COUNTRY CORNER
A parallel agriculture is possible, but politics could defeat it
By Steve Fairchild

People call me utopian on the issue, but I believe in the possibility of a parallel agriculture. Organic farming is a laudable enterprise, I say to my farmer friend’s chagrin. Grass-fed beef is a viable niche market. Bring on the Rough Fell sheep, I say. Fill the hills with Cashmere goats. Plow the prairie with pasture-raised hogs. Or make goat cheese. Or grow produce.

If people want to know not just where their food comes from, but who grows it, good for them—and good for the farmers who will serve them. Such farmers should charge for the extra effort and information.

But, at the same time, by necessity of how we’ve built our society, much of agriculture will remain industrialized. Providing enough protein to feed a city like Chicago is nothing but an industrial-sized job. Extrapolate to the 300 million people in the United States, and it becomes difficult to deny that the industrial model has its place. McDonald’s and Wal-Mart will continue to push protein to the consumers they have done such a good job of identifying and serving—price shoppers and seekers of convenience.

Still, I’d like the opportunity to mix with the growers of my food. I wish I had time to go down to the farmers’ market and chat with the people responsible for my produce. Maybe someday I will. But for now, my time goes to support a five-person house on a one-person income. When I have to choose between having enough food or having food of fashion, I am instinctually utilitarian.

Moreover, while I’m all for niche markets, and even organic production, I disapprove (and will do so publicly and without restraint) of those who would tear down one segment of agriculture to build up their own. A producer doing a good job of pasture-raised poultry and grass-fed beef will win my support if he goes to a farmers’ market to simply peddle meat. But if he puts out a picture of a nearly dead spent hen to suggest to his consumers that by not eating his pasture birds, the picture is what they get, I’m against him. Same if he tells consumers that beef by means other than his own is malignant. This is bad faith, in my book.

Somewhere deep in all of this talk of parallel ag, there is a fine line. It isn’t a question of production methods or what’s coming out of the farm gate in terms of wholesomeness or quality. It is a question of economic models. If we found technology that solved every environmental and odor issue of large-scale farming  tomorrow, there is a core group of people who still would oppose it because farms of a certain scale represent a socio-economic evolution they can’t stand. It’s a mix of populism, social angst, fear of technology and nostalgia. This way of thinking promotes one form of agriculture over another and offers no middle ground.  We can be against the large-scale farm, but it will exist somewhere. And if it must exist away from these shores, we’ve destroyed a base segment of our economy and replaced it with what is supposed to be an egalitarian farming system but turns out to be classist—one in which lower income consumers won’t be able to participate. Organic and hand-picked things for the moneyed. Gruel for the masses. Price and convenience are things that the market will always value and what many  consumers need. That’s a utilitarian fact, not the spleen of a bull-headed editor.

Maybe we should chalk it up to living in fat times. Food security used to be about having enough. Now it is about having the right kind. And in that, there is a whiff of something authoritarian. I’ve never trusted a salesman in a pulpit, and the market for self-righteousness is a narrowly defined niche market indeed.