Farmers’ Markets Put a “Face” on Farming
By Dal Grooms
The number of farmers’ markets in the United States has grown by more than 300 percent in the past 15 years. If you study that trend from an economics standpoint, you have to wonder why. The dollars and cents value of convenience, low prices and access to a variety of products just don’t add up.
Online grocers are convenient with 24/7 availability. Farmers’ markets are not.
At the local grocery store, comparison shopping to find the lowest price is done quickly as similar items are grouped together. That’s not the case at the farmers’ market.
Mega-supermarkets offer food purchases, along with buying your automotive care products and even appliances! Farmers’ markets do not.
So what brings consumers at increasing rates to more than 5,200 farmers’ markets around the country? It’s the relationship that consumers can have with farmers. The Agriculture Department calls it ‘food with a face.’ The popularity of farmers’ markets is the anchor of their current “Know Your Farmer” campaign.
That “face” reminds us that food is not made in the grocery store basement. It is grown and produced with care by men and women who not only have a passion for working with nature to produce food, but also have knowledge on how to produce it in a way that sustains their business at the market.
Much is expected from these farmers. Consumers expect fresh, top quality fruits and vegetables, as well as honey, dairy, meat and grain products. They want these items delivered with a smile and willingness to explain the production methods. If you’ve walked by the vendors’ tables at a market, you know these farmers are delivering on both points.
Other farmers are counting on them, too. Only about 4 percent of farmers use direct sales to consumers as part of their marketing plan. That means their “faces” represent the other 96 percent of farmers who use other marketing methods to sell their products.
While some may think that’s putting too much on the shoulders of those farmers who are using direct marketing, most of them would just smile, shrug and move on, shaking hands and telling customers about ways to prepare their products and what will be available at the market in the coming weeks.
Clearly, the value of a farmers’ market is about relationships and trust, both of which are intangible items that have real value in today’s economy. Economists and marketers have developed any number of models so that relationship value can be measured.
They can run their numbers and manipulate their models. Most consumers already know the value of that relationship. Priceless.
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You can see this in every aspect of American culture - turn on food TV and all the foodies talk about is sustainable agriculture and locally grown produce, but we in agriculture must continue to advocate not only for locally grown produce but for the opportunity to continue with advances in our field that will enable us to feed a hungry world. Locally grown and sustainable is great but it will not feed the millions of people going to bed hungry every night due to poor irrigation and weed overgrowth. I want people to remain open to this issue in Agriculture and see both sides and yes I love my locally grown hormone free beef from our farm, but I understand then need for hormone enhanced products that have less estrogen than the average birth control pill to be able to provide food for a hungry world.
So, I encourage direct to consumer marketing but I also encourage the American consumer to not be blinded by the honest facts that fact Agriculture today. There is no way that production methods of the 1800's will feed a growing hungry world population and we as a society must face this and realize that farmers are doing better today for our environment than ever before. So, please know your farmer, but please don't be so quick to judge other aspects of modern agriculture.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Farmers Needing A Little Help...
"AFBF Urges Senate Support for EPA Resolution of Disapproval
The American Farm Bureau Federation continues to strongly urge senators to adopt a resolution that would prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act without prior congressional approval.
The Senate is expected to vote soon on the resolution introduced by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) that will effectively veto the EPA’s scheme to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as pollutants. Without relief from Congress, agriculture could suffer severe economic impacts from the EPA’s plan to regulate stationary sources of greenhouse gas emissions"
The American Farm Bureau Federation continues to strongly urge senators to adopt a resolution that would prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act without prior congressional approval.
The Senate is expected to vote soon on the resolution introduced by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) that will effectively veto the EPA’s scheme to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as pollutants. Without relief from Congress, agriculture could suffer severe economic impacts from the EPA’s plan to regulate stationary sources of greenhouse gas emissions"
Monday, May 17, 2010
Been reading a new book...
For Mother's day my kids got me the Pioneer Woman's cookbook, and for those of you that don't know - Pioneer women runs a blog and website about being a city girl and mother of four on a working cattle ranch in Oklahoma. She is a blast. My family was amazed that I know who she was when I opened my book and even more amazed when I actually cooked the food. But, I really respect her down to earth opinions about her life and how she has adjust to it. I can feel for her - especially when she talks about her husband coming home covered in cow S%$# from working cattle and her love a wrangler butt - after all that was one of the first things that I had noticed about my husband....
But, like Pioneer Woman, I have really come to respect my husbands love of our land and our farm and our children. Given my day job, my husband has had the job of being with our kids most days too. I went back to work with both of our youngest too when they were each three weeks old - and my Farmer feller took our daughter to work cattle the first day and then to the hay field then next. All of my children have been on our farm since they could walk. They know what a squeeze chute is for and when to stay out of fields while Daddy cuts hay. And they love to play in said hay till they get caught...
I think that I have talked alot in this blog about the importance of being political active but now as there are critical issues facing Agriculture in the Congress, I think becoming active for our way of life will be more important than ever. Because, even though our operations are different, I hope that you can tell that both the Pioneer Women and myself are passionate about our homes and farms or ranches in her case. We want our children to have access to this way of life and bills like the CAP and Trade, Immigration issues, and the EPA navigational waters act will affect how we can run our operations and how our families will be able to keep doing what we love. So, if you have a love for your land or like me - have fallen for a fella who has made you in turn change from a "organic loving high heel wearing" girl to well - whatever I am most days - a country doc with farm kids who have a T-ball game tonight... Get out and have an opinion
But, like Pioneer Woman, I have really come to respect my husbands love of our land and our farm and our children. Given my day job, my husband has had the job of being with our kids most days too. I went back to work with both of our youngest too when they were each three weeks old - and my Farmer feller took our daughter to work cattle the first day and then to the hay field then next. All of my children have been on our farm since they could walk. They know what a squeeze chute is for and when to stay out of fields while Daddy cuts hay. And they love to play in said hay till they get caught...
I think that I have talked alot in this blog about the importance of being political active but now as there are critical issues facing Agriculture in the Congress, I think becoming active for our way of life will be more important than ever. Because, even though our operations are different, I hope that you can tell that both the Pioneer Women and myself are passionate about our homes and farms or ranches in her case. We want our children to have access to this way of life and bills like the CAP and Trade, Immigration issues, and the EPA navigational waters act will affect how we can run our operations and how our families will be able to keep doing what we love. So, if you have a love for your land or like me - have fallen for a fella who has made you in turn change from a "organic loving high heel wearing" girl to well - whatever I am most days - a country doc with farm kids who have a T-ball game tonight... Get out and have an opinion
Friday, May 14, 2010
Organic or Hungry???
Attention Whole Foods Shoppers
Stop obsessing about arugula. Your "sustainable" mantra -- organic, local, and slow -- is no recipe for saving the world's hungry millions.
BY ROBERT PAARLBERG | MAY/JUNE 2010
From Whole Foods recyclable cloth bags to Michelle Obama's organic White House garden, modern eco-foodies are full of good intentions. We want to save the planet. Help local farmers. Fight climate change -- and childhood obesity, too. But though it's certainly a good thing to be thinking about global welfare while chopping our certified organic onions, the hope that we can help others by changing our shopping and eating habits is being wildly oversold to Western consumers. Food has become an elite preoccupation in the West, ironically, just as the most effective ways to address hunger in poor countries have fallen out of fashion.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An Ode to Farming: images from around the world.
