Once upon a time, the American Dream was 40 acres and a mule, just enough land to grow your own and get by. Thousands of people aspired to farming, not as a career choice, but as a way of life. The best form of freedom was bound to a sweet piece of ground. Today less than 4% of Americans are farmers.
Somewhere along the way, the American Dream morphed-out and moved to the city. Pretty soon the American dream meant going to college, becoming a businessman, and owning your own home in suburbia. By the time I was offered the prevailing palette of adult livelihood choices, farming was nowhere to be found. And of course, by then all farmers had been compelled to take up the yoke of business in addition to going about the (difficult enough) business of farming.
But as hard as it is to run a business and run a farm, it’s even harder to run a farm/business in a housing bubble. Look around, there used to be farms everywhere people live. Now there are vast areas of people with no farms among them, leaving the majority to conclude (hopefully not you, dear reader) that there are certain places simply better suited to farming than where most of us happen to live. Farming is… well, it’s done somewhere else now, don’t you know.
Yet far too many of us live directly on top of some of the best floodplain top-soil ever created by eons of weather and decomposed leaves. No, it’s not that there are better places for farming, it’s that all the best farming places have been eaten by the Development PacMan. The (so far) infallible expectation of modern Americans, that they will be able to sell off real estate for more than their purchase price, has driven local farms, once nearly everywhere, to exist hardly anywhere. How on earth can pennies per pound ever compete with dollars per square foot? Not as long as there’s a grocery store right down the road.
The housing bubble created a lot of false value while it buried the source of true value; good topsoil under tons of asphalt and countless ticky-tacky Make-a-Buck subdivisions, now sagging under the weight of bad mortgages and mold. Without including farmers in its Vision, the American Dream of owning your own home has condemned its sleepy children to wake up to the hardship of food insecurity.
So while the bigger bubble of fossil-fueled soil fertility created the food that allowed billions of humans to be born, here in United States, the housing bubble allowed millions of Americans to get rich on fake value while plundering the source of food for all future Americans.
Now both of these bubbles are eroding like the soils upon which they are built. Perhaps bubble isn’t the best term, because most bubbles, like soap bubbles say, simply pop when they cease to exist. The modern fertility and housing bubbles, though, deplete themselves gradually before our eyes. But forget about that, you deserve to be rich, so flip that repo and buy that boat!
Eventually, there’s no more money to be made. Eventually, food becomes scarce for the great number of American Dreamers adjusting their expectations from finding a job to simply finding something to eat. How many of us are currently aware of our position on this relentless trajectory of our nation?
Food security can only exist with farms in proximity. Farms will not return to where they once were, if they are required to make money in those same places. Lots of money has already been made there, which is why there’s sprawl there now, and not farms.
Somehow we have to wrap the next American Dream around some version of local food production, or else the old Dream tanks into a really bad Nightmare. There has to be another Dream besides riding the Equity Train, because when that engine pulls up short, the restaurant at the station’s going to be closed.
So the question is, do you treasure your home for the value of the topsoil upon which it sits? Or do you hope to make money by selling off your property someday? Dream or Nightmare?
That’s why we are no longer a nation of farmers but a nation of bubble-miners. There’s never been a boom without a bust, and our idea of inevitable progress is only derived from the freak sequence of bubbles we’ve been able to ride. Because it’s really easy to forget about the last bust when the next boom is on. Remember the Gold Rush? I didn’t think so…
Instead of chasing the next pseudo-boom, smart money is getting out of money entirely and investing in a much more diverse portfolio of stocks.
Seed stocks.
Tags: agribusiness, food supply, housing bubble, real estate, sustainable farming