Get in My Belly!

America’s agricultural machine is as efficient as it may be cruel. In 1966, the average American family spent 18% of their gross income on food; today, that number is just 10%. We love meat and cheap food. Gorge on it. Animals may be fattened in confined pens for efficiency (called “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFO for short) – immobilized cruelty living in their own squalor – but boy do we eat inexpensively. Beef. Chicken. Pork. Yum! The fuel for this incredible growth? Corn. Tons of it. Subsidized corn ($50 billion in federal monies over the last decade). Water-resources-sucking corn.

Up from 4 billion bushels in 1970 to a staggering 14 billion today. 153 bushels an acre (from 118 bushels in 1990). 10 million tons of fertilizer (out of 23 million tons for all crops). The Midwest is drowning in it… and as rain washes all that fertilizer off the land and down finally into the Gulf of Mexico, there is a 6,000 square mile “dead zone” with almost no oxygen and no sea life. This kills off the “it’s healthier protein” sea life that might otherwise feed us.

The cheapest calories aren’t necessarily good for you. The August 31^st Time points out that $1 will buy 1,200 calories of potato chips, 875 calories of soda, but merely 250 of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit. Our efficiency produces increasing calories with less money. And we wonder why Americans are getting heavier.

With animals shoved into close proximity, we anticipate the spread of disease and add antibiotics to the feed mixes (70% of our antimicrobials are used on farm animals). This creates new antibiotic-resistant diseases that add new threats to our environment. And some of those diseases find their way directly to us. So we fat, sick, and get even sicker with cancer, heart attacks…. Maybe my blogging about our future shouldn’t really be my concern.

Want more stuff to float off into our ecosystem? Pig farms are great. A pig will produce four times the waste, pound for pound, than a person. And that waste has a nasty (and I do mean nasty) habit of find its way into local lakes, rivers and streams... which flow… well you get it. In the end, these practices are simply unsustainable.

Time cites a University of Michigan study that notes: “A transition to more sustainable, smaller-scale production methods could even be possible without a loss in overall yield [per acre]…, but it would require far more farmworkers than we have today. With unemployment approaching double digits – and things are especially grim in impoverished rural areas that have seen populations collapse over the past several decades – that’s hardly a bad thing.”

It’s that “organic” vs. “conventional” farming thang. 1% of all cattle are raised the old fashioned way… graze and walk around, move from field to field to let the grasses grow back naturally… and 99% are brought to market through industrial feed lots. Efficiency like this is hard to change. But think about the consequences of growing demand for meat all over the world, and the impact of these industrialized farming techniques on our environment.

You might like this note from the September 10^th Washington Post… on those organic gaucho’s in Argentina: “Cattle once ruled the seemingly endless grasslands here, delivering decades of prosperity for Argentina and producing a brand familiar to the world -- natural, grass-fed beef... But a quiet revolution has arrived on the famously fertile pampa, a swath of plains bigger than Texas… Instead of roaming freely and eating to their hearts' content, a growing number of Argentine cattle are spending a third of their lives in U.S.-style feedlots. There, crammed in muddy corrals, they are pumped with antibiotics and fed mounds of protein-rich grain, which fattens them up fast but hardly conjures up the romantic image of the Argentine cowboy, the iconic gaucho, lassoing cattle on the high plains.” Yee ha! Said the chief financial officer. Bring on dem diseases and dead zones! Yee ha!

Sure, organic produce costs more; it’s more labor intensive and more dependent on nature… at least in hard dollar terms. But in terms of human life expectancy and environmental quality, it just might be the lowest cost approach.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.