WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD FOR AGRICULTURE?
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| In one of his first tasks as director of the Leopold Center, Fred Kirscehnmann convened a day-long forum with more than 30 people to discuss the future of agriculture. Presenters at the July 21 forum included (from left) Mike Duffy (moderator), Karl Stauber, Cornelia Flora, Fred Kirschenmann (moderator), Jean Dye Gussow, Bill Heffernan, John Gardner and Dick Levins. |
Karl Stauber
We currently are without a vision that will lead American agriculture forward into the 21st century. This is a key issue for the Leopold Center, Iowa State University and land grant universities, as well as the farmer and the consumer. For agriculture to be the base of strong communities, it must have a vision that serves a significant majority of the community. So where do we get the new vision for American agriculture?
Aldo Leopold's writings. Leopold changed drastically in his life from his early days in the Southwest territories to his writing on his "Sand County" farm. He saw transformation, connection and ecological responsibility as being the basis of our relationship in nature. Can we do that?
Our country's new suburban majority. In the 1992 Presidential race for the first time, a majority of votes in the general election were cast in suburban districts. Our vision for agriculture must be understandable by the suburban majority in this country, not just our allies on key Congressional committees.
The role of science and the public good. There is a myth in the United States that public scientists are neutral. Land grant universities were founded on the belief that knowledge would create a public good, or that they were to be advocates of a public good, whether it be elimination of rural poverty, supplying the Industrial Revolution with food and skilled people, or ending hunger in America. So what do we want the public sciences to advocate today?
Sustainable agriculture practices. Individual farmers have been able to make sustainable agriculture work in their own enterprise for a long time. The tougher question is how to offer incentives for sustainable agriculture at a watershed or landscape level. We don't need more on-farm research; we need more political research and better public policy.
The mass consumer. Restaurants in Washington, D.C., and other big cities have made it their business to offer meals prepared from locally grown, sustainably raised foods. But for sustainable agriculture to truly survive, this must be the business strategy for McDonald's as well as farmer-conscious, high-end, white tablecloth restaurants.
The real challenge for the Leopold Center in this political economy is to create a bridge between traditional agriculture and entirely new audiences that include the suburban majority and the mass-market consumer. The real challenge is for the Leopold Center to lead at the "vision" level.
Karl Stauber is president of the Northwest Area Foundation, a private grant-making foundation that assists communities in reducing poverty in eight states, including Iowa. Prior to 1996, Stauber was Under Secretary for Research, Education and Economics for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C.
John Gardner
One of the big issues facing the ecology of agriculture and natural resources today, and in the future, will be the manner in which we develop agricultural biotechnology. It holds both tremendous promise, and also unprecedented problems ...Whether it was the ability to carry out extensive tillage of the soil or exterminate a particular pest, we've discovered that however targeted or carefully a technology is deployed, it results in unanticipated impacts upon the ecology of our agricultural system as a whole. And, far too often, we don't anticipate or recognize these unintended consequences until it is too late. A system-wide breakdown has to occur for us to be convinced that agriculture remains bound by ecological principles striving for stability and longevity. Further, it is the breakdown where government intervention usually takes place. Perhaps it is no concidence that it took approximately 50 years of pulling a plow to create the Soil Erosion Service (today's Natural Resrouces Conservation Service) and 50 years of operating a sprayer to create the Environmental Protection Agency.
John Gardner is an agronomist and associate dean of Agriculture and Natural Resources Extension at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Before coming to Missouri, he directed the Carrington Research and Extension Center at North Dakota State University and helped farmers market high-oil crambe.
The consumer angle
Joan Dye Gussow
When I concluded 25 years ago that we needed to re-localize our food system, I felt I needed to prove that I could eat locally in the Northeast, and still eat well. I can grow all my vegetables and much of my fruit in my 1,000 sq.-ft. garden 20 minutes north of Manhattan, but in that small space I will never feed myself. The experience of trying to do so has taught me some of the lessons we need to teach if we're ever going to have a consumer base that will support sustainable agriculture.
First, weather will matter a lot more if we eat locally. Second, people need to know they may have fewer choices if they eat locally and by the seasons.
We will never change the food system until we can change the demand end. We need to eat as responsibly as possible from as close to home as possible, and work on national policies to empower small farmers and consumers.
Joan Dye Gussow is a long-time organic gardener and former chair of the Nutrition Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is a member of the National Organic Standards Board and author of, among other books, Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce and Agriculture (Bootstrap Press 1991). A new book about 40 years of lessons learned trying to eat more locally will be published by Chelsea Green next spring.
Cornelia Flora
Rural communities, even in Iowa, really are not dependent on agriculture, nor are they likely to depend on agriculture in the future. E-commerce such as Rooster.com, makes it possible for people to have little need for local seed suppliers and implement dealers. Instead, we need to think about what agriculture does for our communities.
In Iowa, agriculture's most important product could be clean water. Had we thought of this sooner, we could have saved the City of Des Moines millions of dollars in water treatment from nitrogen runoff. We could have worked with farmers to help them produce a public good, and all those millions of dollars spent on water treatment could have gone to local farmers to do other things. Other public goods from agriculture might be clean air, reduced global warming, and biodiversity as well as food and feedstuffs. We need to start a discussion with new suburban audiences about what agriculture really produces.
Cornelia Flora is a faculty member in the department of sociology and director of the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development located at Iowa State. This center is one of four centers that combine research and outreach for rural development, and covers 12 states, including Iowa. Flora is a leading researcher on the relationship between agriculture and rural communities.
Bill Heffernan
Globally, five firms hold the intellectual property rights to most of the agriculturally-related biotechnology. A relatively few dominant firms are making the major decisions in food production at all stages. Some of these companies talk about needing only 20,000 to 30,000 farms in the United States to provide for this globalized market. That is an average of only 500 per state and most of these farms will be operating under contracts.
Do we need farmers in this country? According to some economic models of agriculture, we do not. Corporations are skilled at transferring the environmental costs of doing business from themselves to the public, which always helps keep the price of the product more reasonable to the consumer. We need to make the case that independent farmers are stewards of our environment and they take care of our natural resources. If we cannot justify their existence in this way, then perhaps agriculture needs to be treated like any other industry.
Bill Heffernan is professor emeritus of rural sociology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Over the past several decades, he has studied concentration of ownership within the food industry and is one of the nation's leading authorities on the changing structure of agriculture.
Dick Levins
The future of agriculture comes down to economic power. It's no longer a question of becoming more efficient or smarter at what you do, having a vision when someone else doesn't, or being right when someone else is wrong. The hand of large corporations is more visible in agriculture than it has ever been before. The development of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is a good example.
I would like to see the Leopold Center evaluate its work from the perspective of whether each step taken would increase a base of power for the sustainable agriculture community. Farmers continue to compete with each other, a sure way to keep economic power low. Meanwhile, giant corporations merge to further increase their economic power.
I would encourage us to think about two questions: One, how do you operate in this environment of power? And two, where do you find your power, or enough influential friends, to play effectively in this game?
Dick Levins is professor of agricultural economics at the University of Minnesota. He has written a new book, Willard Cochrane and the American Family Farm (University of Nebraska Press), that looks at social and economic forces that have worked against family farming and sustainable agriculture in the 20th century.
More about the vision...
A 10-page summary of the July 21 session is available. The Center plans a series of meetings throughout Iowa to gather more comments. Leopold Center director Fred Kirschenmann offered his view in a speech, "Questions We Aren't Asking in Agriculture," prepared for the Shivvers Lecture at Iowa State University September 12.
