Production agriculture feeds a hungry world

Craft farming and folks who live on a few acres and work in town, but have a big garden and a few animals--God love 'em, because the rural lifestyle was once the backbone of America and a worthy reminant of our society that should be preserved and revered.

That said, what will work for a hands-on, mom-and-pop place, no matter how much love and care goes into each animal and each string bean produced, will not be enough to feed a hungry world or keep the supermarket shelves stocked across the United States.

It's great that upscale folks who can afford it buy all-natural, organic produce and free range chicken, eggs, pork and beef grown without hormones or antibiotics at Whole Foods and the local Farmer's Market. That's what keeps the craft farmers in business.

But we're talking about an America of over 200 million people, which is miniscule compared to the other continents like Asia and Africa. All these people have to eat to stay alive, and the vast quantities of food it takes to do that have to be produced on a massive scale, with modern pest control, weed control, growth promotants like fertilizer, and the mechanical equipment to till vast acreages.

The sheer volume of food needed by this world cannot be produced any other way. It makes a great Saturday Evening Post cover of the local farmer working in his field, to bring produce to the local general store to feed his neighbors. But the reality of what is needed has consigned this idyllic scene to the dustbins of history, except on a very isolated, localized, small scale.

Farmers and ranchers are the original ecologists and environmentalists. They cannot destroy the land, the water and the earth's atmosphere and expect to stay in business. Modern farming techniques are increasingly "green," adding as much back to the soil and water supply as they take out.

The far left likes to romanticize the fiction of buying only locally-grown (to minimize transportation pollution), organic foods, which it tried to promote at the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Denver. When the caterers and other suppliers informed them that they couldn't begin to come up with the massive quantities required to feed that size a group, they backed off into the safe old Al Gore bromide: buy more carbon credits.

If supply is such a serious problem for feeding 50,000 people attending the Democratic convention, then you get the reality of what it's like to feed the multi-millions on the whole earth.