Howard Graham Buffett serving meals in Sierra Leone in 2007. He spends up to 200 days a year on the road, doing foundation work. (Jeannie O’Donnell / The Howard G. Buffett Foundation)
Howard, Warren Buffett’s farmer son, is one man, a rich one man, working in all 54 African countries developing sustainable farming on the continent with the biggest problems in hunger, poverty, soil, infrastructure, economics and politics. Howard’s dad is bridge buddies with Bill Gates who is also saving Africa. There is hope in 2016 that the Bern fires up the base like Teddy Roosevelt and FDR, while the well informed Buffett Gates partnership puts their money where it’s needed – like not in Panama.
“USAID and others have been at this for decades,” he said. “By now, according to projections, we should have ended hunger. So my point is, what we’re doing isn’t working.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Buffett told me. “I’m a farmer. I know what I can get from improved seed. I know what I get from fertilizer. They’re huge. But technology can’t build organic matter. It can’t create topsoil. It can’t magically protect water quality. It’s a quick fix, and Africa needs a long-term solution.”
Instead of a green revolution for Africa, Buffett favors what he calls a “brown revolution,” or, to quote the distinguished agricultural ecologist Sir Gordon Conway, a “doubly green revolution”—a focus on environmentally sustainable agriculture that minimizes erosion, preserves and regenerates soil, and makes the land more resilient, while also increasing yields. In contrast to the green revolution, the brown revolution is a tortoise-like approach: Its impact is gradual. Over the past decade, patiently, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to identify and promote practical, low-cost methods of conservation farming—cover crops, no-till farming, locally bred seed varieties—that improve African soil quality and crop yields without chemical fertilizers and costly imported seeds. “If you take a place like Africa,” Buffett told me, “where they have the most degraded soils in the world, very limited nutrients, ground that is farmed to death—literally to the point where you have to move on and farm another piece of ground—and all you’re doing is throwing on synthetic fertilizer, it’s like trying to put an oxygen mask on a cadaver and expecting it’s going to start breathing again.”
The foundation owns and operates four research farms—4,400 acres in Decatur, 1,000 acres in Nebraska, 3,900 acres in the high desert of southeast Arizona, and the farm in South Africa, spanning 9,200 acres—where scientists from Texas A&M, Penn State, and Purdue are conducting experiments on how best to grow crops in places with little water and poor soil. In South Africa, the foundation is testing 14 different cover crops—among them cowpea, lablab, and pigeon pea—to learn which ones best reduce erosion and improve soil fertility. In Arizona, the foundation replicates the conditions faced by poor African farmers: drought, little or no fertilizer, oxen tilling the land. Tests are under way to measure the precise relationship between water and crop yields. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/how-warren-buffetts-son-would-feed-the-world/476385/
Established in 1999, his Howard G. Buffett Foundation’s (HGBF) primary mission is to improve the standard of living and quality of life for the world’s most impoverished and marginalized populations. It apparently spends $50 million a year on various programs around the world, particularly in Africa.
Not surprisingly one of his biggest projects is improving lives of poor farmers, themselves often starving. His goal is to help teach them methods that they can afford to implement after his programs end. He also insists they learn accounting.
This is apparently in contrast to the approach used by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the organization to which his father has pledged more than $30 billion, which relies more heavily on introducing technology to third world farming. “He’s really pushing a system that is similar to what we have outside this door in America,” explained Howard to Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes, “I told him that we have got to stop doing it like we did.”
“Your father gives money to Gates. You come out and say it’s all wrong. Is this sibling rivalry?” asked Stahl. Gates and Buffett, the country’s two richest men, have become good friends, often playing bridge, celebrating birthdays and traveling together on vacations. Howard responded that Bill, who they call brother Bill, is the smartest guy in the world besides his dad, but pointed out that he understands agriculture quite well and had used a similar approach unsuccessfully when first starting to give away money.
Some details about Howard that Stahl didn’t cover include the fact that Buffett’s son is a writer of more than half a dozen books; sits on the board of Sloan Implement, a privately owned distributor of John Deere agricultural equipment; and also previously served on the boards of food processor Archer Daniels ADM +0.74% Midland; Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc, the largest Coca-Cola bottler in the world; and ConAgra Foods. He has also traveled to more than 95 countries documenting the food and conservation challenges. In 2005, he received the Will Owen Jones Distinguished Journalist of the Year Award, and in 2007, he was appointed a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador Against Hunger on behalf of the World Food Programme. In 2011, he received the World Ecology Award.
It could be a long time before Howard succeeds his father – “He won’t leave until he’s buried in the ground,” Howard told Stahl – and even longer before anyone knows if he proves to be a decent successor. Still he’s certainly proven himself to be a worthy scion of an admirable man, one who has his feet firmly planted in the earth.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2011/12/11/who-is-howard-buffett-60-minutes-gives-glimpse/#6b099cdd6c03
As I was pontificating about how you could have an urban income and a rural lifestyle by raising 50 goats on five acres, my fellow teachers were educating others on Permaculture. Not wanting to expose my blissful state of ignorance to embarrassment I avoided my right of tuition free class attendance. However, Shelby, the sustainable agriculture and “Five Acres to Independence” advocate, took their course including the farm visit. When Shelby raved about the farm’s sawdust toilet I discounted Permaculture, whatever it was about was not for me.
