other Morton1 Worldwatch Books

State ofthe World 1984 through 2006 An annual report on progress toward a sustainable society

Vital Signs 1992 thm* 2-2007 An annual report on the environmental trends that are shaping our future

Saving the PIanet Lester R. Brown Christopher Flavin Sandra P o d

Hour Much 1s Enough? Alan Thein Dutning

Last Oasis Sandra Postel

Full House Lester R. Brown Hal Kane

Power Surge Christopher mavin Nichoh Lenssen

Who wi l l Feed China? Lester R Brown

Tough Choices Lester R. Brown

Fighting for Survival Michael Rennet

The Natural Wealth u f ~ t i o m David Malin Roodman

Life Out of BOY^ Chris Bright

Beyond Malthus Lester R. Brown Gary Gardner Brian Halwei1

Pillar ofSam3 Sandra Postel

Vanishing Bordm Hilary French

Brian Halweil

W-Wa NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON

Where Nave RZZ the Farmer@ Gone?

st for now, the handful of food multinationals seems to have ed. But it's worth W n g a second to mom in and demn-

kt this unpunctuated drive &arch bigness. The b m t has fallen !st heavily on farmers, and examining what this culture of big-

has done to them gives some indication of what impact the culture has on the entire food chain.

Eat Here Where Have All the Farmers Gone? 61

I An Endangered Species Nowadays most of us in the industrialized countries don't farm, so we may no longer really understand that way of life. I was born in the apple-orchard and dairy country of Orange County, New York, but since age five have spent most of my life in New York

L ,

City-while most of the farms back in Orange have given way to spreading subdivisions. It's also hard for those of us who get our food from supermarket shelves or drive-through windows to know how dependent we are on the viability of rural communities.

Whether in the industrial world, where farm communities are growing older and emptier, or in developing nations, where pop- ulation growth is continually increasing the number of farmers and each generation is inheriting smaller family plots, it is becoming harder and harder to make a living a s a farmer. A combination of falling incomes, rising debt, and worsening rural poverty is forc- ing more people to either abandon farming as their primary activ- ity or to leave the countryside altogether-a bewildering juncture, considering that farmers produce perhaps the only good that the human race cannot do without.

Since 1950, the number of people employed in agriculture has plummeted in d industrial nations, in some regions by more than 80 percent.' Look at the numbers, and you might think farm- ers are being singled out by some kind of virus:

In Japan, more than half of all farmers are over 65 years old; in the United,States, farmers over 65 outnumber those under 35 by nearly six to one.2 (Upon retirement or death, many will pass their farms on to children who live in the city and have no inter- est in farming themselves.)

In Poland, 1.4 million farms-70 percent of the total-could disappear as the country is absorbed into the European U n i ~ n . ~

In the Philippines, 1.2 million farm workers lost their jobs between July 1999 and July 2000-a 10 percent drop in one yeat4

Economists have estimated that nearly 2 million Chinese farmers will go out of business in each of the next five years as WTO membership allows cheaper food imports to pour in.5

(This doesn't indude the Chinese farmers leaving the country- side due to water shortages, the expanding North China desert, rn falling crop prices.)

In the United States, where the vast majority of people were Farmers at the time of the American Revolution, h e r people are

v full-time farmers (less than 1 p m t of the population) than are full-time prisoners.6

Of course, the declining numbers of farmers in industrial nations does not imply a decline in the importance of the farm- ing sector. The world still has to eat, and there are 70 million more mouths to feed each year. (Fewer farmers, howwer, mean larger farms and greater concentration of ownership.) Despite a precip- itous plunge in the number of people employed in farming in North

erica, Europe, and East Asia, half the world's people still make heir living from the land. In sub-Saharan Ah-ica and South Asia, nore than 70 percent do. In these regions, agriculture accounts,

I on average, for half of total economic activity.7

Some might argue that the decline of farmers is harmless, I

wen a blessing, particularly for less developed nations that have iot yet experienced the modernization that moves peasants out lf backwater rural areas into the more advanced economies of the ities. For most of the past two centuries, the shift toward fewer armers has generally been assumed to be a kind of progress. The

1 I

ubstitution of high-powered diesel tractors for slow-moving mmen and men with hoes, or of large mechanized industrial I

urns for clusters of small "old-h&ionedm farms, is typically seen s the way to a more abundant and affordable food supply. Our

an-centered society has even come to view rural life, especially 1 the form of small, h d y owned businesses, as backwards or bor- ~ g , fit only for people who wear overalls and go to bed early- u from the sophistication and dynamism of the city.