Helping the world's poor feed themselves is no longer the rallying cry it once was. Food may be today's cause célèbre, but in the pampered West, that means trendy causes like making food "sustainable" -- in other words, organic, local, and slow. Appealing as that might sound, it is the wrong recipe for helping those who need it the most. Even our understanding of the global food problem is wrong these days, driven too much by the single issue of international prices. In April 2008, when the cost of rice for export had tripled in just six months and wheat reached its highest price in 28 years, a New York Times editorial branded this a "World Food Crisis." World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned that high food prices would be particularly damaging in poor countries, where "there is no margin for survival." Now that international rice prices are down 40 percent from their peak and wheat prices have fallen by more than half, we too quickly conclude that the crisis is over. Yet 850 million people in poor countries were chronically undernourished before the 2008 price spike, and the number is even larger now, thanks in part to last year's global recession. This is the real food crisis we face.
It turns out that food prices on the world market tell us very little about global hunger. International markets for food, like most other international markets, are used most heavily by the well-to-do, who are far from hungry. The majority of truly undernourished people -- 62 percent, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization -- live in either Africa or South Asia, and most are small farmers or rural landless laborers living in the countryside of Africa and South Asia. They are significantly shielded from global price fluctuations both by the trade policies of their own governments and by poor roads and infrastructure. In Africa, more than 70 percent of rural households are cut off from the closest urban markets because, for instance, they live more than a 30-minute walk from the nearest all-weather road.
Poverty -- caused by the low income productivity of farmers' labor -- is the primary source of hunger in Africa, and the problem is only getting worse. The number of "food insecure" people in Africa (those consuming less than 2,100 calories a day) will increase 30 percent over the next decade without significant reforms, to 645 million, the U.S. Agriculture Department projects.
What's so tragic about this is that we know from experience how to fix the problem. Wherever the rural poor have gained access to improved roads, modern seeds, less expensive fertilizer, electrical power, and better schools and clinics, their productivity and their income have increased. But recent efforts to deliver such essentials have been undercut by deeply misguided (if sometimes well-meaning) advocacy against agricultural modernization and foreign aid.
In Europe and the United States, a new line of thinking has emerged in elite circles that opposes bringing improved seeds and fertilizers to traditional farmers and opposes linking those farmers more closely to international markets. Influential food writers, advocates, and celebrity restaurant owners are repeating the mantra that "sustainable food" in the future must be organic, local, and slow. But guess what: Rural Africa already has such a system, and it doesn't work. Few smallholder farmers in Africa use any synthetic chemicals, so their food is de facto organic. High transportation costs force them to purchase and sell almost all of their food locally. And food preparation is painfully slow. The result is nothing to celebrate: average income levels of only $1 a day and a one-in-three chance of being malnourished.
If we are going to get serious about solving global hunger, we need to de-romanticize our view of preindustrial food and farming. And that means learning to appreciate the modern, science-intensive, and highly capitalized agricultural system we've developed in the West. Without it, our food would be more expensive and less safe. In other words, a lot like the hunger-plagued rest of the world.
Original Sins
Thirty years ago, had someone asserted in a prominent journal or newspaper that the Green Revolution was a failure, he or she would have been quickly dismissed. Today the charge is surprisingly common. Celebrity author and eco-activist Vandana Shiva claims the Green Revolution has brought nothing to India except "indebted and discontented farmers." A 2002 meeting in Rome of 500 prominent international NGOs, including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, even blamed the Green Revolution for the rise in world hunger. Let's set the record straight.
The development and introduction of high-yielding wheat and rice seeds into poor countries, led by American scientist Norman Borlaug and others in the 1960s and 70s, paid huge dividends. In Asia these new seeds lifted tens of millions of small farmers out of desperate poverty and finally ended the threat of periodic famine. India, for instance, doubled its wheat production between 1964 and 1970 and was able to terminate all dependence on international food aid by 1975. As for indebted and discontented farmers, India's rural poverty rate fell from 60 percent to just 27 percent today. Dismissing these great achievements as a "myth" (the official view of Food First, a California-based organization that campaigns globally against agricultural modernization) is just silly.
It's true that the story of the Green Revolution is not everywhere a happy one. When powerful new farming technologies are introduced into deeply unjust rural social systems, the poor tend to lose out. In Latin America, where access to good agricultural land and credit has been narrowly controlled by traditional elites, the improved seeds made available by the Green Revolution increased income gaps. Absentee landlords in Central America, who previously allowed peasants to plant subsistence crops on underutilized land, pushed them off to sell or rent the land to commercial growers who could turn a profit using the new seeds. Many of the displaced rural poor became slum dwellers. Yet even in Latin America, the prevalence of hunger declined more than 50 percent between 1980 and 2005.
In Asia, the Green Revolution seeds performed just as well on small nonmechanized farms as on larger farms. Wherever small farmers had sufficient access to credit, they took up the new technology just as quickly as big farmers, which led to dramatic income gains and no increase in inequality or social friction. Even poor landless laborers gained, because more abundant crops meant more work at harvest time, increasing rural wages. In Asia, the Green Revolution was good for both agriculture and social justice.
And Africa? Africa has a relatively equitable and secure distribution of land, making it more like Asia than Latin America and increasing the chances that improvements in farm technology will help the poor. If Africa were to put greater resources into farm technology, irrigation, and rural roads, small farmers would benefit.
Organic Myths
There are other common objections to doing what is necessary to solve the real hunger crisis. Most revolve around caveats that purist critics raise regarding food systems in the United States and Western Europe. Yet such concerns, though well-intentioned, are often misinformed and counterproductive -- especially when applied to the developing world.
Take industrial food systems, the current bugaboo of American food writers. Yes, they have many unappealing aspects, but without them food would be not only less abundant but also less safe. Traditional food systems lacking in reliable refrigeration and sanitary packaging are dangerous vectors for diseases. Surveys over the past several decades by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found that the U.S. food supply became steadily safer over time, thanks in part to the introduction of industrial-scale technical improvements. Since 2000, the incidence of E. coli contamination in beef has fallen 45 percent. Today in the United States, most hospitalizations and fatalities from unsafe food come not from sales of contaminated products at supermarkets, but from the mishandling or improper preparation of food inside the home. Illness outbreaks from contaminated foods sold in stores still occur, but the fatalities are typically quite limited. A nationwide scare over unsafe spinach in 2006 triggered the virtual suspension of all fresh and bagged spinach sales, but only three known deaths were recorded. Incidents such as these command attention in part because they are now so rare. Food Inc. should be criticized for filling our plates with too many foods that are unhealthy, but not foods that are unsafe.
Where industrial-scale food technologies have not yet reached into the developing world, contaminated food remains a major risk. In Africa, where many foods are still purchased in open-air markets (often uninspected, unpackaged, unlabeled, unrefrigerated, unpasteurized, and unwashed), an estimated 700,000 people die every year from food- and water-borne diseases, compared with an estimated 5,000 in the United States.
Food grown organically -- that is, without any synthetic nitrogen fertilizers or pesticides -- is not an answer to the health and safety issues. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition last year published a study of 162 scientific papers from the past 50 years on the health benefits of organically grown foods and found no nutritional advantage over conventionally grown foods. According to the Mayo Clinic, "No conclusive evidence shows that organic food is more nutritious than is conventionally grown food."
Health professionals also reject the claim that organic food is safer to eat due to lower pesticide residues. Food and Drug Administration surveys have revealed that the highest dietary exposures to pesticide residues on foods in the United States are so trivial (less than one one-thousandth of a level that would cause toxicity) that the safety gains from buying organic are insignificant. Pesticide exposures remain a serious problem in the developing world, where farm chemical use is not as well regulated, yet even there they are more an occupational risk for unprotected farmworkers than a residue risk for food consumers.
When it comes to protecting the environment, assessments of organic farming become more complex. Excess nitrogen fertilizer use on conventional farms in the United States has polluted rivers and created a "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, but halting synthetic nitrogen fertilizer use entirely (as farmers must do in the United States to get organic certification from the Agriculture Department) would cause environmental problems far worse.
