What was on your plate for your last meal? Food concerns us all: we all eat, and we all make food decisions multiple times per day. While for some people these decisions are made subconsciously, others spend a lot of time and energy understanding food chains, planting, and preparing food. Growing up surrounded by vast fruit orchards and my career in gastronomy and tourism, combined with my academic focus on agriculture and soils, probably places me in the latter group. Yet, despite having a good knowledge of food production, actually working on a farm opened my eyes to a whole world of issues I was previously oblivious to.
In spring 2020, as Covid-19 and consequent lockdowns changed the way we live, farmers were forced to adapt and change certain behaviors for their food production. With borders closed for the first time in decades, the number of seasonal workers making their way to Germany was significantly reduced. Most farmers in Germany rely on seasonal workers from Romania and Poland for cultivating staff-intensive fruits and vegetables. In my home region of the Northern Black Forest (Mittelbaden, Germany), farmers cultivating asparagus and strawberries were particularly hard hit. Rather than lose their crops, farmers issued a call to the local population for support. This was a perfect opportunity for me, as I had lots of free time after finishing my Masters just as the pandemic began. For the next three months, I worked on an organic Demeter-certified vegetable farm, on a conventional strawberry/asparagus farm, and on a conventional fruit farm.
What struck me at once was how farmers are required to make important decisions on a near-daily basis to ensure the success of their yearly income. Farming is a daily gamble, requiring harsh price negotiations, constant justifications, and fights for awareness. Without a certain determination and willingness to take risks, farmers would struggle to survive. Farmers need to be spontaneous and creative because situations change from one day to another. For a farmer to win the gamble, they need to be in control of the risks. However, such risks are rapidly increasing with the climate crisis and globalization.
While every second person lives in urban areas, food production is far away, and risks faced by farmers are hard to imagine for most. Many people do not notice much change in conditions or the season-dependent risks; however, for farmers, there is no hiding. Farmers are at the forefront of climate change, the first ones in a chain of feedback who need to face the consequences of climate change and globalization.
Farmers are hit straight on by global challenges with limited support, apart from largely outdated subsidies. Governmental subsidies target exports and quantities over qualities, artificially pushing food prices down and creating a broken food system. Losing local supply chains, local methods, and traditions enhances dependencies, fueling the risks and threats posed by climatic changes. For example, yields are threatened by more extreme weather events like droughts, disappearing groundwater levels, and late frosts. Additionally, introducing invasive pests that invade large swathes of Europe due to the lack of natural predators exacerbates these challenges. For instance, the Lombardy region in Italy is facing the invasion of the Japanese beetle, which is now munching its way through fruit orchards and forests up north through Switzerland and Germany, with the beetle expected to arrive there soon as well.
Dependencies are enhanced by increased competition for local farmers, which strangles access to previously important markets and leads to volatile pricing. On such markets, the value of uniform products is reduced to their price. While selling a fresh product may seem like a unique selling proposition, for farmers, the perishable nature of their product undermines their negotiation power since perishable products cannot be stored until a better price is paid. Farmers are embroiled in a constant fight for the value of their products. In particular, wholesale markets and other big food distributors put immense pressure on their products. Farmers’ response to global food chains is increasingly local. Selling locally prevents intermediaries but also meets the growing consumer demand for buying local and enhanced transparency.
Further examples of farmers controlling threats include tunnel systems against unforeseen weather events or irrigation systems to counteract droughts. Farmers’ decisions to control risks often involve balancing short- and long-term effects. For example, the usage of pesticides (in conventional systems) may solve pest problems in the short term but brings the risk of missing pollinators and their ecosystem services in the long term. Farmers react by implementing pollination boxes for bumblebees. Moving from balanced ecosystems and regulated biodiversity towards a system of tightly controlled components brings a new group of dependencies.
I learned about the individual character of every farm and how daily decisions are impacted by the mindset of farmers and their individual stories. However, I also learned that the range of decisions controllable by farmers differs between farming systems. The demands of modern-day farming force many farmers to be reactive rather than proactive, a trade-off that has potentially significant consequences for society as a whole. When the most important component cannot plan and build a more sustainable food chain, we all suffer.
But farmers are just one part of the equation, and their business is heavily influenced by others in the system. The solution involves more than just farmers; it involves consumers, distributors, and policies simultaneously. It should not only be farmers dealing with the consequences caused by a much bigger problem. If farmers were insured against certain risks by society, the burden released would allow more flexibility for sustainable practices. In such a system, farmers gain back their power by employing locally, selling locally, and closing nutrient cycles locally. The current vicious cycle of quantity would be transformed into a thriving cycle of quality.
After my time on the different farms, I would argue that the risks and challenges faced by farmers are underrepresented in our society (and also in science). By better understanding their lives, society can take a step towards building a healthier relationship with our food, including giving it a fair value that underpins a more sustainable system.
