GETTING CONTROL OF THE FARM

...Smaller farms engaged in the process may exaggerate the worst features of the industrial agribusiness system, as a boy trying to prove he's a man sometimes exhibits the least admirable characteristics of his sex...

...But every day, the seriousness of environmental damage caused by farm technology becomes more apparent and more difficult to ignore...

...The powerful, mysterious technology that fosters industrial agribusiness is directed at immediate materialistic objectives—more food and more profit—with little concern for long-run sustainability...

...Over three years, we worked with forty-eight farmers testing new ideas in energy use...

...In effect, they had saved almost enough in one year to pay for their long-term investment in alternative energy...

...They needed alternative-energy skills they could apply on their own terms to their own farms...

...Ultimately, farmers who see little room for themselves in industrial agribusiness will demand, and shape, a better technology...

...Implicitly, technology is neutral with respect to how it is used...

...Based on this reassessment, a farm technology employing people and conserving natural resources is more appropriate to our needs than one that economically dislocates people from the farm to the cities and, in the process, squanders soil, water, oil, and other natural resources...

...For the most part, farmers selected the technologies that did the most good for them and gave them the greatest return on their limited financial investment...

...We seem powerless to resist...

...The changes involve methods of food production, ownership of land, and the health of rural communities...

...They were full-time, mud-on-their-boots farmers, however, with little or no off-farm income...

...In Nebraska, half of the 800 municipal water systems are contaminated, the major source of the contamination being fertilizer and livestock waste, 11 Underground water supplies are being depleted in eleven states...

...But these technologies and their impacts are certainly not exclusive to large or corporate farms...

...But given these feed additives, animal factories are possible...

...Defending it has long been the common rhetorical fare of politicians and opinion makers...

...It is designed and expected to produce "more...

...The production process and the technology it employs conform to this expectation...

...Moreover, other nations have undertaken agricultural development with an intensity we might not have expected just a decade or two ago...

...Rather than help farmers cope with a worsening situation, we proposed to change the relationship between farming and energy...

...If it doesn't, then it is time for us to reconsider our technology base...

...They are off the hightech, high-production treadmill...

...Out of the malaise of American agriculture has emerged a growing commitment among many farmers to farm differently in order to survive...

...A number of trends underlie this transformation...

...As rational decision-makers with limited resources, what these farmers needed most was not alternative-energy devices designed by researchers or other experts with high engineering performance standards...

...Without the technology— climate-controlled buildings, automated feed and waste-handling equipment, and computer-controlled feeding regimes— Smaller farms trying to become agribusinesses may exaggerate the worst features of industrial farming, as a boy trying to prove he's a man sometimes exhibits the least admirable characteristics of his sex...

...A group of neighbors filed a lawsuit against National Farms asking them to find some other way to dispose of their waste...

...While some of the boasts about the potential of these technologies may be little more than giddy talk, it's indisputable that the technology base for agriculture is changing rapidly...

...Unlike air and (for the most part) water, land is not regarded as a public resource that no one has the right to pollute...

...When the damage is noticed, it frequently goes unmentioned, since most of the neighborhood may be engaged in more or less the same destructive activities...

...The project provided some information about alternative energy sources and some modest funds for cost-sharing on innovations...

...The farm crisis of the 1980s should be seen as part of this change...

...A farming system so dependent on fossil fuels cannot last forever—not even for long...

...But technology is not deterministic...

...Believing that bigger is better, many farmers have decided to expand their farms—often with disastrous results...

...For some of these uses, there are clear alternatives...

...The rationale for this objective is that if people can be freed from the burdens of working to produce their own food, they will be able to contribute to other economic development objectives...

...Perhaps the most important lesson we derived from the project, however, was that the energy crisis is far more than a technological crisis...

...The sheer quantity would preclude handling it any other way," according to National Farms's manager...

...The point here is not simply that "alternative" technology is better than "conventional" technology, that solar is superior to oil...

