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The Omnivore's Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals

87 points by JacobAldridge 17y ago

karzeem 17y ago
There are a couple different things going on here. First, the author makes some good points that without modern tools, some of the things we ask of modern farms would be impossible. There's a limit to the natural productivity of an acre of land. Second, though, he doesn't address a) whether we're asking too much of one acre of land, or b) whether the things that farmers have to do in order to be productive enough to survive are things that are good to be doing to land, long-term. The author is essentially saying, "If this is what you ask of me, don't complain about the things I have to do to deliver." And that's a fair point. But let's think more about what we should and shouldn't be asking of him and his land. Additionally, the author makes a well-argued takedown of some of Michael Pollan's points from The Omnivore's Dilemma, but Joel Salatin — the man whose farming methods are the centerpiece of the book — is conspicuously absent from the critique. Salatin's farm is extremely productive, and sustainably so. That's accomplished by embracing technology (like electric fences that take ten minutes to set up), not by throwing it out and reverting to Depression-era methods. Salatin's work is more hands-on than that of most farmers, and that's necessary for the type of farm he runs. But it's a model that we'd do well to see spread. (Again, though, it cannot spread widely without some significant changes in what farmers are and are not incentivized to do.)
- jasonkester 17y ago
  I think he actually does a good job of demonstrating that he does much of what he does because it's better for the land. As a farmer, the most valuable thing he has is that land. It will be in his family for a long time, so it's in his best interest to protect it. From what he says, it sounds like most of what he does revolves around keeping that resource healthy and productive.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    As a driver of a car, the most valuable thing is gasoline. So it's OK for me to drive 55mph through a school zone with kids crossing the street, because I get maximum fuel efficiency that way. If I slowed down, I would not be making the best use of a precious resource. So what if I mow some kids down? Me, me, me! My point is, sometimes you have to realize that what's best for the individual is not what's best for society, and that you need to compromise. (In the case of the school zone, the government mandates that you play nice. You can say hello to a fine if you value your fuel economy over the safety of the children trying to cross the street. In the case of a corn farm, the opposite effect is in play -- the government gives you money to only worry about the health of your land. The planet itself can get bent, it's standing in the way of cheap soda!)
    - nazgulnarsil 17y ago
      right because the ONLY reason there are repercussions for dangerous behavior is the government. government isnt magic, it is an extension of what people want. a horribly twisted extension, but still an extension.
- davidmathers 17y ago
  There's really just one thing going on here: the Norman Borlaug/Julian Simon/Bjørn Lomborg people and the enviromentalist people have been talking past each other for the last 70 years and this is just more of the same. It would be refreshing to, just once, read an essay by one side that actually understood the arguments of the other side and seriously addressed them.
- Quarrelsome 17y ago
  "10 minutes to setup". Is that like creating a stackoverflow clone in a weekend?
  - sophacles 17y ago
    Not according to the book mentioned, they are actual portable electric fences designed to be very light and trivially easy to set up.
  - karzeem 17y ago
    It's something out of The Omnivore's Dilemma. Joel Salatin pens his cows with a mobile electric fence that's basically a wire, a bunch of stakes, and a car battery. Michael Pollan notes that it took him and Salatin ten minutes to set it up or tear it down.
willchang 17y ago
These counterpoints to avant-garde farming sensibilities bear repeating: no-till requires herbicides, but is potentially better for the environment than organic; there is not enough animal waste in all the land to fertilize all the crops in the land; monoculture is efficient; etc. Indeed it would be intellectual complacency to demand organic food without acknowledging these things. On the other hand, there are hints of complacency in the author's arguments as well. To say that gestation crates protect piglets does not end the argument -- it should cause us to ask whether pigs should be bred that are capable of destroying their own young. To say that fossil fuels cause farmland to be more productive does not end the argument either -- it should cause us to ask whether food is too cheap, which is to say, whether all the external costs of food have been adequately priced in. This is not precious high-mindedness, but sober reasoning in light of the fact that catastrophic environmental damage may result from burning fossil fuels, or that serious infectious diseases may result from intensive animal husbandry. As for farmers being portrayed as helpless, I would say that they largely are. A farmer can hardly avoid the worst practices of the trade if he is to be competitive; which is why it is only reasonable for the worst practices to be prohibited by law, or driven to extinction by public opinion. Certainly law and public opinion can be incredibly ham-fisted, which is why, I suppose, there's value in articles like this.
- jrockway 17y ago
  it should cause us to ask whether food is too cheap, which is to say, whether all the external costs of food have been adequately priced in This is spot on. Our economy does not price externalities well.
  - jimmybot 17y ago
