Local Economies and Workers

Years ago, independent farms were the backbone of the rural economy, as farmers spent money at local businesses, from the feed store and implement dealer to the coffee shop. As farming has consolidated, with some farms getting much bigger and the rest closing down, the downtown businesses that relied on them have shuttered as well. This trend has been exacerbated by vertical integration of agribusiness, so that one company owns the entire supply chain, rather than supporting many independent businesses. Because sustainable farms are smaller than their consolidated industrial counterparts, they still purchase goods from local vendors, when they can find them.

It is important to note that workers on sustainable farms too often get left out of this equation. For a host of reasons, costs of production are generally higher on these farms than those of large farm operations. They must pass these costs along to the consumer, but there is a limit to what consumers will pay. Even with higher prices, many farms are operating at the narrowest of margins – sometimes the farmers are not even paying themselves a salary. How to pay their workers a living wage is a complicated financial question many sustainable farmers wrestle with.

Industrial operators are not much better in terms of workers, however. These days, industrial operations like a large CAFO or a meat processing plant attempting to open in a rural community will make promises about jobs; the reality rarely lives up to the hype. Jobs at these operations are inevitably low-wage and without benefits or long-term security, and carry high risks of personal injury. Further, the jobs frequently do not even go to community residents, as operators have found that they can pay migrant workers or immigrants far less for the same work. All too often, this ends up with a community bitter about the tax burden from the influx of new residents, the smell or noise from the facility and the broken job promises, and an immigrant labor force who is underpaid and exploited. The only winner is the corporate operator.

Feeding the World

A common argument against sustainable agriculture is that it cannot “feed the world.” However, as noted previously, today’s industrialized agriculture has left one in nine people undernourished worldwide. This is despite the fact that agricultural production today already produces 2,800 daily calories for every person on earth – enough to feed the population of 10 billion we expect by 2050. The fact is that feeding the world is a problem of power, not of calories, and industrial agriculture has concentrated power in an increasingly small number of hands.

Additionally, research has shown that various kinds of sustainable agriculture do achieve yields in the range of those obtained by chemical-dependent methods. Depending on the circumstances and crop, sustainable yields have been shown to be equivalent, slightly greater (particularly in drought conditions, which is increasingly important as the climate changes), or 15 to 20 percent lower than those of chemical agriculture. Given how underfunded the research and development of sustainable agriculture techniques have been, especially in comparison to conventional techniques, the yield differences are relatively small, suggesting that further research investment has the potential to reveal dramatic productivity gains.

Policy to Support Sustainable Agriculture

A different kind of federal agriculture policy could help farmers and taxpayers, and curb many of the worst impacts of industrialization. A policy based on supply management, which creates a grain reserve (a common sense protection against low yield years) and a floor price for farmers, would not incentivize fencerow-to-fencerow planting, making it easier for farmers to take marginal lands (land not worth farming because it would not make enough money) out of production. A 2011 analysis by Dr. Darryl Ray at the University of Tennessee showed that if a farmer-owned reserve had been in place between 1996 and 2010, rather than the patchwork subsidy system, taxpayers would have saved more than $96 billion. The Food from Family Farms Act by the National Family Farm Coalition, is one example of a farm bill proposal to reinstate reserves and fair prices, along with ecologically sustainable planting and a more secure disaster program.

There are also ways to put a price tag on externalities. Costa Rica, a country that relies heavily on ecological tourism, developed a system of payments to landowners for “ecosystem services,” to incentivize them to adopt sustainable land management practices. As a result, forest cover has returned to 50 percent of the country’s land area, up from a low of 20 percent in the 1980s.