Here's why: Less than 1 percent of American cropland is under certified organic production. If the other 99 percent were to switch to organic and had to fertilize crops without any synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, that would require a lot more composted animal manure. To supply enough organic fertilizer, the U.S. cattle population would have to increase roughly fivefold. And because those animals would have to be raised organically on forage crops, much of the land in the lower 48 states would need to be converted to pasture. Organic field crops also have lower yields per hectare. If Europe tried to feed itself organically, it would need an additional 28 million hectares of cropland, equal to all of the remaining forest cover in France, Germany, Britain, and Denmark combined.
Mass deforestation probably isn't what organic advocates intend. The smart way to protect against nitrogen runoff is to reduce synthetic fertilizer applications with taxes, regulations, and cuts in farm subsidies, but not try to go all the way to zero as required by the official organic standard. Scaling up registered organic farming would be on balance harmful, not helpful, to the natural environment.
Not only is organic farming less friendly to the environment than assumed, but modern conventional farming is becoming significantly more sustainable. High-tech farming in rich countries today is far safer for the environment, per bushel of production, than it was in the 1960s, when Rachel Carson criticized the indiscriminate farm use of DDT in her environmental classic, Silent Spring. Thanks in part to Carson's devastating critique, that era's most damaging insecticides were banned and replaced by chemicals that could be applied in lower volume and were less persistent in the environment. Chemical use in American agriculture peaked soon thereafter, in 1973. This was a major victory for environmental advocacy.
And it was just the beginning of what has continued as a significant greening of modern farming in the United States. Soil erosion on farms dropped sharply in the 1970s with the introduction of "no-till" seed planting, an innovation that also reduced dependence on diesel fuel because fields no longer had to be plowed every spring. Farmers then began conserving water by moving to drip irrigation and by leveling their fields with lasers to minimize wasteful runoff. In the 1990s, GPS equipment was added to tractors, autosteering the machines in straighter paths and telling farmers exactly where they were in the field to within one square meter, allowing precise adjustments in chemical use. Infrared sensors were brought in to detect the greenness of the crop, telling a farmer exactly how much more (or less) nitrogen might be needed as the growing season went forward. To reduce wasteful nitrogen use, equipment was developed that can insert fertilizers into the ground at exactly the depth needed and in perfect rows, only where it will be taken up by the plant roots.
These "precision farming" techniques have significantly reduced the environmental footprint of modern agriculture relative to the quantity of food being produced. In 2008, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published a review of the "environmental performance of agriculture" in the world's 30 most advanced industrial countries -- those with the most highly capitalized and science-intensive farming systems. The results showed that between 1990 and 2004, food production in these countries continued to increase (by 5 percent in volume), yet adverse environmental impacts were reduced in every category. The land area taken up by farming declined 4 percent, soil erosion from both wind and water fell, gross greenhouse gas emissions from farming declined 3 percent, and excessive nitrogen fertilizer use fell 17 percent. Biodiversity also improved, as increased numbers of crop varieties and livestock breeds came into use.
Seeding the Future
Africa faces a food crisis, but it's not because the continent's population is growing faster than its potential to produce food, as vintage Malthusians such as environmental advocate Lester Brown and advocacy organizations such as Population Action International would have it. Food production in Africa is vastly less than the region's known potential, and that is why so many millions are going hungry there. African farmers still use almost no fertilizer; only 4 percent of cropland has been improved with irrigation; and most of the continent's cropped area is not planted with seeds improved through scientific plant breeding, so cereal yields are only a fraction of what they could be. Africa is failing to keep up with population growth not because it has exhausted its potential, but instead because too little has been invested in reaching that potential.
One reason for this failure has been sharply diminished assistance from international donors. When agricultural modernization went out of fashion among elites in the developed world beginning in the 1980s, development assistance to farming in poor countries collapsed. Per capita food production in Africa was declining during the 1980s and 1990s and the number of hungry people on the continent was doubling, but the U.S. response was to withdraw development assistance and simply ship more food aid to Africa. Food aid doesn't help farmers become more productive -- and it can create long-term dependency. But in recent years, the dollar value of U.S. food aid to Africa has reached 20 times the dollar value of agricultural development assistance.
The alternative is right in front of us. Foreign assistance to support agricultural improvements has a strong record of success, when undertaken with purpose. In the 1960s, international assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and donor governments led by the United States made Asia's original Green Revolution possible. U.S. assistance to India provided critical help in improving agricultural education, launching a successful agricultural extension service, and funding advanced degrees for Indian agricultural specialists at universities in the United States. The U.S. Agency for International Development, with the World Bank, helped finance fertilizer plants and infrastructure projects, including rural roads and irrigation. India could not have done this on its own -- the country was on the brink of famine at the time and dangerously dependent on food aid. But instead of suffering a famine in 1975, as some naysayers had predicted, India that year celebrated a final and permanent end to its need for food aid.
Foreign assistance to farming has been a high-payoff investment everywhere, including Africa. The World Bank has documented average rates of return on investments in agricultural research in Africa of 35 percent a year, accompanied by significant reductions in poverty. Some research investments in African agriculture have brought rates of return estimated at 68 percent. Blind to these realities, the United States cut its assistance to agricultural research in Africa 77 percent between 1980 and 2006.
When it comes to Africa's growing hunger, governments in rich countries face a stark choice: They can decide to support a steady new infusion of financial and technical assistance to help local governments and farmers become more productive, or they can take a "worry later" approach and be forced to address hunger problems with increasingly expensive shipments of food aid. Development skeptics and farm modernization critics keep pushing us toward this unappealing second path. It's time for leaders with vision and political courage to push back.
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Looks like I have too much time on my hands on a Friday Night, but given how I used to rant and rave about "organic" foods in this house, a big part of me feels I owe it too my farmer friends to post this very well writen article by a Harverd University Associate Political Science professor... he so much more sounds like he knows what he is talking about. But, it is true, there are more and more people and if we as a world society do not embrace modern production techniques, people will continue to starve. You cannot feed 50 billion on organic production. And yes, I still like to buy my local organic strawberries but we should have room for both without the exclusion of either in agriculture. But foodies and chefs need to be made to see the benifits found in modern sustainable agriculture.
Stop obsessing about arugula. Your "sustainable" mantra -- organic, local, and slow -- is no recipe for saving the world's hungry millions.
BY ROBERT PAARLBERG | MAY/JUNE 2010
From Whole Foods recyclable cloth bags to Michelle Obama's organic White House garden, modern eco-foodies are full of good intentions. We want to save the planet. Help local farmers. Fight climate change -- and childhood obesity, too. But though it's certainly a good thing to be thinking about global welfare while chopping our certified organic onions, the hope that we can help others by changing our shopping and eating habits is being wildly oversold to Western consumers. Food has become an elite preoccupation in the West, ironically, just as the most effective ways to address hunger in poor countries have fallen out of fashion.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An Ode to Farming: images from around the world.
Helping the world's poor feed themselves is no longer the rallying cry it once was. Food may be today's cause célèbre, but in the pampered West, that means trendy causes like making food "sustainable" -- in other words, organic, local, and slow. Appealing as that might sound, it is the wrong recipe for helping those who need it the most. Even our understanding of the global food problem is wrong these days, driven too much by the single issue of international prices. In April 2008, when the cost of rice for export had tripled in just six months and wheat reached its highest price in 28 years, a New York Times editorial branded this a "World Food Crisis." World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned that high food prices would be particularly damaging in poor countries, where "there is no margin for survival." Now that international rice prices are down 40 percent from their peak and wheat prices have fallen by more than half, we too quickly conclude that the crisis is over. Yet 850 million people in poor countries were chronically undernourished before the 2008 price spike, and the number is even larger now, thanks in part to last year's global recession. This is the real food crisis we face.
