The myths we tell ourselves about American farming
vox.com
vox.com
It consumes large amounts of resources that can't be sustained. It dumps large amount of chemical and animal waste into the environment in a manner that can't be sustained.
Modern farming is kinda like plastics --- everybody wants cheap stuff but it's only cheap if you ignore the long term costs --- like when it starts polluting human breast milk and gets fed to your babies.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/07/micropla...
The food produced by my small farm is not cheap. We barely use chemicals when absolutely required, and our animal "waste" fertilizes our pastures and reduces our external inputs even further. One consequence of such good stewardship is that our pork sells for 3-4x the cost of supermarket meat.
I find it very frustrating to see all farms demonized like this, because small farms already face scale-based discrimination. Most existing regulations were written to favor Big Ag, and they do indeed produce cheap food (in every sense of the word). Small farms already face nearly impossible odds bringing our food to market, so please don't conflate our practices and products with those of Big Ag.
Fair enough --- as long a you don't do the opposite.
It is my understanding that small farms like yours account for less than 10% of total food production in the USA. So in the overall, big picture view of things, Big Ag effectively is "American farming".
Ugh, groan. As an example, they all know that feed lots are dumping poop directly into water sources that feed into adjacent fields, which is one of the major causes of foodborne illnesses.
If regulations under discussion were applied equally to all farms, then most small farms would cease to exist, because our neighbors would sue us into oblivion.
Not because we are doing anything as egregiously wrong as CAFOs, but because we cannot afford to defend against spurious lawsuits from city folks that have moved to the country.
Proper regulations are good protection against lawsuits. Without regulations your responsibilities to keep the environment clean are vague. OTOH, following regulations in good faith makes your responsibilities very clear.
Where I am, the grain district of Western Australia:
ALMOST two-thirds of the farming population in the agricultural area of Western Australia live on farms of 1,000 acres or more in size.
The average farm size in WA is approximately 4500 hectares (11,000 acres).
https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/sites/gateway/files/Grain%20prod...
Both those statements are true, most farms are greater than 1K acres, and the average size of a grain farm is 11,000 acres.
My neighbour shoots ULR targets at 5,000 yards across his property.
Most of the grain growing here is family dynasty type ownership.
Cattle stations get much much bigger.
50 beef cattle is hobby farm size. It wouldn't provide enough revenue to support a family. We needed grains, oilseeds, pigs and chickens in addition to the 50 beef cattle to support ours.
11,000 acres in Saskatchewan (and presumably Australia) is family farm size. It will have 0 or 1 employees.
I'm ok with the definition that most farms just aren't small. Certainly ok with the idea that a small farm is still giant compared to any other "small" business. But I find it odd that Clarkson's Farm, a show many are probably familiar with today, is literally 1/10 the size of what you are calling a small farm. Is that just a tiny farm?
Edit: Finally tried clicking around your links, I think you messed up the WA one. At any rate, I see a "small" farm is designated by revenue of about 28k. https://cms.agr.wa.gov/WSDAKentico/Imported/641-WSDAAgInfogr..... shows that "63% of farms are less than 50 acres" So, I can see how your average number can work, as that is how statistics work. That said, most farms are clearly not 11k acres.
Edit2: Annoyingly, that link I put up indicates the "small" revenue is 250k. It was an exemption of some sort that I closed the link on that indicated 28.
And all real farms have at least 6 figures of revenue. They also have at least 6 figures of expenses. A small combine harvester costs $500,000, for example.
I'm curious what the exemptions are on runoff regulations. That was the driver for what got me asking.
Edit: I realized late that the numbers for average farm in WA was not jumping to the US state, as I was silly to assume. Since we are discussing US farms, it makes sense to look at those sizes, to me. And, yeah, our farms are much much smaller. Even Texas has average sizes in the 1k range.
Everything this comment above says is also detailed in the book Sacred Cow. Large corporations are, again, the problem. But people come out of the woodwork to defend them under an article that vilifies them.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
What I mean by the contrarian dynamic is that often, negative feedback shows up first, only to produce a flood of objections by people saying some variant of "I can't believe this place is so negative". This happens so frequently that I think it must be a product of something hard-wired in the medium* and something hard-wired in humans. Like any predictable mechanism, this one tends to be bad for discussion quality.
* I mean the medium of the internet forum
My perception at the time of posting the comment was correct. If I could edit the wording now, I would, but I can't. Weird flex.
In New Zealand there are zero farm subsidies and people eat just fine. But without major structural changes to the US federal government I don't think anything will change here.
> New Zealand grain and feed import volumes in 2022 rose to the highest level ever, importing 3.7 million metric tons (MMT), up 13 percent from the previous year. National grain and feed demand continues to outstrip domestic supply by nearly double, with New Zealand producing 2.1 MMT in 2022, but consuming an estimated 5.8 MMT. Dairy farming continues to dominate as the largest consumer, accounting for about 75 percent, followed by poultry (12 percent) and then human consumption (nine percent). Strong recent record milk prices have stimulated demand from the dairy industry in order to boost production. For human consumption, and processing, New Zealand produces milling wheat, oats, and malting barley, but also still imports milling wheat sourced from Australia, its closest neighbor.
