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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 5/12/2008 7:22:39 PM | Now that worldwide demand for food is increasing. Can they make green house office towers so they use up less land for farming? Or would that be too expensive?
Sharply rising prices have triggered food riots in recent weeks in Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan, Guinea, Mauritania and Yemen, and aid agencies around the world worry they may be unable to feed the poorest of the poor.
In the Philippines, officials are raiding warehouses in Manila looking for unscrupulous traders hoarding rice, while in South Korea, panicked housewives recently stripped grocery-store shelves of food when the cost of ramen, an instant noodle made from wheat, suddenly rose.
The shadow of "a new hunger" that has made food too expensive for millions is the result of a sudden and dramatic surge in food prices around the world.
Rising prices for all the world's crucial cereal crops and growing fears of scarcity are careening through international markets, creating turmoil.
Last Thursday, as world rice prices soared by as much as 30% in one day, Egypt decided to suspend rice exports for six months to meet domestic demand and to try to limit price increases.
That was bad news for its main rice customers -- Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
Egypt's move was matched by Vietnam, the world's second-largest rice exporter after Thailand, which cut exports by 25% and ordered officials not to sign any more export contracts this year.
India and Cambodia also rushed to curb their exports in order to have enough supplies to feed their own people.
With crude oil soaring above US$100 a barrel, higher fuel prices have driven up the cost of production and increased transportation costs for all foods.
Pests in Southeast Asia, a 10-year drought in Australia and a 45-day cold snap in China have combined to aggravate the situation.
At the same time, millions of people in China and India have suddenly become relatively wealthy and are changing their eating habits, consuming more meat and chicken, which places a huge demand on cereal stocks.
In China, per-capita meat consumption has increased 150% since the 1980s. But producing more meat requires more feed to raise more animals.
"You simply feed less people on maize [corn] via cattle than you do in maize direct," said John Powell, the UN World Food Program's (WFP) deputy director of external programs in Rome.
Also influencing the food crisis is the move in North America and Europe to biofuel in an effort to ease global warming and reduce reliance on imported energy.
A surge in demand for biofuel has resulted in a sharp decline in agricultural land planted for food crops. About 16% of U.S. agricultural land formerly planted with soybeans and wheat is now growing corn for biofuel.
"For the first time in history, there is a clear link between the price of fuel and the price of food," Mr. Powell said.
"If there were a miraculous 20% increase in the quantity of food production, we would not know what would go toward increased food consumption and what would go to biofuels.
"Where it would go is where the prices are best."
Rice is a staple food for half the world's population. But the sudden surge in prices and restrictions on exports come at a time when stockpiles of rice are at their lowest level in decades.
At the moment, world rice inventories are said to stand at a mere 72 million metric tonnes -- about 17% of what the world consumes annually.
The low stockpiles create a market in which any supply disruption will result in radical price swings.
They also complicate delivering foreign aid to those most in need.
The WPF, which feeds 73 million of the world's most destitute each year, says its costs have increased 55% since June. Unless it gets US$500-million in emergency funding, it may soon have to reduce feeding programs.
Experts predict world food markets will be locked into an inflationary spiral for at least four years, but some say the crisis could linger for a decade or more.
"There is pretty much a sense that what we are seeing is a step change or a structural change and not a peak to be followed by a trough," Mr. Powell said.
"In other words, we are into an era of high food prices. It's not just volatility, it's a step increase." | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 5/13/2008 12:15:52 AM | Yes !
Believe its time to get back to the basics in Life "Its time to to regress back to some of the the old ways " New Technology means High Maintenance to the Enviroment and our wallets !
The Communities Resources are not equiped to maintain the costly exspenses to
become successful in the creators/entreprenuers and the Rich and famous endeavors and achievements !
Our power Sources are becoming depleted and over amped "Our waste lands are becoming over stocked
The Enviroment arround the WORLD is becoming over used and Polluted !
Everybody wants to make the Almighty Dollar ( no insight other than the size of pocket books )
BTW .........Some FOLKS dont want to Tithe or Give Back to the Great One ! The Almighty Really Would like A percentage of his MONIES BacK .... (not a Joke or kidding ) !
Back to the Thread > yes by all means get back to the old ways "'Get your gardens growing and your Land to prosper for you and your families ! Get Healthy and Strong "'tuff n Up ! Living and Life has become to accessable and available at our every Whim !
We MUST start somewhere "'Lets try live n off the Land like we use too !
Life was Good ? Was is Not ?? We did not have all these Problems as we do today !
Lets Improvise and save our Toilets and our Luxuries that were not a given back then "We have so much more to accomodate our Success in Gardening & Living off the Land !
CONSERVATIVE FRIENDS """ Please ""''' We have future Generations to COME | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 6/24/2008 10:02:53 PM | Alternatively we could work on the whole "oil" thing because that's what accounts for most of the increase in food prices since nobody makes the food they eat anymore. That and maybe if we listened to the crazies like Chavez who suggests that Americans stop destroying food for the purpose of inneficient fuel (corn ethanol produces no net gain in energy, unlike sugar ethanol).
