"Small Farms Are Real Farms" by John Ikerd

John Ikerd, professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri, has a message regarding the present state of agriculture in this country: it's not sustainable.Ikerd doesn't see a future for industrial agriculture with its emphasis on monocrops, fertilizer, and pesticides. It's a system that's expanded since the 1960s when a shift in national policy promoted increased productivity over all else.Ikerd preaches sustainable agriculture, calling for policy changes to make farmland accessible and affordable for farmers.This won't happen overnight, Ikerd notes. "It takes time to learn how to manage a farm sustainably because sustainable farming depends on intensive management and less on purchased inputs. It also takes time to heal and restore soils that have been depleted by industrial farming," he said.Corn and soybeans now account for almost 60 percent of all harvested cropland in the United States, he said.USDA statistics indicate that most of that corn goes into corn ethanol (45 percent) or fed to livestock and poultry (40 percent) while 50 percent of the soybean crop is typically exported. This year, amid tariff concerns, China, once America's biggest customer, isn't buying U.S. beans.The bottom line is that 40 million acres--about 16 percent of the country's harvested cropland and only 4 percent of U.S. farmland--are devoted to the production of food for direct human consumption, points out Ikerd.Fewer than 60,000 farms of 500 acres could supply the food currently produced in the U.S., he said.The transition to a sustainable future would require a radical rethinking of U.S. land-use practices, said Ikerd, calling for government policies to ensure long-run domestic food security through sustainable farming.