Page 22 - Farm and Food Policy Strategies for 2040 Series

For 2040, Williams expects to see “huge commercial agriculture because of the economies of
scale” along with the continuing growth of organic production. “I don’t see any reason they can’t
both survive together,” he says. “They’re just meeting different goals.” He adds that because

organic and conventional largely use the same technologies, both are integrating the latest
methods “to control pests and problems without expensive commercial inputs.”

Doug and Anna Crabtree – Putting CRP back into production

Montana farmer Doug Crabtree is especially committed to helping other growers transition to
organic because he witnessed his parents lose their family farm in Ohio during the 1980s. He’s
determined to build a stable base of profitability for the dryland organic operation – Vilicus
Farms – he and his wife Anna launched in 2009, taking the name from the ancient Roman word

for farm manager.

Crabtree plans to expand his 7,400

acres in organic production to 9,000

acres this spring as more area

landowners let their Conservation

Reserve Program contracts expire at

a time of less attractive CRP
payments. “The majority of what we
farm was once enrolled in CRP,” he

says. As the program became less

attractive, he says, it has allowed the
couple to “expand our stewardship
whenever we can.”

He’s also pleased that the 2018 farm
bill’s new “Urban, Indoor, and

Doug and Anna Crabtree (Photo: Vilicus Farms) Other Emerging Agriculture
Production” provisions will enable

innovative enterprises to put

neglected urban resources to work and seize market opportunities in the same way that Vilicus

Farms is making former CRP land more productive in environmentally beneficial ways.

Those opportunities spring from the same surge in consumer demand for organic products,
whether it’s grain from the Midwest or city-based local produce grown without chemicals. “I
think agriculture needs to diversify itself,” Crabtree says, “whether that be more crops on a given
farm or more production systems or more locations that can produce food” such as urban vertical
farms.

Crabtree predicts that by 2040 “we are going to continue to have large-scale commodity
production of corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton – the traditional products – and of the traditional
livestock . . . The farms that are now 20,000 acres in our neighborhood are probably going to be
50,000 or 100,000 acres and there are going to be fewer of them.”

But Crabtree adds that simultaneously, “we will continue to see an increasingly differentiated
type of production that is first and foremost diverse – farms like ours that grow a dozen or more
crops, that respond to market demand . . . where people are able to take underutilized resources,
meet local demand, and make a living for themselves.”
20 www.Agri-Pulse.com