It turns out that food prices on the world market tell us very little about global hunger. International markets for food, like most other international markets, are used most heavily by the well-to-do, who are far from hungry. The majority of truly undernourished people -- 62 percent, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization -- live in either Africa or South Asia, and most are small farmers or rural landless laborers living in the countryside of Africa and South Asia. They are significantly shielded from global price fluctuations both by the trade policies of their own governments and by poor roads and infrastructure. In Africa, more than 70 percent of rural households are cut off from the closest urban markets because, for instance, they live more than a 30-minute walk from the nearest all-weather road.
Poverty -- caused by the low income productivity of farmers' labor -- is the primary source of hunger in Africa, and the problem is only getting worse. The number of "food insecure" people in Africa (those consuming less than 2,100 calories a day) will increase 30 percent over the next decade without significant reforms, to 645 million, the U.S. Agriculture Department projects.
What's so tragic about this is that we know from experience how to fix the problem. Wherever the rural poor have gained access to improved roads, modern seeds, less expensive fertilizer, electrical power, and better schools and clinics, their productivity and their income have increased. But recent efforts to deliver such essentials have been undercut by deeply misguided (if sometimes well-meaning) advocacy against agricultural modernization and foreign aid.
In Europe and the United States, a new line of thinking has emerged in elite circles that opposes bringing improved seeds and fertilizers to traditional farmers and opposes linking those farmers more closely to international markets. Influential food writers, advocates, and celebrity restaurant owners are repeating the mantra that "sustainable food" in the future must be organic, local, and slow. But guess what: Rural Africa already has such a system, and it doesn't work. Few smallholder farmers in Africa use any synthetic chemicals, so their food is de facto organic. High transportation costs force them to purchase and sell almost all of their food locally. And food preparation is painfully slow. The result is nothing to celebrate: average income levels of only $1 a day and a one-in-three chance of being malnourished.
If we are going to get serious about solving global hunger, we need to de-romanticize our view of preindustrial food and farming. And that means learning to appreciate the modern, science-intensive, and highly capitalized agricultural system we've developed in the West. Without it, our food would be more expensive and less safe. In other words, a lot like the hunger-plagued rest of the world.
Original Sins
Thirty years ago, had someone asserted in a prominent journal or newspaper that the Green Revolution was a failure, he or she would have been quickly dismissed. Today the charge is surprisingly common. Celebrity author and eco-activist Vandana Shiva claims the Green Revolution has brought nothing to India except "indebted and discontented farmers." A 2002 meeting in Rome of 500 prominent international NGOs, including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, even blamed the Green Revolution for the rise in world hunger. Let's set the record straight.
The development and introduction of high-yielding wheat and rice seeds into poor countries, led by American scientist Norman Borlaug and others in the 1960s and 70s, paid huge dividends. In Asia these new seeds lifted tens of millions of small farmers out of desperate poverty and finally ended the threat of periodic famine. India, for instance, doubled its wheat production between 1964 and 1970 and was able to terminate all dependence on international food aid by 1975. As for indebted and discontented farmers, India's rural poverty rate fell from 60 percent to just 27 percent today. Dismissing these great achievements as a "myth" (the official view of Food First, a California-based organization that campaigns globally against agricultural modernization) is just silly.
It's true that the story of the Green Revolution is not everywhere a happy one. When powerful new farming technologies are introduced into deeply unjust rural social systems, the poor tend to lose out. In Latin America, where access to good agricultural land and credit has been narrowly controlled by traditional elites, the improved seeds made available by the Green Revolution increased income gaps. Absentee landlords in Central America, who previously allowed peasants to plant subsistence crops on underutilized land, pushed them off to sell or rent the land to commercial growers who could turn a profit using the new seeds. Many of the displaced rural poor became slum dwellers. Yet even in Latin America, the prevalence of hunger declined more than 50 percent between 1980 and 2005.
In Asia, the Green Revolution seeds performed just as well on small nonmechanized farms as on larger farms. Wherever small farmers had sufficient access to credit, they took up the new technology just as quickly as big farmers, which led to dramatic income gains and no increase in inequality or social friction. Even poor landless laborers gained, because more abundant crops meant more work at harvest time, increasing rural wages. In Asia, the Green Revolution was good for both agriculture and social justice.
And Africa? Africa has a relatively equitable and secure distribution of land, making it more like Asia than Latin America and increasing the chances that improvements in farm technology will help the poor. If Africa were to put greater resources into farm technology, irrigation, and rural roads, small farmers would benefit.
Organic Myths
There are other common objections to doing what is necessary to solve the real hunger crisis. Most revolve around caveats that purist critics raise regarding food systems in the United States and Western Europe. Yet such concerns, though well-intentioned, are often misinformed and counterproductive -- especially when applied to the developing world.
Take industrial food systems, the current bugaboo of American food writers. Yes, they have many unappealing aspects, but without them food would be not only less abundant but also less safe. Traditional food systems lacking in reliable refrigeration and sanitary packaging are dangerous vectors for diseases. Surveys over the past several decades by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found that the U.S. food supply became steadily safer over time, thanks in part to the introduction of industrial-scale technical improvements. Since 2000, the incidence of E. coli contamination in beef has fallen 45 percent. Today in the United States, most hospitalizations and fatalities from unsafe food come not from sales of contaminated products at supermarkets, but from the mishandling or improper preparation of food inside the home. Illness outbreaks from contaminated foods sold in stores still occur, but the fatalities are typically quite limited. A nationwide scare over unsafe spinach in 2006 triggered the virtual suspension of all fresh and bagged spinach sales, but only three known deaths were recorded. Incidents such as these command attention in part because they are now so rare. Food Inc. should be criticized for filling our plates with too many foods that are unhealthy, but not foods that are unsafe.
Where industrial-scale food technologies have not yet reached into the developing world, contaminated food remains a major risk. In Africa, where many foods are still purchased in open-air markets (often uninspected, unpackaged, unlabeled, unrefrigerated, unpasteurized, and unwashed), an estimated 700,000 people die every year from food- and water-borne diseases, compared with an estimated 5,000 in the United States.
Food grown organically -- that is, without any synthetic nitrogen fertilizers or pesticides -- is not an answer to the health and safety issues. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition last year published a study of 162 scientific papers from the past 50 years on the health benefits of organically grown foods and found no nutritional advantage over conventionally grown foods. According to the Mayo Clinic, "No conclusive evidence shows that organic food is more nutritious than is conventionally grown food."
Health professionals also reject the claim that organic food is safer to eat due to lower pesticide residues. Food and Drug Administration surveys have revealed that the highest dietary exposures to pesticide residues on foods in the United States are so trivial (less than one one-thousandth of a level that would cause toxicity) that the safety gains from buying organic are insignificant. Pesticide exposures remain a serious problem in the developing world, where farm chemical use is not as well regulated, yet even there they are more an occupational risk for unprotected farmworkers than a residue risk for food consumers.
When it comes to protecting the environment, assessments of organic farming become more complex. Excess nitrogen fertilizer use on conventional farms in the United States has polluted rivers and created a "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, but halting synthetic nitrogen fertilizer use entirely (as farmers must do in the United States to get organic certification from the Agriculture Department) would cause environmental problems far worse.
Here's why: Less than 1 percent of American cropland is under certified organic production. If the other 99 percent were to switch to organic and had to fertilize crops without any synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, that would require a lot more composted animal manure. To supply enough organic fertilizer, the U.S. cattle population would have to increase roughly fivefold. And because those animals would have to be raised organically on forage crops, much of the land in the lower 48 states would need to be converted to pasture. Organic field crops also have lower yields per hectare. If Europe tried to feed itself organically, it would need an additional 28 million hectares of cropland, equal to all of the remaining forest cover in France, Germany, Britain, and Denmark combined.
Mass deforestation probably isn't what organic advocates intend. The smart way to protect against nitrogen runoff is to reduce synthetic fertilizer applications with taxes, regulations, and cuts in farm subsidies, but not try to go all the way to zero as required by the official organic standard. Scaling up registered organic farming would be on balance harmful, not helpful, to the natural environment.
