What Is Lost When We Prioritize Efficiency In Our Food System
Now I wish that I had more time to ask her what it was like growing up and why she chose to leave the farm and her town of less than 500 and make the move to St. Louis. All I have is a short audio clip and my memories of my grandma telling me about her childhood on the farm in Southeast Missouri. I remember visiting my great-grandparents many weekends as a kid but by that time they were renting out the land. The chicken house was empty, the cow for milking was long gone and the vegetable garden was downsized to an asparagus patch and a few annual vegetables. Now with my great grandparents and grandparents gone, the farmhouse sits vacant on a hill, holding too many memories and stories for the family to part with.
Over the years, as I found my way back to working in agriculture, my grandmother would frequently comment, “if only your great-grandpa could see what you are doing now.” The world of agriculture technology and modern farming equipment that characterizes farming today is a world away from the small farm that my great-grandparents started in 1940. I’ve heard my grandmother’s memories of getting electricity for the first time, warming the house with the wood fire burning stove and the rare delicacy of store-bought bread rather than the homemade loaves that were the norm. Both their agricultural practices and their way of living are ways that are lost. And while she made the choice to leave, I reckon that when she left, when many of us left an agricultural lifestyle, we didn’t quite know what all we were leaving behind.
The cabin that my grandfather and father built with the help of family and friends.
Now, sitting on the front porch of my family’s cabin in rural Missouri, just a couple miles down the road from my family’s original homestead, I have been doing a lot of thinking. I’ve been mulling over what was gained and what was lost by the great migration from rural to urban and from farms to desk and factory and service jobs. My grandma was tired of the farm life. She didn’t want to continue working dawn to dusk, with little money, and few new opportunities in sight. She grew up on the farm, and she chose to leave. Who can blame her for making that decision? That decision meant a world of previously unimaginable opportunities for my dad and his siblings, the chance to go to college, to see the world and be exposed to different thoughts and ideas. And for me, I have to admit that I am happy to have grown up in the suburbs of a city. St. Louis provided me a plethora of amazing opportunities including a top-notch public-school system, competitive sports teams and the chance to cultivate a sense of wonder and adventure of what existed beyond my home state of Missouri.
Yet, as I unexpectedly find myself back in Missouri, watching the world reel in the impacts of a global pandemic, I can’t help but think about all that was lost when many of us made the choice to leave the countryside and move to cities to seek work outside of being stewards of the land.
Large mono-cropped fields are the norm in our industrial agriculture system in order to achieve scale. There are benefits in efficiency, yet there is also something lost in this high input - high output, globalized system.
The industrialized food system that we know today is what made it possible for many to seek opportunities other than farming. Like my grandmother, many others in previous generations chose to leave the farm and move to cities. In the early 1900s just under 40% of the total U.S. population lived on farms and 60% lived in rural areas. Today, only about 1% live on farms and about 20% live in rural areas (Evolution of American Agriculture). With the industrialization of agriculture, farms consolidated, adopted high-tech machinery, and started producing food in greater quantities on roughly the same amount of land. At first glance, the improved efficiency of our agriculture system has been unquestionably beneficial. This increased productivity allowed many of us, including my grandmother, the ability to pursue other passions and opportunities away from the farm. It has made food more affordable and more abundant than ever before. Yet, as I watch the Covid-19 pandemic unfold and see the strain it is placing on the food system, suddenly some of what was lost when the migration from the countryside decades ago began is being shown in a new light. Yes, the efficiency is good, but there is a price for that efficiency.
What Was Lost
Over the past seven or so decades, since the Green Revolution, we have created an agriculture and food system that is built on efficiency, long and complex supply chains, and the production of cheap food. But there are unintended side effects of this more efficient system that many did not anticipate. Some of these side effects are being exposed for the first time, now, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic.
If you have been following the news headlines over the past month you would see stories like this:
According to Tyson’s CEO, the “U.S.’s Food Supply Chain is Breaking”
Massive amounts of food are being wasted while the rate of hunger rises: A Long History of Food Destruction in the Face of Hunger
Wendy’s is out of beef: Wendy’s Pulls Burgers Off the Menu in Some Locations Due To Meat Shortage
Food workers are treated as an expendable resource and deemed as essential yet they are going hungry: Essential Workers Go Hungry As Food Rots In America’s Agricultural Heart
These headlines hint at some of the unseen issues of a centralized food system despite the seemingly limitless amount of food on grocery store shelves. The efficient system that we have built has inherent flaws. For years, this has been evident to many that work at the beginning of our food supply chain. To grow cheap food, farmers are forced to operate on low margins and hope they can make it year to year. To grow cheap food, farm workers receive little pay and often have to move from farm to farm to find work. To grow cheap food, large, mono-cropped fields sprayed with synthetic chemicals and fertilizers that deplete our soils and pollute waterways are the norm. The list of all that we compromise by having our current day, efficient food system is long, but many of these costs go unseen to the average consumer.
Where Do We Go From Here
A basket of rainbow carrots at a farmers market. Shopping at farmers markets and talking with local farmers can make a difference in gaining some of the knowledge that is lost by not growing our own food.
We need to strike a balance between idealizing the old way of agriculture and recognizing that our current, industrialized system, focused solely on efficiency is not sustainable. We have to see the flaws alongside the advantages of our modern-day agri-food system. I am not proposing that we go back to 1940 and all move back to the countryside, but I am saying that we need change. We need to reinvent a new type of system that accounts for all of the trade-offs that we may not have initially seen when we, as a nation, decided to leave rural areas and transitioned to large scale, high efficiency agricultural practices. We need to become more acquainted with where our food comes from. And we need to incentivize fair labor and regenerative growing practices that focus on soil health and go beyond the goal of the highest yield per acre.
One point that will always stay with me from my grandma’s stories was her decision to leave the farm, and her freedom to pursue her dreams. I am grateful to live in a world where this is possible, but I also believe in finding a balance between the world of the 1940s and the world of today. We don’t all have to go back to farming, but we do need to be educated on how food reaches our plates. More of us need to try out growing our own food in gardens, we need schools to bring back agriculture education and we need to know more about the impact of the dollars we spend at the grocery store. We have lost a great deal of knowledge and connection to the land that has far reaching impacts. We have to move forward in a way that weaves together local and global, and accounts for both human and environmental welfare.
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