Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, New York. This week Mark writes: I'm fresh from reading “The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals,” an article that seems to cry out for response. It appeared in the July 30, 2009 edition of The American, the journal of the American Enterprise Institute. You can read it for yourself on their website. The author, Blake Hurst, is clearly an intelligent, literate guy with good values. He is fed up with being demonized as an “industrial farmer” by what he calls the "agri-intellectuals." He has run out of patience with the people who read books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and then pontificate about the evils they perceive his style of farming perpetrates. And he makes many points that seem supported by strong public policy values. To paraphrase a few: ▪ Life is messy, and does not fall neatly into categories of good and evil. Farming is a particularly messy part of life. He notes, sagely, that “there are environmental and food safety costs to whatever kind of farming we choose.” ▪ Some of the choices farmers make are social. “Organic” farms can be huge and industrial, and may rely on hours of backbreaking, low-paid, stoop labor to achieve less-thorough eradication of pests and fungus than is achieved through mechanically applied pesticides that require little in the way of labor costs. ▪ Others are environmental Hobson’s choices: Use of herbicides allows corn farmers to avoid tilling, which, in turn, preserves topsoil from erosion. Loss of topsoil might be a greater environmental detriment than application of some herbicides. ▪ Modern industrial methods permit family farms to produce a much greater volume of food more cheaply than older methods. ▪ There’s something hypocritical about those of us who embrace the latest technology in every part of our lives (without, I might add, much concern for the energy and other environmental costs of constant connectedness), but want the idealized Farmer Jones to continue to work by 1930’s technology. And there’s something really obnoxious about the sanctimonious tone of some of our fellow pontificators. ▪ And, by the way, manure is an excellent source of nitrogen. The antagonism to its use on the part of dogmatic experts on organic farming leaves the farmer with no reliable substitute in adequate quantity to restore fertility. Hurst’s views about manure are ones we share completely. What better use of animal manure than to compost it and return it as fertilizer to the land from which it came? That’s what we do once it is composted. I found myself troubled, however, by much of the rest of his article. Hurst’s ultimate argument seems to be that whatever, under current circumstances, produces the largest quantity of food most efficiently and profitably is both the rational choice for a farmer (I can’t really argue with that) AND the system we should perpetuate as a matter of government policy. His confidence in the economic common-sense of the petroleum-dependent production of massive quantities of corn, however, presumes a world in which the cost of the petroleum the farmer buys has been artificially depressed by government policy, the value of the corn the farmer sells has been artificially inflated the same way, and we ignore the costs to the public not only of the means of production but also of the end product—a corn-and-corn-syrup-based diet that is destroying the country’s health. Farmers as rational economic actors may indeed have to grow what the market demands with the cheapest inputs possible. But that does not mean we as a country should perpetuate the system of incentives they’re responding to without considering all the external costs. Hurst fears President Obama will heed Michael Pollan’s advice on a macro level about where to steer the agricultural sector. But surely someone has to consider the social costs of what we grow and how we grow it.
Hurst's analysis seems to suffer from two pervasive logical flaws. First, he equates what makes economic sense for farmers with what's good for society as a whole. His argument for spraying pesticides, for example, is that it is less expensive than the cost of having manual laborers remove pests by hand. But he entirely ignores the potential effects of pesticides on the consumer, on the farmer and his family, and on the farm's neighbors. Does it matter, for example, that any children in the vicinity might suffer autism or other developmental disabilities as a result of exposure to spraying, as some recent research has suggested? Second, Hurst seems to assume that more industrial technology is the right answer to every farming dilemma. I found myself particularly bothered by his use of real life, on-the-ground farm anecdotes as supporting evidence. Because they are told from the viewpoint of humane concern for animal welfare and obvious familiarity with animals, the conclusions he draws seem somehow inevitable. But to my mind his conclusions are anything but inevitable. In fact, his arguments rely on precisely the sort of glossing over of uncomfortable facts and the very kind of caricature he accuses the “agri-intellectuals” of employing. I saw this clearly in his attack on something I know a fair amount about—raising “free range” turkey. Hurst tells of a neighbor who in the 1950s raised his turkeys outside on pasture, until one day 4,000 young birds, too stupid to take shelter, raised their head to the skies and drowned in a rainstorm. The farmer was financially ruined. Ergo, Hurst argues, it is reasonable for farmers to raise turkeys from birth to death in densely populated “open sheds.” He dismisses objections to their crowded condition by the time Thanksgiving arrives, and to their spending their lives walking around in and sleeping in their own waste, on the grounds that they’ve been saved from the rain and from predators, and because the turkeys, as he observes them, “don’t seem to mind” and are “not aware that they’re part of a morally reprehensible system.”
Hurst relies on a strangely constructed body of evidence here. The turkeys we raise are well able to distinguish the more desirable environment from the far less desirable. Sure, we put them in at night to protect them from predators, and, as they are not as young as the birds he describes who drowned or perhaps not as dumb as the standard white industrial breed, they come in readily themselves when it rains hard. (They’re free to come and go during the day.) But because they’re perching birds we give them bars to perch on when they’re inside, and that’s not something they get in an industrial shed. And it is hard to ignore that the moment we open their door in the morning, ours scurry out to graze, run, engage in what appear to be flying relay races, and roost in the apple trees. It is hard not to feel happy listening to the sounds of turkey pleasure (a sort of coo-chirp) when they graze on fresh grass and weeds.
And how does Hurst know that the turkeys “don’t seem to mind” being crowded together on the floor of their shed? Maybe they’re not fighting over space, but could that be because they’ve been de-beaked, the fate of some turkeys? Maybe they’re not sick from their overcrowded mingling in their own droppings on the shed floor, but could that be because they’ve had their snoods removed and are being fed antibiotics as a standard part of their diet? (Try buying non-medicated turkey starter feed at most feed suppliers.) Is Hurst realistically factoring in the social cost of this routine antibiotic use? Is he fairly judging the psychological effects on these most curious and personable of birds when they are closely confined and sometimes mutilated? Is he even considering what these flabby, barely-mobile birds taste like? Hurst, who purports to be a great proponent of nuance in debates about agriculture, evidences precious little nuance when he uses the drowning of some very young turkeys in a rainstorm to justify their perpetual confinement in crowded and dirty conditions. Surely any harm that cmes from laissez-faire free-range practices can be remedied without moving to the other extreme—treating the birds as raw materials in a protein factory. I will leave it to others to dissect Hurst’s presentation of other evidence, such as his defense of pig gestation crates. The bottom line for me: if we are really going to have a nuanced, sensitive discussion about agricultural practices, we have to acknowledge the validity of Hurst’s questions. How do we raise enough food for everyone at a reasonable cost that nets a reasonable living for the farmer? We should not minimize the seriousness of this challenge, as it is not yet clear that returning to the era of small, local producers will provide everyone with an abundant, affordable, and healthful diet. The Blake Hursts of the world, in turn, are going to have to acknowledge the validity of considering all the external costs of their agricultural practices when we make public policy. They are also going to have to get much more serious about understanding the difference between animals that “don’t seem to mind” the conditions we subject them to and those that actually get to enjoy the brief time they spend on earth for our ultimate benefit. —Mark Scherzer