    I get what you mean, but if they were priced correctly, they'd just be internalities. Internalities?
- rflrob 17y ago
  "monoculture is efficient" This is true, from a certain point of view. In the short-to-medium term, monoculture does allow us to produce more from a given acre of land. In the long run, though, monocultures are more susceptible to disease, pests, or other major environmental shifts, which if we're lucky will only cut growth for a season, but could lead to permanent conditions. For example, the 'Gros Michele' cultivar of banana has now been almost entirely superseded by the 'Cavendish' cultivar.
jrockway 17y ago
Exactly the expected response. Industrial food is cheap if you don't think damaging the earth has a cost. Poor people need their high-fructose corn syrup! (And of course, it's OK for the government to heavily subsidize corn production, but when they try to buy poor people whole meals then we hear the conservatives whine about a "nanny state" and how irresponsible people are. "What a waste of tax dollars!") He also seems to have missed the part of the book where they compare Earthbound Farms(an organic industrial farm) to conventional farms. Same processes, same labor, same yields. Higher profit margin. The difference is in a few details. (He also specifically mentions the costs of tilling the field before planting, to kill the weeds. "Omnivore's Dilemma" agrees that this is a bad thing. But it's likely that this has less environmental impact than dumping your herbicides in the river. Industrial organic farming is very far from perfect. But conventional industrial farming is farther.) Finally, what we see here is another example of the tragedy of the commons in action. Is it okay for one farmer to use lots of chemicals on his crops? Sure, they get diluted heavily by the time they run off into the nearby river. No big deal. But when everyone for thousands of miles around does it, then you have a problem. It's not one person's fault, it's the collective's fault. I don't think the author quite grasps this point.
dan_the_welder 17y ago
Go see Food Inc. http://www.foodincmovie.com/ http://www.foodincmovie.com/ Unsettling.
thesubjective 17y ago
Never trust a publisher who is willing to offer direct attack on an authors assertions, but refuses to offer the ability for readers to leave comments on said attack. The lack of (and then rapid increase in cost of) water will end up pushing this farmer out. Bottom line, his way of life, like most of America's is becoming increasingly hard to sustain. Attacking deep ecology and the Organic movement is the wrong tack.
- jrockway 17y ago
  I think you can write a letter to the editor. The article has a conservative slant, anyway, which likely means that they don't want to let facts get in the way of their beliefs. I wish it was not this simple, but it seems to be...
justin_vanw 17y ago
Lets design a system for creating dangerous diseases. We'll take millions of some species we know tend to pass viruses to and from people, say poultry and pigs. Now, lets pack as many together as we possibly can, to the point that they are incredibly stressed, and bonus points if they are physically rubbing against each other all the time, and exposed to each others feces. Now, we need to keep the sick ones alive as long as possible. Let's pump them full of antibiotics, steroids, or whatever else might keep them ambulatory. It's important that any sick animals stay with the rest, so that any disease microbe with a mutation that makes the disease more easily spread are captured in the population, and not left to die in some barn where the animal is quarantined, say. Now, make sure that you keep animals in each location at all times, any gaps where there are no animals in a facility (or merely too few to act as a reservoir) would destroy any mutations unique to that population. Finally, have lots of discrete locations with just a little transfer between them. This way, a successful new disease will have to be virulent enough to invade other locations. This means it will have to either spread to wild birds or other animals, or humans. Finally it also means that it will have the chance to evolve in an environment where the hosts have minimal natural immunity to it. Now you just have to sit back and wait, sooner or later something truly deadly will pop out. To address the article directly: only factory farming has animals penned so tightly they can't even stand up. Only factory farming makes the air so foul that you still can't breath on the next farm over. Only factory farming requires the air in the barns to be completely turned over every 20 minutes to prevent the animals inside from suffocating on fumes from decomposing feces.
- socratees 17y ago
  I completely agree with you. In addition, Biotech and gene modification cause as much damage to our ecosystem just like factory farming. In fact factory farming in most of the cases is about genetically modified cattle & poultry. Apart from the ethical issue of whether we can let someone patent seeds and genes, we also face the issue where we facilitate the transmission of disease causing genes from one species to another.
- Quarrelsome 17y ago
  Wait... so creating scenarios where the chances of getting diseases is bad? So cities are bad? Hospitals? MRSA was produced in hospitals, are all these ideas bad? I believe these ideas need work. The human race tends to blindly run in a direction until it hits a wall, so our current wall is bird flu and swine flu. Sure, we need to improve our course of direction or find ways to mitigate against these diseases but I don't think it helps trying to paint this "running" as being more "immoral", "wrong" or "greedy" than it would otherwise be.
hooande 17y ago
