Plant Chat: Marty Strange, Sustainable Agriculture Expert

It’s my pleasure to welcome my professor, well-known sustainable agriculture expert Marty Strange, to my Plant Chat today. Marty has been widely recognized for his leadership in agricultural and rural education policy.  He received Common Cause’s Public Service Achievement Award and the Rural Sociological Society’s Distinguished Service to Rural Life Award and was named by a panel of scholars and journalists commissioned by the Lincoln Journal Star as one of the 100 people who most influenced the course of the state of Nebraska in the 20th century.  He serves as Scholar In Residence at Green Mountain College at Poultney, Vermont, teaching in the Master in Sustainable Food Systems program, where I am currently studying. He was a co-founder and for 23 years the program director of the Center for Rural Affairs in Nebraska, one of the pioneer organizations in sustainable agriculture and rural microenterprise. His book Family Farming: A New Economic Vision, first published in 1988, is one of the leading critiques of industrial agribusiness and was republished in a new edition in 2008. Continue reading to learn more about Marty’s thoughts on sustainable living, agriculture, the environment, and more.

What are the primary ways in which agriculture has changed in the U.S. over the past 50 years?   

There has been a dramatic increase in labor-saving technology and the labor that has been displaced is the labor of farm owners far more than that of hired workers. Farmers have cannibalized each other as they compete for the land necessary to make most efficient use the latest technology. As a result, land has increased in value and absorbs an even larger share of the farm income in the form of mortgage payments. In many years the increase in the value of land is worth more (at least on paper) than the income a farmer can get from farming that land.

How do these changes impact the environment, animal welfare, and the community? 

Nearly all technologies have had some adverse environmental effect, from the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria due to sub-therapeutic use of growth promoting anti-biotics in animal operations, to the diminution of ground and surface water levels due to irrigation in the arid and semi-arid West, to the growth of Dead Zones of algae in major bodies of water from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Champlain due to run-off of agricultural chemicals from eroded lands. The list is really endless. Agriculture has become a central environmental issue that remains the industry most sheltered from environmental regulation. As for communities, farm enlargement and labor displacement is ruining small town economies nationwide. We are hollowing out the hinterland.

What is the single aspect of modern agriculture that most concerns you?

Agriculture is naturally in a position to contribute to the climate change problem by sequestering carbon in a very stable form in soil. But this requires planting grass on lands that are now being tilled, and that means making better use of ruminant livestock as converters of grass to food. There is a growing cultural aversion to this. So my biggest concern is not with modern agriculture, but with the modern food system.

How do you feel the public perceives agriculture today? Do they have good knowledge of the challenges, practices, and outcomes?  

The public does not think much about agriculture, and when it does it thinks in contradictory terms that are both romantic for the family farm and obsessed with cheap food.

How does the cultivation of monocrops impact the sustainability of the food system?

It builds powerful pests that adapt to ever more powerful pesticides in a downward, losing spiral, it produces soil erosion, the number one cause of the decline of dozens of civilization, it elevates risk of crop failures on the one hand and of price depressing surpluses on the other, both creating financial instabilities that have now become the most costly part of government farm subsidies, ranging from $10 to $20 billion a year.

When it comes to animal agriculture, what are the most pressing concerns facing our current system?   

Vertical integration contracting, concentrated animal feeding operations, anti-competitive practices in the meat packing industry, and a dietary obsession with fat (which is beginning to shift).

What will it take to move the needle from our current agricultural system to a more sustainable model, which takes care of the soil, natural resources, animals, communities, and people? 

A collapse of the industrial food system that produces cheap food on cheap energy, bad biotechnology, and crude use of antibiotics. It will take a food crisis to force major changes in agriculture. But in the meantime, the sustainable agriculture movement needs to be seeding the farming systems that will survive and save us.

The sustainability movement has often focused on small, organic, local agriculture within a community, but what are the limitations for this sort of agricultural system within the overall food system? What are the successes of these sorts of agricultural systems?   

The industrial and sustainable food systems cannot co-exist. The premises of each disavow the practices of the other.

What are some solutions that can be applied to make today’s modern agriculture feasible yet more sustainable? Do you have an example you can share? 

Multi-crop, multi-year rotations, less tillage, more grass, animals in fresh air, improve dryland farming methods and abandon irrigation in the arid West, sharply reduce use of high-energy corn diets in ruminants, both dairy and meat animals, and get them on grass where they belong.

What are some simple messages dietitians can communicate to their clients and the public about how they can support a more sustainable agricultural system in their daily lives?   

Packaging is the bane of a good diet. Learn to cook. Eat more locally. Grow a garden. You can’t fix the system alone, but you can do something.