The Ethical Agriculturalist: A Blog by R.A.B.
industrial farming is bankrupt. I Think it's the opportunity of a lifetime.
R.A.B.
I still remember the day, running with my cross-country teammates among the rustling golden fields of Yellow Dent #2, when one girl picked up a fallen ear and wondered aloud where this massive acreage would end up. I looked at her incredulously. There were only two places it could possibly go: livestock feed, or industrial processing. Most of the corn grown in the great Midwest Corn Belt is not fit for human consumption. Rather, it is ground and mixed with various amounts of fat and minerals for animal feed, like the feed trucked into my father's turkey farm on a weekly basis. It feeds cows, which causes indigestion on such a scale that their farts have become a major global source of methane. Some varieties of dent corn can be processed into highly manufactured foods, but the nutritional value of these is questionable at best. Then there's the massive amount of corn that goes into industrial processing, mainly to ethanol (which is not the environment-saving boon marketers would have you believe) and bio-plastics. The cost of using prime agricultural land for industrial processing is high, and the corn belt today suffers untenable levels of soil erosion and water contamination, all to create a product that no one will eat. And the best part, according to a report issued by the Environmental Working Group, is that even the food that we do export to other countries (thus fulfilling our so-called 'feeding the world' mission) doesn't go to those who need it. The percentage of the diets of the nineteen hungriest nations supplied by the United States (including food aid) averages only 1%. So, no. We're not feeding the world. We're not even growing food. We're growing a product at the very bottom of a very long value chain, the lowest form of calories known to the world which will eventually work its way, either through an animal's or machine's stomach, into a more expensive, refined, and non-nutritious end product. My teammate, despite having grown up in a state blanketed with industrial farms, had never known a farmer. Her contact with the industry was limited to corn mazes and pumpkin patches, and the occasional trip to a local orchard. She thought cows grazed on grass and corn silage until slaughter. She thought the corn went into cans and onto farmstands and fed people. When I pointed out the error of her beliefs, she was horrified. As she had every right to be. I only knew the truth because my own father had lamented it throughout my childhood. If I had grown up with any other father, I would never have bothered to consider the truth, either. How does this happen? Like any fetishized product, untethered from the means of production, the profits in the farming industry depend on keeping the messy truth hidden. It's much easier to just throw out a slogan ("We're feeding the world!") to explain why we have to grow industrial-style monocultures than to admit that we don't really know what's going on, or worse, that we're just doing it because the market demands it. What's shameful about our ignorance is that there really are no secrets here, the information on exports is public, as are the statistics on the level of water and air contamination and erosion associated with industrial farming. There aren't any evil masterminds, except for greedy corporations fulfilling their profit directive. They're terrible, but obviously so. Brazenly bad. And still we manage to completely ignore the problem. How do we start feeding the world for real? Maybe start by growing food that people actually eat. Archives January 2019 Categories
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