Agriculture should answer its critics in search of itself
By Blake Hurst

A growing cadre of critics offers its view of agriculture. We should respond to the criticism. But to do so, we need answers to our own questions.

American farmers produce the cheapest, safest and most abundant food supply in the world. How many times have you heard someone say that? It’s true—and it’s a great blessing—but it may not be enough. The shelves at your local bookstore sag under the weight of books arguing that food is produced in an unethical matter; that abundance is a curse; that our food supply is not safe. The books tell us that inexpensive food is neither desirable nor cheap in the long run. As farmers, we don’t like to think that a small but rapidly growing percentage of the population hates the way we raise food, but we ignore that belief at our peril.

Critics of the way we produce food would say that almost all food produced today is a result of industrial agriculture. Industrial agriculture is implicitly defined as farming that is large scale, concentrates on one or two crops, uses chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, and is several times removed from the final consumer.

“Good” farming is done by a family close to where the food is consumed, sold directly to the consumer and produced in an open market system without contracts between the farmer and his customer. To buy from family farmers is good; to purchase the products of industrial agriculture is bad.

My first exposure to this line of thought came a couple of years ago when I read two books—one called Dominion, by Matthew Scully,and another called Against the Grain, by a writer named Richard Manning. Scully criticizes animal agriculture, concentrating on large-scale units—of course. Yet many of his criticisms would apply to smaller farmers as well.

I’ve since read a half dozen agriculture criticism books, and most of the practices that so concern these newly minted agriculture experts would apply to the way we raised the eight sows that were my 4-H project. Scully is a vegetarian, as is Peter Singer, who also has written a book condemning animal agriculture.

Singer is the Princeton philosopher who is famous for arguing that animals have more rights than human infants. Singer’s book on the food supply doesn’t go that far, but his other work does, and it is clear that he believes there is no ethical way to raise animals for human food.

The subtitle of Richard Manning’s book is “How agriculture hijacked civilization.” Well, at least you read the book with no illusions. Manning hates farming and spends 222 pages damning the humble dirt farmer for every ill visited upon society.

Believe me, he starts at the beginning—tracing the fall of man to the first seed planted, leaving no crop innocent. But his true ire is saved for corn. Manning believes that the consequences of agriculture have been “dire for both humanity and the planet as a whole” and would have us return to hunting and gathering. Yes, as Manning has it, deer hunters are the ideal, John Deere the villain, and the fact that billions would starve to death without agriculture is a problem to be solved by ending what he calls “senseless acts of reproduction.” As a product of just such a senseless act of reproduction, I have real problems with Mr. Manning.

Another popular critic of agriculture, Michael Pollan builds upon Manning’s diatribe in the latest book to be published in this genre, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan starts his book with a section called “Industrial Corn.”

Like Manning, Pollan is no fan of corn farmers or the companies that process corn into food—whether they be manufacturing corn sweetener or raising pigs. He traces the end of Eden to the discovery of the process that uses natural gas to fix nitrogen from the air. He quotes an estimate that two out every five people alive today owe their existence to the discovery of how to manufacture nitrogen fertilizers. Yet Pollan is unimpressed. He points out that the scientist who discovered how to fix nitrogen also developed chemical warfare agents. Pollan doesn’t exactly call an anhydrous rig a weapon of mass destruction, but he comes close. 

One of Pollan’s main indictments of agriculture is our reliance on fossil fuels. I’m reminded, painfully, of this problem every time I buy fertilizer or fill my truck with $3 diesel.

But Pollan’s indictment can’t apply just to agriculture: modern life is dependent upon fossil fuels for everything from air-conditioning our homes to powering our jet skis. Life in much of the modern South is impossible without air-conditioning.

Pollan might as well argue that Atlanta and Miami should be disassembled and moved entirely to the Iron Range of Minnesota as to argue that agriculture is foolish to use tractors and chemical fertilizers.

What is one to make of all this? These books may not draw a huge audience, but they are being read and reviewed. The books will no doubt influence the way some people buy food and, perhaps more ominously, the way lawmakers write the laws and regulations that govern agriculture. Whole Foods is a darling of Wall Street, and the rapid growth in organic food sales is well known to all of us. Wal-Mart is entering the organic market in the way that Wal-Mart enters any market, which is with buying power enough to reshape it.

