Mexican peasant walking to town with a donkeyload of firewood for sale

The New York Times a couple of days ago had a long and well researched article on the slowing of Mexican migration to the United States. Yeah.

Mexican is getting wealthier.  In fact Mexico is now 80% urban, something that has a lot to do with this.  Peasants eking out a living on the land are disappearing. Instead they are taking jobs in towns. Just this morning the newspaper Reforma reported that in the last eighteen months, Mazda, Volkswagen, Pirelli, and Proctor and Gamble are opening huge new plants in Guanajuato, the state in the center of the country where I used to live.

Many might think this sad.  But life as a peasant is not a bundle of fun.

So I thought it might be worth linking to earlier blog posts about Mexican peasants, maize, farming, and migration to the United States.

Why it’s not worthwhile for Mexican peasants to go north.

How Mexican peasants are escaping rural poverty.

Why Mexican peasants don’t want to grow maize.

Mexico’s maize production and importation (2008).

How Mexican peasants came to be growing maize in the twentieth century.

Of course, the great unknown in all this is how much drug money is contributing to prosperity.

I don’t think there is any doubt about this.  Quite a few scholars, both English- and Spanish-speaking have looked at this.  Here’s just a start.

Irrigation and hydraulic technology from Moorish Spain.

Lots of this came over.  Scholars have a pretty good idea of indigenous irrigation techniques so that what was added from the Old World is pretty clear.

Among others, Thomas Glick of Boston University has studied this in Spain and Mexico. He is author of The Old World Background of the Irrigation System of San Antonio, Texas. El Paso, Texas Western Press, 1972. Spanish version, in Los cuadernos de Cauce 2000, No.15 (Madrid, 1988); also in Instituto de la Ingeniería de España, Obras hidráulicas prehispánicas y coloniales en América, I (Madrid, 1992), pp. 225–264. Irrigation and Hydraulic Technology: Medieval Spain and its Legacy. Aldershot, Variorum,1996.

From personal experience, you see the remains of norias (wheels to lift water) all over the place.

The whole of the northern edge of the Bajío region–a key agricultural region in colonial times because it supplied the wheat, mules, etc to the mining districts of Guanajuato and Zacatecas–is riddled with hydraulic works: stone channels and damns that you run across everywhere if you roam through the hills.

I wish I could find the notes from a seminar given by a researcher at the Colegio de Michoacán. Anyway, he described how first the Spanish managed to control the aguas mansas, the gentle waters, the waters that flow year round in the two major rivers (ha!) that flow down from the north, the Laja and the Lerma.  Then they tackled the aguas torrentiales (the torrential waters) because often much of the year’s rainfall occurs in two or three major downpours.  Among the techniques were moveable woven damns to divert the waters into holding areas, and the creation of huge holding areas acres in extent where the water went from one pen to another until all had evaporated, still keeping the ground moist enough for a second crop.

It was a huge, and hugely labor-intensive system that survived until the beginning of the twentieth century and the advent of the small electric motor for pumping out groundwater.

And I recently went to a colonial hacienda in the Bajío, close to Irapuato, which had a system for collecting the waters from the huge areas of roof and running them through channels to irrigate the huerta (orchard/vegetable garden).  I assume most of these techniques were inspired by or directly copied from Moorish Spain.

By the way I see that Simon Fitzwilliam-Hall who runs the al-Filaha site is an expert on hydraulic technology so he probably knows far more about this than I do.

Continuation of the medieval Islam transfer of plants

Obviously the Spanish picked up and brought to New Spain many of the plants that the Iberian peninsula owed to Islam. Bless their hearts, these plants, now expected to live with wet summers and dry winters instead of dry summers and wet winters, adapted and thrived, citrus for example.  William Dunmire, Gardens of New Spain tracing the transfer of the technique of growing fruits in huertas from New Spain into what is now Texas, New Mexico, and California.

Sheep, Cattle, Horses and their Management

Not perhaps technically part of agronomy but very much part of the package that arrived, even if subsequently adapted to conditions in the Americas.  And of course with reverberations in the cowboy culture in what is now the US but was once part of New Spain.

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Finally well-known food activist Gary Nabhan has had a shot at in his thought-provoking Arab/American: Landscape, Culture, and Cuisine in Two Great Deserts (though I wish that he was a tad more precise and analytical in his claims).

