Revisiting an old discussion

Readers J and Bret have written in with great responses to a "distant" thread, responding to my distinction between "value" and "efficiency" in agricultural methods.

The dispute arises over the particulars of our shared disdain for billions upon billions of dollars lavished upon subsidies to first-world agriculture. Specifically, I contend that large-scale agriculture is more "efficient" without regard to the relative value of man-hours than most other forms of agriculture, though less "valuable"; whereas J and Bret both offer solid arguments that the hidden costs of agriculture's myriad externalities actually render the system far less efficient than small-scale and/or organic agriculture.

The short definition for efficiency in this context is "ratio of inputs to outputs." The lower this ratio in practice, the more "efficient" the method. Bret sees the difference arising from different perspectives of analysis - single-actor vs. total-resource. J argues that I ascribe too much efficiency to mass farming practices by restricting my consideration to the mere labor input of the cycle.

I would, however, argue that the crucial distinction is really hidden in different understandings of what constitutes a "benefit" or a "cost" and the ensuing metric of "value." "Efficiency" in the context of human endeavors cannot be efficiently evaluated without paying close attention to estimated (or esteemed) values of relative inputs and outputs.

Consider, if you will, the theoretical underpinnings of Holistic Range Management (HRM), a pasteurage theory which was receiving a trial hearing in the Eastern Sierras during my brief sojourn there from 1995-97.

HRM was devised as a response to an observed environmental problem associated with pasturage in the Midwest. After a few years of pasturage, cow fields would become choked and overgrown with large, wicked weeds which were well-nigh impossible to forage. Enviromentalists compared this to the discovered state of the plains, which often held more buffalo per acre than modern cow pastures, but maintained their pristine prairie grasses for centuries. What was the difference?

The theory behind Holistic Range Management was that cows were practing a simple method of caloric efficiency with detrimental long-term effects. Basically, given a single cow with a choice of foods, each cow seems to choose the most calorically rewarding foodstuff. So, let's say I have a field with alfalfa, crabgrass, and dandelions. Now, my cow is, whenever possible, going to choose the alfalfa over the crabgrass and the crabgrass over the dandelions, because at every stage of development the alfalfa is comparatively more lucrative. Because of this, the alfalfa will fare especially poorly against the dandelions, because, by the time the alfalfa is so scarce it's not worth foraging, the dandelions will generally be older, tougher, and even less nutritious than they were as shoots.

But, let's say you unleash an environmentally unsustainable horde upon your virgin pasture all at once. More cows means much more competition, and thus, your cows will fight over every last plant, ravaging the young alfalfa shoots and the young dandelion shoots in effectively equal measure. According to HRM theory, if you divide your pastures into smaller lots, increase the concentration of your cows, but leave each segment of pasture fallow for a longer period (I think 5 years was the recommended practice), you would allegedly mitigate the environmental impact of your pasturage.

So, is the cow's quest to maximize short-term caloric intake at the expense of it's long-term caloric intake efficient? In meeting the cow's immediate-to-hand agenda, the answer is an obvious "yes." And, in fact, its "environmental rape" method of grazing is even sustainable in an unconstrained environment. Like the buffalo of yore, a herd could move into a territory, decimate everything, then move on to greener pastures, leaving the freshly-fertilized region to its balanced recovery.

Similarly, the undernoted (though perhaps not underrated) anthropologist Marvin Harris observed a similar pattern to the practice of human agriculture. According to the narrative weaved from Harris' observation, human technological advance is primarily an adaptive environmental response which compensates for diminishing caloric returns from any given practice.

As Harris observes, there is no evidence of agriculture from the "Big Game Hunter" period of the Upper Paleolithic, despite ample evidence of massive communities in various Ukrainian steppe towns. With the depletion of big-game stocks from human overhunting, a move is witnessed to the processing and consumption of various grains (the earliest evidence of barley-porridge making was previously taken to be 12,000 years old, though recent evidence suggests grains may have been consumed as distantly as 23,000 years ago). At some point, human population stocks appear to have outpaced the available forage supply, and we begin to see the emergence of agricultural civilizations along the world's riverine basins. Strangely, the rise of agriculture also seems correlated with the dessication of many of the world's most fertile river basins, and Harris postulates that thousands of years of intensive cultivation likely denuded many watersheds, necessitating the development of irrigation. Irrigation led to soil salination, led to ever-greater levels of complexity in human engineering and social structure... presumably marching inevitably down a path of caloric harmonization that leads to today's world of remote farm country and interstate highways.

As Harris sees it, technological innovation can basically be predicted by monitoring the caloric rate of return of any given food-harvesting practice. As any new method of harvest is adopted, it initially yields a far higher return upon investment than the latter stages of the preceding method. Gradually, over a span of centuries, or millenia, the practice yield ever-diminishing returns. At a critical threshold point, we seem to find moments of great historical upheaval followed by the adaptation and adoption of new methods which temporarily boost caloric return.

Now, from a long-term perspective, would such a system be considered "efficient" or "inefficient?"

I can't say.

Which is why, I think efficiency needs to be considered apart from value. J would argue that the cost of gas and other various externals ultimately outweighs the benefits of conserved labor. I'd argue that's not the case. Given the cheapness of oil in the contemporary world, I don't think it's a sustainable argument that petroleum products actually outweigh human labor on the scale of human value. A gallon of gasoline for a tractor is worth far less than an hour of federal mandatory-minimum wage time.

A farmer is seeking a determinate outcome ("enough" return on his crop yield) based upon determinate inputs. Generally speaking, the cost of human labor will, in the long-term, far exceed almost every other affiliated cost of business. Meanwhile, the farmer's goal is not to produce a maximally valuable crop-yield, but one which will provide an adequate return on his investments of time and resources.

In this equation, the goal of environmental preservation should be seen as one of intangible benefit... in the category of such dreams as social equality or full employment... not in the hard world of efficiency-impacting inputs and outputs. The farmer, or any other human actor for that matter, need not see any personal virtue in environmental preservation. In many cases, they do not. However, in the case of organic farming, say, farmers are rewarded for certain stewardship practices by those who place a premium upon such efforts. In their case, the reward is often greater profits on smaller yields (though, again, J disputes the notion that organic yields are smaller than mass-agriculture).

Evaluating the efficiency of a practice must be done within the "event horizon" of human perspective, whether done through a "total resource analysis" or a "single actor resource analysis." From either perspective, the potential costs of "long-term damage" are ultimately indeterminate. It's not clear what constitutes environmental degradation, nor is it clear that such damage per se is an actual long-term detriment. All past evidence of human nature, in fact, seems to indicate that men adapt both their practices and their standards to the environment in which they find themselves.

What is clear is that many of us have a notion of how we would like our environment to appear which, like most social goals, is often held abstractly... i.e., we value Amazonian rainforest for the principles it embodies rather than our own direct experience of it. I think there are potential new markets catering to new definitions of "value." I think it is naive to cloak such values in the economic rhetoric of efficiency. They have no natural place there, and it strains credulity to argue that they do.