The Future of Agriculture: Wired Tomatoes

This post at Technology Review describes the potential for really precision agriculture--essentially applying the "internet of things" to tomato growing in New England.  Did you know New England tomatoes are different than tomatoes grown elsewhere (as in warmer climates)?  There's potential for using technology to monitor growing tomatoes .

I suspect this represents one set of developments in future agriculture, where farmers lose their rednecks (I've got one--from bending over in the garden) by much more intensive use of technology. There will be a further bifurcation of farmers:

So on one hand we'll have the tech-farmers, investing more capital into much more precise control of growth.  I'd count the vertical farmers of leafy greens as other examples.  This agriculture will be seen as much less "natural" than today's.

On the other hand we'll have the artisan farmers, who will be more organic and grow more diverse crops (heirloom tomatoes, etc.)

A Billion Is a Token Amount

So says the greenies, the National Sustainable AGriculture Coalition commenting on the Republican budget (from agriculture.com)

“While we continue to oppose re-opening the farm bill, we are thankful the draft House budget resolution released today is asking for farm bill cuts of only $1 billion …over the next decade, though it raises the rather obvious question of why bother to go through an agonizing re-opening the farm bill via the budget reconciliation process for such a token amount."

Sen. Ev Dirksen had the famous quote about "a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you've got real money. Back then the federal budget was a bit over 100 billion, not the 3-4 trillion of today.

"Progressives" and "The Progressive Farmer"

Minds are funny.  I just Google+1ed a post at Casaubon's Book, something I rarely do.  (The writer Sharon Astyk is deep into the foodie movement: peak oil, locavore, sustainable, etc. but very articulate.) The post was about gay marriage, and noted the legal and property considerations involved in marriage--recommend it.  She would qualify as a political "progressive" in most people's books.

Anyway, the next post on my RSS feed was Chris Clayton's column at "The Progressive Farmer".  The conjunction of someone who's really progressive and the magazine, which isn't progressive at all, at least in the sense that some of the conservatives I follow would use it (i.e., as an epithet, a tad better than "socialist" but much worse than "liberal") struck me. 

"Progessive" as used in connection with farming used to mean the wide-awake, up-to-date farmer, someone who was on his way to being an "industrial" farmer, as the foodies would have it.  It's rather ironic to me to see the evolution of the term.

How Congresspeople Keep Groups Happy

The Sustainable Agriculture Coalition posts about the bill coming out of Senate Ag.  They include this:

The latter [the matching grant initiative, part of SARE] was authorized by Congress, along with the rest of SARE, back in 1990, but to date it has never received an appropriation.

Pardon my cynicism, but what that tells me is for 22 years someone in Congress is doing a song and dance keeping the (few) people behind SARE and the grant idea happy, or if not happy at least supportive in terms of dollars and votes, by reauthorizing the provision each farm bill but never appropriating the money.  To quote someone in the movies: "show me the money".

More Young People Running Small Farms?

One of the fault lines in the green/food movement is shown here.  Ideally they'd like to see more young farmers and small farmers.  They'd also like conservation. But, as quoted from Farm Policy:

“He [Sen. Baucus MT] says there needs to be a balance in the conservation reserve program lands saying, ‘CRP [Conservation Reserve Program] tends to have an adverse effect on some of the smaller towns, on implement dealers for example. Sometimes farmers just go south and have land in CRP and take the income. We’re actually starting to reduce CRP in a way to help younger people get in to agriculture.’”

That's been there since the beginning, or at least the 1930's.  If you take land out of agricultural production, whether for conservation purposes because it's below-average land and subject to erosion, etc., or because you want to reduce production in order to increase prices, you can endanger the people who depend on farmers to make a living and by increasing the value of the remaining farm land you make it harder for people to begin farming.

The old saw goes: there's no such thing as a free lunch, meaning there's always tradeoffs.

When Is an Earmark an Earnmark

The Sustainable Ag Coalition believes that ATTRA lost its funding because Congress thought it was an earmark:

One very distressing casualty of the continuing series of Continuing Resolutions that are keeping the government open but cutting funding week by week is the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, known as ATTRA.  ATTRA’s $2.8 million was cut entirely in H.R. 1, the House-passed full-year Continuing Resolution from mid-February and that proposed program termination was unfortunately including among the $6 billion in cuts adopted by Congress this week in the new short-term Continuing Resolution keeping the government operating through April 8.
The justification for cutting ATTRA appears to be a misperception that it is an earmark.  Indeed, like earmarks, many Senators and Members of Congress request funding for ATTRA every year, as they do for many programs.  However, unlike earmarks for projects in specific congressional districts, ATTRA is a nationwide program, authorized in the 2008 Farm Bill, and it has been included in presidential budgets through many administrations over several decades. 

