Can we ever defend against agricultural warfare?
Alicia Ellis on food security
Food is one of the great bedrocks of human existence. Given its primacy to survival, it has also increasingly become a locus for conflict, either due to famine or as an exploitable vulnerability of even the most powerful countries. Russia’s war on Ukraine made it clear that grain could be fought over in the battle for supremacy, with the whole world dependent on the outcome.
Today, we have a special episode of the podcast. Our Riskgaming designer Ian Curtiss hosts Alicia Ellis, an Air Force veteran who is now the director of the Master of Arts in Global Security program at Arizona State University. She and her husband own a regenerative farm in Phoenix’s East Valley, and she has specialized in the future of American agricultural security in her own research. She’s also designing a game of her own, called New War, to highlight the complex interplay of challenges that come with new forms of warfare and particularly so-called “gray zone” tactics.
Ian and Alicia talk about what it’s like to farm in the twenty-first century, Russia and Ukraine’s grain production, Covid-19 and beef prices, and the complete abdication of government investment in the future security of the food supply.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ian Curtiss:
I'm curious, how did you get into agricultural security?
Alicia Ellis:
I came to Ag in a little bit of a roundabout way. It was not my first career. I joined the military after I got out of college. Then I was in the Air Force for a while and moved all over the country, was deployed a couple of times, and came back and used the GI Bill to get a master's degree in international relations. And then I moved to Washington DC. I took something called a Presidential Management Fellowship, and I spent some time at the Treasury Department and then some time at the State Department.
After about two years in DC, I just could not resist the pull of the West. I became obsessed with the idea of leaving it all behind and moving out West to marry a cowboy or something. So that is essentially what I did. I came out here, I applied to ASU, and I was working on my PhD in political science and international relations. I met my husband, who is a fifth- or sixth-generation farmer.
We were raising beef, about 40 head a year, mostly for local restaurants. And we did some direct-to-consumer stuff. People could get on the website I built and order our beef, and we would have it cut for consumers and delivered to their house. We did that for a few years, and then Covid-19 hit, and there was this massive disruption in the meat industry. A lot of people probably remember the empty butcher counters. But we had been stocking up for quite a while because Four Peaks Brewery was getting ready to make us their sole beef supplier, and we needed to stockpile for a customer that large. And so we had thousands and thousands of pounds of beef in deep cold storage ready for their new menu to launch. And three days after the menu launch, Covid-19 shut down all the restaurants.
We thought we were going to go bankrupt. It was a really bad situation. And a couple of weeks after that, you had Covid-19 spreading through some of the meat processing factories, which was a huge bottleneck in our supply system. So it wasn't that we had shortages of animals, but you ended up with shortages behind the butcher counter because people couldn't get their animals in for processing.
In about two and a half weeks, our direct-to-consumer sales went from just a small side thing, 500 bucks a month or so, to $20,000. And it was just me and one other person running all over the valley delivering all this beef to people. But it really got me thinking about the connection between agriculture and security, which is what I do now. I run our master's programs in global security at ASU.
A couple of years later, after Russia invaded Ukraine, we couldn't get fertilizer for a little while. My husband and I farm about 500 acres outside the valley, and my brother-in-law farms about 1,500. When it came time to plant, I think it was early March, and he couldn't get fertilizer. You had the blockade in the Black Sea. Everybody talked about grain, but Russia and Ukraine are huge fertilizer exporters. At the same time, Russia had cut off the supply of natural gas to Europe. You need natural gas to make ammonia, and you need ammonia to make nitrogen fertilizers. So both of those things caused major disruptions in global fertilizer supply chains.
The prices were through the roof. So not only did my brother-in-law see about a 30% drop in yield that year, but the cost shot way up because of the fertilizer crisis. That got me thinking, okay, you're talking 30% in just two weeks, what if this had gone on a little bit longer? Or what if this happened in May, when the entire Midwest was planting? We could have been looking at a food security crisis at a national or even potentially global scale.
Ian Curtiss:
There's food security and there's agricultural security. People have been talking about food security for a while, and it's generally more from the perspective of helping the poor. But then agricultural security seems to be far more about the supply chain and whole system. Am I seeing that right?
Alicia Ellis:
That's a good way to put it. A lot of people look at food security. That's not a new thing. And for the most part, it's defined by availability, access, nutritional value and so on. When I'm thinking about agriculture security, I'm thinking more at a systems level of protecting that incredibly efficient system we've built. To me, the two examples I just gave poked holes in our sense of security.
