SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

PART VI – FEEDING THE WORLD

Lydia Oakley [name changed for privacy] lives near Tar Heel, North Carolina. North Carolina is pork country and she raises pigs. Lydia is no factory farmer. She owns 60 acres 4 miles south of town and raises pigs for sale on her place. Lydia is proud of her pigs and she has grown her business every year for the past five and now produces 10 free range pigs a month and sells them at the local farmers market in Raleigh, North Carolina. None of the pigs are raised in pens and she gives them no antibiotics or hormones and has a local butcher kill and process the pigs for her. She is able to sell them for over a dollar a pound.

Down the road from Lydia is a Smithfield Foods pork plant. The Smithfield plant butchers 32,000 hogs a day six days a week. They sell the pork products all over the country and sometime all over the world. Grocery markets depend on a steady supply of Smithfield pork to fill their meat shelves and provide daily pork to the consumers that frequent their stores. These consumers are very cost conscious and currently pay the equivalent of .62 cents a pound for these pigs.

In order to produce the same amount of pork as the Smithfield plant, it would require 200,000 Lydias on 12 million acres of land -- one third of the land mass of North Carolina. This ignores whether the 200,000 Lydias could make a living producing 10 pigs a month. The hard reality is efficient farming requires economies of scale and those options are not desired by Lydia.

Feeding the world is no easy proposition. Large efficient operations are necessary to produce the $190 billion dollars worth of meat produced in this country each year. Free range pigs make the University wives and wealthy consumers in Raleigh feel good but detailed analysis presents some problems. Our country's food supply is not sustainable if production is given over to the Lydia Oakleys of this country.

The same analysis would apply to grass fed beef or organic vegetables. Crop yields and animal size is reduced and the area to produce the food is increased. There would simply be to little land for too much demand for food forgetting the cost issue. The cost of all food would easily be multiples of the current cost. More important than increased cost is the heartland issue of overall production which would fall to one third of current production.

Farming without the large efficient farmers would create shortages requiring the need for food rationing. Rationing could be by price or government decree. Either way a lot of people are going to go hungry. This is the inevitable and natural consequence of eliminating our most efficient farmers. Obama idea is to rework the farm bill and eliminate any payments to the largest and most efficient farmers. Only small farmers would be allowed payments or subsidies which will tend to prevent the large farmers from competing.

Eliminating the large farmer will eventually require millions of new small farmers. It will require financing for new farmers with no equity. Urban workers will be recalled to rural America with no training or willingness to work or guaranteed viable economic model. This failed business model has played out in countries all over the world.