Not only is organic farming less friendly to the environment than assumed, but modern conventional farming is becoming significantly more sustainable. High-tech farming in rich countries today is far safer for the environment, per bushel of production, than it was in the 1960s, when Rachel Carson criticized the indiscriminate farm use of DDT in her environmental classic, Silent Spring. Thanks in part to Carson's devastating critique, that era's most damaging insecticides were banned and replaced by chemicals that could be applied in lower volume and were less persistent in the environment. Chemical use in American agriculture peaked soon thereafter, in 1973. This was a major victory for environmental advocacy.
And it was just the beginning of what has continued as a significant greening of modern farming in the United States. Soil erosion on farms dropped sharply in the 1970s with the introduction of "no-till" seed planting, an innovation that also reduced dependence on diesel fuel because fields no longer had to be plowed every spring. Farmers then began conserving water by moving to drip irrigation and by leveling their fields with lasers to minimize wasteful runoff. In the 1990s, GPS equipment was added to tractors, autosteering the machines in straighter paths and telling farmers exactly where they were in the field to within one square meter, allowing precise adjustments in chemical use. Infrared sensors were brought in to detect the greenness of the crop, telling a farmer exactly how much more (or less) nitrogen might be needed as the growing season went forward. To reduce wasteful nitrogen use, equipment was developed that can insert fertilizers into the ground at exactly the depth needed and in perfect rows, only where it will be taken up by the plant roots.
These "precision farming" techniques have significantly reduced the environmental footprint of modern agriculture relative to the quantity of food being produced. In 2008, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published a review of the "environmental performance of agriculture" in the world's 30 most advanced industrial countries -- those with the most highly capitalized and science-intensive farming systems. The results showed that between 1990 and 2004, food production in these countries continued to increase (by 5 percent in volume), yet adverse environmental impacts were reduced in every category. The land area taken up by farming declined 4 percent, soil erosion from both wind and water fell, gross greenhouse gas emissions from farming declined 3 percent, and excessive nitrogen fertilizer use fell 17 percent. Biodiversity also improved, as increased numbers of crop varieties and livestock breeds came into use.
Seeding the Future
Africa faces a food crisis, but it's not because the continent's population is growing faster than its potential to produce food, as vintage Malthusians such as environmental advocate Lester Brown and advocacy organizations such as Population Action International would have it. Food production in Africa is vastly less than the region's known potential, and that is why so many millions are going hungry there. African farmers still use almost no fertilizer; only 4 percent of cropland has been improved with irrigation; and most of the continent's cropped area is not planted with seeds improved through scientific plant breeding, so cereal yields are only a fraction of what they could be. Africa is failing to keep up with population growth not because it has exhausted its potential, but instead because too little has been invested in reaching that potential.
One reason for this failure has been sharply diminished assistance from international donors. When agricultural modernization went out of fashion among elites in the developed world beginning in the 1980s, development assistance to farming in poor countries collapsed. Per capita food production in Africa was declining during the 1980s and 1990s and the number of hungry people on the continent was doubling, but the U.S. response was to withdraw development assistance and simply ship more food aid to Africa. Food aid doesn't help farmers become more productive -- and it can create long-term dependency. But in recent years, the dollar value of U.S. food aid to Africa has reached 20 times the dollar value of agricultural development assistance.
The alternative is right in front of us. Foreign assistance to support agricultural improvements has a strong record of success, when undertaken with purpose. In the 1960s, international assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and donor governments led by the United States made Asia's original Green Revolution possible. U.S. assistance to India provided critical help in improving agricultural education, launching a successful agricultural extension service, and funding advanced degrees for Indian agricultural specialists at universities in the United States. The U.S. Agency for International Development, with the World Bank, helped finance fertilizer plants and infrastructure projects, including rural roads and irrigation. India could not have done this on its own -- the country was on the brink of famine at the time and dangerously dependent on food aid. But instead of suffering a famine in 1975, as some naysayers had predicted, India that year celebrated a final and permanent end to its need for food aid.
Foreign assistance to farming has been a high-payoff investment everywhere, including Africa. The World Bank has documented average rates of return on investments in agricultural research in Africa of 35 percent a year, accompanied by significant reductions in poverty. Some research investments in African agriculture have brought rates of return estimated at 68 percent. Blind to these realities, the United States cut its assistance to agricultural research in Africa 77 percent between 1980 and 2006.
When it comes to Africa's growing hunger, governments in rich countries face a stark choice: They can decide to support a steady new infusion of financial and technical assistance to help local governments and farmers become more productive, or they can take a "worry later" approach and be forced to address hunger problems with increasingly expensive shipments of food aid. Development skeptics and farm modernization critics keep pushing us toward this unappealing second path. It's time for leaders with vision and political courage to push back.
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Looks like I have too much time on my hands on a Friday Night, but given how I used to rant and rave about "organic" foods in this house, a big part of me feels I owe it too my farmer friends to post this very well writen article by a Harverd University Associate Political Science professor... he so much more sounds like he knows what he is talking about. But, it is true, there are more and more people and if we as a world society do not embrace modern production techniques, people will continue to starve. You cannot feed 50 billion on organic production. And yes, I still like to buy my local organic strawberries but we should have room for both without the exclusion of either in agriculture. But foodies and chefs need to be made to see the benifits found in modern sustainable agriculture.
Can We Talk?
Can We Talk?
By Cyndie Sirekis
A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle (“Battle Over Slow Food Heats up in Heartland“) highlighted our nation’s agricultural diversity. The article illustrated how the “tiny but fast-growing” number of farms that sell local and grow organic food contrast with “commodity farms that make up the great bulk of production and sell into a global food chain.”
The closing quote of the article, by California dairy farmer Ray Prock Jr., cut to the heart of much of the discord in the farming and ranching community today and even offered a solution.
“Instead of automatically thinking conventional ag is the enemy, and instead of conventional ag always thinking that organic and local food is the enemy, we need to sit down and figure out where we can work together,” Prock said.
Fortunately for Prock and others who are like-minded, addressing erroneous beliefs that have led some to think of any form of agriculture as “the enemy” got a little easier with the recent release of the latest National Resources Inventory report from the Agriculture Department’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. The NRI is a compilation of a broad range of 50 years of data related to the environment, U.S. land use and productivity, water consumption and many other factors.
The massive NRI survey results clearly show that farmers and ranchers are careful and caring stewards of our nation’s natural resources. They are producing more food using fewer resources. In fact, farm and ranch productivity has increased over the past two and a half decades, while at the same time environmental performance and water quality have been improving.
The shrinking environmental footprint of food and fiber production in the United States is the envy of the world. A few key examples from the NRI survey tell the story.
While farm and ranch productivity has increased dramatically since 1950, the use of resources (labor, seeds, feed, fertilizer, etc.) required for production has declined markedly. In 2008, farmers used 2 percent fewer inputs while producing 262 percent more food, compared to 1950.
Dairy cow milk production on farms operated by Prock and his fellow producers has become more efficient since 1980. The pounds of feed (grain, forage and so on) each cow needs to consume to produce 100 pounds of milk has decreased by more than 40 percent on average in the last 30 years.
Since 1982, U.S. land used for crops has declined by 70 million acres. Conservation tillage, a way of farming that reduces erosion (soil loss) on cropland while using less energy, has grown from 17 percent of land area (acres) in 1982 to 63 percent currently.
Careful stewardship by America’s food producers spurred a nearly 50 percent decline in erosion of cropland by wind and water since 1982.
Fifty years of data tells the story—farm and ranch families, most of whom fall under the “conventional ag” umbrella, care for our natural resources while feeding our nation. Let’s not let another 50 years go by without making Prock’s plea for civil discourse among all types of food producers a reality.
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See, there are good things that the American Farmer is doing for you and for me.
By Cyndie Sirekis
A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle (“Battle Over Slow Food Heats up in Heartland“) highlighted our nation’s agricultural diversity. The article illustrated how the “tiny but fast-growing” number of farms that sell local and grow organic food contrast with “commodity farms that make up the great bulk of production and sell into a global food chain.”
The closing quote of the article, by California dairy farmer Ray Prock Jr., cut to the heart of much of the discord in the farming and ranching community today and even offered a solution.
“Instead of automatically thinking conventional ag is the enemy, and instead of conventional ag always thinking that organic and local food is the enemy, we need to sit down and figure out where we can work together,” Prock said.
Fortunately for Prock and others who are like-minded, addressing erroneous beliefs that have led some to think of any form of agriculture as “the enemy” got a little easier with the recent release of the latest National Resources Inventory report from the Agriculture Department’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. The NRI is a compilation of a broad range of 50 years of data related to the environment, U.S. land use and productivity, water consumption and many other factors.
The massive NRI survey results clearly show that farmers and ranchers are careful and caring stewards of our nation’s natural resources. They are producing more food using fewer resources. In fact, farm and ranch productivity has increased over the past two and a half decades, while at the same time environmental performance and water quality have been improving.
The shrinking environmental footprint of food and fiber production in the United States is the envy of the world. A few key examples from the NRI survey tell the story.
While farm and ranch productivity has increased dramatically since 1950, the use of resources (labor, seeds, feed, fertilizer, etc.) required for production has declined markedly. In 2008, farmers used 2 percent fewer inputs while producing 262 percent more food, compared to 1950.
Dairy cow milk production on farms operated by Prock and his fellow producers has become more efficient since 1980. The pounds of feed (grain, forage and so on) each cow needs to consume to produce 100 pounds of milk has decreased by more than 40 percent on average in the last 30 years.
Since 1982, U.S. land used for crops has declined by 70 million acres. Conservation tillage, a way of farming that reduces erosion (soil loss) on cropland while using less energy, has grown from 17 percent of land area (acres) in 1982 to 63 percent currently.
Careful stewardship by America’s food producers spurred a nearly 50 percent decline in erosion of cropland by wind and water since 1982.
Fifty years of data tells the story—farm and ranch families, most of whom fall under the “conventional ag” umbrella, care for our natural resources while feeding our nation. Let’s not let another 50 years go by without making Prock’s plea for civil discourse among all types of food producers a reality.
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See, there are good things that the American Farmer is doing for you and for me.
Thoughts on American Agriculture
Farmers are Putting the ‘Skinny’ in Production
Today’s farmers and ranchers grow more food with fewer resources. Conservation tillage is up and soil erosion is declining. As farmers and ranchers, we know this based on our experience. Now, a new report confirms this has occurred nationwide.
The 2010 National Resources Inventory (NRI) recently released by the Agriculture Department’s Natural Resources Conservation Service shows that farmers and ranchers are careful and caring stewards of our nation’s natural resources. The massive report, coupled with the latest USDA productivity figures, confirms the shrinking environmental footprint of our efforts to produce food and fiber in the United States. This is good news that should not go unreported.
A Lot Can Happen in 60 Years
The NRI is a compilation of a broad range of 50 years of data related to the environment, U.S. land use and productivity, water consumption and many other factors. Careful analysis of the data by AFBF quantifies how farm and ranch productivity has increased over the past two and a half decades, while at the same time environmental performance and water quality have improved.
There are several major points from the survey that I think tell a compelling story about agriculture.
First off, today’s farmers produce more food with fewer resources. While farm and ranch productivity has increased dramatically since 1950, the use of resources (labor, seeds, feed, fertilizer, etc.) required for production has declined markedly. For example, in 2008 farmers produced 262 percent more food with 2 percent fewer inputs, compared with 1950.
Secondly, farmers can feed more people thanks to the miracle of productivity. Total U.S. crop yield has increased more than 360 percent since 1950, helping America’s farmers and ranchers do our part to feed a growing world.
What Makes a Happy Cow?
Additional points of importance include how America’s dairy farmers are producing more milk with less feed. It takes 40 percent less feed for a cow to produce 100 pounds of milk than it did 30 years ago.
Further, U.S. farm land used for crops has declined by 70 million acres or 15 percent, since 1982. And soil erosion continues to decline. Careful stewardship by America’s food producers spurred a nearly 50 percent decline in erosion of cropland by wind and water since 1982.
These facts, based on in-the-field science, are worth sharing. Farm and ranch families today are caring for our natural resources while feeding our nation. In fact, we are doing so with greater efficiency than ever before. I guess you could say we are cutting the fat and putting the “skinny” in production. Any way you slice it, that makes sense for people and our planet.
Bob Stallman, President
American Farm Bureau Federation
I just got this information and thought this is good news about American Famrers and I wants to share it with the rest of you. I know that very often the media makes an effort to labile American Farmers as factory farmers but please remember, farmers are the original animal rights personal and environmental stewards. Our Animals are our means of production an we want to take the best care of them we can, and without our land we have nothing with which to grow our crops. Depending on the data you find less than 2-6% of all farms in America are a Factory farm - most are people like my family, working hard to put a good product out for your family and mine...
So, if you eat, THANK A FARMER!!!
Today’s farmers and ranchers grow more food with fewer resources. Conservation tillage is up and soil erosion is declining. As farmers and ranchers, we know this based on our experience. Now, a new report confirms this has occurred nationwide.
The 2010 National Resources Inventory (NRI) recently released by the Agriculture Department’s Natural Resources Conservation Service shows that farmers and ranchers are careful and caring stewards of our nation’s natural resources. The massive report, coupled with the latest USDA productivity figures, confirms the shrinking environmental footprint of our efforts to produce food and fiber in the United States. This is good news that should not go unreported.
A Lot Can Happen in 60 Years
The NRI is a compilation of a broad range of 50 years of data related to the environment, U.S. land use and productivity, water consumption and many other factors. Careful analysis of the data by AFBF quantifies how farm and ranch productivity has increased over the past two and a half decades, while at the same time environmental performance and water quality have improved.
There are several major points from the survey that I think tell a compelling story about agriculture.
First off, today’s farmers produce more food with fewer resources. While farm and ranch productivity has increased dramatically since 1950, the use of resources (labor, seeds, feed, fertilizer, etc.) required for production has declined markedly. For example, in 2008 farmers produced 262 percent more food with 2 percent fewer inputs, compared with 1950.
Secondly, farmers can feed more people thanks to the miracle of productivity. Total U.S. crop yield has increased more than 360 percent since 1950, helping America’s farmers and ranchers do our part to feed a growing world.
What Makes a Happy Cow?
Additional points of importance include how America’s dairy farmers are producing more milk with less feed. It takes 40 percent less feed for a cow to produce 100 pounds of milk than it did 30 years ago.
Further, U.S. farm land used for crops has declined by 70 million acres or 15 percent, since 1982. And soil erosion continues to decline. Careful stewardship by America’s food producers spurred a nearly 50 percent decline in erosion of cropland by wind and water since 1982.
These facts, based on in-the-field science, are worth sharing. Farm and ranch families today are caring for our natural resources while feeding our nation. In fact, we are doing so with greater efficiency than ever before. I guess you could say we are cutting the fat and putting the “skinny” in production. Any way you slice it, that makes sense for people and our planet.
Bob Stallman, President
American Farm Bureau Federation
I just got this information and thought this is good news about American Famrers and I wants to share it with the rest of you. I know that very often the media makes an effort to labile American Farmers as factory farmers but please remember, farmers are the original animal rights personal and environmental stewards. Our Animals are our means of production an we want to take the best care of them we can, and without our land we have nothing with which to grow our crops. Depending on the data you find less than 2-6% of all farms in America are a Factory farm - most are people like my family, working hard to put a good product out for your family and mine...
