It’s really fun when you have a brush with greatness and it is no more apropos than when you run into a celebrity in Anaheim during Commodity Classic. Well the celebrity I’m referring to is our very own NCGA past president Ken McCauley, who was featured in the book Power Trip. Now Ken is quite modest and didn’t really tell people that he made it into the book. From start to finish it took more than two years from the time the author Amanda Little visited his farm in White Cloud, Kansas to the time it made it to the book shelves (Fall of ‘09).
Needless to say, as soon as I saw Ken I told him I’d read (and reviewed) the book and he was, well, flabbergasted after he got over being shocked. But he shouldn’t be shocked – the book is very good and Ken did an amazing job of getting out a strong American agricultural message. The book is about how tied our world is to fossil fuels. From transportation to medicines, to plastic to agriculture, fossil fuels are a part of our everyday lives, and Little helps us understand how embedded they are, and addresses the question of how we move away from them.
In an recent blog from Mark, he celebrated that fact that Food Inc. didn’t win an Oscar. Unfortunately you can’t mention that “documentary” without thinking of Michael Pollan who wrote Omnivore’s Dilemma and promotes a world of organic farming. When on Ken’s farm, Little asks him about Pollan to which he replied, “It’s not a way to maximize production.”
Ken explained that the drawback of these organic methods is that they require more labor and time, and in turn generate lower profits. Organic farmers also tend to have lower yields per acre and higher prices.
The question Little didn’t ask him: How is the world going to feed 9 billion people without production agriculture? It’s not.
Ken is very conscientious about sustainable farming since his land, puts food on his table too. Farmers understand more than most that they must take care of the land that feeds them. I just wish consumers understood that better.
Well, to better understand our addiction to oil and the need for production agriculture through the eyes of a great man, Ken McCauley, then be sure to read Power Trip.
If you farm or if you eat you will be affected by a lovely body of water many of us will never see called the Chesapeake Bay. This is because “The Bay” as it is known affectionately is being used as a test case or a template for how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will deal with watersheds across the nation. Unfortunately, those pushing the agenda blame many of the Bays woes on agriculture.
So, although this largely political fight will take place on the east coast, the ramifications are real and they may soon come to your city, town, village, burg and farm.
We all owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Virginia Grains Producers Association for taking the lead in this fight. The primary concern regarding the EPA process is the lack of complete data about current implementation of conservation practices already in place. The shortfall of real information significantly skews water quality reports and results in misleading pollution load reduction assignments for any one sector.
In recent testimony before the United States House of Representatives Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment, Molly Pugh, executive director of the Virginia Grain Producers Association (VGPA), stressed the actions growers have taken and are taking to be responsible stewards of their natural resources.
First and foremost, environmental goals cannot be addressed without assessing the effect on farm profitability. “VGPA has committed to working with all our partners including environment and government partners to achieve our region’s environmental goals and long-term farm profitability,” Pugh said in written testimony. “Our growers are committed to environmental stewardship and making their operations as efficient as possible. Reducing soil erosion, improving field efficiency of nutrient use and improving water quality are all goals that make our growers more profitable and improve the quality of the land on which they depend.” (more…)
Grant Woods’ famous 1930 “American Gothic” painting is an icon of what some people believe sustainable agriculture should be. Ma and Pa Kettle on the little idyllic farmstead making a living on the soil with their bare hands. Notice how miserable they look.
With all the talk these days about lifecycle analysis and carbon footprints, modern agriculture methods have increased our efficiency and therefore reduced our carbon footprint. A group of researchers led by Jude Capper with Washington State University, took a ‘life-cycle assessment’ (LCA) approach to evaluating foods for environmental impact and found that efficiency is more sustainable.
Intuitively, today’s modern production practices often seem to have a higher environmental impact than the “idyllic” management practices of the 1940s. Nonetheless, when assessed on a whole-system basis, greenhouse gas emissions per gallon of milk produced are 63 percent lower. In 2007, the U.S. dairy industry produced 8.3 billion more gallons of milk than in 1944, but due to improved productivity, the carbon footprint of the entire dairy farm industry was reduced by 41 percent during the same time period.
Pasture- or grass-fed meat also is growing in popularity, with the perception that it is more eco-friendly than conventionally produced beef. However, the time needed to grow an animal to slaughter weight is nearly double that of animals fed corn. This means that energy use and greenhouse gas emissions per pound of beef are increased three-fold in grass-fed beef cattle. In total, finishing the current U.S. population of 9.8 million fed-cattle on pasture would require an extra 60 million acres of land. Again, the intuitively environmentally friendly option has a far higher resource and environmental cost.
The study also finds that transportation efficiency often means that “locally grown” food may have a higher environmental impact.