...These farmers were, indeed, conservative...

...There were three complementary strategies: to conserve purchased energy supplies, to produce new sources of energy, and to use energy in different ways...

...But ask any of the farmers who live in the neighborhood of these waste-disposal sites...

...How do we regain control of the technology we use in American agriculture...

...The work of Nebraska farmers and my colleagues at the Center for Rural Affairs has demonstrated that there are real technological choices in agriculture, and that they can help small commercial farmers...

...It would eliminate much of the costly waste-removal problem and would reduce fertilizer costs...

...production is not to be found in the rest of the world, the prospect of finding it at home is even more remote...

...In the 1970s, as we engaged in a massive buildup of agricultural production capacity to feed a hungry world, that world was fast going about the process of improving its own food output...

...And there was no difference in the amount of food produced on the two types of farms...

...Overfed for decades, America is on a societal diet, cutting out most of the rich foods American agriculture has become specialized to produce-red meat, milk, and eggs...

...You'll have more time for Marty Strange is co-director of the Center for Rural Affairs in Walthill, Nebraska...

...H Drinking-water pollution from farm chemicals is now widespread and officially recognized in farm states...

...One prevailing myth is that efficiency improves as farm size increases...

...Of course, technology partisans are quick to chant the familiar refrain that "technology creates problems, technology solves problems...

...For many, it is a matter of economic survival: They know that the predominant technology base is designed to eliminate farmers...

...Most were diversified crop and livestock farms averaging 357 acres, small by Nebraska standards...

...Why should we passively allow the marketplace to determine which technologies we will use, and which social and environmental problems we will have to learn to solve...

...A farm technology employing people and conserving natural resources is more appropriate to our needs...

...There are alternatives to current approaches both in public policy and in private behavior...

...Our need to understand the impact of technology and its interaction with our economic system will become more urgent in the immediate future...

...Crops grown from these seeds are especially vulnerable to disease because they are genetically uniform...

...Without antibiotics also routinely fed to enhance the animal's conversion of feed to meat, the factories would not be profitable (and many are not, anyway...

...But the solution surely is not—and should not be—dependence on American agriculture...

...In agriculture, many environmental impacts of technology are subtle and seemingly unconnected...

...A further reduction of the labor force in agriculture is not going to contribute much to increased economic development...

...Technology determines the tolerable level of neigh-borliness, as well as the scale of the operation...

...One is the trend toward bigness and concentration...

...In short, our assessment of both our resource endowments and our social objectives needs to be overhauled...

...By the concluding third year of the project, the difference in the two groups was startling...

...your family, you'll be less vulnerable to Mother Nature, and you'll pass the farm on to your kids...

...Astronomical yields are possible if fertilizer and pesticides are applied without consideration of their cost...

...Copyright © 1988 by the University of Nebraska Press...

...Some made very few changes...

...Perhaps no aspect of our life is more widely approved of in America than the family farm...

...Never, according to technology's partisans...

...You can't blame them...

...But this change in direction requires confronting American agriculture's (and American society's) deterministic attitude toward technology—the view that if it can be done profitably, it will be done and must be done...

...But most of us are not sure...

...This transformation is complex, incremental, and pervasive...

...Farmers' reputation for blind political resistance to environmental regulation is legendary and, for the most part, well deserved...

...these operations simply could not exist...

...It demonstrated that fanners were rational decision-makers capable of selecting among technologies that were not all equally suited to their farms...

...But it is not well founded, and our growing reliance on big farms for our food supply may be a risky and expensive proposition...

...It does not tell us how much work or production is needed, or what should be produced, or who should benefit from it...

...These were small commercial farmers with average sales of about $36,000 and average net farm incomes of only $3,400...

...But there were less exotic offerings as well—composting of animal manure to improve its use as a fertilizer and soil conditioner, for example...

...The financial crisis of the 1980s has affected big farms more than has been widely recognized...

