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| PHOTO: civileats.com |
Lots of folk are genuinely concerned about the aging population
of famers in the USA. Who is going to grow our crops, raise our livestock and
put food on the American table when this generation of farmers is too old to
farm and quite literally dies out? How
serious is this threat to our food system and are we right to be worried about
the future of food?
One outspoken ‘celebrity’ farmer in the USA who oozes
optimism, joie de vive, and who is
not afraid to tell you ‘how it is’ isn’t so worried; he sees the current ‘age
crisis’ as a rallying cry for change. “The
aging farm population is creating cavernous niches begging to be filled by
creative visionaries who will go in dynamic new directions” Joel Salatin.
So instead of bemoaning the aging population of farmers in
the USA we should be celebrating the fact that we are opening up a niche for
the younger generation to fill – with their fresh ideologies for a sustainable
planet, their embracement of new technologies that can actually bring
sustainable farming into the 21st century. ‘Natural’ farming methods don’t have to work
against science, and importantly science doesn’t have to work against nature;
we are teetering on a brand new age for farming. A new age of agriculture where we can farm
sustainably hand in glove with new technologies, without resorting to genetically
modified organisms, without spraying our crops with a deluge of chemicals,
where livestock can be raised as nature intended – without bars, without
mutilations, without being forced to eat a diet which makes them sick, and
where they are able to engage in their natural behaviours. This new age is ripe
for moving to new levels, and we need an optimistic and energetic youth to take
it forward.
Why does farming need a re-vamp? And why should we be relying on the younger
generation to do it? In answer let’s
take a brief look at the last eighty years of farming…
When and why did it all go wrong? In the mid part of the 20th
century farming for the most part turned its back on nature, as a result of the
culmination of different reasons and different forces at work - although many anecdotally attribute the
birth of factory farming to the Kentucky (or was it Kansas?) chicken farmer who
accidentally ordered too many chicks from the hatchery and had to raise them
indoors because she had nowhere else to put them; then finding it so successful
did it again with the next flock …and the rest is history (thanks to Frank
Perdue). So that story aside here is my
exploration of an event that shook the fabric of the whole world, and changed
the global population in every facet of its culture and way of life, including
farming, and potentially is an encompassment of the many reasons for the demise
of 20th century agriculture – World War II.
Up until the first quarter of the 20th century
farming was a way of life - what your
grandfather did and what your father did – farming, as an occupation, was what
you inherited not what you necessarily chose.
A farmer born and bred didn’t question why he was doing it, or what he
could be doing differently with his or her life – one farmed and one got on
with it. Then after WWII the attitude of
folks globally had a radical change. The
world had shifted and regular Joes shifted with it.
Some of the lads that would have gone into farming were drafted
to fight for their country and saw a different world-view. They had to grow-up quickly without the
security of home, they saw new technologies, different cultures, and discovered
that a much bigger world existed outside of their farm acreage.
Agriculture during the war was in the hands of the women and
the farmers too old to be drafted, and between them they did a magnificent job
of producing food whilst the younger men were fighting on the front lines. However, a bigger industry was growing during
this period – science, technology and engineering – these industries were busily
producing the munitions, machinery and the accouterments of war: the era of
science and technology was in full throttle. By the time the lads, lucky enough
to come back from the war fields, arrived home the fields of agriculture were
no longer appealing, and the celebrity of the farmers holding the fort on the home
front waned quickly after the war.
With this new modern view of the world, folks started to
view farming as a lowly career, where one got ones hands dirty, Why toil in the
dirt with smelly animals from sunrise to sunset 365 days a year, be at the mercy
of mother nature whilst donning rubber boots and a pair of overalls, when
factories with regular guaranteed pay, and jobs in cities with clean offices
beckoned, where new technologies were being developed, where one could leave
the vicariousness of nature behind and not have to worry about paying the bills
after swine fever or a crop failure left one broke.
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| PHOTO: http://www.wamt.org |
BUT then came the dawn of modern farming – if the rest of
world could modernize why not farming too? Under this modern umbrella farmers
could produce more in less time, machinery could do many of the jobs that
before had to be done by hand, weeds could be annihilated by chemicals, hundreds
and thousands of animals could be raised on a relatively small acreage and
their growth sped up with synthetic hormones, animal fodder came in bags and
not from foraging the land…the dawn of industrialization of farming hit the
ground running. So why wouldn’t farmers embrace this, why wouldn’t farming seem
attractive again? This was the promise
of a new land, the old farmstead inherited from grandpa and grandma could be
brought up to speed, perhaps there was a career in farming after all. The baby
boomers could be modern, efficient, produce prodigiously, and make money. Suddenly agriculture was attractive again.
The modernization of farming has brought with it many
problems - dubious animal welfare,
environmental damage, and methods that many agree are injurious to human
health. This is the agriculture that the
new generation has inherited and which many are rejecting and reevaluating. This
is the dawn of a food revolution, the toll of industrialization is now plainly
evident and more and more people are questioning how food gets to the table,
more and more farmers’ markets are opening up across the USA, more and more
people are wanting to close the chasm between the food producers and what they
put in their bellies. A demand for
healthy and clean food is on the increase.
The time is right for young folks to eschew the industrialized practices
of their parents and grandparents (the ‘baby boomers’) and move forward with a
sustainable yet modern agricultural system.
The baby-boom generation of farmers is getting older and many are ready
to pass on the mantle of farming to the young folk – a chasm that can be filled
by “creative visionaries who will go in
dynamic new directions”. I was at a sustainable agricultural conference
recently and my colleague (‘the Epicurean’) pointed out that the room was
filled with folks that looked like they belonged on the pages of an Abercrombie
and Fitch magazine rather than Farming Weekly! Now this is not the “sexy” I am talking
about here but the point of this observation is that it is very exciting to see
so many young folk (who embrace new technologies like ducks to water) engaging
with sustainable agriculture, and we need to keep them engaged. Many of
the older farming generation are stuck in the old ways – and ironically the ‘old
ways’ are the modern industrialized methods - so it’s time for young folk to
jump into the farming seat and ‘post-modernize’ farming with sustainable and
high animal welfare standards as the linchpins thereby guaranteeing a healthy
future for our food, our health and the health of the planet.
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| PHOTO: http://www.agweb.com/ |
So let’s be hip, cool and many of the other trendy
adjectives in the lexicon of ‘vogue’ because in order to engage the young
people and make farming attractive this is truly the way forward – we need to
bring the “sexy” back to farming!
~ THE ACTIVIST
Indeed!
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