Gov. Mitch Daniels took office with a plan to spur economic development for rural Hoosiers by doubling pork production in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). John Ikerd, professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri-Columbia College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources respectfully disagrees.

“You’d have a far greater economic impact on the state by doubling the number of farmers than doubling the number of pigs,” he said recently by phone from his Missouri home.

“From a purely economic standpoint, you have a lot more economic benefit when you can provide an opportunity for people to make a living rather than simply producing more of a product,” he said. “Doubling the number of pigs will have very little positive impact because you’ll degrade the rural environment and destroy rural communities.”

A CAFO conference

It’s talk like this that won Ikerd an invitation to be a keynote speaker Saturday, July 26 at Indiana CAFO Watch’s Conference in Hartford City. Barbara Sha Cox, one of the organizers of the gathering and a third-generation farmer on land her family owns in Randolph County, says Ikerd and other speakers were invited to educate attendees from across Indiana as well as Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky. “This conference isn’t about griping,” she said by cell phone while working on fences around her property. “It’s about education, because that’s what people need.”

Speakers include Ken Midkiff, author of The Meat You Eat (St. Martin’s Press, 2004), and Jay P. Graham, a research fellow for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a consultant to the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, which recently published “Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America.”

For most of his career, Ikerd said he was a pretty traditional agricultural economist. “I would probably have been a proponent of CAFOs and what I now call industrial agriculture,” he said. But he had a change of heart in the 1980s during what he termed the farm financial crisis. “I began to have really serious questions about the economics of agriculture that I’d been taught and was teaching.” Since that time, Ikerd’s interest has been sustainable agriculture. “Rather than focusing simply on the economic bottom line, which has driven agriculture to the large-scale specialized operations, I’m more interested in balancing the economic bottom line with the need to take care of the natural environment,” he said. This requires taking a long-term view of what economic sustainability means for agricultural practice, he said. “It has to be profitable, but it’s not just about making money.”

Sustainable agriculture

Ikerd asserted that sustainable agriculture should not only take care of the land but has to be socially responsible as well. “It has to produce food but it also has to be good for the farmers and for the communities where the farms are located.” Thus his enthusiasm for the local food movement comes as no surprise. “I think this is the new frontier of agriculture,” he said. “The growth in local foods has become the fastest-driven segment of the food market.”

From Ikerd’s perspective, the nation’s long-term food policy should focus on local foods and provide food security by emphasizing sustainable rather than industrial production. “I don’t think there’s any future in farming or food security for the country if we continue just to produce raw commodities for export and increasingly depend upon the rest of the world for our food or transform our agriculture into producing fuel for our automobiles rather than food for people,” he said. “We need people on the land who take care of the land and who are producing food for people rather than just basic raw commodities either to be processed and exported or turned into ethanol or whatever.”

He criticized the consolidation of the livestock industry over the past two decades to the point where three or four major corporations dominate the market and competition is limited. “There’s a vertically integrated chain that goes all the way from the food processor to the farm level,” he said. “We like to brag about our free enterprise market economy in this country, but we’re moving toward a situation where we basically have no markets left in agriculture until you get to the supermarket for food,” he said. “Everything else is controlled through a system of contractual arrangement.”

He called this system “corporatism” and doesn’t like it. “Somebody in a corporate boardroom gets to say how many hogs you’re going to produce and what organizations are going to be involved in the transaction,” he said. The major implication of doing away with wholesale markets for live animals is a centrally planned agricultural economy rather than a competitive economy, he said. “Decisions are being made through a process of corporate planning. It’s basically a wrong-headed idea of how you try to coordinate the economy.”

A way of life

“My big concern about where we’re headed is that our food supply is going to be dependent on a large, bureaucratic organization that’s going to be intent on maximizing returns to their stockholders rather than serving the good of the people either as consumers or as producers,” he added. Ikerd called for a change in our way of doing business. “We need an approach to agriculture and an approach to life that says it’s OK to make a living but at the same time you have a responsibility of caring about other people and a responsibility of caring for the earth.

“We need a more enlightened concept of self-interest because we need to realize that while we’re material beings, we’re also social beings and need to relate to other people,” he said. “We gain important benefits from relating to other people in society, including a sense of equity and justice.”

Ikerd said we also have long-term ethical and moral responsibilities to humanity, and that those are not sacrifices. “I think that’s what people on traditional family farms have always understood when they talked about farming being a ‘way of life,’” he said. “It’s a way to make a living and produce food and have some income but it’s a way to be a part of a community, it’s a place to raise a family, it’s a good way of life and it’s an ethical and moral and honorable and actually a privileged profession to be in because you’re caretakers of the earth and the future.”