David F. Houston Quotes
The ease with which barley may be substituted directly for wheat in human food and its usefulness to replace wheat milling by-products as feed in the production of the milk supply render its abundant production important.
Houston, David F. Weekly News Letter, vol. 4, no. 37, United States Department of Agriculture, 14 Apr. 1917, pp. 1-8.
While this was somewhat hyperbolic at the time, it became true during the century.
From a technical and production point of view, there is no practical limit to population size that is imposed by food production. We can produce sufficient food for the world even if population increases dramatically. None the less, even today we have some starvation and much malnutrition problems. These however are political, economic and tend to be distributional. We can produce the food. Morris does NOT advocate large population growth. Although food need not be a problem with an expanding population, job availability, medical care, energy, land, natural resources, ethnic hatred, migration, violence, and other problems are produced by population growth.
New agricultural techniques like drip irrigation and hydroponics lend themselves to factory style agriculture which can function in cities. At the time, Israel already did some on a commercial basis. In addition to having fresher food where the population is, the cost of transportation and use of energy for same is reduced, but may be needed for the new agricultural techniques themselves.
For many nations, it is an important objective to be totally self-sufficient in their food supply—so that they would not have to depend in other nations in what might be a world famine or food supply. For those nations agricultural subsidies are useful if their farmers cannot produce as cheaply and efficiently as other nations do. In the United States, with the most efficient agriculture in the world, subsidies are a waste of public money {633243} and the result of lobbying and special interest pressure and or corruption {633245}.
This was the origin of the term “Green Revolution”
David Franklin Houston was an American academic, businessman and conservative Democratic politician. He served under President Wilson as the 5th Secretary of Agriculture and the 48th United States Secretary of the Treasury.
