2. Stitches – our food
GOAL 2: Stitches. Continue providing and improving access to necessities like clean water, food, healthcare, shelter, transportation, jobs, entertainment, air conditioning, electricity, lack of warfare, and general high quality of life – WITHOUT the scary sacrifices so many are afraid of.
Food:
We need to transition Big Ag, which impoverishes soil, pollutes air and water, destroys habitat for necessary animals/insects by constant chemical sprays, is unnecessarily cruel to animals, overworks farmers, and causes a great deal of cancer in humans to Regenerative Agriculture, which builds soil, sequesters carbon, does not pollute, works with insects and animals, provides a decent quality of life to domestic animals, gives a better balanced life to farmers, and gives more nutritious food to us.
Industrial agriculture has certainly decreased hunger in the world and deserves a lot of credit for that. However, it does so at the expense of enormous distances traveled by our food to get to centralized processing centers and factories before then being shipped back out to distribution centers like supermarkets and corner stores and restaurants.
Goal: In 10 years 50% of farmland will be worked using Regenerative Agriculture/Permaculture methods and farms will be more evenly distributed around the communities they support, so that 70% or more of each person’s food is grown within 100 miles of them. This will cut down hugely on carbon emissions. We all love exotic food items from the other side of the world and we can still have them – we just need each city and region to go back to more traditional human forms of organization and grow most of their own food nearby. Instead of investing in the oil pipelines that are hastening our doom, we should put money into expanding canals and irrigation pipelines so that areas without enough water can buy water from areas with more than enough water.
People have been doing this for thousands of years, before backhoes and dynamite were invented, so we can certainly do it now. https://watershed.ucdavis.edu/shed/lund/students/Fandi_Nurzaman_MS.pdf
The US alone has 2.4 million miles of oil and gas pipelines installed. https://pipeline101.org/Where-Are-Pipelines-Located
If we change our priorities we can reduce the stress on farmers in dry areas a great deal, increase food security, and maybe even develop a way to quickly drain off and distribute hurricane waters so they don’t cause as much flood damage. Insurance companies might want to invest in this to increase their profits.
There are many, many possible tactics to encourage a safe and relatively smooth transition. Nothing is perfect, but we will not let the perfect be the enemy of the good – in other words, perfectionism has no place here. We will work hard and demand excellence, but not perfection.
Facts:
- In the US at least, farmers are very old compared to the overall workforce – on average they are 58 years old. Many farmers are tired, set in their ways, and do not have much energy to try new things – plus many are hampered by huge debts and predatory contracts with big distribution companies https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/apr/22/chicken-farmers-big-poultry-rules
- Many young people would like to try farming, but cannot get any land, either by renting or by purchasing.
- If farmers want to go outside the conventional arrangements, they have to become their own marketers and stores as well as producing the food. This is an enormous challenge that leads to burnout. Farmers markets help, but we need more middlemen (astonishing thing to find myself saying) to buy from farmers and fulfill supply contracts with supermarkets and stores.
- Farming is extremely regulated by the government, which has spent decades tinkering constantly to produce just enough and not too much of each crop through subsidies, bribes to let land lie empty, and the like. The subsidies have actually had a terrible effect on human health by making things like corn syrup artificially cheap.https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/07/18/486051480/we-subsidize-crops-we-should-eat-less-of-does-this-fatten-us-up https://www.thebalance.com/farm-subsidies-4173885 We’ll need to switch the focus of farming regulations to breaking up monopolies, making it easier to get certification for small local food processing facilities, and encouraging medium-sized distribution agencies for farmers to sell their products through.
- We have ag extension offices all through the USA which are amazing sources of free information and help for anyone on any agriculture-related topic you can imagine.
- There are many styles of farming and food production through the world and a lot of inspirational work being done everywhere. Let’s cultivate our curiosity as well and spark new innovations from each other.
Methods:
We could offer Regenerative Agriculture subsidies for switching farmland from conventional to RA farming. It takes several years minimum to switch land from one style to the other and get it productive. Farming in general is a long-term game, of course, with many fruit trees taking at least 5 years to start being productive. We can’t ask farmers to work for free for years just to switch, so we need to use tax dollars to fund the switch. We can certainly find the money. There aren’t that many farmers, and our species’ survival is dependent on this.
Some very large farms might be able to switch 5% of their land at a time if that would be easier to organize logistically, and also to ensure that we don’t lose too much food from our food supply at once while the changes are happening. Small farms could just switch all at once to get started on the learning curve right away.
We also need to do everything we can to make it easier (i.e., not impossible) for young people to begin farming!
Those are my best food-related ideas at the moment. Policy makers with a great deal more knowledge and experience could come up with much more detailed plans on this.