11/16/2008

By DUANE SCHRAG

Salina Journal

Change is a-comin'.

Visionaries see more diversity, a growing responsiveness to environmental concerns, a nation that is more secure.

And that's just in the field of agriculture.

"We need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine," wrote Michael Pollan in an op-ed piece published five weeks ago by the New York Times. It was styled as an open letter to the next president of the United States.

"True, this is easier said than done -- fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves. To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and the American dinner table."

That's not change everybody can believe in.

"I thought it read like a Karl Marx 'Communist Manifesto,' " said Steve Baccus, president of Kansas Farm Bureau. "It appeared to me he's taking away people's choice, taking away the choice of what farmers want to grow, taking away people's choice of what they want to eat."

The lengthy essay, which acknowledges the work of Salina's Land Institute as an example of change agriculture needs, has been getting some traction. President-elect Barack Obama mentioned the essay in an interview with Time magazine. The core of Pollan's argument -- that the production of food, more than anything else, must be sustainable and so production agriculture, which emerged with the discovery of cheap energy, is going to be forced to change -- resonated with Obama.

"We are just going to completely revamp how we use energy in a way that deals with climate change, deals with national security and drives our economy," Obama said. "That's going to be my No. 1 priority when I get into office, assuming, obviously, that we have done enough to stabilize the immediate economic situation."

A provocative essay

Fred Cholick, dean of Kansas State University's College of Agriculture, said Pollan's essay was provocative.

"At times, I think he oversimplifies the complexity of issues," Cholick said. "I think there's some real good pieces in here. We really need to look at our food system. The coupling of high energy and high food costs -- I don't think anyone would argue with that."

Kansas Secretary of Agriculture Adrian Polansky agreed that Pollan offered some interesting ideas, but he doesn't see production agriculture -- what Pollan and others describe as the rise of monocultures -- changing significantly any time soon.

The changes Polansky, Baccus and others see are more incremental, the adaptation of technology to further refine the current agricultural model.

"Biotechnology will allow us to transfer genes from legumes to corn and wheat so they can fix or make their own nitrogen, and so we won't need chemical or commercial fertilizers in that same way," Polansky said. Other genetic modifications will make crops resistant to pests and fungi. "I don't see anything in this article in terms of these kinds of exciting technology opportunities that can change the need for energy."

Indeed, Pollan sees a much more profound change. To fuel agriculture with little more than daily sunlight -- rather than the release of thousands of years of sunlight -- would require a return to America's agrarian roots.

"Well-designed polyculture systems, incorporating not just grains but vegetables and animals, can produce more food per acre than conventional monocultures, and food of a much higher nutritional value," Pollan wrote. "But this kind of farming is complicated and needs many more hands on the land to make it work.

"Farming without fossil fuels -- performing complex rotations of plants and animals and managing pests without petrochemicals -- is labor intensive and takes more skill than merely 'driving and spraying,' which is how corn-belt farmers describe what they're doing for a living.

"To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more people growing food -- millions more."

How about $100 an hour

Baccus scoffs at the idea.

"What he's suggesting is we do away with mechanization, we do away with large commercial farms and we go back to small farms and we use a whole bunch of workers," Baccus said. "We're having massive depopulation out of rural areas and have had for the last 100 consecutive years.

"We can't get help to work on our farms now. Literally these guys have offered to pay $100 an hour to people to come out there and work and they refuse to do it. We can't get the labor to operate today; I don't know where in the world we would come up with the labor to do it the way Mr. Pollan is suggesting."

Some would welcome the reversal of a century of depopulation.

"It would strengthen rural America," Cholick said. "It would strengthen schools. But we also, with the present system, deal with a lack of labor, of people who are willing to devote the time and effort to that end. That's going to be more difficult than what I think a lot of people believe."

And it's not just whether people are willing to farm. Most haven't a clue how to farm in the way that Pollan and others are advocating.

"There's a couple of generations of knowledge lost," Cholick said. "I think it needs to be actively addressed. That's why we (at K-State) have a 'learn farm', so we can take a person who has a science background and teach them about agriculture."