That or we can fix it the lazy (i.e. inevitable in the long run) way and listen to the neo-Malthusians... | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 6/25/2008 7:16:39 AM | The problem is not food production; it is the various tariffs and trade barriers that prevent food distribution. Liberalization of trade and the elimination of agricultural protectionism would very quickly solve the problem.
Having said that, I'm in favour of stopping the destruction of farmland to build sprawling suburbs. Also, more food should be grown locally, preferably with organic methods, to reduce the environmental footprint. | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 6/25/2008 7:17:00 AM | | There's nothing to stop anyone from starting a farm. The main thing is that farming is a difficult and thankless career where people are forced to work 7 days a week for sub-standard quality of living. I grew up on a large dairy farm and have a brother that owns a farm also. It's very difficult to make a decent living for your family being a farmer. | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 6/25/2008 8:11:58 AM | Hey, the commodities traders have to find somewhere to invest their money now that the subprime market fell through, oil futures is glutted, etc.
What about them, huh?
Huh????????????????
It'll all trickle down to those poor people there, sure there are so many people in the food chain taking their pieces of the pie in the meantime, but "something" will trickle down, eventually........... | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 6/25/2008 8:14:01 AM | | Give the small, independant family farm the same tax breaks the corporate farms get and you'll see some changes. Better yet, do away with income taxes altogether for the small family-owned and operated farm. | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 6/25/2008 9:28:54 AM | the problem there is simply that small businesses are less efficient. As long as we have enough farms that they have to compete with one another to keep prices down (which I'm not saying is the current state of affairs) then more food will be produced by huge soulless factory farms. It's not a popular idea, but compare Wal-mart to a mom & pop shop. Ruthless systematic efficiency to squeeze every penny out of every square inch is how you get the most production.
Unfortunately, even if we converted every inch of land on the planet into farmland, that would only feed the world's populace for a while. Human populations grow exponentially, farm yields only arithemetically. That means that by 2100 (or it might be 2050, I don't honestly remember) we will utterly and completely run out of ways to make food. Then we're gonna have to deal with mass die outs of population just to feed who is remaining.
But before we can reach that kind of endgame scenario we have another hurdle to cross. Supply and Demand. To survive a human needs a certain quantity of food. That amount is relatively static compared to adjustments in the price of food. Namely, if you need a 3-burger a day diet when burgers cost a quarter, you'll need about the same when they cost a dollar. Once burgers reach 3 or 4 dollars, you might switch to alternatives like chicken sandwiches or the McRib. But the fact is you still need to eat 3 of some kind of sandwich to not begin to starve (if only dieting were that simple...). However the demand for human labor in the world as it is today means that some people just don't make enough money to get even the most basic sandwiches.
The logical response is to make more sandwiches. Because you can make more money by selling more sandwiches. All your competitors have the same idea. So the prices go down until there is equilibrium-ish. But at that equilibrium, some people can't eat and humanitarian aid won't actually fix that in the long run because it will create more demand and spiral until people aren't willing/able to be generous anymore.
That's how it would work if the unseen hand were merely able to guide the market on it's own. However, nobody lets that happen. In the US, for example, we have a farm bill passed every so often. The farm bill does a number of things to just ruin this whole idea of the unseen hand. First, the government buys food just to keep it off the market, thus inflating food prices so farming can be profitable, sometimes. That's basically the equivalent of the government going out and buying a whole bunch of wiis and smashing them with hammers to get their price to go up because they're hard to find. More than that though, they also encourage specific farming practices like crop rotation, using certain types of fertilizer, not farm crops on land they have, or making corn for ethanol. These practices are a mix of good for the earth, good for the big picture, or assinine but they all are less than economically efficient in the immediate term. Because of that, the government has to pay the farms to do them. That means that supply and demand quickly become less important and pandering to the government gets more important.
But the funny part here is that the government's objective isn't to feed the most people, it's to ensure the long-term stability of the economy. That's why we wind up destroying corn, peanut butter, milk, and such in our strategic reserves. If that food were on the market (even just feeding starving people in africa) then it would cause less demand for food lowering prices making production more difficult.
I am loathe to take big business' side, or the letting people die side, but unfortunately there really isn't all that much that can be done about it. | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 6/25/2008 10:20:41 PM | Farms will open up if demand continues to increase.
The rest of the world thinks that the US will suffer without lots of gas, but think again. We are a very resourceful peeople who love peace and the good life.
We are going to see a lot of countries lose a lot of people. The desert nations will make a killing with high oil prices but will they feed their poor who are trying to buy the food at exploding rates? | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 6/26/2008 1:44:13 PM | A "tower" type structure has been designed to provide a "greenhouse" and living quarters for many families. I think it had a couple windmills attached to provide a certain amount of power too.
These designs may take a bit more $$$ to put up...but would probably pay off in the long run. But...we want cheap housing that is quick to build...and thats what we get...cheap slip=shod housing!
As far as opening more farms...sure. Allow the return of the "family farm" as a business venture...with the big tax breaks (if taxed at all!) and allow them to actually farm. Let them go for the food production....allow the big corporate farms to sell their crops for bio-fuel.
It could be a win-win.
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 6/26/2008 7:17:51 PM | Give the small, independant family farm the same tax breaks the corporate farms get and you'll see some changes. Better yet, do away with income taxes altogether for the small family-owned and operated farm.
