squee!:
I just read the article, that is pretty terrible. But what can be done about it? The farmers need the fertilizers for farming, and even though some people (myself included) joke about farming subsidies, it isn't as if farming is altogether unimportant. Any ideas?
In my opinion farm subsidies and other programs are a bit of a mess. And I grew up on a farm and ranch that my parents still operate so I am not anti-farmer/anti-rancher. There are programs to take land out of production to both reduce crop production in order to help support prices and also to take land that is marginal in terms of soil quality or is overly prone to wind and water erosion, and should not be farmed at all, out of production.
But these programs are generally short lived with the land going back into production. And in many cases no changes to the land are allowed that would result in it being used for something else (for example adding a stock damn to enable the land to be permanently used as grazing land rather than to be re-tilled and farmed.)
The irony here is that if crop prices are higher, it becomes more economical for farmers to break up and farm marginal land or to use fertilizers to boost crop production from the land they have remaining in production (often using the land set aside payments to pay for the fertilizer.)
The solution would be a fairly complex approach using some fairly sophisitcated systems analysis techniques to identify the various feed back loops and then imposing some manadatory land use legislation to obtain optimum results in terms of price, production, and sustainability. The problem with that is that our politicials are just not going to do that as the various parties have competing interests - consumers want cheap food, farmers want to make a living, corporate farms want to maximize profits and suppliers want to sell farm equipment, seed, fertilizer and pesticides, and farm bureaus want to develop and manage farm programs.
Only a portion of the problem is actually the farmer/rancher's fault and they are in many ways encouraged by the government and economic forces to mis-manage their operations. Before fertilizers were commonly available crops were rotated to use the by products of different crops to maintain healthy levels of nutrients in the soil, For example wheat, corn, and alfalfa crops would be rotated and the land would laso be left fallow in the cycle for a season as well. Some farmes would also run cattle and would then use the manuer for fertilizer. These techniques allowed sustaineable production and conserved the land over the long term without requiring chemicals. This approach is probably very close to what a large scale systems analysis would indicate is the optimum approach - this particular land use system developed over time for the simple reason that it worked.
The ready availability of chemical fertilizers however has changed the picture as it allows potentially higher yield and continuous production of what ever crop will bring the most at market but at increased cost to the farmer and with some unwanted ecological consequences and in the long term some serious issues with chemical residues in the land itself.
When I grew up on my parents farm and ranch, the point was made that a farmer or rancher's only real asset is the land and the first priority is to ensure the land stays healthy. This is not at all what I see today in the majority of cases. For example we have had a fairly serious drought the last few years and I have seen pasture land in the area severely overgrazed by ranchers who are choosing to maintain excessively large herds in the interest of short term profits rather than the long term health of the pastures. The government contributes to this problem by providing "disaster" relief when politicians see or read reports of devastated pastures and then ascribe it to the drought (which is a natural and cyclical thing that native grass lands have survived quite nicely for eons) instead of to poor ranch managment by ranchers who then promoting themselves as "victims" rather than poor managers who deserve to go out of business. The problem is not the drought, but rather a generation of ranchers who have forgotten that their real asset is not the herd but rather the land.
So in the end the problem is greed by all parties, not fertilizer (which farmers really don't need, except on land they should not be farming anyway). And greed has developed in our society as people on average are much more focused on their own well being and their own self interests than they are on the well being of their children and the legacy they will be leaving them - and that pretty much sums up the root cause of virtually every environmental issue.
