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This is intended as a “feel good” story of how the productivity of American agriculture feeds the world.
Today I came across a presentation on feeding World War II German prisoners of war who were sent to the continental United States for the duration of the war. The thesis of this presentation was that American abundance was so great that America fed its enemies better than even the most powerful and wealthy Germans were able to eat, even at feasts in the best of pre-war times. Meat three times a day. Fresh milk and butter. Fresh eggs daily. Fresh vegetables. High-quality bread. Chocolate and ice cream. The German POWs learned that American democracy, equality, and liberty produced more than the authoritarian, “racially superior” regime. They took those ideas back to Germany at the end of the war.
But there are lots of other stories about the mountains of food being shipped from the United States to destinations all over the world.
I suppose I came across this information because for a couple of years I have investigated the extent to which the enormous productivity of American agriculture feeds the world today. The productivity of American agriculture is so impressive that it is no exaggeration to say America feeds the world.
Today, yes, the United States government unreasonably interferes with the agricultural free market. But for the most part, American farmers determine what and how they grow based on current market factors.
And as I have discovered watching some of these farmers, much of their productivity is based on farming large swaths of land using large, expensive equipment. They use multiple computers and consume lots of Diesel fuel to plant and grow technologically advanced seeds. Factors that may not meet the standards of your local artisanal bakery, but that keep millions of poor people from starving.
As a Christian, and not a materialist, I do not consider the material benefits to be the objective of liberty, but a by-product. Liberty, the ability of the individual to follow the path God is calling you to, happens to result in productivity and abundance that allows us to feed the world.
Liberty happens to be a path to productivity that allows America to feed the world. Want to reduce people in hunger? Let people find their own food solutions.
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Also, We ship food around the world on Our dime and the commies in charge receiving it take credit for it while doling it out to Their subjects.
"Yer welcome, world."
I read some history years ago, concerning the years 1920 - 1940, that those outside Our borders actually thought all Our streets were paved with gold.
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Paved with opportunity.
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The best examples of how free markets are superior to government-dominated markets are East vs. West Germany and North vs. South Korea. In both examples, you had a country that was split into two. One half, socialist and very poor, the other half largely free and very prosperous. When these young people say they would prefer socialism to capitalism, I'd like to ask how that worked out for Korea. We can see famine vs. riches, and some people have it backward as to which side is better for the masses.
Heck, even within today's Republican Party, the free market is not held in universal favor.
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Part of the presentation I saw about the German prisoners of war said that the prisoners at first thought the Americans were just lulling the Germans into complacency with initially providing good food, and expected the food to switch to slop soon. But then the good food kept coming. And the prisoners saw what the Americans threw out because it was substandard. The American garbage was better food than what many Germans had even pre-war.
The presentation said a real turning point came when some of the prisoners were sent to American farms and meat processing plants, where they saw food production on an industrial scale unlike anything anywhere else in the world, including their own society of people of superior race. And much of the high-tech American production was done by black Americans, which of course the Germans had been brought up to believe were inferior creatures. [I have also seen presentations about Germans watching in disbelief spy movies about black Americans and women on assembly lines putting together complicated airplanes.]
Good news is that the German prisoners of war who had seen American agriculture took what they learned back to Germany, where they could improve German agriculture to enable the country to feed itself again.
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The current vast supplies of food produced by American farmers and shipped all over the world has fascinated me because of both the scale and the technology.
When I went to work for what was then Rockwell International Corporation in 1985 (then a conglomerate, one part of which built airplane avionics, which in turn had a spin-off business in the then-nascent business of Global Positioning Satellite receivers), I was surprised to learn that the largest group of early adopters of GPS technology was farmers. Farmers seeking to more finely tune their farming techniques across their land for more efficient and more productive results.
Of course today you find information from farmers all over the America who use computerized tractors that literally drive themselves, computerized planters that precisely place individual seeds that have often been treated in particular ways to improve their crop yields, chemical sprayers (including now some drones) that precisely meter out fertilizer and other chemicals based on the particular needs of that particular crop on that particular plot of land.
All this technology of course costs a lot of money. Tractors are $300,000 - $400,000 each, combines $750,000 - $1,000,000, planters attached to those expensive tractors cost another few hundred thousand dollars, etc. Rebuilding the engine on a chemical sprayer might cost $75,000.
But farmers choose to spend that because the increased productivity benefits them, which in turn benefits us and the rest of the world by providing an abundance of food.
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