Industrial Agriculture

Another tradition that I am not a fan of, and one that seems sacrosanct (aren’t they all?) is agriculture. I know we all need to eat but, we must ask the question - what price should we pay for that? A line in the film Shallow Grave captures it perfectly - “that's what you paid for it………….. We don't know how much it cost us yet. For you two to have a good time, we don't know the cost of that yet”. Mother Nature, it seems, is starting to show us the true cost of our actions. Only this week we have had floods in Texas and New Mexico, Wildfires in France and Greece and they’re just the ones that are being reported.


Where to start? Land use change is probably the main point. As I say, I know we have to eat. I know that agriculture, like many other things we hold dear as traditions, has evolved slowly over time to where it is now. But, as I will keep saying, that doesn't mean we should stick with things as they are. Land use change is a huge issue. Essentially the biggest problem humans have made. For agriculture to work - the way we have it running - we need large amounts of land. Of all the habitable land on earth (not including areas like those covered in ice or high mountains or deserts) 50% is given over to agriculture. https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture Of this agricultural land, three quarters is used for animal production - only one quarter is used to grow plants that humans will eat directly. This is either land set aside for them to live on or land used to grow crops for the animals to eat. This land use change strips the landscape of its Biodiversity as it is put into monocrop production - palm, wheat, oats or grain of some kind as far as the eye can see. No diversity, no habitat for animals so the wild animals either die because there is nowhere for them to live or because their food has died - because it too has lost its home - or, they leave to try to find somewhere else to be. And, the calories derived from this excessive animal production is only 17% of global human calorie intake.


If we add to this destructive issue the inputs and negative externalities for this animal production - things like the pesticides and fertilisers used to grow the animals’ food, the soil erosion and degradation, the run-off of fertilisers that enters water courses causing algal blooms and depleting oxygen levels - we start to see a picture that is, in all senses, completely unsustainable. This basic and limited information is taken from a simple report (one of the first I found) from North Dakota State University - https://tinyurl.com/2oqd56bd A deeper dive inside the UN or Google Scholar shows a raft of information reporting and illustrating the issues. Then, we have the externalities of the production of the inputs - fossil fuels and emissions in the production of fertiliser (that then causes run-off issues) transportation emissions, storage, packaging and so on. The eroded soil - laced with Nitrogen or Phosphorus - contaminates other landscapes as it travels or enters watercourses. The damage these processes cause to the environment are enormous and all so we can stick with a traditional model of agriculture. But why stick with it if it is so destructive?


It’s big business. HUGE business and is now largely controlled by multinational corporations. Not meaning to single any specific corporation out, because many others bear similar responsibility, the U.S. giant Cargill has been linked to many environmental harms including deforestation and air pollution. This Wiki page has plenty of details if you want to look further - https://tinyurl.com/ypgdklwh Again, that’s without spending time on an academic search. Cargill alone turns over something in the region of $165 billion and employs lots of people, so some would say this is good for the economy. But, we do need to ask the question again, whether the economy is a thing that should be assisted and supported such that we allow it, and those that practice within it, to cause harm to humans and the place humans call home. The economy is, surely, there to serve us. This relationship has though reversed - humans are here now to serve the economy. If the reason for upholding a tradition like agriculture - and I’m talking specifically here about the corporatised, marketised, industrialised agriculture that is so destructive to people and planet - is because it contributes to the economy, is a good enough reason to hang onto it, then the so called leaders of this world, are either being misled, are too afraid to change or are deriving benefits from a system awash with incentives for destructive practices.

Image credit - Arnoud Joris Maaswinkel, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Alternative options are available. If urban agriculture was given a chance and urban planning began to accommodate and develop it, there is a lot of food that could be produced this way. The Cuban Organoponicos, as just one example, could produce up to 16kg of food per metre squared - https://tinyurl.com/ypvwvjbr This figure compares VERY favourably to the yields from our so-called advanced agriculture. The urban agricultural infrastructure - growing areas - could act as sponges for extreme rain events helping to prevent fast run-off and flash floods (in the town I live in at the moment, these types of events have caused destructive flooding twice in the last 5 years). They could also act as cooling green spaces in extreme heat events helping to mitigate the severity of urban heat episodes. And this is without the fact that we would be providing fresh food that has significantly lower food miles than some foods, it is usually organic, requiring fewer inputs and can help communities come together offering an outlet for those who need it and reducing isolation whilst offering gentle outdoor activity and exercise reintegrating people with nature - a relationship that has been broken. If this was scaled, we could even start to return some of the traditional agricultural lands back into a natural, biodiverse state. I can’t see what’s wrong with this. And that is just one example of an alternative, non-traditional agriculture that can help provide for us and contribute resilience and advance us as we move into an uncertain future. It feels as if the ‘leaders’ of today, fear leaving behind what has essentially become a comfort blanket industry. Nothing more. Then there is organic agriculture, regenerative agriculture, no-dig, permaculture, agro-forestry and so on. There are lots of options - if we just choose to take them.


There are other reasons to be concerned about the tradition of agriculture and industrialised agriculture - from the drive by certain large corporations to develop GM seeds that they can place behind paywalls to the increasing reliance on pesticides and herbicides to the commodification of crops and market speculation that leads to price swings and contributes to food insecurity - all of which have been shown to have highly negative impacts. More on these another time. For now, and please appreciate, this is not a PhD dissertation, it’s a blog. A set of thoughts - some perhaps reasonably informed - that hope to show that there is another way for humanity to organise and develop. Our traditional, lumbering, destructive agricultural practices that are tied to corporations more than they are the land they grow in needs to change. It has to, for all our sakes. I imagine that most people would like to believe that our lands are in the hands of good, honest caretakers who really do have the environment and end consumer in mind. I think though that the real picture is somewhat different and based on profits, greed and corporate fiduciary duty. This isn’t a basis for food growing. It’s a basis for food going. Just look at our green and pleasant land. Pleasant? it's mostly mono culture, stripped of diversity so we can grow and keep animals. Just look around. Where there should be trees, scrub, wildness, there are fields of closely cropped grass and the odd hedge. This is not natural. In any way. Finally, a quote I heard a while back, that apparently comes from farming but is equally applicable to just about everything I'll go through as this blog develops is: The most dangerous 7 words in farming are “that's the way we've always done it”.


More next time……......