The Full Measure of America’s Farming and Food Crisis
By Corby Kummer
NY Times Sunday Book Review, Sept. 7, 2020
PERILOUS BOUNTY
The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It
By Tom Philpott
246 pp. Bloomsbury. $28.
In a world where it’s impossible to keep up with the urgent and awful
stories that seem to get worse by the week, it’s easy to lose track of
all we worried about in before times — little stuff like whether
food-borne illnesses were killing hundreds of people. Is that still
going on?
The answer is of course: Yes. As I write, more than 900 cases of
salmonella have been linked to onions. And in our time of lockdown,
there has been no end to stories of fields of ripe produce being plowed
under, millions of gallons of milk dumped and millions of chickens
slaughtered for lack of ways to bring them to the supermarkets and food
banks that need them. We’ve lost track of just how badly served the
planet has been by the agriculture and distribution systems that evolved
in the name of efficiency and price competition.
Shutting your eyes may be presidential policy, but the journalist and
blogger Tom Philpott won’t let us get away with it. He wants to focus
our attention squarely on the environmental consequences of the global
and, especially, the American way of raising food. Nothing, his new
“Perilous Bounty” reminds us, is going in the right direction.
Not the economics of farming — neither the small-scale diversified
farming we love to support at our local farmer’s market, which has
nearly vanished, nor, surprisingly, the consolidated farms of the Corn
Belt, where even with federal protectionism farming is “a pretty awful
business.” Not the topsoil of those farms, “one of the jewels of global
agriculture” formed over millenniums, depleted by monoculture and left
to wash away in the increasingly uncontrollable and erratic deluges
caused by climate change. Not the tap water of half a million people
around Toledo, who in 2014 were told not to drink, wash or bathe in
water made toxic by “titanic amounts of industrially produced nitrogen
and phosphorus fertilizers” dumped into Lake Erie.
Philpott, now a food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones, has
long been my go-to writer on farming and the environment. His bent is
for small-scale and regenerative farming — the new catchphrase for what
biodynamic and then organic farming were historically called, a practice
of constantly replenishing soil and with it natural ecosystems. I didn’t
once see the word “regenerative” in “Perilous Bounty,” though Philpott
is very much concerned with soil and water health. He must dislike the
term — and given the plain-spoken crankiness that has always been an
endearing feature of his writing, he maintains a surprisingly tactful
silence on it. The whole book, in fact, skirts the tendentiousness that
has become a hallmark of writing that sounds environmental alarms.
Perhaps that’s because the author simply expects the reader to be as
appalled as he is by the plain facts, which he lays out with new
clarity. How to comprehend the huge, unflushable and toxic pig-manure
lagoons in Iowa, where hog breeding crossed over only 75 years ago from
being a useful adjunct to crop farming to become densely concentrated
animal feedlot operations, the animal equivalent of concentration camps?
Why, fecal equivalents, of course. Although the state houses seven hogs
for every human being — 23 million hogs, a third of the hogs farmed in
the United States — their intensive feeding produces as much manure as
28 hogs per resident would. Add in cattle and chickens (Iowa is the
country’s leading producer of eggs) and you’ve got “55 ‘fecal
equivalents’ for every actual person in Iowa.”
The greatest tragedy of what are known as concentrated animal feeding
operations is of course the human carnage — the contemptuous disregard
for worker safety that led to the lifelong maiming documented in Eric
Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” (which took up where Upton Sinclair’s
“The Jungle” had left off a century before) and that Ted Genoways’s “The
Chain” recently made clear in searing detail.
During the pandemic meatpackers have turned a blind eye to the ways
Covid-19 could easily spread in slaughterhouses, and have shown a
chilling indifference to the resulting illness and death in many of the
country’s most vulnerable workers. The administration’s cynical
pandering to the meat industry’s claims of a coming meat shortage by
calling meat employees essential — absolving factory owners, many of
them major campaign donors, of liability for infection and resulting
deaths — will stand as a historic stain on the federal government. So
will an abandonment of worker-safety enforcement and the castration of
the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Sinclair might find
the food-safety laws enacted in the wake of his book still intact and
even strengthened (even if the enforcement is lax). But the cronyism and
political protection of owners above workers would feel very familiar.
“Perilous Bounty” went to press just before the pandemic changed life,
so there’s nothing about the human devastation the administration and
the meat industry have been indifferent to. The reader is likely to feel
dramatic irony, particularly toward the end, as Philpott optimistically
warms to the Green New Deal advanced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed
Markey and endorsed by Bernie Sanders, then still a presidential
candidate. There’s nothing about worker abuse, because Philpott’s scope
is the environment. At the conclusion, as Philpott documents the craven
coddling of the fertilizer industry, the reader wants to yell: “But no —
it got worse! So much worse!”
Philpott’s driving question throughout the book is “Who profits from
this massive bounty?” Not the farmers, and, except for artificially
depressed prices for health-damaging ultraprocessed food, not consumers.
One of his answers is landowners, including many foreign buyers, who
know that “farmland investments are also largely immune from economic
shocks, performing well even when stocks and bonds plunge.” (Though
Philpott doesn’t have the space to document them, some states have tried
and failed to protect huge swaths of their land from overseas land
grabs.) And then there are the companies that sell fertilizers, seeds
and pesticides — four “massive companies” that “loom over the $11
billion U.S. fertilizer markets” and “a ‘Big Six’ of agrochemical seed
companies that towered over farmers in the Midwest and globally alike,”
to whom the author devotes considerable space, and who design their
products to work like interlocking hardware and software.
Is there a way out, and a way forward? Like all of us who write about
food and farming, Philpott goes in search of the counterexample — a
farmer who does things right. His, Tom Frantzen, a farmer in Chickasaw
County in northeast Iowa — “mustached, 60-something, balding and dressed
in a rumpled button-down blue work shirt” — restores rye to its natural
rotation as a cover crop that protects soil over the winter, when barren
corn and soy fields are particularly vulnerable.
Frantzen and another farmer, David Brandt, who’s just far enough south
(a half-hour southeast of Columbus) to add wheat as his cover crop,
report healthier soil and healthy profits, and Philpott excitedly
mentions a 2012 study that documents higher yields and lower runoff.
“The kicker,” he concludes with a flourish, is that “the region’s
farmers won’t take an economic hit from moving beyond growing just corn
and beans. … Growing a wider variety of crops requires more labor and
management, but those expenses are balanced out by drastically reduced
expenditures on agrochemicals.”
But, of course, neighbors aren’t rushing to cancel their charge accounts
with their fertilizer dealers. Subsidized crop insurance for corn and
soybeans is too reassuring to give up. The only way they might change is
through the magic of the market: consumer pressure. “If farmers could
get a premium price for crops,” Philpott says, “meat and milk ‘grown
with biodiversity’ or some such label, farmers would have an incentive
to add them to their rotations.”
Well, we all need to dream. As most of us, and surely the author, dream
of rebuilding an agriculture system that at last puts racial equity at
its center, we can’t lose sight of the land, water and air that need the
loudest and longest advocacy. “Perilous Bounty” will line up many new
recruits.
Corby Kummer is the executive director of the Food and Society policy
program at the Aspen Institute and a senior editor at The
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