“As an example, one dozen eggs, transported several hundred miles to a grocery store in a tractor-trailer that can carry 23,400 dozen eggs is a more fuel-efficient, eco-friendly option than a dozen eggs purchased at a farmers’ market (4.5 times more fuel used) or local farm (17.2 times more fuel used).”
While family farmers toil to bring in crops this fall an interesting thing is happening; folks in the organic and alternative Ag community have chosen to use the lousy harvest conditions as their latest reason to do away with our modern commodity-based food system.
“To my eyes, the disaster unfolding in the Corn Belt is further evidence of a dangerous lack of resiliency. To run properly, our current agricultural system relies on a precise set of conditions: cheap fuel, ample water, stable climate; tweak one of those conditions and the system derails,” says one blogger.
The blogger is partially right. Farmers are indeed much happier when fuel prices, markets and Mother Nature play along. Working normal hours under comfortable conditions and for a fair wage are goals we all aspire to, but to characterize farmers as a bunch of quitters or suggest we change the way we farm because of a little adversity is just plain silly.
Harvesting this year has been a major inconvenience for farmers but they are making rapid progress despite the dismal conditions. What we are dealing with is the wettest harvest weather in 40 years. This is an anomaly and no reason to walk away from a food production system that is the envy of the world.
When the dust settles we will be looking at one of the largest crops of all time despite the challenges. There will be some crop condition issues to manage in storage and drying costs will be higher, but we will have plenty of corn to supply the U.S. and much of the world once again. Rain may be falling but the sky isn’t!
If you want to see resilient, just drive outside the city limits and see the extraordinary steps being taken and hours being worked by growers to fill their bins and your pantry. With harvest behind us these same growers will be telling their children and grandchildren about the tough harvest of 2009 and how they rolled their sleeves up and got the job done.
At the World Food Prize Forum in Des Moines on Thursday, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates praised the work of Norman Borlaug and called for a new “Green Revolution” to help feed the poorest of the world’s poor. Gates also announced grants totaling about $120 million to help small farmers in developing countries such as Africa.
“In the middle of the 20th century, experts predicted famine and starvation, but they turned out to be wrong – because they did not predict Norman Borlaug. He not only showed humanity how to get more food from the earth – he proved that farming has the power to lift up the lives of the poor,” Gates said.
The billionaire noted that Borlaug’s Green Revolution “helped avert famine, save hundreds of millions of lives, and lift whole countries out of poverty” but “it didn’t go far enough. It didn’t go to Africa.”
He blames that on ideological differences between technology and environmentalism that forces a “false choice” between productivity and sustainability. “It blocks important advances. It breeds hostility among people who need to work together. And it makes it hard to launch a comprehensive program to help poor farmers. The fact is, we need both productivity and sustainability – and there is no reason we can’t have both.”
“We have to develop crops, including new inputs to go with them that can grow in a drought,” Gates said. “We have to have crops that can survive a flood, that can resist pests and new diseases. We need higher yields on the same land, despite more difficult weather. And we will never get there without a continuous and urgent, science-based search to increase productivity, especially focused on the needs of small farms in the developing world.”
I’m no big fan of Bill Gates, but I was very pleased to hear him standing up to radical environmentalists who want us to move backward instead of forward and supporting the use of biotech crops to help the poor in developing countries grow enough food to feed themselves.
You can watch Gates’ address on YouTube in three different segments (due to the 10 minute limit on videos for YouTube). Here is the first installment.
Summer is rapidly coming to an end and with the return of school those useful and amusing temporary employees called interns are also heading back to college.
If you want to educate yourself about corn, or in some cases just laugh at their spin on all things corn, you can enjoy some of the fruits of their summer labor by going to the following links highlighted here.
In Nebraska The Cob Squad has hit again by adding four new videos to the Nebraska Corn Board’s Channel on YouTube. There is a series of three, which together forms a full news broadcast and a bonus commercial.
Part 1 discusses sustainability in agriculture; Part 2 addresses some of the issues like California’s Prop 2; Part 3 investigates efficient water use and Part 4 is a commercial about new corn products.
In the heart of the Corn Belt Illinois’ film crew created several videos explaining the difference between field corn and sweet corn; and offers up a second installment on what happens to all of the field corn produced in Illinois, which they say is enough to fill railroad box cars stretching all the way from Illinois to Hong Kong.
And if you need a dose of twisted corn history you won’t want to miss the tale of Lewis & Clark’s lesser know mission of discovery, funding provided of course by the unemployed history major’s association.
Now, it’s time for us full-time slackers to get back to work.