So, if you eat, THANK A FARMER!!!
Thursday, May 13, 2010
More life from Rural America
Again, sitting here, thinking that life is really a funny kinda thing... Been to work this week... been a patient again myself and still cannot find it in myself to like that. I love being the caregiver but not taking the care giving. Thought I would sit here and tell y'all more about myself tonight and where I come from. See, aside from the one funny story and the fact that I like to encourage people to become more active in our political system about whatever their passions are... (my husband calls it something else that I won't put on here in case any kids happen to read this... rhymes with witch... Haha)
Well, lets see... I was born in a rural county in upper Middle Tennessee. If you have read my other blogs, you would know that I came from a more cityfied county being as we had stoplights and traffic lights growing up. I was always known in the county, well even in three or four counties actually growing up for who I belonged too. If you have never lived in the south or been around a Southerner this may seem like an odd turn of phrase to you, but I was the granddaughter a "THE VET" for most of the upper middle Tennessee area - people even brought Thoroughbred race horses from Lexington, KY, for my Grandpa to fix but to me he was just my Pa Doc purveyor of Barbies and grill cheese sandwiches on Saturday afternoons for as far back as I can remember. If people did not know him, then they know my Pa Pa Honey - my Mom's Dad was a retired military man with a talent for fixen things - anything - he had ran the local BP station with my Uncle Ray till he started working with my Pa Doc at the Vet office - I was a lucky little girl - one stop two Grandpa's spoiling me... Then of course people would know Pa Honey's wife Lyndell... I always called her Lyndell - she was the elementary school's PE teacher my entire time at Livingston Elementary - makes being bad at school difficult if every teacher there is a friend of your Grandmothers... or lastly they might know my Mema (Pa Doc's Wife) she was the social butterfly of the group and in as much as our county had a social calender she was on it. Of course, you may ask, what about my parents... my Dad did several things on and off for years before he got his Vet degree and went to work with my Pa in 1986 and my Mom - my unofficial hero - even if she cannot control her temper - was a nurse at our hometown hospital and she and my two uncles ran a motel in town and the town's video store.
See what I mean about everybody knowing me... plus these family members that I am telling you about come from large families. My Pa Doc was one of 14, My Lyndel was one of six, Pa Honey one of 5, and they all had 3-4 kids each, so I grew up being surrounded by and related too my town. But that was and still is small town life.
I am proud of the fact that to this day, my church makes an effort not only to pray about the elderly and ill in our congregation, but to make sure that they get the food they need and the errands run if needed. Yes, this type of small town living makes certain parts of my job difficult like when patients tell me to tell that Husband of mine "hello" and I have to remind them I can't... but I digress, I was telling you all about me and my life 30 years ago...
I was the oldest of two children and if you listen to people who will tell you, I was a precocious child who never stopped asking why - I guess that means I never shut up, so my Mom found a private one room school in Alpine for me when I was three years old. I was in Kindergarten full time and loving every minute of it, I would read and do math and since it was a one room school... I was kinda the class pet and would learn whatever anyone wanted to teach me. But, when they wanted to push me into 2nd grade work at 4 - Mom and her Mom, Lyndell, freaked out a bit and put me in regular school, where I was bored out of my mind. There was this room full of kids still learning colors and I had been reading books. I still remember when the teacher sent a note home asking my Mom to come in so she could speak with her. It turns out that my 1rst grade teacher thought I was slow cause I was not paying attention to my work and wanted me tested to see if I needed to be in school at all (I was barely four at that point). It took my Lyndell to convince her I was not slow but bored. They got me some books from 2nd grade, I think, and I read the rest of the year.
I graduated the youngest and tallest girl in my class from high school. The next day after my High School Graduation, I started summer school as a sophomore at college - seems several years in public school did not get rid of my inner geek after all. I am not proud of this - this is just how I am. I spent many a lonely night in high school cause nobody ever called and I was too busy studying or working to realize that maybe I should take some time off to be a kid. I got called many a name and the sad thing is I never tried with scholastics in high school - not once do I ever remember studying like I should have - I didn't even try to be Valedictorian or that other word I cannot spell. Don't get me wrong I did OK - ranked third - but I never ever remember studying in my life till I hit medical school and yes that counts college. I did not even know how - but boy was medical school a wake up on the fact that I was not the smartest person in the room anymore and if I was going to make it I had better work my butt off...
I guess the other two things that have made me who I am today is the fact that my Mom got very sick with an illness few people understand and it nearly killed her when I was a freshman in high school and the fact that my Farmer felling love with this geek and married me even with all my crazy ambitions.
My Mom has systemic lupus errythematosis with renal involvement - I can still remember the Fellow at Vanderbilt Medical School telling a scared 12-13 year old me to "wise up kid, you Mom is going to die", now do you wonder why I refused to train there... Mom did not die, but for the better part of my high school years she was too sick to do very much. My Dad started working for the USDA and was gone away from home for weeks at a time, so I was qualified for a hardship license to drive. I would get my Brother and I ready for school, drive us there, pick him up, take him home, go to work, grocery shop, pay bills, do laundry/dishes/clean, and take care of my Mom - often I slept on the living room floor so I could help her back and forth to the bathroom in our home. Money was always tight it seemed, I did not realize then that my parents were not the best at fiances, and I always may sure my brother did not do without. I remember going without lunch cause I "was not hungry" when in reality there was no money to eat with. Why didn't I ask a grown up for help - well by then my Pa Doc was dead to lung cancer and I was too proud and stubborn to tell my Lyndell - she already bought most of my and my brother's clothes. Its just one of those things I was raised with - you work hard, you don't whine, you do the best you can with what you've got. Blessedly my Mom doesn't remember much of those years, and sadly, I lost my Lyndell to lung cancer the night of my senior prom.
But the other thing that has made me into who I am today, is the man I was fortunate enough to marry. I know in this modern age of feminism that saying you owe something to a man is most definitely not cool, but the best parts of who I am as a women, a mother, a wife, and a doctor are all from being around my husband. My Farmer is the product of parents who are still married and in love after 30+ years. Not only are his parents married but both sets of his grandparents remained married to their spouses till the death of one separated them from each other. He comes from a 5th generation family farm, and from some of the best most honest people I have ever had the privilege to meet. And yes, his county does not have any stoplights even in 2010. He reminds me that even in this modern age of social networking that their are family that still sit up with the dead and take care of their parents. There are people in this world who's word really is as good as any legal document you could have, and people who mean it when they say they "be praying for you"
So, here I am, am working mother of three little farm hands of our own. Agvocating and Advocating that there will be an American way of life for them to enjoy. Praying that at least one of them will keep mine and my Husbands dream alive and have a sixth McLerran Farmer on our land, and praying that maybe one will see what I do - not as something that takes Mommy away from them but that lets Mommy give a little back to the people of this area that have given to me over the years... there are many. Whether it was Mr. Pat Grimes jerking me out of Algebra class to find out why I did not do as good on a Meosis/Mitosis test as I should have, Dr. Rick Fields taking time to show me real life trauma in our ED as a teen, or the paramedics that took the time to let me learn and ride with them to show me greater understanding for my field...and to many more like Ma Linda, Mr. Ramsey, Ms. Dorminey, Janey, and all those I cannot list, please know that by your actions you helped make me into the person I am today...
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Life is Funny...
I have been serious in nearly every one of these blogs, and as I realized this morning when I was getting my girls ready to go for "I'm a STAR day" at school to benefit Relay for Life, I am not generally this serious. I usually sit and tell funny stories, and they are often about myself. So, while I still remain passionate to being a conservative outspoken agvocate and advocate for health care, today I am going to be a bit silly on this blog.
