With the launch of the SPIN-Farming online learning series in 2006, we invited people to see prime cropland in unlikely places – backyards, neighborhood community plots, small scattered slivers of unused land, all under an acre in size – where production and revenue would be measured by the foot. Twenty years ago that took some imagination. Many said we were looking through rose-colored glasses. History was on their side.
E.F. Schumacher’s book Small Is Beautiful came out twenty years earlier in 1973, around the same time US Secretary Earl Butz issued the directive to “Get big or get out.” In the following decades we all know which view prevailed – large-scale agribusiness. The shuttering of small, independent and family farms was intentional, not a national tragedy.
Over the last 50+ years Butz’s vision worked out much the way he foresaw. Big mechanized farms produced food more efficiently and cheaply for a growing population and created the most abundant and richly varied food supply in the world.
This system became dominant and delivered benefits, but over time its tradeoffs became apparent. It’s capital and resource intensive. It takes more from the natural system than it puts back. In some cases, its by-products harm the environment. Its food contains less nutrition. It‘s susceptible to supply disruption. It hooked farmers on a commodity/export system that left them with less control over their prices and profitability and with significant government involvement in their business. Boom and bust cycles, once signs of disfunction, have become normalized. Bailout money that goes to farmers quickly gets passed on to their bankers, machinery dealers or chemical suppliers.
Meanwhile, Schumacher’s vision of small, organic, locally-based farms has become appealing to more and more people who are willing to pay whatever prices are necessary to keep them in business.
For much of the recent past these two visions of farming were set against each other. Now each is settling in alongside the other, influencing and learning from each other.
Big industrialized farmers are starting to operate differently, putting processes in place to measure and control pesticides and fertilizers and reduce water and energy usage. This saves them money and produces less pollution. New computing power and real-time data are helping them exert more control over their growing methods and make them less dependent on information from their suppliers. This will reduce their negative environmental impacts even more.
Meanwhile more consumers have changed food they eat and sparking new business opportunities for low-tech locally-based farmers. More constituencies, including consumers, corporations, healthcare professionals and academic research groups have pressed government to implement policies to rebuild local and regional food systems. Both private and public investment is flowing to new decentralized supply chains that combine large scale efficiencies with a commitment to small farmers and helping them feed identity-preserved product into the larger conventional food system.
Which brings us to the current state of affairs: there is no longer one standard bearer for the modern farmer. Scale, crops, growing methods, markets and economics are wildly different across the industry. Having all these different farming approaches in play allows disparate farmers to adapt and improve each other’s concepts and practices. Having more options provides more ways to practice the profession. Having more options means there’s more ways to succeed. Having more options is what makes our food system more secure because not all farmers are identically affected by whatever the attention-grabbing crisis of the day happens to be.
This season, like ones of the recent past, is starting amid the constant din of bad news. What might be comforting and helpful to you in carrying on is this: despite decades of stories that have focused on how unsustainable and dysfunctional our food production system is, more people have access to more food than ever before. And this: every day farmers are succeeding somewhere, somehow, one way or the other. And the work they do creates a future where for one way to be right, the other doesn’t have to be all wrong.
FORGE YOUR OWN PATH TO FARMING THAT’S LOW RISK, PROFITABLE AND THAT MORE AND MORE WANT TO SUPPORT . GET STARTED HERE.