I watched "Food, Inc.," on PBS tonight, and I got so angry that I had to email most of my siblings who grew up on our Iowa farm with me some 50 years ago.
I had never realized how much things have changed since when I was pulling weeds from the soybean rows when I was a kid.
Sadly, the changes that have taken place weren't for the better, just more efficient and costly!
So why is organic food more expensive than factory food?
Organic food is raised sustainably, often using permaculture.
Factory food is raised with pesticides, chemical fertilizers, genetically modified seeds and heavy use of fossil fuels and expensive equipment.
My unscientific answer is the cost of human labor and a lack of subsidization from governments.
Now I don't think we need to pay labor less. If anything, labor needs to be paid more.
However, commercial agriculture has lots of exterior costs that we as a society pay, such as environmental clean-ups from Confined Feeding Operations. Much of the pollution in our water systems today comes from agricultural run-off from farms, especially operations that don't honor the land like our forefathers, who rotated crops, used contour farming and drank the water from their own wells. Today most water systems in the Midwest are contaminated with nitrates from fertilizers, essentially making the water undrinkable for pregnant women and young children.
Thus small towns must get federally subsidized loans so they can yet one more time try to find a water source that hasn't yet been contaminated.
One of the biggest sources of global warming and smog comes from major big-time agriculture, with its heavy use of fossil fuels and nitrogen-loaded fertilizers. On a warm summer day, one can just see the heavy haze hanging over the fields that have just been sprayed.
Yet those who are willing to live pauper lives as farmers, raising produce that is grown organically and ethically, caring for the land for future generations; and their animals respectfully, find it almost impossible to break into the field (no pun intended).
Farmers who want to raise grains and big crops like soybeans and corn can't save their own seeds to plant in subsequent years. All seeds today for these crops are essentially owned by Monsanto, which forbids farmers to use seeds from their crops in a subsequent year. Farmers are even sued if the crops they raised have been pollinated by their crops across the road.
My solution to this whole mess: Spread the subsidizing around from the big commercial producers to struggling farmers who want to raise crops and animals organically. Another option: Cut off all subsidization for all farmers. Consumers will then have to pay the true costs for what they chose to buy. Perhaps then farmers will not over-produce crops that are now subsidized, but will instead raise crops that are good for consumers. Animals will eat what they are supposed to eat. Other countries can once again raise their own crops to feed their own people.
We are told that farming has to keep up with a growing population. I would like to re-phrase that to say that farmers are working to feed people all the food they want year around, like watermelon in December, strawberries and tomatoes in the dead of winter. Until recent years, the human race did just fine eating foods locally that were in season. I can't wait until the strawberries are in here in North Carolina in about three weeks. They'll taste much better when they are grown just a few miles away, and I haven't had any since last summer.
Many of us need to learn to grown our own food again, and not depend on commercial growers. We can grow our own greens and sprouts. We can have our own chickens and eggs. We can be vegetarians or near-vegetarians. If those of us who are able had our own gardens, if we ate locally foods that are in season, if we canned and froze foods in season for the winter months ahead, I do think that then there would be enough good organic food available to feed the world.
But commercial production would be considerably less and less food would be transported long distances.
Organic small farmers are doing their best to bring ethics back to agriculture. Many farmers who have gotten sucked into commercial production are tiring of their dependence on big government subsidies and the big corporations that lobby for these subsidies.
It is time to now change the face of farming in this country. It will never be simple or painless, but the longer we let corporations run the show, the more enslaved we will become to them in the years ahead.