FOL Matt forwards a link to a Mother Jones that advocates a kind of “lowering of standards” by advocates of better agriculture. The article makes a good point about the dangers of insisting on purity instead of encouraging incremental improvement; at the same time the article’s recommendations could serve to provide cover for both greenwashing and “high-tech” programs by corporate agribusiness.
The article seems to also assert that polycultural farming methods yield less food per acre than “conventional” (industrial) methods; every other reference I’ve read says the opposite, that polycultural farming results in significantly higher yield than industrial farming. I’ve not examined the studies myself, it seems somebody is wrong here and I don’t know who.
All that said, I think there is a big problem with the following sentence, which occurs in the middle of a very useful analysis of the labor costs and policy requirements of redeveloping a sustainable food infrastructure:
The industrial agribusiness model of simplified monoculture became dominant not only because it gave us cheap food, but because it reflected a society that was becoming more urban.
This perpetuates a misunderstanding that happens to totally benefit the corporate masters of industrial agriculture. We are told no one wants to live in the countryside, and thus we must have industrial agriculture (and suburban sprawl, cubicle jobs, long commutes, and supermarkets full of lifeless food from faraway places).
Obviously, the causation is reversed: the rise of industrial agriculture removes skilled jobs from the rural community (as the article says, “polyculture requires far more intensive and continuous management than does its industrial counterpart”). The children of farmers and their neighbors grow up amid declining work, and less interesting work, available in their community. Of course many bright, motivated young people leave.
You can characterize this a preference to live in the city but that doesn’t quite capture the spirit of the thing. Wendell Berry describes it more aptly as “the dispossession of farmers by machines, chemicals and oppressed migrants.”
One of the saddest sights in America is the hyphenated sign of a consolidated school. Its multiple names mark a headstone for places where food, soil and communities were once full of life; a memory that the work of fossil fuel could never enrich us as much as the work of people.