Look in an urban newspaper. The food section is filled with features that celebrate trends fueled by the books I’ve mentioned—organic farmer’s markets, the slow food movement, heirloom tomatoes and the rest. A couple of further examples will help make the point.

Recently, there was a hearing on Capitol Hill about a bill to ban the slaughter of horses for meat. Although Europe is held up as more sensitive, more advanced and more ethical in food choices than the great unwashed who populate this country, that’s not true when it comes to horse meat—considered a delicacy in France and sought for food other places on the Continent.

And so we discover that the ethics of eating are tricky: the Frenchman quails at the thought of genetically modified corn but seems perfectly happy to eat Flicka. Columnist Ellen Goodman recently wrote about Whole Foods’ decision to quit displaying live lobsters for their customers. Something about eye contact with supper was just too jarring for the tender sensibilities of those who shop in Whole Foods. Goodman quoted a lobster fisherman who basically said that lobsters are barely more than insects.

That’s a sentiment that farmers understand but clearly not convincing to Goodman or the people who make the decisions at Whole Foods. Goodman went on to quote Pollan and talk about the deplorable conditions in which beef cattle are raised.

And that leads me to an overarching observation about this trend. Modern, commercial farmers are in this industrial agriculture game together. None of us can be innocent in the eyes of those agriculture critics who manage to get books published. The terrible conditions Goodman talks about are at a run-of-the-mill feedlot just like the one that is on—or was very recently on—most of our farms. It seems that cows shouldn’t eat corn. Grass is fine, but just grass. For Goodman, cattle “standing in their own waste” and eating corn is cruel and unusual. It gives cows belly aches, robs us of important omega fatty acids, makes us fat, and, not incidentally, ruins the world’s environment.

Moreover, if you only grow corn and don’t feed it, you’re guilty by association, as Richard Manning points out. Corn is responsible for wars, pestilence and unhappiness of all stripes. Many of us would like to separate our corn, soybean and cow/calf operations from the CAFOs that raise hogs and chickens. But that won’t work.

We’re almost all part of industrial agriculture, and we all have to deal with the criticisms of it and the problems our farming may or may not have caused.

Even if we accept the arguments made in the books I’ve mentioned, these distinctions of production are hard to subscribe to in the supermarket. For in the aisles of the supermarket, even the food purist will be defeated. In a delightful chapter called “Big Organic,” Pollan describes how two large corporations in California produce much of the organic greens purchased by consumers in Whole Foods, the temple of ethical farming. Dare that be called “industrial organic?” He also describes chickens sold as “free range” by Whole Foods. They are raised in a broiler house just like the ones used in Missouri but with a fenced lawn in front and a small door for the chickens. The day he was there, the chickens were all inside, and there was no evidence they ever went outside. But they could have, so they were free range.

So the consumer buying at Whole Foods is supporting corporate farming—and a dishonest bit of marketing. Meanwhile, the consumer buying a steak at his local supermarket is buying a product that may well have been born on a family-owned ranch and fattened in a feedlot owned by another family with corn produced from a family farm in the Corn Belt. Only in the last few days of its life did the steer enter a corporate world. Who has made the most “ethical” food choice?

Or consider a friend of mine, who with his son, raises both pigs and chickens in confinement—an archetypical and evil industrial farmer, you might say. Except he uses what the chickens and pigs leave behind to raise organic corn and soybeans. Is he good, or is he bad? Or just a very smart businessman?

And how come manure is “industrial waste” when collected and knifed in the soil, but part of a holistic and altogether good process when the cow or the pig delivers it to the land? Must not we realize that she is not particularly mindful of her distance from a stream, a pond or a tile outlet? Recent events in Californian organic spinach fields bring new urgency to that question.

Along those lines, organic production raises another series of “ethical” choices. I recently visited an organic vineyard and winery operated by a delightful couple who left a career in engineering to follow their dream of farming. They don’t use chemical fungicides but treat their vines with sulfur to fight funguses. So we’re faced with an irony. We’re spending billions of dollars to remove sulfur from diesel fuel but adding it to organically raised crops.

In their indictment of corn, neither Pollan nor Manning mentions the fact that last year we harvested 30 percent fewer acres of corn than we did in 1920. If corn is so bad, isn’t it good that industrial agriculture has allowed us to produce the corn we need on fewer acres?

Probably the biggest change in land use in the past few decades is the growth of forested acres in the Northeast. That has only been possible because industrial farming is so productive. Those forests provide open spaces, soak up carbon and increase wildlife. Is that bad?