I think the author's point here is that most people just don't want to let go of the _idea_ of the american farmer. Culturally, we want a farmer to be a guy riding a tractor or milking a cow, not some guy who puts animals into boxes and then churns them out factory style. The image of a farm that contains happy animals in a field has been put into all of our heads at a very young age (remember "Old McDonald"?). The practice of industrial farming isn't only distasteful to think about, but it goes against some of our strongest cultural archetypes. I think that's why the author used so many examples of unpleasant things that he saw as a farmer growing up. He was trying to say that no matter how it's done, farming is a dirty and bloody business. It's nice to picture farming like it was in re-runs of Lassie, but that doesn't mean we should expect him to run his business based on outdated ideas. I think that this is a case of technology progressing faster than society is comfortable with. Whatever problems are created by industrial farming (environmental damage or harm to the animals) will be corrected by some ambitious startup founders who come up with clever solutions. The idea of industrial farming is relatively new, especially when compared to the thousands of years put into mastering regular farming. I don't think it's wise to stand in the way of progress just because we find certain elements of it to be distasteful (but not harmful).
- encoderer 17y ago
  But the reason the "family farm" you describe went extinct isn't because we all need so much more food than we used to. While that's true, looking at the history, there's no reason to think the move away from multi-crop rotations to corn on corn on corn was done for any reason aside from short-term financial interests of farmers decades ago, and then a shit load of direct farm welfare since. I haven't read Omnivores Dilemma tho I have read In Defense of Food. Thinking I'll pick up the former this week. Sounds like a good read.
- bmj 17y ago
  I think that this is a case of technology progressing faster than society is comfortable with. Whatever problems are created by industrial farming (environmental damage or harm to the animals) will be corrected by some ambitious startup founders who come up with clever solutions. I find this attitude to be a bit dangerous. Sitting around waiting for some entrepreneur to save the world doesn't strike me as the best solution. Regarding the bloodiness of farming, Pollan, in _The Omnivore's Dilemma_, doesn't shield the reader from this. In fact, you get a very detailed view of what chicken farming and processing looks like on a sustainable farm. What's most interesting about it is how human Salatin and his family are about it--they understand they are killing things, and that if they don't give themselves some respite from it, they will change for the worse. The biggest issue I have with technology and farming (particularly the use of chemicals and hormones, not as much with machinery) is that we don't understand the ramifications of what we are doing yet. Consider that at one point in time, we thought it was smart to spray ourselves with DDT. We may not learn what the various herbicides and antibiotics and hormones are doing to us for years to come. One of Pollan's primary points in his writing is that food is too important for us to hand over to technocrats and big business.
xexers 17y ago
Disclaimer: I grew up on a farm. I have personally slaughtered many animals including pigs, chickens, ducks, and fish. I am now a vegetarian. This article is 90% correct. I agree on most topics. A main thread here is sustainable farming. However 2 key points are intentionally confusing. 1. "Paul Johnson is forecasting a move toward vegetarianism. But if we assume, at least for the present, that most of us will continue to eat meat, let me dive in where most fear to tread." 2. "the amount of nitrogen available naturally would only support a worldwide population of 4 billion souls or so." Point #1, he quickly skips over possibly the most important way out of this mess. If people were to eat less meat this entire article would be useless. From another article: "According to the journal Soil and Water, one acre of land could produce 50,000 pounds of tomatoes, 40,000 pounds of potatoes, 30,000 pounds of carrots or just 250 pounds of beef." Point #2, when he says we can only feed 4 billion, he is talking about on a typical meat centered western diet. On a vegetarian diet, this world could feed well 10s of billions.
- encoderer 17y ago
  #2... Is that because of how much Corn is grown to feed livestock? Because as I understood it, the largest direct consumer of Nitrogen is Corn?
  - bmj 17y ago
    Livestock feeding isn't the only consumer of large amounts of corn. Consider that just about every processed food there is has some measure of corn products in them. Then there's the ethanol industry, too....
    - jrockway 17y ago
      This is really only in the US, though, where the government pays more for corn than it's worth on the market. This makes it cheap, and since people want cheap food, "they" have figured out how to put it in everything. When I go to Europe, the drinks on the flight there are sweetened with HFCS. On the way back, they are sweetened with cane sugar. "Corn in everything" is mostly and American thing. (And we're so healthy because of it!)
dimitar 17y ago
Why do we see IT people telling farmers how to farm, and not for example farmers teaching programmers to program?
- plesn 17y ago
  If there were programmer companies that would be putting those farmers into bad situation by using there monopolies in order to tax them or to misuse their data or to put chips in there heads, they would ;-) We hopefully not always listen to "experts" and we care about what happens around us.
- davidmathers 17y ago
  Bad analogy. The right analogy would be computer manufacturers and farmers saying they want to buy computers that are manufactured in a sustainable manner and aren't causing significant environmental damage. I'm down with that.
- rdrimmie 17y ago
