« Agribusiness' Biggest Yield? Sorrows »

photo credit: Michael Gäbler (CC BY-SA 3.0)Given food shortages, what’s not to like about big crop yields? Turns out that the model of production ruling farms today is doing a better job of yielding a big crop of sorrows than of feeding the world. Nor is it focused on healthy produce. That’s because the model focuses on what most benefits the half dozen or so corporations that now control U.S. farm production. The model looks at efficiencies that reduce costs and increase profits in the short term, not at producing the healthiest crops or stewarding the health of land, water, and well-balanced ecoregions. It aggressively pursues the efficiencies that come with the following:

1. being big rather than being to scale with an ecoregion, 
2. monocropping mega-acres instead of planning crop diversity that is more in harmony with nature,
3. repeating the same crop year after year with megadoses of fertilizers, instead of stewarding the mutltudes of microbes that maintain healthy soils 
4. using bioengineered seeds, including genetic rearrangements, that assure patented ownership by corporations as well as assuring that other products of the corporation will be required such as specific herbicides and pesticides, 
5. defining modern farming to mean large scale mechanization rather than human labor or machinery that is to scale with smaller farms,
6. producing to benefit from government subsidies that assure corporate profits rather than producing foremost for the wellbeing of humans, domestic animals, wildlife, land, and water, 
7. confining animals in small quarters to reduce costs rather than managing them for animal, ecological, and food health. 

All seven of these “efficiencies” continue to dictate use of the big-scale agribusiness model of farming. They are why every farm state now has centers teaching the alternative, namely, sustainable agriculture based on a different model. Some centers are connected with universities; some freestanding. I am co-host of a podcast giving an example of each: (1) the Leopold Center, Iowa State Univ., (2) Center for Rural Affairs, Lyons, Nebraska.

The corporatization and industrialization of U.S. farms, and farming globally, continues the centuries trend of consolidation of wealth and deeply flawed mechanization of animal, plant, and human life. Nature and wildlife are treated alternatively as nuisance and pest or, in the case of aquifers and soil, as sources to be exploited as cheaply as possible.

Farmers are not bad people. The model being used is bad. It has led to a highly contortionist form of production of the produce we buy, the milk we drink, the meat we eat, the biofuels we use, and whatever else farmland feeds and fuels. As a result, the model of farming that has taken over rural America yields big harvests, but none is bigger than the yield of sorrows.

I write in my book, Blinded by Progress, about being a farm kid myself and the continuing massive changes in the model of how we produce from the land. Recently, Finelines magazine (edited by David Martin, Volume 23, Spring 2014) included an excerpt from my book. I entitled the excerpt, “The Agribusiness Yield of Sorrows.” (It’s mostly pages 60-62 in my book; but while you’re there, ber sure to read page 153. Devastating indictment, I think.)

The agribusiness model is no more sustainable than other MultiEarth practices. All the rural centers for sustainability focus in organics, farming to scale, keeping small local economies functioning, and emphasize the elements of rural culture that are beneficial to human and ecological wellbeing. Interestingly, the crop yields of land using such agricultural models is equivalent to or higher than the agribusiness model. The biodiversity and sustainability are far better. Many of them see the benefits of a New Ruralism that joins the quest for OneEarth living, and doing it on the farm.

And, by the way, those food shortages? They happen because regions no longer have control over their own food production; such controls have been taken over by government-corporation partnerships. Wherever local farmers are empowered with technologies of scale and fair markets instead of their reverse, farming of the land supplies food in fine sufficiency.