The Future of Farming
Having farmed and run cattle for more than 15 years and participated in the Conservation Reserve Program for 10 years, I found "Protected Land Goes Back to Work as Crop Prices Soar" [April 28-May 5] misleading.
Although some lands put into reserve were fragile, the majority of those I knew about were there because as a nation, we were producing so much that the price was too low to be profitable. As prices on wheat, corn, and other grains move higher, the farmer can better afford to take the risk of planting and cultivating a crop. My observation is that a lot of good farmland is not being cultivated because it's easier to get a government check than to face the adversities of nature and the marketplace.
Gary Boren
Tooele, Utah
Land moving from the conservation Reserve Program to production is probably accurate. We are in a Catch-22 situation. Ethanol production could reduce dependency on oil. Yet the demand for corn means more acres planted, and corn for ethanol means less corn for food. We are already seeing a spike in food prices that will continue. What has been lost is the fact that high-input farming—the use of commercial fertilizers and pesticides—has saved thousands of acres that could go into the conservation program and into habitat. The infatuation with organic farming, if it is on a large scale, will only increase the need to plant more acres. What is undeniable is yields from organic production are lower than high-input farming. Where would the additional acres come from? Conservation acres and habitat. Farmers employing high-input-farming practices have done more for land conservation than any other conservation program.
John Wolford
Tallahassee, Fla.
In the future, if land is taken out of the CRP to grow switch grass for cellulosic ethanol feedstock, then the farmer could increase his per-acre profit while increasing the number of farm jobs. The biofuel produced from the switch grass then could displace fossil petroleum fuel, while keeping all the profits from biofuel production in the United States. All of this is in addition to reduction of the expense to the government of supporting the crp. How can a process that reduces governmental costs, recycles carbon dioxide, and increases domestic jobs be bad for us?
Paul Heaney
Honeoye Falls, N.Y.
Tools: 
Share
|
| Comments (1) | Print
Reader Comments
Organic Farming vs. Business as Ususal
Letter of May 15th:
Land moving from the conservation Reserve Program to production is probably accurate. We are in a Catch-22 situation. Ethanol production could reduce dependency on oil. Yet the demand for corn means more acres planted, and corn for ethanol means less corn for food. We are already seeing a spike in food prices that will continue. What has been lost is the fact that high-input farming—the use of commercial fertilizers and pesticides—has saved thousands of acres that could go into the conservation program and into habitat. The infatuation with organic farming, if it is on a large scale, will only increase the need to plant more acres. What is undeniable is yields from organic production are lower than high-input farming. Where would the additional acres come from? Conservation acres and habitat. Farmers employing high-input-farming practices have done more for land conservation than any other conservation program.
John Wolford
Tallahassee, Fla.
Sir/Madam;
In response to John Wolford’s letter:
THE MYTH:
Industrial agriculture is efficient.
THE TRUTH:
Small farms produce more agricultural output per unit area than large farms. Moreover, larger, less diverse farms require far more mechanical and chemical inputs. These ever increasing inputs are devastating to the environment and make these farms far less efficient than smaller, more sustainable farms.
Once the flawed yield measurement system is discarded, the “bigger is better” myth is shattered. As summarized by the food policy expert Peter Rosset, “Surveying the data, we indeed find that small farms almost always produce far more agricultural output per unit area than larger farms. This is now widely recognized by agricultural economists across the political spectrum, as the inverse relationship between farm size and output.” He notes that even the World Bank now advocates redistributing land to small farmers in the third world as a step toward increasing overall agricultural productivity.
Government studies underscore this “inverse relationship.” According to a 1992 U.S. Agricultural Census report, relatively smaller farm sizes are 2 to 10 times more productive per unit acre than larger ones. The smallest farms surveyed in the study, those of 27 acres or less, are more than ten times as productive (in dollar output per acre) than large farms (6,000 acres or more), and extremely small farms (4 acres or less) can be over a hundred times as productive.
Small is Beautiful. Go there.
Add your thoughts
Your comment will be posted immediately, unless it is spam or contains profanity. For more information, please see our Comments FAQ.advertisement