Urban life does offer a wide array of opportunities, attrac- -.IS, and hopes that many farm families decide to pursue will- 1 2 1 ~ But city Iife often turns out to be a disappointment, as

laced farmers find themselves lodged in crowded slums, t I

62 Eat Here

where unemployment and ill health are the norm and where they are worse off than they were back home. Much evidence suggests that farmers aren't so much being lured to the city as they are being driven off their farms by a variety of structural changes in the way the global food chain operates. Bob Long, a rancher in McPherson County, Nebraska, stated in a recent New York Times article that passing the farm onto his son would be nothing less than "child abuse."s

As Iong as cities are under the pressure of population growth (a situation expected to continue at least for the next three or four decades), there will always be pressure for a large share of human- ity to subsist in the countryside. Even in highly urbanized North America and Europe, roughly 25 percent of the population-275 million people-still reside in rural areas.9 Meanwhile, for the 3 billion. Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans who remain in the countryside-and who will be there for the foreseeable future- the marginalization of farmers has set up a vicious cycle of low educational achievement, rising infant mortality, and deepening mental distress.

Hired Hands on Their Own Land

In the 18th and 19th centuries, farmers weren't so trapped. Most weren't d t h y , but they generally enjoyed stable incomes and strong community ties. Diversified farms yielded a range of raw and processed gwds that the farmer could typically sell in a local mar- ket. Production costs tended to be much lower than now, as many of the needed inputs were home-grown: the farmer planted seed saved f?om the previous year, the farm's cows or pigs provided fer- tilizer, and the diversity of crops-usually a large range of grains, tubers, vegetables, herbs, flowers, and fruits for home use as well as for sale-effectively functioned as pest controls.

Things have changed, especially in the past half-century. "The end of World War II was a watershed periodPsays Iowa State agri- cultural economist Mike Duffy. "The widespread introduction of chemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides, produced as part of

Yhere Haw AU the Farmers Gone? 63

he war effort, set in motion dramatic changes in how we farm- , -- > a dramatic dedine in the number of farmers."lO In the post-

period, along with increasing mechanization, there was an w i n g tendency to "outsource" pieces of the work that the

farmers had previously done themselves-from producing their own fertilizer to cleaning and padraging their harvest. That out- sourcing, which may have seemed like a welcome convenience at the time, eventually boomeranged: at first it enabled the farmer to increase output, and thus profits, but when all the other farm- ers were doing it too, crop prices began to fill.

Before long, the processing and packaging businesses were adding more economic value to the purchased product than the farmer, and it was those businesses that became the dominant players in the food industry. Instead of farmers outsourcing to contractors, it became a matter of large food processors buying raw materials from farmers, on the processors' terms. Today, most of the money is in the work the farmer no longer does- or even controls. Tractor makers, agrochemical firms, seed com- panies, food processors, and supermarkets take most of what is spent on food, leaving the farmer less than 10 cents of the typi- cal food dollar.11 (See Figure 3-1, p. 45.) (As noted earlier, an

ierican who buys a loaf of bread is paying about as much for ~e wrapper as for the wheat.)

Ironically, then, as farms became more mechanized and more "productive," a self-destructive feedback loop was set in motion: over-supply and dedining crop prices cut into farmers' profits, d ing a demand for more technology aimed at making up for

shrinking margins by increasing volume still more. Output increased dramatically, but expenses (for tractors, combines, fer- tilizer, and seed) also ballooned-while the commodity prim stag-

I nated or declined. Even as they were looking more and more i modernized, the farmers were becoming less and less the masters

of their own domain. On the typical Iowa farm, the farmer's profit margin has dropped from 35 percent in 1950 to 9 percent today.12 To generate the same income (assuming stable yields

64 Eat Here

and prices), the farm would need to be roughly four times as large today as in 1950-or the farmer would need to get a night job. And that's precisely what we've seen in most indushiahd nations: fewer farmers on bigger tracts of land producing a greater share of the food supply. The farmer with declining margins buys out his neighbor and expands or risks being cannibalized himself.

