Thoughts of an Agrarian Renaissance from Washington State University

The Farm of the Future:
A Mosaic of Diversity

By Brian Clark, Marketing and News Services

Will the farm of the future be larger than today’s farm or smaller? Single crop or diversified? Organic or conventional? Family-owned or corporately owned?

The answer to all those questions could be “yes” but, as physicist Niels Bohr once said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” The future of farming is a hot topic, one of serious concern to farmers as well as everyone who eats.

Connections asked a group of experts to speculate about where the American farm is headed. And as Dan Bernardo, dean of WSU’s College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences, recently told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “It may be easier to predict where we’ll be in 20 years than in one.”

One of the greatest concerns in recent years is the decline of the family farm. The U.S. is historically an agrarian society, but the number of farms has dwindled while farm size has swelled in the past century. As agribusinesses has driven a “green revolution” that fed millions who might otherwise have gone hungry, the American psyche has suffered as mom and pop have sold their land and their kids have moved to the city.

An Agrarian Renaissance?

But the times are changing, and many observers of the global food system—the network of farmers, fields, and related industries that puts food on our tables—see an agrarian renaissance in the making.

“It’s not about big versus small anymore,” said John Gardner, WSU’s vice president of economic development and Extension. “Individual agricultural operations will be differentiated according to place, market niche, and individual interests. From an era of Wonder Bread to, well—look at the bread aisle now!”

Like the markets for bread, apples, potatoes, and other commodities—which consumers have changed with demands for variety, nutrition, and sustainability—so too the farms of the future are likely to look less like they are cut from the same cloth and more like a mosaic.

Gardner said the farm of the future will be “site specific.” Small or large, growing a single crop or a diversified array, farmers will tailor operations to grow in concert with local resources. Part of the reason for this is growing consumer concern about the social and environmental costs of their choices, which is driving change across entire industries.

“What we’re seeing,” said David Granatstein, a WSU Extension educator and Climate Friendly Farming project leader, “are behaviors changing. People are talking about energy; they’re changing their habits, taking fewer trips, changing cars.”

And change is happening quickly in Granatstein’s view. With rising food and energy prices, the miles we travel to work or play and the miles our food travels are of great concern. “The food and fuel thing happened in one year—people weren’t expecting that, and it’s changing the way we do things.”

Locavores

The sudden uptick in concern about the intertwined system of food and energy is captured by the Oxford American Dictionary’s choice of “locavore” as its 2007 word of the year.

A “locavore” is someone who consumes food produced locally, on the assumption that the fewer miles food travels the more sustainable it is in terms of carbon footprint. Not so, said Granatstein, who argues that we need to conduct “life-cycle assessments” for agricultural products, as mileage alone does not capture the full impact of food’s footprint. To the “food miles” calculus must be added all the other costs of production.

“Some of this calls for getting people to change their diets and expectations—not having tomatoes available year-round is something we need to be alert to,” said Mike Kahn, associate director of WSU’s Agricultural Research Center.

While this is likely true, Granatstein is quick to point out that “our long-distance shipping is generally quite efficient relative to a bunch of people driving pickup trucks to sell at a farmers market.”

The Triple Bottom Line

The global food and energy system needs to “reconcile the books,” according to Gardner. He sketches the concept of a “triple bottom line.” Old-school economics, he explained, just followed the money, leaving aside the social and environmental costs of doing business as intangible. In order to balance the books, Gardner insists that tomorrow’s economist will have to include those intangible costs when calculating profit. “Otherwise,” he said, “it’s not fair to the farmer or the consumer.

“If we can successfully reinvent ourselves, the American rural landscape needs to have a longer-term vision. This will require ongoing adjustment. We’ll have a covenant, and then the power of the entrepreneur can kick in. We need to free up the entrepreneurs from regulation but we have to have the triple bottom line in place.

“One of the big issues happening now is that we’re in the midst of coming to terms with food and natural resource products that we have not been paying the whole price for,” Gardner continued. “We’re seeing food riots in Haiti, but also rice and flour rationing at Wal-Mart, Costco, and so on. Some of this is knee-jerk reaction, simply because we don’t know where the reconciliation will end up.” Some will resist the process of reconciliation, but it must happen in order to provide a hungry world with a safe and abundant food supply, he added.

“A while ago,” said Ralph Cavalieri, associate dean and director of the Agricultural Research Center, “we were pretty smug that we’d solved the problem of world hunger with the green revolution, but the more critters you have to feed, the more food you need. And, the land mass on which to grow that food is not increasing.”

“In fact,” added Kahn, “the land devoted to agriculture is decreasing around the globe.” And, he said, “Nobody would argue that current agricultural practices are sustainable right now. There are going to be shifts in production systems.”

Eyes Per Acre

Gardner sees opportunity in the evolution of the American farm. “We’ve shaken people out of ag in the past era. If you look at the whole supply chain of food, ag probably employs 30 percent of Americans. But we’ve run people out of the starting point; only about 1 percent of Americans work in production agriculture. The supply chain will probably reshuffle and, to use a term from Wes Jackson at the Land Institute, the ‘eyes-to-acres’ ratio will probably go up. We need more people on the land. We’re entering an era where there are going to be lots of opportunities for people to get in early in the supply chain.”

WSU alum Travis Allan, general manager of Allan Brothers Fruit in Naches, Wash., agrees. “I see a huge demand for competent, intelligent people to come into the industry,” he said. “One of the most important things we’ll do over the next decade is recruit talented, energetic young people to farming.”

Granatstein said more and more people are interested in learning to garden or farm on a small scale. He sees people educating themselves through Cultivating Success, WSU Extension’s sustainable small farm course. “The sense among people is that if they know how to grow their own food, they’ll be protected against rising prices and safety concerns about safety,” he said. In other words, they’ll have a buffer against change and a sense of security knowing where their food comes from.

Pedro Calderon Hernandez, ’05, witnesses these concerns from his vantage point as animal health manager at Viega Dairy in Sunnyside. “It’s important to keep our animals healthy because that keeps the product healthy and that benefits the people who drink the milk,” he said. “Everything starts here, and when it goes to the city, people don’t know where their milk comes from, but they’re very concerned about safe food.”

For Allan, being close to the source is the reason he followed his family into the orchard industry. “I produce an eating experience, something people enjoy and get pleasure from,” he said. “And that’s the best.”

Even as the mosaic of agrarian diversity increases the eyes-per-acre ratio, the billions of hungry people on the planet require systems of highly efficient mass production in order to stay fed.

“Larger scale ag will continue to provide most of our food,” Granatstein observed, “but energy is the wild card here. Agribusinesses will be challenged with producing energy locally, on-farm, so part of a farm may be dedicated to growing fuel stock. They’ll have to internalize that cost in some way. We simply won’t be able to tolerate waste, and anyway, most waste has some potential value. So we either reuse or simply don’t produce waste.”

Wasting not so we want not requires applied problem-solving, a key skill students acquire with a WSU education. Applied problem solving is also one of the core missions of Extension, the nation-wide system that focuses on applying the power of science to current problems as well as issues still on the horizon.

“The notion of an educated populace dealing with knowledge that has a rapidly contracting half-life speaks to the land-grant mission as first devised,” said Gardner. “We need to expand our educational mission to embrace the entire society and that speaks to the founding mission of Extension.”