I read Atul Gawande’s New Yorker essay on healthcare and what we can learn from America’s agricultural history—and the government’s involvement with agriculture—with interest. I’m a graduate of my state’s land grant university, and I can still recite the 4-H pledge. Hurst Farms is obviously too small to have an R&D department, and agriculture relies on both the basic and practical research that universities do.
Gawande is correct about the state of agriculture at the turn of the last century, and I hope someday to tell that story—how we’ve all benefited from the application of science to the production of food and fiber.
Having said all that, one could easily get the impression from the article that the tools to change farming were available in 1900, and only the stubbornness of the agriculturist prevented their adoption. While it’s true that farmers are conservative and slow to adapt, we just didn’t have the tools available to increase yields until Henry Wallace developed hybrid corn, the ability to synthesize nitrogen from the air was developed, and the internal combustion engine powered by petroleum instead of steam allowed the use of portable power.
Would it have taken longer to get where we are without the extension service Gawande writes about? Sure. Would we have got here anyway? Absolutely.
Gawande also steals more than a few bases in his analogy. If all the Senate was getting ready to recommend was a medical extension service, to experiment and disperse information to medical providers, they wouldn’t be having so much trouble passing the bill. Hell, I’d be in favor of that!
One final comment. I truly believe that technology trumps the influence of farm subsidies. That farm size and structure is a result of the tools we use, and not a result of whatever the latest farm bill says. Gawande implies that agriculture is a success because of farm subsidies—I would argue that their long-term effects on what we do and the way we do it has been small. Unlike the medical system reform now before Congress, farm subsidies have never limited an individual farmer’s profits or size or adaptation of technology. In the long run, subsidies lead to lower prices, which has probably slowed the change to the latest technology. They may have limited risk, which would increase the adoption of technology. I don’t have any way of quantifying those opposing forces, but my intuition is that we’re about where we’d be without 80 years of intervention. Farming is competitive, and the value of farm subsidies rapidly gets bid into the price of land, the most inelastic of inputs. We’re richer because of subsidies, but our yearly profits from actually farming the land are about the same as they would be without subsidies (an argument that doesn’t win me many friends amongst other farmers).
Blake Hurst is a farmer in Missouri and a contributing editor to American.com