  Because we're in a forum full of IT people, not farmers. I guarantee you there are places (on the Internet and in real life) where farmers are talking about the flaws of any number of software and hardware. This just isn't one of them.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Because programming best practices don't really affect farmers, but not having food or a planet to live on does affect programmers.
  - pragmatic 17y ago
    What about GPS and other devices used directly by farmers. Do you have any idea how much hardware/software goes into modern ag equipment?
wglb 17y ago
As the son of a dryland wheat farmer, I have been concerned about the amount of fertilizer and pesticides put into the soil. The author has a very good basic point. Farmers and the agribusiness industry do what they do not because they are evil but because customers want what they produce. This is often overlooked by those of us who criticize the current system of production. So we need to keep in mind that it is a system, and we all consume what this vast system produces, and we don't show any slackening of demand in the stuff we buy, particularly in the corn economy. But the author's self interest gets a little heated, and he misses many of the points made in Omnivore's Dilemma (note the second word of the title and who it belongs to). There is a lot of exposition about the current financial structure of the industry with subsidies going to the small and huge family farms that actually provide significant benefit to the agribusiness and reduces the flexibility that the farmer might otherwise have regarding what to grow. It is not useful, in my mind, to demonize the critics of our current way of business, nor is it useful to demonize the industry. This is a pretty complex problem. As a former farmboy and current tech guy I found Omnivore's Dilemma to be quite evenhanded. This article is not. Both have good points worth contemplation. Food is a huge ethical dilemma, and things are more interrelated than one might first think.
- bmj 17y ago
  As a former farmboy and current tech guy I found Omnivore's Dilemma to be quite evenhanded. This article is not. Both have good points worth contemplation. This often gets lost in the shuffle. Pollan investigated four different modes of food production, and followed the trail from farm to table for each. Certainly, he made some judgments about what he saw (and what he saw affected how he eats), but he gave each mode its due.
pyre 17y ago
I call BS on this guy. Maybe he should contact Snopes about his 'turkeys drowning in the rain' bit: http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/turkey.asp I was ready to accept what this guy was saying until I got to that point. Then I stopped reading. I now view this entire article as a rebellion of agribusiness to the fact that people are starting to become more interested in how their food gets to the table and don't like what they see. {edit} Even if that story is true, it's a poor justification for caging all animals. "All animals need to be bred in cages and indoors because one particular animal can't survive outdoors." <sarcasm> Seems like sound enough logic to me </sarcasm> {/edit}
- jrockway 17y ago
  Thanks for this. I have been trying to say this: I now view this entire article as a rebellion of agribusiness to the fact that people are starting to become more interested in how their food gets to the table and don't like what they see. in all my comments below, but I couldn't quite put it this eloquently. I think you are exactly right; he is arguing that his way is best for his fields, his profit margin, and for getting low prices at the store. "The Omnivore's Dilemma" takes a more holistic approach and argues how this approach is worse for the planet as a whole (and how it's just plain wasteful). It's good to hear both sides of the story, but I can't help but feel that the "organic" way is closer to what's best for everyone.
- kscaldef 17y ago
  I agree. I was willing to give this guy a fair listen, but that anecdote, and the following claim that sows routinely crush their piglets to death made me think: either this guy is lying, or he fails to realize that something is already very, very wrong if these things are true.
chez17 17y ago
This is a typical analysis of our food system. This would be like if we had a discussion on American energy usage and talked all about how coal verse solar or about unplugging unused devices and nobody said a single thing about oil consumption the entire time. We can dance around with the little stuff all we want but the real issue is meat consumption. Organic farming is plenty sustainable if we all stopped eating meat so much. It uses more land, more food, and is far worse for the environment. If American's stopped eating meat 3 times a day and started eating it once or twice a week, it would solve a lot of problems. I just can't take articles like this seriously because he does nothing to address how poorly the status quo is and the real reasons behind it. You can scream about organic or conventional until you're blue in the face but it won't mean anything if you don't address the real problem.
psranga 17y ago
I wish the article had more facts and was more scientific. Blanket assertions like "we'll need 5 billion more cows" do not convince me. Anybody read about John Jeavon's work? I just bought his book (How to Grow More Vegetables) a couple of days ago. He claims that we have the technology to create self-sustaining farms which can feed a person on about 4000 sqft. Present day agriculture requires between 9000 and 30,000 sqft per person. So it's entirely unclear to me that industrial agriculture is the only way to feed the planet. Certainly his method is human-intensive (by design), so you can't have situations like a family of 2 adults farming 1000 acres of corn. So it's unlikely to be adopted in the US. Web sites: www.growbiointensive.org And they have a store in Palo Alto: www.bountifulgardens.org

