6 ms·

Industrialisation of farming is a good thing more than a bad thing. You don't want the cost of food to go up, or the supply to go down. You kind of want large s

by cm2187 6y ago

Industrialisation of farming is a good thing more than a bad thing. You don't want the cost of food to go up, or the supply to go down. You kind of want large scale industrial farming. It's like complaining that large factories are taking over small artisans.

mastazi 6y ago
I would like to know if that 70% of farmlands also correspond to 70% (or more) of the output. I am skeptical that is the case - but I might be wrong... I would like to see the output figures in any case.
mellavora 6y ago
Maybe true in glorious future where the industrialized farm can support increased biodiversity. Currently, however, this promotes large-scale monoculture. Which is inherently harmful on almost every level, including the ability to keep the cost of food down and and the supply up. Food diversity is much much less than it was 100 years ago. Nutritional content of food is down significant levels from 30 years ago.
- xenocratus 6y ago
  > Nutritional content of food is down significant levels from 30 years ago. Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an... > Currently, however, this promotes large-scale monoculture. This can be good or bad, depending on what is produced in a large scale, I guess(?) Especially at this point in time we should focus on foods that don't mess with the environment/don't fuel climate change.
- nemo44x 6y ago
  It’s also dangerous from a national security point of view. Consolidating farming and relying on monocultures certainly has economic benefits but it also creates an increasingly fragile system. A new parasite or disease could easily destroy enough of a years harvest (or more) and now the nation has a food shortage. Because so much of our food is derived from or reliant on the monoculture it would have cascading effects. It would be a disaster on many levels. Of course this is preventable but who has the courage to stand up for something that could happen when the political capital is won dealing with the cleanup. Food diversity isn’t just a “feels good” thing or an “ought to be” thing - it’s very much important in creating a resilient food supply which in my opinion is a matter of national security.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >Consolidating farming and relying on monocultures certainly has economic benefits but it also creates an increasingly fragile system. But everything you're describing is with monocultures, not with consolidated farming. If a particular crop breed is the most efficient I don't see why a diverse group of farmers wouldn't all go with that.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >Currently, however, this promotes large-scale monoculture. Standardization is a hallmark of efficiency and humanity has lots of mouths to feed. I'm not sure you can really do it any other way.
  - danielheath 6y ago
    I don't think we could have gotten here any other way, and I'm very glad to be able to eat every day - but if we keep rapidly converting good land into bad, we're going to end up worse off than we were before Haber & Bosch gave us an alternative to famine.
  - stelonix 6y ago
    Yes, we can[0]. For agroforests to work though, you need to change the mindset from demanding every fruit everytime of the year to something more in line with how crop cycles work. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agroforestry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agroforestry
- tkdubs 6y ago
  Agreed. I this trend has made us all a lot more wealthy (and obese) as more people spend less time farming their day away.
- iguy 6y ago
  > Maybe true in glorious future where the industrialized farm can support increased biodiversity While it certainly reduces on-farm biodiversity, higher yields also let us leave more land completely un-farmed. For example I think maybe 10% of France has returned to forest in the last 40 years, and more since 1900, but I can't seem to find a great link...
  - ip26 6y ago
    The Jevons Paradox would like a word. E.g., we spend 14 million acres on non-food corn ethanol, and 80+ million acres of corn is fed to livestock at terrible feed conversion ratios. We'd get the same amount of net calories on our plates for 8 million acres if we ate the corn.
    - iguy 6y ago
      The area farmed in the US has declined slowly since the 1950s, maybe down 20%? Am eyeballing graphs as google is failing me: https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/58267/farms_fig01_450px.png?v=7683.2 https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/58267/farms_fig01_45... It would decline faster if we didn't subsidize stupid stuff like corn ethanol, for sure. Edit, a maybe a better graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-land-area-used-for-agriculture?tab=chart&country=CAN~FRA~DEU~POL~GBR~USA~JPN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-land-area-used-f...
      - ip26 6y ago
        I don't know about France, but I understand in the US that decline has mostly been the result of residential development buying out farmland. For just one small but hot-button current example, see Napa. For a historical example, see Silicon Valley, which was once orchards.
        iguy 6y ago
