Ross: Bring on the farming revolution

We assume giant farms are more efficient than smaller ones, but it turns out that might not be the case. In fact, David Montgomery, who teaches Geomorphology at the University of Washington, argues in the book “Growing a Revolution: Bringing our soil back to life,” that the key to solving world hunger isn’t in GMO’s: It’s in the soil.

“Most people don’t tend to think about soil,” he said. “We take it for granted; it’s what we walk around on, maybe we dig in it. It’s outside of cities. Yet it’s the foundation for civilization.”

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Montgomery writes that, according to a 1992 agricultural census, small diversified farms produce more than twice as much food per acre than large farms do. Even though that sounds absolutely backward.

“Large farms can actually be really efficient at growing particular crops, but if you’re really worried about the total amount of food that’s produced per acre, which is the right number to think about for feeding the world, small farms are actually much more efficient,” he said.

So why do we have such big farms? In the US, about 1 percent of the population feeds the rest of us, allowing us to do all the other things we’d like to do, Montgomery says. Big farms allow a small number of people to feed a lot of us.

But when you look at the results, the best possible methods on an organic farm would out-produce a chemically enhanced farm.

“And you could do it for longer; you could sustain it,” Montgomery said.

This is what drives me nuts, and is why Howard Buffett, one of Warren’s sons, has embarked on a crusade to take the subsidies out of farming. If what Montgomery says is true, the environmentally responsible thing to do is also the most profitable thing to do. Yet we still aren’t doing it.

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So why do we still subsidize large farms? Well, Montgomery says historically it has been the working American farmers who have been squeezed by lobbyists and that a bottom-up revolution may be on the horizon.

“The economics have finally come to the point where it may actually be in a farmer’s short-term best interest to treat the land in a way that’s in society’s long-term best interest,” he said. “And that’s where a geologist like me gets really interested in it because when those things line up, it’s actually setting the stage for a real revolution in agriculture and how we think about things.

“When you think about fuel costs; when you re-think subsidies, it’s often a lot easier and cheaper to work with Mother Nature, rather than to try and row against her current.”

The timing might be really good for this type of thing. We have a president not playing by the old rules and isn’t necessarily beholden to the usual special interests. If he could change the minds on subsidies of the Republicans in some of those farm states — who on the one hand hate welfare, but on the other always vote for agricultural welfare — what would happen?

“The farmers that I interviewed that were in the soil health movement, basically to a person, said that if we simply eliminated agricultural subsidies in the United States, farming would change overnight to adopt more regenerative practices,” he said.

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