Forty acres plus a mule was the promise made to the slaves who were freed during General Sherman’s Civil War march to the sea. Most of the delivered acreage was abandoned rice plantations around Charleston, South Carolina. In case you’re not familiar with what many in the South still call “The War of Northern Aggression,” Charleston was the birthplace of the secessionism that led to the war. It was also a major seaport, one of the largest and wealthiest cities on America’s Atlantic coast line. Sherman destroyed large parts of it and recovery took over 100 years.
If you’ve followed the history of the constant tussle between the U.S. government and American agriculture, what happened next won’t surprise you. After the cessation of hostilities in 1865 and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson revoked the order and returned the land to its previous owners. Because of the change in policy, the phrase "40 acres and a mule" became a catchphrase for the failure of Reconstruction policies in restoring to African Americans the fruits of two and a half centuries of their labor.
It was a federal decision in keeping with their longstanding attitude of “Yeah, we’re going to do this for the long term good” followed soon thereafter by “OK, maybe not.”
But there are plenty of twenty-first century activists who would take modern day farming and ranching back to the days of 40 acres and a mule, ignoring agricultural history and shunning the technological advances that have made the American farm the stunning success it became during the twentieth century.
I’m annoyed by people who want to draw hearts and flowers around an imaginary life in an idealized, Disneyesque rural America. They have in mind a white-washed two story farm house surrounded by a white picket fence, a few chickens pecking around the front yard, a cow in the pasture and a some hogs out by the old red barn. Ma tends the chickens; Pa raises some corn and beans and a few tomatoes. The only thing that might be missing is Lassie and little Timmie.
Those idealized farmers are able to feed the family, of course, and have some produce left over to sell in town for city folks. But that extra production only happens in good years. Modern advances like motorized plows (commonly called tractors) to replace that stubborn mule, regular irrigation (instead of relying on the vagaries of Mother Nature and when she wishes to make it rain), and improvements like better seed corn, a grain that has gone through many genetic modifications during the thousands of years it has been a human food crop.
Poultry, hogs and cattle have gone through a lot of genetic modification, too, with the aim of improving yield. A lot of hard work has resulted in higher output from lesser input and a much smaller carbon footprint. More efficient production of livestock has been matched by more efficient production of crops, making the horrendous famines that stalked mankind at least until the Norman Borlaug-inspired Green Revolution of the mid-twentieth century.
Here’s proof. The estimable Dr. Jude Capper, Department of Animal Sciences, Washington State University, has just published a paper on the changing environmental impact of cattle, comparing data from 1977 with 2007, a 30 year span that represents just an eye-blink in the evolutionary scale of bovine agriculture.
She wrote, “Modern beef production requires considerably fewer resources than the equivalent system in 1977, with 69.9% of animals, 81.4% of feedstuffs, 87.9% of the water, and only 67.0% of the land required to produce 1 billion kg of beef. Waste outputs were similarly reduced, with modern beef systems producing 81.9% of the manure, 82.3% CH4, and 88.0% N2O per billion kilograms of beef compared with production systems in 1977.
The Carbon footprint per billion kilograms of beef produced in 2007 was reduced by 16.3% compared with equivalent beef production in 1977. As the US population increases, it is crucial to continue the improvements in efficiency demonstrated over the past 30 years to supply the market demand for safe, affordable beef while reducing resource use and mitigating environmental impact.”
There are three important points in her synopsis - Land requirements have been reduced by about a third. Waste output has been reduced by almost 20%. Even more impressive is the 16.3% reduction in the carbon footprint.
How did all that happen? Selective breeding, of course; it’s something the cattle industry has worked on diligently, especially during the time period covered by Capper’s study. An incredible amount of research done on nutrition and health care, too, has been a major contributor. Texas A&M, University of Nebraska, Iowa State, Colorado State, Kansas State, and the rest of the great Ag Schools have dissected those subjects and led the way to much more efficient practices.
I can write similar words about all the important foodstuffs grown by American farmers. They continue to create more with less input – using less land, less water, less fertilizer but taking more to market at the end of the day. Poultry, pigs, corn, wheat, soybeans; the story remains the same.
There was a sentence in Capper’s paper that was the double-underlined, bolded typeface throw-a-flag ‘capper’ to her entire paper, though. “As the US population increases, it is crucial to continue the improvements in efficiency demonstrated over the past 30 years to supply the market demand for safe, affordable beef while reducing resource use and mitigating environmental impact.”
I’ll take some slight editorial license to that sentence, though and rewrite the first clause to read “As the world population increases,” because America’s farms are not just feeding America’s people and American research is not just for the benefit of American agriculture.
We are in a rush to make world agriculture more productive because arable land continues to decrease while our head count continues to rise. In a few very short decades, there might be 50% more mouths to feed. The only way to keep up with demand that grows that quickly is to continue on the remarkable course of the past 30 years examined by Capper. Going back to smaller farms, walking away from advances in output created by GMO’s, and all the other fantasy-fueled retreats espoused by anti-ag types is asking to take a road that will lead to slow motion suicide.
Forty acres and a mule? That’s so 1865. We have to plan now for the food requirements of 2065 and we can’t afford the 100+ years to recover from the Sherman-like damage that will be caused by such a wholesale retreat from the future.
Chuck Jolley is a free lance writer, based in Kansas City, who covers a wide range of ag industry topics for Vance Publishing.
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