AMERICAN: The Journal of the American Enterprise InstituteThursday, July 30, 2009The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectualsBy Blake HurstFarming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is. This is somethingthe critics of industrial farming never seem to understand.I’m dozing, as I often do on airplanes, but the guy behind me has been broadcasting nonstop fornearly three hours. I finally admit defeat and start some serious eavesdropping. He’s talking aboutfood, damning farming, particularly livestock farming, compensating for his lack of knowledgewith volume.I’m so tired of people who wouldn’t visit a doctor who used a stethoscope instead of an MRIdemanding that farmers like me use 1930s technology to raise food. Farming has always beenmessy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is.But now we have to listen to self-appointed experts on airplanes frightening their seatmatesabout the profession I have practiced for more than 30 years. I’d had enough. I turned around andpolitely told the lecturer that he ought not believe everything he reads. He quieted and asked mewhat kind of farming I do. I told him, and when he asked if I used organic farming, I said no,and left it at that. I didn’t answer with the first thought that came to mind, which is simply this: Ideal in the real world, not superstitions, and unless the consumer absolutely forces my hand, I amabout as likely to adopt organic methods as the Wall Street Journal is to publish their next editionby setting the type by hand.Young turkeys aren’t smart enough to come in out of the rain, and will stand outsidein a downpour, with beaks open and eyes skyward, until they drown.He was a businessman, and I’m sure spends his days with spreadsheets, projections, and mar-keting studies. He hasn’t used a slide rule in his career and wouldn’t make projections with tealeaves or soothsayers. He does not blame witchcraft for a bad quarter, or expect the factory thatmakes his product to use steam power instead of electricity, or horses and wagons to deliver hisproducts instead of trucks and trains. But he expects me to farm like my grandfather, and not inci-dentally, I suppose, to live like him as well. He thinks farmers are too stupid to farm sustainably,too cruel to treat their animals well, and too careless to worry about their communities, their health,and their families. I would not presume to criticize his car, or the size of his house, or the way heruns his business. But he is an expert about me, on the strength of one book, and is sharing thatexpertise with captive audiences every time he gets the chance. Enough, enough, enough.Industrial Farming and Its CriticsCritics of “industrial farming” spend most of their time concerned with the processes by whichfood is raised. This is because the results of organic production are so, well, troublesome. Withthe subtraction of every “unnatural” additive, molds, fungus, and bugs increase. Since it is difficultto sell a religion with so many readily quantifiable bad results, the trusty family farmer has to be1thrown into the breach, saving the whole organic movement by his saintly presence, chewing onhis straw, plodding along, at one with his environment, his community, his neighborhood. Exceptthat some of the largest farms in the country are organic—and are giant organizations dependentupon lots of hired stoop labor doing the most backbreaking of tasks in order to save the sensitiveconscience of my fellow passenger the merest whiff of pesticide contamination. They do not spendmuch time talking about that at the Whole Foods store.The most delicious irony is this: the parts of farming that are the most “industrial” are themost likely to be owned by the kind of family farmers that elicit such a positive response fromthe consumer. Corn farms are almost all owned and managed by small family farmers. But cornfarmers salivate at the thought of one more biotech breakthrough, use vast amounts of energy toincrease production, and raise large quantities of an indistinguishable commodity to sell to hugecorporations that turn that corn into thousands of industrial products.The biggest environmental harm I’ve done as a farmer is the topsoil (and nutrients)I used to send down the Missouri River to the Gulf of Mexico before we began topractice no-till farming, made possible only by the use of herbicides.Most livestock is produced by family farms, and even the poultry industry, with its contractsand vertical integration, relies on family farms to contract for the production of the birds. Despitethe obvious change in scale over time, family farms, like ours, still meet around the kitchen table,send their kids to the same small schools, sit in the same church pew, and belong to the same civicorganizations our parents and grandparents did. We may be industrial by some definition, but notour own. Reality is messier than it appears in the book my tormentor was reading, and farmingmore complicated than a simple morality play.On the desk in front of me are a dozen books, all hugely critical of present-day farming. Farm-ers are often given a pass in these books, painted as either naïve tools of corporate greed, oreconomic nullities forced into their present circumstances by the unrelenting forces of the twingrindstones of corporate greed and unfeeling markets. To the farmer on the ground, though, afarmer blessed with free choice and hard won experience, the moral choices aren’t quite so easy.Biotech crops actually cut the use of chemicals, and increase food safety. Are people who refuseto use them my moral superiors? Herbicides cut the need for tillage, which decreases soil erosionby millions of tons. The biggest environmental harm I have done as a farmer is the topsoil (andnutrients) I used to send down the Missouri River to the Gulf of Mexico before we began to prac-tice no-till farming, made possible only by the use of herbicides. The combination of herbicidesand genetically modified seed has made my farm more sustainable, not less, and actually reducesthe pollution I send down the river.Finally, consumers benefit from cheap food. If you think they don’t, just remember the head-lines after food prices began increasing in 2007 and 2008, including the study by the Food andAgriculture Organization of the United Nations announcing that 50 million additional people arenow hungry because of increasing food prices. Only “industrial