We should be producing less.

Everyone knows that the American farmer produces more crop per acre; more milk per cow; more pork per pig; more eggs per chicken than previous generations of farmers.

It’s not even close. Farmers are growing product in quantities now, only dreamed about in previous generations.

Heck, within my own lifetime I can remember my dad and my grandfather shocked at a corn yield of 120 bushels per acre in certain fields. Less than one generation later, our same farm is producing more than 300 bushels of corn per acre in the same fields — an unbelievable explosion of productivity!

The knee-jerk reaction to this hyper-production is the universal, self-satisfying conclusion that we’re making “progress”.

What a load of rubbish.

Agriculture — the science or practice of farming, including cultivation of the soil for the growing of crops and the rearing of animals to provide food, wool, and other products — is the noblest profession of all, and it has been completely hijacked and depersonalized by a concept that has dominated American Agriculture since World War II:

Bigger is Better.

Here’s a fun anecdotal story: When I came home to the family farm having completed college way back in 2008, I was enthusiastic and full of youthful energy — ready and willing to take over the family farm. A deluge of advice poured in. Dairy industry experts universally presented “the” singular direction we needed to take the farm:

Why, you need to expand, of course!

It is a ubiquitous scenario with family farms: Mom and Dad are looking to retire, and the son or daughter is looking to come home to the farm. Expansion is exactly what needs to happen!

In our case, we were milking 60 cows in an outdated stanchion barn. Updates and improvements needed to be made, but not to maintain a herd of 60 cows, no — a dairy expansion was in order, because “That’s what you do when a kid comes back to the farm.”

So we listened to the “experts” and roughly designed our expansion. This was 2008. We set a target of 220 cows — more than triple our herd — in a brand new freestall facility with a brand new parlor.

The price tag of the parlor and housing facility: Roughly $1 million.

Dad and I even toured a few facilities as we made our plans, and were naturally hypnotized by the shiny new concrete, stainless steel, and prospect of “not having to deal with a gutter system that always broke down.”

There is, however, one silver lining — farmers tend to be brutally honest. I listened when one farmer in particular exclaimed, “Every single farmer I know that has expanded never stops chasing his tail.” There were expletives in the actual quote.

When I looked into Dad’s eyes, I saw a level of exhaustion creeping across his face. Sure, the shiny stuff was enticing, but what about everything else? If we triple our herd size, then our feed storage is no longer adequate. We need more manure storage. Our equipment is no longer large enough to handle the increased workload. We will need another skid loader, larger tractors, a bigger manure spreader, ad nauseam. It never stops. We never stop chasing our own tail.

And for what?

Let’s seriously explore the realities of where American agriculture is headed. It is common knowledge that there is more food thrown into American landfills than any other single material. It’s not even close. The EPA estimates that 22 percent of municipal waste — nearly a quarter — is food.

In the last three years we have seen, as manifestly evident as a nuclear explosion, record-setting farm bankruptcies, foreclosures, and a farmer suicide rate that exceeds the suicide rate of military combat veterans. Farmers who have been conditioned to produce more, and more, and more have dumped milk down the drain, euthanized market-ready livestock, and bulldozed animal carcasses into landfills. All of this, while grocery store prices have increased and supplies have been restricted.

Environmentally, the Ogallala water reservoir, which is the only reason America has a breadbasket at all, is 30% depleted. Within 50 years, the reservoir will be 70% depleted.

In plain English: Within our lifetime, large swaths of the American Great Plains will resemble the Sahara Desert. This irreversible destruction is already happening.

For our own part, rather than expanding and producing more for the sake of producing more, Dad and I invested a by-comparison measly $30,000 into the stanchion barn as I took over the herd of 60 cows. We did not expand, and we did not blow through a million dollars just because we were told to do so.

And until the ag crisis of the past few years, I enjoyed a breakeven price of $12/cwt milk.

As farmers, we need to be producing less, not more.

— Dan Wegmueller is the owner of Wegmueller Farms and his column appears regularly in the Times. His website is https://www.farmforthought.org.