There are no magic silver bullets on agriculture and climate change

Unfortunately, of two recent reads, one gets that right, but then gets one issue wrong and others partially wrong, while the other, allegedly informed by the "protagonist" in the first book, isn't informed enough.

I'm going to mash together versions of both Goodreads reviews with additional comment, the second being shortened.

We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate by Michael Grunwald
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Low-till and no-till will save us, right? Wrong.

A raft of new plants, like Kernza, a perennial-plant riff on wheat, will save us, right? Mostly wrong.

Veggie burgers will save us, right? Wrong as currently entailed, though with some missing information.

Lab meat will save us, right? Wrong totally, but also with some missing information.

GMOs could save us, right? He doesn’t get explicit, but seems to have “yes with caveats” as his answer. I offer a bigger yes with more caveats.

And, he has one good point at the end — we should bring back individual shaming, as well as stop looking for magical silver bullets. You bought the SUV. YOU bought the 1/3 pound hamburger.

Grunwald uses Timothy Searchinger as, well, the nonfiction equivalent of a protagonist for much of this book, though he also has other skeptics of the silver bullets above as well. (This is the muse cited by "Sea of Grass," below, for helping straighten them out on biofuels, though apparently they didn't read closely enough.) Overall, the book is somewhere between good and very good. I hit on 3.75 stars rounded up, because most of the 3-starrers wrongly in my opinion thought it too long, and it needed to be this detailed.

He does a generally good job, but not perfect, especially later in the book.

No spoiler alerts on what he gets right, above. So, we'll tackle what's less than fully correct.

Grunwald ignores that Impossible Burger actually has as much saturated fat, and more sodium, than conventional food. Fake cheese, at least mainline commercial varieties, do have less saturated fat than the real deal, but do have more sodium, as I have discussed in some depth. It's also pretty highly processed.

Also, Grunwald got "golden rice" wrong. Wrong. Its problem was not the "mean greenies" opposing it as much as, even after it cleared that hurdle, for basically another decade, it had lower yields than conventional rice.

Heralded on the cover of Time magazine in 2000 as a genetically modified (GMO) crop with the potential to save millions of lives in the Third World, Golden Rice is still years away from field introduction and even then, may fall short of lofty health benefits still cited regularly by GMO advocates, suggests a new study from Washington University in St. Louis.  

Golden Rice is still not ready for the market, but we find little support for the common claim that environmental activists are responsible for stalling its introduction. GMO opponents have not been the problem,” said lead author Glenn Stone, professor of anthropology and environmental studies in Arts & Sciences.

I told you more than a decade, did I not? Stone goes on to explicitly refute the idea that "mean greenies" inhibited golden rice's adoption. And, he has supported GMO crops in general.

On this issue, Grunwald comes close to believing, by non-condemnation, in GMOs as a silver bullet. 

On lab meat? He doesn’t delve enough into the energy inputs it will need to scale up, let alone the need for computer chipmaking type clean room sterility. Grunwald should have, if he didn’t want to voice it himself, gotten a true skeptic for more comment on this. Indeed, he should have looked at the energy inputs for scaling up Impossible Burger type foods.

The book is otherwise pretty good and almost very good until around 250. Frank Mitloehner claims there’s no more “stooping labor” with today’s Big Ag animal farms. Really? There is. It’s called “illegal immigrants.” (I don’t know if the new round of people from the Levant and Africa get pushed into the same in Europe or not.) But, no, there's still plenty of “stoop labor” in US agriculture. And, while that's not the focus of the book, we need to do more than one-shot ethics in the world of modern ag.

As for Ethiopians with stunted growth because of lack of animal protein? It may in part being stunted due to lack of protein period during Ethiopia’s famines.

The highly touted ranch in Brazil's Cerrado? Grunwald rightly notes that Brazil's tropical latitude means this can't be done well in the US. That said, he also has it looking as good as it does in part by comparing it to rundown neighboring ranches. I'm sure a 1920s or 1930s US ranch would come off just about as badly.

