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Column: Focusing on American farms is more important than ever 

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This week is ‘National Ag Week’

By Brian E. Maxted of Paso Robles

– It’s National Ag Week, a week organized by the Agriculture Council of America, when we traditionally “recognize and celebrate the abundance provided by agriculture.”

But if you survey recent headlines, and a torrent of geopolitical events, the result of existing policy choices and good ol’ Mother Nature are presenting some of the toughest conditions in decades for the agriculture industry, especially in California.

Consider some of the issues and news that have been stacking up against our farmers:

 

And we haven’t mentioned the industry’s never-ending labor pains: rising labor costs every year exacerbated by the lack of a cohesive farmworkers visa program (made increasingly challenging since the pandemic) combined with an aging and dwindling workforce.

Holloway CEO Brian Maxted

Holloway CEO Brian Maxted

These are just some the domestic issues. On a global scale, the number of periodicals on all sides of the spectrum are predicting that the war in Ukraine risks an all-out hunger crisis in many parts of the Middle East, Asia and Africa. All of which makes you wonder, how do our farmers keep farming? Why do they keep farming? Should they keep farming?

Agriculture policy has a lot in common with energy and defense policy. In a period of peace and stability, these industries can be an easy target to tighten (or loosen) regulation in the name of a cause that ultimately drives more production to occur overseas or experience a decrease in spending. However, in a period of instability or volatility, we realize how vital these industries are to civilization’s very existence and how there is no substitute to a strong, thriving domestic food production.

This is especially true for Central California agriculture. Within the “100-mile circle” that includes Bakersfield, Fresno, Salinas, and Modesto, lies the largest patch of Class 1 soils, (the best there is) where the sun shines 300-plus days a year, and the climate is ideal for the most diverse and continuous growing seasons. This area produces nearly half of our country’s fresh fruits, vegetables, and nuts – more than 250 different crops rich in vitamins and nutrients essential for human survival.

However, over the past few weeks and months (and longer in California), the industry has experienced compounding challenges at a staggering pace. We’re painting with a broad brush here, but reading the headlines, you can see why the industry is under stress it has not seen in decades. To make matters worse, Mother Nature even jumped on the pile, with hailstorms and frost conditions that wreaked havoc on new growth and blooming trees in California.

Mother Nature is Mother Nature. There’s not a lot we can do against hailstorms and frost, other than continue to adopt sustainable practices and hope we’re not exacerbating climate challenges with our farming activities. Instead of compounding the problem, we can focus on optimizing crop health, while making a positive impact with sustainable soil and water management practices.

But even when seeking to do the right thing, our country remains so divisive that rather than coming together and offering common sense, and dare I say, occasionally compromising solutions, we – more often than not – retreat back into our tribal corners.

What we need is to come together. We need to see what’s happening on the other side of the theoretical barbed-wire fence. We need to better understand where our food is coming from and the people who produce it: Our farmers, our field workers, our ag consultants, our technologists, our operators and drivers. Some of our growers have been farming the same ground for four or five generations, are true stewards of the land, and have an invested interest in protecting it.

Most farmers wake up before dawn every day to tend to their fields and flock; battle the elements for an entire season; plan, hope and pray for a solid harvest and then take nearly everything they just earned for a year’s work and invest it right back into the ground again for the following season. Their ground is their passion, their livelihood, their heritage; and in return, they make available to us the most plentiful bounty and variety of sustenance human existence has ever experienced.

What we need this week, and every other week is to get more familiar with agriculture: Visit a farm, go to a farmer’s market, attend field days, take a farm tour, talk to those who produce our food, understand them, understand their needs.

I’ll list a few thoughts here, each of which requires a deeper dive on how best to accomplish them, to aid farmers:

  1. Invest in additional water infrastructure with sensible environmental regulation for construction;
  2. Reprioritize water use in the West, including encouraging greywater recycling and desalination powered by excess solar energy, especially for coastal cities;
  3. Promote healthy soils programs and regenerative farming practices to protect our most vital resource;
  4. Encourage domestic energy production (is purchasing more from Venezuela or Iran as a substitute really bettering the planet?) to lower farming and transport costs while also increasing domestic production of fertilizer (a byproduct of the natural gas industry);
  5. Fix immigration to stabilize the labor pool (nobody is stealing anyone’s job these days and America’s success is an immigrant’s story);
  6. Incentivize food waste recycling and carbon sequestration programs to produce and use compost that puts valuable nutrients back in the soil instead of a landfill.

These are only a few potential solutions. Ask a farmer what keeps them up at night and you will get an invaluable window into how to prevent what could be the largest domestic food crisis since the 1930s.

It’s time to give our farmers a hand, rather than regurgitate tribal dogma that ultimately puts our food security at risk. Otherwise, today’s rising costs will lead to tomorrow’s shortages – a reality tragically imminent in many parts of the developing world today.

Learn more about Holloway’s soils-first solutions for agriculture at hollowayag.com.

 

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