“The industrialized agricultural system of the 20th century was one of the greatest mistakes of mankind. Only the most misguided of us would point to it as a triumph of anything other than hubris.” H Farmer
Llpoh should have picked a better example of the success of industrialization than agriculture. If eating was simply a matter of producing the highest number of calories from a specific plot of land with the lowest investment of labor regardless of the amount of energy expended to do so, he’d be right. The problem with our current system of agriculture should be obvious to anyone with two eyeballs and heartbeat, but for some reason only the smallest minority of people are able to see the holistic panorama of industrialized agriculture and it’s downstream effects on the population.
Let’s examine some of the issues in greater detail before we decide what makes something successful as opposed to efficient.
Food is more than calories. I’m not a nutritionist or an MD, but I do know that calories are simply a mechanism for delivering energy to an organism, not a measure of nutritive value. If a toddler needed 500 calories a day and was offered a choice between a 500 calorie soft drink or an equal amount of vegetables, meat and fruit, only a sadist would feed the child the soft drink as a steady diet based on cost alone. `A single handful of fresh greens picked right out of the garden brings greater value to the life of a human being than a 2 liter Mountain Dew with ten times the calories.
Humans need better nutrition to live healthier and longer lives. Today we have calories produced by industrialized agriculture with little nutritive value that leave people to live miserable lives filled with preventable illnesses and multiple disabilities directly related to poor diet. The associated costs to re-mediate these problems using pharmaceuticals and overtaxing the healthcare system are never factored in, nor is the cost of lost labor directly related to these failings.
Loss of knowledge. When we began as homesteaders we possessed very limited knowledge regarding the production of food. Most of the lessons learned took years because food production is cyclical in nature and requires years of experience to build any type of knowledge base. These factors include seasonality, hybridization, mortality, fertility, water cycles, morbidity, invasive pests, etc. What America once possessed in the untold millions was generational knowledge of individuals concerning what to plant and when, what breeds proved best for which environments, maximizing the benefits of waste cycles, minimizing erosion and soil loss, water quality and drought prevention- the list is longer than my own life would ever be able to uncover in the time I have left to learn and I am dedicated to the task in a way the vast majority living would ever do.
The problem isn’t that there are too few people left with this knowledge, but that EVERY ONE requires it. I haven’t met anyone yet who doesn’t eat- excluding a couple of breathatarians who strike me as frauds. The whole of the population is entirely dependent on a very, very small minority to satisfy ALL of their nutritive requirements. That is no less of a threat to the future of our civilization than an equally small minority controlling the vast majority of financial resources needed by the rest of the population. For some reason we all seem to count on the benevolence of the food producers to continue turning it out for a fraction of its true value so everyone can benefit.
What happens if, say form example, the elite banker class winds up in control of the last means of agricultural production and no one is left with any land/knowledge or resources to counter that kind of monopolism? Will they continue to sell healthy high end heirloom produce and heritage meats to the hoi polloi or hoard it to themselves and allow us high fructose corn syrup and a low end form of soylent green to keep the masses from starvation at extortionist prices? The near elimination of the knowledge required to maintain sustainable farming practices isn’t something that can be reversed in time to prevent a holomodor on a scale unimaginable to even the most doomy doomers out there.
Soil. I wish I could begin to explain the importance of soil to life. Soil is not an inert anchor for roots, it is one of the most complex ecosystems on Earth. It is the final transition between decay and growth and the damage that industrial agriculture has done to the soils- and by extension the watersheds- is nothing less than catastrophic. That we still produce crops is a testament to the historic health and fertility of North America rather than the efficacy of the industrial model. The volume of soils lost due to erosion, the poisons released into the waters and atmosphere and remaining in the soils as result of pesticides and herbicides, the diseases and disorders, the cancers and obesity, the spent fossil fuels that will never be replaced in order to produce “cheap” food is incalculable.
Soils are created at a rate of inches per millennium and we have exhausted these in time spans of fifty years or less. Once gone they are not replaced for any amount of money or any human effort. The use of NPK since the end of WWII as a means of goosing production worked fine as long as there was soil to use up and unlimited amounts of cheap oil to create these additives. Once the soil is done, once the cost of fossil fuels exceeds the limits of profitably of pulling it out of the ground the era of cheap food is over, forever. The cost of high priced food will only be available for those who can afford it. Our advanced systems of industrialization applied to a natural system was not only short sighted, it was nothing short of an inevitable ELE.
The industrialized agricultural system of the 20th century was one of the greatest mistakes of mankind. Only the most misguided of us would point to it as a triumph of anything other than hubris. The collapse of the debt based economies of the world will be like a summer cold compared to the collapse of the oil based industrial agriculture system, the pancreatic cancer of our species.