The Future of Our Food is Not in Vast Factory Farms
Comic strip mocking George Orwell’s Animal Farm. UK Foreign Office copy of the comic strip by Norman Pett. UK National Archives, 1950. Wikipedia Commons.
Prologue
Quite by accident, a neighbor said to me that the New York Times had a lengthy opinion piece in support of animal farms, which represent the worst form of modern agriculture. I checked it out and the neighbor was right. The New York Times had more than one opinion piece parroting the anxieties of agricultural scientists and advertisements and misleading rhetoric of agribusiness. The editor of the effort, Eliza Barclay, is confident that the future of our food may rest “in vast, sustainably managed factory farms [relying on] water… pumped across the country, from the Great Lakes to California.”
Dante’s inferno
This science fiction fantasy shocked me. I have been reading the New York Times, on and off, for many years. Its reporters write well and, in some instances, cover controversial and conventional politics and international affairs, though in the case of the wars in Ukraine and Israel, the Times follows strictly the script of the State Department.
But reading eloquent articles in support of the so-called “green revolution,” pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, giant automated harvester machines and “taking care” of millions of cattle in order to add some more pounds of meat on their bodies on the eve of their slaughter, was too much. David Wallace-Wells, one of the opinion writers for the New York Times, started the discussion with an extensive article exploring the vulnerabilities of agriculture at a time climate chaos is changing everything, including conventional farming. He says that the alternative farming ways like no-till (climate-friendly regenerative practices) is losing its appeal. And vegetarianism is apparently a fad among the rich, while meat-eating has been expanding in a dramatic and unconscionable rate in both America and Europe.
Certainly, these are troubling trends as meat eating is responsible for the largest amounts of greenhouse gases coming out of agriculture. About half of the land on the planet is for growing food. And three-quarters of that land produces feed for livestock.
Some of the concerns raised by Wallace-Wells are legitimate, though he repeated agribusiness myths like that of the miraculous impact of the green revolution in Asia. In posing the problems of a farming “system” embraced by climate chaos and abuse / overuse of drinking water worldwide, he said nothing of what could reduce the looming dangers of fossil-fuel agriculture caught in the tectonic plates of billionaire control and addiction to hazardous pesticides and gigantic machines. Meat eating must be dramatically reduced as much as population must decline — dramatically. No woman should have more than one child.
World leaders and scientists must finally become adults in the room. Stop wars. They are climate fuses. Phaseout at lease 50 percent of fossil fuels by 2030. Split large estates to small organic farms, which use neither pesticides, nor synthetic or sludge fertilizers, radiation, and genetic engineering. Join ancient knowledge of growing food with the latest insights from the science of agroecology. We cannot keep saying we must double food production because we expect an additional billion or two of humans – by 2050.
The dismal picture Wallace-Wells painted becomes the background for the ideas and arguments in support of a thoroughly discredited, corrupt and violent slaughterhouse / animal farm for the climate-ridden agriculture of skyscrapers of the future. Expanding animal farms horizontally or vertically is wrong and immoral. These animal factories separate farmers and non-farmers from nature. They justify the manipulation and the dumping of the sacred Earth and her sacred animals in their shredding machine. It’s as if we cannot learn from our past errors. We keep disregarding millennial agrarian traditions and civilizations, much less science, ecology and a livable future. Xenophon, student of Socrates and general and historian, mirrored Homer in arguing that small-scale farming made the Greeks food secure and champions of freedom, democracy, science, craftsmanship, piety for the gods, and civilization.[1]
Sheep, island of Aegina. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos
Which is better, the small or the large farm?
We cannot ignore Xenophon. Small farms are civilization. Vast factory farms are alien to civilization. They are large factories of disease, mechanized inhumanity and gargantuan violence. Vast industrial farms do not produce more food per acre than tiny family farms. They give birth instead to local and global hunger.
Miguel Altieri, Professor Emeritus of agroecology at the University of California, Berkeley, is very concerned about the dominance of industrial agriculture. “This crisis,” he says, “threatens the livelihoods of over a billion hungry people, [it] is the direct result of the dominating industrial farming model, which is dangerously dependent on fossil fuels and has also become the largest source of human impact on the biosphere. Ninety-one per cent of the 1.5 billion hectares of cropland are under annual crops worldwide, mostly monocultures of wheat, rice, maize, cotton, and soybeans highly dependent on inputs of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and huge amounts of irrigation water, and which increasingly advance at the expense of forests and other natural vegetation. In this [twenty-first] century, one of the main ecological dilemmas arising from the environmental homogenization of agricultural systems is an increased vulnerability of crops to climate change. Subsidized grain monocultures convey temporary economic advantages to a few large-scale farmers, but in the long term they do not represent an ecological optimum. Rather, the drastic narrowing of cultivated plant diversity has put the world’s food production in greater peril. The social and environmental impacts of local crop shortfalls resulting from such uniformity can be considerable in an era of climatic extremes as crop losses often mean ongoing ecological degradation, poverty, hunger and even famine.”
