I learned my lesson with my first and only online debate with a stranger. No more blog battles for me. I was right in the fuss, of course, but I certainly didn’t influence the editorialist in San Francisco. She super bad-mouthed modern agriculture. The non-agriculturist thought we could grow and eat what we need by sticking to her plan. I did ask her for her solution to Hemorrhagic Septicemia cutting into our food supply. I could tell she thought me a smart aleck but she still didn’t deal with the reality of cattle diseases.
I ended the stalemate with logic. Mine is simple: it took from whenever you say the first humans were on earth until the 1950s for the world population to reach three billion of us. It only took another fifty years for it to double to six billion. During that time there was no more fertile land created. Instead, there were lots of food acres converted to residences, highways, schools, soccer fields and so forth. How do you feed twice the people without more land? Well, just like most everything else in life, changes in food production have been slow but steady for thousands of years. It’s been improvements through technology in everything from animal genetics to insect control to harvest equipment that has made it possible to raise enough food.
I certainly don’t claim everything farm-wise has been without mistakes. Again like most everything else, there have been oversights, underfunding, lack of knowledge and just plain ol’ wrong in ag technology. But standards, monitoring and regulations have all increased and improved over time. Take pesticides for instance: they are like automobiles in some ways. Both are much safer than fifty years ago. I got to witness monster changes in pesticides over thirty-five years. And the ones banned even much further back were ones to really be concerned about but nobody knew at the time. Ever heard of calcium arsenate? If you are a descendant of a southern farm family from the first half of the 1900s, your ancestors shook that bad chemical dust from a sack onto to cotton plants to kill insects while afoot or on horseback.
My ’Frisco debater really fired off about “egg factories” and wanted all chickens to be free range. I informed her one of those egg factories was right over there at Edwards, Mississippi but I had my own hens, thank you. And mine were free range by day but locked up for their personal safety at night. I told her my eggs were not as safe as the “factory” ones. My chickens had access to their own manure: the factory ones didn’t. Light is passed through factory eggs to identify blood spots or bits of flesh. If I broke one of mine in a skillet and a blood spot was on the top of the yolk, I could toss that egg out. But if it were hid on the bottom, it just got cooked too and I never knew.
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Terry Rector writes for the Warren County Soil and Water Conservation District, 601-636-7679 ext. 3.