There is an alternative to this huge scaling up, which is to buck the trend and bring some of the input-supplying and post-har- vest processing-and the related profits-back onto the farm. But more self-sufficient farming would be highly unpopular with the industries that now make lucrative profits h m inputs and pro- cessing. And since these industries have much more political clout than the farmers do, there is little support for rescuing farmers from their increasingly s e d e condition-and the idea h a been largely forgotten. Farmers continue to get the message that the only way to succeed is to get big.

Food Cartels

The traditional explanation for this constant pressure to "get big or get out" has been that it improves the efficiency of the food sys- tem-bigger farms replace smaller farms, because the bigger farms operate at lower costs. In some respects, this is quite true. Scaling up may allow a farmer to spread a tractor's cost over greater acreage, for example. Greater size also means greater lever- age in purchasing inputs or negotiating loan rates-increasingly important as satellite-guided combines and other equipment make farming more and more capital-intensive. But these economies of scale typically level off. Data for a wide range of crops produmd in the United States show that the lowest production costs are generay achieved on farms that are much smaller than the typical farm now is. But large farms can tolerate lower mar- gins, so while they may not produce at lower cost, they can afford to sell their crops at lower cost, if forced to do so-as indeed they are, by the food processors who buy from them. In short, to the extent that a giant farm has a financial benefit over a small one,

e Have AU the Farmers Gone? 65

it's a benefit that goes only to the processor-not to the farmer, the farm community, or the environment.

The shift of the food dollar away h m farmers is compounded by intense concentration in every link of the food chain-from seeds and herbicides to farm fmance and retailing. (See Sidebar 3- 1, p. 47.) In Canada, for example, just b e e companies control over 70 percent of fertilizer sales, five banks provide the vast majority of agricultural credit, two companies control over 70 percent of beef packing, and five companies dominate food retadhg.13 The merger of Philip Moms and Nabisco (recently m e d Altria) cre- ated an empire that collects nearly 10 cents of every dollar a U.S. :onsumer spends on food.14 Such high concentration can be deadly for the farmer's bottom lines, allowing agribusiness firms to extract higher prices for the products the farmer buys h r n them, while offering lower prices for the crop they buy from the farmer.

An even more worrisome form of concentration, according to Bill Heffernan, a rural sociologist at the University of Missouri, I

s the emergence of several clusters of firms that-through merg- :rs, takeovers, and alliances with other links in the food chain-

v possess *a seamless and fully vertically integrated control of he food system from gene to supermarket shelf." 15 Consider the -ecent partnership between Monsanto and Cargill, which con-

fertilizers, pesticides, farm finance, grain collection, processing, livestock feed processing, livestock produc- d slaughtering, as well as some well-known processed food

int of a company like Cargill, such s yield tremendous control over costs and can therefore

farmer. Want to buy seed to grow corn? f corn in a hundred-kilometer radius, particular Monsanto corn variety for

elevators or feedlots, then if you don't plant Mon- a market for your corn, Need a loan

try the seed? Go to Cargxll-owned Bank of Ellsworth, but be e to let them h o w which seed you'll be buying. Also mention

66 Eat Here

that you'll be buying Cargiu's Saslderco brand fedher. But sup- pose, once the corn is grown, that you don't like the idea of hav- ing to sell to Cargd at tbe prices it dictates. Well, maybe you'll feed the corn to your pigs, then, and sel l them to the highest bidder. No problem-Cargill's Excel Corporation buys pigs, too. Or sup- pose you're renouncing the farm life and moving to the city! No more home-made grits for breakfast, you're buying corn flakes. Wdl, good news: Cargill Foods supplies corn flour to the top cereal makers. You'll notice, though, that all the big brands of corn flakes seem to have pretty much the same hefty price per ounce. After all, they're all made by the agricultural oligopoly.

