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Loss in Number of Farms

A few months ago, the USDA released the results of the 2012 Census of Agriculture.  One of the statistics that seems to have attracted a lot of attention is the finding that there was a 4.3% loss in the number of farms from 2007 to 2012.  More recent discussions have begun to breakdown these numbers by state and even by county within a state.

The loss in the number of farms is seen as a worrying trend my some.  For example, here is North Carolina's agriculture commissioner:

“the loss of 2,700 farms is troubling at a time when worldwide demand for food continues to grow. We also know that North Carolina is gaining about 100,000 people a year, which will only increase the pressure on farmland. We clearly have to step up our conservation efforts. It’s a priority I will work on with the General Assembly this year”

I'm not so sure whether these changes are worrying.  There are some important things to remember in these discussions.

First, the USDA defines a "farm" as any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold.  $1,000 is a very low threshold.  If you sold one cow, you're a farm according to the USDA.  And, what we see is that most of the "lost farms" are those in this very small category.  For example, using the Census data, here is the breakdown of the number of farms in 2007 and 2012 by dollar sales.

The vast majority of the lost "farms", both in absolute and percentage terms, had less than $2,500 in annual sales.  I know many of us have a soft spot for "small farmers", but I would guess there are very few people selling less than $2,500 in agricultural output who are relying on those sales as a main source of income.  Indeed, according to the USDA-ERS, the average off-farm income (see figure 4) of farms with sales less than $1,000 was between $70,000 and $80,000, and most in this category (87.7%) are farming at a loss (i.e., they're paying to farm; the farm loss is a write-off against non-farm income gains). I conjecture that some of the loss of farms in the low sales category might be explained by better off-farm job and income prospects in 2012 than what existed in 2007.

As the table above also shows, there were more farms in the highest sales category.  Much of this likely reflects the fact that many of the farms that, in 2007, were in a lower sales category, were, in 2012, selling more than $500,000 because commodity prices were much higher.  That is, farms didn't get bigger per se, it is simply that the value of the output they were selling rose.  Farms were simply moving up the distribution of sales classification categories.  There are, of course, also changes as a result of an older farm population (which also mirrors an older US population) with people retiring out of agriculture resulting in some farms consolidating.

If the concern about the drop in farm numbers food security (i.e., will we have enough food to eat?), the above table also suggests little cause for alarm.  The data shows that larger farms (those that experienced an increase from 2007 to 2012) account for the vast majority of agricultural output.  In 2006, only 3.9% of farms have more than $500,000 in sales.  But, they accounted for 62.5% of agricultural output value.  A drop in the number of farms does not necessarily imply a drop in the amount of food produced.

Finally, one shouldn't just focus on the "number of farms" but the financial viability of farms.  When we look at profitability of farms, what we see from the Ag Census data is that there was an enormous increases in the value of products sold by farms from 2007 to 2012.  In fact, net farm income was up almost 24% from 2007 to 2012.

All in all, I see little cause for alarm from the Ag Census numbers on the recent change in number of farms.

 

Geneticists on GMO wheat

I previously noted some skepticism about GMO wheat by a prominent wheat geneticist.  Thus, I was interested to see this piece in The Scientist that included several interesting observations from other wheat geneticists.  

One of the the things that the story makes clear is that many traits of interest (in this particular story, the trait happens to be resistance to stem rust - a disease that can result in significant yield loss) can often be eventually achieved through traditional breeding or through newer "non GMO" molecular techniques including cloning and cisgenic technology (like transgenic technologies but involves moving genes within a species). The main problem with developing rust-resistant varieties using traditional breeding techniques is lost time:

But using traditional breeding strategies to pyramid resistance genes is time-consuming. In a typical wheat-breeding program, “from the first cross to the release of a variety, it’s about eight to nine years,” says James Anderson, the head of the wheat-breeding program at the University of Minnesota. And that’s just to develop a strain that carries one gene of interest. To stack three, four, or even five rust-resistance genes can add several more years to that time line. At CIMMYT, Singh and his colleagues have been working for nearly a decade to breed varieties that have multiple adult resistance genes. 

