Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
5
Soil, Crops, and Food: Dirt and Nutrition
Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit and identity. For some, that
irrationality leads to a kind of resignation.
—J. F. Foer,
Eating Animals
, 2009
In these days of indigestion
It is oftentimes a question
As to what to eat and what to leave alone;
For each microbe and bacillus
Has a different way to kill us,
And in time they always claim us for their own.
—Roy Atwell,
Some Little Bug Is Going to Find You Some Day
, 1915
Most Americans take food for granted. We are so used to warehouse-
size supermarkets, shelves groaning under the weight of mostly unnec-
essary and unhealthy products, and the continual availability of
out-of-season fruits and vegetables that we rarely think about the
farms that produced them, the countries they came from, or the soil
in which they grew. There is an almost total disconnect between food
producers and food consumers. Few of us are aware that most farmers
today must go to the supermarket to buy food, just like the 98 percent
of Americans who are not farmers. Farmers journey to the supermarket
as often as the rest of us because their farms do not produce a variety
of products.
The Department of Agriculture defi nes a farm as any operation with
the potential to produce at least $1,000 worth of agricultural goods
in a given year. Based on 2006 prices, an operation could be consid-
ered a farm for growing 4 acres of corn or a tenth of an acre of
berries (a square area only 66 feet by 66 feet) or for owning one