The FED since Greenspan has printed at least $10 trillion of ‘thin-air’ paper money with zero results and is now begging the politicians for Fiscal stimulus in Infrastructure. Trump is right there with them wanting to build walls, bridges and airports. Since 80% of the voters live in the city and another 19% live in the burbs the real 1%’s are still down on the farm. Alas alack rural redmeat farmers didn’t take classes in Permaculture, let alone practice Regenerative Agriculture because the Fiscal poohbahs don’t see the NEED!
Buy the Farm to Avoid a Crisis
Early in my goat farming career I bought 6,000+ pounds of goats from a scalper named Floyd Thompson in neighboring Higgins, TX. – At the age of twelve, Will Rogers ran away from his Oklahoma home to Higgins to learn how to be a cowboy. – I agreed to pay 80 cents a pound for Floyd’s 68 rag-tag collection. We drove truck and trailer to the grain silo for an empty weigh-in and returned an hour later for the loaded tally. Wrote a $5,000 check from Shelby’s account and started my two-month saga to resell those puppies for at least 85 cents a pound.
You would think that like Adam Smith, the father of Economics who gathered his wisdom of the law of supply and demand at the Glasgow, Scotland sheep auction, I had learned my lesson. But after Shelby and I relocated the Anala Goat Company to Kendleton, TX, 50 miles southwest of Houston I became incentivized by the West African need for $1.25/lb. billy goats. Mrs. Kettler and her husband had over 200 Nubian goats on two acres in Waco, TX. They were a legend in Texas dairy goatdom for selling $7/gal. raw goat’s milk to David Koresh and his Branch Davidians. The ATF put an end to Mrs. Kettler’s number one customer and to top it off Mr. K, who did all the milking by hand, died.
Because Allah, like God, protects children, drunks and architects, I was spared from complete failure by my Palestinian goat vendor in Katy, who needed two-tooth billies for the Eid al-Fitr festival celebrated by Muslims around the world, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Alhamdulillah, in 2002 Eid was in February. Eid al-Fitr in Arabic literally means “festival of breaking the fast” and back then it meant saving my ass.
You see, Juan Valdez – he looked like a Juan Valdez, only taller – came out to our farm as the Goat Marketing Rep of the Texas Department of Agriculture and inquired about the handsome “coat of many colors” Joseph. “Did you get that buck from Mrs. Kettler?”
The COD part turned out to be a bad check but Rudy and I got to tour the Producers Livestock Auction, where every Tuesday 4,000 goats and 6,000 sheep are auctioned off. Ali the Turk is the big buyer of sheep and goats in Texas. On Mondays, he’s in Junction, Tuesday he’s front and center in San Angelo, he ends his work week buying for the East Coast ethnic market on Fridays in Goldthwaite. He has his purchased sheep and goats loaded on four level cattle trucks for deliver to New Holland, Pennsylvania.
No longer in the goat business per se I’m still interested in economics and especially the value of my fixed income dollar. I was on a jet plane to Rio on August 15, 1971 when the flight was grounded in Panama because Nixon closed the ‘Gold Window.’ At the time I thought that was cute. My 1955 Social Studies teacher claimed the dollar was only worth 35 cents, in 1971 it was 25 cents and after Greenspan and Bernanke less than a nickel. I thought the great Satan Greenspan was having an Adam Smith moment when he recently touted the 1913 (when a dollar was a dollar) economy and a return to the gold standard.
A Return to the Goat Standard says that inflation from a dollar a pound in 2001 to $3.00/lb. 15 years later in 2016 is close to 8% per year. Another way, the current price of our 80lb. wether in 2001 dollars is $2.18 the law of supply and demand at work.
Adam Smith, the forefather of all economists including Alan Greenspan, wrote in his 1776 Econ 101 text book, Wealth of Nations, that
Aspirational career options for an ENFP on the Myers-Briggs personality test, were architect at the top and farmer at the bottom. After thirty years of very limited success trying to make my fame and fortune as an architect I gave farming a shot. My ten year goat farmer experience taught me how to survive and thrive as a member of the 98.5% Everyone Else proletariat.
“Bloom where you are planted,” was my Aquarian wife’s mantra, her truth, her philosophy of life. It was one of the first cross stitch patterns she completed. She had it framed and intentionally hanging on the wall in our bathroom, as a daily reminder. I didn’t pay much attention or think much of it until we bought nine hectares of land, with a barn, in the countryside, 50 miles southwest of Houston. The acreage 150 years ago belonged to a plantation that was sold to the slaves that had been freed by that earlier Aquarian, Abraham Lincoln.
Today, you need a $250,000 annual income to escape the maddening Everyone Else club. Wherever we are planted from Bangladesh to Boston, three percent is the magic number to be a player, but as in Las Vegas, the house odds guarantee that only two percent make it to financial independence. Half of those two per-centers never had to sweat it as they were born rich. George ‘W’ and Trump got their two per-cent creds at birth, while Obama and Hillary chose the 
My real worry is that the Central Bankers today’s Monarchs and the Bankers, the Landed Gentry of yore, don’t have a clue on what to do about the global economic situation. Remember when Alan Greenspan said that: