"In the 1700s a group of French economists who called themselves physiocrats ("government by nature") argued that all wealth originates from the land, making farming the only truly productive enterprise. All other work was seen as extractive or transformational of the original value created by farmers. All agricultural products, they believed, circulated through an economy like blood through a body and were just as essential for well-being and long life....Physiocracy failed to take hold, mostly because the bounty of natural resources newly discovered in Asia, Africa and the Americas appeared to be unlimited, Careful stewardship of the land took a distant backseat to rapid and dramatic resource exploitation, leading eventually to scarcity anxiety as supposedly bottomless wells of resources began to run dry. It's only now, Dorn believes, as we bump up against significant and unbending environmental limits that the advantages of a physiocratic-style economy are becoming evident again."
-Courtney White from Grass, Soil, Hope: A Journey Through Carbon Country
There is a tendency in agriculture to say that those outside agriculture just don't understand how things work because what do you know of farming if you've never farmed. I think this is short sighted. How can we grow and become better if we refuse to accept criticism? And even more frightening what are the ramifications if we refuse to deal (or acknowledge) serious issues like climate change, anti biotic resistance and the inevitable depletion of fossil fuels. I, however, think it is interesting to hear the outside perspective. The CDC's views on antibiotic resistance, economists views on scarcity and how this all should effect the decisions the industry is making. And yet as an industry, we've adopted this attitude as if the outsiders are ganging up against us. It's PETA and those damned environmentalists, they're trying to ruin everything. People think food just comes from the store and my favorite: we're feeding the world (as if that absolves us of environmental and moral considerations). What I come back to is a lesson I learned in high school: all my friends and some random acquaintances said the juvenile delinquent I was dating was cheating on me. Of course he said he wasn't and of course he was. The lesson there is that when people who have no attachment to the situation are telling you something and someone who is emotionally (or financially) attached to the situation are telling you differently,it is usually the people who aren't intimately involved that have a clearer picture of what is really going on. I think it goes with the you can't see the forest for the trees analogy. Anyhow, if you have time check out the economist turned farmer. (I really like Ted Talks. If you've never heard of Ted Talks we're probably not friends and you should immediately run to ted.com and learn about all kinds of science and technology and psychology and really cool people doing really amazing things.)
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