This guy is so right on. I just had to post it and share with you his opinion on the topic of why cattle herds are slowly disappearing and the monoculture is gaining ground, literally.

“The researchers have followed the industry and stopped looking at livestock
as an investment to build wealth. Poultry and pork have stopped being a
wealth builder and cattle have been headed in that direction. The last four
or five years have gotten some farmers attention. Not sure the researchers
have followed. We need folks to look at long periods for wealth creation.
Pork and poultry have completely stopped being long term and unless you are
building your own genetics for retail agriculture (heritage pork for example)
you really can’t build wealth with those enterprises. There is still hope
for beef cattle although the bright light is fading.

If we had someone bucking the system and showing how owning a smaller farm
in Iowa, supported by off farm income (this is historically the norm), and
investing in wealth building strategies, beef cattle could still play an
important role. There are down cycles in beef production. But what does
any 40 year period look like for the boom and bust of beef cattle? I’m not
talking feedlots, I’m talking cow/calf with possibly finishing included but
not necessarily.

We need our researchers to think out of the box and help farming families
build wealth. Too often the researchers have jumped on the industry bandwagon
and encouraged farming families to join the ride, rather than empower
families to develop strategies focused on longer term wealth connected to
soil health, community health, family health, etc.

My cultural formation took a huge turn for the better in 1998 when I heard
two Minnesota dairy farming families talk about switching to a rotational
grazing system. They had almost no institutional support for this creative
and very effective thinking. They had a terrible time getting financing.
They lowered their gross income, increased their net income significantly,
and improved their family well being enormously. I can’t remember the details
but the sociologist from the University of Wisconsin so pivotal in developing
the grazing networks in that state was essentially doing his research and
helping families in absolute secret because there was so much hostility from
mainstream agriculture to rotational grazing.

Here’s a really radical strategy: farming families need to be encouraged to
build longer term wealth by being very skeptical of those who are selling
them things and our land grant universities need to focus on serving tax
payers (farming families) rather than chasing ag business/industry dollars.
Of course that’s just old fashion, out of date thinking because if commitments
were made in those directions we’d end up with more families farming and a
university that wasn’t in panic mode all the time because it can’t pay the
bills. Much better to keep on keeping on with our current dynamic of
decline. After all, look how successful the agriculture industry, with our
land grant system cheering all the way, has been in developing and applying
seed biotechnology. The twin miracles of RoundUp Ready and BT technologies
delivered profits from farms to seed companies over a 20 year period (that’s
being generous–probably actually less than 20 years) and now the technology
is failing. That bandwagon did not build wealth for farming families and
their communities. It also encouraged marginal land to come into grain
production and took away the competitive advantage of farmers who were good
managers of their farming resources, especially those with livestock in the
mix.

This isn’t about demonizing agri-business. The business of business is
business. But the business of public institutions is the public good. The
public good in agriculture is to encourage innovation based on efficiency
and effectiveness. Cover crops and rotational grazing are great examples
of both of these dynamics at work. Public institutions have played very
minor roles in those developments. Farmers played huge roles. Industry now
steps in and provides new products to serve these innovations. This is the
dynamic that fuels real agricultural development. But instead of being on
the front end of partnering with farmers, the Land Grants came on board
following business instead of helping farmers develop the strategies. It’s
time our public institutions recognize and invest in this dynamic of lots
of innovators (farmers) being empowered to innovate. It’s also time for the
senior leaders in agriculture to step up and out of their comfort zones to
challenge the narrative that the last 20 years have been a time of fantastic
innovation in agriculture. The last 20 years have been a real disappointment.
There are real metrics pointing to these failures: global ag investment in
research, failures in preserving soil, a lack of development in sustainable
irrigation dependent agriculture, the enormous loss of biological diversity,
and the use of market power by agricultural and food industries to grow
their businesses rather depending on real innovations and efficiencies.

Circling back to cow/calf. I would argue that the farmers enjoying the most
wealth right now and who will be able to maintain that wealth when the beef
cycle has a down turn, are going to be the farmers/ranchers who either
ignored the narrative of the USDA, the Land Grants, and the beef industry
or who paid attention to the narrative only to make sure they weren’t following
the advice.”

Matt

Matt Russell and Patrick Standley
Coyote Run Farm