As these vertical food conglomerates consolidate, Heffernan warns, "there is little room left in the global food system for inde- pendent farmers"-the h e r s being increasingly left with "take it or leave it" contracts from the remaining conglomerates.16 In the last two decades, the share of American agricultural output pro- duced under contract has more than tripled, from 10 percent to 35 percent-and this doesn't include the contracts that farmers must sign to plant genetically engineered seed.17 (These seeds account for 80 percent of the soy, 70 percent of the cotton, and 40 percent of the corn planted on American soil.)lg Such centralized control of the food system, in which farmers are effectively reduced to hired hands on their own land, rerninds Heffernan of the Soviet- style state farms, but with the Big Brother role now being played by agribusiness executives.19 It is also reminiscent of theUcompany store" which once dominated small Ameriw mining or factory towns, except that if you move out of town now, the store is s t i l l with you. The company store has gone global.

The ability of agribusiness to roam around the planet, buy- ing at the lowest possible price and selling at the highest, has tended to tighten the squeeze, throwing every farmer on the planet into direct competition with every other farmer. A recent UN Food and Agriculture Organization assessm'ent of the experience of 16 developing nations in implementing the latest phase of the General Agreement and Tariffs and Trade (GATT) concluded that

Where Have Al l the Farmers Gone? 67

- a common reported concern was with a general trend towards the concentration of farms: a process that tends to further margin- alize small producers and exacerbate rural poverty and unem- ployment.20 The sad irony, says Thomas Reardon of Michigan State University, is that while small farmers in all reaches of the world are i n d g l y affected by cheap, heavily subsidized imports of foods from outside of their traditional rural markets, they are nonetheless often excluded from opportunities to participate in food exports themselves. To keep down transaction costs and to keep promising standardized, exp~rters and other downstream play- ers prefer to buy from a few large producers.21

As the global food system becomes increasingly dominated by a handful of vmically integrated, international corporations, the servitude of the farmer points to a broader society-wide servi- tude that OPEC-like food cartels could impose, through their con- trol over food prices and fwd quality, Agricultural economists have alrea* noted that the widening gap between retail food prices and farm prices that emerged in the 1990s was due almost exclusively to exploitation of market power, and not to extra services pro- vided by processors and retailers.22 It's questionable whether we should pay as much for a bread wrapper as we do for the nutri- ents it contains. But beyond this lies a more fundamental ques- tion. Farmers are professionals, with &&ve knowledge of their local soils, weather, native plants, sources of fedizer or mulch, I :native pollinators, ecology, and community. In a world where the I ' land is no longer managed by such professionals, but is instead managed by distant corporate bureaucracies interested in extract- ing maximum output at minimum cost, what kind of food will we have, and at what price? !

' There is no question that large industrid farms can produce lots 8 of food. Indeed, they're designed to maximize quantity. But when the farmer kcomes little more than the lawest-mst producer of raw materials, more than his own welfare will suffer. Though the farm

68 Eat Here

sector has lost power and profit, it is still the one Iink in the agri- hod chain accounting for the largest share of agriculture's public goo6including half the world's jobs, many of its most vital com- munities, and many of its most diverse landscapes. And in provid- ing many of these goods, small farms dearly have the advantage.

Consider the impact on the stability of l o d communities. Ova half a cmaury ago, William GoIdschmidf an anthropologist work- ing at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), tried to assess how farm structure and size affect the health of rural communi- ties. In California's San Joaquin Valley, a region then considered to be at the cutting edge of agricultural industrialization, he iden- tified two small towns that were alike in all basic economic and geographic dimensions, including value of agricultural produc- tion, except in farm size. Comparing the two, he found an inverse correlation between the sizes of the farms and the well-being of the communities they were a part of. The smal-farm community, Dinuba, supported about 20 percent more people, and at a a n - siderably higher level of living-including lower poverty rates, laver levels of economic and social cIass distinctions, and a lower ,

crime rate-than the large-farm community of Arvin. The rnajor- ity of Dinuba's residents were independent entrepreneurs, whereas fewer than 20 percent of Arvin's residents were, most of the oth- ers being agricultural laborers. Dinuba had twice as many busi- ness establishments as Arvin, and did 61 percent more retaiI business. It had more schooIs, parks, newspapers, civic organiza- tions, and churches, as well as better physical infiastmcture-paved, streets, s i d e garbage disposal, sewage disposal and other pub- lic services. Dinuba also had more institutions for democratic deci- sion making and much broader participation by its citizens. (Political scientists have long recognized that a broad base of independent entrepreneurs and property owners is one of the keys to a healthy democracy.)23

