UN Chronicle | Book excerpt from Eat Here by Brian Halweil

Book Excerpt: Eat Here
By Brian Halweil

Article

The world’s agricultural biodiversity—the ultimate insurance policy against climate variations, pest outbreaks and other unforeseen threats to food security—depends largely on the millions of small farmers who use this diversity in their local growing environments. But the marginalization of farmers who have developed or inherited complex farming systems over generations means more than just the loss of specific crop varieties and the knowledge of how they best grow. “We forever lose the best available knowledge and experience of place, including what to do with marginal lands not suited for industrial production’, says Steve Gleissman, an agroecologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz.1 The 12 million hogs produced by Smithfield Foods Inc., the largest hog producer and processor in the world and a pioneer in vertical integration, are nearly identical genetically and raised under identical conditions, whether they are in a Smithfield feedlot in Virginia or Mexico or Poland.2

As farmers become increasingly integrated into the agribusiness food chain, they have fewer and fewer controls over the totality of the production process—shifting more and more to the role of “technology applicators”, as opposed to managers making informed and independent decisions. Recent USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] surveys of contract poultry farmers in the United States found that, in seeking outside advice on their operations, these farmers now turn first to bankers and then to the corporations that hold their contracts.3 If the contracting corporation is also the same company that is selling the farm its seed and fertilizer, as is often the case, there’s a strong likelihood that that company’s procedures will be followed. That corporation, as a global enterprise with no compelling local ties, is also less likely to be concerned about the pollution and resource degradation created by those procedures, at least compared with a farmer who is rooted in that community. Grower contracts generally disavow any environmental liability.

And then there is the ecological fallout unique to large-scale industrial agriculture. Colossal confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) constitute perhaps the most egregious example of agriculture that has, like a garbage barge in a goldfish pond, overwhelmed the ability of an ecosystem to cope. CAFOs are increasingly the norm in livestock production because, like crop monocultures, they allow the production of huge populations of animals which can be slaughtered and marketed at rock-bottom costs. But the disconnection between the livestock and the land used to produce their feed means that CAFOs generate gargantuan amounts of waste that the surrounding soil cannot possibly absorb. (One farm in Utah will raise over 1.5 million hogs in a year, producing as much waste each day as the city of Los Angeles.)4 The waste is generally stored in large lagoons which are prone to leak and even spill over during heavy storms. From North Carolina to South Korea, the overwhelming stench of these lagoons—a combination of hydrogen sulfide, ammonia and methane gas that smells like rotten eggs—renders miles of surrounding land uninhabitable.

A different form of ecological disruption results from the conditions under which these animals are raised. Because massive numbers of closely confined livestock are highly susceptible to infection, and because a steady diet of anti-biotics can modestly boost animal growth, overuse of antibiotics has become the norm in industrial animal production. In recent years, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have identified such industrial feeding operations as principal causes of the growing antibiotic resistance in food-borne bacteria like salmonella and campylobacter.5

Perhaps most surprising to people who have only casually followed the debate about small-farm values versus factory-farm “efficiency” is the fact that a large body of evidence shows that small farms are actually more productive than large ones, producing as much as 1,000 per cent more output per unit of area.6 How does this jibe with the often-mentioned productivity advantages of large-scale mechanized operations? The answer is simply that those big-farm advantages are always calculated on the basis of how much of one crop the land will yield per acre. The greater productivity of a smaller, more complex farm, however, is calculated on the basis of how much food overall is produced per acre. The smaller farm can grow several crops utilizing different root depths, plant heights, or nutrients on the same piece of land simultaneously. It is this “polyculture” that offers the small farm’s productivity advantage.

To illustrate the difference between these two kinds of measurement, consider a large U.S. midwestern corn farm. That farm may produce more corn per hectare than a small farm in which the corn is grown as part of a poly-culture that also includes beans, squash, potato and “weeds” that serve as fodder. But in overall output, the polycrop—under close supervision by a knowledgeable farmer—produces much more food, whether you measure in tonnes, calories or dollars. (According to the 2002 U.S. Agricultural Census, the smallest category of farm, with an average size of two hectares, produced $15,104 per hectare and netted about $2,902 per acre. The largest farms, averaging 15,581 hectares, yielded $249 per hectare and netted about $52 per hectare. This pattern holds for every farm-size category.)7 The inverse relationship between farm size and output can be attributed to the more efficient use of land, water and other agricultural resources that small operations afford, including the efficiencies of inter-cropping various plants in the same field, planting multiple times during the year, targeting irrigation and integrating crops and livestock. So in terms of converting inputs into outputs, society would be better off with small-scale farmers. And as population continues to grow in many nations, and the amount of farmland and water available to each person continues to shrink, a small farm structure may become central to feeding the planet.

Notes
1.	Steve Gleissman, University of California, Santa Cruz, Department of Environmental Studies, discussion with author, 4 May 2001.
2.	David B. Ottaway, “Something of a Rout for US. Pig Farmer,” Washington Post, 4 July 2000; “History of Smithfield Foods,” www.smithfieldfoods.com, viewed 9 June 2004.
3.	Farmers’ Legal Action Group Inc., Assessing the Impact of Integrator Practices on Contract Poultry Growers (St. Paul, Minnesota: September 2001).
4.	David Barboza,”Goliath of the Hog World,” New York Times, 7 April 2000; Sierra Club, Corporate Hogs at the Public Trough (Washington, D.C., 1999); Circle Four Farms, “Frequently Asked Questions,” www.c4farms.com/FAQ/FAQ.htm, viewed 29 July 2004.
5.	World Health Organization and United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, “Antimicrobial Resistance,” Fact Sheet No. 194 (Geneva: WHO, January 2003); U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, A Public Health Action Plan to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance (Atlanta, Georgia: June 2002); Margaret Mellon, Charles Benbrook, and Karen Lutz Benbrook, Hogging It! Estimates of Antimicrobial Abuse in Livestock (Washington, D.C.: Union of Concerned Scientists, 2001).
6.	Peter Rosset, “The Multiple Functions and Benefits of Small Farm Agriculture,” Policy Brief No. 4 (Oakland, California: Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy, September 1999), pp. 12, 13.
7.	United States Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2002 Census of Agriculture (Washington, D. C.: 2002), Volume I, Chapter 1, Table 55, pp. 58-65.

Go Back Top