The food system is in crisis, but with every crisis come opportunities
In case you hadn’t noticed, food prices are rising. The cost of eating is going up. The UN’s Food & Agriculture Organization, FAO, assesses monthly changes in the cost of a “basket of food” containing five basic food groups with a metric called the Food Price Index. In 2021, the average global Food Price Index rose by more than 16%. More than anything else, supply chain disruption (due largely to the Covid pandemic) and climate change are responsible for the price hikes.
Even before Covid-19, however, new regulations limiting the amount of time long-haul truckers could drive without a break caused the prices of numerous agricultural staples to spike. In 2019, the costs of minerals and salt, two essential nutritional supplements for sheep, rose by nearly 40 percent. The cost of moving livestock feeds over long distances also rose, as did the cost of transporting fruits, vegetables, and dairy products, much of it from California, to markets in the Midwest and East. Of course, increased costs translate to increased consumer prices.
As Covid-19 spread around the world, supply chain disruption intensified. Mega-meat packing plants in the American Midwest shut down or curtailed activities. Supermarkets began reporting meat shortages, which one would think would be good news for small-holder farmers in the Northeast who sell meat directly to their customers. But it wasn’t. As demand for locally produced meats increased, the availability of appointments at the small, USDA meat processing facilities in New York, Pennsylvania and New England plummeted. The cause: Farmers in the Mid-west, were now shipping thousands of animals to be processed at plants in the Northeast. So, livestock producers in the Northeast could not meet local demand.
Add to this, the impacts of climate change, and you’ve got a perfect storm. Here are just a few examples:
1. Land capable of producing food is being lost at an astonishing rate. Some 25-35 percent of the earth’s arable soils are experiencing climate change-induced desertification. Floods and storms, some following major droughts, are washing soil away and decimating regional agricultures.
2. Much of Kansas’ and Nebraska’s corn and soy crops were lost to floods in March of 2019. Most of these grains are used to produce livestock feeds. Although the federal government helped prevent bankruptcies, there was no way to replace the lost crops. It seems to take about two years for the loss of a crop to impact its price in the market. So now, in 2021, the impact of the 2019 floods is hitting the market, and beef, pork and chicken prices in October 2021 were 8 to 28 percent higher than they were in 2020.
3. Further west, the worst drought in 1,200 years has reduced the Colorado River, which supplies drinking and irrigation water to six western states and Mexico, to a trickle. In California, which produces about 70% of the nation’s fruits and vegetables, farmers are unable to irrigate their crops, and harvests are failing. Fruit and vegetable prices are now beginning to reflect the drought’s impact.
4. Back in upstate New York, the rain has been relentless. The region received deluge-esque downpours throughout July and August, exactly when the second cutting of hay was about to happen. “Second cut” hay is more nutritious than the first cut (I’ll spare you the details about why). If you run a grass-fed/grass finished cattle, sheep, or goat operation, you need that more nutritious hay. But farmers had to leave a lot of grass in the field. When a commodity is in short supply, demand and with it, price, increase. That is happening with hay in upstate New York. Those costs have to be passed on to consumers if the livestock operation in going to survive.
Clearly, the Covid pandemic and climate change are impacting food production, and its delivery to consumers. These challenges are not going away any time soon. While we, individually, can’t control global pandemics or climate change, we may have more control over our food system than you might think.
But first, we need to face the fact that the cost of eating is rising, and consumers need to budget more for food. That’s a given. But perhaps it’s not such a bad thing. With every crisis comes opportunities.
Best-selling author Michael Pollan points out that Americans spend more on their consumer electronics than they do on food. For Americans, most of whom have never been without food, the only thing that has mattered is price. But the myth that food can be cheap is just that, a myth. Food, the most important biochemicals we put into our bodies, is expensive. And it should be. For years, most of our food has been provided by a so-called industrial (aka, conventional) food system. This system produces a lot of food, cheaply, in concentrated production centers like the Midwest and California. But meats, vegetables and dairy produced industrially can’t compete nutritionally with foods produced by what we call the regenerative (aka, sustainable) system (which includes organic agriculture). For example, vegetables grown on organic farms contain orders of magnitude more nutrients and minerals than do conventionally grown vegetables. Vegetables from enormous industrial farms in California, trucked across country, stored in a distributor’s cooler for 2-3 days and then placed on a grocer’s shelf for a week contain, not surprisingly, half the vitamins and flavor chemicals as vegetables harvested on the day you buy them at a local farmers market. Grass-fed beef is richer in vitamins and healthy lipids and lower in “bad” lipids than conventionally produced beef. Organic milk contains 12% of the pesticides and antibiotics found in conventional milk, and grains grown regeneratively contain none of the carcinogenic herbicide glyphosate, used widely in conventional grain production. So, we pay for it now, or we pay later with increased medical bills. If you care to compare, the cost of industrially produced food is rising relatively faster than for the same foods produced by small, sustainably managed farms.
A big part of managing the cost of eating and the quality of what we consume can be achieved by eating locally. In the Northeast, where farms are small and spread across myriad micro-environments, access to healthy fresh food has never been greater. Micro-environmental diversity obviates food shortages. Dozens of websites list thousands of farms and farmers markets across every region of the country. Many are open year-round, with hot-house and hoop-house vegetables available well into the fall and winter. Supply chain disruption is rarely a problem when we eat locally.
One of the few places where food shortages still present an unresolved challenge is in the meat sector which, in the Northeast, was created by midwestern livestock jamming eastern packing plants during the pandemic. That situation would be readily resolved by reviving the State Meat Inspection system. State inspected meat can only be sold within the state where it was inspected (USDA inspected meat can be sold anywhere). For obvious reasons, large, midwestern livestock producers are not interested in having their animals processed in state inspected facilities. Local, small-scale producers, however, would be happy to have access to these facilities. Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania have already restored state meat inspection; the system has been in place in Vermont for years. New York had a state meat inspection system until 1975 (1977 for poultry). It can be revived with little difficulty or cost. And federal funds are available to share in those costs. I encourage every New Yorker reading this to contact their state representatives and tell them to support the revival of New York State Meat Inspection as a food security issue. Those outside of New York, can make the same case in their states.
The cost of eating is going up. That’s undeniable. But perhaps the quality of what we eat can also increase, and in the process, we can produce healthy food, and secure local food systems.