The distinctions between Dinuba and Arvin suggest that industrial agriculture may be limited in what it can do for a com- munity. Faver (and less meaningful) jobs, less local spending, and

Where Have All the Farmers Gone? 69

P. a hemorrhagic flow of profits to absentee landowners and distant --->pliers means that indushial farms can actually be a net drain ,, the local economy. And while big-box stores like Wal-Mart

'

argue that they bring jobs and other economic benefits to a com- munity, studies have shown they may displace more work than they create. The National Retail Planning Forum in the United King-

' dom, a nonprofit planning research group that works with indus- try and government, estimated that each new food superstore

' accounts for a net loss of 276 full-time employees: the immediate ' increase in superstore employment is offset by the more gradual

decrease in food store employment in the 15-kilometer zone around the stores. And many of the new jobs are part-time, lower

: paying, and lower quality.24 Not surprisingly, when the economic prospects of small farms

h e , the social fabric of rural communities begins to tear. In me United States, farming families are more than twice as likely +- live in poverty.25 They have less education and lower rates of

:dial protection, along with higher rates of infant mortality, alalco-

lism, child abuse, spousal abuse, and mental -ess.2"oss Europe, a similar pattern is evident.27And in sub-Saharan Africa, sociologist Deborah Bryceson of the Netherlands-based African Studies Centre has studied the dislocation of small farmers and found that *as de-agrarianization proceeds, signs of social dysfunc- tion associated with urban areas [including petty crime and break- downs of family ti4 are resurfacing in villages."28

People without meanin@ work often become frustrated, but farrners may be a special case. "More so than other occupa- tions, Earming represents a way of life and defines who you are," says Mike Rosrnann, a clinical psychologist and farmer who runs

, AgnWellness Inc., a farmer counseling network in Harlan, Iowa. "Losing the family farm, or the prospect of losing the family farm, can generate tremendous guilt and anxiety, as if one has failed to protea the heritage that his ancestors worked to hold ontd29 One measure of the despair has been a worldwide surge in the num-

' ber of b e r s committing suicide. Since 1998, officials estimate

70 Eat Here

that thousands of farmers in the Indian state of A n b Pradesh committed suicide, including many who took their lives by swd-

, ' lowing pesticides that they had gone into debt to purchase but that had nonetheless failed to save their crops.M In Britain, farm work- ers are twice as likely to commit suicide than the rest of the pop- ulation.31 U.S. farmers, according to one swey, are five times as

4 ' likely to commit suicide as to die from farm accidents, which have been traditionally the most frequent cause of unnatural death for tl1em.3~ The true number may be even higher, as suicide hotlines report that they often receive calls from farmers who want to know which sorts of accidents (falling into the blades of a com- bine? getting shot while hunting?) are least likely to be investigated by insurance companies that don't pay claims for suicides.

Whether from despair or anger, farmers seem increasingly ready to rise up, sometimes violently, against government, wedthy landholders, or agribusiness giants. In recent years we've witnessed the Zapatista revolution in Chiapas, the seizing of white-owned farms by landless blacks in Zimbabwe, and the attacks of European farmers on warehouses storing genetically engineered seed. In Ham& of Rage, journalist Joel Dyer links the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed nearly 200 people, as well as the rise of radical-rrgbt and anti-government militias in the U.S. heartland, to a spreading despair and anger stemming from the ongoing farm crbk33 Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Project on Envi- ronment, Population, and Security at the University of Toronto, regards farmer dislocation (and the resulting rural unemploy- ment and poverty) as one of the major securityheats for the com- ing decades. Such dislocation is responsible for roughly half of the growth of urban populations across the Third World, and such growth often occurs in volatile shantytowns that are already strain- ing to meet the basic needs of their residents. " m a t was an extremely traumatic transition for Europe and North America from a rural society to an urban one is now proceeding at two to three times that speed in developing nations: says Homer-Dixon.w And these nations have considerabIy less industdimtion to absorb

t Where Have AU the Farmers Gone? 71

me labor. Such an accelerated transition poses enormous adjust- rent challenges for India and China, where perhaps a billion and

half people still make their living horn the land. The social fallout of small farmers going extinct has a wor-

q g ecological analog. Consider that in the Andean highlands, a single farm may host as many as 40 distinct varieties of potato

dong with numerous other native plants), each having slrghtly ifferent optimal soil, water, light, and temperature regimes,

