Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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.