Farming Sustainably in America

by Rob Wheeler

Published March 05, 2009 @ 10:46AM PT

If we want to create a sustainable America and world, adopting more sustainable agricultural programs and healthier eating habits would be a good place to start. Perhaps that is one reason why so many of you have given us suggestions for what should be included in our National Strategy for Sustainability focusing on these topics. As Jeffrey Barber mentioned in the blog post below, we’ve been reviewing the suggestions you’ve made and will be featuring and commenting on them in the weeks to come.

We’ll begin by covering such topics as how a White House Victory Garden could be used to promote the development and implementation of a National Strategy for Sustainability; eating a healthier diet can help us protect the natural environment, conserve valuable resources, and prevent global warming; federal sustainable agriculture programs could be strengthened; unsustainable subsidies could be replaced with sustainable incentives and policies; and home and community gardening encouraged through a National Strategy Plan; etc.

We face many agriculturally related challenges in the US that could be dealt with by implementing a Sustainability Strategy. For example, agriculture uses 70% of the water in the US, which is causing serious problems particularly in the Southwest. A recent study found that Lake Mead, which supplies water to 22 million people in the region, is likely to go bone dry by 2021. Similarly, a 2006 UN study found that raising livestock accounts for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions and can lead significantly to water scarcity.

Factory farming is another problem. By 2002 there were 12,000 concentrated animal feeding operations in the US holding 890 million animals, thus averaging 75,000 animals each. A single farm, with 140,000 head of cattle, can produce 1.6 million tons of manure each year, more waste than is produced by Houston, Texas.  The EPA reports that factory farms produce three times as much animal waste as humans, the majority of which is spread on the ground untreated often carrying excess nutrients and farm chemicals that find their way into waterways, lakes, groundwater, soils and airways. This includes antibiotics and hormones, pesticides, and heavy metals. 

According to the Pew Trust, “the industrialization of American agriculture has transformed the character of agriculture and with it the face of rural America. The family-owned farm that once produced a diverse mix of crops and food animals is largely gone, replaced by ever-larger operations producing just one animal species, or growing just one crop, and many rural communities have fared poorly.”

Our federal government needs to do more to address this. Of $165 billion spent on farm programs in the US between 1995 and 2005 more than three-fourths went to commodity crop subsidies, benefiting just 10% of producers. More than 90% of these checks went to corn, wheat, rice, cotton, and soybean growers. Thus many sustainable agriculture advocates call to scale back subsidies and put more money into conservation, nutrition, and rural development instead. 

We’ll be covering such topics as these in the coming weeks with many suggestions for how we can overcome such challenges by developing a US Strategy for Sustainability. Meanwhile a couple of things that you can do is to look for grass-fed, free-range meats; cut down on meat consumption; and seek out local farmers that can assure you about the safety of their practices.