Animal cruelty? Grunwald mentions modern poultry occasionally breaking legs. Doesn’t mention cows with what are likely painful udders. Or young bullocks-to-be castrated into steers. He does mention California’s “free roaming” pigs laws and says Searchinger is OK with them, if they don’t cut hog production too much. Well, that’s nice. Or "nice." Am I somewhat of a hypocrite? Yes, I still eat real cheese. That said, it's all minimum of Cabot or Tillamook. Hopefully they don't use quite as bloated of cows along with not using bovine growth hormones in specific.

Grunwald touches a bit on the water issue, but not as much as he could. The Ogallala Aquifer that waters all the High Plains farms that provide feed for all the High Plains feedlots, or the Big Ag High Plains beef rancher that has his own feedlot? Never mentioned, and when I checked the index when I was up to about page 280, and noticed that, that became the tipping point to drop from 5 stars to 4. This book could have used a good dosage of “Cadillac Desert.” Yes, GMOs let alone CRISPR may increase dryland yields even more (see "Sea of Grass") but they'll still be less than Ogallala-watered corn, milo and beans. So, the issue of water is indeed indirectly, even semi-directly, related to the issue of climate change and agriculture.

Finally, I can’t totally buy a key sub-thesis. I think not only is transitioning beef eating to chicken good, but lessening beef eating beyond that, and chicken eating as well is even better. It's another way of reducing Big Ag, animal division's stress on the land. (Grunwald didn’t mention recent outbreaks of avian flu, as a reason to cut chicken raising and worry about chicken, and egg, costs.) He also comes off as too sanguine about how much, and how cleanly, factory fish farming can scale up. I’m not saying we need to have the entire world go vegetarian, let alone vegan. But, the whole Western world could eat less of all meats, and all dairy products. If you do that, people might have less of a hankering for meat substitutes, which have the health issues noted above, and even with veggie burgers, not to mention lab meat, the energy input issues and more. 

I confess to being somewhat of a hypocrite on these issues. But, I have eaten vegetarian for stretches of three months or more at a time. And vegetarian, not just beef-omitting like Grunwald. Per the individual shaming that he mentions, we can all do better.

That said, vegetarianism will leave you B12 deficient without eating fortified foods and veganism even more so. Plants do not have B12, and mushrooms and other fungi have very little. See here. Now, yes, this is the naturalistic fallacy, but our ancestors, since or before the last common ancestor with bonobos and chimpanzees, ate insect and grub meat, at a minimum, in all likelihood. Besides, it's fun to hoist people like this with the naturalism petard.

But, we can all do better. If, on average, Americans ate no more than 1.5 ounces of ALL types of meat per day, the planet would be much better off.

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Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie by Dave Hage
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is somewhere between 2.75 to 4.25 stars, depending on how much knowledge one brings to the issue already, per a guide I use more and more in my own reading of nonfiction books.

For me, there were two main things I learned.

One was the use of tile drains in the boggy Midwest. Via Marc Reisner's "Cadillac Desert," I have long been familiar with them in irrigated areas of the desert Southwest, to reduce salinity in the soil water level beneath roots and carry off the salts in the West's alkaline water. The broad principles are the same.

The second was the development of new corn and soybean seed types for the northern high plains. This is problematic, per Grunwald above noting land is not free. The reason this is being done is for more corn and beans for biofuels, a climate-wrecker.

That said, the authors appear to pull some punches, and to miss some things.

One pulled punch? Bison in Yellowstone National Park almost certainly do NOT transmit brucellosis to cattle. That said, elk on the adjacent National Elk Range, fed hay in winter as if they were cattle, almost certainly DO, but ranchers and hunters in Montana and Wyoming don't like to talk about that.

Second and related, and also tied to a 2-star reviewer here? The degree of animus from ranchers toward bison, though mentioned, seemed downplayed.

Third, the degree to which it's not an either or of conventional big ag or people in West Virginia or New Delhi starving is underplayed.

