THE HUNGRY AMERICAN

The number of farms in the United States since I was born in 1945 has declined by half.  Of course the size of individual farms has increased accordingly.  Not all farm land has been simply moved into larger farm holdings.  Some has been lost to non-farm holdings and activities.  It was recently estimated that the number of arms in the US at the beginning of 2010 was 2.08 million.  This is a decline of 0.6 percent from the previous year.  We have the fewest number of Americans living on farms as we have ever had in the history of the country. 

While many people enjoy gardening for some of their food, growing food is not as simple as it seems.  Further, many people live in circumstances where they could not grow a substantial amount of their food if they wanted, or needed, too.  Only sixty three percent of Americans own their own home and many of these homes are condos or in suburbs with restricted lot size and water availability.  Keeping animals is very difficult to impossible in most suburban locations.

In the most recent American Bee Journal an article showed that the number of bee colonies kept in the United States has declined to the lowest level since the Second World War.  However, the loss has come primarily from hobbyists, people who run ten or fewer hives.  The big operators have gotten bigger and the little guys have gotten out.  The bee journal suggested this was due to the increased difficulties of keeping bees in recent years due to disease and other stresses in the environment.

However, I think it is because of the cultural changes that have occurred in the last fifty years: where many people no longer own their own homes, those that do have smaller tracts of land, with many zoning and homeowners association rules restrictions on the use of their land, and when the average stay in a house is less than five years. 

 

The end result is that the knowledge of how to grow food, at least enough to support a family, produce honey, or in other ways care for ourselves is being lost.  The ability to do so has already been destroyed.  This has occurred due to government policies that reward production but ignores the damage done by the producer. 

One of the damages government policies and large corporate farms have cause is the massive reallocation of people off of the land and into cities where they are employed by corporations, or not at all.  When Pol Pot, or the Chinese, or Stalin, did this it was universally condemned.  When we do it we call it progress. 

          When things change, and they always do, there will be many hungry Americans.