        Urban land is 69 M acres, cropland 391 (according to some quick googling) and pasture 654. So urban is 17% of cropland, or 7% of all farmland. I'm surprised it's that high to be honest, compared to plane-window impressions. Surely a majority of urban area is post-1950, how much is former crop/ranch/forest I'd struggle to guess. Would be interesting to have better numbers, and over time.
- creato 6y ago
  > Currently, however, this promotes large-scale monoculture. Which is inherently harmful on almost every level, including the ability to keep the cost of food down and and the supply up. It's hard to reconcile this point with the strong trends over the last century of more monoculture, more production, and much lower prices.
  - CameronNemo 6y ago
    It is not just monoculture that has created this increase in production. It is also increased inputs like fertilizer and pesticides. At a certain point the pesticides stop being effective and the ground needs so much fertilizer it increases prices. This happens on hundred year time scales, so you can't just look at a small portion of ecological history to reach conclusions. You are welcome to think what you want, but everything I have read about agricultural ecology suggests that nature is stronger than our science. Pests evolve (perhaps slowly, but faster than the science we stole from nature). Naturally enriched soil is more fertile.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  I'm willing to bet that biodiversity in large farms and in small farms is relatively similar. Sure, if we returned to the way the American Indigenous farmed, co-planting maize, beans and squash that'd be awesome for biodiversity. But that requires hand harvesting -- you can't even use a sickle or a horse to help, let alone any type of machinery. Small farmers and big farmers both use monocultures.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - iguy 6y ago
    > let alone any type of machinery. Any 20th C machine. If we do get good enough at robotics that we can switch from herbicides to weeding by AI, that might allow all sorts of interesting things.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  That nutritional argument seems very speculative. I don't know of any 70-year-old food that could be tested side-by-side with 'modern' food. And 'nutritional content' is certainly up per dollar, per man-hour. And its more available with modern refrigeration and transportation. It seems overwhelmingly true that for most people, their food has improved drastically over 70 years.
  - gtsop 6y ago
    > I don't know of any 70-year-old food that could be tested side-by-side with 'modern' food. That's a false base for your argument. You can find traditionally grown vegs from villages today. Then you can grab a tomato from your super-cheap super market and test those two side by side. The traditionaly grown veg isn't old per say, but it is surely way closer to the old qualities. So if you find a difference between those two products you must surely conclude there is a difference between old - modern crops.
    - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      So that just leaves soil, tillage, fertilizer, process. Which were pretty primitive 70 years ago.
  - akiselev 6y ago
    What does 70 year old food have to do with it? Just go to any seed store or seed bank and you will find hundreds if not thousands (or tens of thousands) of varieties of everyday fruits and vegetables that you will not be able to find on store shelves. It's not because they're too old, it's because they're not economically viable at industrial scale. Their aesthetics are unappealing to consumers, they spoil too fast off the vine, they bruise too easily in transport, their shapes and textures are harder to machines to work with, and so on. The age of the variety is a red herring, it's the industrialization of farming that's important. Our access to food has improved significantly, but anyone with a small garden and some seeds from an online shop knows that the "quality" of everything from modern tomatoes to berries is suspect.
    - 6y ago
ashleshbiradar 6y ago
it depends on the context, concentration of land in the hands of few promotes income inequality. It maybe a good thing for consumers, but will be a bad thing for small - medium farmers who wouldn't be able to sustain their income source.
Amezarak 6y ago
> You don't want the cost of food to go up, or the supply to go down. Our economic and technological systems generally pursue what is approximately analogous to a greedy algorithm. This effect worsens as any sector becomes centralized. A small pool of large farmers is in the long run more likely to get stuck at suboptimal efficiencies than a large pool of small farmers. But more concerning than that is continually optimizing any system for efficiency makes it more fragile. Some number of small farmers are more likely to survive system shocks than a large farmers. A system dominated by a few highly efficient large farmers is a system in extreme danger from systemic shocks and black swan events. That is, catastrophic drops in the food supply are much more likely with a few large farmers, not many small farmers. If industrial production of smartphones collapses, who cares. Life will go on. We can forego many industries, if we really have to, so as long as we take care of the externalities (which we aren't doing with smartphones, but whatever), no big deal if they're oversized and over-optimized. This is not the case with food. People have to eat.
dalbasal 6y ago