Let's just get rid of income taxes for everybody. Of course that would mean cutting government spending, but I'm willing to make that sacrifice. | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 6/26/2008 8:26:42 PM | I admire your spirit ~ and before it's all over ~ that might just happen in some areas around the country ~
however there is little profit in a small patch and much, much work involved ~
You can feed yourself and say 6 others on a small patch, everybody needs to work!~ if it's good dirt and the water is cheap. ~ Lots of canning involved ~ pickeling and drying. You mix in some 15 -20 chickens ~ one or two sows ~ you can borrow the boar ~ 5 cows ~ a gentle bull that won't tear up fences and a sweet water well, some~Fruit trees ~ Your good to live a very humble life hanging on by a thread.
It puts more meaning into deer hunting and fishing ~
If you grow just one crop ~ you have a market to develop ~ You must have a plan~ a commitment. You can' t assume. ~ there a lot to it.
Dance | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 6/26/2008 9:11:24 PM | THE AMERICAN FARMER, FOR THE MOST PART, IS DOING WELL.
YES, EXPECT A HUGE PRICE INCREASE IN ALL FOODS AND MORE SHORTAGES.
THE FUEL COST RISE HAS NOT PEAKED, NOR HAS THE TRINKLE DOWN EFFECT HIT THE COST OF FOOD TO CONSUMERS.
ONE SOLUTION; IF A BARREL OF OIL IS $125.00 THEN A BUSHEL OF CORN, SOYBEAN OR WHEAT SHOULD BE $125.00.
GUESS THEY COULD ALWAYS EAT CAMEL OR WEEDS.
WITH THAT SAID; YES, WE NEED MORE FARMS.
CORPORATE AMERICA HAS PURCHASED 1000's OF SMALL FARMS OUTRIGHT OR THEY HAVE COMMISSIONED HOG, CATTLE AND GRAIN FARMS, UNDER CONTRACT, FOR ALL OF THEIR MEAT AND OR GRAIN.
GUESS WALLSTREET MAY WIN AGAIN>>>>>>>>>
MANY LARGE INDEPENDENT FARMERS ARE LLC'S' NOW, THEY WORK FOR THEIR FARM, SOUND CRAZY, NO SMART BUSINESS.
THEY WRITE OFF EVERYTHING IMAGINABLE, I ADMIRE THEM FOR BEING SAVY AND RESOURCEFUL.
SMALL FARMS, AS ONE PERSON PUT IT IN HIS FORUM POST, ARE IN TROUBLE AND HARD TO MANAGE,>>BUT AS PRICES RISE, MORE GUARANTEES WILL FOLLOW.
BY THE WAY, NO, I'M NOT A FARMER BUT I AM MOVING TO THE COUNTRY, NOT TO FAR AWAY FROM BIG CITIES THOUGH !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
IN CLOSING; FOOD, WATER AND THE AIR WE BREATHE ARE ESSENTIAL,
SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO THE BOTTOM LINE, WE ARE IN BIG TROUBLE AND ITS MUCH CLOSER THAN ONE MIGHT THINK.
ALL THE BEST TODAY, JOHN | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 8/18/2008 4:45:04 AM | OP...
You asked should we "Open up" new farms...
How do you open a farm?
You gave a great laundry list of problems deal with Food production, distubution, and consumtion...but didnt any of your Ideas on how to solve these problems by the openning of new farms.
Just a side note, I believe the Vast majority of corn produced in the USA is not for direct human consuption...meaning, if taken right off the stalk, you would not be able to eat it. It Has to be processed.
A portion is used as animal feed
and a big portion is processed as additives for other products...(eg) corn sweetners.
So unless Americal cuts way back on Sodas, Corn chips, Meat, ect., and eats more Corn on the Cob, whats the use in opening more farms | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 8/18/2008 7:34:16 AM | People can "open" all the farms they want to but ultimately it's the market that dictates how many can be supported.
There isn't actually any under-supply either. There is more than enough food to feed the world but the problem is distribution and the realities of the market. If you simply give food away you undermine its value. The more food you give away, the lower the price goes. Eventually the price goes too low for farmers to make a profit and when that happens farmers stop farming. This has the effect of driving the price of food up but it also means there's less to go around. In that case you can rest assured that those who cannot afford the food won't get any.
Of course, nobody is actually giving food away anyway. An agency of some sort buys it and distributes it. This however is only one step away from simply giving it away for free. Somebody has to cover the cost of buying the food and distributing it but no government is willing to do that for the simple reason that it's not healthy for the world market and their own national interest. No government wants to pay full market value for the food that is required to satisfy the needs of the third world (where the population is growing with no sign of slowing) It's a bit of a vicious circle because sending enough food facilitates nothing more than greater demand unless the receiving country does something to address their own economic and population growth issues.
