Will the Real Farmer Please Stand Up?

Tumbledown was incensed again to read Lew Middleton's comment that "Today's farmers are specialists, not generalists." (The Hoosier Farmer, Fall 2006, p. 1) When Middleton went on to claim that such specialization is "all aimed at creating the safest" and "healthiest" environment for the livestock, Tumbledown nearly let loose an expletive. Specialization is driven by corporate insatiability, by the profit motive. Specialization in livestock farming is not "friendly to the environment." It is the most likely source of the E. coli in our spinach, just ask Michael Pollan. (Op ed in today's NYT Magazine, "The Vegetable-Industrial Complex," joined a growing chorus of people who are refusing to ignore the obvious.) Pollan quotes Wendell Berry's old saw that we have taken nature's elegant solution in which "crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops" and, by becoming specialists in either crop production or animal production (but never proficient in both), we have turned nature's solution into two very real problems: "a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot."

The solution that is eventually proposed for our E. coli problem is not likely to be a real solution (that is, a radical solution, that fixes the root problem of specialization) like nature's solution, but a technological quick fix, like the "high-tech" agriculture touted in the most recent Hoosier Farmer. (The irony is, of course, that the magazine cover sported dairy cows on pasture, not beef cattle and sows in confined operations.) At any rate, Pollan is right, look for the politicos and their trough-filling K-street fat cats to start touting programs to irradiate the entire food supply. Don't look anytime soon for a return to real farms where everyone raises, "some corn, some wheat, some soybeans, a few milk cows, a few pigs, maybe some beef cows. And, of course, a big garden to help feed a growing family." (Hoosier Farmer)

Tumbledown did get a little good news this week in the story about Denise O’Brien, the organic farmer and Democratic candidate to become Iowa's secretary of agriculture. Denise is a real farmer. For Iowa's sake, and for ours, Tumbledown is praying that she wins.