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Summary: American farming is highly productive and highly unsustainable. It consumes large amounts of resources that can't be sustained. It dumps large amoun

Summary: American farming is highly productive and highly unsustainable. It consumes large amounts of resources that can't be sustained. It dumps large amount of chemical and animal waste into the environment in a manner that can't be sustained. Modern farming is kinda like plastics --- everybody wants cheap stuff but it's only cheap if you ignore the long term costs --- like when it starts polluting human breast milk and gets fed to your babies. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/07/microplastics-human-breast-milk-first-time https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/07/micropla...

voakbasda 3y ago
These statements are only true about big farms and rarely apply to small operations. The food produced by my small farm is not cheap. We barely use chemicals when absolutely required, and our animal "waste" fertilizes our pastures and reduces our external inputs even further. One consequence of such good stewardship is that our pork sells for 3-4x the cost of supermarket meat. I find it very frustrating to see all farms demonized like this, because small farms already face scale-based discrimination. Most existing regulations were written to favor Big Ag, and they do indeed produce cheap food (in every sense of the word). Small farms already face nearly impossible odds bringing our food to market, so please don't conflate our practices and products with those of Big Ag.
- jqpabc123 3y ago
  so please don't conflate our practices and products with those of Big Ag. Fair enough --- as long a you don't do the opposite. It is my understanding that small farms like yours account for less than 10% of total food production in the USA. So in the overall, big picture view of things, Big Ag effectively is "American farming".
- neuralRiot 3y ago
  One thing that no one wants admit and much less industries and investors is that there’s no additive solution for the environmental problem. The way small farms operate might be sustainable but it’s impossible to keep consuming animal products at the current rate in sustainable manner. Consuming animal products 3 times a day 7 days a week is just egregious.

voakbasda 3y ago

These statements are only true about big farms and rarely apply to small operations. The food produced by my small farm is not cheap. We barely use chemicals when absolutely required, and our animal "waste" fertilizes our pastures and reduces our external inputs even further. One consequence of such good stewardship is that our pork sells for 3-4x the cost of supermarket meat. I find it very frustrating to see all farms demonized like this, because small farms already face scale-based discrimination. Most existing regulations were written to favor Big Ag, and they do indeed produce cheap food (in every sense of the word). Small farms already face nearly impossible odds bringing our food to market, so please don't conflate our practices and products with those of Big Ag.

jqpabc123 3y ago
so please don't conflate our practices and products with those of Big Ag. Fair enough --- as long a you don't do the opposite. It is my understanding that small farms like yours account for less than 10% of total food production in the USA. So in the overall, big picture view of things, Big Ag effectively is "American farming".
neuralRiot 3y ago
One thing that no one wants admit and much less industries and investors is that there’s no additive solution for the environmental problem. The way small farms operate might be sustainable but it’s impossible to keep consuming animal products at the current rate in sustainable manner. Consuming animal products 3 times a day 7 days a week is just egregious.