In any case , if Canada for example, buys enough food from its own farmers to feed , oh, let's say Ethiopia, then that's all well and good. The problem is that this creates an artificial demand that will drive prices up. If Ethiopia manages to pull in a great harvest in the next year and needs nothing from Canada, Canada is left holding the bag as it were. Our farmers now have an excess of product and prices too low for a profit to be made. That's when farmers go bankrupt. Then, next year, there is less product, to go around. Prices now go through the roof. Canada can't afford to send Ethiopia enough food to sustain itself if it finds itself facing famine again. In a world where the highest bidder takes the prize, Ethiopia has nothing to bid with. We all pay more , Ethiopians starve, and farmers are out of business. All this while fields lie fallow.
So anyway, you can't simply give the food away to those who need it. It's not actually in anybody's best interest to do that. Well, it is for the guy starving of course but he is actually part of his own problem even if he's entirely innocent of consciously contributing to it. The socialist mindset figures it's better to simply feed the world but capitalism , which has created the developed world offers proof that it's more humane to allow our inherent selfishness work for the betterment of society. That's basically what Adam Smith said and it seems that he was more or less right. Leave the market alone and you can skim the cream off the top. Tinker with it, try to manipulate it and you end up with something you can't use. Well, giving away food might solve the problems of the short term but it does nothing to address the long term.
The last option of course is to offer the food as well as education funding. That's fine but for two things :
1: That's a lot of money. Who pays exactly ?
2: What happens if the receiving government doesn't want the education , just the cash ? Do we cut them off from food assistance like a bad child having to skip dinner ?
So you can take the hard-line and offer the food with strings attached but you can't offer all the food that is required because that plan has the potential to seriously disrupt the global economy. You can take the socialistic stance and offer the food for nothing. The damage from that won't be seen for a few years in all likelihood but rest assured that it's coming.
So do we need more farms ? Nope. We need the Third World to start developing at a much faster pace. | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 8/18/2008 8:05:34 AM | Allow people to keep small animmals like chickens, rabbots, etc in their back yards. No more of this "It is zoned residential, so you can't have animals" bull that so many urban centers have. Someone wants to plant their front lawn full of corn, they should be allowed...forget that nicely trimmed green acreage out fornt that serves little if any purpose.
I've heard some communities outlawed clotheslines for gods sake! They felt it made the area look "poor"...forget any energy shortages or the fact that people like the scent of fresh laundry. Make these people go without for a week or two and see how fast their tune changes.
Farmers don't make a lot...with increased fuel prices, etc, they get hosed. Set and fixed prices on what they produce doesn't help. They can't "get the best price" from the market...the pricing is set already! Milk, pork, cattle, grains. If they tried to withhold their produce to protest a bit, they get the mortgage called in, loss of income, bills don't get paid, etc, etc.
Trying to produce your own is fine...but most people cannot grow enough for themselves at all...no time, or space, nor even the inclination to do so.
Highrises could have "rooftop" gardens for those who want to have them...but they don't. Some even refuse to allow tenants to put so much as a box planter on the balcony!
A lot of foolishness has come down the line as far as small farmers are concerned. Corporations have been tying the noose tighter and tighter, along with the gov'ts help. | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 8/18/2008 8:31:39 AM |
Let's just get rid of income taxes for everybody. Of course that would mean cutting government spending, but I'm willing to make that sacrifice.
Boortz- Linder FairTax: tax consumption, not production.
National sales tax on new products purchased by end users.
The proposal includes a monthly tax "prebate" check that reimburses tax paid on the first $1200 or so of spending, or $276/month.
The tax would be calculated in the price of goods, so there would be little or no change in consumer prices, and "take-home pay" should be unchanged. | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 8/19/2008 6:29:58 AM | 10% straight across the board, including all corporations. Tax problem solved. Now..back to the farming issue...
Perhaps a "credit card" type thing where the farmer pays NOTHING to raise the crop, sells it, and he keeps 30% of the sales price...the rest pays off the cost of raising the crop. The creditors get the 70 % to split up to pay for the fuel, fertilizer, seed, repairs, etc. New machinery would be the exception and labour. This way it pretty wel covers everything. This way, no set price on the crop, nor on what it took to raise it. Thereby passing the costs on to the buyers, rather than forcing the farmer into debt to grow a crop, which may or may not pay off. | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 8/19/2008 8:38:55 AM | Even in the cities, people should look into, I think they are called Earth boxes. Basically, window planters. But everyone loves the convenience of McCardboard's.
the real problem isn't production of the food (getting rid of the waste doesn't help, tho), it is as the other poster said, its food distribution. Frankenseeds have increased production, at the cost of local varieties.
Oil is needed for the fertilizer and the trucks to get it to market. Growing locally, with recycled compost, would help. | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 8/19/2008 4:41:02 PM |
Allow people to keep small animmals like chickens, rabbots, etc in their back yards. No more of this "It is zoned residential
Do you know the flies and stench this produces...that why God made the country.
"Green Acres is the place for you"... | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 8/19/2008 7:20:29 PM |
Then we're gonna have to deal with mass die outs of population just to feed who is remaining.
Who to feed? The plan was put in motion many years ago. NSSM 200.
http://www.population-security.org/28-APP2.html | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 8/19/2008 9:40:52 PM |
Do you know the flies and stench this produces...that why God made the country.
"Green Acres is the place for you"...
What????
Los Angles just passed a law allowing you to have up to 3 chickens.......
Anyone ever wonder how much Fertilizer and water is wasted on the green lawns across the US???
