Farming Statistics
The holiday season is ripe with statistics, we’ve heard reports on the cost of a typical Thanksgiving meal compared to last year, consumer spending on Black Friday, and the fact that seventeen million or 14.6% of Americans struggled last year to put food on the table, an increase of 4 million since 2007. I’m Susan Allen I’ll be back after the break to examine the role our regions farmers and ranchers are playing in the fight against hunger. No one will contest that the Northwest’s own Bill Gates is a smart man, yet given that fact it’s surprising that so many so called intellectuals oppose his belief that modern production agriculture, complete with it’s GPS systems, biotechnology and genetically modified plants are a key component in fighting world hunger. They don’t get that the organic, locavore society they aggressively promote is elitism, and when anti-ag groups lobby to increase regulations on farmers it cripples our ability to feed not only our country but the world. We recently witnessed the devastating results of misguided environmentalists at the Valley Hope Forgot, in California’s Central Valley where water was diverted from acres of farmland to protect the delta smelt. Thanks to advances in production agriculture the average US farmer today feeds one hundred and forty four people a day, in 1960, just 50 years ago it was forty six, a statistic I guarantee you won’t hear reported this holiday season.
