High & Dry Farm

Dear readers,

I have embarked on writing this essay about the present collapse of the American food system. This will be a very long essay, which I will assemble in increments over the coming weeks. Here are a few of the themes I will address. Over time I will expand on these themes, and document the claims I make with footnotes and citations.

• Small family farms, once the well-spring of American cultural values, have all but disappeared and have been replaced by vast corporate megafarms. This has been the direct result of Federal agricultural policies.
• The owners/operators of these megafarm corporations have vast wealth and power: thus I refer to them as agricultural oligarchs.
• There is a revolving door between officials at the USDA and lobbyists for the agricultural oligarchs, with the result that the USDA has actively fostered replacement of small family farms with corporate megafarms.
• The vulnerability of the American food supply chain was grimly revealed by the Covid 19 epidemic. In part due to this experience, there is huge public interest in fresh locally grown food and food grown by sustainable organic methods. Changes in the American food system, promoted by the USDA, are presently making this situation worse, not better. The infrastructure for delivery of locally grown food has virtually disappeared, while the USDA National Organic Program has changed rules and enforcement in a way which has driven legitimate organic farmers out of business, replacing their products with food that is organic in name only, and is typically imported from foreign countries.
• The organic food movement was begun as a way to produce food in a manner that improved the quality of agricultural soils over time, in contrast to conventional agricultural practices that destroy the world’s topsoils over time. An important feature of healthy agricultural soils is a high level of organic matter, the very foundation of the term “organic agriculture”. Yet astonishingly, the USDA, under the corrupt influence of agricultural oligarchs, has changed their rules to allow hydroponically grown food to be sold as organic. Obviously, food grown without soil cannot increase the quality of soil over time. As I will discuss in detail, the opposite is true. The source of materials for hydroponic agriculture involves practices that destroy agricultural soils and destroy tropical rain forests in a manner that accelerates global warming.
• One of the causes of the disappearance of small local farms is the disappearance of markets for the products of small farms. Grocery stores once purchased vegetables, meat, and dairy products locally. However, the vast majority of grocery stores are now owned by a few megacorporations, and further consolidation by corporate mergers continues. These megacorporate grocery store chains have consolidated their purchasing so that no farm can sell to a grocery store chain unless they are large enough to produce enough product to satisfy the needs of all of the chain’s outlets nationwide. Only corporate megafarms can do this.
• The consolidation of food retail outlets has also destroyed any access to food that is fresh and local. Even if the broccoli you see in the store was grown 30 miles away, it was likely trucked to a megacorporate facility 1500 miles away before being transferred to another truck for transport to a regional distribution center 500 miles away, where it was transferred to a third truck delivering it to your local grocery store. But because of the nature of this distribution system, more often than not, it is more economical to source the broccoli from a foreign country.
• Small wonder, then, that America now grows only 80% of the food it eats. We were once a net food exporting nation. We are now a net food importing nation. This means that we lack food security. Any calamity disrupting the transnational supply chain for food would cause starvation in the USA. Beyond this, although the percentage of American food sold as “organic” increases each year, the acreage of US farms engaged in organic agriculture decreases each year. How is this possible? It results from the fact that all the growth in sales of organic food represents growth in organic food imports. Presently 40% of all organic food and 60% of all organic fruit comes from foreign countries. Further, much of this imported “organic” food is not really organic and could not legally be sold as organic in the country of origin.
• How is possible that a country with vast agricultural acreage is not food self-sufficient? The answer is that much of US agriculture does not grow food. Vast Federal subsidies promote the growth of corn to produce fuel ethanol and soybeans to produce fuel biodiesel. This despite the fact that some estimates indicate that each gallon of biofuel produced requires burning a gallon of fossil fuel. This production comes at the cost of degrading Midwest soils, sending much of its fertility to produce vast dead-zones at the outflow of the Mississippi river at the Gulf Coast, and causing massive pollution of Midwest drinking water supplies.