tuning into the food network
Above: Wrangling livestock in the year 2025.
Grist:
In the United States, the clearest signs of climate change so far have been stern words from Al Gore and a few hotter-than-normal summers.
In Greenland, by contrast, global warming has sparked a revolution -- at least, when it comes to agriculture. A recent article in the German magazine Der Spiegel explores the dramatic new opportunities arising for the island's farmers. The article opens with a man tending his potato patch amid the roar of "an iceberg breaking apart, with pieces of it tumbling into the foaming sea." It's some of the first serious crop farming to take place in Greenland since temperatures there plunged in the "Little Ice Age" of the 14th century.
If current warming trends continue, farmers the world over will face conditions that change rapidly and unpredictably. Some niches will open, as in Greenland; others will close or mutate. As we consider the possibilities, it's worth asking whether modern U.S. agriculture techniques, which have conquered much of the globe over the past 40 years, are up to the challenge.
One glaring weak point in our food-production system is its reliance on fossil-fuel energy -- and lots of it.
Conventional farmers look mainly to synthetic fertilizers derived in part from natural gas. Between 1950 -- roughly when U.S.-style agriculture began to spread to the global south under the aegis of the Green Revolution -- and 1998, "worldwide use of fertilizers increased more than tenfold overall and more than fourfold per person," according to a report from the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins.
Moreover, U.S. agricultural production tends to be highly concentrated in a few areas -- grain in the Midwest, fruits and vegetables in California, the Southwest, and Florida. In the recent E. coli scare surrounding pre-washed, bagged spinach, it came out that three-quarters of the nation's spinach crop hails from California -- and three-quarters of that from the Salinas Valley. That means the food system leans heavily on long-haul travel.
While current information on U.S. "food miles" -- the distance food travels from farm to table -- is scarce, one oft-cited study estimates the average at 1,500 miles. Since that figure hinges on statistics from 1980, the number has more than likely increased. The ever-growing popularity of frozen "convenience" food puts ever more distance between consumers and their sustenance. And globalization means we haul in lots of, say, asparagus from Mexico and garlic from China -- and ship out loads of corn and soy. USDA trade figures show steadily rising imports and exports, with both expected to top $60 billion this year.
If, as the vast majority of scientists believe, human consumption of fossil fuel powers the current wave of global warming, it might be time for a serious rethinking of U.S. agricultural methods.
(Do yourself a favor and point and click for the links.)
Never mind that farm politics have always been a little hinky in America: privatize, privatize, privatize was the mantra political leaders and many pundits embraced over the last 20-plus years, and we've seen just how well that's all been working out. Save the return of Jesus as a business and marketing undergrad or colonialization by an alien master race, in a post-global warming world, infrastructure, infrastructure, and infrastructure will probably the tune we dance to. Too big to fail enterprises - like American Ag - will need serious government intervention. Perhaps the era of big government - well, maybe a big government less concerned with bombing places overseas - isn't over after all...
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