Soy to the World

Moo-ve over! With climate change, getting fed will get more competitive.

Farming in the epoch of the Anthropocene is like trying to play chess while someone randomly rearranges the pieces every few moves. Here in the United States of Agribusiness, we’ve managed to turn food into everything but, well, food. Rather than prepare for climate chaos, we are feeding its growth with bovine hormones, ammonium fertilizers, and deforestation.

Biking mornings in rural Tennessee I felt the unusually abrupt shift of seasons. Summer is not over, we may still see some triple-digit days, but there was frost on the soybean fields for three mornings and after the heat returned the leaves were browning and being cast into the last winds of Hurricane Francine.

This got me thinking about how the extreme weather we are seeing all around the world will impact farmers here at home when there are many more triple-digit days, erratic rain patterns, and late or early frosts that come just after planting or just before harvest.

In my state, we’ve gone from half a million quaint family farms in 1929 to a mere 63,105 today. Progressive farming, they call it. I see it more as a game of agricultural Monopoly where the prize is a monoculture wasteland with lots of little plastic houses and the losers are, well, all of us —…