87 points by JacobAldridge 17y ago

There are a couple different things going on here. First, the author makes some good points that without modern tools, some of the things we ask of modern farms would be impossible. There's a limit to the natural productivity of an acre of land. Second, though, he doesn't address a) whether we're asking too much of one acre of land, or b) whether the things that farmers have to do in order to be productive enough to survive are things that are good to be doing to land, long-term. The author is essentially saying, "If this is what you ask of me, don't complain about the things I have to do to deliver." And that's a fair point. But let's think more about what we should and shouldn't be asking of him and his land. Additionally, the author makes a well-argued takedown of some of Michael Pollan's points from The Omnivore's Dilemma, but Joel Salatin — the man whose farming methods are the centerpiece of the book — is conspicuously absent from the critique. Salatin's farm is extremely productive, and sustainably so. That's accomplished by embracing technology (like electric fences that take ten minutes to set up), not by throwing it out and reverting to Depression-era methods. Salatin's work is more hands-on than that of most farmers, and that's necessary for the type of farm he runs. But it's a model that we'd do well to see spread. (Again, though, it cannot spread widely without some significant changes in what farmers are and are not incentivized to do.)

jasonkester 17y ago
I think he actually does a good job of demonstrating that he does much of what he does because it's better for the land. As a farmer, the most valuable thing he has is that land. It will be in his family for a long time, so it's in his best interest to protect it. From what he says, it sounds like most of what he does revolves around keeping that resource healthy and productive.
- jrockway 17y ago
  As a driver of a car, the most valuable thing is gasoline. So it's OK for me to drive 55mph through a school zone with kids crossing the street, because I get maximum fuel efficiency that way. If I slowed down, I would not be making the best use of a precious resource. So what if I mow some kids down? Me, me, me! My point is, sometimes you have to realize that what's best for the individual is not what's best for society, and that you need to compromise. (In the case of the school zone, the government mandates that you play nice. You can say hello to a fine if you value your fuel economy over the safety of the children trying to cross the street. In the case of a corn farm, the opposite effect is in play -- the government gives you money to only worry about the health of your land. The planet itself can get bent, it's standing in the way of cheap soda!)
  - nazgulnarsil 17y ago
    right because the ONLY reason there are repercussions for dangerous behavior is the government. government isnt magic, it is an extension of what people want. a horribly twisted extension, but still an extension.
davidmathers 17y ago
There's really just one thing going on here: the Norman Borlaug/Julian Simon/Bjørn Lomborg people and the enviromentalist people have been talking past each other for the last 70 years and this is just more of the same. It would be refreshing to, just once, read an essay by one side that actually understood the arguments of the other side and seriously addressed them.
Quarrelsome 17y ago
"10 minutes to setup". Is that like creating a stackoverflow clone in a weekend?
- sophacles 17y ago
  Not according to the book mentioned, they are actual portable electric fences designed to be very light and trivially easy to set up.
- karzeem 17y ago
  It's something out of The Omnivore's Dilemma. Joel Salatin pens his cows with a mobile electric fence that's basically a wire, a bunch of stakes, and a car battery. Michael Pollan notes that it took him and Salatin ten minutes to set it up or tear it down.

willchang 17y ago

These counterpoints to avant-garde farming sensibilities bear repeating: no-till requires herbicides, but is potentially better for the environment than organic; there is not enough animal waste in all the land to fertilize all the crops in the land; monoculture is efficient; etc. Indeed it would be intellectual complacency to demand organic food without acknowledging these things. On the other hand, there are hints of complacency in the author's arguments as well. To say that gestation crates protect piglets does not end the argument -- it should cause us to ask whether pigs should be bred that are capable of destroying their own young. To say that fossil fuels cause farmland to be more productive does not end the argument either -- it should cause us to ask whether food is too cheap, which is to say, whether all the external costs of food have been adequately priced in. This is not precious high-mindedness, but sober reasoning in light of the fact that catastrophic environmental damage may result from burning fossil fuels, or that serious infectious diseases may result from intensive animal husbandry. As for farmers being portrayed as helpless, I would say that they largely are. A farmer can hardly avoid the worst practices of the trade if he is to be competitive; which is why it is only reasonable for the worst practices to be prohibited by law, or driven to extinction by public opinion. Certainly law and public opinion can be incredibly ham-fisted, which is why, I suppose, there's value in articles like this.

