Efficiency and the dairy industry

Fundamentals of Management (MGMT3001) taught me that an organization’s top goals are efficiency and effectiveness. In the words of Peter Drucker, “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”

But does that hold true with all systems? In the words of Walker and Salt, “Being efficient leads to elimination of redundancies—keeping only those things that are directly and immediately beneficial... [and] leads inevitably to unwanted outcomes” (7). In an ecosystem, efficiency ignores ecological services, such as air purification or waste decomposition, and has a short time frame—you are looking only at the visible, profit-making, immediate output.

Walker and Salt identify diversity as key feature of a generally resilient system. Increased efficiency drives down diversity: “The more variations available to respond to a shock [to the system], the greater the ability to absorb the shock” (121). That is to say, if the local Trader Joe’s burns down, that’s cool: Kortes, Cecil’s, and Lunds are within walking distance. But when the single efficient and optimized grocery store closes in Lanesboro, MN, you have to hope in the car and drive to another city for your groceries. Same thing with crops: flag smut decimate your Paha wheat crop? Too bad you didn’t plant any other types of grain.

Here’s where Roger Cady comes in again. During his talk last fall, he stated that the only way to meet future demand of milk is through increased efficiency. Greater productivity in dairy cows would be preferable to greater numbers of dairy cows because the former dilutes your fixed costs. If you only have to feed, house, and medicate a hundred cows but get 20% more milk out of them, that’s a good thing. Right?

Well, maybe from a short-term profit standpoint. But let’s consider other factors. First, animal welfare. I have not thoroughly researched the negative effects on dairy cows, but from what I’ve read, high productivity can lead to udder infections, lameness, and infertility.

Also, fixed costs. Maybe the maintenance costs that Cady wants to reduce are unnaturally high to begin with. It seems like less productive cows would need less feed, fewer antibiotics (to counteract infections like mastitis), and would not have to be replaced as often.

Another way to combat the hazards of efficiency would be to increase diversity: goats lactate, too, you know. And goodness knows we have other options for calcium and protein. Maybe we need focus on increasing the effectiveness of dairy production, rather than the efficiency.

Photo from Courtney Nash.

Resilience on the brain

Warren Belasco is taking me on a fascinating and thorough trip down memory lane in Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, which I plan to review later. In a chapter on the modernists’ take on the future of food, Belasco makes a point that speaks to resilience, even if he doesn’t use the word:

Vulnerable to numerous maladies and very expensive to feed, house, and maintain, these hybrids [chickens] required a lot of chemicals, drugs, and machinery. These higher input costs favored further concentration of production, which in turn increased biological and economic vulnerability—a feedback loop resulting, almost literally, from putting too many eggs in too few baskets." (195)

Belasco briefly puts his finger on the efficiency trap that the animal industry has fallen into. The more efficient the animal, the more precarious and input-intensive it becomes to (ab)use it.

As a sidenote, I love making connections like this. I also love Belasco’s prose. It’s hard to tell from this quote, but he strikes the perfect balance, in my opinion, between an didactic and extravagant style.

Photo from Wikipedia: A White Leghorn, the most popular commercial layer.

Adaptive Cycles and Bottom-Up Change

"Understanding global problems through local experience: how experiential leaning teaches resilience." Julia Nerbonne, 9 Dec 2009.

As mentioned in the previous post, I learned about adaptive cycles from Nerbonne’s presentation. Nerbonne is the Environmental Sustainability program director at HECUA (Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs). What I took away from her talk was less what the title suggested and more like this headline she showed from Grist.org: "Dispassion as the world ends: The absent heart of the great climate affair."

Why don’t US citizens care about environmental issues as strongly as we did about, say, civil rights? We discussed a number of issues: it’s too big to tackle, we don’t experience negative feedback (e.g., subsidies hide true effects), some people are too poor to care, dispassionate scientists are telling the story, etc.

Nerbonne added another point: The cognitive dissonance is too great. It is psychologically challenging to understand the effects of a nation’s driving or meat-eating habits and continue to drive or eat meat. So we choose not to think about it or to downplay its importance.

Yet if I understand correctly, part of Nerbonne’s job is about trying to get people into that challenging state. And another part is to give hope to those challenged people that the issues can be resolved, that the world can be put back on track, even if your city doesn’t currently have public transportation and nobody you know is a vegetarian.

Here’s where adaptive cycles come in again, the framework that is compelling to me because it is broadly applicable and gives me hope in bottom-up change. It’s not just for analyzing ecosystems. You can analyze your life, too. For example, I experienced rapid growth two years ago when I consumed all sort of vegetarian and nutrition literature. I entered the conservation stage when I began taking classes at the U. I reached the release point when the reductionist view of nutrition threw me into a tailspin. And now here I am, reorganizing myself, refocusing my resources.

The adaptive cycle is stackable, too. Individuals’ releases have an effect on their immediate communities. In fact, my transfer to the U was prompted by a classmate’s transfer. And I like to think that some of my excited conversations at family events have had an effect. Who knows what will nudge someone to their release point.

Extend this vertically. Small communities nudge a city to release. States nudge the federal government. So for all the people that are frustrated that change is not coming from the top, find hope in bottom-up change. Struggle through your reorganization, educate yourself, and keep your eye on the prize.

Michelle Obama and local students in the White House kitchen garden.

Images from idrc.ca and picapp.com