 What they don't mention is that the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service is not a federal agency, as the name might imply (and I first thought).  It's the outcome of a cooperative agreement with the Rural Development Service--in other words federal money provided to a cooperative.  Here's the general blurb from RD:

We have over 80 years of experience working with the cooperative sector and remain the only federal agency charged with that responsibility. USDA Rural Development has been providing support to cooperatives since the Cooperative Marketing Act of 1926, promoting the knowledge of cooperative principles and practices as well as collecting statistics on cooperative activities. The Cooperative Program provides assistance for rural residents interested in forming new cooperatives and administers programs that fund value-added producer grants, rural cooperative development centers, and small socially-disadvantaged producers.
We also provide resources to local cooperatives to support a department-wide effort known as, 'Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food'. This initiative, led by Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan puts an increased emphasis on regional food systems, which will have direct and significant benefits to rural communities. Lear [sic] more here:

Now if the appropriation is specifically for that cooperative agreement, it comes pretty close in my mind to an earmark. If RD is given a lump sum of money for cooperative agreements and decides to give $2.8 million to ATTRA, then it's not.

Profits and Sustainability

Chris Clayton sees a gap between the aspirations of the sustainable ag movement and the realities of profit-seeking   From the summary of the NAS report being discussed:

This report recommends reaching this goal through two parallel efforts: an incremental
approach, in which ongoing endeavors to develop sustainable agricultural techniques
are expanded; and a transformative approach, in which multiple research areas are brought
together to design farming systems that balance the competing demands from the outset.

The first approach talks of stuff like "no-till" farming; the second is more utopian. I'm conservative enough to doubt our ability to come up with such a set of farming systems. 

For contrast see this post at Treehugger. There's discussion of a "sustainability index", but the discussions by the operator of a 4,000 acre vegetable farm focus on doing more with less. "More with less" easily translates to more profitability; the sustainability index could be a proxy for "more with less".

A Question for Foodies

According to this post at Universal York, by 1900 the small city of York, PA had five thriving farmers markets.  So my question to foodies, who push farmers markets, what happened?  Why did the markets fade away, and what does that mean for their current renaissance? 

My own answer is--efficiency and lower costs in satisfying consumers desires was the cause, which means only a small niche in the future for farmers markets.

The Problems of Foodies--"Founding Farmers" Restaurant

Jane Black had an article on the problems the hot new "Founding Farmers restaurant" has with its goal of serving local, sustainable, and organic food.  She catches instances where their performance is less than their promises, but I don't take it as a critical, muckraking piece, rather as showing the difficulties of putting a square peg (the sustainable restaurant) into a round hole (the existing food system).  What happens is the buyer for the restaurant assumes a big responsibility which isn't easily performed, the responsibility of searching out the backstory of every food item purchased.  There might, in bigger cities, be a niche for an organic, sustainable broker, someone who takes on that burden and serves as a middleman between food producer and the restaurant.

No-Till for the Long Haul

Ag Web has an article from a long time no-till farmer which should  please the greens and foodies on first reading, if not the second. 

I say that because he makes clear it's not an open-and-shut case for no-till, it's heavily dependent on the type of soil and the nature of the topography.  And an investment in tiling is required. (My guess is plowed land dries more than no-till land, hence the need for tile.) And he's very much into new technology.  So the overall perspective is very different than the romanticism I see in many locavore-organic-sustainable ag types.

Recession and Locavores

Mr. Wells in the NYTimes Magazine writes about adapting his family's food buying in light of the recession's impacts:

Until recently, whenever we went to the farmers’ market, we would lug home $50 pork roasts and $14 gallons of milk. We would spend over $100 on food that might not last more than three days. Sometimes we’d shop on Saturday morning and have nothing to make for dinner on Monday. I shrugged this off as one of those oddities of New York life, like getting a ticket because your neighbor put out his trash on the wrong day. But the $35 chicken made me reconsider. Buying sustainably raised beef and sustainably squeezed milk and sustainably hatched poultry is a way of life that, these days, I just can’t sustain.

Have Any Architects Ever Gardened?

Here's a sentence from a proposal for a Dallas project,which is supposed to be "economically, environmentally and socially sustainable": "Some of the unusual features to be included in the 2.5 acre block include enough garden space to feed around 300 inhabitants, 40% affordable housing, an educational element that serves all of the residents and fully renewable, off-the-grid energy." That's roughly 350 square feet per person. Not sure how you do much meat off that area, so presumably these are 300 vegans. And I personally doubt the ability of 350 square feet to provide all the fruits and vegetables for a person, much less the grain.

[Some may say I'm willfully misreading the description, that "sustainable" doesn't mean self-sufficient. That may be true, but still a reasonable modesty in claims would be fitting.)

Indian Elections and Vandana Shiva

Ms Vandana Shiva is an Indian activist who attacks the green revolution and industrial agriculture. She's pushed the meme of suicides of Indian farmers, who are over their heads in debt.

But this week the Congress Party, which has led the government, won a surprise victory, which is interpreted as pro-industrial, pro-modernization. I was struck by sentences like this one, in the descriptions: "In his last term, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh oversaw a costly initiative to guarantee employment to the poor in rural India and alleviate farmer debt."