jrockway 17y ago
it should cause us to ask whether food is too cheap, which is to say, whether all the external costs of food have been adequately priced in This is spot on. Our economy does not price externalities well.
- jimmybot 17y ago
  I get what you mean, but if they were priced correctly, they'd just be internalities. Internalities?
rflrob 17y ago
"monoculture is efficient" This is true, from a certain point of view. In the short-to-medium term, monoculture does allow us to produce more from a given acre of land. In the long run, though, monocultures are more susceptible to disease, pests, or other major environmental shifts, which if we're lucky will only cut growth for a season, but could lead to permanent conditions. For example, the 'Gros Michele' cultivar of banana has now been almost entirely superseded by the 'Cavendish' cultivar.

jrockway 17y ago

Exactly the expected response. Industrial food is cheap if you don't think damaging the earth has a cost. Poor people need their high-fructose corn syrup! (And of course, it's OK for the government to heavily subsidize corn production, but when they try to buy poor people whole meals then we hear the conservatives whine about a "nanny state" and how irresponsible people are. "What a waste of tax dollars!") He also seems to have missed the part of the book where they compare Earthbound Farms(an organic industrial farm) to conventional farms. Same processes, same labor, same yields. Higher profit margin. The difference is in a few details. (He also specifically mentions the costs of tilling the field before planting, to kill the weeds. "Omnivore's Dilemma" agrees that this is a bad thing. But it's likely that this has less environmental impact than dumping your herbicides in the river. Industrial organic farming is very far from perfect. But conventional industrial farming is farther.) Finally, what we see here is another example of the tragedy of the commons in action. Is it okay for one farmer to use lots of chemicals on his crops? Sure, they get diluted heavily by the time they run off into the nearby river. No big deal. But when everyone for thousands of miles around does it, then you have a problem. It's not one person's fault, it's the collective's fault. I don't think the author quite grasps this point.

dan_the_welder 17y ago

Go see Food Inc. http://www.foodincmovie.com/ http://www.foodincmovie.com/ Unsettling.

thesubjective 17y ago

Never trust a publisher who is willing to offer direct attack on an authors assertions, but refuses to offer the ability for readers to leave comments on said attack. The lack of (and then rapid increase in cost of) water will end up pushing this farmer out. Bottom line, his way of life, like most of America's is becoming increasingly hard to sustain. Attacking deep ecology and the Organic movement is the wrong tack.

jrockway 17y ago
I think you can write a letter to the editor. The article has a conservative slant, anyway, which likely means that they don't want to let facts get in the way of their beliefs. I wish it was not this simple, but it seems to be...

justin_vanw 17y ago

Lets design a system for creating dangerous diseases. We'll take millions of some species we know tend to pass viruses to and from people, say poultry and pigs. Now, lets pack as many together as we possibly can, to the point that they are incredibly stressed, and bonus points if they are physically rubbing against each other all the time, and exposed to each others feces. Now, we need to keep the sick ones alive as long as possible. Let's pump them full of antibiotics, steroids, or whatever else might keep them ambulatory. It's important that any sick animals stay with the rest, so that any disease microbe with a mutation that makes the disease more easily spread are captured in the population, and not left to die in some barn where the animal is quarantined, say. Now, make sure that you keep animals in each location at all times, any gaps where there are no animals in a facility (or merely too few to act as a reservoir) would destroy any mutations unique to that population. Finally, have lots of discrete locations with just a little transfer between them. This way, a successful new disease will have to be virulent enough to invade other locations. This means it will have to either spread to wild birds or other animals, or humans. Finally it also means that it will have the chance to evolve in an environment where the hosts have minimal natural immunity to it. Now you just have to sit back and wait, sooner or later something truly deadly will pop out. To address the article directly: only factory farming has animals penned so tightly they can't even stand up. Only factory farming makes the air so foul that you still can't breath on the next farm over. Only factory farming requires the air in the barns to be completely turned over every 20 minutes to prevent the animals inside from suffocating on fumes from decomposing feces.

socratees 17y ago
I completely agree with you. In addition, Biotech and gene modification cause as much damage to our ecosystem just like factory farming. In fact factory farming in most of the cases is about genetically modified cattle & poultry. Apart from the ethical issue of whether we can let someone patent seeds and genes, we also face the issue where we facilitate the transmission of disease causing genes from one species to another.
Quarrelsome 17y ago
Wait... so creating scenarios where the chances of getting diseases is bad? So cities are bad? Hospitals? MRSA was produced in hospitals, are all these ideas bad? I believe these ideas need work. The human race tends to blindly run in a direction until it hits a wall, so our current wall is bird flu and swine flu. Sure, we need to improve our course of direction or find ways to mitigate against these diseases but I don't think it helps trying to paint this "running" as being more "immoral", "wrong" or "greedy" than it would otherwise be.

