Pat: you are right. In a nutshell, "Them's that eats is them's that pays". Global
starvation has little if anything to do with confinement feeding systems in the US.
This is BY NO MEANS a justification for confinement feeding systems, but a simple
statement of fact. Starving people and confinement feeding are two separate, but
parallel issues - each involving "grain" or food nutrients, but for different
reasons.
The central problem of the US (and perhaps other grain-exporting countries as well)
has always been overproduction. We produce more than we can sell, so we search
creatively for ways of absorbing the excess (e.g. anyone remember PL480?) so we can
produce yet more. Sound a little circular? There is a logic to it, but you have to
be imaginative to follow it.
Why do farmers continually strive for higher yields, more milk/cow, faster rate of
gain in steers, hogs, etc? Because we, in university and government ag research,
give them the tools and varieties/hybrids to do it, and industry feeds them all the
promos, peer-incentives, and paint to make it seem attractive.
Why do we strive so hard to produce more, when all it does it drive down the price,
tighten the margin on what we do produce (the difference between cost of and value
of production), and oblige us to get bigger, and buy more inputs, to produce more,
just to stay in business? They call it a treadmill, and so it is.
If your goal (as a research community) was to support and sustain the farming
community and natural environment, while ensuring abundant and healthy food for
society - which is what all the platitudes say - this would be nonsensical.
Continued overproduction, particularly using techniques that are increasingly
harmful to both human (farmer and consumer) health and the environment, is
fundamentally incompatible with the goal of *serving* the farming community,
protecting natural resources, and producing safe food for society. Indeed, it is
the antithesis of this goal.
Clearly, and I would welcome ideas to the contrary, the goal is NOT to sustain the
farming ommunity...etc, but something else. The beneficiary of our hard work - and
our real client(s) - may become clearer if we consider who it is that *has*
benefited from sustained overproduction, narrow production margins, and a
continually declining farm population.
a. Some say society benefits, because food is cheaper. Hard argument to make, when
such a small fraction of the dollar value spent by consumers for "food" actually
gets to the farmer. Most - and it is over 90% for many prepared foods, including a
loaf of bread - goes to marketers, processors, and other post-farmgate segments in
the food chain. So, the price that farmers receive for their products has
remarkably little bearing on the value of food to consumers. Cheap food may have
been a real goal decades ago, but today, it is a specious if compelling argument.
Everybody likes a bargain.
b. OK, if not society, then who? Farmers? Someone once said that ag researchers
must be the only class of people in the world who rate their success on how many of
their own clients they can drive out of business. Perhaps, maybe 40 years ago,
farmers were delighted to leave their land and get to the city, and it may well have
been a blessing to give them the tools and reasons to leave farming. But that "joy
of release" sure doesn't pertain today, when many farm families are hanging
desperately onto their land and their home, working part time and doing without,
just to make it through another year. Do the figures on standard of living, rate of
suicide and abuse, etc. bear out the premise that farmers have benefited from higher
yields and high-tech agriculture? I think not.
c. OK, so if it is not consumer and farmers, who is left? The environment? Nuf
said.
d. That leaves.....what other segment of ag and food? Those who supply the inputs,
upon which high yields are based, and who purchase, market, trade, process, and sell
the products.
This brief amateur analysis (with apologies to those of you who do this for a
living), suggests that all available evidence is inconsistent with the premise that
the high yield agriculture paradigm which we in the publicly funded research
community have nurtured with such care is serving society, farmers, or the
environment - our ostensible "clients". The inference is inescapable - we are
serving another sector entirely, even to the point of disenfranchising our own
mandated clients.
Now, against this background, consider the evolution of confinement-feeding
systems. Feeding grain to livestock (and esp. to classes of livestock that can do
very nicely, thank you very much, without grain entirely) has always been a way of
buffering against either the weather or the market. Rain-damaged grain could still
be fed to stock - not a complete loss. If the market favors fat cattle, then keep
the grain and feed them out. Fair enough. But now, confinement feeding has become
the tail that is wagging the dog. Some 70-90% of all grain produced in North
America is grown specifically for livestock feeding. Imagine it!
And why? because livestock are quite inefficient at converting grain, and hence,
consume a lot of cheap grain to produce products that we value - meat, milk, etc.
What better way to justify and absorb ever higher grain yields, while at the same
time, producing a "value-added" product? An acre of "milk" is worth a great deal
more than as acre of "corn" - particularly to those processing the milk. Indeed, it
could be argued that confinement feeding systems were, at least at one time, a
logical solution to the problem of overproduction. The only problem is that now our
capacity to absorb livestock products is saturated, and grain overproduction has
even overshot this solution, yet we continue to produce still more that we still
can't sell.
Don't misunderstand. I'm not saying that there are not starving people who would
benefit from grain - ideally, their own grain, produced by their own hands on their
own farms. But they are not going to benefit from "our" grain, even if we stopped
feeding it to livestock (which we *should* do, but for other reasons)- because they
don't have the money to buy it. The same is true of genetic engineering. People
are hungry for reasons that have remarkably little to do with corn genetics, and
everything to do with entitlement and accessibility.
It is important to look closely at causality in these kinds of disputes, to avoid
the pitfalls of false assumptions - intentional (a la Avery) or otherwise. Ann
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