OK. My first thought post is a doozy. World hunger. Everyone supports the idea of ending world hunger. As of 2021, there are almost 8 billion people living on the planet Earth, and that number is growing by over 100 million every year. That’s a lot of people to feed. There are some people going hungry now, and it could get worse in the future. So, whose responsibility is it to feed the world?

One group of companies want you to believe that they have the responsibility to feed the world. They are the agricultural technology giants, like Monsanto. If you are not familiar with Monsanto, they produce glyphosate, the herbicide marketed as Roundup. I’m sure Monsanto makes plenty of money selling Roundup, but they make even more money selling genetically modified “roundup ready” crop seed. The potential appeal of “Roundup ready” is that farmers can spread the herbicide freely on their fields to ensure that the only plant species that exists in their fields is the crop they are trying to grow. But it is indisputable that the practices of applying chemical fertilizers and pesticides while growing monocultures sterilizes and depletes the soil. That’s a big deal. To learn more, there’s a wonderful, current, documentary discussing soil science and agriculture: Kiss the Ground.  It’s currently streaming on Netflix.

The big money multinational agricultural technology companies continue to consolidate. Bayer bought Monsanto for an all-cash offer of $63 billion. ChemChina bought Syngenta for an all-cash offer of $43 billion. Dow and DuPont merged and spun off Corteva Agriscience which has a market capitalization of about $35 billion. All of this happened between 2015 and 2019. As an example of their dominance, the three companies now control over 80% of the US seed corn market. This type of corporate consolidation is rarely good for the consumer. When the consumers are the entire population of the earth, and the goods are food, well, it can be that much worse.

Joel Salatin is a bit of a rock star farmer. He is prominently featured in Food Inc., another great documentary. It’s getting a little old (released in 2008), but it still largely speaks true. You should check it out if you haven’t already. You can watch it for free on watchdocumentaries.com. Salatin is also featured in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a great book by Michael Pollan. Salatin is a regular attendee at international agricultural conferences. I introduced him, to get to this: In Folks, This Ain’t Normal, he said that he has heard African farmers say “We can feed our people, but we can’t compete with the below cost soy, wheat and corn that is dumped on us from the US.” (That quote is paraphrased from memory, I couldn’t place the exact line in a skim through the book).

That quote really sums up where my head is at. The world can feed itself. I get that there is a place for big scale agriculture. But there’s a bigger place for local and regional agriculture. With only big scale agriculture, we become dependent on a system that’s becoming more and more precarious. Local and regional agriculture can be much more resilient. There’s many hidden costs to big scale agriculture (carbon footprint, depleting and eroding soil, loss of biodiversity, health issues, government subsidies, …). When hidden costs are considered, smaller operations are competitive with industrial systems. Their practices tend to be organic and restorative. Their lower food miles means a smaller carbon footprint for transportation and it means everything is fresher. To me, I don’t want big agriculture to be responsible to feed the planet. I want small and regional food systems to be empowered to do the job for their own communities and countries. One way that you can help is to support your local and regional farmers.