...The bigger-is-better myth has driven many family farmers to try to farm bigger than they can farm well, or to farm with technologies meant to be used on larger farms...

...The new information and genetic technologies may dwarf the impacts of those of the past...

...The crisis is essentially financial—a product of misplaced values, both economic and cultural—and many farmers who consider themselves family farmers have bought into the values of industrial agribusiness...

...Unemployment and poverty, not food shortages, are the social problems in America...

...They've stopped trying to do more and have started trying to do better...

...It is praised for its virtues and pitied for its problems...

...But both environmentalists and farmers are wrong to pose the issue as agriculture versus environment...

...But in fact, the family farm is an institution eroding from within, struggling somewhere between decline and death to hang on to the things it stands for...

...However, the problem of what to do with the mountain (or ocean) of hog waste created by such densely populated hog cities remains largely unsolved...

...Saying so is not intended to exonerate them...

...In agriculture, there are alternative paths to technical change, though they have been spurned in favor of the industrial path...

...The water level is declining by six inches to six feet per year beneath more than fifteen million irrigated acres...

...This article is adapted, by permission, from his book, "Family Farming: A New Economic Vision," to be published this fall by the University of Nebraska Press and the Institute for Food and Development Policy...

...It suggests not only regulation of certain technologies, but deliberate, selective rejection of some technologies altogether...

...As one farmer explained to us, family members felt "responsible" for the success or failure of the solar collector they had built themselves, and took steps to conserve fuel in other ways as well, so the collector would "look good...

...Our own agriculture needs to develop more appropriate technology...

...Some farmers are leading the way on their own farms by changing the technologies they •use...

...Gradually, after some initial reluctance, some of these designs were undertaken on the farm...

...With such a small part of our population engaged in food production as it is, with diminished expectations of what we might be able to sell in the world market, and with excessive eating becoming a health menace at home, there is little need for more food output from American agriculture...

...These alternatives need to be reconsidered now, and not just in the so-called developing nations...

...Though no less essential to human life than air or water, land is a commodity that you can own and, if you wish, willfully destroy...

...China is now the world's largest grain producer, a net exporter of grain...

...Is that a realistic goal...

...China was once viewed condescendingly as a gigantic open mouth, waiting for the American farmer to shovel grain into it...

...We need to consider restraining, rejecting, or replacing some of the industrial technologies used in agriculture...

...H The widespread use of antibiotics commonly used in human medicine to reduce risk of livestock disease and improve the efficiency with which animals convert feed mto food has produced strains of bacteria that are dangerous to human health and resistant to the antibiotics...

...As a consequence, manure has become a waste-disposal problem and a pollutant instead of the fertilizer resource it was when animals were widely scattered on thousands of farms...

...Capital and resources are increasingly scarce, whereas people willing to farm are plentiful...

...Leading agricultural advisers in the state warned us that they were also conservative, reluctant to change, doomed by their own resistance to new technology...

...If a new technique can make twice as much corn for one farm or one farmer, it must be used, even if it eventually ruins both the farmer and the farm...

...One-half of the group undertook conservation measures—insulation, caulking, and other simple practices, such as painting fuel tanks white to reduce evaporation of fuel in the summer—and experimented with new energy conservation practices on their farms...

...Another is toward specialization, as more farms produce a narrower range of crops or livestock and invest larger sums of money in more expensive, less versatile buildings and equipment...

...A long-term transformation is under way in American agriculture from small-scale, broad-based family farming to large-scale, industrial farming...

...Why should the general public get worked up about soil loss when the bad news seems to be too much food, not too little good land for growing it...

...In a like vein, seed companies and commodity groups sponsor competitions for top yields of various commodities...

...At the conclusion of the project, our analysis showed that the most popular innovations proved to be the most cost-effective as well...

...The nuclear bomb issue presents, of course, the ultimate test...