Once upon a time, in a county not far from here, a city girl (me - see I grew up in the County with stop lights) started dating a farm boy from the MIDDLE OF NOWHERE (Brian - his county did not have stop lights, that's right - not one in the entire county). We met in college, sigh, fell in love, more sighs... and somewhere in this mix he decided it would be a good idea to take me deer hunting. ( See I said this would be funny...)
OK, its like 2:30 AM and its cold and dark... and we head out to go "hunting". First off, he wants me to walk through the cow poop and "cover my scent"... and I am starting to think he really did mean we are going to hunt an animal on this trip. So, now scent covered off we go down through the wood to the deer stand. Brian has a nice deer stand to hunt in, he built it himself, so at least I am sitting in a covered box in the edge of a field with a roof in the freezing cold instead of up in a tree. OK, now its dark and its cold, and wouldn't you know it... Brian is actually sitting there in the dark looking like he can see something. I start to talk and get shushed... this is really not turning into my morning. I am thinking I should have stayed in bed. OK... the sun starts to come up and we can see deer, and here comes the buck that my boyfriend has been after all season. He gets ready to shoot and motions at me to be quite... does his final sighting and... I scream out "RUN BAMBI".
If you have ever met a hunter you know that its lucky at this point that I got away without being shot (just kidding) but really Brian was very very upset at me and politely kicked me out of the deer stand and I had to walk back to his parent's house while he "finished hunting" aka calmed down. The sad thing is this, his buddy shot the buck (8-9 points by the way I think, maybe more you would have to ask Brian, I am sure he remembers) the next field over.
Now, you may think by this story that I oppose hunting, and I don't. I shoot with Brian all the time and some of our best dates involved shooting, I just could not stand the thought of seeing him shoot that deer, however he hunts regularly and we eat what he kills. I am proud of that fact, just like I am proud of how good a shot I am. However, If I go "hunting" with him now it involves a camera...
Once upon a time, in a county not far from here, a city girl (me - see I grew up in the County with stop lights) started dating a farm boy from the MIDDLE OF NOWHERE (Brian - his county did not have stop lights, that's right - not one in the entire county). We met in college, sigh, fell in love, more sighs... and somewhere in this mix he decided it would be a good idea to take me deer hunting. ( See I said this would be funny...)
OK, its like 2:30 AM and its cold and dark... and we head out to go "hunting". First off, he wants me to walk through the cow poop and "cover my scent"... and I am starting to think he really did mean we are going to hunt an animal on this trip. So, now scent covered off we go down through the wood to the deer stand. Brian has a nice deer stand to hunt in, he built it himself, so at least I am sitting in a covered box in the edge of a field with a roof in the freezing cold instead of up in a tree. OK, now its dark and its cold, and wouldn't you know it... Brian is actually sitting there in the dark looking like he can see something. I start to talk and get shushed... this is really not turning into my morning. I am thinking I should have stayed in bed. OK... the sun starts to come up and we can see deer, and here comes the buck that my boyfriend has been after all season. He gets ready to shoot and motions at me to be quite... does his final sighting and... I scream out "RUN BAMBI".
If you have ever met a hunter you know that its lucky at this point that I got away without being shot (just kidding) but really Brian was very very upset at me and politely kicked me out of the deer stand and I had to walk back to his parent's house while he "finished hunting" aka calmed down. The sad thing is this, his buddy shot the buck (8-9 points by the way I think, maybe more you would have to ask Brian, I am sure he remembers) the next field over.
Now, you may think by this story that I oppose hunting, and I don't. I shoot with Brian all the time and some of our best dates involved shooting, I just could not stand the thought of seeing him shoot that deer, however he hunts regularly and we eat what he kills. I am proud of that fact, just like I am proud of how good a shot I am. However, If I go "hunting" with him now it involves a camera...
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Counting Blessings...
I have had an interesting week... in my day job I am the physician and the healer, the one who spends my days listening to the woes and ills of others, and I must say its a job I love. Yes, I have spent a lot of time in the last few weeks to months tell you all what is wrong with medicine and our country in general and I still stand by those assessments, but after a week of being a patient and a participant in the health care system, I have had a chance to see what is right in the health care in this country. I know many patients are jaded and feel that doctors and nurses only come to work for the pay, but in my work and in the care that I have received this week, I would have to disagree. I started my week with emergency surgery for an ovarian cyst, ad while I understood all the technical jargon being discussed by myself and my GYN doctor my husband does not. He faced the day, called in from his work selling bulls, setting up feeders, and checking fences to a phone call from his wife crying in pain saying come and get me. His day ended up watching me get wheeled of to the Operating Room. I signed forms and explained away this test or that and even though I was in pain I still found myself translating what was going on and what was going to happen next to him and therefore to the rest of my family. My ability to translate the many steps in getting from the doctors office to the operating room was very helpful in keeping my family calm and its not that the nurses or my doctor were not trying to explain it. its just there is such a gap between what the average person understands about medicine and what we in medicine actually explain to patients.
We need a test and we order it. How many times do a patient or their families actually understand why we are doing it? I mean think about it, Medical Doctors spend 8 years learning to practice our craft, and we try to explain it to patients who can have very limited education in a matter of minutes sometimes over issues that are important as life and death. This issue is at the very heart of why so much money is spent on patients at the end of their lives. Family's that don't understand wanting to save elderly family members with illnesses that may not be explained very well by doctors that may not be comfortable explaining death and dying anyway, and whammo you get lots of test on an older population. And, no, I disagree with how the President and Congress choose to handle this particular issue of health care reform. I don't feel that a medical board sitting off somewhere can ever decide what is best for my patients. people sitting off somewhere are a big problem from medicine now - no insurance administrator can ever read a chart and know what I know about my patients no matter how good I document. All this medical supervisory board will do is limit how much care elderly patients get. Now we have a stick limiting care for patients, instead of doctors educating patients and families as to why extra testing in a dying patient may not help the patent's care.
But back to my week, after surgery I ended up with a bowel illeus (stopped working - really bad nausea and vomiting) and another 24 hour stay in the hospital. This time was an overnight stay with XRAYs, labs, and the whole nine yards. Anyway, I am home now and feeling better. food still taste a bit off, but I have gained more respect for the fear that my patients must have at facing the unknown I call medicine. What to me is just a day's work is to most of them scary and unknown with lots of long words and painful test that despite our best attempts may never be understood... So I hope that this week has taught me more patience for my patients, more peace for myself, and more time to count all my blessings.
We need a test and we order it. How many times do a patient or their families actually understand why we are doing it? I mean think about it, Medical Doctors spend 8 years learning to practice our craft, and we try to explain it to patients who can have very limited education in a matter of minutes sometimes over issues that are important as life and death. This issue is at the very heart of why so much money is spent on patients at the end of their lives. Family's that don't understand wanting to save elderly family members with illnesses that may not be explained very well by doctors that may not be comfortable explaining death and dying anyway, and whammo you get lots of test on an older population. And, no, I disagree with how the President and Congress choose to handle this particular issue of health care reform. I don't feel that a medical board sitting off somewhere can ever decide what is best for my patients. people sitting off somewhere are a big problem from medicine now - no insurance administrator can ever read a chart and know what I know about my patients no matter how good I document. All this medical supervisory board will do is limit how much care elderly patients get. Now we have a stick limiting care for patients, instead of doctors educating patients and families as to why extra testing in a dying patient may not help the patent's care.
But back to my week, after surgery I ended up with a bowel illeus (stopped working - really bad nausea and vomiting) and another 24 hour stay in the hospital. This time was an overnight stay with XRAYs, labs, and the whole nine yards. Anyway, I am home now and feeling better. food still taste a bit off, but I have gained more respect for the fear that my patients must have at facing the unknown I call medicine. What to me is just a day's work is to most of them scary and unknown with lots of long words and painful test that despite our best attempts may never be understood... So I hope that this week has taught me more patience for my patients, more peace for myself, and more time to count all my blessings.
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