Agricultural "Efficiency"

Several things have combined in my reading that I'd like to think about a bit more. I'm reading Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. This is a fabulous book in which Berry, a Kentucky farmer for decades, writes about (among other things) the very wrong direction of American agriculture toward larger farms owned and worked by fewer people and more machines. The effects of this include (some of this is him, some is me):

• dying small towns and rural areas in America


• an influx of people out of these areas and into cities that cannot handle the additional population


• a resulting swamping of the job market in such urban areas, decrease wages (you can't demand more pay with endless newcomers swelling the cities, desperate for jobs)


• a similar flooding of the housing market, increasing housing prices


• a "more efficient" agricultural process, but one which relies extremely heavily on:
  
  • Large machinery, which increases debt of farmers
  
  
  • Petroleum fuels and Large corporations which manufacture and maintain the equipment
  
  
  • Increased specialization toward one crop, reducing crop rotation efforts
  
  
  • Removing animals from plants has resulted in a large need for costly petroleum-based fertilizers for crops and huge problems of large amounts of polluting manure, which is also highly toxic due to chemical and hormone additives to animal diets. Berry summarizes: "The genius of American farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems."
  
  
  • Using all available land for cropland and rangeland, removing boundaries and margins, which previously helped farmers in many ways, including maintaining topsoil (which is being eroded at rates higher than those during the dustbowl of the 1940's in some areas)
  
  
  
  


• Low prices on food goods

So, are all the negative consequences of this ever-increasing "efficiency" worth it (and I didn't even begin to mention health concerns about pesticides, milk-hormones, and crops bred to grow quickly and have length shelf lives)? Our small-scale family farms can't survive in this environment, as prices are pushed so low that only the large industrial farmers can produce crops at the prices of today. At least they do this currently, but is it sustainable? Certainly it is not, as soil takes decades to regenerate, as does the natural fertility of the soils. Now we are dependent upon the processes that have destroyed the land in the first place. The vicious cycle.

I didn't mention the rest of the world, which of course is greatly impacted by the lower prices on food. In that their farmers can't make a living (unless they mimic what our farmers do, but only a few farmers can do that, because of the large-scale operations required). So most of their farmers can't make a living in this environment.

Which brings us to points of conflict in the world. Bolivia, the poorest of South America's countries, relies on coca farming (which isn't farmed as I describe above), since other crops don't provide as much income. See this Washington Post Article on Evo Morales and Bolivia's Coca Farmers. Perhaps this is an isolated event? No, consider the Opium farmers adding to the difficulty of success against terrorism in Afghanistan.

Eating is basic to the human life. We all must eat. And farming is the way we've relied on eating for thousands of years. By industrializing farming, by treating the earth as a machine, we are destroying something so vital to our own existence.

Perhaps this is necessary, some would argue, as the population of the earth continues to sprial upwards. True, it does. But this is only delaying larger problems later, when population is even larger, and agricultural land is less, due to our current actions. So this isn't a solution. Surely, we must reduce our impact on this earth, which will mean a reduction in ease, comforts, power, and probably food too. But if we don't start doing it now, we just pass the problems on to my newborn son's generations, who instead of aiming for great things, will just be trying to ward off disaster, or to survive it.