Farming Abundance

The Path To One Billion Americans

By Veronique de Rugy & Patricia Patnode

Strawberry patches line the halls of residential apartment buildings. Luscious, nutrient dense tomatoes grow in your pantry. Farms produce exponentially more food without turning to pesticides. The cost of food becomes an afterthought.

Tallgrass prairies return to the Midwest, recovering native plants and animals and tired soil. The perpetually drought-stricken West has access to abundant fresh water. A reduced farming footprint, yet farming everywhere.

Families can afford to have children and grow the United States’ population at a healthy rate. Housing expands to accommodate families. Cities expand to create opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship.

A greener world without the enormous price tag currently associated with that objective.

This vision for America is achievable……if we make better decisions about energy, housing, land and food policy.

Farming has changed massively in the last 70 years. In 1950, the U.S. government published a report containing several dozen hand-drawn graphs describing 1900-1950 as the dawn of the “machine age,” a farming revolution wherein tractors and milking machines forever changed agricultural operations. This innovation revolution is still ongoing in agriculture, thanks to technologies such as near-infrared spectroscopy, drones and autonomous tractors.

Future innovations in farming will deliver better and more food: perfect cow milk without cows, meat without slaughter, vertical farms without farmlands. Radical innovation in agricultural technology deployed to produce food even more efficiently and cheaply can give us the dream of our forefathers: abundance.

Enter the Farming Abundance project. On this Substack, we will publish a series of solutions-focused essays aimed at identifying how we can cultivate better ideas to unlock food and energy abundance in support of a growing U.S. population.

We will present ideas of people who choose abundance over stagnation in search of a better and more exciting future. Innovators will, as they have in the past, reinvent what we eat and how we create our food to meet growing demands and feed more people…if the government gets out of the way.

As essays in this series will explain, we do not have a shortfall of ideas to bring this vison to life. What constrains these ideas from becoming reality are government policies imposing constraints on this abundance. Many of these constraints are found in our energy regulation and land use policies. Try making a profit selling cheap agricultural commodities grown in vertical farms, when the costs of energy and construction are astronomical due to our regulatory regime.

Some of these constraints are also found in the “Farm Bill.” The first Farm Bill was created in the aftermath of the Great Depression to provide financial support to poor farmers and struggling agricultural workers. Since then, the Farm Bill has undergone a great transformation and expansion – growing to include countless regulations, supplemental nutrition programs and more. The Farm Bill and all its parts are up for reauthorization this year. The Congressional Budget Office projects that this iteration of the bill will be a $1.3 trillion behemoth, a 50% increase since the last bill was adopted in 2018. Thinking critically about the contents of the Farm Bill is one way to start reforming our regulatory system in favor of abundance.    

Whether it is 80 years of failed nutritional policies, biofuel mandates that increase the price of energy and food and intensify food insecurity, subsidies for big agribusiness or land use regulation that limits farmland and prevent access to affordable housing, these countless well intentioned government policies curtail economic and environmental progress that could be made.

These topics and many more will be explored in more depth in the next year. Are you ready?  Let’s grow!