Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?
“We’re heading to a place where we don’t have farmers; we just have food production.”<p>This.<p>I don&#x27;t know what the solution to this is. I have a small farm, and raise meat sheep. But it&#x27;s very much a hobby. The problem is, though, that almost all of the other farmers in my area, the ones I meet at the feed store or the livestock auction, they&#x27;re also hobby farmers. There is exactly one “real” farmer (meaning that it&#x27;s his full time job) in my area. He raises specialty row crops and runs an agricultural co-op, the kind where you pay a certain amount a month and get a box of fresh vegetables every week. But hobby farmers can&#x27;t feed the country. We can&#x27;t even feed ourselves, if it comes to that.<p>The problem is that these vegetables, which don&#x27;t have to be shipped any distance and don&#x27;t have the overhead of a grocery store, are still more expensive than the equivalent groceries in the local Safeway. The economies of scale in agriculture have become so strong that there&#x27;s no way to compete on price any other way. And people understandably don&#x27;t want to double their grocery bills just to buy local.<p>I grew up on a 300 acre cattle farm. Fifty years ago a family could make a living on a 300 acre, well situated east coast farm. Not any more. You&#x27;d have trouble just paying for gas, groceries, and medical care. Forget paying down a mortgage or god forbid buying new farm equipment. The only way to even stay on the farm, is to either walk into a situation where everything - land, house, barn, equipment, everything - is already paid for. Or to get a full time job in town and farm on the weekends. That&#x27;s what my dad did. And it&#x27;s what my sister and brother-in-law do now.<p>We have a situation where we&#x27;ve harnessed economies of scale so much that we have only a small handful of corporations producing our food. They mainly want to grow exactly the same small number of crops, to keep supply chains simple. We&#x27;ve wrung all of the redundancy, both financial and biodiversity, out of the system.<p>So what happens if someone figures out how to weaponize that against us? What happens if Chinese investors own half the farm land and we go to war with China? Or what happens if we encounter this generation&#x27;s version of potato blight on corn or wheat? This is not just a human tragedy. It&#x27;s a huge national security issue, and it looks like nobody is paying attention.