I’m not a big fan of the term conventional agriculture. As a farmer, I know what it means, and I know it references the way I farm. My concern with the term is how it might be interpreted by those who don’t have first hand experience with farming. In my mind the uneducated and inexperienced view conventional agriculture as plowing fields clean of weeds and crop residue and applying whatever fertlizer, pesticide, and herbicide is necessary to have the most yield. I even see that idea perpetuated in some of the DVDs my one year old watches that show equipment working in the field. That just isn’t how things are done anymore. Conventional and sustainable are not mutually exclusive terms.
I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts on this subject for a few weeks, and as it turns out someone else has done it for me. Sam Vance has a blog called Edible Intelligence at http://edibleintelligence.blogspot.com/. Right at the top of his blog Mr. Vance describes his writings as “An education about the food industry from someone with an education in the food industry.” This is the kind of first hand experience I’m talking about. He has written a post titled “Creating Evil” in response to a Washington Post opinion piece that attempts to explain why all the innovation and technology employed by modern farmers and the food industry is bad for the farmer and the country. The author, Eric Scholsser, says these advancements take money away from farmers, harm our land, and make all of us unhealthy. I would argue that people have plenty of choices when it comes to food in the United States, and the vast majority of us know what a good diet is. Whether or not one chooses to eat a well balanced diet is up to them.
That’s getting into a bit of a different subject, so let’s focus on “conventional” agriculture. Since my thoughts are much the same as Mr. Vance on this topic, and he has done a great job of explaining them, I’ve placed his post below for you to read for yourself.
When you hear advocates for sustainable ag and organic production talk about what they do, you are left with the impression that conventional farmers do not do those things.
If you click the title to this post, you’ll be directed to a WaPo article by Eric Schlosser, Author of Fast Food Nation and co-producer of Food Inc. In the article, Schlosser writes a rebuttal to foodies being called elitist. Within that rebuttal, Mr. Schlosser makes several broad statements about food and ag. He says that modern ag is, ‘overly reliant on monocultures, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, chemical additives, genetically modified organisms, factory farms, government subsidies and fossil fuels’.
Eric Schlosser wants the public to believe that modern agriculture doesn’t use crop rotation, no-till, cover crops, wind breaks, grass waterways, etc. He paints the picture of 1 big, monolithic building run by an evil villain whose only goal is to poison children.
I knew about crop rotation, no-till, grass waterways, etc, before I ever knew what organic was. His charge against conventional ag is incredibly misleading, considering that organic farms also use pesticides, fertilizers, fossil fuels, and government subsidies.
I spent many years of my youth on a farm and my college education is specifically designed to give me the training to run a food manufacturing facility. Given that, I have never seen a ‘Factory Farm’. This is meant as an expletive that is all too often said by people who aren’t educated enough to recognize what they are looking at in a large operation. Of course, ignorance leads to fear, and ultimately, name calling.
Large operations have insanely huge input costs. To control those costs, farmers have invested in precision agriculture in the past 15 years. Many tractors now have in cab computers, gps systems, and auto-steer. Soil samples are taken all over the field and plotted with gps so variable rate spreaders can be used so the farmers don’t waste a drop of the increasingly expensive fertilizer. GM crop varieties reduce the amount of pesticides needed, which also means that farm equipment is run for less hours. This means reduced consumption of fuel lowered maintenance costs over the life of the equipment.
The farm isn’t the only place Eric Schlosser has fostered the view point that everyone else is evil. He also takes several shots at the food industry. He makes reference to consolidation among meat packers and then likens it to the climate that existed when The Jungle was written. It’s as if having more owners would magically improve the safety of the world’s safest food supply.
He talks about the food and ag system being centralized. While some companies only have one plant, most food companies set up plants in different areas of the country… you know… in regions. Of course, this must be a lie if Mr. Schlosser insists that our system is centralized and if foodies all call for a regional food system. Kroger is one of the nations largest grocer’s and has it’s own manufacturing, named Kroger Manufacturing. Kroger Manufacturing has bakeries, dairies, and various other facilities spread all over the country. In all, Kroger Manufacturing has over 40 facilities where food is produced. That doesn’t seem very central to me.
