By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post
A former professor of agriculture economics told a Kansas food conference Friday the pandemic has shown the current food system is not sustainable and is headed for change.
John Ikerd, professor emeritus of ag economics at the University of Missouri-Columbia, presented to the Local Food Connections virtual conference, which was sponsored by the Kansas Rural Center.
In Ikerd's presentation, "Local Food: Past, Present and Future," he suggested the United States is headed back to a pre-World War II food supply system in which food is grown and sold in a local area.
Ikerd said our current food system is corporately controlled, industrial and global, in which the average calories for humans move 1,200 to 2,ooo miles from location of production to end consumer.
"Even though the farms may be independently owned in many cases, it's the processing corporations that control most of the important decisions on that farm."
He argued this is an unsustainable and environmentally harmful means of feeding people.
The future is in the past
"If you go back to the food system of the 1940s and '50s, back when I was growing up in Missouri, we had a local food system at that time," Ikerd said. "We had small diversified farms."
At that time, Ikerd described communities of necessity. People came together at harvest time, socialized together, attended church together, and their children went to school together.
These communities had small, independent grocery stores and small, independent restaurants. Meat and flour where processed by local packers and mills, and local canneries handled produce.
"I would say 70 to 80 percent of everything we ate came within 50 miles of our home," he said.
Resurgence of local food
In 50 years, Americans saw a fundamental change in the food system.
"But I think the trend in the industrialization of the food system has run its course, and we're due for a fundamental change," Ikerd said. "I believe the farms and food systems of the future will be far more like those of the past than those of today."
He said he believes the future holds more diversified farms with more local control.
At the change of the millennium, the United States saw a resurgence of the local food movement. This shift was amplified by the pandemic in 202o, Ikerd said.
"We saw a resurgence of people wanting to go to the farmer's markets, and then when the farmer's markets couldn't function anymore, they went to online sales," Ikerd said.
"Many farmers that were already online saw their sales grow so fast where they could barely keep up. They are still in a situation, and they are still in a situation where the processing plants are scheduled one and two years in advance."
Communities also saw a large increase in home gardening.
Failures of commercial food
The COVID pandemic exposed major risk in the current industrialized food system, Ikerd said.
"This industrial food system that we have created with large-scale production, processing and distribution is very efficient economically, but it's lacking in resilience," he said. ...
"We saw the consequences of that in 2020 in respect to the large processing plants when they had outbreaks of COVID in those plants."
You can't shut down a food system like you shut down a plant, he said. The animals and crops continue to grow, and there was no place for that food to go. However, when consumers went to the supermarkets, the shelves were empty.
"It's not just there in processing and distribution," he said. "It is there on the farms," he said. "The large specialized farming operations are also lacking in resilience. They are inherently risky."
Specialized farms are more susceptible to disease, drought, other weather disasters and insect infestation. They are also susceptible to economic pressures, such as market fluctuations and export interruption.
Large commercial farms require expensive specialized equipment that can't be quickly converted to use for other food production. Capital requirements also require high-debt financing, which leaves independent farmers vulnerable.
Government farm policy and taxpayer subsidy has propped up the industrial farm model and allowed it to continue, Ikerd said.
Smaller, diverse farms rely more on skilled labor and local management and less on technology, which reduces the need for large amounts of capital, he said. These farms can produce more food per acre and per dollar invested, Ikerd said.
Farmers and taxpayers are not the only ones losing out. Consumers are seeing higher food prices.
Food prices increased at rates lower than inflation until about the 1990s. However, over the last 20 years, food prices have gone up faster than the inflation rate. As the food system came under corporate control, large processors and retailers were able to take larger profits from the system.
Local food opportunities
As farmer and consumers become more aware of the economic and environmental ramifications of commercial farming, they are turning more to local systems, Ikerd said.
Local food opportunities include farmer's markets, community supported agriculture, online food marketing, food hubs and online aggregation.
Community supported agriculture is usually a single farmer who sells directly to consumers through a food box subscription. Food hubs pull small- to medium-size producers together, so they can pool their resources and fill larger orders for school, restaurants, grocery stores or community groups.
Online aggregation in agriculture is a group of independent farmers coming together to market online.
Ikerd said he saw great potential in online marketing for the independent farmer.
Even if someone buys online from a local farmer, Ikerd said, there still can be a greater connection between the farmer and the consumer.
"You can go visit those farms. You can connect with them personally. It's people that care about food that are connected. The customers and the farmers both care about food," he said.
"It's about customers and farmers that care about the land and taking care of the land. That's what sustainability is about — caring for each other and caring for the land and finding a way to make that work economically."
Industrial farming violates ethical social, ecological and economic principles, Ikerd said.
"I can't tell you when it's going to change or how it's going to change," he said, "but it will in fact change, because it's not sustainable. You simply can't keep doing what we've been doing indefinitely.
"I don't know how long, as taxpayers, we're are going to continue to prop it up, but when enough people wake up to the fundamental flaws in our food system today and the possibility and the potential for the future, we'll see a very different future."