about food: food prices, food scares, food shortages, food riots. Food has America's attention these days, but folks are overlooking a critical piece of the brewing crisis: a national shortage of farmers.
We farmers make up a mere 1.6 percent of the U.S. population right now. Picture an inverted pyramid balanced precariously on its nose: that's our national food supply, with about 3 million of us feeding three hundred million of you. In food terms, our nation resembles an elephant perched on a pair of stiletto heels.
With the average age of farmers approaching 60, young farmers like me in short supply (a scant 5.8 percent of us are under the age of 35), and three quarters of the country living the city life, you'd be wise to wonder who's going to milk the cows and grow the grain for your morning bowl of cornflakes down the road. More and more, our collective knowledge about growing food is housed in nursing homes, and in another twenty years, today's average-aged farmer will be dead.
Proponents of modern industrial agriculture will argue that there's nothing to worry about -- that we don't need more farmers to feed ourselves; we just need bigger tractors, bigger farms, and biotechnology. Except for one big problem: oil.
America's industrial food system relies almost entirely on oil, which it transforms into everything from carrots to Coke by way of diesel-powered tractors, fossil fuel-based and mined fertilizers, oil-derived pesticides, and gas-guzzling trucks. When all is said and done, the average American "eats" 350 gallons of fossil fuel a year, and close to one fifth of all the energy used in the U.S. is burned up producing, processing, and transporting food. It means that as oil supplies peter out and fuel costs keep ballooning, America is headed for hunger if we bet our lunch on industrial agriculture.
Our chance of surviving our food-production challenges -- unlike various other civilizations that have collapsed for lack of food throughout history -- hinges in part on rebuilding a whole new generation of farmers in America. Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute estimates we'll need about 50 million new farmers in the next thirty years. What's more, these new farmers won't be able to operate under the illusion of limitless oil. The unfolding oil crunch is one reason I just bought a team of draft horses for my farm in Oregon.
Pulling off sustainable agriculture at a national and global scale is going to take a lot of things: land reform that gives new farmers access to farmland, land-use planning that prioritizes agriculture in both urban and rural settings, low-interest loans to help beginning farmers get their start, training and technical assistance to teach smart farming practices, and an American government that puts an end to subsidizing industrial agribusiness and starts investing purposefully in a crop of sustainable family farmers -- starting with the fastest-growing segment of farm operators today: women, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American farmers.
It's also going to take a cultural shift that revalues the farming way of life, breathes life into rural towns, and throws a party when a college grad decides to take up a hoe for a living. A hundred years down the road and well-fed, we'll be looking back on these times and marveling at that short, weird blip in our history when almost everyone lived in cities, when we didn't farm with horses and mules, and when eating bananas in Alaska seemed as normal as a sunrise.
As for the naysayers who insist that family farmers can't feed the world, there is no shortage of data showing that the net productivity of smaller scale, diversified farms can be equal to or greater than that of industrial monocultures. In Amish country, comparative studies showed that the net cash return per acre of cropland on horse-powered farms was up to half again the average of mechanized farms.
With diesel leaning towards five dollars a gallon at the pumps today and rising, the writing is on the wall: We're staring down the barrel of a true food crisis unless we cultivate a new cadre of farmers who can keep the pantry stocked when the oil runs dry. Dinner -- and everything else -- depends on it.
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Comments View as Flat
nattaylor Posted 7:05 am
20 May 2008
Numbers
Is it unreasonable to expect a farmer to feed a hundred people? I really don't know, but it doesn't seem that crazy to me. My family runs a very small scale organic produce farm, and could feed at least 20 people a modest amount of daily produce.
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PermieWriter Posted 8:26 am
20 May 2008
Hurray for farmers
It's going to be a tough battle. Our culture has spent the last several decades systematically devaluing farming, encouraging the smartest kids to get away from farming, portraying farmers as stupid and/or monstrous. Despite all this there have been a lot of bright, young kids who have farm leanings, but the price of entry keeps them out. These are the kids who spend a few summers as Willing Workers on Organic Farms, or other less formal arrangements, and then find out that since they weren't born into farming, they'll never be able to buy land.
And I'm talking about food farms, not acreages devoted to growing fuel or industrial feedstocks. That's making the problem worse, as has been well documented here.
Some folks are finding outlets in urban dead zones, but the basic problem remains. While real estate is more valuable for homes than food and while food prices remain artificially low, there will be little demand for small to medium-sized farmers, particularly near cities where they're most needed. Until it's too late, of course.
Eat what you grow, grow what you eat
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Ron Steenblik Posted 9:27 am
20 May 2008
I'm not sure I see the point here
There are only something like 0.7 million doctors in the United States. Should we regard that as a dangerous pinpoint on which to rest the weight of the health of the nation?
