We are organic rice farmers, and this year the harvest is good, and the price for the rice is high thanks to government policies, so we might actually make a profit this harvest (the high price of fertilizer and diesel to run farm machinery and irrigation pumps had made a lot of farmers consider just letting the land go fallow instead of losing money).
Now the problem:Will the government subsidize the price of cheap rice (usually imported from Viet Nam etc) so the poor can eat?
Ah, but the pointy head scientists have other priorities: Save the planet by eliminating farms altogether?
No, not a joke: from the Inquirer:
University of California researchers in Irvine have developed a way to create farm-free food. Believe it or not, UCI professor Steven Davis says we could create edible materials with biological and chemical methods, removing the need for agriculture. As a result, we may not need to use large tracts of land to grow our food.That could stop people from burning patches of wilderness to convert them into farms. Also, that may reduce our use of pesticides and water to prevent the spreading of poisons and maintain a vital resource. More importantly, farm-free food production may remove our supply’s reliance on sunlight and might reduce our carbon emissions.
,,, “Such ‘food without the farm’ could avoid enormous quantities of climate-warming emissions while also safeguarding biodiverse lands that might otherwise be cleared for farms,” he added.
a similar article on Nature says the same thing.
An increasing number of academic studies and for-profit ventures have recently demonstrated that edible molecules can be synthesized via chemical and biological processes without need of agricultural feedstocks. Whereas plant-, cell- or fungi-based proteins and meat substitutes made from processed agricultural commodities are increasingly available, synthetically produced food may contain carbon from fossil fuels, waste or the atmosphere—that is, feedstocks that are not the product of agricultural photosynthesis.
in other words, fake food. Better living through chemistry.
Yet the prospects for producing food in this way raises many questions, prominent among them: what kind of food might feasibly be synthesized and with what advantages over agricultural products?
uh what's wrong with this picture?
uh, what will you do with the unemployed farmers? How will you stop them from farming? And would artificial food be cheap enough to feed the urban poor?
fake food factories will need an investment...follow the money...who will get rich on it? And will those who will get rich on fake food push (bribe) governments to encourage farmers not to farm?
What about small farmers?
On my "to read" list: CoryDigs has a long essay about food. and discusses many of these questions. True, it is a conspiracy site but she does put up links to check on the stories and then you can google to find different opinions.
Most of her report is about GMOs, big agri etc (which the left would considered evil) but then they go into the ecology types including those in the governments, buying up farm land to stop growing crops (a far right conspiracy). And even about mRNA vaccines for the anti vax conspiracy types to hyper-ventillate about.
So anyway, what does this mean for our farmers?
The reason I say our farmers is that years ago, land reform meant much of our family's land was given to the farmers who actually farmed it. Now, years later, their kids are educated, moved to Manila or to get overseas jobs, and there is actually a labor shortage in farm areas because no one wants to work that hard to stay poor.
One result: Many elderly farmers are selling the land to the rich from Manila to build summer homes, or to returning OFW for investment.
Since we no longer own our land, the rice for our organic rice company is grown by local farmers who we subcontract with, and we help them with the price of irrigation, ferilizer, handplows, machinery to harvest, etc. with the agreement that we have first dibs to buy their crop....
Back in the 1990s, much of the harvest was done by hand, and we supplied the thresher, but now we use a harvester/thresher (rented: Too expensive for us to buy). And bye bye waterbuffalo: Handplows are now used (sort of a large rototiller). The next step will be to rent a machine to plant the rice seedlings.
all of this means fewer people working in agriculture, of course, but the dirty little secret is that few younger people are willing to live in poverty doing back breaking farm work.
For our fields, since the young folk are leaving for better paying jobs, not only have we mechanized, but we import help.
some of our own farm land is farmed with people Joy's area in the Visayas, which is a lot poorer than our area and has fewer jobs
but the high price of fossil fuel is complicating matters: making it too expensive to grow food.
Then there is a huge story about farming that rarely gets in the news
Kuya is being pressured to sell his good rice growing land to a company to put solar panels on it. With the government policy to buy rice at a higher price, we probably will not do this...but you see how these things are connected.
and that doesn't even include conspiracy theories about the Chinese telecom company putting up the superduper fast internet antennas on our land (refused by Kuya)... uh, who can afford high speed internet in a rural area, so why are they placing them there? maybe because we are near a major military base?
sigh. Must stop reading internet conspiracy theories.
CNN shows traditional rice farming: which was how it was done when I first moved here but is slowly changing : something to remember the next time you read about those low carbon life style
that was how we did it up to a few years ago, and this is how it is now being done.
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