Issues with creating a sustainable regenerative agriculture in America

Issues (Not in any particular order of importance)

• Price Manipulation

The price of vegetables and other specialty crops – even certified organic vegetables and specialty crops – is driven by a cheap (in many cases illegal) farm and food processing labor system. USDA in 2017 estimated that approximately 50 percent of specialty vegetables were grown by illegal immigrant labor.

It is, for all practical purposes, a pirate economy – heavily defended by large agri-business enterprises.

There have been recent efforts in Congress to further manipulate this illegal system by granting undocumented farm workers special immigration status (not as an effective method to reform immigration laws, but as a legislative ‘gimmick’ to allow a manipulated and exploitive economy to continue without political criticism).

Small scale certified organic producers using sustainable practices are at a severe pricing disadvantage. Many resort to various forms of volunteer labor to supplement their production systems and allow them to financially survive.

• Nutrition and Food Health

A major (and inobvious) contributing factor to declines in global biodiversity has been changes in diet (and demand for food by type) driven by the green revolution. The green revolution globally saved many from starvation and nutrition deficient disease. It also narrowed diets and replaced diverse whole foods with foods derived from grains.

1. Issues with lack of diversity in agro-ecology.
   1. American agriculture (and the political economy of American agriculture) has become narrowly focused – grains and confined animal operations.
   2. Diverse, specialty farming has lacked significant support from both USDA and congress.
   3. Knowledge of diverse agro-ecology has declined precipitously with the concentration of crops and ownership in agriculture.
   4. Issues with nutrition education.
      1. Nutrition education in the early public education system has been neglected.
      2. A large body of historical and current nutritional knowledge seems to find little educational support.
   5. Issues with medicine’s knowledge of nutrition.
      1. General medicine has, until recently, neglected nutrition as part of general healthcare practice.
      2. Historical knowledge of nutrition and the benefits of various plant based remedies has also been neglected.

• Land Access…Cost of Land…Real Estate Appraisal of Agricultural Land

A major issue limiting the expansion of sustainable, regenerative farm practice has been the cost of land. This varies regionally, but is generally at the top of local ag advocates’ list:

1. Midwestern lands and western lands have ‘some’ limited standard real estate appraisal methods to evaluate the agricultural qualities of land as a factor in financial valuation. Even in those highly agricultural areas the ability to evaluate agro-ecological factors is severely limited. In many parts of the country agricultural lands receive standard comparable price analysis. For example, the real estate appraisal for our 91 acre Rhode Island purchase in late 2017 compared the property to other open land with vary dissimilar agro-ecological properties (and no comparison of soils).
2. Most landowners allow lease periods that are too short for agricultural planning purposes. The interest in potential development of land – and a chance to sell property into development at a high price – drive the interest of landowners to constrain lease periods. Also, many times land trusts and governments also constrain their land use leases (I have never researched the underlying issues.).
3. Much of the national and regional political interest has been with distribution and food hubs. The needs to increase organic, sustainable production and expand value-added processing related to that expansion has been politically and financially neglected in my opinion. I have seen examples of food hubs that immediately have sourcing issues and react by compromising their initial regional mission. Our local farmer’s market organizer and distribution group, Farm Fresh RI, has needed to reinvent both who they serve and how broadly they serve in order to maintain their political role in the community. They are developing a $16M food hub building …in the end It appears to me it will look like a conventional food distributor and real estate lease agent….a completely different ethic than the original intent of the socially responsible Brown University students that founded the organization.

• Cultural issues

Twenty-five years of work on environmental issues, agro-ecology, ecological economics, and agriculture have led me to the sense that the major impediments to evolving a more robust sustainable, regenerative agriculture are cultural[KE4] .

1. We now have acutely deteriorated rural communities and rural community institutions –decline in societal institutions that maintain social cohesion (decline in churches, small business and small business organizations, etc.)
   1. Public educational institutions have focused on ‘measured’ education…at the expense of a deeper understanding of civics, culture, home economics, etc. My older daughter at this point in her life is a third grade teacher in a public school system. She graduated from Skidmore College with a double major in child development and American studies. She did her teacher training in a Waldorf school…then began a community school in a poor area of Providence with four other women. She loves her work at developing young minds and bodies – she tolerates all the ‘measurements’ and finds it harmful in certain cases.
   2. State and local governments have become increasingly materialistic and bureaucratic – utilizing statutes and law to counter profound cultural issues. This becomes sadly troubling and petty in many cases. They are, governmentally, sincere attempts to encourage healthier behaviors – the problem is the ethical dilemma that occurs with legislating personal behavior.
   3. I am a strong advocate of free, just markets – but do not see how we survive long as a society with our current concentrations of politico-economic power.
   4. All of the above has led to a significant number of culturally narrow and poorly educated citizens with little ability to make thoughtful, healthful decisions.

• Equipment issues

Because of the small scale of organic certified vegetable and specialty crop farming there is limited innovation in equipment (not enough demand for equipment manufacturers to invest).

Needs

1. A large capital pool for landholding – a partnership between farmers and pool management – structured as some form of quasi-governmental ‘charity’ because it will need for many years to subsidize land costs.
2. A national effort to reform land grant universities and other technical colleges – to broader their curriculum, reevaluate their applied science education, and expand healthy methods for their experimental/trial farms and nutrition programs. Some have made changes to their trial farms and nutrition education…which is great…but I do not think it broad (this needs a study). As an aside, for two years I have been engaged with my undergraduate engineering and science school to utilize the food program… expanding it to a working farm…as an early stage method to broaden engineering education.
3. Equitable Compensation Methods…breaking through a pricing structure based upon cheap (and in many cases illegal) labor. This is an extremely complex political issue with much of the agricultural capital invested in maintaining the status quo of concentrated ownership.
4. Seasonal capital for farms and seasonal value added food production.
5. A subsidized capital pool to provide incentives to equipment manufacturers and technical colleges to develop a new generation of farm equipment.

A Final Observation

There are two current societal positions I find false:

1. That the best wealth creation occurs by limiting ownership and driving down costs. I believe broad ownership – and dynamic interaction between owners – creates the best environment for wealth creation.
2. That an agriculture based upon small scale landowners cannot ‘feed the world’. There are a number of studies that show diverse, distirbuted farm operations can feed an ex0panding population with a more resilient, disease resiilient, disease resistant agriculture.