Also, I disagree with PermieWriter that "our culture has spent the last several decades systematically devaluing farming, encouraging the smartest kids to get away from farming, portraying farmers as stupid and/or monstrous."
Don't confuse criticism of farm policy with devaluation of farming. I know of nobody who says we cannot live without farming, or devalues it as an occupation.
Is the nation really encouraging the smartest kids to get away from farming? Tell, me, how is society doing that? The smartest kids may rightly be encouraged to go into a field like research, but there is no shortage of people who are able to do research related to agriculture.
Nor is there a shortage of people who would be interested in farming given the right conditions. (As PermieWrite him or herself writes, "Despite all this there have been a lot of bright, young kids who have farm leanings ... .") New farmers don't have to be "cultivated", though of course training for those who are interested in farming is useful. And please first look at the kind of agriculture that government programs and support policies encourage before blaming societal attitudes for the decline of the family farm.
PermieWriter laments that "the price of entry keeps them [young kids with farm leanings] out" of farming. Well, I wonder why? One cannot have it both ways. The farm lobby wants policy interventions that maintain high prices (like biofuel-support policies are doing now), but then of course economic rents are generated, which leads to an increase in the price of farmland, which then raises the price of entering farming.
Finally, Zoe Bradbury refers to "naysayers who insist that family farmers can't feed the world". I haven't heard anybody make that claim. I'd be curious to know who has.
These are only my personal opinions.
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Tasermons Partner Posted 10:02 am
20 May 2008
Just use more immigrants...maybe robots...
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Podchef Posted 11:24 am
20 May 2008
Freedom to Farm
For the past 60 years or more the small family farm system which was the backbone of the American food system has been steamrollered by Farm Policy, the rise of the commodity agriculture hydra and globalist corporate agribusiness. None of these things in themselves set about to topple agriculture but together they have done a pretty good job of destroying the ability for small family farms to survive and for anyone to get into farming on any scale they choose.
Something like 70% of American Food is produced by 10% of "Farmers"--more like large scale commodity driven corporations. We import over 1/2 the food eaten in this country--80% of seafood and over 40% of the beef alone. How has this helped the American farmer? Nafta, Gatt, Free Trade, the WTO and the IMF have done as much to ruin American (and just about every other country's) agriculture as it has done to ruin manufacturing in the US.
Combine this with an intrinsic lack of understanding among American consumers as to where their food comes from, how it is grown and how important it is to pay farmers a fare price and we have "devaluing" of farming. Not that people actually go out of their way to denigrate farmers--the media does enough of this though--they just don't consider them, or have learned to loath them all because of the 10% which pollute the air, land and sea.
And now, as if land prices, fuel prices, corporate control of everything from market access to vertically integrated operations weren't enough to deal with, the USDA--an agency set up to benefit American agriculture and to support farmers efforts to produce food--has turned against the small, sustainable farmer in favor of criminal, wasteful, irresponsible Agribusiness. Most of this is due to the revolving door policy of Washington.
In the past 5 years, and maybe even longer than that, the USDA has set about to make it more and more difficult to be a farmer. They have imposed ridiculous laws, created an unnecessary bureaucracy and are wasting taxpayer money on a ponzi-like scheme which benefits Corporations and large-scale producers at the expense of all other farmers and consumers. The National Animal Identification System (NAIS) is purely about lining the pockets of those who told the USDA to instigate it. It amounts to a license to farm, a triple tax on the food system and a big-bother system of watching who has what. Pedophiles are less monitored than Farmers will be under NAIS.
In one of the USDA's more infamous documents on NAIS they claim that their operatives should treat all farmers as if they have a 6th grade education. If that is the agency which is supposed to support and aide farming's opinion, no wonder many people I know look down on farmers. Sure, many farmers are less than Mensa candidates, many are Mensa geniuses. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to farm, but it does take talent, knowledge and willingness to work miserable hours in all weather to earn next to nothing.
As for small family farms not being able to feed the world--I hear and read that a lot. It usually comes from those opposed to organics, raw milk, sustainability, you name it. If the organization denies Peak Oil, they probably have people who think small family farms can't feed a region, let alone the world. Their solution is to do away with farms all together and import our food from somewhere else. They obviously don't realize that 40% of the worlds food is grown on farms smaller than 6 acres.
You have a choice--drive or eat--which will it be?
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Laura Hess Posted 1:51 pm
20 May 2008
Re: the point about access to land
In the five years I've spent working at the Yale Sustainable Food Project, I've come to know many farmers who grow food sustainably. They fall into three major categories:
- Those who farm on inherited land: the third-generation apple grower, the third-generation dairy farmer.
