There has been much written of late about the need for change in the business of agriculture in the United States, much of it led by the groups like Food Democracy Now! With such groups, I am a huge supporter of the need for sustainable agriculture in the United States, and move away from industrial agriculture that serves almost no one except those controlling it, sometime referred to (appropriately) as "Big Food." But it has struck me of late that one persuasive argument that is not being made in support of sustainable agriculture is that it is a jobs issue.
What got me thinking about this (again), is the recent Op-Ed in the New York Times by Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry, entitled A 50-Year Farm Bill. In it, these estimable gentlemen argue that:
Clearly, our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our food supply is not sustainable. We must restore ecological health to our agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our rural communities.
For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.
The emphasis is mine, and is important. Because in discussing the indefensible environmental damage that industrial agriculture causes, and its role in creating obesity among other awful things, we seemed to have forgotten that agriculture, although still a huge part of the U.S. economy in monetary terms, no longer is so in employment terms. Note this additional sentence from the just quoted-from Op-Ed:
Industrial agricultural has made our food supply entirely dependent on fossil fuels and, by substituting technological "solutions" for human work and care, has virtually destroyed the cultures of husbandry (imperfect as they may have been) once indigenous to family farms and farming neighborhoods.
The emphasis is again mine, because this is the point that really struck me. The "human work and care" that once made agriculture sustainable, and that was replaced by pesticides and industrialization, was once also a huge source of meaningful employment in this country. Note this finding from recent research done by the USDA Economic Research Service:
In the 1930s, the rejuvenation of the farm sector could have reasonably been expected to boost rural economies and the well-being of farm families. More than three-fourths of all rural counties depended on agriculture as their primary source of income. There were 30.4 million people living and working on 6.3 million farms. The rural farm population represented over half the rural population, which itself was a quarter of the U.S. total.
At the turn of the 21st century, 5.9 million people lived or worked on 2.1 million farms, representing 2 percent of total U.S. population. Only 20 percent of rural U.S. counties now depend on agriculture for more than 15 percent of earnings. Even in these farming counties, nonfarm sectors have been and continue to be major sources of employment.
And so as the industrialization of agriculture increased, it was not just its sustainability (as defined by Berry and others) that was lost; also lost was the capacity of agriculture to sustain a significant portion of the U.S. population through job-creation and income-production. Notably, what was also created in this transformation of agriculture was the need for a huge, largely illegal, temporary work-force, because the industrial model could not sustain itself without an army of low-wage agricultural workers to provide the "human work and care." Thankfully, there are a sizable number of people who are fighting in many ways to get back to the land, farming small plots using sustainable and organic means. Thus, as Berry notes:
Thoughtful farmers and consumers everywhere are already making many necessary changes in the production and marketing of food. But we also need a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles. We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.
And so, to piggy-back on this argument, we also need a 50-year farm bil that addresses forthrightly the problem of job loss, because sustainable agriculture is a jobs issue too.
Updated with an apology for all caps in the title. In my (legal) writing, the main title is supposed to be all-caps.