Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Charles C. Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet, published earlier this year, is a fabulous book. Not a perfect book; sometimes, in order to bulk up this two-pronged thesis, he will throw in supplementary material that threatens to bog down his central investigation. But that investigation comes through loud and clear all the same, and it is one worth looking at closely.
The ethos we’ve built around farming in the United States is broken. Rather than encouraging farmers to eliminate risk by diversifying their crops, pursuing sustainability, and embracing a proper scale, we’ve propped up a truly unsustainable style of production with subsidies and insurance programs.
New research demonstrates – again – how deceptive the concepts of productivity and efficiency are in agriculture. Huge increases in labor productivity and modest increases in land productivity are gained by a massive increase of use of external resources, while natural capital is depleted. Is that efficient?
The Cornish-Rock cross is an ideal partner for the vertical factory model — a model in which bird, agribusinessman, and illegal immigrant plant worker are tightly bound in the same machine that spits out soylent green parts for consumption by the masses. The model that provides cheap protein, provides cheap veggies, provides cheap clothing, provides a cheapened life….
Even without pesticides, industrial agriculture is doomed to fail from extremely high rates of soil erosion and soil compaction at rates that far exceed losses in the past, since soil couldn’t wash or blow away as easily on small farms that grew many crops.
Should they be approved, just three companies will control 65% of the world’s pesticide sales and 61% of the world’s commercial seed sales – the biggest agribusiness oligopoly in history.
We caught up with Joel Salatin, PolyFace Farms, at the Mother Earth News Fair. We asked Joel to talk about our current agricultural system.
The primary obstacle to sustainable food security is an economic model and thought system, embodied in industrial agriculture, that views life in disassociated parts, obscuring the destructive impact this approach has on humans, natural resources, and the environment.
This idea might seem all wet to some people, but I’d like to propose on Earth Day that we make a top priority of making water’s links to food, environment and city issues more dramatic, more front-and-centre, and more spirited and spiritual.
I’m not what you’d call a Bible thumper, but I do like to quote it on occasion, inserting an appropriate passage into the conversation in a sonorous voice that makes me sound wise.
The image on a gallon of maple syrup reflects a way of life – slower and less high-tech, more localized and neighborly – that many people rightly yearn for.
You can find a stunning photo of the kingdom of corn in, of all places, the Sunday New York Times travel section Jan. 7.