- Those who derive income from another profession / the dual-careerists: the lawyer-farmer, the psychologist-farmer. This category also includes the landscape-architect-turned-farmer and the investment-banker-turned-farmer, who bought land and started farming in middle age.
- Those who manage farms owned by rich people.
What all three categories of farmers have in common--save a few intrepid deviators I didn't include--is that they didn't buy their land with money they earned farming. Unlike in many other gainful occupations, the pay scale in farming doesn't increase a whole lot as one becomes more capable. Which is a central problem Zoe Bradbury touches on: you need land to grow food, and land costs money that aspiring young farmers don't have, unless they want to be investment bankers for a little while beforehand. Of course, land in the Northeast is more expensive than land, say, in Nebraska. But, with all due respect to Nebraskans, I want to farm in the place that is home to me. An artist friend once said to me, I don't want to raise babies in a place without art. Well, I don't want to raise babies in a place without farms.I--and many of my friends--would like to be farmers, and we have degrees from fancy schools like Yale which do us absolutely no good in this endeavor. To Ron Steenblik: when I was in school here, never once did I hear a professor mention in even the most hypothetical of terms that a student might go on to work in some capacity, ANY capacity, related to agriculture. Message: Yale students do not become farmers, or agricultural researchers, or what have you. There's your systematic devaluation. And I majored in Environmental Studies, so it wasn't my department.
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PermieWriter Posted 2:24 pm
20 May 2008
Re: land access
Those three categories are the ones I have seen, as well, though most of my direct experience with farmers has been in Sonoma County, which is not perhaps the most representative sample. The people who raised food (as opposed to wine grapes) were mostly retired people who had made a bundle in the city or young, driven people who were leasing land from a kindly rich person or the county. The rich people who were farming, themselves, were all growing grapes (mostly pinot noir and chardonnay).
My knowledge of people going in to farming stems from interviews with staff at UC extensions and the Santa Rosa branch of the USDA and hearing them lament about the quality and quantity of people lining up to be farmers. All of the best ones studying ag, they said, want to go into something cleaner, like policy, rather than field work. Which was, of course, what they were doing. It's easy to want other people to break their backs doing farm work, which is very hard work indeed when done the conventional way. That is why I'm so in love with permaculture, which advocates doing things the intelligent, easy way.
What, it's not obvious I'm a XX sort? Weird...
Eat what you grow, grow what you eat
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Aimee Witteman Posted 12:39 am
21 May 2008
Help for Beginning Farmers in New Farm Bill
Thanks for the great post, Zoe.
An observation and then some info at the bottom about new programs in the farm bill that can help beginning farmers.
The inverted pyramid is even more precarious: the number of farmers in the U.S. is actually about 1 million less than the statistic you stated. Beyond the ability of a shrinking number of fossil fuel-dependent farms to feed a growing population, there is also the incredibly negative impact that land and farm concentration have on rural communities (plenty of sociological and economic documentation to back this up - see Goldschmidt Hyopthesis).
Ok - some good news about the farm bill. Despite the many problems that the 2008 farm bill will continue to perpetuate, a couple of the 'bright spots' are new programs that address the challenges facing beginning farmers, including access-to-land:
- there is a new Individual Development Account program that will be available in 15 states (the states haven't been chosen yet: contact your representative to get your state in line). The program uses financial training and matched savings accounts to assist those of modest means to establish savings. The savings in the account can be used toward capital expenditures for a farm or ranch, including the expenses associated with purchasing land, buildings, equipment, or livestock, or toward training. CA and MI have had pilot IDA programs that have been very successful at helping new farmers purchase land.
- there is a beginning farmer contract land sales program that provides a new permanent, nationwide authority for federal guarantees on private land contract sales from retiring to beginning farmers and ranchers.
- there are changes to the beginning farmer and rancher down payment loan program with lower interest rates, better lending terms, and higher maximum purchase price on first-time land purchases.
A bunch more is in there - check out www.sustainableagriculturecoalition.org for more info. We need to get the word out to aspiring new farmers that there is some (modest) assistance for them in the new farm bill.Permalink
mihan Posted 4:59 am
21 May 2008
Doctors, farmers
Perhaps you're missing the point: The average age of doctors is not 60, so we won't run out of doctors any time soon.
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JMG Posted 5:21 am
21 May 2008
Doctors, farmers II
Even more important, doctors have very scant correlation with health, only health care costs.
Farmers have a very high correlation -- in fact, a nearly perfect causal relationship -- with food supplies in societies that have abandoned the hunter-gatherer model.
The 5% Project
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