Ag Testament

As we move into our Schematic Design Phase of the smartFARM project, we will be challenged to determine what technologies we embrace and to what scale do we choose to deploy them.  In our recent classes we have been challenged with this topic and so we are posting the following piece as a means of initiating discussion.

Please read and post your thoughts as comments.  If you have a differing viewpoint, feel free to devise an entirely new post as counter-point.

Enjoy!

This posting is in regards to the discussion we started in class on 10-26.  Those of us in the farm sector expressed some concerns about how we might be directing the resources that seem to be coming our way in this project. I think  the process was respectful and open, but there is still a bit of mystery about what we were on about.  I hope the following thoughts might provide a framework for understanding the concerns the Farm People tried to express.

First, I want to reiterate that I am not against technology, nor against accepting grants or funding for this project.  My concern, and I will speak for myself here, is that our project does not repeat the decades of previous attempts to “fix” the farm problem by creating more incentives for the large to outcompete the small.  Since the time of FDR, the direction farm policy has taken is to weed out the “inefficient” producers, and to favor large over small operations.  Thus, we subsidize only commodities that are most efficiently grown on a large scale (wheat, potatoes, soybeans, corn, and cotton) but not fruits and veg.  We direct research money disproportionately to make those commodities ever higher yielding, while largely ignoring the needs of small farms.  When Ag secretary Earl Butts said “get big or get out,” he really was summarizing three generations of Federal policy.  As a result, we have eroded our supply of skilled small farmers faster than our topsoil.

But while it is true that half of our food comes from only 10% of the farms, it is also true that the other half comes from the smaller, but far more numerous, 90% of growers.  Both are equally important: why do resources automatically flow to the overprivalaged?  

I think this issue is not just present in Ag.  I remember the Savings and Loan crisis during the first Bush Administration, and have followed the current crisis in the financial sector.  It seems clear that we have a system generally in our country which favors a certain scale of operation which is “too big to be allowed to fail.” Other sectors become too small to care about. Thus profit is held privately, but risk is public.  Or, as one of my friends put it, we have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.

So as we design the smart farm, I really want us to consider the scalability of what we do.  Some technology scales both up and down: methane generators, one of the concepts I want to pursue for this unit, have been very popular in developing countries, where a salvaged oil drum, an inner tube and few cheap plumbing parts can make a digester that can allow a family to cook with gas.  The same technology can be used on a huge scale to handle manure lagoons from feedlots or municipal sewage.

Other forms of technology only scale in one direction.  The electric tractor is great for a four acre farm, but it could not, at this time, scale up to the needs of a farmer who uses a 450 HP quad track to pull his air seeder.  On the other hand, precision Ag scales up much better than down.  (I am a supporter of precision Ag, as it reduces waste in farm chemicals and provides both economic and environmental benefits.)

So in the interest of social justice, I would like our designs to be compatible with scaling down, or scaling up and down, but not just appropriate for scaling up.  The big operators already have so many advantages; we don’t need to continue to unbalance the already tilted playing field.  If you can show me that a four acre farm can benefit from sensor technology, then I’m all for it.  If it looks like you would need 10,000 acres to justify the technology, I will question it’s appropriateness for this project.

One of the really hopeful things I took from yesterdays’ discussion was the notion that policy itself could be a part of our design process.  I confess that I was thinking inside the box on that one.  I think policy affects all four aspects our design, and could use some review.  For Food, why do we subsidize what we grow, rather than how we grow it?  If we stopped subsidizing five commodities and started subsidizing carbon sequestration practices, it would be a truly radical change.  For Energy, why is it that a really large investment in a wind farm can be enormously profitable, but a small, back yard wind turbine can only reverse the residential meter to zero before any surplus energy is gifted to the utility?  Again, the rules are different for the large and the small.  For Water, we could look at the arcane ways in which water rights are handled.  For Structure, we could examine how to discourage development of Ag land, and encourage the reclamation of dead zones in urban areas, or of rural communities in danger of becoming ghost towns.

There are many who bemoan the passing of the small family farm, the Jeffersonian ideal of the independent yeoman and his family as the backbone of the new democracy.  I am not arguing for the preservation of this way of life out of pure nostalgia, but out of a sense of environmental fitness.  The industrial model of agriculture has given us a huge surplus in production, one that has allowed our species to exceed the carrying capacity of our environment, at least for a while.  The unforeseen consequences of the green revolution are becoming more visible, and more troubling.  The industrial model needs to be questioned, and the assumption that the only value to assign to farming is efficiency needs to be challenged.  Sustainability will require ecological values, such as diversity over monocropping, nutrient cycling rather than synthetic inputs, and a deep involvement of the farmer on many levels of biological as well as financial management.  It will take more boots on the ground, more eyes on the dirt, than we have now.  What we do in this class may make some difference in this process, and it needs radical change.   It is to my mind important that we consider the scalability of our designs to determine if we are helping to preserve and diversify the 90%, or merely continuing to support the operations which are approaching the “too big to fail”  end of the spectrum.

Eric Wegner

Comments

[Jessica]

Eric, this is really well written and hits on many points that have not been thoroughly discussed or thought through in class. I agree that scalability is one of the concerns that should be at the forefront of our design considerations. Hopefully throughout the design process we can come back again and again to this notion to make sure we are not losing sight of our target. On some levels though (and I think you start to touch on this), some of the technologies we are proposing may traditionally be geared toward the large farms, but are being reworked to be useful on the small farm. I don't think that we are set on implementing any one thing right now, but just exploring the possibility that technology can be used efficiently at a small scale.
The social justice issues you bring up are very pertinent as well. It seems wrong to have small farms at such a disadvantage. Maybe our goal should be to provide equality among the different sizes of farms since they are all equally important for our sources of food. I wouldn't rule out technologies that can be scaled up though, as long as they are also capable of scaling down--I'm glad you also feel the same.
Policy may become very important in determining which technologies will be appropriate for this project. The examples you brought up are really great in that they point out what seems to be a simple and obvious inequality. It got me thinking that there are probably two main things that affect scalability: capital and policy. It seems that those two things are the only things getting in the way of making certain technologies feasible at the small scale. If we could target policy changes, maybe we could also affect the range of scale for technology. And if by creating demand for technologies that are currently very expensive, maybe we can affect the future price and accessibility.
Great thoughts and very helpful!

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