# Accept that shipping globally is necessary for ensuring every nation’s food security, but rethink what we’re transporting and where.

I think that shipping globally is exactly what has *compromised* every nation’s food security. For example:

- The USDA sends “food aid” in the form of below-market-price surplus powdered milk to Jamaica, incidentally driving Jamaican dairy farmers out of business. In years when there’s no surplus milk production in the US, there’s no powdered milk to send to Jamaica, and now that there are very few diary farmers there, there’s very little fresh milk to be had there. Food security = 0.

- Coffee growers in Brazil or whatnot have nothing to eat, because they’re growing a commodity for international commerce rather than food for themselves to eat. When global coffee prices drop, all of a sudden they can’t afford food. Food security = 0.

- Cuba, when once upon a time it had the most industrialized agriculture in Latin America, was completely dependent on Soviet fossil fuel imports, hence Cuba had zero food security. When the USSR vanished, Cuba no longer had a source of fossil fuels, and had some difficult years. But now that Cuba grows most of its own vegetables locally and organically, it has a lot more food security than it ever had before. We should all study what happened there, very carefully. “Cuba Peak Oil” was a dress rehearsal for “Global Peak Oil”. There’s an excellent film that tells the Cuba story: “The Power of Community”.

# Leverage the best practices of farms on multiple scales. Using large operations to produce commodities like grain and smaller outfits to grow locally.

Large scale, industrial corn, soy, and wheat operations cannot be said to embody “best practices” in any meaningful sense of the phrase. Large scale grain farms do not measure up, whether in the realm of fossil fuel consumption/carbon footprint, water usage, soil depletion, other environmental impacts, or societal impacts. Even the question of productivity per acre can be debated, especially if you consider the possibility of interruptions to our supply of cheap fossile fuels. There is also the possibility of increasing growing density by planting multiple crops (eg., corn, beans, and squash) in the same field at the same time. This requires hand-harvesting. The last time I checked, we were not in the midst of a labor shortage, but rather a job shortage.
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# Redirect money to support research and farmers willing to risk testing new models – poly-face farms etc.

What is a poly-face farm? I Googled it, and found nothing. Do you mean the Polyface Farm, in Virginia? If that is what you mean, they are not using a new model; they’ve merely added a few twists to an old model. Their methods entail much less “risk” than mainstream methods, as can be seen by their relative success, and the repeated failures of mainstream small farms.

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Many of us share common goals: safe, nutritious, plentiful, stable food supplies; happy, healthy, fulfilled citizens; international peace. I do not accept the author’s contention that there is a middle ground between the old, broken food system, and the new, “sustainable” one. If we don’t act swifty and decisively to fix things, fossil fuel supply instability will sucker punch us, and we’ll be down for the count.