...Industrial agribusiness thrives on technologies that have the most serious environmental impacts...

...Solar grain drying and space heating are well proven, for example...

...Are there practical alternatives for most farmers trying to make a living on the land...

...They aren't being told how to farm by the chemical companies and the machine dealers any more...

...A technical solution to one problem leads to another problem, which itself will be solved by another technical innovation...

...Some, of course, do so gleefully, but most do so to survive...

...Consider the most vital inputs for industrialized agriculture—oil and natural gas...

...Public policy can encourage alternative agriculture, but only farmers experimenting and adapting it to their own farms can make it become the conventional farming of tomorrow...

...In our society, only about 1 per cent of the population is directly involved in commercial food production and that 1 per cent supplies nearly all the food we eat, plus half again that much for export...

...It's hard to exaggerate the extent of our continuing dependence on these particular fuels to power machinery, to control weeds and other pests, to supplement fertility on soils stressed by repeated planting of the same crops, to dry those crops after harvest, and to heat animal factories...

...They were simply careful with the limited resources at their disposal...

...What are the environmental costs of such a strategy...

...For National Farms, the problem seemed to be solved by another technology: sprinkler irrigation systems...

...Whether we have the capacity to choose among these technologies rather than just cope with their adverse consequences will become more, not less, of an issue...

...The personality of our industrial system is materialistic...

...The new sources and uses of energy on the farm were what is usually described as appropriate technology...

...Why not remove as much solid waste as possible, dilute the remaining slurry, and spread the liquid waste over corn fields through the sprinkler irrigation systems...

...Both groups increased output by the same amount...

...But some progress is being made in seriously criticizing technical development in more than ideological ways...

...That year alone, these innovators consumed 13 per cent less energy and spent $27,312 (17 per cent) less money on energy than the non-innovators...

...Even more startling, basic conservation measures such as insulation and caulking could only account for another 25 per cent...

...Most of the environmental destruction in agriculture occurs in relatively unpopulated areas where it doesn't easily offend...

...If a market for boundless U.S...

...This technocratic view prefers the neat prospect of regulating a few large farms over the messy chore of forcing many small, stubborn, independent farmers into line with environmental needs...

...The problem of world hunger is still real, because in most of these countries the poor have no access to the increased output of food...

...Without antibiotics routinely administered within feed, the animals would be vulnerable to diseases that spread easily wherever large numbers of animals are kept in close quarters...

...Because the power of modern technology is not merely physical, but psychological as well, it begins to have a life of its own, a method, a design, a capacity to shape the economic system itself...

...At the conclusion of the project, we tried to determine exactly how the farmers had managed to save on energy...

...Technology should become the servant, not the master of good farming...

...When farm families gained a sense of responsibility, of ownership and control over their technology, they behaved in a more resource-conserving manner in all areas of their farm life...

...In response, National Farms argued that this was not economically possible...

...A recent report by a Congressional agency identifies 150 new agricultural production technologies likely to be available to the public by the year 2000...

...They prefer to allow the market to determine technological progress, and then to regulate environmental impacts with scientific precision...

...In September 1986, a court ordered the company not to alter its operation, but to pay one farm couple $125,000 for the loss of satisfaction of their home...

...It captures all but the most conscientiously resistant farmers...

...We are reduced to the level of self-control of a dog chasing its tail because that's where the tail leads it...

...They appeal to aggression (kill this weed dead), power (sentence this pest to death), and envy (how can my field be as weed-free as my neighbor's...

...As a result, the innovators enjoyed an average improvement in farm income of $ 1,138—about one-third of their average farm income at the beginning of the project...

...The goal was to see if the innovators could reduce energy expenditures while maintaining production levels, improving their farm income by doing so...

...They are leading the way with private decisions about how they farm...

...Six Third World nations—Mexico, Brazil, China, India, South Korea, and Indonesia—have nearly half the world's population and have increased agricultural production faster than their population since 1970...

