Arlyn Schipper
On a shelf alongside the kitchen table in his home, Arlyn Schipper has a collection of miniature scale models of all the farm tractors he’s owned since he started farming almost four decades ago.
Schipper farms 6,000 acres of corn and soybeans in central Iowa. With so many acres, he is considered a large operator even by Iowa’s farm-size standards. The model tractors illustrate how technology has transformed the U.S. agricultural sector over the last half-century—and they also explain why Schipper has built a farm operation of 6,000 acres. When modern tractors allow him to plow 6,000 acres as easily as 600, and a single tractor puts him hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, it makes sense to try to use the investment to its full potential.
As a board member of Foods Resource Bank, a U.S. based anti-hunger organization (and a sponsor of this report), Schipper volunteers with other U.S. farmers from the Midwest to share some of what they’ve learned about farming with smallholders in the developing world. On a trip to Zambia in the winter of 2011, he couldn’t resist the urge to strap himself to a mule and plow a row of corn as farmers do in the village he was visiting. One row was enough for him.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, breakthroughs in agricultural technology have transformed farming in the United States, making possible astonishing increases in productivity and efficiency. Productivity gains in agriculture have coincided with farms getting bigger.1 The data show that each U.S. farmer is now producing enough to feed 155 people—compared to 19 people in 1940.2 Arlyn Schipper has never tried to calculate how many people his farm feeds, but he takes immense pride in the fact that the food he produces prevents people in the United States and around the world from going hungry.
Consumers in the United States spend a lesser share of their incomes on food than people in any other nation. Leaving aside issues of quality for the moment, everyone in the country benefits from low food prices. Low-income households, with the least to spend on food, perhaps benefit the most. Production agriculture—the kind done by Schipper and other large-scale operators—is crucial to maintaining U.S. food security and preventing hunger. This does not mean hunger has been eradicated in the United States—not as long as its underlying causes, primarily poverty, persist—but hunger rates would surely be higher if not for the relatively low cost of food.
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