which the farmer-given enough time-can manage. (In com- parison, in the United States, just four closely related varieties acmunt for about 99 percent of all the potatoes produced.)35 But according to Karl Zimmerer, a University of Wisconsin sociolo- ist, declining farm incomes in the Andes force more and more rowers into migrant labor pools for part of the year, with seri- us effects on farm ecology, As t ime becomes constrained, the

er manages the system more homogenously-cutting back ,,, ,,ie number of traditional varieties (a small home garden of favorite culinary varieties may be the last refuge of diversity), nd scaling up production of a few commercial varieties. Much f the traditional crop diversity is lost.36

Complex farm systems require a sophisticated and intimate knowledge of the land-something small-scale, full-time farm-

; ers are better able to provide. Two or three different: crops that have different root depths, for example, can often be planted on the same piece of land, or crops requiring different drainage can

K be planted in close proximity on a tract that has variegated topog- aphy. But these kinds of cultivation can't be done with heavy ractors moving at high speed. Highly site-specific and manage- lent-intensive cultivation demands ingenuity and awareness of ~cal ecology, and can't be achieved using heavy equipment and --- y applications of agrochemicals. That isn't to say that being

.,.J is always sufficient to ensure ecologically sound food pro- uction, because economic adversity can drive small farms, as well s big ones, to compromise sustainable food production by trans-

mogrifpng the craft of land stewardship into the crude labor of

72 Eat Here

commodity production. But a large-scale, highly mechanized farm is simply not equipped to preserve landscape complexity. Instead, its n o d method is to use blunt management tools, like crops that have been genetically engineered to churn out insec- ticides, which obviate the need to scout the field to see if spray- ing is necessary at all.

Zn the U.S. Midwest, as farm size has increased, cropping sys- tems have gotten more simplified. Since 1972, the number of countia with more than 55 percent of their acreage planted in corn and soybeans has nearly tripled, from 97 to 267.37 AS fanns scaled up, the great simplicity of managing the corn-soybean rotation- an 800-acre (324-hectare) farm, for instance, may require no more than a couple of weeks for planting in the spring and a few weeks for harvesting in the fall-bemme its big selling point. The vari- ous arms of the agricultural economy in the region, from exten- sion services to grain elevators to seed suppliers, began to solidify around this corn-soybean rotation, reinfordng the farmers' move- ment away h m other crops. Fewer and fewer farmers kept live- stock, as beef and hog production became "economical" only in other parts of the country where it was becoming more concen- trated. Giving up livestock meant eliminating clover, pasture mix- tures, and a Zcey source of fertilizer in the Midwest, while creating tremendous manure concentrations in other places.

But the mrn and soybean rotation--one monoculture followed by another-is exhemdy inefficient or "leaky" in its use of applied fertilizer. Low levels of biodiversity tend to leave a range of vacant niches in the field; corn and soybean plants draw up only some of the nutrients in the fertilizers, during their major growth spurts and from certain soil depths. Moreover, the Midwest's shift to monoculture has subjected the country to a double hit of nitro- gen pollution. Not only does the removal and concentration of live- stock tend to dump inordinate amounts of feces in the places (such a s Utah and North Carolina) where the livestock opera- tions are naw locate&but the monodtures that remain in the Mid- west have much poorer nitrogen retention than they would if their

Where Have A l l the Fanners Gone? 73

cropping were more complex. (The addition of just a winter rye mop to the corn-soy rotation has been shown to reduce nitrogen 1 - m f f by nearly 50 percent.)38

I And maybe this disaster-in-the-making should really be

egarded as a triple hit, because in addition to contaminating mid- vestern water supplies, the runoff ends up in the Gulf of M&co,

where the nitrogen feeds massive algae blooms. When the algae die, they are decomposed by bacteria whose respiration depletes the watch oxygen-suffocating fish, shellfish, and all other life that dwsn't escape. In recent years this process periodically has left 20,000 square kilometers of water off the Louisiana coast biologically

ead39 Thus the act of simpllfylng the ecology of a field in Iowa an contribute to severe pollution in Utah, North Carolina,

siana, and Iowa. f ie world's agricultural biodiversity-the ultimate insurance

I against dimate variations, pest outbreaks, and other unfore-

seen threats to food security-depends largely on the millions of small farmers who use this diversity in their local growing &- ronments. But the marginalization of farmers who have developed

