“If you’re going to complain about farmers, make sure you don’t talk with your mouth full”
“They got money for wars but can’t feed the poor.”
~ Tupac Shakur ~
And we can't go any further without my favorite quote about farmers: "If you ate today, thank a farmer." In some cases, this quote, along with the Tiernan quote from above, could be considered true. But if you're from Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, or nearly any other state which grows millions of acres of feed corn and soybeans, it simply isn't true. What is true is that we don't have anywhere near what I'd call a food shortage in the United States, or the world, for that matter. What we do have is a world-wide distribution problem. We have subsidized farming and a greed problem. People simply aren't starving because there isn't enough food.
Before I go one step further, let me be clear that I have the utmost respect for farmers and the hard work they do, and to some degree, the risks they take. What I don't support is the farming industry and the way it's set up to maximize profit and control distribution. And this isn't just in the farming industry. Like just about any other industry you can name, farming is a product of capitalism and is more about profit than it is about food. And believe me when I tell you, we're all about to suffer for it in a big way.
How did I come to this cynical conclusion, you may ask? I spent two years helping some local, well-established farmers during harvest. They made the mistake of sharing some numbers with me and I started digging just a bit. Math wasn't my strongest subject in school, but I've gotten good enough to do the basics, which is mostly all it takes to figure out some basic profit and loss and distribution.
I drove a grain cart, which means I could see each and every bushel of corn or soybeans picked go through the computer. It's simple division to determine bushels picked based on weight, but it isn't really necessary. The computer does it for you. I won't bore you with the daily details, but what I can tell you is that, in round numbers, they harvested 250,000 bushels of corn each year. Of that 250,000 bushels, 10,000 bushels were transported to the local Cooperative. And the other 240,000 bushels? Well, these former truck drivers spent all winter each year delivering corn to the closest ethanol plant to make government subsidized gas for your car. Surely you've noticed that 10% ethanol gas at the pump is less money than regular unleaded, even though the process is more expensive.
So, why would these farmers (and most of the others) sell all this corn to make gasoline? It pays better. Much better, actually. In some cases a dollar per bushel better. Take that times 240,000 bushels, and now you're talking about real money. And why on earth would selling corn for ethanol pay better than selling it for food? Listen, Linda. We have enough food. The ethanol commodity is government-subsidized.
If you'll recall from your basic Economics class, when demand for a product increases, so generally does its price. When you have an overstock of something, it drives the prices down. And in the case of corn, excess supply was bringing it down... a lot. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but that whole, "knee high by the fourth of July" nonsense is long gone. Now corn is 6-8' tall by that date. Modified strains of seed, better insecticides and herbicides, and endless supplies of irrigation, have pushed production way, way up. Irrigation alone basically doubles the yield compared to dryland corn. So, what is one to do with all this excess and still keep the price up? You create a market for it (ethanol), and then you subsidize it. The same is true of soybeans, but to a lesser extent. Another crop for another time.
It sure sounds like everyone wins, doesn't it? There's already enough food. So why not make a way to support farmers that helps stretch the supply of fossil fuels and utilizes all this corn. I'll tell you why, and there are two reasons I can think of just off the top of my head. The first in my mind is that you have to fix the distribution problem so that no one in the world goes hungry while we're growing record crops before you do anything else! How inhumane is it for a starving child to know or see or even hear about sources of food going to put fuel in cars? And make no mistake, there's also a large percentage of corn crop going to feed cattle, an obvious food source, and yet, feeding grain to cattle is a ridiculously inefficient use of the crop. And I haven't even addressed water yet.
The second reason in my opinion, and likely the most important, is the impact agriculture is having on our environment. You can argue all you want about climate change and whether or not it's happening. Of course it's happening. It's been happening since the last ice age. The question isn't whether or not it's happening. The question is, 'At what rate?" It's now happening at an exponential rate and human beings and agriculture have almost everything to do with the rate at which it's changing. Here's partly how.
Since white Europeans hit the continent and started farming, more and more of our native grasses have been converted to farmland. In fact, by some estimates, up to 98% of the once lush grasslands of the Great Plains have been lost to agriculture. That creates a species issue, a water retention issue, an erosion issue, and even a carbon dioxide issue. Sure, crops create oxygen, blah blah blah, but only a fraction of what is produced by trees and native grasses for only a fraction of the time. In addition, erosion and over-planting (even with "no-till" and crop rotation) is killing our topsoil. If you've been sleeping, an adequate topsoil is part of the equation that keeps us all alive. By the admission of the farmers I worked for, the topsoil depth, when they began farming in the area some 50 years ago, was about 2 feet. Today, the depth is closer to 6 inches, and yet, we keep planting.
Have you heard of the Ogallala Aquifer? In most of the Midwestern states and throughout the Plains, it's where we get our fresh water. If you had a glass of water today, it came from the Ogallala Aquifer. It's also what gets used for irrigation of crops...the ones that go to make gasoline, biodiesel, corn syrup, plastic, and other useless crap to a starving child. And if you think we don't have starving kids right here in Nebraska...hell, right here in Jefferson County, you're just not paying attention. But I digress. The Ogallala Aquifer is slated to be mostly gone by 2050. That's 26 years. You think wars over oil are bad, wait until Midwesterners start killing each other over something to drink.
Just like the decades-old conflict between Israel and Palestine, many will try to say this is a complicated issue. And I can see where you might want to lean that direction. Sure, working out how to pay farmers, create demand, feed everyone, and fuel our cars has a lot of moving parts. But the one moving part we can't ignore is our environment, and especially, our water. It's running out. And it's running out locally in our lifetime. When that happens, none of the other parts will matter.
It's not complicated.
Namaste
