Apr
25
We eat to encourage farmers to grow
April 25, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
by Rachael
As read from headlines today, the UK and the US retailers are limiting consumers’ purchase of food namely rice, wheat, oil and etc. Even during WWII, Americans were only placed limits of purchase of fossil fuels or light bulbs, but not food. Food rationing does not only happen in developing countries but also developed nations, like what Elmy said yesterday.
An interesting webpage loaded into my browser While I was following related news today. It was tracing some kind of historical background of crop yields and prices in the US back in the last century.
William Tracy, head of the Agronomy Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that “we non-farmers who like to eat must encourage farmers to grow products for the market, and cash-crop farmers need a reason to assume the risk and expense of farming”.
On the webpage, it illustrated that Tracy did a look up at historical data on 16 US crops of different genes and found that “almost all showed no yield increase” starting 1860, “and then they started going up in the 1930s.” He added, “[T]his was a social phenomenon. In the 1930s, under the New Deal, the government basically said ‘We need to support farmers, make sure they get paid for what they grow.’”
He added more of his discovery that “The government created price supports, and as soon as farmers realized they could start making money by growing food, crop productivity skyrocketed. The farmers have to get a fair return for what they do, and if they don’t, there is not much sense in buying more nitrogen or irrigation systems.”
Food supplies are more elastic due to demand than I have ever thought.