If everyone in the US grew Zuccini instead of a lawn... we could bake a loaf>>>>
a BIG LOAF | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 8/19/2008 11:47:33 PM | "Anyone ever wonder how much Fertilizer and water is wasted on the green lawns across the US???"
A very long read, I apologize but well worth it.
"From the New Yorker
Turf War
Americans can’t live without their lawns—but how long can they live with them?
by Elizabeth Kolbert July 21, 2008
Lawns in the U.S. cover an area roughly the size of New York State; each year, forty billion dollars is spent on their upkeep.
Lawns in the U.S. cover an area roughly the size of New York State; each year, forty billion dollars is spent on their upkeep.
In 1841, Andrew Jackson Downing published the first landscape-gardening book aimed at an American audience. At the time, Downing was twenty-five years old and living in Newburgh, New York. He owned a nursery, which he had inherited from his father, and for several years had been publishing loftily titled articles, such as “Remarks on the Duration of the Improved Varieties of New York Fruit Trees,” in horticultural magazines. Downing was dismayed by what he saw as the general slovenliness of rural America, where pigs and poultry were allowed to roam free, “bare and bald” houses were thrown up, and trees were planted haphazardly, if at all. (The first practice, he complained, contributed to the generally “brutal aspect of the streets.”) His “Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening” urged readers to improve themselves by improving their front yards. “In the landscape garden we appeal to that sense of the Beautiful and the Perfect, which is one of the highest attributes of our nature,” it declared.
Downing’s practical ideas about how to achieve the Beautiful included grouping trees in clusters, importing shrubbery of “the finest foreign sorts,” and mixing forms and colors with enough variety to “keep alive the interest of a spectator, and awaken further curiosity.” Essential to any Perfect garden, he held, was an expanse of “grass mown into a softness like velvet.” As an example of what he had in mind, Downing pointed to the Livingston estate, near Hudson, New York. (Privately, in a letter to a friend, he noted that maintaining the grounds of the Livingston estate required the labors of ten men.) “No expenditure in ornamental gardening is, to our mind, productive of so much beauty as that incurred in producing a well kept lawn,” he wrote.
By almost any measure, the “Treatise” was a success. It went through eight editions and sixteen printings, and it made Downing famous. One critic called him the “Sir Joshua Reynolds of our rural decorations.” The “Treatise,” another proclaimed, had ushered in a “new epoch in the annals both of our literature and our social history.” In 1851, Downing was invited by President Millard Fillmore to design improvements to the grounds around the Capitol. Before the project could be completed, however, Downing died in a steamboat accident on the Hudson; he was just thirty-six.
Downing’s practice was taken over by his prot�g�, Calvert Vaux, whom he had brought over from London as an assistant. (Vaux named his first son Downing.) Later, Vaux joined up with Frederick Law Olmsted, whose career Downing had also encouraged. The two men embraced many of Downing’s ideas. They designed Central Park, with its broad lawns, and laid out suburbs like Riverside, Illinois, and Sudbrook Park, Maryland, with their many lesser lawns. Olmsted and Vaux’s work, in turn, influenced countless suburban subdivisions. The design for Levittown little resembled the Livingston estate, except for the grassy plot surrounding every Cape Cod. “No single feature of a suburban residential community contributes as much to the charm and beauty of the individual home and the locality as well-kept lawns,” Abraham Levitt once observed.
Having migrated into many parts of the United States that did not yet belong to the United States when the “Treatise” was published, the lawn today is nearly ubiquitous. Its spread has given rise to an entire industry, or, really, complex of industries—Americans spend an estimated forty billion dollars each year on grass—and to the academic discipline of turf management, degrees in which can now be obtained from, among other schools, the University of Massachusetts and Ohio State. The lawn has become so much a part of the suburban landscape that it is difficult to see it as something that had to be invented.
This triumph has also brought into being a new tradition in landscape writing. The anti-lawn treatise attacks both the idea of the velvety expanse—David Quammen has observed, only half jokingly, that though Communism has fallen, “lawnism” continues—and the real labor that goes into pursuing it. The writer in this tradition toils in the hope (probably vain) of reversing more than a hundred and fifty years of gardening history. He envisions an American landscape that looks more like it did in Downing’s day—one covered in moss, or scrub, or, alternatively, just weeds.
Among the dozen or so main grasses that make up the American lawn, almost none are native to America. Kentucky bluegrass comes from Europe and northern Asia, Bermuda grass from Africa, and Zoysia grass from East Asia. These and other so-called turfgrasses are botanically ambidextrous; they can reproduce sexually, by putting out seeds, and asexually, by spreading laterally. (Biologists believe that they acquired this second ability some twenty million years ago, during the Miocene, when large herbivores, including the ancestors of the modern horse, switched from eating leaves to munching grass.)
Mowing turfgrass quite literally cuts off the option of sexual reproduction. From the gardener’s perspective, the result is a denser, thicker mat of green. From the grasses’ point of view, the result is a perpetual state of vegetable adolescence. With every successive trim, the plants are forcibly rejuvenated. In his anti-lawn essay “Why Mow?,” Michael Pollan puts it this way: “Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.”
