A cheap and reliable food supply

[Patt]

It seems like in all our discussions about a wide range of farming topics we always come back around to this one point, well here in America we have a cheap and reliable food supply and that is a good and necessary thing.

So 2 questions: is it really a good thing and is it a necessity in order to keep people from starving? Please if you can show some statistics to back up your opinions.

[Ernie]

Originally Posted by Patt

It seems like in all our discussions about a wide range of farming topics we always come back around to this one point, well here in America we have a cheap and reliable food supply and that is a good and necessary thing.

So 2 questions: is it really a good thing and is it a necessity in order to keep people from starving? Please if you can show some statistics to back up your opinions.

It's cheap, but I would disagree that it's reliable. It's only about fifty years old and hasn't been stressed yet. It's like a mountain climber's rope that hasn't been up the mountain. You don't know you can depend upon it until you've hung there with only death below.

I'm assuming we're talking about the corporate agricultural system, both the large factory farms and then the "independent" farmers who subsist on government subsidies and live in thrall to Cargill.

I have book after book that shows statistics but numbers don't wake people up.

Drive through the rural countryside and count the new barns. Count them. I'll be surprised if you see as many as 3 every 100 miles. What you'll see is decrepit old barns ready to fall down and cornfields planted right up to the doorstep of aged old farmhouses. You'll see suburbs where there used to be food production.

Go down to the local bait and tackle shop in your small rural town and see how many old farmers are gathered around a table drinking coffee at 9am in the morning. Ask them where their sons are. I'll be surprised if 1 in 5 of them tells you that their sons are farming.

Go to your local supermarket and take an eyeball at the produce. Look at the labels where it's from.

[Emmy D]

Ernie, I would just like to say there are MANY independent farmers who are NOT taking farm subsidies and are NOT in thrall with Cargill/Monstato/ADM...etc.!

Come on down to my farm, a farm that has been in my family since 1868, and you will see none of the things you mention above, like corn up to the doorstep, falling down farm house, old crappy barn!

For the most part in my county you won't find any of those things at all, what you will find is pride in farming and a strong work ethic!!

Edited to add, there is a new "independent" grocery story opening soon in my town, completely owned by a couple who live in my town, they will sell locally grown produce, eggs and meat!!

Emmy

[Ernie]

Originally Posted by Emmy D

Ernie, I would just like to say there are MANY independent farmers who are NOT taking farm subsidies and are NOT in thrall with Cargill/Monstato/ADM...etc.!

Come on down to my farm, a farm that has been in my family since 1868, and you will see none of the things you mention above, like corn up to the doorstep, falling down farm house, old crappy barn!

For the most part in my county you won't find any of those things at all, what you will find is pride in farming and a strong work ethic!!

Edited to add, there is a new "independent" grocery story opening soon in my town, completely owned by a couple who live in my town, they will sell locally grown produce, eggs and meat!!

Emmy

Good on you, Emmy! I hope I get to see it sometime. You're the exception though, not the norm. For every gold nugget like you there's a whole lot of turds floating in the stream.

[Heritagefarm]

As I stated in another topic, cheap food is cheap in exchange fore your health, the land's health and the general public's health. Cheap food has been made cheap with petroleum, and mass production. Small farms have the capability to make as much money as those huge, huge corn fields! Recent estimates say it takes 2 calories of energy to make every calorie of corn.

[Heritagefarm]

Originally Posted by Ernie

Good on you, Emmy! I hope I get to see it sometime. You're the exception though, not the norm. For every gold nugget like you there's a whole lot of turds floating in the stream.

Need more gold nuggets, then. I hope our farm is a gold nugget. We aim for sustainable. Which is a repeat of what was done before. Everything USED to be local and healthy, now what? Look at America, cancer up to our noses with unhealthy foods!

[Emmy D]

The good is not "on" me Ernie, I just moved back to the farm after being away for close to 30 years...the good is "on" because the people in this area (not just me) kept the values and community that they grew up with. There are very few, if very many, farms at all in this county that are not at least "Centennial" farms!! Of course people leave, I did, I didn't want to live here on this place when I was young, I wanted to see the world and I did and LOVED it, but when you have close to 150 years riding on your back you come home, emerse yourself in your "community" and become very surprised to find that the pride is still here in tiny town!

Emmy

[marvella]

Originally Posted by Heritagefarm

As I stated in another topic, cheap food is cheap in exchange fore your health, the land's health and the general public's health. Cheap food has been made cheap with petroleum, and mass production. Small farms have the capability to make as much money as those huge, huge corn fields! Recent estimates say it takes 2 calories of energy to make every calorie of corn.

your remark about the need for petroleum is the crux of this issue. if you break our foods down into the smallest parts, we are eatinng petroleum almost exclusively. read michael pollan if you haven't already.

oil barons have been in the presidency almost continuosly for the last 30 years.