But, would it work?

But there are fundamental questions about the changes Pollan is advocating. Whether such a model is even possible, for example. Champions of the current food production model say never before has so much food been produced so intensively; never before has Earth's population grown so fast (it's growing by 220,000 a day, 80 million a year).

Is this really the right time to be returning to an agricultural model that has been fading for the past century? Or, as Pollan wrote, "Can the sort of sustainable agriculture you're proposing feed the world?

"The simplest and most honest answer is we don't know, because we haven't tried."

Everyone -- including Pollan -- seems to agree that the cost of food would go up. Not everyone agrees by how much, or what the fallout would be.

"The cost of food would be without question considerably higher per person," Polansky said. "For each family, that means less money to spend on education for their children and various other family needs."

Baccus said the cost of food would rise exponentially. He's not persuaded the present model should be scrapped.

"I think he's underestimating the ability of the current model to adapt," Baccus said. "I think we can produce enough food to feed the world without any problem."

Cheap food's not cheap

Pollan suggests that cheap food may not be the bargain it appears to be. He notes that four of the top causes of death in America are linked to diet.

"It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount -- from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent," he wrote. "While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system ... without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet."

Baccus was put off by Pollan's concerns over unhealthy diet.

"My impression of Mr. Pollan is that he's intending only to offer people the choice of a healthy lifestyle," he said.

Cholick agrees Americans would benefit from healthier diets.

"All you have to do is read the obesity numbers," he said. "But are consumers willing to not drive though fast food? We know it isn't the most nutritious. Is the home willing to spend more time making bread?"

We're eating oil

Perhaps the most sensitive nerve Pollan stepped on was his conclusion that production agriculture -- a massive business enterprise, increasingly concentrated, and the recipient of nearly all your food dollars -- should be abandoned in favor of one that is more diverse, that relies more on people and less on energy. "When we eat from the industrial-food system," Pollan wrote, "we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases."

There's also concerns about food safety. Concentrating food production makes the system more vulnerable. Pollan reminds readers what Tommy Thompson, outgoing secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said at his final press conference in 2004: "I, for the life of me, cannot understand why terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do."

Polansky, Cholick and Baccus all agree food will have to be produced using less fossil fuels, and they point to innovations such as no-till farming as evidence that progress is being made. But they also expressed far more confidence than Pollan in technology's ability to allow the current model to work.

"As the cost of energy goes up, we'll switch to other things that use less energy, or science will step up and devise new forms of energy," Baccus said. "I think that to simply sit back and say that the cost of energy is getting so bad that we're going to have to shut everything down, I think that's way too simplistic."

Certainly more simplistic than Pollan would advocate. His view -- and that of an increasing number of people -- is that perhaps half the world's oil reserves have been burned, the bulk of that in the past 30 years; what has been burned so far is the most accessible oil; and global demand for crude oil is accelerating.

In Pollan's view, the time to act is now.

"This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you've inherited -- designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so -- are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute," he wrote. "The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation."

Keep government out

Baccus isn't persuaded.

"My personal opinion is that if the government will stay out of it and let market forces work, I think he's wrong," Baccus said. "... He talks about a calamity and I don't think the calamity is as early in arriving as he's thinking."

Cholick believes change will take time.

"I have faith in technology. I think alternate forms of energy will ultimately replace fossil fuel. I see us stepwise replacing some of the fossil fuel inputs," he said. "It will be a long time before we are totally independent of fossil fuel."

He shares Pollan's view that food production would benefit from more diversity. He also shares the view that meeting the world's food needs is going to be increasingly challenging.

"The thing I like about the article is, we need an open, honest debate of this issue as we look down the road to the future," Cholick said. "If this dialogue stimulates that debate, I strongly, strongly support the dialogue."

n Reporter Duane Schrag can be reached at 822-1422 or by e-mail at dschrag@salina.com.

To read online Michael Pollan’s op-ed piece that ran in the New York Times, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?_r=1&scp=6&sq=michael%20pollan&st=cse&oref=slogin