A quick follow up on our previous blog on corporate farming.
Large-scale industrial agriculture depends on engineering the land to ensure the absence of natural diversity. But as the recent emergence of herbicide-tolerant weeds on U.S. farms has shown, nature ultimately finds a way to re-assert itself.
Big-Ag has had only one big idea: uniformity. The obvious example is corn. The U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts that American farmers - big farmers - will plant 94 million acres of corn this year. That’s the equivalent of planting corn on every inch of Montana. To do that you’d have to make sure that every inch of Montana fell within corn-growing parameters. That would mean leveling the high spots, irrigating the dry spots, draining the wet spots, fertilizing the infertile spots, and so on. Corn is usually grown where the terrain is less rigorous than it is in Montana. But even in Iowa that has meant leveling, irrigating, draining, fertilizing, and, of course, spraying. When you see a Midwest cornfield, you know you’re looking at nature with one idea superimposed upon it - uniformity.
A reasonable agriculture would do its best to emulate nature. Rather than change the earth to suit a crop - which is what we do with corn and soybeans and a handful of other agricultural commodities - it would diversify its crops to suit the earth. This is not going to happen in Big-Ag. Business encourages production and consumption to make money so they can then use to make even more money
Farmers have been encouraged to apply a uniform herbicide to kill weeds. Mostly, that herbicide has been glyphosate, marketed under the Monsanto trade name Roundup. Farmers have sprayed and over-sprayed billions of gallons of Roundup thanks to an economic premise: corn good, weeds bad. 15 years after genetically-engineered, Roundup-tolerant crops were widely introduced, it’s no longer working against spontaneous new generations of Roundup-tolerant weeds. To fix the problem of glyphosate-tolerant weeds, Dow Chemical is hoping to introduce crop varieties that will withstand being sprayed with an herbicide called 2,4-D. When it was first released to farmers in 1946, 2,4-D was a breakthrough — a herbicide that killed only certain kinds of plants instead of killing them all. It’s less safe than glyphosate, especially because it’s sometimes contaminated with dioxin. But it’s not an indiscriminate, lethal killer. However, this is backward-engineering of a sort, like trying to breed birds that will tolerate DDT.
While the USDA has yet to decide whether to approve Dow’s 2,4-D-tolerant soybeans yet, it has decided to speed up the process of reviewing genetically-engineered crops, mainly to help deal with the spread of so-called superweeds caused by the nearly universal application of glyphosate for the last decade and a half. According to Dow’s numbers, superweeds affected some 60 million acres of crops last year. If things go right, bureaucratically, that is just so much cash in Dow’s pocket. “Farmers need technology right now to help them with issues such as weed resistance,” a Dow official said last month. Translation? Farmers need technology right now to help them with issues created by right-now technology introduced 15 years ago. the USDA is helping them do the same old wrong thing faster. When an idea goes bad, the USDA seems to think, the way to fix it is to speed up the introduction of ideas that will go bad for exactly the same reason. And it’s always, somehow, the same bad idea: the uniform application of an anti-biological agent, whether it’s a pesticide in crops or an antibiotic on factory farms. The result is always the same. Nature finds a way around it.
This is the irrationality of monoculture as it’s practiced in the United States and now all over the world. It has one big idea, and it will never give it up, because it has invested everything in that one big idea. Feeding the world is not actually a problem with local, diverse agriculture. We have been "convinced" that it is. However, actual practice has shown just the opposite. You can feed more people with numerous smaller-scale, diverse farms and gardens while maintaining or enriching biodiversity and stabilizing soils and forests. Large-scale farmers are not at all interested in "feeding the world". Most "big agriculture" farmers' actions are a total effort to gain the highest yield per acre at the lowest overhead for the best price they can find for that commodity. The world already produces too much food. According to the FAO and the UN Special Raporteur on the Right to Food, in 2008 the world produced enough food for 12 billion people. Yet one billion humans were chronically malnourished and a billion were obese.
In the Philippines there are more than 300 kinds of edible fruit but only about 12 are commercialized.They have edible nuts that have never seen the market-stall. The Philippines also have the world's largest pineapple plantation with over 15,000 hectares to produce pineapples to fit the size of the cans rather than for nutritional value.
Source
Large-scale industrial agriculture depends on engineering the land to ensure the absence of natural diversity. But as the recent emergence of herbicide-tolerant weeds on U.S. farms has shown, nature ultimately finds a way to re-assert itself.
Big-Ag has had only one big idea: uniformity. The obvious example is corn. The U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts that American farmers - big farmers - will plant 94 million acres of corn this year. That’s the equivalent of planting corn on every inch of Montana. To do that you’d have to make sure that every inch of Montana fell within corn-growing parameters. That would mean leveling the high spots, irrigating the dry spots, draining the wet spots, fertilizing the infertile spots, and so on. Corn is usually grown where the terrain is less rigorous than it is in Montana. But even in Iowa that has meant leveling, irrigating, draining, fertilizing, and, of course, spraying. When you see a Midwest cornfield, you know you’re looking at nature with one idea superimposed upon it - uniformity.