...It occurs subtly, within family farms as they grow, as well as from the outside as corporate and other types of investor-owned farms develop...

...More broadly, the range of policy questions raised by the environmental movement, from reducing toxic chemicals to remedying acid rain, present even more complex challenges to technology...

...The big-ger-is-better notion is deeply ingrained in agricultural economics, and it underlies most of American farm policy...

...Farmers who have led the way in search of other solutions will be regarded as pioneers...

...As a result, world demand for our food is simply not as strong as predicted...

...If we couldn't spread it through the irrigation rigs, it would shut us down...

...Farm technology in the United States has been shaped by an assessment that natural resources are plentiful and labor is dear...

...To our chagrin, we discovered that only 6 per cent of the total energy savings could reasonably be attributed to alternative-energy devices that we had helped the farmers design and construct...

...Of course, it was never true that natural resources were inexhaustible...

...But most important, this transformation is unnecessary and, to many of us, undesirable...

...They are pretty much unknown...

...And this problem crops up wherever this particular technology is used...

...For even if it is true that the industrial path made sense at one time, it is time to reevaluate that judgment...

...Both diversity and individuality are its enemy...

...It will require a fresh approach to problem-solving, one that places greater emphasis on know-how and less emphasis on technical devices...

...Those issues are resolved by the economic system...

...It is difficult to grasp the largely invisible erosion of topsoil on good farmland...

...Dozens of projects were built in the second year...

...Between 1976 and 1985, Americans trimmed beef consumption by an average of 16 per cent...

...And after all, even a dull dog eventually stops chasing its own tail...

...In a Nebraska case, a corporate farm, National Farms, Inc., built facilities for producing 350,000 hogs per year, instantly placing it second among hog producers nationwide...

...More food is not needed, but less resource destruction is...

...This project did more than demonstrate that fanners could save energy and make money doing so...

...Unfortunately, the debate among the technologies—"soft," "appropriate," "intermediate," "industrial"—can be dogmatic on all sides...

...Only our view of it is...

...Much of the debate has resembled arguing in the dark over whether and how to light the room...

...But the technological fetish is reinforced by the demonstrations, and by the declaration of the winners...

...Environmental problems are largely unnoticed in agriculture because most of them occur on or to private land...

...Both groups kept careful records of their energy use and expenditures and farm production...

...A good example of this one-thing-leads-to-another view of technology is the current controversy in rural areas over the offensive odor from many of the large-scale hog factories that now dominate pork production...

...When the summer clouds hang low or the winds blow, the odor from this indelicate spray is unbearable...

...They have accepted responsibility for the way they farm, and they are looking for ways that give them a future on the land...

...But our technological dependence on oil and natural gas as unique sources of energy is nearly complete...

...Per-capita consumption of all three staples has fallen sharply...

...It is meant only to reiterate a theme: The transformation of agriculture from family farming to industrial agribusiness is incremental and pervasive...

...It is reinforced, too, by the powerful cultural images portrayed in the news media and in advertising of the farmer as a manager of complex technological systems...

...Why depend on technology to cure us of its own aftermath, when we can decide now whether to accept the consequences...

...Thousands of American farmers are demonstrating that there are practical alternatives to the technological treadmill...

...But does that assessment remain accurate...

...Out of the promise of greater efficiency has emerged a big, troubled farming system, increasingly inefficient and unstable, top-heavy with highly specialized su-perfarms and unable to right itself without massive public support...

...When should human judgment intervene over market forces to determine technological change...

...The farmers had made one-time investments of $29,699 of their own money in 148 major and minor innovations that reduced their energy consumption...

...More of the damage is affecting those off the farm...

...It is also appropriate to ask whether the social objective our farm technology is designed to accomplish—to produce ever more food with fewer people—is still relevant...

...11 Genetically specialized seeds now account for most crop production...

...Modern, mechanized, and temperature-controlled hog buildings make this scale of operation possible...

