Farms Need People, Not Machines

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/10/farms-need-people-not-machines/246944/

Machines have their place on farms and ranches. Researchers have calculated how the tractor's plowing, planting, and harvesting has saved tens of millions of people and draft animals from backbreaking toil. And personal experience has taught me the indispensability of a tractor for lifting and moving heavy objects on a ranch. But broadly adopting an industrial model in agriculture -- especially for raising animals - has been disastrous.

In the Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry builds perhaps the most compelling case that technology has been misapplied to agriculture. Industrialization, he argues, is the primary cause of our depopulated farms and rural towns. In 1790, 90 percent of our people were engaged in agriculture. Today, technology and decades of federal policy that deliberately reduced agricultural jobs have shrunk the farm community to less than 1 percent of our population, and our rural population to 17 percent. Our physical separation from natural settings may well be exacerbating an alienation from nature fraught with trouble for our collective health and psyche.

Department of Agriculture research in the 1930s and '40s documented the importance of farming practices based on human skill and hand work - crop diversification and rotations, integration of animals, and using grass to guard against erosion, manage pests, and maintain soil fertility. But, as Berry notes, at mid-century the American approach to producing food veered sharply away from farming founded on human stewardship, natural cycling, and recycling. It abandoned grass and embraced chemicals and machines.

As World War II munitions plants were converted to manufacturing agricultural chemicals, U.S. use of manmade fertilizers quickly doubled. Government policy subsidized and encouraged maximum grain output, while discouraging permanent pastures, crop rotations and diversity, and grass buffers.

[PETRUS]

1. K&R nt

[jwirr]

2. And that is how we ended up so dependent on Monsanto and other

farm manufacturers and big farmers many miles away instead of having the independence that was available to so many of us back then. Those small farms grew food to sell but most of all they provided food, shelter, work, and many other things we needed in the local area where we had control of it. Yes, sometimes it was backbreaking work but it was also fulfilling, personally fulfilling. One thing that most people do not realize is that we had a lot of time as compared to today when it comes to leisure. As you can see I miss those days of freedom.

[handmade34]

3. nothing

...and I mean nothing, is as satisfying to me as a hard day's work on a farm. Damn, I miss it so much!

[bhikkhu]

4. Higher food prices are the trade off, however

Mechanization has lowered the costs of agriculture, which has the benefits you see above.

I agree with the article - we do need more people involved in farming. More people has many benefits, and is more or less inevitable sooner or later; but its good to keep in mind that there is a price to pay.