Cow Parade Lala ‘pastarán’ en León, originally uploaded by RightIndex.

Grains.  Maria, really appreciated your insight that Crete may be self sufficient in most foodstuffs but not grains.

Subsidies.  Kay and Adam, I wish, I wish I had some grip on the subsidy system.  I don’t.  All I know is that governments have always been major players in agriculture and that government decisions are probably more important than weather, market or anything else in whether or not farms make a go of it.  And if anyone can contribute more here, I’d love to hear it.

Normative or positive.  Paola,  I completely agree that much of the US discussion is driven by what should be.  As an empiricist, to throw in another technical term, I think what has happened has to inform what we think should happen.  And I think the fact that small farms (both in terms of acreage and in terms of income) don’t do well in the developed world is something that has to be p0ndered.

Life on farms.  Hard, as Cindy and Kay point too.  And to go back to a comment of Judith Klinger a couple of posts back, yes combing wheat throws up a lot of nasty dust.  Not nearly as much or as nasty as older methods of threshing.

World agriculture.  I’m really talking about the US (and to some extent Europe) in these posts Adam.  As you know there is this constant barrage of “if only we could have small farms . . .” which also throws in sustainable which I have to get to sometime.  I appreciate that I am horribly ignorant of most other parts of the world.  May be we can chat about that later and I’d love to know more about the examples you describe.  But step by step!

More in a couple of days.

But let’s start with my most basic worry. Farming is a business, an industry.  It may also be a calling but a farmer first and foremost has to make a profit to keep going.  And that means that like other businesses and industries, economies of scale matter.

That’s particularly the case in the most important kind of farming, food farming. (Remember farming has always also supplied fibres (cotton), industrial oils (olive oil), building materials (wattles, thatch), and fuel (faggots, straw, dung)).

But assuming we are talking about food, the most important kind of farming in the past (and for the foreseeable future too) is grain farming (particularly if you stretching that to include other seeds such as soy beans).  This is what provides the bulk of the calories for the human race.

The idea that it would make sense to go back to non-mechanized grain farming is risible.  I don’t see anyone arguing that we should have Americans or Europeans or even immigrants going around with scythes.

I vividly remember from my youth the problem of wild oats in a field.  There were no herbicides that got rid of them and if the big milling companies found them in their samples, your price plummeted.  The only way to get rid of them was to hand weed.  In one sense it was easy because they grew taller than wheat at least at certain periods of growth.   But ever tried spending a week hand weeding tens of acres of grain?  Not, definitely not, recommended.  And that’s a whole lot easier than harvesting with scythes would be.

Mechanized grain farming requires lots of capital and lots of land (that’s capital too).  A tractor costs over $100,000.  A combine harvester runs a cool $300,ooo new.  Think about amortizing just those two over (say) ten years.  Then add in rent, seed, fertilizers, storage,  and think about the returns you need.  You can only do this successfully if you have a big farm.

And of course a combine has a big turning radius.  You simply can’t use one on small fields.

So grain farming has to be big farming.

But what counts as big?  What about veggies? What about the family farm and family values?  Lots of other questions. But this will get us started.

Well, before you screw up your nose, it’s worth realizing that the poi now served in Hawaii is the poi equivalent of Wonder Bread.  Taro (the corm from which poi is made) smells like chestnuts as it cooks.  And when the cooked corms are freshly pounded they are sweet and delicious.  It’s very digestible and many would like more poi.

Not likely. The cost of poi in Hawaii is soaring.  Compare these prices

20 lbs rice go for $8.oo-10.00

3.5 pound bag of poi at Costco $15.00

3oz powdered poi including shipping to mainland $22.00 (with water this makes 13.5 oz poi)

Now you do add water to the plastic bags of poi so that the eating weight goes up but not as much as the weight of rice when cooked.

Bottom line: poi is about 8 times as expensive as rice.  Ergo.  Hawaiians eat rice except on special occasions.

Now why the difference?  Rice is grown in huge fields in California, leveled by laser, and harvested by machine.   The quality is excellent.

Taro is grown in paddies in Hawaii.  It is the subject of much enthusiasm–so many varieties, so tied up with Hawaiian history and legend.  So far so good.

