Food Security Should Be a Priority
By Brad Rach
You’ve heard me say this many times before—farms like yours are best for rural economies, best for the environment, and best for food security. In this column, I want to talk more about food security.
Did you see the feature story on Dan Casler and his family in the last issue of our Magazine? The Caslers run a family dairy farm in New York. When Dan saw an article in Hoard’s titled “Agricultural Security Is National Security,” he decided it was time to set the record straight.
The article talked about how computer hackers and shortages of immigrant labor threatened dairy farms. Dan wrote a letter reminding everyone those problems were mostly associated with very large farms.
Family dairy farms like Dan’s aren’t big enough to attract much attention from hackers. Dairy operations like Dan’s rely on family labor far more than they do immigrant labor.
Dan made some good points in his letter. If all dairy farms were like yours, we wouldn’t be so worried about food security. Dairy cows would be spread out all over the countryside instead of concentrated in a few unbelievably large farms.
Surely, individual family farms could still have all sorts of troubles. However, none of those troubles would happen on a large enough scale to threaten our nation’s food security.
It wasn’t long after Dan sent his letter into Hoard’s that we got a grim reminder of what he was talking about. A horrible explosion and fire at Southfork Dairy in the Texas Panhandle killed most of the 18,000 cows on that farm. The entire state of Texas lost 3 percent of its milk production in a single tragic day.
The same giant dairy operations that threaten your markets also threaten our national food security. Let’s all do everything we can to help consumers understand what’s at stake when we lose family farms like yours.