In the early days of lawns—British aristocrats started planting them sometime around the start of the eighteenth century—there were two ways to mow. A landowner could use grazing animals, like sheep, which meant also employing sheepkeepers, or he could send out bands of scythe-wielding servants. Then, in 1830, Edwin Beard Budding, an engineer from Gloucestershire, came up with a third alternative—“a machine for mowing lawns, etc.” (Supposedly, Budding was inspired by the rotating blades then used to trim the nap on carpets.) Budding’s invention made the task of cutting grass faster and cheaper and, at least for the maker of the new mowers, profitable. Further mechanical improvements followed. In 1870, an American inventor named Elwood McGuire designed a lightweight mower with an innovative wheel design. By 1885, U.S. manufacturers were pumping out machines at the rate of fifty thousand a year. In 1893, the first steam-powered mower was patented, and a few decades later the gasoline-powered mower hit the market. An advertisement for an Ideal Junior Power Mower, from 1922, celebrated the exceptional efficiency of the new technology. It asserted that many property owners, “who previously had to hire two or three men to keep their grass cut, now do the work with one of these.”
A lawn may be pleasing to look at, or provide the children with a place to play, or offer the dog room to relieve himself, but it has no productive value. The only work it does is cultural. In Downing’s day, the servant-mowed lawn stood, eloquently, for the power structure that made it possible: who but the very rich could afford such a pointless luxury? As mechanical mowers enabled middle-class suburbanites to cut their own grass, this meaning was lost and a different one took hold. A lawn came to signal its owner’s commitment to a communitarian project: the upkeep of the greensward that linked one yard to the next.
“A fine carpet of green grass stamps the inhabitants as good neighbors, as desirable citizens,” Abraham Levitt wrote. (By covenant, the original Levittowners agreed to mow their lawns once a week between April 15th and November 15th.) “The appearance of a lawn bespeaks the personal values of the resident,” a group called the Lawn Institute declared. “Some feel that a person who keeps the lawn perfectly clipped is a person who can be trusted.”
Over time, the fact that anyone could keep up a lawn was successfully, though not altogether logically, translated into the notion that everyone ought to. Many communities around the country adopted “weed laws” mandating that all yards be maintained to a certain uniform standard. Such laws are, for the most part, still on the books. Homeowners who, for one reason or another, don’t toe the line have found themselves receiving citations and fines and, in some (admittedly unusual) cases, wrangling with the police. Just last summer, a seventy-year-old widow from Orem, Utah, was led in handcuffs to a holding cell, after letting her grass go brown. She became a celebrity in the blogosphere, where she was known as the Lawn Lady.
Pretty much by definition, a lawn is unnatural. Still, there are degrees of unnaturalness. Even as the American lawn was being democratized, it was also becoming more artificial.
Turfgrasses have a seasonal cycle: they grow quickly when conditions are favorable—for cool-weather species like Kentucky bluegrass, this is in spring, while for warm-weather species like Bermuda grass it’s in summer—and then they slow down. During the slow phase, the grass becomes dull-colored or, if the weather is dry, yellow or brown. In 1909, a German chemist named Fritz Haber figured out how to synthesize ammonia. One use for what became known as the Haber-Bosch process was to manufacture explosives—the process was perfected just in time for the First World War—and a second was to produce synthetic fertilizer. It was observed that repeated applications of synthetic fertilizer could counteract turfgrasses’ seasonal cycle by, in effect, tricking the plants into putting out new growth. Sensing a potential bonanza, lawn-care companies began marketing the idea of an ever-green green. The Scotts Company recommended that customers apply its fertilizer, Turf Builder, no fewer than five times a year.
With the advent of herbicides, in the nineteen-forties, still tighter control became possible. As long as a hand trowel was the only option, weeding a lawn had been considered more or less hopeless, and most guides advised against even trying. (A lawn “thickly starred with the glowing yellow blossoms” of dandelions “isn’t in itself a bad picture,” the journal Country Life in America observed consolingly.) The new herbicides allowed gardeners to kill off plants that they didn’t care for with a single spraying.
One of the most popular herbicides was—and continues to be—2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, or 2,4-D, as it is commonly known, a major ingredient in Agent Orange. Regrettably, 2,4-D killed not only dandelions but also plants that were beneficial to lawns, like nitrogen-fixing clover. To cover up this loss, any plant that the chemical eradicated was redefined as an enemy. “Once considered the ultimate in fine turf, a clover lawn is looked upon today by most authorities as not much better than a weed patch” is how one guidebook explained the change.
The greener, purer lawns that the chemical treatments made possible were, as monocultures, more vulnerable to pests, and when grubs attacked the resulting brown spot showed up like lipstick on a collar. The answer to this chemically induced problem was to apply more chemicals. As Paul Robbins reports in “Lawn People” (2007), the first pesticide popularly spread on lawns was lead arsenate, which tended to leave behind both lead and arsenic contamination. Next in line were DDT and chlordane. Once they were shown to be toxic, pesticides like diazinon and chlorpyrifos—both of which affect the nervous system—took their place. Diazinon and chlorpyrifos, too, were eventually revealed to be hazardous. (Diazinon came under scrutiny after birds started dropping dead around a recently sprayed golf course.) The insecticide carbaryl, which is marketed under the trade name Sevin, is still broadly applied to lawns. A likely human carcinogen, it has been shown to cause developmental damage in lab animals, and is toxic to—among many other organisms—tadpoles, salamanders, and honeybees. In “American Green” (2006), Ted Steinberg, a professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, compares the lawn to “a nationwide chemical experiment with homeowners as the guinea pigs.”