I remember as a child hearing the funny question: “How do you eat an elephant?” Of course the response – best delivered with a Rodney Dangerfield impersonation – is “one bite at a time.” I remember thinking it was a goofy question. It wasn’t until years later that I started to realize there was wisdom to be found in these quaint colloquialisms that get passed down from generation to generation.
This flash back was triggered by some information I came across yesterday regarding the significant contribution that alternative energy sources like ethanol are already making to our pool of domestic resources. Gene Griffith, CEO of Patriot Renewable Energy noted simply his single 100 million gallon a year ethanol plant produces enough ethanol to fuel 100,000 vehicle for a year. They produce enough feed co-product (DDGS) to feed 500,000 head of cattle.
Many critics of ethanol say it is a bad idea because it can’t immediately replace all the petroleum we consume. This is true; no one fuel option can. We will need a menu of resources from wind and electric, nuclear and biomass to fill the giant market niche that imported oil currently dominates and protects like a crazed elephant cow protecting her offspring. So in the interim do we park our cars, stop commerce and other wise give up our quality of life and pray for a single post petroleum savior?
It seems we better answer these questions quickly because some experts say oil fields are depleting more quickly than previously thought. Something as simple as “increasing the amount of ethanol blended in our gasoline from 10% to 15% would create 140,000 green collar jobs nationwide and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 million tons per year – the equivalent to removing 3.5 million vehicles from our roads,” according to Congresswoman Debbie Halvorson.
(Makes one wonder if building more ethanol plants might not be a better and more taxpayer friendly option than cash for clunkers, but I digress).
So, how do we tackle our troubling dependence on imported oil? One bite at a time; One ethanol plant at a time; One fuel efficient vehicle at a time; One new convert to conservation, etc…
Building off a campaign conducted in Washington, D.C., by the National Corn Growers Association and several state corn organizations, the Nebraska Corn Board and Nebraska Corn Growers Association have launched a campaign in Nebraska to promote some of the positive aspects of farming today.
Some of the positive messages include the fact that American farmers have slashed the fertilizer needed to grow a bushel of corn by 36 percent in the last three decades and that farmers have cut erosion 44 percent in the last two decades.
“Farmers are also growing five times more corn today than they did in the 1930s but we’re doing so on 20 percent less land,” said Jon Holzfaster, chairman of the Nebraska Corn Board. “Farmers have always and will continue to adapt and improve how they farm. We felt it was important to let the people of Nebraska know.”
Holzfaster said the campaign comes in response to some negative messages about corn production and, in part, corn-based ethanol, that have surfaced over the last year. “It got to a point that we felt some facts about farming today needed to be told,” he said.
The campaign is known as “Sustaining Innovation” because farmers are incredibly innovative and have continuously improved their productivity since humans first placed a seed in the soil. “We strive to do a better job in every row, on every acre, on every farm, every season,” Holzfaster said.
How many ways can you define sustainability? What does it mean to you? I’m beginning to think the list is endless. During a conference I attended this week I heard three very prominent people offer their definition during a round table discussion. This was at the Alltech Symposium where the theme was The Sustainability Principle. The panelists at this session each took a turn answering the question, “How do you define sustainability? There were also asked to put that in terms of how the audience should be interested in it. Anyone who is in agriculture, including corn growers, needs to know how people are looking at this issue since it will be important as new legislation and regulations come about as a result of it.
Our first panelist to tackle this question was Lutz Goedde, Deputy Director, Agricultural Development, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He says the Foundation he works for looks at sustainability “through a very different lens compared to many other organizations.” He then proceeded to say that there are a billion people in the world who live on under a dollar a day and described what that is like. He says that agriculture is the primary means for most of them to get food and earn a living. He says they follow the Bill and Melinda sustainability philosophy that “every person on the planet has the right to live a healthy and productive life.” Next he says that there are normally three dimensions to sustainability which are economic, social and environmental.
Listen to Goedde’s reply here:
Next up was Dr. Michael Boehlje, Professor, Dept. of Agricultural Economics and the Center for Food and Agricultural Business, Purdue University. He said we could look at sustainability from a traditional farm management standpoint of carrying capacity that recognizes current and future capacity on a global basis and deals with absorbing waste in terms of the economic or production activity you’re involved in. He says that although government is involved in this issue, it will be consumers who “will be the ultimate in terms of whether in fact sustainability practices are adopted and those who adopt them are compensated for them.”
Listen to Boehlje’s reply here:
Finally we heard an answer to this question from Philip Wilkinson, Order of the British Empire, Executive Director, 2 Sisters Food Group. He said that the definition he would use is the one used by the United Nations but since that has already been brought up by earlier speakers he composed a slightly different one. He says, “A sustainable agricultural system is one which maximizes production by increases in yield while minimizing environmental impact and does not compromise animal welfare.” He says farmers are the logical custodians of the land who can accomplish this. He also quoted a former United Kingdom Minister who summed it us as, “Don’t cheat your children.”