I think that frame was correct for a long time, but things that are generally true in one generation can be false in another. Small, undercapitalized, under-industrialized farms were an issue for a long time... in some/many times and places this was the bottleneck on the green revolution. That doesn't (necessarily) mean it's the case here. IE, the economies of scale when going from a $100k farm to a $10m may not apply to a move from $10m to $1bn. I think this is ultimately the question: Are there real economies of scale edriving this. If/where the current transition is being driven by finance, it's a different kettle of fish. IE, If it's just cheaper/easier to finance megafarms... which I think is the case, it's not real economies of scale. It's securitisation. As the article mentions, extreme scale and centralization has some serious side effects. Industrial farming is the story of several centuries. It has major triumphs, like the feeding an extraordinary human population. It also has major dark spots. Slavery, and centuries of moral failures of the colonial "plantation" model. But it also caused several famines and other such collapses. For an old analogy from the early days... Agribusiness that the British East India Company could profit from was often at odds with producing food. Douglas Adams has a fantastic essay (section) about Dutch agricultural industrialization reforms in Bali. If nothing else, there's a major "eggs in one basket" problem... an even bigger problem when it comes to ecosystems and biology than elsewhere.
whalesalad 6y ago
Uncapped and unbounded it’s a bad thing. The measuring posts are moving every day, they’re constantly getting bigger. Small farms are bought out by bigger farms. You sure you want a handful of multinational conglomerates growing all of our food?
- kanox 6y ago
  Yes. Is there a good reason for agriculture to be less concentrated than industrial sectors, for example automotive?
  - fbelzile 6y ago
    Increased innovation created through more competition (eg: vertical farming). Also, all the issues associated with mono-cultures. I don't think comparing agribusiness to other industries is going to help. Yes, factory farming is more efficient, which makes it cheaper. But the price we pay doesn't necessarily reflect the actual costs to our health and the environment.
    - kevindong 6y ago
      Having massive farms does not guarantee a lack of competition though. Lack of competition requires a very, very small handful of corporations to own most of the farmland producing a particular crop. Additionally, large farms seemingly are more well suited for polyculture (i.e. small farms are more predisposed to do monoculture farming given their smaller scale).
fotdutah 6y ago
It seems an over-simplification to say that it's always good for the cost of food to go down, or the supply to go up. In the West, it looks like much of the rewards of intensification goes towards making people obese. And in societies where more people don't have enough to eat, it still isn't clear whether more intensive farming resolves that. The move to cash crops seems to lead to less local food security for example. And perhaps landless people moving to the city ultimately creates a higher demand for food than can be matched by the output of farming modernization?
- onecommentman 6y ago
  To challenge the assumption that more food supply is always good, you need to address the issue of famine. A recent narrative https://fic.tufts.edu/publication-item/somalian-famine-narratives/ https://fic.tufts.edu/publication-item/somalian-famine-narra... As Gandhi said at a religious conference with global elites, it’s fine to be pontificating with well-fed faces, but to the majority of Indians, God looks like a loaf of bread. India is at the forefront of addressing the complexities of modernization. They also have the greatest need to do so, with 200M malnourished in Southern Asia. http://www.fao.org/3/ca9692en/online/ca9692en.html#chapter-1_1 http://www.fao.org/3/ca9692en/online/ca9692en.html#chapter-1... Some articles on pros and cons of modernization: https://www.futurefarming.com/Smart-farmers/Articles/2020/4/Indian-agriculture-on-modernisation-track-since-2014-563584E/ https://www.futurefarming.com/Smart-farmers/Articles/2020/4/... https://www.dw.com/en/why-indian-farmers-are-angry-over-agricultural-reforms/a-55137691 https://www.dw.com/en/why-indian-farmers-are-angry-over-agri... https://www.gisreportsonline.com/as-indian-agriculture-expands-farmers-and-reform-prospects-suffer,economy,2454.html https://www.gisreportsonline.com/as-indian-agriculture-expan...
ph4 6y ago
This is a gross over-simplification of an incredibly complex problem. For those interested in an analysis that goes beyond 140-character insights, please read A Small Farm Future by Chris Smaje. And for those uninterested, be cautious of these "common sense" hot takes.
gdubs 6y ago
The challenge is when every problem becomes a hammer in search of a nail — corn and soy being the hammer in industrial farming. Industrial agriculture is phenomenal, and a miracle of the 20th century. But at the same time, the negative externalities (to borrow a fifty cent phrase) have basically caught up with us. Monocultures are environmentally costly, and land use change is a major driver of climate change. Personally I’d love to see a patchwork of local, regional farms supplementing an ever larger share of the food supply. There’s appetite for this type of produce — wealthy suburbanites are more and more willing to spend extra for “organic”, as flawed as that term may be.

