Efficiency versus Resiliency
A proper southern drawl that pours like molasses is a beautiful thing. Listening to White Oak Pastures owner Will Harris talk about his “aycus of layund” is delightful, but the real treat is in the experiential wisdom he shares — knowledge gained only from raising animals in a way that mimics the cycles of nature and deeply contemplating our food system.
Harris is a pioneer of regenerative farming, although he prefers the phrase “resilient food system.” He passionately rails against “big food” and “big ag.” With his deep, southern voice, he pleads for a less centralized, more resilient food system that allows animals to live in alignment with their nature, rebuilds depleted lands, and supports declining rural communities. But his ideas are applicable far beyond food and farming.
The Efficiency/Resiliency Tradeoff
Life is a web of tradeoffs. In describing the flaws of the industrial food model, Harris points to the relationship between efficiency and resiliency, saying, “consolidation made production very cheap and very efficient, but it took away the resilience.”
Resiliency is the ability to overcome difficulties, and efficiency is the ability to achieve an end with zero waste. It’s easy to imagine how the two could be at odds in any system. Greater efficiency leads to less resiliency. Greater resiliency leads to less efficiency. Both are necessary, but balance is paramount.
Since the industrial revolution, we’ve been efficiency-obsessed, consistently trading resiliency via process improvements, hyper-specialization, just-in-time supply chains, and mechanization. We’ve almost entirely sacrificed resiliency in the relentless pursuit of efficiency.
Throughout the last 250 years, economists from Adam Smith to David Riccardo have touted the benefits of comparative advantage and specialization. Economics-as-a-science has accelerated the race to 100% efficiency. But is the efficiency/resiliency tradeoff being appropriately priced?
When all is well, the tradeoff seems like a good deal. Everything becomes cheaper, and even lower socio-economic classes can access a superabundance of goods and services. But what happens when difficulty arises to jam the gears of the efficiency-based machine?
The Cycles of Nature and Markets
Will Harris seems obsessed with nature’s cycles. He talks about carbon, energy, water, mineral, and microbial cycles. Markets, too, are cyclical. If you turn on the financial news, you’re sure to hear a pundit mention business or credit cycles concerning the day’s events — and when things get too far out of balance in nature and markets, corrections lurk.
We’ve tipped the scales of the efficiency/resiliency balance on the farm and in the markets. The imbalance results from short-termism —focusing on immediate rewards over long-term security.
The short-sightedness is evident in our commoditized food system. The bulk of our meat comes from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and is packed predominantly by a handful of multi-national meatpackers. Our grain is grown mainly on mono-cropped fields where various “-icides” are doused to maximize yields. Yes, prices are lower as a result but perhaps only on the surface.
In his Southern gentlemanly way, Harris is quick to point out significant costs (externalities) that aren’t accounted for at the register:
“There is a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that is as large as the state of Massachusetts. It was caused by fertilizer and pesticides washing off fields up and down the Mississippi River.”
Animals are packed together in tight quarters and require the widespread use of antibiotics, which could ultimately lead to medicine-resistant pathogens.
Industrial agriculture is responsible for at least 25% of greenhouse gas emissions.
Perhaps our food prices are higher than we believe. When producers receive the rewards but don’t bear the total costs, the risk/reward calculation is skewed in their favor. Consumers who don’t pay the actual price at the register are less likely to seek alternatives.
And while capitalism is undoubtedly the best system in the world for allocating resources, it’s not perfect (especially in the short term).
Just-in-Time Supply Chain Management
The covid pandemic again highlighted that over-emphasizing efficiency leads to less resiliency. The global supply chain system nearly crumbled when governments implemented draconian lockdown policies worldwide. We’re still feeling the effects over two years later.
Today, one event can create cascading problems that criss-cross the globe because short-term optimization has taken precedence over resilience. This tradeoff is unmistakable in examining the adoption of “just-in-time” (JIT) supply chain management.
JIT is an invention of efficiency. The name of the game is to eliminate waste, and JIT takes it to the extreme. Extra inventory is a drag on companies’ balance sheets, so starting with the auto industry, it was eliminated. Instead, materials (and labor) began being delivered precisely when needed. Cutting inventory and labor costs increased profits which were cheered and ultimately demanded by investors.
But efficiency creates risk and lowers resiliency. Natural disasters, trade disputes, labor strikes, and pandemics can grind the system to a halt. For uber-cheap goods today, we’re risking an economic (and humanitarian) crisis tomorrow. The covid pandemic was a warning shot, a non-fatal blow of too much efficiency and too little resiliency. Whether or not we heed the alarm is yet to be seen.
How to be more resilient
Charles Darwin pointed out, “it’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” Our linear, efficiency-optimized systems are not especially adaptable to change, and as Heraclitus pointed out over 2,500 years ago, “change is the only constant in life.”
So, where can we go from here?
In a 2020 New York Times column, Thomas Friedman recognized our current state of imbalance, noting:
“Over the past 20 years, we’ve been steadily removing man-made and natural buffers, redundancies, regulations, and norms that provide resilience and protection when big systems — be they ecological, geopolitical or financial — get stressed. We’ve been recklessly removing these buffers out of an obsession with short-term efficiency and growth, or without thinking at all.”
It’s not too late to rethink our incentive paradigm, but the onus is on consumers. How we spend our money directly reflects the kind of future we want — one that is a single event away from collapse or one that is built to withstand the inevitable natural and unnatural disasters that are sure to come.
It’s not time to beg bureaucrats to save us — they won’t. It’s not time to point fingers at others. It’s time to reward those like Will Harris who are closer to balancing efficiency and resiliency and aim for balance in our personal systems.
