In a wonderful piece by Bill Liebhardt "Hormones, Grass and Milk" (UC Davis
Magazine, Winter 1992.), the unequal benefits of BST are correctly
identified: "BGH is a technology that places economic power and decision-
making in the hands of a very few individuals: the biotechnology companies."
Certainly many large scale producers will realize a return on bGH, many
medium-sized family dairy farms like those in Wisconsin will see foreclosure,
but Monsanto will take home the largest check. BST is not scale neutral,
nothing is, to believe differently is naive. Liebhardt compares bGH with
another technology that does not receive half the attention the products of
genetic engineering does because it works against economies of scale. I am
referring to a rotational grazing system. I believe (as does Liebhardt and
many others) rotational grazing can maintain production, cut input costs,
strengthen family farming, promote rural communities, and protect the
environment -- that's what sustainable agriculture is all about!
Stewart Smith presented a lecture at the University of Vermont in
November, 1991, entitled "Is There Farming in Agriculture's Future? The
Impact of Biotechnology." There he identified the real bias in agricultural
research exemplified by bovine somatotrophin -- Sector bias. Allow me to
quote at length:
"It is not LGU (Land Grant Univ) research is de facto size biased, but
rather -- Sector biased. Most agricultural research results in more non-
farm activity at the expense of farm activity. That results in a
reduction of returns to cover opportunity costs and requires farmers to
either increase the number of units produced or utilize their management and
labor in endeavors other than commodity production to recapture lost returns.
Indirectly the technology results in fewer and larger farms (in terms of
commodity production) and more part time farms, but the reason is sector
bias and not direct scale bias."
By sector, Smith means within the agricultural system in the US there are
three sectors: inputs, marketing and farming. Of today's research conducted
at LGU, only 9% address problems on the farm (like rotational grazing,
alternative cropping systems and the like). The remaining activity in the
agricultural colleges in the US promote input and output components of the
food system, often at the expense of farming activity. BGH and rotational
grazing is just a current example of an eighty year process that Smith
documents. With the majority of research addressing the needs of the
marketing and input sectors of agriculture, "economies of scope offset
economies of scale."
As to the question put forth by Tokya Dammond, The Economist's
assessment is far from accurate and it chimes the party line which normally
discounts external costs, be they social or environmental. Ecomomists
defend BST as they would any other agricultural technology, claiming scale
neutrality and "that larger farms simply have better managers more attuned to
adoption" (Smith). I beleive this a poor excuse for putting farmers out of
business and a livelihood. I have heard university administration officials
here resign to the fact that 10,000 farms will be lost in the next decade in
Wisconsin. Being the dairy state, many will no doubt be dairy farms. To
what degree the impact of BST will be the cause of this erosion of Wisconsin
farming, I could only speculate, but that is often what economics is all
about. As for the lack the imagination of LGU administration to envision
something different than rural demise, how about supporting the farming
sector rather than exploiting? What about developing and promoting socially
and environmentally conscious technologies that can be reproduced on
the farm rather than sustaining the profit margins of multinationals who
promote unsustainable technologies (biological or otherwise)?
Douglas Romig
Univ of Wisconsin-Madison
Dept of Soil Science
1525 Observatory Dr
Madison, WI 53706
deromig@students.wisc.edu