Why Agriculture Fails at Food

Summary

The article discusses the inherent flaws and unsustainable practices of industrial agriculture, contrasting it with the benefits of organic, biodiverse farming.

Abstract

The text argues that modern agriculture, despite its technological advancements, fails to address the complex dynamics of nature and sustainability. It traces the historical shift from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural ones, highlighting the unintended consequences such as reduced biodiversity, health issues, and the centralization of power. The author criticizes the monopolistic tendencies in agriculture, from ancient times to the present day, where the focus has shifted from feeding people to amassing power and wealth. The article emphasizes that industrial agriculture, which relies on chemicals and genetic modifications, depletes topsoil and externalizes costs through environmental damage and health issues. In contrast, organic farming is presented as a viable solution that restores soil health and promotes true efficiency, human health, and environmental sustainability. The text concludes by asserting that agriculture should be viewed as a cyclical, regenerative process rather than a zero-sum game of extraction.

Opinions

Agriculture has historically contributed to a reduction in human health and biodiversity, making our food supply more vulnerable.
The practice of agriculture has been co-opted by those seeking power, leading to a focus on control, extraction, and ownership rather than the well-being of people and the planet.
Industrial agriculture is inherently flawed, as it externalizes its true costs, damages the environment, and contributes to health issues like malnutrition, obesity, and diabetes.
The author suggests that organic farming is not only sustainable but also more efficient and nutritious in the long term, contrary to the arguments of industrial farm advocates.
The article posits that the earth is running out of topsoil due to industrial agricultural practices, which is unsustainable for future food production.
The author believes that agriculture should be part of a complex cycle of bounty, where humans participate as members and beneficiaries of a regenerative system.

From Pharaoh to Big Agra, it’s always been about monopolizing the harvest

Credit: anucha sirivisansuwan/Getty Images

There’s no single answer.

Our current approaches to stewarding nature are vastly oversimplified. They may be complicated, but they’re not complex. They have many moving parts, use lots of technology, and involve many different actors, but they don’t acknowledge the interconnectedness of nature or the possibility of unseen factors. Nature is dynamic and in constant flux, so we must manage it with approaches that seek balance rather than the extraction of maximum yield.

The first hunter-gatherers to plant seeds couldn’t have foreseen an era when the practice of agriculture would threaten the viability of the planet’s topsoil. Nor should they be blamed. Agriculture, along with writing and cities, launched what we now think of as civilization. But agriculture also reduced the biodiversity of the human diet, making our food supply vulnerable to blight, pests, and vermin. Agriculture made us more sedentary and more susceptible to infection. Our skeletons got smaller and our livestock became more diseased. In many ways, hunter-gatherers enjoyed healthier, more sustainable living than the farmers who succeeded them.

As biblical legend reminds us, agriculture created the conditions for “feast and famine,” or surpluses and deficiencies, which in turn offered opportunities for wealth and control. To people looking for power, agriculture provided a ready way of centralizing necessary resources—necessitating the inventions of both text and math.

Agriculture augured a new approach to the world: instead of gathering what the earth provides, farmers break the ground and grow what they want. Agriculture turns harvest from a gift of nature to an achievement of people. We have understood this irony for millennia. In biblical legend, Cain’s “sacrifice” of the grain he grew and harvested was not accepted by God. Abel, a shepherd, humbly acknowledged that he was sacrificing an animal he did not create. Cain’s cultivated crop, on the other hand, was rejected as hubris, for only God can create things.

But even with those mythical lessons in hand, we were unable to shake off agriculture’s bias for monopoly. By the Middle Ages, when the last of Europe’s common lands were enclosed by chartered monopolies, agriculture’s worst liabilities were amplified. A society built on privatized farming became about control, extraction, and ownership, even at the expense of true efficiency, human health, and environmental sustainability.

Agriculture became the means to an end that had nothing to do with feeding people and everything to do with amassing power. Industrialized cotton farming in the American colonies became justification for the extremely lucrative slave trade. Industrialized agriculture today primarily serves the shareholders of chemical, pesticide, and bioengineering companies. Industrial farm advocates argue that organic practices don’t scale because they are too intensive, but this is only true for the first year or two, while the soil destroyed by decades of chemical abuse is restored to health. Organic, biodiverse farming is not a luxury for the wealthy, but a path to survival for those who are currently starving in sub-Saharan Africa. We know now, beyond any doubt, that industrial agriculture gets less food out of the ground, with fewer nutrients, less efficiently, more expensively, and with greater environmental devastation than small and organic farming. This is no longer a debate.

Industrial agriculture succeeds by externalizing its true costs to others. It spawns high-cost diseases, both directly through contaminated food and livestock, and indirectly in the form of malnutrition, obesity, and diabetes. The fast food and corporate grocery industries, meanwhile, externalize the cost of transport to the public road system, and subjugation of supplier nations to the military — all while receiving anticompetitive subsidies from the government. Studies by the United Nations and the World Bank have concluded that genetic engineering has no positive role in meeting the world’s food needs.

The problem with relying entirely on industrial approaches to the land, or anything, is that they oversimplify complex systems. They ignore the circulatory, regenerative properties of living organisms and communities, and treat everything in linear terms: inputs and outputs.

They might maximize one season’s yield of crop, but at the expense of the soil matrix, nutrient levels, crop health, and future harvest yield. This then necessitates the use of more chemicals and genetic modifications, and the cycle continues.

By current estimates, the earth will run out of topsoil (the layer of earth in which plants can grow) within sixty years. That’s great for markets based on scarcity, but terrible for a planet of humans who need to eat.

Agriculture is not just a zero-sum game of extracting value from the earth and monopolizing it. It means participating as both members and beneficiaries of a complex cycle of bounty.

This was section 74 of the new book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, which is being serialized weekly on Medium. Read the previous section here and the following section here.