There may be unconventional solutions to modern food production issues.
Local Havre farmer Doug Crabtree breaks the issues into three core sections.
“Essentially I think there are three aspects connected to food and agriculture that are not working or certainly not working well. That is food availability and quality, the economics of farming or producing food, and the environmental or ecological impacts of farming on the land and on our natural resources.” -Doug Crabtree
Montana Farmers Union President Walter Schweitzer agrees there are significant problems with farming today.
“The Covid Pandemic put a microscope on our food supply chain, and we found out that it’s broken. About 40 or 50 years ago we started down this direction of a cheap food policy and part of that was to get big, more efficient supposedly, and concentrate the processing into the hands of a few. We found during the pandemic that when consumers were going to the grocery store and finding that they were being rationed meat and produce and dairy products while producers were euthanizing livestock and dumping milk down the drain and plowing in their vegetable fields. This is a broken supply chain, and it’s because we have concentrated all of it in just a few areas.”-Walter Schweitzer
Local farmer Doug Crabtree has an unconventional solution to the farming problems he described. Instead of concentrating his production in a few areas he’s focusing on diversity.
“A lot of what we do is based on the principle of diversity and we believe that nature is the best teacher of how to treat land and manage it, and when you look at nature there is no monoculture and the plant and animal community is diverse, and the healthier the system is the more diverse it is, so we try to emulate that.” – Doug Crabtree