> Palm Kernel Extract (PKE) continues to be the largest imported feed (54 percent of imports), sourced from Indonesia and Malaysia, destined specifically for the dairy sector. In addition, Distiller's Dried Grains with Solubles (DDGS) is a high growth import market from the United States, as well as soybean meal from South America.
[0]: https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/Report/DownloadRepo...
Keep in mind that a lot of the history/explanation is flat out wrong or trying to take inspiration from the 1619 Project - farms get all sorts of regulatory carve-outs because a) they still control huge swaths of land and huge parts of the economy of most of the states b) and increases in food prices would be a political disaster for everyone else.
Yes, it's kind of a myth that farmers are numerous, poor, destitute, etc. But the article is literally begging the question of why don't we just impose more cost on farming, and the answer is so obvious without needing to delve into a fraught debunking.
We want to maintain a high supply of food and need producers to do that without thinking they could go bankrupt next year. Seems reasonable to me.
Does anyone want to tell them how septic systems work?
> generate nearly 2.5 billion pounds of waste every day [...] or spread onto crop fields as fertilizer
Vox is mad that they're essentially recycling?
> “a comprehensive evaluation is essential before determining whether any regulatory revisions are necessary or appropriate.”
I guess reason is no longer a virtue, at least to Vox, who would prefer a fully reactionary government that operates from the same level of ignorance as their writing pool.
Feedlots are destructive to the environment in a way that rotational grazing is not. Grass fed beef with rotational grazing is good for the environment, reducing fertilizer requirements without causing food contamination or wasting resources trucking cows and grain around. It's not good for big-ag, because they need a market for their subsidized corn/soybeans and it's not good for national beef producers because they want to co-locate and integrate everything for cost savings, but it'd be good for the cows, the environment and local businesses that are being undercut by the national players.
Grass-fed beef isn't necessarily better for the environment than beef from CAFOs. While grass-fed systems offer benefits like soil health, they often require more land, potentially leading to deforestation. They can also be less efficient in terms of resource use and have variable effects on carbon sequestration. A comprehensive assessment considering land use efficiency, resource consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions is essential to fully understand the environmental impact of different beef production methods.
https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/grazed-and-co...
"About 75% to 80% of grass-fed beef sold in the U.S. is grown abroad, from Australia, New Zealand and parts of South America ..."
"Many U.S. customers who want to support local food are likely unaware of the foreign origin of most grass-fed beef. By law, if meat is "processed," or passes through a USDA-inspected plant (a requirement for all imported beef), it can be labeled as a product of the U.S. "
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/13/746576239/is...
"This report concludes that grass-fed livestock are not a climate solution. Grazing livestock are net contributors to the climate problem, as are all livestock. Rising animal production and consumption, whatever the farming system and animal type, is causing damaging greenhouse gas release and contributing to changes in land use.
'Ultimately, if high consuming individuals and countries want to do something positive for the climate, maintaining their current consumption levels but simply switching to grass-fed beef is not a solution. Eating less meat, of all types, is.’"
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-10-03-grass-fed-beef-good-or-...
Deforestation is only a problem if you have a corrupt government that doesn't manage its land and gives carte blanche for destructive behavior.
People will naturally eat less meat at a higher price point. Currently the externalities of industrial meat production aren't priced into the cost of factory meat, which is why it's artificially cheap. If you were to price those things into it, it'd be more expensive than (or at least at parity with) sustainably raised animals.
> Deforestation is only a problem if you have a corrupt government that doesn't manage its land
While governance plays a role in deforestation, these pastures are often already deforested areas. Producing beef there still demands a significant amount of agricultural land for a minor share of our caloric intake. Reforesting could offer greater benefits like carbon storage and biodiversity restoration.
> People will naturally eat less meat at a higher price point. Currently the externalities of industrial meat production aren't priced into the cost of factory meat, which is why it's artificially cheap
Exactly, and that's why I believe that subsidies for polluting and destructive sectors should be abolished, and these sectors should be appropriately taxed. Doing so could make the price of meat prohibitive for most, which aligns with your point about higher prices reducing consumption.
It's uncertain how many animals could be raised sustainably, and how many people would be able to afford meat from such sources. The number for both is likely low.
I also worry about biodiversity. If we've managed to reduce animal populations by 70% in the last 50 years, how long will it be until they collapse completely? Agriculture is the main culprit, with animal agriculture making up 80% of it.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/13/almost-7...
I'm glad we can at least come together on wanting the cost of industrial meat to be represented in its price.
We could make meat "affordable" with only sustainable production, small local sustainable farmers can make a decent living if they cut out most of the middle men, going straight from the processor to local restaurants/butchers/direct sales. More people would need to be involved in agriculture to make it scale, and meat wouldn't be cheap like it is now, but it will have the upside of converting a lot of marginal land to beautiful mixed pasture and forests full of life.
[0] https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/917471
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
Transport typically accounts for less than 1% of beef’s GHG emissions: choosing to eat local has very minimal effects on its total footprint
[2] https://foodrevolution.org/blog/grass-fed-beef-2021-update/
Where do you think a city's sewage goes? In LA, for example:
> The treated wastewater (effluent) that is not reclaimed is piped into the Los Angeles River, Santa Monica Bay, or Los Angeles Harbor to name a few.
Most cities don't recycle their poop. They just dump it into the nearest body of water after processing it.
[0]: https://dpw.lacounty.gov/landing/wr/sewer/wwTreatment.cfm#:~....