A great piece in The New York Times on how farming is broken and why there is a need to rethink it, and go back into the past for its future:
The very structure of the agricultural system, as it stands now, is designed to return the greatest profit possible, not to the farmers but to the producers of the chemicals they use and the seeds they plant. And because those chemicals depend on fossil energy, the entire system is inherently unsustainable. What farmers used to return to the soil in the form of labor and animal manure — not the toxic kind you find in livestock confinement systems — they now must purchase, just the way they buy diesel for their tractors.
We have an created an unsustainable society without these methods we can not harvest enough crops to feed the population, old methods will mean people starve. A transformation of society and the norms of what we consider successful / important is what is needed….
@markberly That’s the myth that perpetuates the system. The US *threw away* 40% of it’s food last year, not counting subsidized fallow fields. It’s markets, not methods, that are responsible for hunger. If you’re interested, try Raj Patel’s “Stuffed and Starved”…