I wonder whether the Congress victory means Indian farmers aren't in as rough shape as Ms Shiva claims, or at least they feel the system is responding to their concerns.

New Farmers in Nebraska

U of Nebraska has a piece on ag students possibly returning to the farm and the hurdles they face. It's interesting, but would be discouraging for the alternative ag people--the only farming option discussed is the "factory farm", or "industrial ag"--no consideration of mini-farms growing fruits and veggies.

Wealth, Not Scarcity, Was the Cause of High Food Prices

We got through a scare about food scarcity last year--prices soared. Some foodies thought it was a sign of impending disaster, as the industrialized agriculture system was starting to totter. Now things have changed and people have looked at data.

From Farm Policy:

“‘The report indicated world demand is going to be anemic this year,’ leading to more supplies than analysts expected, said Don Roose, president of U.S. Commodities Inc. in West Des Moines, Iowa. ‘It’s a very fragile world economy.’”

"In part, the Farm Foundation report stated that, “In 2008, Farm Foundation commissioned three Purdue University economists to write the report, What’s Driving Food Prices? Released in July 2008, the report had two purposes: to review recent studies on the world food crisis, and to identify the primary drivers of food prices. The economists, Phil Abbott, Chris Hurt and Wally Tyner, identified three major drivers of food prices: world agricultural commodity consumption growth exceeding production growth, leading to very low commodity inventories; the low value of the U.S. dollar; and the new linkage of energy and agricultural markets. Each was a primary contributor to tightening world grain and oilseeds stocks."

What it says to me is that last year the world (outside our borders) was wealthy, had money to spend, and spent it on food, driving up prices. That's what "consumption growth" means to me. The "low value of the U.S. dollar" simply says the world got richer vis a vis us.

This year the world is poorer and we are richer (those of us who are employed or living off Uncle via a pension).

Mother Jones on Organic and Sustainable Agriculture

Via Kevin Drum, here's a long and good article in Mother Jones on the current and future state of organic and sustainable agriculture. It's challenged by some of the comments, but because it agrees with me, I think it's good. I do think he gives too much credibility to the urban agriculture possibilities and ignores the importance of market forces.

For example: "food miles". Whether or not it's more environmentally friendly to grow sheep in New Zealand and ship the resulting lamb to the UK is a question. But IMO the way to answer it is to ensure the cost of transportation includes all the externalities. In other words, a carbon tax. (I've more faith in a carbon tax than in trading carbon offsets under a "cap and trade" policy. My experience in implementing payment limitation rules suggests a tax would be better and more easily enforced.)

Claims by the Corn Growers--We're Crunchy

According to a piece via EWG:

"Specifically, corn has seen the following changes between 1987 and 2007, Dickey [President of National Corn Growers] noted.

1. Land use: The amount of land needed to produce one bushel has decreased 37 percent.

2. Soil loss: Manageable soil loss per bushel of corn has decreased by 69 percent.

3. Energy: The energy used to produce a bushel of corn has decreased by 37 percent.

4. Climate impact: Corn production has seen a 30 percent decrease in greenhouse gas emissions per bushel."

Reminder to Foodies: Advise and Consent

The "foodies" (i.e., organic, locavore, sustainable advocates) have been proposing names, first for Secretary of Agriculture and now for posts within ag. I found the following excerpt from a Government Executive piece on USDA appointment to be a reminder of where the power really is:

Meanwhile, a House Agriculture Committee member and a key Senate aide said they believe Chuck Hassebrook, executive director for the Center for Rural Affairs, is a top candidate for deputy secretary.

Other Capitol Hill sources said a Hassebrook nomination would be highly controversial and might not make it out of the Senate Agriculture Committee because he has been such a strong critic of farm programs. Hassebrook is an advocate of strict farm program payment limits and favors more spending on nonagricultural rural development.

Lesson to the Alice Waters of the world: you don't have the power. To get it, you need an "Emily's List" and get your hands dirty, not cleaning vegetables but in the day to day politicking that elects Reps and Senators.

Tight Budgets

Chris Clayton at DTN has an interview with the President of the Farm Bureau predicting farm programs will face tight budgets. That, in my opinion, is bad news for the supporters of organic farming, sustainable agriculture, etc., simply because conventional ag has a stronger presence on the appropriations committees than they do.

Standards for "Sustainable Agriculture"

Interesting piece on the steps in the bureaucratic evolution of standards for "sustainable agriculture" here. It's moving along speedily (next committee meeting is May 2009).

Wikipedia has an article on it. I haven't digested the theological differences between sustainable and organic (reminds me of trying to figure out the differences between the Reformed Presbyterian (General Synod) of 1840-70, the Associate Reformed Presbyterians, and the others.) For any advocates of organic farming reading me, be advised that the Wikipedia article states organic is less productive than conventional farming, which of course is heresy. (I must be feeling like pulling wings off flies today.)