r inherited complex farming systems over generations means lore than just the loss of specific crop varieties and the knowl- dge of how they best grow. 'We forever lose the best available nowledge and experienm of place, including what to do with mar- inal lands not suited for industrial production," says Steve Gleiss- m, an agroecologist at the University of California at Santa Zuz." The 12 million hogs produced by SmiMeld Foods Inc.,

argest hog producer and processor in the world and a pioneer vertical integration, are nearly identical genetically and raised

nder identical conditions whether they are in a Smithfreld feed- .). jt in Virginia or Mexico or Poland.4'

As farmers become increasingly integrated into the ap'busi- ess food chain, they have fewer and fwer controls over the total- Y of the production process-shifting more and more to the

of *technology applicators," as opposed to managers making rmed and independent decisions. Recent USDA surveys of

74 Eat Here

contract poultry farmers in the United States found that, in seek- ing outside advice on their operations, these farmers now turn first to bankers and then to the corporations that hold their contracts9 If the contracting corporation is also the same company that is sell- ing the farm its w d and f e , as is often the case, there's a strong likelihood that that company's procedures wilI be followed. That corporation, as a global enterprise with no compelling local ties, is also less likely to be concerned about the pollution and resource degradation created by those procedures, at least compared with a farmer who is rooted in that community. Grower contracts gen- erally disavow any environmental liability.

And then there is the ecological fallout unique to large-scale, industrial agriculture. Colossal confined animal feeding opera- tions (CAFOs), constitute perhaps the most egregious example of agriculture that has, like a garbage barge in a goldfish pond, overwhelmed the ability of an ecosystem to cope. CAFOs are increasingly the norm in livestock production because, like crop monocultures, they allow the production of huge populations of animals which can be slaughtered and marketed at rock-bottom costs. But the disconnection between the livestock and the land used to produce their feed means that CAFOs generate gargan- tuan amounts of waste that the surrounding soil cannot possi-

I bly absorb. (One farm in Utah will rake over 1.5 million hogs in a year, producing as much waste each day as the city of Los Ange- Ies.)43 The waste is generally stored in large lagoons, which are prone to leak and wen spill aver during heavy storms. From North Carolina to South Korea, the overwhelming stench of these lagoons-a combination of hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and methane gas that smells like rotten eggs-renders miles of sur- rounding land uninhabitable,

A different form of ecological disruption results from the conditions under which these animals are raised. Because mas- sive numbers of closely confined livestock are highly susceptible to infection, and because a steady diet of antibiotics can modestly boost animal growth, weruse of antibiotics has become the norm

Have ALL the Farmers Gone? 75

1 llldustrial animal production. In recent: years, the United ations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health brganization, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Pre- mtion have identified such industrid feeding operations as prin-

causes of the growing antibiotic resistance in food-borne bacteria like salmonella and campylobacter.44

Perhaps most surprising to people who have only casually ~llowed the debate about small-farm values versus factory-farm fficiency" is the fact that a large body of evidence s h m that small sms are actually more productive than large ones, producing as

I as 1,000 percent more output per unit of area.& How does his jibe with the often-mentioned productivity advantages of

large-scale mechanized operations? The answer is simply that those big-farm advantages are always calculated on the basis of how much of one crop the land will yield per acre, The greater produc- tivity of a smaller, more complex farm, however, is calculated on

i the basis of how much food overall is produced per acre. The naller farm can grow several crops utiIizing different root depths, ant heights, or nutrients on the same piece of land simuItane- sly. It is this "polyculture" that offers the small farm's produc- ~ i ty advantage.

