Husbandry
In some sense, we've abandoned the notion
The Founding Fathers had a lot to say about farming, virtually all of it good. There are some indications that certain methods typically employed in farming have been and are now ultimately destructive, and I am in agreement with many of these assertions. We are in the process of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Unfortunately we’ve done exactly the opposite of what we should have; as the old saying goes we should not have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, quite the opposite has happened, we threw out the baby and kept the bathwater. The baby was our agrarian culture, the bathwater is our chosen methods of farming. And we knew, or should have known, what we were doing.
“Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals, and happiness.”
Thomas Jefferson
The chart is from Vox, “40 maps that explain food in America.” “Back in the day,” agrarian culture was the culture in the United States. Fast forward five generations or so, and the workforce involved is less than 2% of the population. A great book on the subject is The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, by Wendell Berry.
The first Industrial Revolution 1765
The first industrial revolution followed the proto-industrialization period. It started at the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 19th. The biggest changes came in the industries in the form of mechanization. Mechanization was why agriculture started to be replaced by the industry as the backbone of the societal economy.
The industrial revolution had a lot to do with the decline of farming as an occupation for many Americans. World War I and World War II had a lot to do with it as well; both wars caused labor shortages on farms, which were alleviated through mechanization and immigration. Of course government at some point had to become directly involved.
Get big or get out!
Earl “Rusty” Butts, Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. His policies favored large-scale corporate farming
By the 1970’s of course, see the chart, most of the damage had already been done. Kissinger’s quote below may give you an indication of where all of this is heading.
“Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”
Farming “evolved,” literally, as replacement for hunting and gathering; I’ve learned why for myself, it is a lot easier to put sufficient food on the table via farming, and as importantly perhaps, more reliable. Also, it does not require migration with the weather, and with the animals. In short, farming was a behavioral adaptation that improved group and individual “fitness,” in Darwinian terms. Farming is what allowed humans to put down roots, and to grow societies where there had once roamed tribes.
Naturally, we made something of a mess of things, and we are still making a mess of things. The destruction really comes down to our methods, which even before the age of iron involved tilling the soil. Tilling leads invariably to soil loss, in corn production for example, “the average soil loss rate is 5.8 tons per acre per year.” With the soil loss goes nutrient loss; the algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico, covering an area the size of Rhode Island, are man made. The Dust Bowl was man made, and possibly the largest ecological disaster ever. And eventually, there will be no soil. Dirt maybe, but no soil. It really is that simple.
We have exacerbated the soil loss problem by finishing beef cattle on grains, which they did not evolve to eat, requiring yet more tillage. Then we have created pollution problems by finishing those animals in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) where manure management becomes a huge issue; a situation which coincidentally removes the fertilizer value of manure from the farm. Finally, we started growing corn for ethanol to fuel cars; which is governed by equations that absolutely do not add up to a benefit of any sort whatsoever. For more on how this story has ended prior civilizations, read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail Or Succeed, by Jared Diamond. What we have now to large extent, are not farms, but factories.
The days of tilling with a stick and weeding by hand are long gone, as are the days of 1-bottom plows pulled behind draft animals and weeding with a hoe. Now we can till 32 rows at a time, behind a GPS guided, eight-wheeled tractor; in other words, we can quickly wreak havoc on a massive scale. And I’ve yet to even mention herbicides and pesticides, which kill literally everything in and on the soil, except for the plants “engineered” to withstand the assault.
And this brings us back around to husbandry.
And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard
Genesis 9:20
In the New International Version (NIV) of this verse, the literal translation of the Hebrew is used in place of husbandman; “a man of the soil.”
One modern definition of husbandry is, “Careful management or conservation of resources; economy.” However, the solution to soil loss is not to simply prevent erosion, but to build soil, as was done over the eons by bison on the Great Plains for example. Conserve resources. Animals on grass, under predator pressure, are what made the plains great in the first place. The natural ecosystem is self-regenerating. We need to husband the soil itself, and mimicking nature is the way to do it. I mention predator pressure because it is very, very important. If you have not already, check out the video, How Wolves Change Rivers.
But there is one, albeit big, problem with this solution; it doesn’t lend itself to industrialization. More people are involved, but even more “disturbing,” less or no cheap fertilizers from fossil fuels, less herbicide and pesticide, if any; all products backed by “Big Ag” of course, which doesn’t want to see anything even close to regenerative. It’s like healthcare in that sense; as is often attributed to Hippocrates, “Let food be thy medicine, and let medicine be thy food,” the similar problem with that solution is that there is no profit in such an approach for the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. Health insurance is a fairly recent development; from the wiki:
During the middle to late 20th century, traditional disability insurance evolved into modern health insurance programs.
Mid-to-late 20th century; that’s probably not a coincidence; our “food” is literally sickening and killing us, slowly. The classic text on this subject is Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, by Weston A. Price.
Back to the issue at hand; with my apologies for the digression. An agrarian culture is not only the farms, it includes an entire network of interrelated businesses; fat rendering plants (anyone remember buying lard?), tanneries for hides, ferriers, blacksmiths, veterinarians, neighborhood butchers, and the list goes on. For example, there are no longer local outlets for much of a food animal, which is why when I take a pig to the butcher nothing comes back except muscle meat. The lard, offal, trotters, head, and skin, end up in a landfill; that’s probably 30% of the animal by weight, and if I want anything done with any of that, I have to do it myself. As a culture we are wasteful in the extreme.
There is some regenerative and diversified farming going on. There are a fair number of advocates, Joel Salatin being perhaps the most well known, and his many books will give you a guide to other leaders in the field. But, the food is relatively expensive, compared to most of what passes for food in the grocery store. Perhaps it’s another coincidence, but I doubt it; the cost of food has been roughly halved since 1950, as a percentage of the average household budget, while the cost of healthcare has way more than doubled. There is no such thing as a free lunch, they’ll get you coming or going, take your pick. For 8 years now, we’ve chosen to pay more for food. And now we are growing are own. It’s a win-win-win-win; better food, more physical work, a longer “healthspan,” and virtually zero spent on healthcare, except for subsidizing the healthcare of others, which cannot be legally avoided.
You can help, even if on a very small scale. If you want to know how to get started, you have but to ask. If any of this rings true with you, also checkout my posts, Free Trade: What Could Go Wrong, and Free Trade What Could Go Wrong, Part 2.