Mr. Schlosser mentions how sick everyone is getting due to our very unsafe food supply… actually, he only mentions children, which is kind of cowardly if you ask me. He fails to mention that you can’t go anywhere else in the world and find safer food. He makes a mention of pesticide residues and how bad that is for kids, but leaves out the part where residue limits are set so far below the amount that can make people sick, that it’s virtually impossible to get sick from the residues. For instance, a child would need to eat 154 servings of apples in one day to get sick from the highest amount of residue allowed in apples by the USDA. To calculate your own limits, go here.
Foodies get called elitist because they advocate an antiquated method of farming that, if implemented, would leave a large portion of the planet without food(hunger is already a huge problem throughout much of the world). Any volunteers to never eat again? No? Hmm. They also scoff at how little we pay for food as a percentage of our income, which is an indicator of economic health, not personal health. Ethiopians pay a huge amount of their income(for those fortunate to have incomes) for food and they are starving. Many foodies brag about how much more they spend for food. Sound elitist? Yes. The cost of food didn’t make us fat, our abundance of calories did. We’re still wired to eat and screw as much as possible, so it takes a fair amount of education to get people to willfully waste calories by exercising and not eating so much. The elitist solution is to make food even more expensive for the poorest people in this country.
Leave a comment below, or better yet, on Edible Intelligence, and let us know what you think about “conventional” agriculture.
Hi, we are a farm family on the east end of Long Island , New York. When some of my customers ask if we are organic, I tell them no we are conventional farmers. I find it very lengthy to explain and usually they do not want to listen. Like you I am trying to organize my thoughts to write a small index size card explaining the conventional farmer who uses IPM growing methods. I found your article helpful and can take some of the facts to better explain what we do. Thank you, Debbie Schmitt
Thanks so much for reading and taking the time to leave a comment! From my view I think conventional row crop farming is seen this way by many people who have never been around farming. Till the fields clean, load them up with fertlizers and pesticides, harvest, repeat. Also I see a lot websites and blogs talking about how bad our monoculture system is. There’s not much monoculture going on in the Midwest I can tell you. Unless you call corn, beans, and wheat a monoculture. Check out this other post I wrote about how farmers can be environmentalists by default. http://wp.me/p1mm3B-83
Can you explain this comment further?
“He makes a mention of pesticide residues and how bad that is for kids, but leaves out the part where residue limits are set so far below the amount that can make people sick, that it’s virtually impossible to get sick from the residues. For instance, a child would need to eat 154 servings of apples in one day to get sick from the highest amount of residue allowed in apples by the USDA.”
Everything is toxic at a certain level. Oxygen can be bad for you at a high enough level. What Sam is saying in this example is that the amount pesticide residue allowed to be on apples is so far below what would be considered an actual toxic amount that a child would need to eat 154 servings in a short period of time for there to be an adverse effect. Let me see if I can get Mr. Vance to chime in as well.
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We have traces of just about everything in our body at any given moment, either through naturally occurring chemical processes in our bodies or absorbed through the environment. It’s the dose that makes the poison as far as any chemical goes.
Hastily thought of analogy:
A bullet can kill or seriously wound, right? I mean, we all know this. However, if I put a bullet in your pocket, you won’t die. Let’s say I get someone to throw that bullet at you… still nothing. Maybe I get a former college pitcher to zing one right at your heart? Maybe a bruise and you’d be somewhat annoyed. Next, I try a slingshot and perhaps I even break the skin… At what point does the bullet become a serious threat to your health and well being? It would have to be the velocity. So only at a certain speed, will the bullet become a problem.
In toxicology, there is L.O.E.L. In L.O.E.L. we determine the least amount required to cause illness, and we can make that limit many orders of magnitude smaller than what the L.O.E.L. says so that in order to get to the amount that may make you ill, you would have to ingest an improbable amount of that substance. This is what the FDA does. If the L.O.E.L. for a substance is .03grams/kilogram of body weight, then they set the limit as a gras substance somewhere around .00003 Grams/Kilogram of body weight. So if a product has the legal limit per serving, then you may need to eat upwards of a thousand servings before your body has a chance to metabolize that substance, usually within a day or two. Let’s say this serving is a can of cola… could you drink a thousand… or even a couple hundred cans of pop in a day or two?
But notice that this is NEVER mentioned when you read a press release from CSPI(Center for Science in the Public Interest). They just want you to be afraid and boycott.
Thank you, Sam.