To illustrate the difference between these two kinds of meas- I-mrrnent, consider a large U.S. midwestern corn farm. That farm

ay produce more corn per hectare than a small farm in which e corn is grown as part of a polyculture that also includes beans, uash, potato, and "weeds" that serve as fodder. But in overall out-

the polycropunder dose supervision by a knowled~eable - rmer-produces much more food, whether you measure in

s, calories, or dollars. (According to the 2002 US. Agncul- ~1, Census, the smallest category of farm,'with an average size f two hectares, produced $15,104 per hectare and netted about 2.902 per acre. The largest farms, averaging 15,581 hectares,

lded $249 per hectare and netted about $52 per hectare. This ttern holds for every farm-size ~ategory.)~6 The inverse relation: ip between farm size and output can be attributed to the more

76 Eat Here

efficient use of land, water, and other agricultural resources that small operations afford, including the efficiencies of intercropping various plants in the same field, phting multiple times during the year, targeting irrigation, and integrating crops and livestock. So in terms of converting inputs into outputs, society would be better off with s d - s c a l e farmers. And as population continues to grow in many nations, and the amount of farmland and water a d b l e to each person continues to shrink, a small farm struc- ture may become central to feeding the planet.

Ihere Have AU the Farmers Gone? 77

BREAKING GROUND: Nairobi, Kenya

One of the great ironies o f modem agriculture i s that, while farmers have delivered food i n astonishing abundance, farmers themselves are now members of the poorest-and the hungriest-occupation on Earth.47 This is the problem that has come to dominate the agenda of a Kenyan NGO, the Association for Better Land Husbandry.

ABLH was set up i n 1994 to promote a variety of conservation farming techniques, including biointensive fanning. This approach, popularized i n California, relies on a technique called "dauble-dig- ging," which aerates the soil and permits better nutrient circulation. Biointensive farming can boost yields dramatically without added chemicals. It also offers a possible solution to the plague of striga, a noxious weed that each year robs as much as 20 percent of East Africa's grainfa In a one-two punch against the vampire weed, it enriches soils with compost (nitrogen and other nutrienEs keep striga seeds from sprouting), and then produces a dense, diverse plant

, canopy that shades out most weeds. But by themselves, such improvements aren't going t o bring pros-

perity to farmers. "Doubling maize yields and tripling kale yields doesn't make much of a difference if you can't get your produce to market, or if a flood o f cheap imports squashes your local market,"

,says Jim Cheatle, founder and director o f ABLH.49 To get at these issues, Cheatle expanded the group's agenda to include a kind of 'rrner empowerment. ABLH now coordinates nearly 20 farm coopera- -.ves so that local growers can capture the marketing and distribu-

Reon advantages that come with scale. "Instead of each of several lousand farmers buying their own delivery truck and setting up ~e i r own marketing offices," says Jane Turn, an ABLH extertsionist, .he cooperative can pool its resources for a much larger delivery

nd a marketing staff."So might seem like an obvious thing to do, but any concern

od marketing is sti l l unusual i n places like Kenya. A recent f over 200 sustainable farming projects i n the developing und that only 12 to 15 percent had tried to improve market-

cessing.51 Co-op produce i s now selling i n both local and markets under the "Farmer's Own" brand name. Among the bearing this label are Mr. Brittle, a macadamia nut energy

Eat Here

bar, and Mchuzi Mix, a soup and sauce thickener made from locally grown beans and corn. "We're competing with the big boys," says Frandsca Odundo, the marketing manager for Farmefs Own.S2 Francisca i s trying to cultivate allegiance for the new brand, which now sits on shelves alongside the Cadbury and Nestle labels.

During a trip t o Kenya i n 2001, I got a sense for the tangible results of these efforts when Turn took me t o a farm t o pick up pro- duce for a Farmefs Own vegetable stand. The farm was run by Flora Mwoshi, a young mother of three. On the day I visited, she was har- vesting bright green bell peppers. With a young child resting on her hip, Flora balanced a five-gallon plastic bucket of peppers on her head and bore it t o our truck, where it was weighed. Several more buckets followed. Her six-year-OM daughter, barefoot but wearing her ' !st white dress because she had heard that white people were com- ,,,g to visit, watched i n awe as her mother became the center o f attention. Jane paid the woman 600 Kenyan shillings, about $10. That doesn't sound like much, but that money went directly into her pocket-no middleman to pay, no bills for agrochemicals or expen- sive seeds. And many more vegetables remained to be harvested,

This simple transaction was the most inspiring moment of my trip-a generally dismal journey to the epicenter of global hunger. We, the "white people," hadn't arrived with some foreign technology of highly dubious potential. We were there as witnesses and-in a broad sense-as colleagues. What we witnessed was a Local response to a local problem. And we could see that the response worked, because the'produce was beautiful, and the farmer got paid.53

C H A P T E R 5