Efficiency & Resilience in a COVID World
Since World War II our food production focused almost exclusively on efficiency. The “Greatest Generation” was raised in the depression and saw food rationing in WW II. They lived through times when hunger, rather than obesity, was the core nutritional concern for the poor. Those experiences drove a singular focus on efficiency in agriculture. That focus has paid off; in the US we enjoy inexpensive food and we now produce 3 times the food with a 75% reduction in labor and a 25% reduction in land compared to 1948 (USDA, Economic Research Service). Worldwide, we suffer more from a food distribution problem than a production problem.
Some of the improved efficiency was driven by government social policy that subsidized grain to feed the masses and preserve the family farm. Ryan Stockwell (1) discusses how well intentioned subsidies were “an incubator” for corporate farming. Those subsidies were also the moment of conception for confined animal feeding operations. Whether one hates corporate farms and confined feeding or not, we should be clear that those things came from efforts to support family farms and exclusive focus on efficiency to feed the world.
The 6th century BC Greeks understood: “pan metron ariston”, all things in moderation. It took the COVID-19 meat shortage to remind us that efficiency isn’t everything in relation to food supply. In the beef sector, four companies process 95% of the beef in the US in about 100 mega- processing plants. Efficiency at its finest, but when a few plants shut down in Late April the meat case at your local grocer went empty. Little guys like us were buried with orders, but most direct sales outlets don’t have much storage capacity and there are very few small processors left in America.
COVID-19 was the epitome of a “Black Swan” - a term popularized by author Nassim Nicholas Taleb . In “The Black Swan” Taleb argues that our world is ultimately dominated by extreme outlier events that no one sees coming beforehand, but that we all rationalize into a false façade of cause and effect after the fact. In a later book called “Anti-fragile” Taleb points out the necessity of redundancy in a Black Swan world. Our food production model is more like an airport hub than a spider’s web. We have several nodes that emanate nation-wide and if one goes down, we feel it. In contrast, a private beef sales model is an intricate spider’s web with connections at every point. The spider’s web is redundant, but also resilient. There were not enough small meat processors to feed the nation when COVID-19 hit the United States. The same concept applies for toilet paper, PPE, drug raw materials, etc. As we outsourced jobs and materials, efficiency drove the redundancy out of business.
Nature taught me about redundancy before Taleb’s book. I was efficiency driven in the early years at Rancho Largo; trying to run at a stocking rate that used all available grass and not worrying about the diversity of plants and animals on the range. The ecosystem eventually told me that extra grass is fertilizer, that extra grass captures rainfall, and that diversity is resilience when the weather calls in a Black Swan. Nature also understands Taleb’s “anti-fragile” concept. Fragile things break with adversity. Resilience is just surviving through adversity. Anti-fragile means thriving in the face of adversity. I watched an explosion of plant diversity after the severe drought of 2011-2013. The drought killed some plants of the more dominant grass species making room for less dominant species in the successional sequence.
Most consumers are driven to a direct sales food system by health and environmental concerns. But, a local system would also feed people in the face of a catastrophe. Let’s hope when the next Black Swan comes, we have a healthy, resilient environment and a healthy, resilient food marketing system. By the way, an order of Locker Beef would give you some personal resilience if the supermarkets run out!
1) Stockwell, Ryan, University of Missouri- Columbia, PhD Thesis, 2008; (https://doi.org/10.32469/10355/7196)