Archive: Opinions

85 years ago there were about seven million farms in the United States.  Today the number is close to two million.  41% of the contiguous 48 US states is used to feed livestock, which amounts to 800 million acres, as opposed to the 77.3 million acres used to feed humans.  As of this writing the US Census Bureau's US Population Clock says the US population was 329,324,741 last Tuesday.  In 1935 it was 127,250,232.  That means 202,074,509 more people in the same time that we lost 60% of our farms in the same amount of time that we gained 258.8% in population growth.

Now large solar farms threaten to take acres of farmland to produce clean, sustainable energy.  That is a good thing because the world will eventually run out of oil -- one estimate says by 2030, another adds a decade or two to that.  And coal and oil powered electricity is more expensive than solar.  And solar power presumably is a lot better for the planet than fossil fuels.  But people still have to eat, and for that we need farms.

Lansing's Ag Committee Chair Connie Wilcox said last week that she is concerned about taking large chunks of prime farmland out of the farming equation.  She worried that farmers might prefer the land lease money as co-ops and other economic forces make it harder and harder for small farms to exist.  She pointed out that food doesn't just magically appear in the grocery store.  It comes from farms.

So save the earth with solar energy and starve because there aren't enough farms to sustain all of us?  Or eat well while the climate deteriorates to unsustainable levels (for human habitation)?  And for farmers, take the lease money in order to be able to afford putting food on the table?  (Yes that is quite an irony!)  Or continue farming at a loss because there is no way to make a profit under the current economic system farmers use to sell their crops?

There are two solutions to these quandaries.  The first is to make it affordable for small farms to operate at a profit.  Large forces trying to keep food prices lower may need to be relaxed.  If paying more is what it takes to not starve, then it's probably worth it, but it causes more problems for people who can't afford food already.

The other piece of this is the difference between a good old fashioned tomato fresh off the farm and a hydroponically or large-farm tomato that is bred and processed to keep for a long time.  There is nothing like the taste of a fresh, farm-grown tomato.  And for those mass produced tomatoes the taste is nothing.  I don't know about you, but getting the texture of a tomato without any taste seems like a waste of chewing to me.

The other solution is to come up with some form of system that classifies prime solar array sites as sites that are not prime farmland, but still good for solar, ie. large, sunny expanses of land that are near power lines where they can connect to the power grid.  Maybe offer tax incentives for locating on prime solar sites that are not also prime farmland.

You need both solutions -- one won't work without the other.  Farmers, who, after all, are vital to our survival, need to be able to make a living.  And we need to convert to sustainable energy.

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