Farming is facing a three-pronged existential crisis
Originally published on Agriculture Dive on July 2, 2024.
Farming has become an extremely precarious business. Without many previously critical subsidies, margins have become slimmer or nonexistent. Climate change has made drought and flooding more common, threatening several crop harvests. And a globalized economy has created regional conflicts that cause widespread impacts on costs and supply.
As agriculture transforms and farmers change the way they work, the struggle to adapt to this rapidly changing climate is being felt far and wide.
“We’re an intergenerational farm,” said Harold Wilken, a fourth-generation grain farmer located outside of Chicago. “When I was a conventional farmer, the margins were so small, and I knew there was no way that my son or my nephew could farm with me. By moving away from conventional methods, it gave us the opportunity to have more income to bring in the next generation.”
Rebecca Chesney, a food anthropologist and the director of sustainability innovation at ISS Guckenheimer, a corporate catering food service company, identifies three core paradigm shifts currently occurring in agriculture and how some farms are dealing with the changes.
1. A move away from yield and revenue to a profitability and input costs focus
Between 1965 and 2019, farmer yields increased by 44%, primarily due to the Green Revolution, which introduced the widespread use of fertilizers, pesticides and high-yield crop varieties. For farmers selling their crops to aggregators who combine a single crop type from various suppliers — known as commodity or elevator farmers — the sole method to boost profits was to increase revenue by increasing yield.
“That was really the focus,” Chesney said. “Just grow more, sell more and bring in more. It became a singular focus on finding these high-yield crop varieties.”
Agriculture became an intellectual property game. Companies that had patents on the seeds and inputs that produced the biggest plants, thrived. Between 2018 and 2020, just three companies — Bayer, Corteva and Syngenta — accounted for more than 70% of the seed sales for corn and soybeans.
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Jesse Klein 