Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
while being regularly doused with herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides. Yield,
disease resistance, the ability to survive repeated dosing with noxious
poisons---these are the goals of the mad scientists leading corporate chemical
agriculture. The health of the soil and the nutritional value of the crop are
meaningless to them. Is this too harsh a judgment? Look at the nutritional quality
of our food and the worn-out state of our farmlands to answer that question
I'd like to insert a rather esoteric opinion here. It is my contention that attempting
to turn agriculture into an industrial process breaks a fundamental agreement that
mankind has had with nature since the inception of thinking humans on this planet.
Not only with nature in general, but with the individual plant and animal families
with whom we have these ancient agreements. The agreement with cattle, for
instance, is that their human herders will offer protection from wild predators,
shelter and warmth when necessary, and provide good food and water to them.
We will help protect their offspring, care for them when they are sick or injured,
and work to improve the breed. In exchange, the cattle provide for us their milk,
meat, hides, manure, and sometimes labor. This has been a fair trade for the
animals and for the humans taking on the responsibility.
We humans have long had a similar agreement with members of the plant
kingdom: care, protection from competing plants, fertile soil and abundant water,
working to improve the breed. Industrial agriculture and corporate greed have
broken these agreements, and more than broken them: these ancient pacts have
been violated in the most obscene manner.An old English term for a farmer and
livestock person was a husbandman. To husband was a verb that meant to care
for as a wife's husband would care for their family: To husband the land, and the
crops, and the animals. Wise husbandmen passed on a better farm than they
inherited, passed this on to their children and to the descendants of the plants and
animals they had cared for and partnered with. We who wish to create a new and
better world should strive to get back to that ideal, and to extend it to all of the
Earth that is in our care.
Getting back to our critique of today's agriculture: Regardless of their intent,
neither the granola heads nor the nature nazis have proven to have much of a
clue when it comes to the big picture. It's time to change that situation. In order to
make a new agriculture, we need to use everything we know or can find out, from
any discipline. Being a believer and purist of any one school or philosophy of
agriculture, and trying to bend reality to fit those accepted truths, is not going to
lead us forward.
Most organic growers have no clue what minerals are in their soil. Is it not so?The
chemical growers are generally a little better informed, as they are used to getting
their soil tested in order to find out how many pounds of chemical fertilizer to add,
but they have little understanding of the essential role of the nutrient minerals
either.
