Why Does Farm Income Keep Disappearing?
by Hal Hamilton and Elizabeth Sawin
— January 1, 2002 —
Year after year we invest billions trying to support farmers without ever creating the conditions for farms to thrive without subsidies.
Here at Sustainability Institute, we develop computer simulation models to investigate such issues. Over the past couple of years we’ve worked with economists and farm leaders to model the corn economy. [...]
A World Food Production Quiz
by Donella Meadows
— August 10, 2000 —
In some ways the world food situation hasn’t changed for decades. There are still millions of starving people. There are still places where so much food is grown that it has to be thrown away. Fertilizers and pesticides pollute the countryside; soil erodes; groundwater tables drop. Every year when the new statistics come out, [...]
Forget Camp David, Forget Survivor, Watch Capitol Hill
by Donella Meadows
— July 20, 2000 —
I don’t get it. Why are the 24-hour news media, always desperate for gripping stories, reporting every hour on the Camp David summit, where, as I write this column, they have no access to what’s really going on? Why don’t some of those eager reporters move over to Capitol Hill to cover the constantly [...]
Two Mindsets, Two Visions of Sustainable Agriculture
by Donella Meadows
— July 29, 1999 —
“I guess you must be in favor of pesticides,” concluded a Monsanto public relations guy, after I objected to his company’s genetically engineered potato.
“I guess it’s OK with you if people starve,” said a botanist I deeply respect, with whom I have carried out a fervent argument about genetic engineering.
Accusations like these astonish me. [...]
There’s Farming and Then There’s Farming
by Donella Meadows
— June 3, 1999 —
Awhile ago Beth Sawin and Phil Rice, researchers at the Sustainability Institute, put together a graph that I can’t get out of my mind. It shows Midwest corn yields doubling from about 60 bushels per acre in 1950 to 120 bushels on average today. Despite the doubled yield, gross earnings per acre have stayed [...]
