Farm Policy Needs Long View

Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, leading lights of the sustainable food movement, wrote an op-ed the other day, hoping to inspire A 50 Year Farm Bill. They discuss the shameful waste and abuse of our soil's health, and sum up the urgency this way ...

... For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations. ...

Their suggested solution lies partly in efforts, already underway, to breed perennial grain crops through traditional plant breeding. Perennial crops, because they don't have to be replanted every year, leave the soil covered the majority of the time. Turning more land to grazing pasture and more diverse crop rotations would also help, but the principle remains - we can't let our soil continue to wash and blow away because we simply can't replace it.

Not that you have to take my word for it. A 2006 Cornell study of erosion worldwide indicated that the United States is losing topsoil 10 times faster than it can be replaced naturally, and that the world is losing 37,000 square miles of cropland to erosion every year. That's a lot of soil loss to make up for even if we were trying, which we aren't.

Shorter soil situation: More people + less crop land = bad, bad news.

"Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught, only then will you discover you cannot eat money" - Cree proverb

(Photo credit: Flat6 on Flickr)