Only Reconnect - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 105

the 1940s, around 2-2.5 tonnes per hectare. Since then, there has been
a rapid increase to reach an average of 8 tonnes per hectare today. 4 In the
US, each dairy cow produces nearly 8000 kilogrammes of milk each year,
more than triple that of a cow 50 years ago. Over the same period, beef
cattle have increased in size by 22 per cent, pigs by 90 per cent, and broiler
chickens by 52 per cent. 5
At the same time, the scale of production has grown. Small farmers
have been swallowed up, and large operators have thrived and expanded
even further. The industry has become bigger and better at producing food
as a commodity, most of which is now grown or reared in massive
monocultures. Whereas once farming was based on mixed enterprises,
with livestock wastes returned to the land, and cereal and vegetable by-
products fed to animals, now enterprises are increasingly specialized and
geographically separated. Should we be concerned about these losses of
cultural diversity? Or should we resist any attempt to see farming as
anything other than an efficient producer of the commodities that we all
need on a daily basis?
One of the most striking changes has been the growth in scale of
livestock farming, and the shift towards confined systems that rely entirely
on imported feedstuffs. The trend has been the same in every industr-
ialized country - but the effect has been the greatest in the US. Huge
livestock operations have emerged in the pig, dairy, broiler and layer
chicken, and beef sectors. For many of these enterprises, it is no longer
correct to use the term 'farm'. 6 In Colorado and Texas, five companies own
27 feedlots on which 1.5 million cattle are penned, an average of 60,000
animals per feedlot. A single feedlot of 240 hectares in California contains
100,000 animals, finishing more than 200,000 each year. Four hundred
animals are squeezed into each hectare, and each animal puts on about 1.5
kilogrammes daily, staying in the feedlot for four to five months. As they
consume about 10 kilogrammes of feed each day, there is a great deal of
waste. A feedlot this size produces 100,000 tonnes of waste per year, and
uses 4 million litres of water a day in the summer. Just to top it all, the
beef is sold under the company's own brand name as 'ranch beef ', evoking
days of open prairies and traditional cowboy culture. 7
This growth and skewing of the size of farm operations is mirrored
by growing concentration, at every stage, in the food chain. There are fewer
input suppliers, fewer farms, fewer millers, slaughterers and packing
businesses, and fewer processors. Increasingly, one business owns a whole
piece of the food chain, producing the feed, raising the livestock, slaughter-
ing and packing them, and then selling the products to consumers in their
own shops. Bill Heffernan and colleagues at the University of Missouri
have been tracking the concentration ratio of the top four firms in various