On Agriculture

Due to its popularity on my other blog, I've decided to post this essay here.

I felt the need to comment on a recent post I found on the Twin Cities Metroblogging site entitled, "Why Super-sized Farms Don't Work." The post in itself was a response to an article from Grist magazine online.

I would like to begin by saying that I am (and have been) interested in agricultural issues of this type. A great non-profit resource on this topic is the Organic Consumers Association. I have even had the opportunity to meet and speak with the director, Ronnie Cummings, a number of times.

Anyway I think I first started thinking about agriculture when I was in high school. Not sure where the actual influence came from but it was something to do with my amateur interest in archeology and ancient civilization. What I came to in my own deductions was that roughly 12,000 years ago humans began cultivating food rather than obtaining it by hunting, gathering, and animal husbandry. The whole process was not overnight of course, but the effects of this agricultural revolution stimulated one of the most profound sociological shifts in human history.
Without getting into too much history let me just paint a picture for you. 12,000 or so years ago our ancestors got it into their heads that it is possible to make food by putting the seeds in the ground. Probably had something to do with food sprouting up in former refuse heaps. Anyhow, methods were crude at first, perhaps just sprinkling some seeds on the ground before they migrated on to another spot and then coming back the next year to find more food. Well, certainly this was seen by some as a better idea than searching for food or hunting it down. Eventually, for whatever reason, primitive agriculture WAS adopted. This led to a lot of developments and changes. A reorganization of the division of labor (notably a shift from matriarchal to patriarchal society). Rise of the warrior class (to protect the food), sedentary lifestyle, food surpluses, population growth, waste management issues, and of course the rise of civilization.

So what does this have to do with contemporary food production in the rural Midwest?

Well, one thing that I learned a while back is that economically, food has some interesting qualities. Most of us are familiar with the inverse relationship between supply and demand. Supply up (assuming demand constant)= price goes down, otherwise known as a surplus. Demand up (assuming supply constant)=price goes up, otherwise known as a shortage. This is how things work according to free-market ideology assuming once again that there are no other variables exerting an influence. Well, as we all know, life doesn't lend itself easily to math quite so readily. Which brings me to the point about food. In food production it's usually desirable to produce a surplus (which of course fuels population growth, thus requiring more food production) in case of plagues, famine, natural disasters, theft, etc. Interesting to note that keeping track of surplus, as well as it's exchange for other goods led to the development of writing, private property and ownership, and class inequality, among other things. However as we just learned, having a surplus (with a less elastic and hence more static demand) drives prices down. Lower prices means that producers (farmers) need to produce more to make up for the loss in price, and a vicious circle ensues. Add a few thousand years to the equation and we get to a very complex system of economies of scale, subsidies for farmers to NOT grow food (in order to avoid glutting the market), commodity crops, world trade agreements, diminishing returns, large-scale industrial farming, and maybe most importantly the infrastructure that supports it all. So we're starting to see how complex the problem is and how it requires complex solutions as well.

Of course, buying locally produced food is a good first step, but it's not one that alone will be able to halt the decline and disappearance of the midwestern family farm. Perhaps the title of the post I'm responding to should have been entitled, "Why Super-sized Farms Work, and Why We Need a Better Solution."