Wendell Berry - a Prophet?

Wendell Berry was recently featured on Bill Moyer's public television show.  Berry, for those who don't know, is a farmer and a long time critic of modern production agriculture.  He is something of a hero in the "food movement."  Indeed, Moyer's show is titled "Wendell Berry: Poet & Prophet".

There is much that could be said about Berry's views (the show is embedded below).  Berry seems like a nice grandfatherly sort of guy who would be fun to hang out with.  But, I think some of his views and prescriptions for the future are misplaced.  I'll pick just two examples.

First, Berry wants us - as a nation - to get back to the farm and to "resettle" America.  Here are a few back-and forths:

BILL MOYERS: When you and I were born in 1934 there were almost seven million family farms in this country. There are now roughly around two million family farms and most of us are further away from the foundations of nature than we’ve ever been.

WENDELL BERRY: Well, there’s another tough problem. And so you have to look ahead a little bit. I don't like to talk about the future very much because it doesn’t exist, and we don’t know anything about it. But one thing we know right now is that people want to be healthy and to be healthy you have to have a diverse diet and diverse agriculture employs a lot more people than monoculture. So you imagine people moving out into the landscape because it will pay them to do it. It’ll be what we now vulgarly call job creation.

. . .

BILL MOYERS: Resettling of America means….?

WENDELL BERRY: It means putting people on the land enough people on the land to take proper care of it and pay them decently for doing it. The fact that we and our families know the history of people having to leave the country because they couldn’t make a living there, is the history of rural America. But that they left because they couldn’t make a living is an indictment of our land policies. The idea that you have to go somewhere else, that you have to leave a fertile country in order to make a living is preposterous and it’s a result of the wrong idea of what we mean by making a living in the first place. To make a living is not to make a killing, it’s to have enough.

So, people left the countryside because of bad "land policies", and we should now "resettle" America and somehow pay people to do the resettling??

Putting aside the fact that most of the productive farm land in the US is already privately owned (the US government owns huge swaths of land in the West that it leases for grazing) by someone (most of them family farms if you look at the USDA data), and that farmers have been relatively profitable in the past decade, I think this take is a bad reading on history.  

People left the countryside because they found more profitable opportunities in town, and this transition is largely a positive development.  Technological development, to be sure, played a big role in the reduction of labor in agriculture, but so too did new opportunities off the farm.

The Harvard economics professor, Edward Glaeser, has written a book about the benefits of cities, cultural, economic, environmental, and otherwise, and he argues that the government has actually unduly subsidized rural (or suburban) living relative to city living.  

Take a look at a country like China.  As that country develops, hordes of citizens are trying to get out of the countryside and find factory jobs in town.  One of the biggest problems for the Chinese government's restrictive migration policies is keeping those people on the farms (or in trying to "manage" the transition).    

So, it can't be "our" land policies - because the rural to urban migration has happened in virtually every developed country, and it is unclear to me why or how we'd want to pay people to move back out to rural America.  

All this is coming from a guy who grew up in a town of 300 people, and who had to drive 15-20 miles to get to a grocery store.  There are some joys of small-town rural living, but I hardly think it is something many (perhaps most) Americans would enjoy.  By all means, if people want to move out and run farm, go for it!  But, why should taxpayers subsidize this activity?

A second, smaller observataion. 

Berry makes a big deal about "monoculture" and the value of diversity of diet:

WENDELL BERRY: But one thing we know right now is that people want to be healthy and to be healthy you have to have a diverse diet and diverse agriculture employs a lot more people than monoculture. 

But, there has never been a time in world history when citizens have had access to a more diverse diet than we do now.  Here is how I put it in the Food Police:

A person who restricts their diet to only those things grown locally is one restricting diversity in their diet – especially in the winter.  Walk in almost any supermarket in almost any town in America almost any time of year, and the diversity and abundance of fruits and vegetables is absolutely astounding.  Vidalia onions from Georgia, oranges from Florida, Californian lettuce, sweet corn from Iowa, mangos, bananas, and jalapenos from south of the border.   If you live in the right location, you might have access to such a cornucopia a few weeks or months out of the year but Wal-Mart offers it to us every day.  Fifty to a hundred years ago, the available transportation and storage technologies required people to eat a lot more local food.  Yet, despite weighting a bit less, people weren’t healthier then.  One reason, among many, is that our great grandparents lacked the diversity of diets that we enjoy by eating food from places that come from beyond our backyard. 

Assorted Links

How credible are the studies "showing" red meat consumption causes early death?

Do the obese impose costs on others?  Not according to this study "I find that obese people pay for all of their own increased health costs in the form of lower wages, rather than passing them on to employers, insurers, and co-workers.."