Ian Curtiss:
When I did my master's degree in China, we had a class on non-traditional security. We covered all sorts of topics, water security, agricultural security, biological security, economic security. And many in the room, particularly Westerners, had the perspective that these are just topics for paranoid communists — that these issues are kind of interesting, but will resolve themselves because of the market.
And here we are today, 15 years later, our federal government and state governments are actively talking about all these issues, creating new laws and industrial policy to protect our economic security. Things have totally flipped.
Alicia Ellis:
You make a good point. One argument I hear a lot when I talk about this is that markets are resilient. But certain sectors like Ag can't absorb a disruption for even a relatively short period of time. And some things like food are existential. You have to think about those things in advance, and you have to think about the unthinkable too.
That’s one of the things I want to do with the new war game we're building. It's about not just about building something that is realistic or that has already happened or is probably going to happen, but to actually think about the things that could happen, even if it's not necessarily likely that they will.
Ian Curtiss:
So much of agriculture depends on fine details. It's a market, so you're buying and selling at different prices. Everyone's trying to find the right opportunity, but you're also dealing with these vast, huge international trends that a single farmer has little control over. For example, I'm curious to hear a little bit more about your farm's access to water and how that plays out in Arizona.
Alicia Ellis:
The water question is huge, and desert farming is really important, not just to the United States, but all over the world. It's somewhere where you can farm all year round. They're not growing anything in the winter in Montana, but a lot of the warm climates where you can farm year-round are arid. So we have to have irrigation systems, and we've made incredible advancements just in the last decade or so. Right now, our farm is undergoing a huge investment to make it more efficient, switching to sprinkler systems as opposed to flood irrigation. And it's looking to save about 20 to 30%, which is huge.
We're also using a newly patented compost that, over time, increases the water holding capacity in the soil. One of the things I want to do with the new agriculture and security project is get some soil scientists in there to start measuring that, because our guess is that upgrade will potentially save another 15%. So now you're talking about just huge savings on how much water you need to farm the same amount of land at the same productivity.
That would be absolutely huge for Arizona farmers because some farmers have seen their water cut by 50%, and they have to figure out how to continue to be productive and continue to produce food.
Ian Curtiss:
I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but it's roughly the 80/20 rule, if I recall. It's something like 80% of water that goes to farmers.
Alicia Ellis:
Yeah, I've heard somewhere between 70 and 80. The important thing to remember, though, is that the water is going to produce something else we need to survive. We need water to survive, we also need food to survive. And we're turning that water into food every day.
Ian Curtiss:
What's so interesting about metrics too, is that our metrics are generally about economic growth. In the state of Arizona, it's something like 80% of our economic growth that comes from non-farming. So if you're looking purely at an economic output metric, it's like, oh, well, if there's water shortages, then we need to pivot the water toward more productive economic activities.
There’s also this argument that farmers have been helped too much by the federal government. They've been subsidized by the money put into the infrastructure — the dams and water transport systems — and this water should go to more economically productive places in the state or in the region. That sounds good economically, but then it comes back to where the food will come from so everyone can eat. Does redeploying the water mean greater imports of food?
Alicia Ellis:
There are a lot of security reasons not to do that.
Ian Curtiss:
Yeah, exactly. So I’d like to get your take on the cultural friction around farmers and cities and the supply chain risk.
Alicia Ellis:
Most of the farmland around here is not owned by the farmer anymore, it's owned by developers, who hang onto it and allow you to continue farming it. It gives them a tax break, so there's an incentive on both sides, until they're ready to sell it for more housing developments. The problem you run into is that it's difficult to make long-term investments in your land if you don't own it. So making improvements to water efficiency, building up the soil structure and soil health gets really, really difficult.
It was interesting to see how that played out in your Riskgame on water. I had what was probably my favorite role in the game, and I just lucked into it. I was a local politician who not only was a farmer herself but was very rooted in that community. That was the constituency who put me into office, and I really cared about seeing the farming community survive and thrive. Midway through the game, though, you introduced a change in my incentives such that I was dealing with, I think, a personal medical issue. I was going to need money, and I had an incentive to sell my farm and sell the water rights, which would enable chip fabs in the state to have more water.
My character had to make this important choice, with all the competing incentives up against each other. What I decided to do had a real impact on the options of the other players and how the game turned out. It forced us to work on this problem in the context of real human motivations and real human interactions. That's how we actually solve problems in real life.
Ian Curtiss:
When you chose your seat, I was not involved in that process. But a little part of me was happy. It couldn't have been a better fit. This is just the sort of thing that is so interesting when it comes to agricultural security, industrial policy and so forth. It's this process of picking winners and losers. You incentivize one industry, and it means you are passively hurting another.