Meanwhile, the risks of the chemical lawn are not confined to the people who own the lawns, or to the creatures that try to live in them. Rain and irrigation carry synthetic fertilizers into streams and lakes, where the excess nutrients contribute to algae blooms that, in turn, produce aquatic “dead zones.” Manhattanites may not keep lawns, but they drink the chemicals that run off them. A 2002 report found traces of thirty-seven pesticides in streams feeding into the Croton River Watershed. A few years ago, Toronto banned the use of virtually all lawn pesticides and herbicides, including 2,4-D and carbaryl, on the ground that they pose a health risk, especially to children.
Although it was not intended as such, Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” published in 1962, is often cited as the first work in the anti-lawn tradition. In her study of America’s indiscriminate use of pesticides, Carson was repeatedly led back to the front yard.
“One may get a jar-type attachment for the garden hose, for example, by which such extremely dangerous chemicals as chlordane or dieldrin are applied as one waters the lawn,” she observed. “Power mowers also have been fitted with devices for the dissemination of pesticides, attachments that will dispense a cloud of vapor as the homeowner goes about the task of mowing.” Rarely, she argued, was the homeowner aware of the dangers of what he was doing, because it was not in the interests of the manufacturer to inform him of these. “Instead, the typical illustration portrays a happy family scene, father and son smilingly preparing to apply the chemical to the lawn, small children tumbling over the grass with a dog.”
Right around the time that Carson was writing “Silent Spring,” Lorrie Otto, a mother of two from the Milwaukee suburb of Bayside, decided to restore her front lawn to prairie. One day, while she was folding laundry in her basement, some village workers arrived and, without consulting her, mowed her yard. Otto began speaking out against lawns, calling them, among other things, “sterile,” “monotonous,” and “flagrantly wasteful.” Her talks inspired the founding, in 1979, of what might be described as the nation’s first grassroots anti-grass movement, which dubbed itself Wild Ones. (Wild Ones now has chapters in twelve states, including New York and Connecticut.)
Between them, Carson and Otto introduced all the main anti-lawn arguments: toxicity, habitat destruction, resource depletion, enforced conformity. They accepted the moral interpretation of the lawn, only to perform yet another inversion. Instead of demonstrating that a homeowner cared about his neighbors, a trim and tidy stretch of turf showed that he didn’t.
“If they’re so large that you cannot use just a little hand-push lawn mower, then I truly think they are evil,” Otto once said of lawns. “Really evil.”
But what is the conscientious suburbanite supposed to do? If one accepts the idea that lawns are, in a deep sense, unethical, how does one fill the front yard?
Over the years, many alternatives to the lawn have been proposed. Pollan, in his book “Second Nature” (1991), suggests replacing parts—or all—of the lawn with garden. In “Noah’s Garden” (1993), Sara Stein, by contrast, advocates “ungardening”—essentially allowing the grass to revert to thicket. Sally and Andy Wasowski, in their “Requiem for a Lawnmower” (2004), recommend filling the yard with native trees and wildflowers. For those who don’t want to give up the look or the playing space provided by a lawn, the Wasowskis suggest using Buffalo grass, one of the very few turf species native to North America. Smaller American Lawns Today, or SALT, is a concept developed by William Niering, who for many years was a professor of botany at Connecticut College. Niering planted trees around his property, then left most of the rest of his yard unmowed, to become a meadow. “The meadow can take as much of your remaining lawn as you want,” he observes in an essay posted on SALT’s Web site. “There are some people who prefer no lawn, which is ideal!” For the past few decades, David Benner, a horticulturist from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, has been touting moss as an alternative to grass: he himself has a one-acre “moss garden.” Recently, there have been several calls to make the lawnspace productive. In “Food Not Lawns” (2006), Heather C. Flores argues that the average yard could yield several hundred pounds of fruits and vegetables per year. (If you live in an urban area and don’t have a lawn, she suggests digging up your driveway.) “Edible Estates” (2008) is the chronicle of a project by Fritz Haeg, an architect and artist, who rips up conventional front yards in order to replace them with visually striking “edible plantings.” Haeg calls his approach “full-frontal gardening.”
Of course, to advocate a single replacement for the lawn is to risk reproducing the problem. The essential trouble with the American lawn is its estrangement from place: it is not a response to the landscape so much as an idea imposed upon it—all green, all the time, everywhere. Recently, a NASA-funded study, which used satellite data collected by the Department of Defense, determined that, including golf courses, lawns in the United States cover nearly fifty thousand square miles—an area roughly the size of New York State. The same study concluded that most of this New York State-size lawn was growing in places where turfgrass should never have been planted. In order to keep all the lawns in the country well irrigated, the author of the study calculated, it would take an astonishing two hundred gallons of water per person, per day. According to a separate estimate, by the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly a third of all residential water use in the United States currently goes toward landscaping.