hooande 17y ago

I think the author's point here is that most people just don't want to let go of the _idea_ of the american farmer. Culturally, we want a farmer to be a guy riding a tractor or milking a cow, not some guy who puts animals into boxes and then churns them out factory style. The image of a farm that contains happy animals in a field has been put into all of our heads at a very young age (remember "Old McDonald"?). The practice of industrial farming isn't only distasteful to think about, but it goes against some of our strongest cultural archetypes. I think that's why the author used so many examples of unpleasant things that he saw as a farmer growing up. He was trying to say that no matter how it's done, farming is a dirty and bloody business. It's nice to picture farming like it was in re-runs of Lassie, but that doesn't mean we should expect him to run his business based on outdated ideas. I think that this is a case of technology progressing faster than society is comfortable with. Whatever problems are created by industrial farming (environmental damage or harm to the animals) will be corrected by some ambitious startup founders who come up with clever solutions. The idea of industrial farming is relatively new, especially when compared to the thousands of years put into mastering regular farming. I don't think it's wise to stand in the way of progress just because we find certain elements of it to be distasteful (but not harmful).

encoderer 17y ago
But the reason the "family farm" you describe went extinct isn't because we all need so much more food than we used to. While that's true, looking at the history, there's no reason to think the move away from multi-crop rotations to corn on corn on corn was done for any reason aside from short-term financial interests of farmers decades ago, and then a shit load of direct farm welfare since. I haven't read Omnivores Dilemma tho I have read In Defense of Food. Thinking I'll pick up the former this week. Sounds like a good read.
bmj 17y ago
I think that this is a case of technology progressing faster than society is comfortable with. Whatever problems are created by industrial farming (environmental damage or harm to the animals) will be corrected by some ambitious startup founders who come up with clever solutions. I find this attitude to be a bit dangerous. Sitting around waiting for some entrepreneur to save the world doesn't strike me as the best solution. Regarding the bloodiness of farming, Pollan, in _The Omnivore's Dilemma_, doesn't shield the reader from this. In fact, you get a very detailed view of what chicken farming and processing looks like on a sustainable farm. What's most interesting about it is how human Salatin and his family are about it--they understand they are killing things, and that if they don't give themselves some respite from it, they will change for the worse. The biggest issue I have with technology and farming (particularly the use of chemicals and hormones, not as much with machinery) is that we don't understand the ramifications of what we are doing yet. Consider that at one point in time, we thought it was smart to spray ourselves with DDT. We may not learn what the various herbicides and antibiotics and hormones are doing to us for years to come. One of Pollan's primary points in his writing is that food is too important for us to hand over to technocrats and big business.

xexers 17y ago

Disclaimer: I grew up on a farm. I have personally slaughtered many animals including pigs, chickens, ducks, and fish. I am now a vegetarian. This article is 90% correct. I agree on most topics. A main thread here is sustainable farming. However 2 key points are intentionally confusing. 1. "Paul Johnson is forecasting a move toward vegetarianism. But if we assume, at least for the present, that most of us will continue to eat meat, let me dive in where most fear to tread." 2. "the amount of nitrogen available naturally would only support a worldwide population of 4 billion souls or so." Point #1, he quickly skips over possibly the most important way out of this mess. If people were to eat less meat this entire article would be useless. From another article: "According to the journal Soil and Water, one acre of land could produce 50,000 pounds of tomatoes, 40,000 pounds of potatoes, 30,000 pounds of carrots or just 250 pounds of beef." Point #2, when he says we can only feed 4 billion, he is talking about on a typical meat centered western diet. On a vegetarian diet, this world could feed well 10s of billions.

encoderer 17y ago
#2... Is that because of how much Corn is grown to feed livestock? Because as I understood it, the largest direct consumer of Nitrogen is Corn?
- bmj 17y ago
  Livestock feeding isn't the only consumer of large amounts of corn. Consider that just about every processed food there is has some measure of corn products in them. Then there's the ethanol industry, too....
  - jrockway 17y ago
    This is really only in the US, though, where the government pays more for corn than it's worth on the market. This makes it cheap, and since people want cheap food, "they" have figured out how to put it in everything. When I go to Europe, the drinks on the flight there are sweetened with HFCS. On the way back, they are sweetened with cane sugar. "Corn in everything" is mostly and American thing. (And we're so healthy because of it!)

dimitar 17y ago

Why do we see IT people telling farmers how to farm, and not for example farmers teaching programmers to program?