Like you said, we've seen this before in Ukraine and so forth. It's forgetting about supply chains, forgetting about the complexity of these systems. That’s the sort of thing we need to map out. But who owns that in the U.S. government? Is it the USDA?
Alicia Ellis:
Well, I'm hoping it's going to be ASU. That's part of the idea behind this agriculture and national security project I'm working on. Nobody is really mapping it, and like you said, it’s a really complex system and you have so many people that are involved. Somebody looking at the economic response — the list of sanctions on Russia — was not necessarily thinking about fertilizer. The farmer is, but they don't necessarily have the sort of big picture perspective of how supply chains halfway across the world are going to impact what's happening here.
So what you need is all those people in the same room, and it’s remarkably difficult to do that. I think that's another beauty of wargaming as a method of learning. You can put all the roles in the same room. A big part of the project I'm working on is to actively involve producers and actively involve agribusiness and actively involve farmers and actively involve policymakers and actively involve academics.
Ian Curtiss:
So who are the different actors in governments or industry that you're looking at? The USDA is so domestically focused. The Department of Defense doesn't quite make sense in terms of watching agriculture prices and supply chains.
Alicia Ellis:
There are a bunch of agencies that have an interest in this, but it's not clear who the lead is and how you would respond to a crisis. The key is that everybody needs to be communicating. And with this war game, I'd really like to involve the private sector as well. We have major agribusiness companies that play a critical role.
Ian Curtiss:
I'm so glad you mentioned private sector. We saw already with the CHIPS Act and medical supplies issues during Covid the lack of awareness of our dependence on private sector. And what that implies is all the data and all the information, all the IP, is held by all these different entities, and they don't want to share it because that's how they make money.
Alicia Ellis:
That's a good point. You're making me think of the grain industry in particular. I mean, wheat, that's the famine food. Grain is so important to our diets all over the world. There’s incentive to hang onto that information, because the major grain traders are not just involved in distribution, but in the futures markets as well.
I read a book recently about the “great grain robbery,” which happened in the 1970s. The Soviet Union had a bad year. I think a drought killed something like a third of their harvest. And so they needed to come and secure grain contracts from the United States.
So they sent someone over. It was the head of their ministry. I am not sure who the big four U.S. producers were at the time, but mostly the same ones we have now. The Soviets went to them individually and secured what was probably very exciting for each company: the biggest single contract in history. And it wasn't until afterward that the companies realized the Soviets had secured large contracts with every single company, which meant that they had now promised more grain than we could actually supply to meet both domestic demand and what they had just contracted to sell to the Soviet Union.
So you can imagine what that does to prices. It didn't take very long — really a couple of weeks — to see absolute chaos in the market.
Ian Curtiss:
That highlights the fascinating intersection of security and economics. Ag was the one industry where we continued to do business with the Soviet Union. We wanted their grain. And today it's microchips in China, arguably.
Alicia Ellis:
Yeah. Although you might be surprised by how much of this is still going on. Ag was one of the few industries that was still able to do business with Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. That is how they get a lot of dollars into their economy even still. Part of that was by necessity. I talked about the fertilizer problem. The immediate response was to exempt fertilizer from sanctions. You can see the necessity of doing so, but you can also see it as a continued vulnerability.
Ian Curtiss:
Exactly. And I’ll add that today with the tariffs, it's soybeans — all the soybean farmers across the United States selling soy around the world, and South American farmers trying to sell soybeans to China and so forth. It's a huge issue, and we don't really know what's going to happen with prices, with the economic impact, of the new tariff regime.
Alicia Ellis:
I'm glad you raised soybeans. I wouldn't want to be a soybean farmer this year for sure. But you make a good point about the overall system. When you're talking about the economy at a global level, it's sort of militating toward increased efficiency. I mean, that's the idea behind free trade. Take soybeans for instance. We plant soybeans — soybeans and corn are the majority of what the Midwest plants now. It used to be wheat.
As we've moved to soybeans and corn, a lot of the world's wheat is produced in Russia and Ukraine. Low estimates put it at about a quarter, high estimates somewhere around a third. You have a lot of countries in the Middle East and North Africa that are 100% import reliant or close to it. So even if it is efficient, is it a good idea for a third of the world's wheat to be produced in just one area? Especially when we saw how high prices because of a poor Russian yield led to the Arab Spring.
As we embarked on this quest for maximum efficiency, we forgot to think about the value of diversity and resilience in our supply chains.