If we are to eschew the technology that has produced the modern farm, we will have to farm more acres to produce as much food—at the expense of open spaces, wildlife and carbon sinks.

The Sierra Club says that agricultural chemicals foul almost every stream in the Midwest, but a quick perusal of the EPA’s list of polluted streams would show that sediment is the most likely cause of pollution. Sediment is increased by cultivation and lessened by no-till farming. No-till is only possible with the use of herbicides. Again, what is the correct ethical choice here? 

It’s hard to imagine how 8 million New Yorkers could travel to a nearby farm to purchase their food. It’s unlikely that people will trade in their Starbucks habit for ice water, lose their desire for fruits and vegetables in the winter time, or quit eating fast food when they are in a hurry.

People may well desire to purchase food produced locally, and farmers’ markets will continue to expand to supply that need. But we can’t feed 300 million people without big organizations interacting in the commerce needed to ship large amounts of food. On the other hand, all of us have to admit that changes in small towns due to agricultural consolidation have been a disaster for the places we love and the way we have chosen to live. We must agree that farming is somehow special and that the passing of so many farms is a tragedy. It is a tragedy with great cost to our local main street, our schools, and yes, to the country as a whole.

Clearly, farming “responsibly” will require more farmers and might even revitalize the places we live. So we are faced with a conundrum—one that is difficult, perhaps impossible, to solve. We can’t feed the world without modern technology, yet we don’t like the side effects. But we can’t lament the death of small towns and the loss of population in most rural places without also talking about the increase in wealth enjoyed by all and brought about by the productivity growth in agriculture.

Both farmers and consumers have some questions to answer. Farmers have to decide whether they should ignore this trend, ridicule it or join it. The first is really not an option. Our critics are here, and they’re unlikely to go away. Ridiculing these beliefs is hardly the answer either, although it is sometimes irresistible. Here is Rod Dreher, in his book Crunchy Con:

“When you’ve seen the face of the woman who planted it and shaken the hand of the man who harvested it, you become aware of the intimate human connection between you, the farmer and the earth. To do so is to become aware of the radical giftedness of our lives… Learning the names of the small farmers, and coming to appreciate what they do is to reverse the sweeping process of alienation from the earth and from each other that the industrialized agriculture and mass production of foodstuffs has wrought.”

Now that’s a heavy load to bear. A safe, plentiful food supply is not enough. Now we’re responsible for halting “sweeping alienation” in its tracks. I’m really not up to that. But even when it’s difficult, we have to take these folks seriously. Rod Dreher’s book was reviewed in every major intellectual magazine and in most major newspapers.

Publicity begets conversation. Conversation shapes minds. That means we have to speak out when critics of agriculture make untrue claims, question the motives of farmers or ignore the fact that natural is not always good and that man-made is not always bad. Maybe we’ll have to adopt the point of view of a friend of mine who has switched to organic production. In a recent conversation with him, I made some of the points I’ve made here. I told him that in buying organic people are spending much more on food without receiving anything particularly healthful in return. He replied:

“Well, look at it this way. Think about how mad those snooty folks and wacko liberals on either coast make you. Maybe high-priced organic food is our way to get even!” 

Are consumers willing to shift a tenth, or maybe even a fifth, of their consumption of new cars, movies and vacations to the purchase of food raised in an “ethical” manner? Will they give up iPods for free range chickens, DVD players for organic strawberries, weekends at the lake for a trip to a farmers’ market? I can’t answer those questions, but one thing is for sure: the answer will determine how we produce food in the future.

It’s not hard to envision a future with parallel marketing channels for the things we grow. One channel is a market for food much like the one we have now, which will satisfy the needs of the vast majority of consumers—consumers who are price conscious and comfortable with technology and modernity. That market will bid for foodstuffs against the rapidly growing biofuel industry. The other channel is an organic or luxury market, which will serve consumers who view food as a sacrament and take great interest and care about how their food is produced and by whom. Conventional producers must think about what we do and forthrightly explain why we do things the way we do. And organic producers will have to acknowledge that no system of raising food is without environmental costs as well as benefits. We’ll all have to be nimble and quick. We must spend more time marketing our products and satisfying consumers’ desires and less time fighting amongst ourselves. We’re used to being commodity producers who produce identical products in identical ways with very similar and very low margins. If we’re lucky, and smart, we may have a better future.