And it came to pass at the end of two full years, that Pharaoh dreamed: and, behold, he stood by the river.
And, behold, there came up out of the river seven well favoured kine and fatfleshed; and they fed in a meadow.
And, behold, seven other kine came up after them out of the river, ill favoured and leanfleshed; and stood by the other kine upon the brink of the river.
And the ill favoured and leanfleshed kine did eat up the seven well favoured and fat kine. So Pharaoh awoke.
And he slept and dreamed the second time: and, behold, seven ears of corn came up upon one stalk, rank and good.
And, behold, seven thin ears and blasted with the east wind sprung up after them.
And the seven thin ears devoured the seven rank and full ears. And Pharaoh awoke, and, behold, it was a dream.
And it came to pass in the morning that his spirit was troubled; and he sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt, and all the wise men thereof: and Pharaoh told them his dream; but there was none that could interpret them unto Pharaoh.
Gen 41: 1-8 KJV
The world has just come through Covid, and it’s not finished. We have huge supply chain problems, inflation problems, and multiple forms of deep civil discord. We have the threat of war and are experiencing deep damage to American credibility in our dealings with friend and foe. Now add to that, coming hunger.
I’m an aging minority; I grew up around traditional American agriculture. My earliest childhood was on a farm and while the family left that land while I was still quite young, I continued to experience farming through regular work on my grandfather’s farm and among extended family with significant acreage. I didn’t learn until I was an adult that a greater share of food production was made on huge spreads of land or in feed lots, often owned by large corporations. The farms I knew growing up were the traditional – now sort of idealized – farms with cows, chickens, crops, and a few stray barn cats. Other farms had similar schemes, maybe substituting in hogs, sheep, or horses. I helped bring in the hay, manually, and mucked the winter bull stalls in March, the manure to be spread on the fields for that year’s crop to thrive. Grandad had recently upgraded to small individual milk machines. The milk was pasteurized in a tank in a corner room of the barn, then retailed to neighbors who brought their own steel milk cans to be refilled. The chickens laid eggs, also sold, and those same chickens eventually became the best barbequed chicken one could ever imagine, served with vegetables grown in the garden and rolls cooked in a wood stove in Grandma’s kitchen.
Unfortunately, that vision of farming is now mostly just a nostalgic memory when contrasted with what farming has become. There are plenty of small farms left, but only a tiny number of them are fully functioning, long ago displaced by an economy demanding the most calories for the fewest pennies possible. The industrialized agriculture that replaced it is showing dangerous vulnerabilities.
In December 2021, I posted an article detailing an acute global shortage of urea, a key component in running most diesel engines now. I also noted that agriculture would be impacted next: “If that isn’t bad enough, urea is also a critical ingredient in agricultural fertilizer and those markets are also disrupted worldwide, such that abundant crop yields are also endangered.”
Fast forward to February 2022. I am indebted to a concise article, ‘Farms Are Failing’ as Fertilizer Prices Drive Up Cost of Food’, by Andrey Rudakov detailing the multi-pronged growing crisis in agriculture that even now, has yet to hit major news sources. I can attest to its truth, partly borne out of my own personal experience of the way it was growing up and then how it changed, by observing the even more primitive continuation of some of those traditions among the local Amish and by watching extended family gradually leave farming. For a fuller explanation, I couldn’t recommend any more urgently, The Omivore’s Dilemma as the single most accessible ‘text book’ for understanding the dynamics of where food comes from. It should be required reading in every high school in America, both urban and rural. The mechanics of soil fertility are described well in readable detail in this book.
The immediate threat is the price of fertilizer. This is a global threat, and while other nations presently have an even more immediate problem than we do, it’s coming for us steadily and surely.
Let’s assume for a moment that predictions of severe fertilizer shortage and farm production failure are overstated. Maybe someone pulls a rabbit out of their hat at the last minute. But I don’t believe that a diminished threat scenario will lessen the cultural shockwave caused by the failure of universally cheap calories which have become ingrained as the most fundamental expectation that masses of people hold regarding food. Well-off suburban moms will grumble that their food budget goes from [a hypothetical] 5% to 7-8%; meanwhile, tens of millions of the less fortunate will experience real hunger in their gut for the first time in their life. No amount of mainstream media spin can talk their audience out of that experience.
Part of this is a re-organized global economy and international tension, some of it is Covid and supply chain issues. Even more so, it’s generations-old structural deficiencies intentionally and shortsightedly built into our agricultural system. Some might say it’s divine judgement.
By the end of 2022, the United States is going to know literal hunger like it has not in a generation. It’ll start with the impoverished, already short on nourishment, and will extend to millions more that can only afford a portion of what they need to feed their family. Decades of mass nutritional improvements will be lost. How far will it go? Far enough to require federal intervention. This is my prediction. I cannot swear that it will go no further.