There's a lot to agree with - and a lot to consider - in this piece by a Missouri farmer in the AEI journal The American. Its true that the slow food movement has been harsh on traditional farmers, and de-humanized them to an extent, and that we aren't yet in a place (and may never be) where organic farming is the primary method of farming. But the author, I think, sounds like someone who would be happy to adjust methods if they were profitable and convenient ... and that's the general purpose of the green/slow-food movement - to create a market force and integrated systems so that organic farming is a reasonable and cost-effective option to farmers. He makes good points about nitrogen content and the need for artificial fertilizer, and I don't know enough to comment on that point, but I would think that that would be a problem to tackle with further innovation - and may become intractable in its own right with peak oil/natural gas curbing nitrogen production.
2 comments:
Peak oil, yeah baby! You should just post my rebuttal.
By Syd O:
This is a nice "yeah but not me" article. I'm glad he does things than some other farmers do. I would say I'm not a big softie for animal rights so those complaints I don't care about too much but I thought most of his arguments made sense yet can be blown apart as they result in other problems.
-It's true the herbicides can reduce tilling so you lose less soil erosion but at the same time the extra nitrogen that flows down the "big muddy" and other major rivers are creating dead zones in the ocean.
-I agree that composting is a must. People should even compost their own feces. It's been done in China and Asia for years. What other culture pisses in their drinking water?
-Congratulations that you do use cover crops. But the fact you tout that you use it doesn't mean that 80% of farmers do the same thing. I have talked to farmers who no longer have to have a corn-soy rotation if they buy the right fertilizer. And that means nothing grows on the ground till the fertilizer is sprayed which means...
- you have dead ground sitting there doing nothing. If you think about how much carbon fails to be harvested into plants until the crop is put in it's a lot of land that's sitting there doing nothing. I've done the Chicago to Champaign commute enough to know what Pollan is talking about.
-and that's a lot of land we are talking about. Where did this land come from? From draining natural wetland habitats and cutting down forests. Forests are huge carbon sinks and wetlands clean the water and help produce fertile soil.
-I would agree that farmers are still pretty connected or atleast way more connected than the average consumer who buys their produce. I cannot argue that people would have a different affinity towards meat products if they knew what it was like to raise and kill their meat.
-Technology has been a big help in creating more population but that's not a good thing. Malthus was right for a reason. We live on a finite planet and when there's too many creatures fighting for resources in the same small space there can only be problems.
-It's not natural to have 4,000 turkeys.
It's not a 100:0 ration of bad farmers to agri-intellectuals and farming is a hard way to live. (No one doubts this and it's been made clear that hunter/gatherers lead more leisurely lives than agriculture socieites) But there are enough factors to tilt the argument to the intellectuals.
Note: I didn't even mention Peak Oil once but I could have very well interjected it at any time.
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