by cm2187 6y ago

mastazi 6y ago

I would like to know if that 70% of farmlands also correspond to 70% (or more) of the output. I am skeptical that is the case - but I might be wrong... I would like to see the output figures in any case.

mellavora 6y ago

Maybe true in glorious future where the industrialized farm can support increased biodiversity. Currently, however, this promotes large-scale monoculture. Which is inherently harmful on almost every level, including the ability to keep the cost of food down and and the supply up. Food diversity is much much less than it was 100 years ago. Nutritional content of food is down significant levels from 30 years ago.

xenocratus 6y ago
> Nutritional content of food is down significant levels from 30 years ago. Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an... > Currently, however, this promotes large-scale monoculture. This can be good or bad, depending on what is produced in a large scale, I guess(?) Especially at this point in time we should focus on foods that don't mess with the environment/don't fuel climate change.
nemo44x 6y ago
It’s also dangerous from a national security point of view. Consolidating farming and relying on monocultures certainly has economic benefits but it also creates an increasingly fragile system. A new parasite or disease could easily destroy enough of a years harvest (or more) and now the nation has a food shortage. Because so much of our food is derived from or reliant on the monoculture it would have cascading effects. It would be a disaster on many levels. Of course this is preventable but who has the courage to stand up for something that could happen when the political capital is won dealing with the cleanup. Food diversity isn’t just a “feels good” thing or an “ought to be” thing - it’s very much important in creating a resilient food supply which in my opinion is a matter of national security.
- gruez 6y ago
  >Consolidating farming and relying on monocultures certainly has economic benefits but it also creates an increasingly fragile system. But everything you're describing is with monocultures, not with consolidated farming. If a particular crop breed is the most efficient I don't see why a diverse group of farmers wouldn't all go with that.
macspoofing 6y ago
>Currently, however, this promotes large-scale monoculture. Standardization is a hallmark of efficiency and humanity has lots of mouths to feed. I'm not sure you can really do it any other way.
- danielheath 6y ago
  I don't think we could have gotten here any other way, and I'm very glad to be able to eat every day - but if we keep rapidly converting good land into bad, we're going to end up worse off than we were before Haber & Bosch gave us an alternative to famine.
- stelonix 6y ago
  Yes, we can[0]. For agroforests to work though, you need to change the mindset from demanding every fruit everytime of the year to something more in line with how crop cycles work. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agroforestry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agroforestry
tkdubs 6y ago
Agreed. I this trend has made us all a lot more wealthy (and obese) as more people spend less time farming their day away.
iguy 6y ago
> Maybe true in glorious future where the industrialized farm can support increased biodiversity While it certainly reduces on-farm biodiversity, higher yields also let us leave more land completely un-farmed. For example I think maybe 10% of France has returned to forest in the last 40 years, and more since 1900, but I can't seem to find a great link...
- ip26 6y ago
  The Jevons Paradox would like a word. E.g., we spend 14 million acres on non-food corn ethanol, and 80+ million acres of corn is fed to livestock at terrible feed conversion ratios. We'd get the same amount of net calories on our plates for 8 million acres if we ate the corn.
  - iguy 6y ago
    The area farmed in the US has declined slowly since the 1950s, maybe down 20%? Am eyeballing graphs as google is failing me: https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/58267/farms_fig01_450px.png?v=7683.2 https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/58267/farms_fig01_45... It would decline faster if we didn't subsidize stupid stuff like corn ethanol, for sure. Edit, a maybe a better graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-land-area-used-for-agriculture?tab=chart&country=CAN~FRA~DEU~POL~GBR~USA~JPN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-land-area-used-f...
