Radical Noesis - Thinking outside the box

Industrial agriculture is typically highly specialized and involves farms that grow only a few crops at a time, usually to be sold. This is in contrast to traditional farmers, who are self-sufficient and grow a multitude of crops, only the surplus of which might be sold or shared with others. Specialization of this kind requires significant capital investment in order to acquire and use multitudinous inputs and resources such as fertilizers, machinery for planting and harvesting, hired labor, and pesticides (Solbrig 1994:205). The point of this is to produce large quantities of cheap food to feed an ever-growing population. This has been accomplished, although it doesn’t do much to end hunger for those who can’t afford to buy that food.

The groundwork of modern agriculture was laid in seventeenth century Europe, and the industrial revolution that began in the nineteenth century in Europe and is still happening in other parts of the world has also contributed. North America, New Zealand, and Australia have the most advanced agriculture systems (Solbrig 1994:207). Industrialization brought with it not only advanced food production but also advanced input production. Organic fertilizer such as ruminant manure and bird guano were used until after World War II, when industrially produced nitrogenous fertilizer became cheap and widely available. These were usable over large swaths of land, making it possible to fertilize, and therefore produce on, ever growing numbers of acres (Solbrig 1994:209). This concentration and centralization of farming has caused a very large drop in the number of farmers. In the United States, there are more full-time prisoners than full-time farmers (Halweil 2004:61).

Because of an increased dependence on these fertilizers and other inputs, industrial agriculture is sometimes called “subsidized agriculture.” Fertilizer is not the only input that is required in large amounts. Energy is essential to modern farming in order to run machinery, in the form of food to feed laborers, and to transport the food from centralized locations. The system is actually energy unsustainable, because one calorie of production costs 2.5 calories of fossil fuels. Most fertilizers are actually made from fossil fuels as well, which is part of why this number is so high (Barlett 1989:261).

Also with industrial agriculture comes increased influence of the state, competition, and overproduction. Government plays a major role in industrial agriculture. It determines what kind of land to use, recommends how farming should be done, regulates input content, and decides whether each input and output is safe. In most countries, some more than others, prices are even set and/or regulated by the state. It taxes producers, distributors, and consumers, and it decides whom to give tax breaks to in order to influence production (Barlett 1989:262). This is another aspect of “subsidized agriculture.”

Industrial agriculture threatens biodiversity, sustainability, and food security. If only a few large, powerful companies own everything in our agricultural system, including the farms, it could lead to their working harder to make money than to secure resources. These firms, since they control the farmland and choose what is grown on it, put the citizens of the world at their mercy as far as food prices, selection, and security. This system is unsustainable, because if the same crop is grown by a large company in one area of the world, and blight or other disease effects that particular crop, a large portion of the world’s supplies of it could dwindle or vanish (Grey 2000:146). Because corporations clear large swaths of forest for farmland, cattle grazing land, and the like, biodiversity and the stability of natural systems are at risk. How many species that we’ve never even seen might be going extinct because of this?

When it comes to the industrial food system, vertical integration is the most impressive and possibly the most dangerous tactic. Vertical integration is the bringing together of two or more successive steps of production or distribution under one ownership. It can be achieved by directly purchasing the resources necessary to control each step or through contract farming, wherein a contract is made between farmers and companies specifying conditions of production and/or marketing (Goldschmidt 1978:xxvi). Vertical integration also allows the passing on of risks to lower levels by outsourcing. Contracts “provide control over production methods and inputs, assuring standardization and quality controls” (Grey 2000:145).

The control inherent in vertical integration allows a corporation to make most or all decisions about a product’s life cycle from what fertilizers are used, what seeds are planted, and how they are grown to packaging, advertising, and pricing. An example is the partnership between Monsanto and Cargill, “which controls seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, farm finance, grain collection, grain processing, livestock feed processing, livestock production, and slaughtering, as well as some well-known food brands.” This leaves farmers little to no control. If the area where you want to grow corn has feedlots or mills or elevators controlled by a certain company who also owns the bank that makes loan decisions, owns the hog farms, owns the food you eat, and owns the fertilizers and pesticides, you’re hard-pressed to use anything but that company’s brands of basically everything you need (Halweil 2004:65-66). You won’t be producing much organic food there, that’s for sure. The consumer also suffers from a lack of retail choices in this situation.

Taxes are a complicated issue for vertically integrated corporations, and that complexity can be used to find tax loopholes. If a corporation only makes 10% of its gross income with agriculture, it doesn’t need to report that separately (Goldschmidt 1978:xxvi). This allows the corporation to slip under the radar of government regulators in some cases, including the IRS. The Roosevelt administration instituted the agricultural relief program, which hands out subsidies proportional to the productivity of the farm enterprise (Goldschmidt 1978:xxxiii). Therefore, a person or corporation with more holdings receives more relief, because it was thought that all farms shared equally in the depression.

Also, the corporation can then use its control to influence the sales of its own pesticides, its own fertilizers, and its own seeds (which could be genetically engineered to respond better to its own pesticides and fertilizers). Because it would be in the corporation’s bets interests to push as much fertilizer and pesticides into the process as it can, the inherent problems with overuse of those materials become more pronounced. Pesticides and fertilizers that aren’t absorbed by the plants are washed off into groundwater and contaminate drinking water, kill native species, and generally wreak havoc on local ecosystems. Fertilizer that leeches into water systems can also cause massive algae blooms (Halweil 2004:73).

Though industrial agriculture has produced large supplies of cheap food, the way the system works in the U.S. is not as efficient as we may be told. Japan’s productivity per acre is approximately 10 times America’s (Goldschmidt 1978:xxxii), and small farms produce as much as 1,000% more output per unit of land (Halweil 2004:75). Considering this inefficiency and the environmental and social problems caused by industrial agriculture and vertical integration, it would seem that considering alternatives would be a good idea.

References Cited

Barlett, Peggy F.
1989 Industrial Agriculture From Economic Anthropology. Pp. 253-291. Stuart
Plattner, ed. Stanford University Press. Stanford, California.

Goldschmidt, Walter
1978 As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social
Consequences of Agribusiness. Pp. xxiii – 54. Allanheld, Osman & Co Publishers Inc. Montclair, NJ

Grey, Mark A.
2000 The Industrial Food Stream and its Alternatives in the United States: An
Introduction. Human Organization. Vol. 59, No. 2. Pp. 143-150.

Halweil, Brian
2004 Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket. Pp.
59-78. W.W. Norton & Co. New York

Solbrig, Otto T. & Dorothy J.
1994 So Shall You Reap: Farming and Crops in Human Affairs. Pp. 204-252.
Island Press.