Big agriculture's big lie

A Kansas editor says our assembly-line approach to growing our food is actually contributing to world hunger -- and explains why buying local and buying organic is so important.

By Ira Boudway

Read more: Books, Kansas, Interviews, Authors, Books Interviews

July 15, 2005 | If George Pyle thought at all about farming when he joined a Kansas newspaper 27 years ago, he thought it sounded like a pretty boring beat for a young reporter. Beyond that, he was ready to go along with what most people seemed to believe: Agriculture was destined to become completely industrialized, and farmers should rejoice at being relieved of such humble work. But after joining the editorial staff at the Salina Journal -- where Bob Dole famously referred to him as "that liberal editor from Salina" during the '96 campaign -- Pyle found that to be able to do his job he had to care about farming.

"For a Kansas newspaper editor to have no opinion on farm issues," he writes in the prologue to his new book, "Raising Less Corn, More Hell," "would be akin to a Florida counterpart having no thoughts on Medicare." The more questions he asked, the more he began to doubt the prevailing wisdom among land-grant university professors and agribusiness managers that fewer and fewer farmers ought to be growing more and more food on ever larger plots of land.

In the course of three decades as a newspaper writer, Pyle went from feeling that the "farm beat" was like covering the progress of a glacier to understanding that the real story of agriculture in America is quite dramatic. In Pyle's view, our farming culture is based on one big bad idea and one big fat lie.

"The bad idea," he writes, "is the increasing concentration -- economic, political, and genetic -- of the ways in which our food is produced." The lie behind it is that "the world is either short of food or risks being short of food in the near future." With the help of an editorial writers' fellowship, and later as the director of the Prairie Writers Circle at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, Pyle took time away from his daily deadlines to research a book on the American farm economy.

"Raising Less Corn, More Hell" is dedicated to the memory of his father, who was raised on a Kansas farm, but Pyle is no sentimentalist when it comes to the fate of family farms. What the agricultural economy needs, he argues, is a truly free market -- not one kept afloat by federal subsidies and unaccounted environmental damage. The root cause of hunger, he claims, is usually a lack of money. Yet the fear of not having enough food has driven the rise of chemical fertilizers, massive machinery, genetically modified seed, and whatever else will help squeeze greater yields out of every acre.

Meanwhile, the true costs of the industrial system -- eroded soil and depleted aquifers, polluted water and air, desperate and indebted farmers, rundown main streets, unhealthy diets, and a food supply at risk - are not factored into the price of food.

Even as we push to grow more, the government subsidizes farmers for growing less. The subsidies continually fail to keep up with gains in production, leading to a surplus of food that costs less than it should. This gets shipped abroad and cripples the efforts of third-world countries to develop their own agricultural base. And so the system fails even on its promise to feed the world.

In "Raising Less Corn, More Hell," Pyle has collected the various strands of the long-standing case against industrial agriculture into a compact polemic or -- perhaps more fitting for the work of a practiced editorial writer -- into one long, impassioned Op-Ed. He recently spoke with Salon from his desk at the Salt Lake Tribune.

You mention in your prologue that when you started as a newspaper writer in 1977, you didn't imagine yourself ever writing a book arguing against industrial agriculture. How did you wind up thinking that was what you should write?

Well, I didn't think I'd be writing anything about agriculture. It seemed dull. And the prevailing wisdom at the time was that even farmers thought it was dull and that pushing them out of the business and turning it over to industry was doing them a favor, sparing them the unremitting toil of bumpkins. As a reporter and then later as an editorial writer I tended to accept the idea that this was the way things were going and that there wasn't any point in protesting it. But there were other voices, from farmers and from consumer activists, who were trying to tell me that that wasn't the case, that there were other ways to go and that some decisions that had been made by large agribusinesses and by government were distorting the natural process as opposed to its just being this natural evolution of things.

I think a lot of people might be surprised by the title of your book, by the suggestion that we should be growing less of anything. Could briefly explain why growing less is a good idea?

Most of the problem both for farmers and for people in the world who are hungry or malnourished is not an undersupply but an oversupply that ripples through the economy. Starting in the Depression, the problem was that even dirt-poor, uneducated farmers were producing way more crops than the economy could afford to buy. So the idea was that we would take some land out of production, even destroy crops, and just give farmers money so they can stay in business at least another year. That way they won't just plant and produce as much as they can.

Most farmers can't afford to do what an industry would do in a flooded market -- slow down the production line or lay people off. If you're halfway through the year and it looks like your field of wheat is not going to make much money, but there's a big market for sunflower seeds, it's too late to tear up the wheat and plant sunflower seeds.

Ideally, if you match the supply with the demand, farmers can make a living off the market -- not off the government. But every time you take land out of production, that's accompanied by a new strain of hybrid corn or a new process, so that even though there are fewer acres, there are more crops. Taking land out of production doesn't lower the yields; it also doesn't raise the number of people who are buying.

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