The Northeast is one of the relatively few regions in the country that are actually well suited to lawns. There, the simplest alternative to the modern, industrialized lawn may be a lawn that functions more or less as it did in the eighteen-forties, before herbicides or even sprinklers had been invented. In “Redesigning the American Lawn” (1993), F. Herbert Bormann, Diana Balmori, and Gordon T. Geballe dub such a lawn the Freedom Lawn. The Freedom Lawn consists of grass mixed with whatever else happens to seed itself, which, the authors note, might include:
dandelion, violets, bluets, spurrey, chickweed, chrysanthemum, brown-eyed Susan, partridge berry, Canada mayflower, various clovers, plantains, evening primrose, rushes, and wood rush, as well as grasses not usually associated with the well-manicured lawn, such as broomsedge, sweet vernal grass, timothy, quack grass, oat grass, crabgrass, and foxtail grass.
The Freedom Lawn is still mowed—preferably with a push-mower—but it is watered infrequently, if at all, and receives no chemical “inputs.” If a brown spot develops, it is likely soon to be filled by what some might call weeds, but which Bormann, Balmori, and Geballe would rather refer to as “low growing broad-leaved plants.”
The anti-lawn movement has been around now for several decades. In that time, thousands of American families have dug up their lawns and put in wildflowers or meadows or vegetable gardens. In that same period, however, millions more have put in new lawns. A recent study by researchers at Ohio State University estimates that, owing to new development, the space devoted to turfgrass in the United States is growing at the rate of almost six hundred square miles a year.
The easy explanation for the failure of the anti-lawn movement is that change is hard. People have been trained to expect lawns, and this expectation is self-reinforcing: weed laws are all but explicitly about maintaining property values. When Haeg installed an “edible estate” in the front yard of a Salina, Kansas, resident named Stan Cox, passersby kept asking Cox whether his neighbors had complained about it yet. Everyone “claims to like the new front yard, yet everyone expects others not to like it,” Cox writes. For a developer, meanwhile, putting in turfgrass is by far the easiest way to landscape; what is sometimes called “contractor’s mix” grass seed is specifically formulated to provide a fast-growing—though not necessarily long-lasting—green. (Lowe’s, which sells fifteen pounds of contractor’s-mix seed for $23.52, advertises it as an “economy mixture that provides quick grass cover.”) The lawn may be wasteful and destructive, it may even be dangerous, but it is, in its way, convenient.
This is perhaps the final stage of the American lawn. What began as a symbol of privilege and evolved into an expression of shared values has now come to represent expedience. We no longer choose to keep lawns; we just keep on keeping them. In the meantime, the familiar image of Dad cutting the grass and then, beer in hand, sitting back to admire his work, is, in many communities, a fiction: increasingly, lawn care has become another one of those jobs, like cooking dinner or playing with the kids, that’s outsourced to someone else. When my husband and I lived in Westchester County, he used to mow our minuscule Freedom Lawn—“freedom” here being understood as just another word for nothing left to lose—himself. That he did so was not a source of pride around our house but vague embarrassment.
If Downing came back today, what would he think of our lawns? Presumably, the neatness of our pigless yards would impress him. But it is hard not to feel that he would, at least, be ambivalent. Downing was passionate about landscape gardening, and even more so about its edifying possibilities. He urged his readers to improve their yards not just for the sake of their own uplift and enjoyment but in the interest of the greater good; through the “principle of imitation,” they would become models for their neighbors, and in this way a single example of refinement could transform a “graceless village.” We now have lawns smoother and more velvety than Downing could have imagined. And yet our relationship to the Beautiful remains vexed. As the anti-lawnists correctly observe, the American lawn now represents a serious civic problem. That the space devoted to it continues to grow—and that more and more water and chemicals and fertilizer are devoted to its upkeep—doesn’t prove that we care so much as that we are careless.♦
ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT RISKO | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 8/20/2008 10:18:51 AM | | Don't you think we'd need fewer farms if we just used the ones we had better? Right now the energy bill gives enough money to farmers to turn corn into fuel that farmers here in Iowa are turning down the crop rotation subsidies, turning down the making unprofitable crop subsidies, and those sorts of things, all so they can make more government corn money. | |
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| Should we be opening up more farms?
Posted: 8/20/2008 10:41:35 AM | If we used our food products more effectivly and efficently we would not have a food shortage..... acres and acres of produce lay to rot on a regular basis because farmers are paid to not harvest it for various reasons. There is more than enough food for everyone in the world if we just stopped wasteing it!
Just the excess horse population alone could feed millions of people on a regular basis. Just to name one other area that is tabo and is a waste. There are millions of other types of animals unthanized daily that could also feed a great number of people.
So if we just stop wasteing food already grown in the fields and utilize all the sources we have to offer the hungry we would not have hunger in such the numbers that we see..... even in our own community.
I we use the structures we already have and make them into living areas there is no reason to develop highrises and vast areas for folks to live in that take away from the farming areas and such.
Until we stop wasteing what we already have to offer ourselves and others, there will be hunger and homeless... which is NOT a necessity!!! | |
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