America’s farmers have an enormous opportunity ahead of them, Dale Rodman told a group of Kansans Wednesday.
“Over the next 20 to 30 years the world is going to have to produce as much food as was produced in the past 10,000 years,” he said. China, alone, will add 100 million families to the global population, he observed.
Rodman pointed out that not only is the population growth in Asia enormous, so is the growth in personal income in many of those nations. He said studies show that when per capita income reaches $4,000 a year, families begin to eat meat. Because both India and China are growing rapidly economically, and because they don’t have the capacity to produce the additional beef, pork and poultry their increasingly wealthy families desire, the market for exports to those nations will continue to grow.
Rodman had charts showing the numbers of additional families being created in China, India and several other nations as well as graphically demonstrating income growth.
Speaking to board members of the Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development, he said Kansas should gear up to produce more beef, pork and poultry to help meet Asia’s need.
He also called for more investment in research on sorghum with the goal of raising the production per acre to levels similar to those achieved for corn through public and commercial research over the years.
Rodman and others from the departments of agriculture and commerce who made presentations to the board, were equally optimistic about the future of food production — and most said that a lack of affordable housing in rural areas was a major impediment to rural growth.
With the crackdown on immigration, farm labor is also hard to find, particularly for work on commercial hog farms and similar operations.
WHILE THESE ARE GOOD problems to have, they are far from easy to solve. High commodity prices have made Kansas and the other farm states islands of prosperity in the global recession. Our unemployment has stayed comfortably below national levels from the beginning. But while good prices for grains, et cetera, have reduced farmers’ debt, stimulated the farm implement business and sent farm owners on longer, more comfortable, vacations than they have had in decades, they have yet to reverse declining population numbers or revitalized the downtowns of farm communities.
Sec. Rodman is right to urge the creation of modern, commercial scale, hog production units. It also would be good if Kansas corn could be fed to Kansas chickens and turkeys.
But it would be even better if the agricultural labor picture could be brightened very substantially so that whose who did the grunt work feeding the world earned enough money to buy a house, a car, decent clothes and could send their kids to college.
Milking cows, raising pigs, harvesting grain, and doing all of the other jobs required to produce the food 7 billion people must have every day of their lives to survive, surely classifies as essential work. The contribution food production makes to human happiness can’t be overestimated.
But it most certainly can be under-compensated — and has been since Jean-Francois Millet painted his classic portrait of an exploited serf in 1862. Until the man with a hoe earns as much as a man on a car assembly line, the economies of America’s farm states will remain in the doldrums.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
