The United States is in the midst of an existential farm crisis. From the wholesale disappearance of the family farm, overproduction, and industrial scale farming to depleted farm land, corporate control of farms, and the unsustainability of the subsidy culture, America’s “amber waves of grain” are threatening to become the deadened brown husks of an entire way of life.
But farming is not the only crisis to come from the failure to practice sustainability and harvest healthy food. An environmental, economic, and human health crisis is approaching the United States unlike the country has ever seen. One of the fattest, sickest nations on earth, our country spends more than any other nation on healthcare. The majority of this spending is aimed at chronic health issues yet the country is becoming fatter and sicker with each passing year. The United States cannot sustain such expenditures.
In addition, aggressive farming has reduced natural habitat, depleted the soil, and set the United States in motion to face a crisis in which the soil itself is no longer able to render crops at all.
Farming is, by nature, an up and down game, with many
variables going into the production of food that can drive both prices and
production. Throughout American and, indeed, world history, agriculture has
been susceptible to the climate, weather, human action, war, and economic
policy. Even bumper crops producing high volumes of extra product can be
detrimental by lowering the prices received for them. But, for all history, one
thing has remained constant: the fact that human society totally depends on the
ability of farmers to produce food. It is quite a simple realization but a
powerful one. The death of the farmer is the death of humanity as a whole.
In the United States, since the early 1900s, the entire country has experience
various farm crises – some as a result of weather and climate disasters but
mostly as a result of governmental policy, i.e. the inability of the U.S.
government to ensure that farmers actually have an incentive to produce food.