Listen to Wilkinson’s reply here:
So there you have it. Three more ways to look at this issue. Now if we could all just agree on a common definition . . . You can find NCGA CEO Rick Tolman’s definition here.
Farmers will soon have a new tool to analyze their natural resource use and key crop production inputs, introduced this week at the Commodity Classic by Field to Market, The Keystone Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture.
The Fieldprint Calculator was developed with input from a diverse group of grower organizations, agribusinesses, food companies, economists and conservation groups, to help farmers evaluate natural resource use on their operation compared to industry averages. These measures could help improve production efficiencies and profit potential.
The calculator will be available at www.fieldtomarket.org beginning March 15 for grower testing and feedback.
“Sustainable agriculture must make sense economically as well as environmentally or it’s not sustainable,” said Doug Goehring, who grows corn, soybeans and wheat in North Dakota. “This calculator will help producers understand how they’re being sustainable on the farm today, while providing insight into for future improvements that can benefit the environment and our bottom line.”
Watch Doug demonstrate the Fieldprint calculator here:
It’s really fun when you have a brush with greatness and it is no more apropos than when you run into a celebrity in Anaheim during Commodity Classic. Well the celebrity I’m referring to is our very own NCGA past president Ken McCauley, who was featured in the book Power Trip. Now Ken is quite modest and didn’t really tell people that he made it into the book. From start to finish it took more than two years from the time the author Amanda Little visited his farm in White Cloud, Kansas to the time it made it to the book shelves (Fall of ‘09).
In an recent blog from Mark, he celebrated that fact that Food Inc. didn’t win an Oscar. Unfortunately you can’t mention that “documentary” without thinking of Michael Pollan who wrote Omnivore’s Dilemma and promotes a world of organic farming. When on Ken’s farm, Little asks him about Pollan to which he replied, “It’s not a way to maximize production.”
If you farm or if you eat you will be affected by a lovely body of water many of us will never see called the Chesapeake Bay. This is because “The Bay” as it is known affectionately is being used as a test case or a template for how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will deal with watersheds across the nation. Unfortunately, those pushing the agenda blame many of the Bays woes on agriculture.
Grant Woods’ famous 1930 “American Gothic” painting is an icon of what some people believe sustainable agriculture should be. Ma and Pa Kettle on the little idyllic farmstead making a living on the soil with their bare hands. Notice how miserable they look. 
“In the middle of the 20th century, experts predicted famine and starvation, but they turned out to be wrong – because they did not predict Norman Borlaug. He not only showed humanity how to get more food from the earth – he proved that farming has the power to lift up the lives of the poor,” Gates said.
Some of the positive messages include the fact that American farmers have slashed the fertilizer needed to grow a bushel of corn by 36 percent in the last three decades and that farmers have cut erosion 44 percent in the last two decades.
Our first panelist to tackle this question was Lutz Goedde, Deputy Director, Agricultural Development, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He says the Foundation he works for looks at sustainability “through a very different lens compared to many other organizations.” He then proceeded to say that there are a billion people in the world who live on under a dollar a day and described what that is like. He says that agriculture is the primary means for most of them to get food and earn a living. He says they follow the Bill and Melinda sustainability philosophy that “every person on the planet has the right to live a healthy and productive life.” Next he says that there are normally three dimensions to sustainability which are economic, social and environmental. 
Next up was Dr. Michael Boehlje, Professor, Dept. of Agricultural Economics and the Center for Food and Agricultural Business, Purdue University. He said we could look at sustainability from a traditional farm management standpoint of carrying capacity that recognizes current and future capacity on a global basis and deals with absorbing waste in terms of the economic or production activity you’re involved in. He says that although government is involved in this issue, it will be consumers who “will be the ultimate in terms of whether in fact sustainability practices are adopted and those who adopt them are compensated for them.” 
Finally we heard an answer to this question from Philip Wilkinson, Order of the British Empire, Executive Director, 2 Sisters Food Group. He said that the definition he would use is the one used by the United Nations but since that has already been brought up by earlier speakers he composed a slightly different one. He says, “A sustainable agricultural system is one which maximizes production by increases in yield while minimizing environmental impact and does not compromise animal welfare.” He says farmers are the logical custodians of the land who can accomplish this. He also quoted a former United Kingdom Minister who summed it us as, “Don’t cheat your children.”
Farmers will soon have a new tool to analyze their natural resource use and key crop production inputs, introduced this week at the Commodity Classic by