Fourth, the degree to which Big Ag lobbyists control discussion on any possible changes to farm legislation, from expanding the conservation reserve program through expanding the types of crops eligible for insurance to sliding scales on insurance coverage. The authors here, especially, come off as "Minnesota nice."

There's lesser pulled punches here and there in the book.

One, partially but not totally beyond this book? Just how "hollowed out" much of the plains is, not only from larger farm and ranch size, but consolidation in the agribusiness world, especially in things like meatpacking.

So, if you don't know what a local soil conservation district is, you might learn a fair amount. If you do? Not so much.

Speaking of, the authors don't discuss the thousands of SCD check dams across the country, backing up large ponds or small lakes, many of them constructed during the Depression and at the end of their estimated or expected life spans.

I thought about giving this a starless review but ended at 3 stars.

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National farm care — and crop insurance fraud — vs national health care

As Congress faces a new farm bill, it's almost certain that members of both parties will "manage" to avoid discussing the crop insurance fraud current and past farm bills perpetuate. Yeah, the story is based on farmers and insurers who got busted, but? It took years to bust them and there's surely plenty of more subtle, unbusted fraudsters still out there.

This:

In an AgWeb article detailing how federal agents busted a record-breaking $100 million crop insurance fraud ring in North Carolina, Don Doles, the lead investigator of the case, said that despite his record-breaking case, he and his fellow agents “touched about a tenth of those truly participating at some level,” adding that “the scope of what happened is so much bigger than what could ever be included in a story.” To that end, it’s possible that crop insurance fraud costs taxpayers somewhere in the ballpark of a billion dollars a year. 

For Doles, the most frustrating aspect of the case was just how involved the big tobacco companies were in the fraud scheme. “The person acting as dealer hauls off the unaccounted [for] tobacco, bought at half price and sells it to a big tobacco company that snaps up great tobacco for $1.75, even though they know it’s shady,” Doles explained to AgWeb.

Confirms that. 

Subsidies from the USDA to help with crop insurance (how many "conservative" farmers rant against national health care?) make it worse.

So, why can't the Rethuglican half of Congress, most supportive of the fraud and largess, along with the Democrap half of Congress, generally being tolerant of this in exchange for scraps of TANF, SNAP and school lunch money, give us national health care?

Boo fucking hoo for High Plains Tex-ass farmers

From what I know, they probably overdraw the Ogallala Aquifer more than any other state that's above it, though New Mexico's could be right up there with them. In both states, anyway, a fair amount of it is for the same demented reason as in places like Southern California with Lower Colorado River Water — alfalfa for dairy farming. (And, if not that, some of the milo on the Texas side of the line also goes to dairy farming.)

And now they're crying about how it's being depleted so rapidly, without talking too much about how they're a large part of the problem, compounded by higher evaporation from irrigation in warmer Texas vs Kansas or Nebraska, and compounded further by the aquifer kind of tilting downhill toward the south. (On the New Mexico side of the line, wells into the Ogallala were starting to draw sand 25 years ago in spots.)

And, this is only going to get worse due to climate change, which most farmers don't want to discuss, although admitting it in the background. (Even the Noble Research Institute prefers euphemism, such as "climate variability.")

Per a PBS Frontline episode years ago about use of Roundup vs crop rotation? Many farmers, mythos aside about their yeomanship or anything else, have gotten lazy on such things. One part of me doesn't totally blame them, as they continue to face Ag Secretary Earl Butz's now 60-year-old dictum of "get big or get out." But, even with that, I still see laziness.

Cesar Chavez, hugely flawed hero

The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography by Miriam Pawel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

(Addendum, outside the review, and expansion of it, itself. Noting the one retweet of this, despite Chavez' numerous flaws, I reject the idea that organizing farmworkers was bad, and I also reject the idea that Chavez' later Hispanic political empowerment, even at the expense of farmworker neglect, was all bad. So, to anybody dedicated to following the ideas of Hayek, or beyond, or other doctrinaire conservativism, no soap from me, and I'm putting that right up front.)


Miriam Pawel, author of a previous book on farmworkers, offers us an in-depth, totally honest must-read, based on thousands of hours of audiotapes, notes and more.