[edcopp]

What is better than cheap food is free food, right.

I am an old guy. Sometimes I go to the senior citizens center in my town for lunch (suggested donation $1). I live in a poor county. This week several tons of potatoes arrived, along with a couple of tons of cheese and about a half ton of rice. The deal was take all the potatoes and rice that you want, but only one 5# box of cheese per person.

Similar deliveries were made to local food banks. So the food becomes available to anyone who shows up. There was no documentation on anything but the cheese.

Looks like the powers that be are purchasing cheap food and using it to secure votes for the present administration (could that be?).

[Heritagefarm]

Originally Posted by marvella

your remark about the need for petroleum is the crux of this issue. if you break our foods down into the smallest parts, we are eatinng petroleum almost exclusively. read michael pollan if you haven't already.

oil barons have been in the presidency almost continuosly for the last 30 years.

Yes, actually I have read the Omnivore's Dilemma, and part of another one (the one with lettuce on the cover), and I plan on reading more. Quite fascinating (and worrisome).

[Emmy D]

Ed Copp, nobody bought my vote for the food I donated to the local food pantry this week...how silly to say that the people who donate food are doing it to secure votes for the current admin...I did the same when I live in Florida and Bush was the current admin then!

Emmy

[marvella]

Originally Posted by Heritagefarm

Yes, actually I have read the Omnivore's Dilemma, and part of another one (the one with lettuce on the cover), and I plan on reading more. Quite fascinating (and worrisome).

my all time favorite book is botany of desire. not of just pollan books, but all books. it changed my way of looking at the world.

[Beeman]

Is cheap food good? People don't value what they don't pay much for. Is cheap food part of the obesity problem? High calorie processed foods are the cheaper food by the calorie. Then of course we have the food price kept cheap by cheap possibly illegal labor and cheap transportation which is becoming much more expensive.

[marvella]

Originally Posted by edcopp

What is better than cheap food is free food, right.

I am an old guy. Sometimes I go to the senior citizens center in my town for lunch (suggested donation $1). I live in a poor county. This week several tons of potatoes arrived, along with a couple of tons of cheese and about a half ton of rice. The deal was take all the potatoes and rice that you want, but only one 5# box of cheese per person.

Similar deliveries were made to local food banks. So the food becomes available to anyone who shows up. There was no documentation on anything but the cheese.

Looks like the powers that be are purchasing cheap food and using it to secure votes for the present administration (could that be?).

they've been giving away tons of free food for decades. i got free cheese, rice, peanut butter and milk 30+ years ago from the gov't. it's a result of gov't farm policy, not just one president.

[Ernie]

Originally Posted by Emmy D

Ed Copp, nobody bought my vote for the food I donated to the local food pantry this week...how silly to say that the people who donate food are doing it to secure votes for the current admin...I did the same when I live in Florida and Bush was the current admin then!

Emmy

Oh, you'd better believe you weren't the only one providing food to the food pantry this week. Good on you for doing so, but not everyone pulled up to unload with pure intentions.

Ed's right. It's happening in just about every area.

http://www.fns.usda.gov/fdd/

In this link you can find more information about the USDA's "food distribution" program.

Here you can see where the government is buying up "surplus" food for distribution. Why is it surplus? Because other countries are refusing to buy it from us.

http://www.capitalpress.com/lvstk/TH...070210-infobox

[Kris in MI]

Originally Posted by Patt

It seems like in all our discussions about a wide range of farming topics we always come back around to this one point, well here in America we have a cheap and reliable food supply and that is a good and necessary thing.

So 2 questions: is it really a good thing and is it a necessity in order to keep people from starving? Please if you can show some statistics to back up your opinions.

Looks like question 1 has been addressed , so I'll tackle question 2.

IMHO, cheap food is not as necessary to keep people from starving as EDUCATING people to FEED THEMSELVES is. So many people have no idea what to do with real food--as in whole foods like they come from the farm fields--that the price of that 'ingredient' doesn't make a difference in whether or not they starve. If you can't take rice and cook it, doesn't matter how cheap it is. Same for fresh veggies, meats, etc. If you don't know what to do with it once it's in your hands, the ability to buy tons and tons of it won't keep you from starving.