    - ip26 6y ago
      I don't know about France, but I understand in the US that decline has mostly been the result of residential development buying out farmland. For just one small but hot-button current example, see Napa. For a historical example, see Silicon Valley, which was once orchards.
      - iguy 6y ago
        Urban land is 69 M acres, cropland 391 (according to some quick googling) and pasture 654. So urban is 17% of cropland, or 7% of all farmland. I'm surprised it's that high to be honest, compared to plane-window impressions. Surely a majority of urban area is post-1950, how much is former crop/ranch/forest I'd struggle to guess. Would be interesting to have better numbers, and over time.
creato 6y ago
> Currently, however, this promotes large-scale monoculture. Which is inherently harmful on almost every level, including the ability to keep the cost of food down and and the supply up. It's hard to reconcile this point with the strong trends over the last century of more monoculture, more production, and much lower prices.
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  It is not just monoculture that has created this increase in production. It is also increased inputs like fertilizer and pesticides. At a certain point the pesticides stop being effective and the ground needs so much fertilizer it increases prices. This happens on hundred year time scales, so you can't just look at a small portion of ecological history to reach conclusions. You are welcome to think what you want, but everything I have read about agricultural ecology suggests that nature is stronger than our science. Pests evolve (perhaps slowly, but faster than the science we stole from nature). Naturally enriched soil is more fertile.
bryanlarsen 6y ago
I'm willing to bet that biodiversity in large farms and in small farms is relatively similar. Sure, if we returned to the way the American Indigenous farmed, co-planting maize, beans and squash that'd be awesome for biodiversity. But that requires hand harvesting -- you can't even use a sickle or a horse to help, let alone any type of machinery. Small farmers and big farmers both use monocultures.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- iguy 6y ago
  > let alone any type of machinery. Any 20th C machine. If we do get good enough at robotics that we can switch from herbicides to weeding by AI, that might allow all sorts of interesting things.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
That nutritional argument seems very speculative. I don't know of any 70-year-old food that could be tested side-by-side with 'modern' food. And 'nutritional content' is certainly up per dollar, per man-hour. And its more available with modern refrigeration and transportation. It seems overwhelmingly true that for most people, their food has improved drastically over 70 years.
- gtsop 6y ago
  > I don't know of any 70-year-old food that could be tested side-by-side with 'modern' food. That's a false base for your argument. You can find traditionally grown vegs from villages today. Then you can grab a tomato from your super-cheap super market and test those two side by side. The traditionaly grown veg isn't old per say, but it is surely way closer to the old qualities. So if you find a difference between those two products you must surely conclude there is a difference between old - modern crops.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    So that just leaves soil, tillage, fertilizer, process. Which were pretty primitive 70 years ago.
- akiselev 6y ago
  What does 70 year old food have to do with it? Just go to any seed store or seed bank and you will find hundreds if not thousands (or tens of thousands) of varieties of everyday fruits and vegetables that you will not be able to find on store shelves. It's not because they're too old, it's because they're not economically viable at industrial scale. Their aesthetics are unappealing to consumers, they spoil too fast off the vine, they bruise too easily in transport, their shapes and textures are harder to machines to work with, and so on. The age of the variety is a red herring, it's the industrialization of farming that's important. Our access to food has improved significantly, but anyone with a small garden and some seeds from an online shop knows that the "quality" of everything from modern tomatoes to berries is suspect.
  - 6y ago

