PERILOUS BOUNTY
The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It
By Tom Philpott
In a world where it’s impossible to keep up with the urgent and awful stories that seem to get worse by the week, it’s easy to lose track of all we worried about in before times — little stuff like whether food-borne illnesses were killing hundreds of people. Is that still going on?
The answer is of course: Yes. As I write, more than 900 cases of salmonella have been linked to onions. And in our time of lockdown, there has been no end to stories of fields of ripe produce being plowed under, millions of gallons of milk dumped and millions of chickens slaughtered for lack of ways to bring them to the supermarkets and food banks that need them. We’ve lost track of just how badly served the planet has been by the agriculture and distribution systems that evolved in the name of efficiency and price competition.
Shutting your eyes may be presidential policy, but the journalist and blogger Tom Philpott won’t let us get away with it. He wants to focus our attention squarely on the environmental consequences of the global and, especially, the American way of raising food. Nothing, his new “Perilous Bounty” reminds us, is going in the right direction.
Not the economics of farming — neither the small-scale diversified farming we love to support at our local farmer’s market, which has nearly vanished, nor, surprisingly, the consolidated farms of the Corn Belt, where even with federal protectionism farming is “a pretty awful business.” Not the topsoil of those farms, “one of the jewels of global agriculture” formed over millenniums, depleted by monoculture and left to wash away in the increasingly uncontrollable and erratic deluges caused by climate change. Not the tap water of half a million people around Toledo, who in 2014 were told not to drink, wash or bathe in water made toxic by “titanic amounts of industrially produced nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers” dumped into Lake Erie.
Philpott, now a food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones, has long been my go-to writer on farming and the environment. His bent is for small-scale and regenerative farming — the new catchphrase for what biodynamic and then organic farming were historically called, a practice of constantly replenishing soil and with it natural ecosystems. I didn’t once see the word “regenerative” in “Perilous Bounty,” though Philpott is very much concerned with soil and water health. He must dislike the term — and given the plain-spoken crankiness that has always been an endearing feature of his writing, he maintains a surprisingly tactful silence on it. The whole book, in fact, skirts the tendentiousness that has become a hallmark of writing that sounds environmental alarms.
Perhaps that’s because the author simply expects the reader to be as appalled as he is by the plain facts, which he lays out with new clarity. How to comprehend the huge, unflushable and toxic pig-manure lagoons in Iowa, where hog breeding crossed over only 75 years ago from being a useful adjunct to crop farming to become densely concentrated animal feedlot operations, the animal equivalent of concentration camps? Why, fecal equivalents, of course. Although the state houses seven hogs for every human being — 23 million hogs, a third of the hogs farmed in the United States — their intensive feeding produces as much manure as 28 hogs per resident would. Add in cattle and chickens (Iowa is the country’s leading producer of eggs) and you’ve got “55 ‘fecal equivalents’ for every actual person in Iowa.”
The greatest tragedy of what are known as concentrated animal feeding operations is of course the human carnage — the contemptuous disregard for worker safety that led to the lifelong maiming documented in Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” (which took up where Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” had left off a century before) and that Ted Genoways’s “The Chain” recently made clear in searing detail.
During the pandemic meatpackers have turned a blind eye to the ways Covid-19 could easily spread in slaughterhouses, and have shown a chilling indifference to the resulting illness and death in many of the country’s most vulnerable workers. The administration’s cynical pandering to the meat industry’s claims of a coming meat shortage by calling meat employees essential — absolving factory owners, many of them major campaign donors, of liability for infection and resulting deaths — will stand as a historic stain on the federal government. So will an abandonment of worker-safety enforcement and the castration of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Sinclair might find the food-safety laws enacted in the wake of his book still intact and even strengthened (even if the enforcement is lax). But the cronyism and political protection of owners above workers would feel very familiar.
“Perilous Bounty” went to press just before the pandemic changed life, so there’s nothing about the human devastation the administration and the meat industry have been indifferent to. The reader is likely to feel dramatic irony, particularly toward the end, as Philpott optimistically warms to the Green New Deal advanced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey and endorsed by Bernie Sanders, then still a presidential candidate. There’s nothing about worker abuse, because Philpott’s scope is the environment. At the conclusion, as Philpott documents the craven coddling of the fertilizer industry, the reader wants to yell: “But no — it got worse! So much worse!”
Philpott’s driving question throughout the book is “Who profits from this massive bounty?” Not the farmers, and, except for artificially depressed prices for health-damaging ultraprocessed food, not consumers.
One of his answers is landowners, including many foreign buyers, who know that “farmland investments are also largely immune from economic shocks, performing well even when stocks and bonds plunge.” (Though Philpott doesn’t have the space to document them, some states have tried and failed to protect huge swaths of their land from overseas land grabs.) And then there are the companies that sell fertilizers, seeds and pesticides — four “massive companies” that “loom over the $11 billion U.S. fertilizer markets” and “a ‘Big Six’ of agrochemical seed companies that towered over farmers in the Midwest and globally alike,” to whom the author devotes considerable space, and who design their products to work like interlocking hardware and software.
Is there a way out, and a way forward? Like all of us who write about food and farming, Philpott goes in search of the counterexample — a farmer who does things right. His, Tom Frantzen, a farmer in Chickasaw County in northeast Iowa — “mustached, 60-something, balding and dressed in a rumpled button-down blue work shirt” — restores rye to its natural rotation as a cover crop that protects soil over the winter, when barren corn and soy fields are particularly vulnerable.
Frantzen and another farmer, David Brandt, who’s just far enough south (a half-hour southeast of Columbus) to add wheat as his cover crop, report healthier soil and healthy profits, and Philpott excitedly mentions a 2012 study that documents higher yields and lower runoff. “The kicker,” he concludes with a flourish, is that “the region’s farmers won’t take an economic hit from moving beyond growing just corn and beans. … Growing a wider variety of crops requires more labor and management, but those expenses are balanced out by drastically reduced expenditures on agrochemicals.”
But, of course, neighbors aren’t rushing to cancel their charge accounts with their fertilizer dealers. Subsidized crop insurance for corn and soybeans is too reassuring to give up. The only way they might change is through the magic of the market: consumer pressure. “If farmers could get a premium price for crops,” Philpott says, “meat and milk ‘grown with biodiversity’ or some such label, farmers would have an incentive to add them to their rotations.”
Well, we all need to dream. As most of us, and surely the author, dream of rebuilding an agriculture system that at last puts racial equity at its center, we can’t lose sight of the land, water and air that need the loudest and longest advocacy. “Perilous Bounty” will line up many new recruits.
