Jun 3, 2009

Four Great Ideas

A friend of mine who is, like me, a farm magazine editor with his picture on a column and who is, like me, getting older, is responding to the urge to sweep together his accumulated wisdom and straighten out the world before he departs.

Recently, he ruminated about the virtues of raw milk and the evils of pasteurization, marveling at how he grew up drinking it and survived just fine. I, on the other hand, also grew up on a dairy farm and drank raw milk, but I also had two relatives who got tuberculosis and undulant fever from drinking raw milk on their farms.

A lot of people today think things were somehow better back before science and technology messed up farming. I think that’s a dippy idea.

The farm I grew up on didn’t use much scientific agriculture. In high school, I learned to love science, but it wasn’t until I went to the land-grant university that I found out how science fit into agriculture, and I was hooked forever. It is not likely that I will choose to repudiate myself or the rational processes I have worked to promulgate during my career.

Science is a method that gives us the best version of truth we have at any given moment, and good science continually questions the truth and updates and refines it.

Sure, we now know that heating raw milk has some drawbacks. Maybe we can find a better way. Until then, I’ll drink mine pasteurized and thank Louis Pasteur for his fine work 150 years ago. He and others discovered how germs cause disease and how to control them.

Milk is just the symbol here.

The bigger question is whether agriculture would be better off trying to return to some magical, mystical, romantic past or pushing ahead using science to figure out better ways to do things.

To my mind, the best invention that ever occurred in the United States of America resulted from a four-part symphony of laws – composed during rare moments of brilliance in Congress. The first part was the Homestead Act of 1862, which assured land ownership by the common man instead of landed estates owned by nobility and worked by peons. The second was the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862, which established the land-grant university and gave it the mission to educate the children of these landowners.

The third was the Hatch Act of 1887, which created the Agricultural Experiment Station and hitched it to the land-grant university. That made sure that science and agricultural education were hooked like Siamese twins.

The fourth was passage of the Smith-Lever Act in 1914, which created the Cooperative Extension System to carry science out into the farming community.

Today, governments looking to balance budgets forget that the farming industry could be just as disingenuous as the finance industry, the medical industry or the automobile industry, all of which could use education with public service in mind. What might these and other industries have looked like if they’d had use of agriculture’s four-part invention?

It might be a good time to remind our political leaders not to repudiate what leaders of the past invented. It is one model our country has that other countries work to emulate to better feed their people.