So, why not use biotechnology?  The main barrier to the use of technologies that happen to fall under the "GMO" umbrella isn't necessarily technological know-how but potential public opposition and regulatory costs - something I mentioned in my previous post:

One of the huge costs is that related to regulatory burden associated with creating and commercializing seeds made with GM technologies relative to other breeding technologies.  That sounds to me like good motivation to work on attempts to bring down the regulatory costs associated with genetic engineering.  It also suggests a need to work on public opposition with scientific communication on the health and environmental aspects of genetic engineering.  It also makes me wonder if activist pressures might eventually bring molecular breeding techniques under a similar regulatory umbrella that now drives up the cost of commercializing GM.

Here are a couple choice quotes from the article that highlight the regulatory costs

One way to hasten the development of a long-lasting stem rust–resistant wheat variety is to engineer plants’ DNA to carry resistance genes, creating what are known as genetically modified (GM) crops. But at many of the facilities that develop wheat varieties—primarily led by academic breeding groups, in contrast to the commercial domination of corn and soybean development—such transgenic approaches are taboo, as public opposition, regulatory expenses, and genetic complexity have kept wheat transgenics off the market. “We could do millions of things [with transgenics],” says Jorge Dubcovsky, a wheat geneticist and breeder at the University of California, Davis, “but we have our hands tied.”

and

But the prospect of GM wheat faces additional hurdles. Because the crop is regionally idiosyncratic—farmers in South Dakota use different varieties than those in Washington or Kansas, for instance—it is not possible to develop a single blockbuster variety that can be sold across the country. As a result, unlike corn and soybeans, which are primarily sold by agribusiness corporations, new wheat varieties for local farmers have primarily come from academic breeders, and universities can rarely afford the expense of regulatory review by the multiple government agencies that approve GM crops. “In the public sector, we cannot release transgenics because we cannot afford the regulatory costs,” says Dubcovsky.

The last quote highlights two important issues.  One is the interesting political economy created by the localized nature wheat breeding.  Many new wheat varieties have historically been released by public Land-Grant Universities, and producers in the respective states have, in some cases, come to expect such new varieties to be free (or at least inexpensive) based on the premise that they were developed using taxpayer dollars.  Wheat producers in many states, presumably, don't want to have to buy seed from large agro-chemical companies, and that can create barriers to Universities partnering with such companies to commercialize traits.  That leads to the second issue highlighted in the quote, which is the fact that many universities don't have the resources or the regulatory know-how to attain approval and commercialize a new variety.  Almost paradoxically, those who have been calling for increased regulatory burden for GMOs have handed large agro-chemical companies a ticket to increased market power.  

Here's what I had to say about that in the Food Police

 But, who benefits from stricter regulations that make it harder to enter the market for biotech seeds?  It certainly isn’t the small start-up firms [or universities] trying to break down entry barriers to get their new invention on the market.  Rather, it’s the establish behemoths who have teams of lawyers and lobbyists who can absorb the regulatory costs that keep out their smaller competitors. Adding regulatory hurdles hasn’t dampened Monsanto’s market power, it has enhanced it. 

They key isn't to try to keep large agribusinesses out of the seed and biotech market, but rather to make sure that the barriers to entry are low enough that anybody can compete with them.

 

 

Critique of modern agriculture in song

One of our gradudate students sent me a link to this music video performed by a band, Wookiefoot, he recently saw in concert.

If you couldn't follow along, here's a sample of some of the lyrics

Then McDonalds got a farm GM GM GMO
And on that farm he had a chicken and a cow
But they do now you really don’t wanna know
Why must we label it organic
When that’s the way we’ve been growing it for ten thousand years

I don't suppose it would do any good to mention what organic really means or to show what agriculture really looked like 10,000 years ago?  

Last Week

Last week I failed to offer up any new blog posts, but the following picture should provide ample explanation.

My family and I had the pleasure of visiting Kauai and I found it a bit ironic that just a few miles down from the large facilities of Dow Agrosciences and of Dupont-Pioneer, many local cars possessed bumper stickers like the following: