My oldest daughter is a freshman in high school and is studying ancient history this year. Her teacher — a wise old man who’s very animated and is a true inspirer of his students — often begins chanting “Surplus food and water! Surplus food and water!” during class. His point is something we often forget today: how vital food is for the continuance of any civilization.
How can we not remember something as basic as this? Because most of us have lived our entire lives — and our parents lived their entire lives — more free from war, famine and disease than any civilization in the history of the world. Starvation and death from communicable disease on any appreciable scale don’t exist anywhere in the world today outside of war zones and the most repressive and illiberal regimes (North Korea, for example).
Some will argue against this statement, but the facts seem clear. According to humanprogress.org, 80 percent of the world lived in absolute poverty in 1820, and 40 percent as recently as 1980; today that number is under 10 percent. Since 1961, calories consumed per person per day in sub-Saharan Africa has grown from 1,800 to over 2,400. And average life expectancy — a statistic that is greatly influenced by communicable diseases — hovered around 30 years for most of human history; today it is 72 worldwide.
The point is that when famine was in the not-distant past, people were desperate to avoid it. We’re blessed to have lost that sense of desperation. But it’s not hard to see how Americans who had lived through the Great Depression and World War II didn’t put up much resistance to the use of synthetic chemicals on their farms — they were anxious to avoid the starvation they’d witnessed earlier in their lives. The same could be said for people in India and China and anywhere else in the world: “surplus food and water” to avoid famine is hard to argue against. Resorting to industrial farming, even with its toxic synthetic chemicals, was understandable from that perspective — for that time.
But today is different. Thanks to the relatively good governance we’ve experienced since the end of World War II (maybe contrary to how many of us feel about our current political environment), combined with effective treaty regimes and, probably, nuclear weapons, the risk of largescale war, famine and death from communicable disease is lower than it’s ever been. Of course, we face different threats — incommunicable diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s — but we no longer need to resort to food-production-at-any-cost practices. We can afford to return to practices that don’t degrade the soil. We know how to produce enough food to feed the world with ecological techniques.
One of the other reasons we’re able to institute regenerative practices today is technology. In this issue of Acres U.S.A., we highlight some of the incredible innovations that are making synthetic-chemical-free farming possible. Loran Steinlage highlights ten areas of tech he’s keeping an eye on as a row cropper. Then we add five of our own, most of which apply to all different types of farm operations. Laura Kavanaugh discusses in-field soil DNA testing. And in the interview, Adrian Ferrero of Biome Makers shares how DNA testing of soil biology is revolutionizing how growers understand the life in their soil.
Now is the time to continue providing surplus food and water — just via better means.
And that’s the view from the country.
