This may seem like a silly question since this is the agriculture we have. On the other hand, when a growing number of scientific and other groups claim that it is a problem it probably is worth a look.
My favorite voice in this matter is Wendell Berry who
is an American novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. A prolific author, he has written dozens of novels, short stories, poems, and essays. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry has been named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award.
In 1977 he wrote
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture
Since its publication by Sierra Club Books in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land—from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it.
Sadly, as Berry notes in his Afterword to this third edition, his arguments and observations are more relevant than ever. We continue to suffer loss of community, the devaluation of human work, and the destruction of nature under an economic system dedicated to the mechanistic pursuit of products and profits. Although “this book has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong,” Berry writes, there are good people working “to make something comely and enduring of our life on this earth.” Wendell Berry is one of those people, writing and working, as ever, with passion, eloquence, and conviction.
Just to make it clear that he has lots of company in his criticism of our system of agriculture here is what the
Union of Concerned Scientists have to say:
Today, the majority of American farmland is dominated by industrial agriculture—the system of chemically intensive food production developed in the decades after World War II, featuring enormous single-crop farms and animal production facilities.
Back then, industrial agriculture was hailed as a technological triumph that would enable a skyrocketing world population to feed itself. Today, a growing chorus of agricultural experts—including farmers as well as scientists and policy makers—sees industrial agriculture as a dead end, a mistaken application to living systems of approaches better suited for making jet fighters and refrigerators.
The impacts of industrial agriculture on the environment, public health, and rural communities make it an unsustainable way to grow our food over the long term. And better, science-based methods are available.
Some of you may disagree but you are shrinking in number.
Read on below for some more information.
There is an abundance of opinion on this issue but I will focus on some quotes of Wendell Berry for he says it very well.
I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children; whose work serves the earth he lives on and from and with, and is therefore pleasurable and meaningful and unending; whose rewards are not deferred until "retirement," but arrive daily and seasonally out of the details of the life of their place; whose goal is the continuance of the life of the world, which for a while animates and contains them, and which they know they can never compass with their understanding or desire.
The Unforeseen Wilderness : An Essay on Kentucky's Red River Gorge (1971),
Today, local economies are being destroyed by the "pluralistic," displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.
Interview in New Perspectives Quarterly (1992),
Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm — which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.
The Unsettling of America : Culture & Agriculture (1996), p. 62.
We haven't accepted — we can't really believe — that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but that is so. And we still think and behave as though we face an unspoiled continent, with thousands of acres of living space for every man. We still sing "America the Beautiful" as though we had not created in it, by strenuous effort, at great expense, and with dauntless self-praise, an unprecedented ugliness.
"The Rise".
These are a sample of the things that should be obvious to everyone about our system and what it does. The industrialization of agriculture is but on part of a mind set that puts profit first and goes beyond the simple meanings of the word "greed".
There is a special irony when voices like Berry's are labeled as cranks in the name of science. Reductionist science serves the oligarchy totally. It is populated by prostitutes who use it with an unashamed arrogance. Science, as we know it today, is no longer Natural Philosophy. It, in fact, seems to abhor nature and glorify the limited wisdom of humans. Meanwhile the damage it spews out exceeds the good it discovers because the results are only used to make money. Yes, of course, these profit making uses of science have "benefits". There has to be something to sell.
I am going to be 79 in March. I have had a long career in science and an international reputation that is worth mentioning. I pioneered more than one field and refused to let artificial boundaries limit me. I can point you to myriad examples of outstanding science, even in the reductionist realm, that is ignored because it does not profit the oligarchy. Drug companies, big agriculture, energy, weapons, you name it, all exploit modern science and reject Natural Philosophy.
We are paying a price. Global Warming is but one part of a larger picture of a system that controls us rather than is under our control. There are no bad guys, there is no conspiracy. Only imperfect human beings who are brilliant in limited ways and very ignorant in so many others of importance.
Given the nature of what our evolution has spawned, I am very pessimistic. I hope I am wrong. Fortunately I won't exist when the stuff hits the fan.