Only Reconnect - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 106

food sectors for many years. Today in the US, the largest four firms control
79 per cent of beef packing and 57 per cent of pork packing. The
concentration ratio for broiler and turkey producers is between 40-50
per cent. For flour milling, dry and wet corn milling, and soybean
crushing, the ratio varies between 57-80 per cent. 8
Big scale also brings simplification and loss of biological diversity.
Worldwide, there are 6500 breeds of domesticated animals and birds,
including cattle, goats, sheep, buffalo, yaks, pigs, horses, chicken, turkeys,
ducks, geese, pigeons and ostriches. One third of these are under immed-
iate threat of extinction owing to their very small population size. Over
the past century, it is believed that 5000 animal and bird breeds have
already been lost. The situation is most serious in the already industrialized
farming systems, with half of breeds at risk in Europe and one third at
risk in North America. We must now worry that those countries currently
with fewer breeds at risk, 10-20 per cent in Asia, Africa and Latin
America, will follow the same route as the industrialized countries. 9
For some, such large-scale operations and loss of diversity are a measure
of success. Food commodity prices have been falling steadily over the
past 20 years, and most industrialized countries have moved well away
from the threat of food shortages. It was only in 1954, after all, that the
UK ended food rationing. However, in this success lies the seed of
destruction. Large-scale industrialized farming looks good precisely
because it measures its own success narrowly and ignores the costly side
effects. 10 There are many signs that our highly productive and modernized
systems are now in crisis. Farmers have been dispossessed, food and
environmental safety compromised, and food insecurity allowed to persist.
Consumers are increasingly disconnected from the process of food
production, and disenchantment grows. Aldo Leopold, perceptive observer
of our relations of nature, saw the changes coming more than half a
century ago when he said: 'If the individual has a warm personal understanding of
the land, he will perceive of his own accord that it is something more than a breadbasket.' 11
The End of the Family Farm Culture?
The realities of industrialized farming contrast painfully with the pastoral
notions of an agricultural system that many consumers still hold dear.
Rural communities are dying all over the industrialized world; but the food
system appears to go from strength to strength. In an old landscape only
recently converted to farming, yet another farm sale takes place in the
morning mist. In the Mid-West grain bowl of North America, and home
to generations of family farmers, the gavel smacks down on piles of rusting