Glenn's blog

I am not a farmer. I did grow up in the country and ate a whole lot of food grown on our own land. I have a small garden now, but the majority of the food I eat is grown by someone else.

Photo by thebittenword.com via flickr

I have also never studied agriculture, so this post is a whole lot of conjecture. It would be interesting to know if any of my ideas are valid or just completely out there.

I of course would like to see an end to the use of animals in agriculture. By this I mean all agriculture. We already know that small scale farms can function extremely well using no animal by-products as fertilizers of soil amendments. If you have any doubts about this check out the Veganic Agriculture Network. The Heugonaut Street Farm in upstate New York has been farming veganically for years, and doing well at it.

But can a system like this work on a large scale?

From reading and listening to farmers I sense a strange tension in their worldview. Farmers seem to want to be seen as tillers of the soil, but they also want to use the technology of GMO crops and pesticides. They use the phrase "modern family farm" but and invoke an idyllic vision of green hills and grazing cattle, but in reality the farms are all closed barns and computers. Animals are fed, watered, hatched, and killed by machines. Crops are partially planted and monitored by machines, but for some reason they hold on to the past, holding archaic country fairs that praise growing plants by hand, knowledge of nature learned from hard work rather than books at a university.

For some reason this seems to me like it's a halfway adoption of technology that's really undermining any potential for real effectiveness. Instead of this haphazard use of technology, why not re-evaluate the whole system?

What if leaving agriculture in the hands of farmers isn't the best and most efficient means of feeding the world? Current systems of agriculture are inefficient and wasteful. I don't know if this is necessarily bad - since natural processes are very often inefficient and wasteful. But, if we take out this emotional attachment to farming, could we develop a system that has more potential for feeding more people and doing much less harm to the planet and its inhabitants?

One system that is being proposed is vertical farming. This is by no means a perfect system either, since there would be large energy costs with artificial lighting and heating. More information about the pros and cons of vertical farming can be found on the Wikipedia page.

Of course, reducing or completely eliminating animal agriculture would free up huge amounts of farmland to be used for food for humans instead of the extreme wastefulness of growing crops to feed animals which we then eat, at a huge net loss of energy and nutrients.

Unless we reduce the amount of land that we are using to grow crops, we're going to continue destroying wildlife habitat, pushing more species to extinction.

Would GMO crops increase productivity so that less land could be used to grow more crops? There's a whole lot of mixed information on this, but mostly the companies who produce these crops say yes, while some scientists have found that GMO crops may actually decrease yields while increasing the amount of pesticides required. A nasty side-effect of this increased pesticide use may be pesticide-resistance in insects and weeds, which would require ever stronger pesticides and herbicides. More on GMO crops can be found onthe Genetically modified foods page.

This is kind of a half-formulated bunch of thoughts about this subject, but maybe it will be part of the conversation that I think we really need to have about how we are going to feed all of the people on this planet fairly, without destroying it for future generations. I'm sure it can be done, if we really think seriously about it. I'm sure that we can reduce ecological damage, stop the exploitation of animals, and provide for the growing population of humans – I think we might be smart enough.