HOMEGROWN Life: HOMEGROWN Life: A Word on Efficiency (and Productivity and Sustainability)

But
I’ve had a pretty different life than most of my friends, family, and
neighbors out here on the Osage Plains. I’ve dabbled in poetry. I found a
wife all the way over on Missouri’s East Coast (that’s St. Louis). I’ve
eaten raw oysters right out of the Puget Sound and the Chesapeake Bay.
Heck, once I even joined with several hundred people protesting on Karl
Rove’s lawn on a sunny Sunday afternoon for blocking the DREAM Act that
would have protected immigrant children from getting deported when they
turn 18 years old.

For several years I worked as a community
organizer, trying to help stop industrial livestock facilities from
further encroaching in rural Missouri. (Note: Farm Aid
was a key partner in helping to support this organizing effort by
funding great organizations like the Missouri Rural Crisis Center.) It
was challenging and fulfilling work that involved equal parts
politicking, translation of confusing legalese into legislative
language, and haranguing people to hold their public officials
accountable. There were wins and losses in this struggle. And today, the
battle for the future of agriculture rages on.

In reflecting on
these experiences and my return to living and working on the family farm
where I grew up, I am haunted by the concepts of efficiency, of
productivity, of sustainability. Industrial agriculture would have you
believe that “modern agriculture,” as they call it, is the only way to
feed the world. In this circle, genetically modifying seeds, driving
gigantic machines from satellite-positioning systems, and producing
fossil-fuel-based chemicals are thought to be the most efficient
practices. In this circle, housing livestock in giant indoor factories
or crowded feedlots is the only way to be a productive member of the
modern livestock-producing class. I can’t count the number of times I’ve
heard politicians parrot the line, “America’s farmers are the best and
most efficient in the world,” in an attempt to claim their undying
allegiance to those of us in the food-producing regions.

But in this era of post-truth politics (coined by the great blogger David Roberts
over at Grist), it’s easy to cherry pick data and come to whatever
conclusion you desire. If you don’t take into account local pollution
and rural depopulation, perhaps industrial crop production has some
merit. If you don’t have to see it or smell it or pray about it, perhaps
industrial livestock production is “a reasonable response to increasing
consumer demand for protein in the developing world.” If you don’t have
concerns about the social costs of increased concentration of wealth
and land resources, the trend toward smaller numbers of people managing
more acres per farm probably seems trivial. If you’re a row crop farmer
who inherits lots of land and equipment, it’s probably easy to assume
that anyone can get a loan for their farming operation and that
capital-intensive agriculture is the only way to go.

There are
lots of us out here in farm country who are living a different
narrative. We are re-creating productive soils with compost and organic
soil amendments. We are using low-cost and high-labor practices to try
and produce real food for people instead of feeding an industrial
ingredient machine of fat and sugar and carbohydrates. We are many,
although our voice within agriculture circles is minimal at times. We
don’t have the money to be hiring lobbyists or propping up
professionally staffed organizations (a la the Farm Bureau, National
Cattlemen’s Beef Association, National Corn Growers Association) that
constantly promote our message. We define efficiency very differently,
as a measure of maximizing production with whatever you have in a way
that enhances the long-term productivity of the land.

So
enough with the chip-on-the-shoulder rant. Here’s the rub. Here’s the
reason I even wanted to write down this rambling mess. I can’t
truthfully give you the metrics of the tale I’m trying to tell. I’m a
data-driven guy who can’t give you the numbers. The scientific consensus
is still out. Is it really more efficient for me to shovel goat manure,
let it age, plant some lettuce in it, and truck it to local consumers?
Or is it more efficient for Missourians to keep buying lettuce from
California that was picked by migrant workers in unsafe conditions who
were likely paid poorly, and with said lettuce robbing the withering
Colorado River of its flow? There are people who try to figure these
things out, but a lot of it centers on the pivot of what one means by
efficiency and productivity and measurement.

One thing I know for
sure is that many in the local farm and food scene are working through
the same issue. We are numbers people in search of numbers. We aren’t
crazy unscientific loons like our industrial brothers and sisters think
we are. We’re not trying to “take agriculture back to some romantic
golden age.” Instead, we understand biology, biodiversity, and ecology.
We are concerned about humans as a keystone species dependent upon a
fragile food chain in a living world. We embrace technology. We live in
the modern world. We take our periodic table of elements very seriously.
And for these reasons, plus the grand questions about ethics and
morality that are best discussed over campfires and beers, we look
forward to expanding the conversation in the years and decades and
centuries to come. Because there might be answers out there somewhere.
And where there are answers, there are sure to be more questions.

Bryce
Oates is a farmer, father, writer and rural economic development
entrepreneur. He works with his family to raise organic vegetables,
beef, lamb, chickens, goats and manage the bottomland forest woodlot in
Western Missouri. He has helped to launch numerous social enterprises
including a sustainable wood processing cooperative, a dairy goat cheese
processing facility and a conservation-based land management company
that incentivizes carbon sequestration in forests and grasslands. Bryce
currently co-owns the Root Cellar Grocery in Downtown Columbia,
Missouri, where the local food store operates a weekly produce
subscription program, the Missouri Bounty Box. Bryce, along with 135 other farmers, sells his produce through this program.