5 reasons you should care about farming.

  I realize farming, and land management in general, is not the most thrilling of subjects for most people. Especially when your only connection to farming is through your grocery store purchases or the limp pot of basil slowly dying on your windowsill. I know that for most people, agriculture is not the hub through which all other world problems are linked, nor is it a particularly charged issue. Some people grow food. We eat it. Done. However, I am going to argue that there are some very good reasons for you to take a serious interest in farming, and not just for the sake of feeling virtuous:

1. What you can't see CAN hurt you... when the markets don't take into account all of the costs of production for something, it leads to harms economists call externalities. These are problems, such as soil erosion, damage to public health, loss of biodiversity, and others that you and I pay for through reduced quality of life and through our tax dollars spent cleaning up after industrial farming's dirty practices (Example: Des Moines, Iowa operates the world's largest nitrate removal plant, installed to process the extremely high levels of nitrate that build up in the water supply due to fertilizer runoff from surrounding cropland). 
2. Farming is a rapidly dying subculture in America. In 2014, the average American farmer was 58.3 years old and had been farming for more than ten years. And the number of young farms and young farmers has been steadily declining over the past decades, despite a recent surge of interest in farming among younger generations. For most, the barriers to entry (cost of land, equipment, and inputs) are so high that it isn’t financially feasible for new farmers to get into the game, and most give up after only a few years.
3. Farming is a social justice issue. Did you know that most of the food grown in California (the source of nearly half of all US-grown produce) relies almost exclusively on cheap migrant labor? And that tomato farms use a modern form of indentured servitude to trap workers on the farms until the harvest is done? Americans are often willing to ignore the workers’ rights abuses that occur on our farms in the name of cheap food, but we need to make labor practices more transparent and ethical, both to protect workers (many of whom are illegal aliens afraid to bring up safety issues for fear of deportation) and ourselves. Producers willing to cut corners on their most valuable input, human lives, aren’t likely to be behaving ethically in other areas of their production, making our food system less safe than we care to imagine.
4. Farming can help stop global warming. Although the past several decades of agricultural intensification has sacrificed most of our topsoil to tillage, our streams and rivers to pollution from confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and cornfields, and our climate to massive inputs of carbon dioxide and methane from all sectors of the industry (from chemical fertilizer production to massive tillage, CAFO animal production, and food processing), there are ways to correct our mistakes, and they’re already being done by many farmers today. No-till and conservation tillage, cover cropping, and conservation reserve plantings all help to build up organic matter in the soil, thus sequestering it from the atmosphere! Careful management of grazing animals on grasslands rather than in confined feeding operations can lead to healthier animals and help develop biodiverse grasslands that again sequester more carbon in the soil. Many books have been written about these practices, some of which I will post on my bookshelf. We can use our ingenuity to make farming healthier for people and the environment, but we need you to care, because…
5. One person CAN make a difference. If you commit to getting your food from more sustainable sources, the people around you will notice. You don’t have to preach, just let them see you making a deliberate change in your practices, and let the effects ripple out from your choices. Over time, as we vote with our dollars and inspire others to do the same, we really can change the face of farming.

Supporting smaller, local farms, biodynamic farms, grass-fed animal operations, and organic producers will, over time, inform producers that this is the type of product we want to pay for, and tip the scales away from massive chemically-maintained operations dependent on cheap labor to more diverse, dynamic operations supporting local businesses and sustainable livelihoods. Farming can become a sustainable profession, but we have to pull together to make it that way.