Capital Press: National Ag Day honors few who feed the masses

Spread the word

The Agriculture Council of America has compiled information that can be shared with urban family members, customers, friends and strangers. Here are some talking points they recommend for the value of American agriculture.

World population is at 6.2 billion today and is expected to reach 7.5 billion by the year 2020.

Agriculture is America's No. 1 export.

About 17 percent of raw U.S. agriculture products are exported yearly.

U.S. farmers and ranchers produce more than 200 raw commodities yearly for domestic and export markets.

In 1999, one farmer produced enough food to feed about 129 people each day.

Agriculture generates 20 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product.

One-fourth of the world's beef and nearly one-fifth of the world's grain, milk and eggs are produced in the U.S.

The United States exports $43.5 billion in agriculture products and imports $26.4 billion in farm products, equaling a positive net trade balance of $17.1 billion.

One in three U.S. farm acres is planted for export, and 25 percent of gross farm income comes directly from exports.

Every hour, the U.S. exports $6 million worth of agricultural products.

www.agday.org

National Ag Day honors few who feed the masses

Capital Press

March 16, 2006

The American farmer is an optimistic pessimist, ever aware that disaster may loom in the next storm cloud while working for, and dreaming of, a brighter tomorrow.

For farm families and farm workers, every day is an ag day, but next week the Agriculture Council of America and organizations around the country will heighten their efforts to highlight the important role agriculture plays in everyone's lives. National Ag Day is March 21, the first official day of spring, and is part of National Ag Week, March 18-26.

The Agriculture Council of America describes the purpose of Ag Day as follows on its website, www.agday.org:

"Agriculture provides almost everything we eat, use and wear on a daily basis. But too few people truly understand this contribution. This is particularly the case in our schools, where students may only be exposed to agriculture if they enroll in related vocational training. ... Each American farmer feeds more than 144 people - a dramatic increase from 25 people in the 1960s. Quite simply, American agriculture is doing more - and doing it better. As the world population soars, there is an even greater demand for the food and fiber produced in the United States."

As those pressures grow and technology evolves, it can be difficult to envision what the farm or ranch of tomorrow will look like, let alone imagine what the farm of 2025 will look like. But it is that future that young people around the country attempted to describe in essays submitted for this year's Ag Day essay contest.

LaTasha Cote, a senior from Couch High School in Myrtle, Mo., who won this year's contest, expresses the optimism needed to cultivate a career on the farm.

Cote describes her vision for the dairy farm of the future in which technology and computer controls save labor and maximize efficiency. She predicts a cure for mad cow disease and farm-grown solutions to human medical problems.

"Agriculture has also found the answer to the high cost of fuel and feed," Cote writes. "It used to be a problem that the everyday person worried constantly about; now it is merely a thing of the past."

But Cote is no Pollyanna. She also sees difficulty in 2025, even though the world will be further improved by agricultural-based advances in technology.

"It has been said that we are running out of room to farm, even since the confinement of beef cattle, goats and horses. Though scientists have said that they are getting closer to remedying ways to grow life on the moon, the population crisis is still overwhelming."

The growing U.S. population, which now tops more than 300 million, is not only a growing challenge to feed, but in many areas of the West and elsewhere, those people are sprawling farther and farther out from urban centers. They are planting homes and strip malls next door to, or on top of, farms and rangelands.

Activists often make a lot of noise about "corporate" agriculture, but most farms are individual or family operations, although many are incorporated. And it's that family-based structure that makes it easy for suburbia to whittle away at agricultural lands. It's being consumed one pasture, one field and one farm at a time.

Increasingly, farmers are finding their rural farms being invaded by urban sprawl. Individual farmers and their families are making difficult - and irrevocable - personal decisions to sell some or all of their land rather than deal with the increased production costs, more restrictive environmental regulations, higher taxes and fees, technical complications and encroaching construction.

National Ag Day is needed today more than it has ever been in its 35-year history. People need to know where their food and fiber come from.

They need to know that agriculture - conventional or otherwise - benefits people and the environment by providing wildlife habitat, greenspace and watershed benefits that aren't measured in terms of a price per acre or tax revenue.

The American people need to know that agriculture is about the soil, but it's not a dirty word.