A reasonable agriculture would do its best to emulate nature. Rather than change the earth to suit a crop - which is what we do with corn and soybeans and a handful of other agricultural commodities - it would diversify its crops to suit the earth. This is not going to happen in Big-Ag. Business encourages production and consumption to make money so they can then use to make even more money
Farmers have been encouraged to apply a uniform herbicide to kill weeds. Mostly, that herbicide has been glyphosate, marketed under the Monsanto trade name Roundup. Farmers have sprayed and over-sprayed billions of gallons of Roundup thanks to an economic premise: corn good, weeds bad. 15 years after genetically-engineered, Roundup-tolerant crops were widely introduced, it’s no longer working against spontaneous new generations of Roundup-tolerant weeds. To fix the problem of glyphosate-tolerant weeds, Dow Chemical is hoping to introduce crop varieties that will withstand being sprayed with an herbicide called 2,4-D. When it was first released to farmers in 1946, 2,4-D was a breakthrough — a herbicide that killed only certain kinds of plants instead of killing them all. It’s less safe than glyphosate, especially because it’s sometimes contaminated with dioxin. But it’s not an indiscriminate, lethal killer. However, this is backward-engineering of a sort, like trying to breed birds that will tolerate DDT.
While the USDA has yet to decide whether to approve Dow’s 2,4-D-tolerant soybeans yet, it has decided to speed up the process of reviewing genetically-engineered crops, mainly to help deal with the spread of so-called superweeds caused by the nearly universal application of glyphosate for the last decade and a half. According to Dow’s numbers, superweeds affected some 60 million acres of crops last year. If things go right, bureaucratically, that is just so much cash in Dow’s pocket. “Farmers need technology right now to help them with issues such as weed resistance,” a Dow official said last month. Translation? Farmers need technology right now to help them with issues created by right-now technology introduced 15 years ago. the USDA is helping them do the same old wrong thing faster. When an idea goes bad, the USDA seems to think, the way to fix it is to speed up the introduction of ideas that will go bad for exactly the same reason. And it’s always, somehow, the same bad idea: the uniform application of an anti-biological agent, whether it’s a pesticide in crops or an antibiotic on factory farms. The result is always the same. Nature finds a way around it.
This is the irrationality of monoculture as it’s practiced in the United States and now all over the world. It has one big idea, and it will never give it up, because it has invested everything in that one big idea. Feeding the world is not actually a problem with local, diverse agriculture. We have been "convinced" that it is. However, actual practice has shown just the opposite. You can feed more people with numerous smaller-scale, diverse farms and gardens while maintaining or enriching biodiversity and stabilizing soils and forests. Large-scale farmers are not at all interested in "feeding the world". Most "big agriculture" farmers' actions are a total effort to gain the highest yield per acre at the lowest overhead for the best price they can find for that commodity. The world already produces too much food. According to the FAO and the UN Special Raporteur on the Right to Food, in 2008 the world produced enough food for 12 billion people. Yet one billion humans were chronically malnourished and a billion were obese.
In the Philippines there are more than 300 kinds of edible fruit but only about 12 are commercialized.They have edible nuts that have never seen the market-stall. The Philippines also have the world's largest pineapple plantation with over 15,000 hectares to produce pineapples to fit the size of the cans rather than for nutritional value.
Source
The world already produces too much food because uses modern technology. But if we need the World Revolution and archaic agriculture methods to feed the world we certainly will starve. Stop being reactionary! Small farmers have also no interest in feeding the world. A large class of farmers is an obstacle to socialism.
ReplyDeleteI think the article accurately depicts a problem with monoculture and that in farming there should be a balance and a diversified approach to producing food. I accept though it is not the last word on the subject and should not become a tenet of faith.
ReplyDeleteAs for your comments upon a large class of small farmers being an obstacle to socialism, way back in Canada, the Socialist Party of Canada discussed this in an article The Slave of the Farm "Amongst the many problems confronting the Socialists of the world one of the oldest and most perplexing is that of spreading a proletarian viewpoint amongst the more or less scattered and detached agrarian workers The presentation of our case to the wage slave has been a comparatively simple and direct process, the method of exploitation being at once easy of comprehension and stark naked to the most casual glance. With the country slave, however, the position has been obscured by the form of concentration of capital which extracts full measure of profit behind a mask of small ownership of property."
Well worth a read.
http://www.worldsocialism.org/canada/
Bob St.Peter, Director of Food for Maine's Future and Executive Committee member of the National Family Farm Coalition. “Here in the U.S., 400 million acres of farmland are going to change hands over the next 20 years. Whether those lands will support diversified family farms or multi-national corporations is one of the most important political questions in the U.S. today."
ReplyDeletehttp://www.grain.org/article/entries/4486-farmers-demand-the-world-bank-and-wall-street-stop-grabbing-their-lands-at-opening-of-the-bank-s-annual-conference-in-washington-dc