Altieri also argues that small family farms are more productive than large industrial farms. “In overall output, the diversified [small] farm,” he says, “produces much more food, even if measured in dollars. In the USA data shows that the smallest 2-hectare farms produced $15,104 per hectare and netted about $2,902 per acre. The largest farms, averaging 15,581 hectares, yielded $249 per hectare and netted about $52 per hectare. Not only do small-medium-sized farms exhibit higher yields than conventional farmers but do so with much lower negative impact on the environment. Small farms are ‘multi-functional’– more productive, more efficient, and contribute more to economic development than do large farms. Communities surrounded by populous small farms have healthier economies than do communities surrounded by depopulated large, mechanized farms. One recent study on the impact of small farms on local economies found that small producers create 10% more permanent jobs, a 20% larger increase in retail sales, and a 37% larger increase in local per capita income. Small farmers also take better care of natural resources, including reducing soil erosion and conserving biodiversity.”
In addition, small organic family farms cool the climate. They have been sequestering greenhouse gases into the soil.
I have also documented these advantages of small farms in my works. I learned from my long experience at the US Environmental Protection Agency. Small is beautiful. Small farms in a village or near towns grow wholesome food, which becomes human and environmental health, supporting honeybees and biodiversity, wildlife, democracy and a cooler planet.
In contrast, large farms, and especially vast animal factories, produce unhealthy food contaminated for the most part by neurotoxic and carcinogenic pesticides and antibiotics. The medical and ecological costs of this food are high, harming both humans and nature. Chemicals and machines threaten the integrity of the natural world and the philosophical and political health of democratic societies. What is a growing boy and girl supposed to think of themselves and their parents seeing the elders building the infrastructure of factory death, which includes billions of animals and the periodic spread of deadly pandemics?
Weaponized farming
So, the New York Times has weaponized agriculture for probably similar reasons it favors America’s funding of the horrendous war in Ukraine and Israel’s wars against Palestine-Lebanon-Syria. Israel is having America fight its wars — in order to fulfill a fictional delusion, recreating Israel on the basis of the sayings of a seventh century BCE Biblical author. Yet astonishingly, this doesn’t bother the Times or the Biden administration.
The planetary emperor
Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University explains America’s obsession with war like a symptom of megalomania and delusion of global hegemony. He is right. I have reached a similar conclusion. Greek history is very instructive about things political and philosophical. What the Athenian rural oligarchs did in the sixth century BCE – selling into slavery Athenian peasants who could not repay their debt, still speaks to us. But, fortunately, the rest of the Athenian powerful invited Solon to solve the crisis. Solon was a former ruler and a patriot. He knew the billionaires of his age. He made slavery illegal and set the foundations of democracy. But in addition to the insights that inspire me from Greek history, I have been observing America for several decades. Regrettably, America follows closely the career of imperial Rome and England, especially in agriculture. Four of my books[2] document the rise of the large farms and their ecological and political deleterious effects in America and the world.
Sachs has spent his life watching carefully US finance policy makers and especially the dramatic domestic and global impact of the Military-Industrial Complex, the trillions of dollars the US has been spending for having or thinking and willing to believe in a total strategic dominance over the planet by encircling the Earth with more than 750 military bases. However, the costs of this imaginary planetary control are very high. The US government and the billionaires behind the throne and the “lawmakers” in Washington, DC, have done very little to stop, much less correct, the degradation of the country’s infrastructure. I rode a bullet train, not in America, but in China. There are no protections for those who avoid driving a car. I ride my bike and twice cars almost killed me. American oligarchs have also failed miserably to stop and reverse the growing inequality between the few and the many. Senator Bernie Sanders speaks of the billionaire class. Sachs said that 10 Americans have over a trillion dollars.
It’s this reality, hubris of global hegemony and its unfathomable costs, that threaten America. The construction of a sandcastle of planetary control as well as the real control and management of the US economy by a handful of billionaires explains the tilt of the New York Times in embracing vast animal farms as the new mode of agriculture. Mega factory farms, however, have never strived to feed the world. The “green revolution” was no more than a campaign to grab land from small farmers and sell pesticides and fertilizers and agricultural machines. It did not feed people who did not have the money to buy food. In fact, the number of hungry people is increasing in the world. In 2023, about 757 million people were hungry.
The billionaire owners of large factory farms, exactly like the dark age feudal landlords of England and France, use slaughterhouses to control the food people eat. They also buy most of the best land. They hide these political goals. And media and newspapers like the New York Times help them cover up those secrets.
NOTES
1. Xenophon, Oeconomicus 5.6-14, 17-20; 6.1, 12. ↑
2. (1) Fear in the Countryside (1976); (2) Harvest of Devastation (1994); (3) This Land is Their Land (2006); (4) Poison Spring (2014). ↑
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