The Ethical Agriculturalist: A Blog by R.A.B.
industrial farming is bankrupt. I Think it's the opportunity of a lifetime.
R.A.B.
You may have heard about the epidemic of farmer suicides in India, spurred in part by massive debt as farmers buy into industrialized methods of production (and lose control over their farms). You may think that this is an isolated problem caused by a lack of social safety nets, and that in our own country with a long history of industrial farming reaching back to WWII we must have a better grasp on how to deal with mass-production of commodity crops. You would be reasonable in thinking this. You would also be wrong. Farmers here in the United States have been continuously producing record crops over the past few years, a major technological feat, but are receiving less and less compensation for their work as this oversupply gluts an already saturated market. Farmers are going deeper into debt just to try to keep up with the ridiculous pace of production. They have to just for the chance to break even. Farmers are increasingly isolated as the rural countryside empties of farmers and farms become larger-scale and more automated. Add the stress of mounting debt, and it's not surprising that farmers here in the US have the highest rate of suicide of any occupation. As of 2012, farmer suicide rates (84.5/100k) were 1.6 times higher than the next highest profession (construction workers, 53.3/100k), and more than four times the national average (20.3/100k, CDC, 2012). There is no way to definitively say that farm debt and suicide rates are linked. But financial stress is certainly one pressure that pushes people to hopelessness and depression. This stress is only going to grow as we become better at producing commodity crops on a massive scale. As commodity prices fall to record lows, cheap commodity grains have passed the point of being an economically efficient way to manufacture calories. And the psychological pressure this puts on farmers is beyond justification. We should stop and ask ourselves if it's worth it.
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