...What those farmers and we learned is that the energy crisis is not a crisis of technology, but one of culture...

...We are poised on the edge of a starburst of new technologies that will constitute a revolution as sweeping as those of mechanics and chemicals...

...They cut corners, making compromises with the methods they know should be used...

...Examples of the dependence of industrial agribusiness on destructive technologies are common: the misuses of the center-pivot irrigation system on ecologically fragile soils in the High Plains, the use of cancer-causing hormones as growth stimulants in cattle, and the continuing battle over regulation of pesticides used on food crops...

...Technology alone, therefore, is not the solution to it...

...In fact, some of the worst abuses of these technologies are on family farms trying to compete with industrial agribusiness...

...The come-on for many of these ads is plain: Use our products and you'll be considered tough, smart, and ahead of the pack, better than your neighbors, the one people turn to for advice...

...We forget that technology is nothing more than technique—a way of getting something done...

...Many emphasize masculine ego and play on other emotional weaknesses...

...The other half agreed not to do anything they would not have done anyway to conserve energy...

...they therefore require more disease-preventing chemicals...

...These farm families were reasserting cultural values long since overpowered by industrial technologies...

...With few exceptions, the projects were successful, and many of the farmers quickly moved on to additional ideas...

...I believe future generations will look back on the period following World War II as a quaint and somewhat curious period during which agricultural technology became preoccupied with the many uses of oil, and during which agricultural science suspended inquiry into solutions to farm problems that were not based on use of that resource...

...At spring planting time especially, farmers are bombarded with television advertisements aggrandizing them as top managers if they use the right brand-name chemicals, seed, or machinery...

...Consider the burgeoning business of raising livestock in factorylike operations...

...Gradually, modern farming practices are being recognized as the number one environmental issue in our society...

...More and more countries once considered prime targets for American exCapital and resources are increasingly scarce, whereas people willing to farm are plentiful...

...It's a prideful competition, a demonstration of mechanical prowess...

...But all participated in educational programs, listened to speakers describe possible projects, and worked with the project staff in designing innovations for their farms...

...The most serious environmental problems in agriculture are those caused by technologies that make large-scale farming possible and that sever the rewards of farming from the rewards of stewardship and husbandry...

...The point is that when people understand and make rational choices about the technology they use, when they adapt the technology to their needs, they behave more responsibly in its use...

...Some environmentalists consider farmers to be little more than petty land abusers and are inclined to discount any social concern over their economic future...

...We began cutting out milk and eggs even earlier, per-capita consumption falling by 16 per cent and 18 per cent, respectively, between 1970 and 1985...

...In Iowa, pesticide residues have been found in one-third of the state's wells serving 27 per cent of the population...

...But that economic system does shape the uses of technology, and to the extent that the economic system has a "personality" of its own—a peculiar set of values that influence social behavior—the technology it uses will reflect that personality and those values...

...The remaining 69 per cent was purely the product of changes in behavior on the part of the farm families...

...The most popular were solar devices to heat homes and livestock buildings, to heat water for use in dairy barns, and to dry grain...

...ports don't seem to want our grain...

...And farmers themselves are beginning to recognize that they are on the front line of exposure to many adverse and unanticipated environmental hazards caused by farm technologies...

...In 1976, as oil prices spiraled upward and threatened the existence of many farmers, we set out to show that farmers could turn the energy crisis into an economic opportunity...

...Whether the farmer who wins the tractor pull or the yield contest can make a living using such technologies is not tested—except, of course, in the market...

...They were not "conservative" or resistant to change...

...The innovations we need from agricultural science are those that recognize this fundamental reassessment of our needs...

...Numerous designs were rendered, each tailored to the farm and the farmer...

...Consider these tell-tale signs: 11 If we continue to erode topsoil at current rates for the next fifty years, crop yields will fall enough to equal the loss of twenty-three million acres of cropland...