First, has the decline in funding and the shift toward a breakthrough science model left us adequately prepared to solve the problems with our national and global food system? And second, would simply bolstering, as opposed to also broadening, our current system of agricultural research be an adequate response?
Us, in this case, being the US.
Paul B. Thompson, the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University, had a great post in the run-up to Thanksgiving that I missed last week. He points out that Americans have been “disinvesting” in agricultural research and development over the past three decades, and that what investment there was has been “too narrowly focused on piecemeal adjustments in plant and animal genetics”.
Thompson then gives a run-down on the history of agricultural research in the US, and how it changed, especially in the wake of the Pound report in 1975. And despite the efforts of farm lobby groups, who fought to preserve the old system of land-grant universities and research, agricultural research and the ways it was funded altered in fundamental ways. Why? As Thompson notes of the USDA’s effective approach to solving farmers’ problems,
Despite its utility, however, this was not especially sexy science.
The analysis goes on to look at the rise in popularity of alternative “low-input methods such as organic, no-till, and poly-crop” approaches to farming, and at how, and why, these approaches have been so ill-served by research and research funding. What I find so remarkable is that Thompson’s detailed look at the USDA finds a mirror in research for poorer countries. Here’s what he has to say:
There is debate about these alternative approaches here in the United States, but there is really no debating the fact that poor farmers around the world could imitate many of [these] farming practices, given some adaptive research that tailors them to local soils and climate. In contrast, the more industrial approach requires two things that poor farmers lack. One is the infrastructure of local seed, fertilizer, and chemical companies, along with an effective regulatory system to monitor the impact of high-tech farming. The other is the money to buy these inputs from the private sector, even when they are available.
There is much more that repays a close reading; for example:
[T]he organic farming community’s attraction to vitalistic metaphors and unsubstantiated health-claims alienated many scientists whose careers depended upon pursuing a research program that could pass the laugh test. … [R]esearch focused on genomics and genetic engineering was much more promising to a budding scientist than the iffy strategy of partnering with the organic growers.
Lets forget about organic, for now, and the laugh test as a measure of scientific value, and see US scientists renew the old-fashioned approach to food and nutrition security, because clearly where US agriculture leads, the rest of the world follows.
Not sure I buy into Thompson’s account. He seems to imply that the biotech route to success has failed in the USA. But it has not – just look at the percentage of GM soyabean, maize and cotton the US now produces and exports. Indeed, the major threat to US agricultural exports is this model spreading to other countries – and Thompson seems to be trying to kick this possibility into the long grass.
Thompson’s alternative to biotech is that developing countries should adopt the Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farms model: “there is really no debating the fact that poor farmers around the world could imitate many of Salatin’s farming practices, given some adaptive research that tailors them to local soils and climate.”
This is bizarre: the Polyface model is closely based on what Third World farmers are already doing. Just read “Farmers of Forty Centuries”, or “The African Husbandman”. or “Agriculture in the Sudan” or lots more. These farmers got there long before Polyface and now need new technology and new seed, rather than “Do as we do” recommendations from US academics.
If the biotech route is not affordable by farmers in developing countries (who need better markets to cover higher input costs) then what is wrong with the “old” USDA model of massive crop introduction direct to farmers. Thompson says that the USDA in its early days “produced hundreds of plant varieties specifically tailored to local growing conditions around the United States”. Perhaps (eventually) so, but the main driver was the PI system of varietal introduction. Over many decades this scattered thousands of varieties of hundreds of crops around the US until matches were found by farmers between a variety and the appropriate growing conditions. Thus the crops and varieties were not “specifically tailored” but specifically pre-adapted to growing conditions. A notable example for Canada was “Red Fife” wheat which transformed production. This variety had wandered the world and eventually found its way to Ontario where it was pre-adapted (and not in any way “tailored”) but vastly successful. And, of course, nobody messed around trying to “tailor” wine grape varieties: they stayed genetically the same until the appropriate growing conditions were found – notably in California.
The USDA “scatter-gun” – and massively successful – approach to crop introduction is now never tried in developing countries. Introduction is numerically limited, passes into institutes rather than direct to farmers, and is subject to filtering on research stations and then perhaps to breeding. Yet massive introduction could be far more useful to developing countries that the “carrying coals to Newcastle” recommendation to emulate the Polyface Farm model.
With an ever increasing number of people living in sprawling cities, in my view, the toughest question for agriculture is how to get the nutrients, partcicularly, P and K, back to the farmers?
In China this is a problem that was solved long ago (as described in Farmers for 40 centuries). Heavy metal contamination and the potential spread of human pathogens are significant obstacles to the wider adoption of Chinese recycling practices, but clearly, these are areas where either technical solutions already exist or can be developed with appropriate research inputs. The challenge is one of scale.
“…poor farmers around the world could imitate many of [these] farming practices…”? Surely they already use them!
P.S. Sorry, didn’t mean to call you Shirley. RIP Leslie Nielsen.