Pawel, in the first "critical" biography of Chavez, gives us the good, the bad, and the ugly in the life of the man who gave California's farmworkers their first union, then, due to stubbornness, wrongly-directed singlemindedness and authoritarian leadership, essentially wrecked that same union, to the point that farmworkers today are little better off, in a number of ways, than they were before Chavez founded the United Farm Workers.

Where to start? Here: Pawel quotes Chavez talking about that "singlemindedness." That was part of his genius in getting the United Farm Workers started. So, too, was his recognition that, because agricultural workers were largely uncovered by US labor law, there were few rules to play "outside of." Related to that, he was an outside-the-box thinker in early tactical and strategic moves.

If only we could end his life, or freeze it, in the early 1970s, then the Chavez of myth — a myth largely perpetuated by Hollywood-type liberals, which in turn adds to the degree of truth in generalizations about that subculture — would closely match that of reality. But, we don't end there.

Pawel shows that recognition as a union, especially on larger contracts, meant that the UFW was no longer "outside the system." That became even more true in the mid-70s, after California passed into law the bill creating the Agricultural Labor Relations Board.

It was at this point that, as Pawel shows, Chavez essentially went off the rails. He decided the UFW needed to be a social movement, not a union. He decided his single-mindedness needed to be more authoritarian. And, to bring this all together, he decided to borrow some "control" tools from the notorious 1970s cult, Synanon, even working with its founder. The result? Longtime Chavez supporters were accused of being traitors to the cause, Communists, or whatever, and booted out. Besides Synanon, Chavez also borrowed ideas from Mao and the Cultural Revolution.

All of this was new to me, the stuff related to Synanon, Chavez turning UFW headquarters into something akin to a cult, and his refusal to focus on union development issues because that would force him to delegate authority.

Meanwhile, because he wasn't a good administrator, but was too much of a "controller" to delegate administrative tasks, maintaining and renegotiating contracts fell by the wayside. Expanding the union outside of California did the same, with Chavez even crushing independent organizing efforts. (Austin having a "Cesar Chavez Boulevard" could be considered a bit laughable for this reason.) And, the UFW wound up owing a bunch of back taxes.

At the same time, Chavez began intervening a lot more in California politics, an idea he once rejected. He also began marketing the UFW as a brand, especially to the likes of those Hollywood-type liberals, even as more and more contracts with growers were lost and the union was shrinking.

This isn't to deny that things like pesticide use in the fields weren't important issues. It is to say that things like that were secondary to renewing efforts at organization of union locals, getting new contracts signed with growers, etc. It is also to say that many of them were "pitched" at appealing to those Hollywood-type liberals. And, as Chavez because more and more of a national political star and icon, that, the elbow grease work of maintaining a union, appealed to him even less as the 1970s moved into the 1980s.

However, as a result, he was able to expand the political power of "la raza." And, to do so somewhat outside of California. So, Austin's commemoration of him isn't totally wrong, either.

Given that the farm workers' movement really started in my pre-school days, that the slide of the union and Chavez' move to becoming a cult leader happened before the end of my high school days, growing up in a politically quite conservative household, and that his next move to political icon and final abandonment of original unionization efforts happened before I had started escaping that background, let alone gone beyond more stereotypical versions of liberalism, I never had understood what had happened to the farm workers' movement. And now I know — Cesar Chavez happened to it — the good, the bad, and the ugly.

This just catches the tip of the iceberg of a must-read book. And, should lead a reader asking, was the expansion of political power worth it for the price that Chavez eventually left farmworkers to pay?



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Deflation hits America’s breadbasket

Wheat prices are collapsing even faster than banks in America’s heartland.

And, that cheap price at the gas pump, in addition to running the risk of deluding Americas into buying SUVs again, undercuts the ethanol-propped price of corn.

Prices may well drop another 50 percent, reversing part-time farmers, many of them perhaps retirees fleeing the coasts, doing farming. OTOH, land prices will probably drop by at least that much, enticing semi-retirees to cybercommute from the heartland.