plesn 17y ago
If there were programmer companies that would be putting those farmers into bad situation by using there monopolies in order to tax them or to misuse their data or to put chips in there heads, they would ;-) We hopefully not always listen to "experts" and we care about what happens around us.
davidmathers 17y ago
Bad analogy. The right analogy would be computer manufacturers and farmers saying they want to buy computers that are manufactured in a sustainable manner and aren't causing significant environmental damage. I'm down with that.
rdrimmie 17y ago
Because we're in a forum full of IT people, not farmers. I guarantee you there are places (on the Internet and in real life) where farmers are talking about the flaws of any number of software and hardware. This just isn't one of them.
jrockway 17y ago
Because programming best practices don't really affect farmers, but not having food or a planet to live on does affect programmers.
- pragmatic 17y ago
  What about GPS and other devices used directly by farmers. Do you have any idea how much hardware/software goes into modern ag equipment?

wglb 17y ago

As the son of a dryland wheat farmer, I have been concerned about the amount of fertilizer and pesticides put into the soil. The author has a very good basic point. Farmers and the agribusiness industry do what they do not because they are evil but because customers want what they produce. This is often overlooked by those of us who criticize the current system of production. So we need to keep in mind that it is a system, and we all consume what this vast system produces, and we don't show any slackening of demand in the stuff we buy, particularly in the corn economy. But the author's self interest gets a little heated, and he misses many of the points made in Omnivore's Dilemma (note the second word of the title and who it belongs to). There is a lot of exposition about the current financial structure of the industry with subsidies going to the small and huge family farms that actually provide significant benefit to the agribusiness and reduces the flexibility that the farmer might otherwise have regarding what to grow. It is not useful, in my mind, to demonize the critics of our current way of business, nor is it useful to demonize the industry. This is a pretty complex problem. As a former farmboy and current tech guy I found Omnivore's Dilemma to be quite evenhanded. This article is not. Both have good points worth contemplation. Food is a huge ethical dilemma, and things are more interrelated than one might first think.

bmj 17y ago
As a former farmboy and current tech guy I found Omnivore's Dilemma to be quite evenhanded. This article is not. Both have good points worth contemplation. This often gets lost in the shuffle. Pollan investigated four different modes of food production, and followed the trail from farm to table for each. Certainly, he made some judgments about what he saw (and what he saw affected how he eats), but he gave each mode its due.

pyre 17y ago

I call BS on this guy. Maybe he should contact Snopes about his 'turkeys drowning in the rain' bit: http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/turkey.asp I was ready to accept what this guy was saying until I got to that point. Then I stopped reading. I now view this entire article as a rebellion of agribusiness to the fact that people are starting to become more interested in how their food gets to the table and don't like what they see. {edit} Even if that story is true, it's a poor justification for caging all animals. "All animals need to be bred in cages and indoors because one particular animal can't survive outdoors." <sarcasm> Seems like sound enough logic to me </sarcasm> {/edit}

jrockway 17y ago
Thanks for this. I have been trying to say this: I now view this entire article as a rebellion of agribusiness to the fact that people are starting to become more interested in how their food gets to the table and don't like what they see. in all my comments below, but I couldn't quite put it this eloquently. I think you are exactly right; he is arguing that his way is best for his fields, his profit margin, and for getting low prices at the store. "The Omnivore's Dilemma" takes a more holistic approach and argues how this approach is worse for the planet as a whole (and how it's just plain wasteful). It's good to hear both sides of the story, but I can't help but feel that the "organic" way is closer to what's best for everyone.
kscaldef 17y ago
I agree. I was willing to give this guy a fair listen, but that anecdote, and the following claim that sows routinely crush their piglets to death made me think: either this guy is lying, or he fails to realize that something is already very, very wrong if these things are true.

chez17 17y ago

This is a typical analysis of our food system. This would be like if we had a discussion on American energy usage and talked all about how coal verse solar or about unplugging unused devices and nobody said a single thing about oil consumption the entire time. We can dance around with the little stuff all we want but the real issue is meat consumption. Organic farming is plenty sustainable if we all stopped eating meat so much. It uses more land, more food, and is far worse for the environment. If American's stopped eating meat 3 times a day and started eating it once or twice a week, it would solve a lot of problems. I just can't take articles like this seriously because he does nothing to address how poorly the status quo is and the real reasons behind it. You can scream about organic or conventional until you're blue in the face but it won't mean anything if you don't address the real problem.

psranga 17y ago

I wish the article had more facts and was more scientific. Blanket assertions like "we'll need 5 billion more cows" do not convince me. Anybody read about John Jeavon's work? I just bought his book (How to Grow More Vegetables) a couple of days ago. He claims that we have the technology to create self-sustaining farms which can feed a person on about 4000 sqft. Present day agriculture requires between 9000 and 30,000 sqft per person. So it's entirely unclear to me that industrial agriculture is the only way to feed the planet. Certainly his method is human-intensive (by design), so you can't have situations like a family of 2 adults farming 1000 acres of corn. So it's unlikely to be adopted in the US. Web sites: www.growbiointensive.org And they have a store in Palo Alto: www.bountifulgardens.org