[springvalley]

I have lived on my farm for almost fifty years, my father bought it in 1962. I have slowly seen the downfall of the small livestock based family farms in my area. At one time everyone in the neighborhood had a few milk cows, some hogs, a henhouse full of chickens, a large garden, a bunch of kids and a intrest in helping your neighbor prosper. Now I have a few neighbors that farm, very little livestock, corn and soybeans, big agriculture that comes in with twenty four row planters in the spring, and huge half million dollar combines and grain carts in the fall, filling semi after semi of GMO grain bound for the river(Mississippi) grain terminals to supply America with cheap food. My father use to help several neighbors back and forth to help get crops in and out, to help with the high input of labor needed in those days. As our family grew and my brothers and I helping more and more on the farm, made the labor less stressfull on my father. As time went on the farms grew, machinery got bigger and the dependancy on others grew less and less. Soon sons left home to work in factories, and farms got bigger and a few sons stayed to help, but most went on to better things as they were not needed to help as machinery got bigger and more efficient. And then farmers got more aggresive in aquiring more and more land to pay for all that new "Bigger" machinery. They started renting more land and getting it anyway they could, some not the most reputable ways one could think of. Now instead of farmers helping one another, farmers are competing with one another, trying to rent that 80 down the road, from the widow of one of their friends fathers. Or from a friend that has been having financial problems down at the local bank, or one of the original old timers, that finaly has given up as his body has just worn out from a lifetime of farming the way he wanted to and felt was ethical in his eyes. So now I have no neighbors that drive by and wave, or call for help shelling corn, or sorting hogs, or putting up those lastcouple loads of hay for the season. We have lost the romantic side of agriculture, the side where neighbor cared for neighbor, and wentb out of their way to keep them neighbors. So at what price have we made cheap food to feed the world and at what price have we had to pay to get there. Not so sure we have advanced in our thinking here.>Thanks Marc

[jlrbhjmnc]

This image is from http://www.dailymarkets.com/economy/...on-the-planet/

[DJ in WA]

Patt, there's alot of people who don't want you asking these questions.

Is our food really cheap if we factor in all the costs?

Yep, we spend trillions of dollars fighting wars supposedly to protect our source of cheap energy so we can avoid physical effort and produce cheap junk food and get fat and then spend trillions more of government money on healthcare.

And we can spend billions on farm subsidies so we can overproduce cheap junk food so we can get lazy and fat and need trillions more on healthcare.

Round and round we go. Send a dollar to govt and get 30 cents back and tell them how grateful we are. As long as people have enough food in front of them, they don't care how much was stolen from them.

[haypoint]

Ernie makes some good points, but this comment deserves discussion, ”Drive through the rural countryside and count the new barns. Count them. I'll be surprised if you see as many as 3 every 100 miles. What you'll see is decrepit old barns ready to fall down and cornfields planted right up to the doorstep of aged old farmhouses. You'll see suburbs where there used to be food production.

Those beautiful barns were built for livestock and loose hay. The cattle don’t live there and no one is putting up loose hay. In order to stay farming, with the razor thin profit margins, farms have gotten bigger. That means those old farmhouses sit empty, while the fields get planted to corn or soybeans. In my experience, those beautiful old homes are energy hogs and are difficult to keep rented.

If farming were less profitable, urban sprawl would be much worse. As long as a farmer has the hope of making a living on the land, they are less likely to sell off to create suburbs.
If you think we shouldn’t be paving over our productive farm ground, there are ways to protect the land from ourselves. They call it zoning restrictions. Yup, more regulation run by the local gubment officials.

Emmy D has a few positive comments. On the surface I like, “ there is a new "independent" grocery story opening soon in my town, completely owned by a couple who live in my town, they will sell locally grown produce, eggs and meat!!

As I contemplated the creation of a CSA in my area, I saw that I’d need to provide a substantial portion of the groceries. Locally grown is the latest catch phrase. So, I walked around a few grocery stores. People are not spending much on fruits, veggies, eggs and meat. It is mostly cans and boxes. Unless you live in the tropics, local fruits and vegetables are a narrow window. Every bit helps, but surely not a solution.

Springvalley, good post.

Kris in MI wrote, “IMHO, cheap food is not as necessary to keep people from starving as EDUCATING people to FEED THEMSELVES is. So many people have no idea what to do with real food--as in whole foods like they come from the farm fields--that the price of that 'ingredient' doesn't make a difference in whether or not they starve. If you can't take rice and cook it, doesn't matter how cheap it is. Same for fresh veggies, meats, etc. If you don't know what to do with it once it's in your hands, the ability to buy tons and tons of it won't keep you from starving.”

I think it is the old, “ You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” People do not want to cook with basics. As the vast majority of our population gets further from the farm, we lose the interest in basics. I know of a woman that only buys frozen breaded, precooked chicken, so she won’t have to deal with touching a “real” chicken. Another woman I know is very health conscious. Lean Cuisine fills her freezer. I’ve tried to explain to her what quality beef goes into ALL processed products, but she shuts me up. People do not want to know. A bag of rice doesn’t get picked up, but throw some flecks of red peppers in it and put it in a box, it flies off the shelves.

Seems to me the main cause of the French Revolution was food, or rather the lack of it. “Let them eat cake.” didn’t sit well with the masses. A few lost their heads over it.