The price we pay for our food

Americans have always spent less of their income on food than any other industrialized nation. Of course, we pay a price for that cheap food supply. Some cancer victims might say that they would rather spend $8 on cereal if it means avoiding having to spend $80,000 on chemotherapy.

The price we pay for our cheap food supply is not just the increased risk to our health from the chemicals used in our crop production. We also pay a price environmentally. After World War II, organic farming methods were gradually replaced with chemical methods. When I was a young person living on a farm, farmers rotated the crops to improve the soil. A field would be planted with corn, then beans, then oats, and then clover or alfalfa. The rotation would reduce the infestation of insects and each crop would replace natural nutrients into the ground. In addition, clover and alfalfa would fix nitrogen in the ground as fertilizer. The fields were surrounded with hedge rows which reduced wind erosion. Finally, most farmers raised livestock and would fertilize the fields with the animal manure.

Today farmers in our area concentrate on corn and soybeans and use chemicals to control weeds and insect instead of cultivation and crop rotation. The price we pay for that is the loss of humus and topsoil in our farmland. Another price we pay is the pollution of our water streams with chemicals. And of course, there are no hedge rows left to prevent wind erosion.

For low income people, it is cheaper to buy food laden with sweeteners than it is to buy more nutritious food. Many experts claim this is one reason why so many poverty stricken people are paradoxically obese.

There is no easy answer on how to feed our nation without polluting the environment and posing risks to our health. However, if the government considers second hand smoke to be such a health hazard that anti-smoking laws must be enacted, then it also must look into regulating some of the health hazards posed by our food production system. For one, government subsidies can be evened out so that less subsidies are given to corn and more subsidies are given to producers of not only organic food producers but also to growers of other crops which can be considered more nutritious and healthful such as fruits and vegetables. In addition, we the consumer should make an effort to seek out organic foods even if they do cost more. However, trying to convince the American consumer to spend more money on healthier food is like trying to get smokers to quit smoking.

It would be great if farmers would start to grow more of what we need in the way of fruits and vegetables and reduce the amount of corn. This would lower the price of fruits and vegetables to the consumer and increase the price of corn for the farmer. However, the corn lobby is not about to let that happen.

By the way, it's ironic that you didn't mention the recent city-sponsored Mosquito insecticide fumigation in your complaint. (In the good old days, people hung nets around their beds.) I guess it's OK when the City does it, but not when farmers do it? :)

It doesn't work that way, Dave. Minonk Township's resources are better suited economically to produce corn and soybeans than peaches and carrots. Furthermore, if you've taken basic Economics, you may recall that producers of ag commodities are price takers, not price makers. That's because there are a large number of competing producers (worldwide in many cases) producing fungible (like) products. If a group of producers decided to stop production, the price would not go up since their competitors would still sell their production in the open market. The producers withholding production would only hurt themselves via reduced sales and would not impact market prices due to the large number of other producers still producing.

Dave, your latest editorial again paints an inaccurate picture of farming with its factual errors. Reading it, one might think you'd also advocate going back to cutting ice blocks from frozen lakes for our iceboxes. Let me focus only on your last comment: "It would be great if farmers would start to grow more of what we need in the way of fruits and vegetables and reduce the amount of corn. This would lower the price of fruits and vegetables to the consumer and increase the price of corn for the farmer."

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