 People don't really like to eat "light food" - they only like to tell you they do

Congress worried about who receives farm subsidies

Farmer's Market Malfeasance

There is a lot of romanticism associated with local food, and farmers markets are often promoted as a may to promote trust in the food system.  I cautioned against some of these sentiments in chapter 9 of the Food Police:

As far as the environment goes, it is important to also recognize that “buy local” is a cause not a certifiable production practice. Some local producers use organic and low-tillage production methods, but many do not. At least with organic, there is a certifying body that requires adherence to certain standards to attain the label. There is no standardization with local. Some locavores think that’s a good thing. But, one consequence is that you can never really be sure (even if you ask) whether a local tomato was grown with more or less pesticides or in a way that causes more or less soil erosion than the one traveling cross-country.

 Now comes this story from a Southern California NBC affiliate.  

There are now more than 300 farmers markets in the LA area, with more opening every month. But an NBCLA undercover investigation has revealed that some farmers at these markets are making false claims and flat-out lies about the produce they're selling.

and

We found farms full of weeds, or dry dirt, instead of rows of the vegetables that were being sold at the markets. In fact, farmers markets are closely regulated by state law. Farmers who sell at these markets are supposed to sell produce they've grown themselves, and they can't make false claims about their produce.

We did find plenty of vendors doing just that, like Underwood Farms, which sells produce at 14 markets, all grown on a family farm in Moorpark.

But our investigation also uncovered vendors who are selling stuff they didn't grow, like Frutos Farms, which sells at seven different farmers markets in LA and Orange counties.

And as for trustworthiness:  

And during our investigation, NBCLA examined another big claim made at farmers markets -- that their produce is "pesticide-free."

NBCLA bought one container of strawberries, from five different vendors, at five farmers markets, including a vendor called "The Berry Best," at the Torrance farmers market.

NBCLA's undercover shopper questioned the Berry Best's owner about the strawberries:

"These are pesticide-free?"

Owner Mary Ellen Martinez responded, "Yes, they are."

To see if that's true, we took our five samples to a state-certified lab, and had them tested for pesticides.

Results showed three out of five samples we tested sold berries that did contain pesticides, including the sample from the Berry Best

Just because someone is selling something at the farmer's market doesn't mean they're telling you the truth.

FARE Talk

Last week, I recorded a podcast with Brady Deaton, who is a professor of food, agricultural, and resource economics (FARE) at the University of Guelph in Canada. For the past couple years, Brady has been putting out a series of interesting FARE talks on farm policy and other food and agricultural issues.  You can find he full list of interesting podcasts on his website at Guelph.

You can listen to my talk with Brady at the link above or download the podcast at this link.

Is Farming the Future?

A story from CNBC has been making the rounds indicating that students should "Skip the MBA, get an agricultural degree."  As a professor of agricultural economics I'm predisposed to like this argument.  And, personally, I think most ag econ departments offer solid skills that students just don't get in an MBA. 

That being said, I think there are good reasons to take pause.  This argument is being made by Jim Rogers, an investor and hedge fund owner.  For years, he has been saying things like: 

There’s going to be a huge shift in American society, American culture, in the places where one is going to get rich. The stock brokers are going to be driving taxis. The smart ones will learn to drive tractors so they can work for the smart farmers. The farmers are going to be driving Lamborghinis. I’m telling you. You should start Forbes Farming. 

With a growing world population, and the struggle to continue increases in agricultural productivity, he may be right.  He (probably) has millions betting on this proposition.  But, he may also be wrong, and if history is any guide, he may be very wrong.  

If you think ag is going to be really profitable in the future, buy stock in Monsanto, Bayer, John Deere, Tyson, McDonalds, Brinker, and other food and agribusiness companies.  But my reading of the research suggests that by and large, gains in stocks of agribusiness companies have lagged other industries.  For example, here is a graph of relative returns from an Ag Index developed in this research by agricultural economists, and reported on in this paper (the time period runs from 1970 to 2008) relative to S&P 500.

Investing in ag might be good a diversification strategy, but as strategy to maximize returns, the graph above show it would have been a spectacularly bad bet since the 1970s.  

Here is a different perspective in a paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics by Zapata, Detre, and Hanabuchi, which shows the price ratio of stocks to commodities from 1871 to 2010.  Again, there are periods where commodities would have provided some diversification benefits, but clearly stocks have generally outperformed commodities over this 100 year time period, as the upward trend indicates.  

Just as Malthus under-estimated the potential benefits of agricultural research and technology to keep up with population growth, I think Jim Rogers may be doing the same.