July 2010 Archive for On the Udder Hand

Talk about poor milk prices has dominated the dairy industry for the past 18 months, so it’s worth pointing out some of the longer-term and bigger-picture economic trends in dairy farming, courtesy of this latest report by USDA’s Economic Research Service.

The new report (entitled “Structure and Finances of U.S. Farms: Family Farm Report”, and based on a data collected in 2007) reviews the full spectrum of farming in the U.S., and repeats a mantra familiar to most of us who defend agriculture when talking to consumers:

Most U.S. farms—98 percent in 2007—are family operations, and even the largest farms are predominantly family run.

So that’s further corroboration of the fact that there is not an equals sign between being a big farmer, and being a “big bad corporation” – which is most typically defined as the opposite of a “family farm.” 

What’s also interesting is that from a dollars and cents perspective, the USDA is defining a large scale farm as one that sells more than $250,000 of products a year (see the report summary’s first page for how they distinguish between small and large – the arbitrary dividing line is a quarter million in sales).  What’s ironic about that definition is that just about every dairy farm, even in a year of low milk prices, will be defined as “large.” 

Here’s the math on that:  with an average all-milk price of $13, you would need fewer than two million pounds of milk production to reach that threshold, which is the output of a 90-cow dairy.  In a year when average prices are higher, which will be 2010, an even smaller farm would fall into that category, using that same income threshold.  And that of course is just measuring milk output, not any sales of beef or crops. 

Now, here are a couple of other sobering, if hardly newsworthy, observations from the ERS report:

Large-scale family farms and nonfamily farms account for 12 percent of U.S farms but 84 percent of the value of production. In contrast, small family farms make up most of the U.S. farm count but produce a modest share of farm output.

Small farms are less profitable than large-scale farms, on average, and their operator households tend to rely on off-farm income for their livelihood.

RE point 1:  Just 12 percent of farms sell more than $250,000 worth of product, but because dairy is a high-value commodity, that pushes even modest-sized farms into USDA’s large category, and those generate most of the U.S.’s agricultural output.

RE point 2: If you look at the chart on the top of page 11 of the full report, you’ll see that at least in 2005, the largest dairy operations enjoyed a significantly larger cost of production advantage when compared to the smallest farms.  What’s also worth considering, of course, is that in 2005, we really hadn’t seen the run-up in feed grain costs that started in 2007, and while the trend has moderated for now, it is still part of the “new normal” of livestock production.  So this data may already be irrelevant in light of other economic trends driving up corn and soy prices. 

What hasn’t changed are the trends toward fewer, but smaller farms, and the continued family ownership of those operations.

This posting is going to be a logical bookend to my most recent one, from earlier this month, when I posed the question about whether supporting “local” farm production is truly a reasonable, sustainable choice for most consumers, given that locally-grown produce and farm goods often aren’t what a family wants, needs or really eats.

So here is another stanza in that song, courtesy of this past Sunday’s Washington Post, which presented a lengthy analysis of so-called “green” consumer behavior that, far from being altruistic or sustainable, is downright selfish.  The essence of the article is drawn from psychological research which demonstrates that while people may wish to conserve energy, save the planet and help others, after doing so – or even after just thinking about doing so – they take steps that are completely contradictory to those more conscientious behaviors.  As the Post’s Michael Rosenwald reports:

University of Toronto behavioral marketing professor Nina Mazar showed in a recent study that people who bought green products were more likely to cheat and steal than those who bought conventional products. One of Mazar's experiments invited participants to shop either at online stores that carry mainly green products or mainly conventional products. Then they played a game that allowed them to cheat to make more money. The shoppers from the green store were more dishonest than those at the conventional store, which brought them higher earnings in the game.

The name for this practice is moral licensing:  at least some of us feel morally entitled to engage in dubious, if not downright sinful behaviors, if they are preceded by or coupled with morally-virtuous behaviors.  Like the Tahoes and Range Rovers parked at the Whole Foods.  Or the people who likewise burn plenty of fossil fuels to drive several times a week to the farmer’s market.  Or the ones who leave their CFL bulbs burning for hours in an empty room.

Similar things happen in eating:  we’ve all seen the person getting a Diet Coke with the super-size fries and double burger.  It turns out that from a moral license perspective, such an apparent paradox is typical.

So the moral license concept raises an interesting point about the politics of food production, and why the grip of the Food Inc. movement is so powerful.  It appears that in order to balance their less virtuous consumptive behaviors, at least some people have a powerful need to have food, with all its contemporary iterations (i.e. organic, local, grass-fed, family-farmed, raw, sustainable, antibiotic-free, and so forth), be especially upright and respectable.  It may not be about the food product in question, but the shadier behavior it has to atone for, that matters most. 

A neighbor who was out of town for the July 4^th holiday asked us to collect the produce – mostly veggies, but also some blackberries – from the Community Supported Agriculture collective to which her family belongs.  So last week, we did.

My wife drove to a Home Depot about four miles away, which is the regular rendezvous point where the farm, located in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, trucks its produce to the Fairfax County, VA, patrons that support it.  The haul was mostly potatoes, squash, eggplants, some sweet corn, and the aforementioned blackberries….more or less the same type of stuff appearing in the local farmers’ markets at this point in the summer.  And for that matter, mostly the same produce we would purchase, either at a farmers’ market, if we go, or more likely, at one of the large supermarkets in our community.

As I was eating the eggplant that my wife fried up last weekend, I reflected on that fact that CSA’s are, like farmers’ markets, an interesting way to market foods to people willing to pay a premium for direct delivery, and more importantly, people willing to accept whatever is in season that grew successfully on that particular farm.  Would we have normally bought zucchini and corn?  Yes, the kids like those.  Eggplants? No, and the kids didn’t much care for it.  Blackberries?  Yes, but we prefer strawberries and blueberries, although the former is no longer in season and is doubtless being shipped in from somewhere not local, while the blueberries are in season – in New Jersey – which is kind of local, but not near enough, if you are a purist about it.

On that last point, I recently read this short column in the Atlantic magazine about how people need to think less rigidly about food miles, and about what is really “local.”  The example that Barry Estabrook (who is a chef, and at least apparently once worked on farms) gave was that tomatoes coming from the southern part of New England were just as good as if they came from closer to where he lives in northern New England. 

So yeah, that seems like a no brainer….but the question is always, as compared to what?  If you like tomatoes, and it’s not during the summer, are you willing to shed your devotion to sourcing local foods from Connecticut if it means buying tomatoes from California, or Florida, or even Mexico?  What if you want bananas (which I eat almost daily) and coffee for breakfast?  Those aren’t ever local or even U.S.-grown. 

Estabrook’s column concludes that eating a “balanced, sustainable” diet is the best thing for the environment, and a person’s health.  That sounds reasonable, but is it?  If I like citrus, along with bananas and tomatoes – all healthy foods – how do I procure them sustainably if they come from the West Coast, or for that matter, from Latin America?  The local CSA farm I may patronize anywhere along the East Coast will never in a million years grow coffee, tea, bananas, or oranges…but the local Safeway always has those things.  So my question then becomes, what if the foods I enjoy purchasing for my health are actually not sustaining local farms, if only because I want mangoes and kiwis, not blackberries and eggplants?  (and speaking of coffee, there is a terrifically insightful recent blog posting from Freakonomics writer James McWilliams about the shortcomings of the Fair Trade movement).

No wonder people get emotional about the seeming polarity of these choices.  They are inherently contradictory, which is why the rhetoric is so hostile when we discuss them.