The trouble it’s done on a very small scale.  No machines are used. And very few people want to work full time in muddy water bending to plant or harvest taro.  It’s usually done by new immigrants from Samoa or Tonga.   Even with their low wages, the taro is bound to be expensive.

Two points.

1.  Taro is typical of what human diets depend on: carbohydrates.  And so the cost of taro or rice or wheat is the most important thing for most humans.

2.  It’s difficult to produce inexpensive carbohydrates the taro way, that is on the scale of the vegetable garden. Try gardening wheat.

Yet increasingly in the US, an idealised form of vegetable gardening is held up as the model of agriculture (of course vegetables for the market are overwhelmingly produced on large farms and mechanized as far as possible).  Small scale, labor intensive farming is what lots of food activists are pushing for. Just this weekend the NYT had yet another article dismissing large-scale industrial agriculture. (It would be nice if for once they had a serious article addressing, say, the problem of milk prices).

This is not serious.  It’s that kind of farming that allows me to sit here posting and (I venture) you to sit there reading.  It has problems.  That’s no surprise.  But as taro shows, vegefication–that is, treating vegetables as the most important food and small scale vegetable gardening as the model farming should aspire to–would be plain silly if it weren’t also so irresponsible.

Really, I have to pinch myself.  Nicholas Kristof is devoting an op-ed to this in the New York Times today.   I have no particular brief for one government department or another.  Cumbersome as government is, ideally they should change as circumstances change.  If the Department of Agriculture no longer fulfills a national function, then it should go.

But I don’t see any argument to this effect in Kristof’s piece.  He just meanders about: his childhood on a cherry farm and two-liners against industrial agriculture.  As near as he comes to an argument is that when 35% of Americans (working Americans? families?) engaged in agriculture, a Department of Agriculture made sense.  Now only 2% work this way, it would be better to change it to Department of Food since all Americans eat.

Well, hmm, yes.  It’s true all Americans eat.  But are government departments created and closed on the basis of how many people engage in an activity?  I thought it had more to do with considerations of the national good.  But leave that to one side.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  Agriculture is not just about producing food.  It produces raw materials for industry.

For example, the US is the second biggest producer of cotton in the world. Cotton is a 25 billion dollar a year industry (the proposed bailout of the automotive industry is for 14 billion) and it creates 400,000 jobs.  And what about timber for building, and paper pulp, and starch?  Forget about the misbegotten ethanol scheme. Even without that the Department of Agriculture oversees far more than food.

And then there’s the small point that the Department of Agriculture oversees a huge export industry.

And what would this new Secretary of Food do?  Would he compete with Health and Human Services on nutrition?  With the FDA on safety?  With the EPA on the environment? And if he’s really concerned about food, would he start policing food processors?   After all, food processors play at least as big a role in creating the food we eat as do farmers.

Look, there are serious issues about food.  But once again the New York Times is just blowing the opportunity to address them.

Luckily Joe Pastry did spot it and here a link to his reply with which I totally agree. You may have to scroll through his other entries until you come to More Free Range Derangement on May 13th. You can enjoy his custard pieces while you’re at it.

But really, what is it with the New York Times on food and agriculture? For every article on, say, fertilizer shortages, they publish one chatty piece after another on produce from urban gardens or how we only have to go back to the good old days of small farms and grandma’s cooking (which I have not bookmarked). At a time when the world’s food stocks are at their lowest point in ages and when food prices are rising, it is criminal that the US paper of record should have such one-sided and irresponsible articles.

The Argentine paper La Nacion, for examples, has a weekly section dedicated to agriculture. Now it is Argentina’s major industry. But agriculture is a major industry in the US too. I find much more informative articles based on serious reporting, not top-of-the-head opinions, in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, or the Economist.

I haven’t figured out where I stand on this yet, though I know which way I lean. Self sufficiency in food is a hopeless goal for most countries. The Romans couldn’t do it. The Dutch became the most prosperous country in seventeenth century Europe partly by abandoning that goal. The British haven’t been able to do it in a couple of centuries and haven’t a prayer of doing it now.

Given that, this is a trend that is not going to disappear. It’s also not so different from factories on foreign soil. It’s just that the area is much larger. And given what we’ve learned about how to farm more efficiently, this could boost world food production enormously.

In any case, it’s not hard to predict that who has access to agricultural land and how that maps on to political boundaries is going to be a hot topic in the next few years.