ashleshbiradar 6y ago

it depends on the context, concentration of land in the hands of few promotes income inequality. It maybe a good thing for consumers, but will be a bad thing for small - medium farmers who wouldn't be able to sustain their income source.

Amezarak 6y ago

> You don't want the cost of food to go up, or the supply to go down. Our economic and technological systems generally pursue what is approximately analogous to a greedy algorithm. This effect worsens as any sector becomes centralized. A small pool of large farmers is in the long run more likely to get stuck at suboptimal efficiencies than a large pool of small farmers. But more concerning than that is continually optimizing any system for efficiency makes it more fragile. Some number of small farmers are more likely to survive system shocks than a large farmers. A system dominated by a few highly efficient large farmers is a system in extreme danger from systemic shocks and black swan events. That is, catastrophic drops in the food supply are much more likely with a few large farmers, not many small farmers. If industrial production of smartphones collapses, who cares. Life will go on. We can forego many industries, if we really have to, so as long as we take care of the externalities (which we aren't doing with smartphones, but whatever), no big deal if they're oversized and over-optimized. This is not the case with food. People have to eat.

dalbasal 6y ago

I think that frame was correct for a long time, but things that are generally true in one generation can be false in another. Small, undercapitalized, under-industrialized farms were an issue for a long time... in some/many times and places this was the bottleneck on the green revolution. That doesn't (necessarily) mean it's the case here. IE, the economies of scale when going from a $100k farm to a $10m may not apply to a move from $10m to $1bn. I think this is ultimately the question: Are there real economies of scale edriving this. If/where the current transition is being driven by finance, it's a different kettle of fish. IE, If it's just cheaper/easier to finance megafarms... which I think is the case, it's not real economies of scale. It's securitisation. As the article mentions, extreme scale and centralization has some serious side effects. Industrial farming is the story of several centuries. It has major triumphs, like the feeding an extraordinary human population. It also has major dark spots. Slavery, and centuries of moral failures of the colonial "plantation" model. But it also caused several famines and other such collapses. For an old analogy from the early days... Agribusiness that the British East India Company could profit from was often at odds with producing food. Douglas Adams has a fantastic essay (section) about Dutch agricultural industrialization reforms in Bali. If nothing else, there's a major "eggs in one basket" problem... an even bigger problem when it comes to ecosystems and biology than elsewhere.

whalesalad 6y ago

Uncapped and unbounded it’s a bad thing. The measuring posts are moving every day, they’re constantly getting bigger. Small farms are bought out by bigger farms. You sure you want a handful of multinational conglomerates growing all of our food?

kanox 6y ago
Yes. Is there a good reason for agriculture to be less concentrated than industrial sectors, for example automotive?
- fbelzile 6y ago
  Increased innovation created through more competition (eg: vertical farming). Also, all the issues associated with mono-cultures. I don't think comparing agribusiness to other industries is going to help. Yes, factory farming is more efficient, which makes it cheaper. But the price we pay doesn't necessarily reflect the actual costs to our health and the environment.
  - kevindong 6y ago
    Having massive farms does not guarantee a lack of competition though. Lack of competition requires a very, very small handful of corporations to own most of the farmland producing a particular crop. Additionally, large farms seemingly are more well suited for polyculture (i.e. small farms are more predisposed to do monoculture farming given their smaller scale).

fotdutah 6y ago

It seems an over-simplification to say that it's always good for the cost of food to go down, or the supply to go up. In the West, it looks like much of the rewards of intensification goes towards making people obese. And in societies where more people don't have enough to eat, it still isn't clear whether more intensive farming resolves that. The move to cash crops seems to lead to less local food security for example. And perhaps landless people moving to the city ultimately creates a higher demand for food than can be matched by the output of farming modernization?

onecommentman 6y ago
To challenge the assumption that more food supply is always good, you need to address the issue of famine. A recent narrative https://fic.tufts.edu/publication-item/somalian-famine-narratives/ https://fic.tufts.edu/publication-item/somalian-famine-narra... As Gandhi said at a religious conference with global elites, it’s fine to be pontificating with well-fed faces, but to the majority of Indians, God looks like a loaf of bread. India is at the forefront of addressing the complexities of modernization. They also have the greatest need to do so, with 200M malnourished in Southern Asia. http://www.fao.org/3/ca9692en/online/ca9692en.html#chapter-1_1 http://www.fao.org/3/ca9692en/online/ca9692en.html#chapter-1... Some articles on pros and cons of modernization: https://www.futurefarming.com/Smart-farmers/Articles/2020/4/Indian-agriculture-on-modernisation-track-since-2014-563584E/ https://www.futurefarming.com/Smart-farmers/Articles/2020/4/... https://www.dw.com/en/why-indian-farmers-are-angry-over-agricultural-reforms/a-55137691 https://www.dw.com/en/why-indian-farmers-are-angry-over-agri... https://www.gisreportsonline.com/as-indian-agriculture-expands-farmers-and-reform-prospects-suffer,economy,2454.html https://www.gisreportsonline.com/as-indian-agriculture-expan...

ph4 6y ago

This is a gross over-simplification of an incredibly complex problem. For those interested in an analysis that goes beyond 140-character insights, please read A Small Farm Future by Chris Smaje. And for those uninterested, be cautious of these "common sense" hot takes.

gdubs 6y ago

The challenge is when every problem becomes a hammer in search of a nail — corn and soy being the hammer in industrial farming. Industrial agriculture is phenomenal, and a miracle of the 20th century. But at the same time, the negative externalities (to borrow a fifty cent phrase) have basically caught up with us. Monocultures are environmentally costly, and land use change is a major driver of climate change. Personally I’d love to see a patchwork of local, regional farms supplementing an ever larger share of the food supply. There’s appetite for this type of produce — wealthy suburbanites are more and more willing to spend extra for “organic”, as flawed as that term may be.