Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes: Just when I think I have things somewhat figured out, along comes someone with a whole new angle to set me to rethinking. Several weeks back, I speculated that perhaps the family farm and the American public would be better off if Americans spent a greater portion of their incomes on food. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I compared our food production system to health care. I concluded that the millions of Americans who are hungry and millions who are uninsured are evidence that the free market does not have the advantages claimed for it in broadly distributing life’s necessaries. Then I read this week’s New Yorker, in which Atul Gawande also compared American agriculture with American health care, bringing to bear some historical perspective. He noted that 100 years ago, Americans perceived themselves to be living in a time of great crisis because food was consuming 40% of a typical family’s budget. Like health care today, the proportion of our national economy devoted to food production then seemed on an unrelenting upward trajectory. A splintered and inefficient system wasted huge amounts of resources. The crisis was resolved fairly rapidly, says Gawande, when the cooperative extension services were established, bringing scientific improvements and lessons in efficiency to individual farmers who served as models in their communities. They disseminated information to their fellow farmers, who adopted successful methods, and, as Gawande tells it, ushered in an age of efficiency and bounty. Gawande expresses hope that the myriad pilot projects in the House and Senate health bills will, if adopted, lead to a similarly rapid period of innovation and rationalization in health care that will make our system affordable and therefore more able to spread its resources to the less fortunate among us.
Gawande leaves his story in the early part of the twentieth century. He does not explore the mid and late 20th-century corporatization of agriculture, the current terrible distortions in what we produce as food (such as the overly heavy reliance on corn, corn syrup and corn derivatives) and the environmental degradations we’ve caused. He does not grapple with the questions raised by our current resurgence of hunger. But his history seems to me valuable in establishing two important points: (1) He teaches us that rolling back the clock to a nineteenth century model of agricultural production may not be ideal. Maybe the golden age was, in fact, the 1920’s. Of course, the agriculture of that decade ushered in the dust bowl, but there may be something about that moment which we want to aspire to as our “tao”, our way. (2) Gawande reminds us of the importance of studying and improving how we do things, and how the government can be supportive in that endeavor. We’ve seen how farming seems to require constant improvisation and refinement. We have been fortunate to meet a number of farmers who have freely dispensed their advice and learning. You can certainly learn by doing, but when someone else has gotten a husbandry or horticultural process down to a science, why not let them help you slide along the learning curve? But we haven’t gotten much from the cooperative extension services, which, when we consulted them 10 years ago, seemed wholly oriented toward big agribusiness methods and uninterested in encouraging organic production. There's evidence that they have more recently begun to recognize the needs of smaller scale, chemical-averse farmers like us. If the government focused on encouraging small-scale farmers who market directly to consumers, perhaps they would come up with efficiencies that would lead to lower production costs, thus making the healthiest foods more readily available to all. —Mark Scherzer
