The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766 – 1834) was a British minister and scholar whose works spanned many disciplines. One of his most important books, Essay on the Principle of Population, or a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness, laid out Malthus’ argument that population growth is geometric or exponential, while the growth of the food supply is arithmetic. Of course, exponential or geometric growth climbs at a faster rate than arithmetic growth.
In short, Malthus thought humankind was heading for a catastrophe.
Malthus felt mere subsistence limited population growth; if the quality of the means rose for those living at a subsistence level, then a population increases. This initiates a cycle of an increasing quality of life that raises population levels. However, since population levels quickly outgrow the pace of food production, severe measures must be taken to keep population growth under control. Malthus believed reason played a major role in deciding if procreation was a risk. This reasoning would grow, per Malthus, as the quality of life fell to meager subsistence levels; the decline occurs as population growth outstrips the capacity of a nation to support its population. Malthus felt any intervention into this cycle would only delay the inevitable.
Subsequent history has shown that population growth is as likely, or more likely, to increase as the quality of life decreases to subsistence levels. This, however, is not the same as a population facing real food shortages, which is what Malthus discussed.
Nevertheless, Malthus failed to consider the ability of technology to maintain or increase food production as the world’s population has grown. Yet, his work spurred the rise of scientific agriculture in the postwar years. Political leaders around the world grew concerned over the ability of agriculture to support the global population. The push for mass production of food became a key agricultural issue over the intervening years.
Although postwar agricultural technology has certainly expanded the world’s food supply, this technology in itself has become something of a threat. The misappropriation of resources may end up doing more harm than famines caused solely by nature. For instance, Federal government policies have pushed 200-acre Midwestern family farms of the mid 20th Century to evolve into 5,000-acre corporations today. At that scale, large farm equipment is necessary but requires the removal of old fence lines, fence lines where trees would typically grow and prevent wind erosion of the topsoil.
In the Midwest, topsoil depths have declined to six to eight inches. The proper weather conditions, combined with vast fields devoid of wind shelter from trees, could easily lift the thin layer of topsoil from the ground. The topsoil is where the vegetation grows its roots. Under the topsoil lays a hard-tack clay incapable of cultivation; roots need a loose tilth to grow in, especially at the sprouting stage of the seed.
The dangers do not stop there: Modern biotechnology has allowed scientists to engineer crops, particularly corn and soybeans, to grow in almost any soil condition. The soil serves merely as an anchor for the crop’s roots. The required nutrients for these crops are synthetic, added by the farmer, with very little input from the soil. The technology has arrived at a place where the soil’s health is almost irrelevant, and this has turned away the farmer’s concern over soil conditions.
Large-scale farming makes soil tilth development very difficult, and American agriculture may be at the cusp of a collapse due to the depletion and/or erosion of topsoil.
I gained this education on soil health by practical experience. In the ’90’s, I attempted to plant three acres of grass around the house we just built. It was late September, and the local lawn seeders were booked in a last minute rush to beat frost conditions. My window of planting opportunity was closing, so I decided to take it upon myself to plant the grass. I knew farming; my family came from a long line of farmers, so I wasn’t clueless as to how to approach seeding. Besides, the ground had been actively farmed right up to the prior growing season, so how difficult could it be to establish grass?
Very difficult, as I discovered the next spring, due to the lack of nutrients and microorganisms in the soil. Parts of the topsoil were so dead that even the most tenacious of weeds would not grow there. I spent five years laboring to revitalize the soil, especially in areas where the grass would not take. I kept lawn chemicals off the soil, knowing that densely seeded grass would be the best preventative for weeds. Slowly but surely, life returned to the soil; the reemergence of earthworms was a good sign the soil was returning to health.
But look at the number of growing seasons that came and went before I could reestablish soil health. I shudder at the potential collapse of the topsoil as even three years – about the minimum time needed to partially revive dead soil through composting and manuring, assuming some topsoil remains – are sufficient for a food supply to collapse.
This, then, is what piqued my interest in sustainable farming, not because it later became trendy to buy local foods. Not that there’s anything wrong with the local food movement, as anything that brings about a reversal in the deterioration of soil conditions is a good thing in my mind. Whatever it takes, we need that reversal.
The unraveling of small-scale American agriculture follows previous patterns in history: both the Greek and Medieval cities neglected their agriculture as prosperity grew. In the case of the Medieval city, in a time before monarchical states arose to wipe out these concentrations of guilds and free citizens, part of their downfall can be traced to the city residents’ increasingly singular focus on commerce and industry, to the detriment of the farms surrounding the cities.
An unsound agricultural system, it seems, announces the fall of civilizations.
Our present agricultural system produces massive amounts of grain; only a small fraction of farmland is used to support local food production. We now have a system wherein food products are shipped all over the globe, while local farmland is misappropriated for uses other than supplying food to nearby metropolitan areas. This will be unsustainable in the future, as rising energy costs will add to massive price increases in food at the grocery store, not to mention the toll that is being taken on local soil and global environmental conditions.
Large, complex economic systems are inefficient at pairing unused labor to needed production. This is certainly apparent in our current economic turmoil. If our agricultural system needs to be downscaled to salvage our topsoil, and the land reallocated for use in supplying food to local markets, then a large number of small-scale farmers will be necessary to see this come to realization.
We have numerous unemployed who are smart, skillful and eminently qualified to manage a farm; it simply takes a bit of education slated towards the specifics of farm management to re-utilize those skills for food production. There may be those willing to hang up their suits and pursue the entrepreneurial outside office of farming. Thus, the two dangling threads of deteriorating soil conditions and high unemployment could be tied off with the proper efforts. Our agriculture stands in need of skillful small-acreage manager/owners, those who could spark a much-needed revitalization of middle-income jobs, as well as the return of local economies.
This is not a call for a return to an agrarian-based economy, but merely a way to initiate the unwinding of an overly complex economic system that is the cause of our present woes. Of course, there is always a hitch: The middle-income demographics are overburdened with debt, thus the ability to raise capital to initiate a farming venture would indeed prove difficult, if not impossible, in the current credit markets. Small-scale farming operations, thankfully, require nowhere near the capital investments of large-scale operations.
Here, then, is a truly problematic scenario that differential curves cannot answer. It will take hard-fought, sleeves-rolled-up citizen engagement to make this transition happen successfully.
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