http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0729-01.htm
Published on Monday,
July 29, 2002 in the Los Angeles Times
Grim Reaping
The Industrialization of Agriculture is
Killing the Land
by George B. Pyle
Even when city folks
notice the dwindling population of rural
areas and express concern for the dying small communities
scattered across the continent, they remain blind to the
real causes and the best solutions. They are blind because
they have bought the lie that the industrialization of food
production is both inevitable and good and that the only
problem is finding new uses for the surplus rural population.
The health of rural
communities cannot be considered apart
from the health of the land that once supported them and
still, for the moment, feeds the rest of us.
That land is being
laid waste just as surely as are the
small towns that used to thrive on the business of farming.
Yet the fields cannot speak up, and so their victimization
goes mostly unnoticed.
For one thing, the
fields are much lighter than they used to be.
The latest federal
figures available, from 1997, indicate
that each year wind and water erosion alone carries away
2 billion tons of soil, or 5.6 tons per cultivated acre.
For every ton of grain
and hay harvested in the United
States, we lose 2.5 tons of soil.
And, as it is removed
by water, the soil takes with it many
tons of nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and other
chemicals that poison the waters downstream, require more
expensive treatment facilities in cities and create large
areas of oxygen-starved, fish-destroying "dead zones"
in
coastal waters.
Not only are our fields
losing quantity, the remaining soil
is of ever-decreasing quality. The soil that is left is
ripped up to produce a season of genetically identical,
chemical-dependent crops, then left bare for much of the
year, exposed to wind and rain. Like a drug addict who
loses the ability to feel normal without chemical stimulus,
modern agriculture has so fried the soil that it cannot
produce without larger and larger infusions of chemicals.
Water poured onto arid
fields quickly evaporates, leaving
behind increased amounts of salt that only reduce the
ability of the soil to produce.
All that accelerates
soil degradation and requires ever
more fertilizer and other chemicals to make up for the
natural nutritional value of soil that has been wiped
away by modern, high-intensity agriculture.
Good soil is not just
dirt. It is a hive of life, much
of it either microscopic or even disgusting to urban eyes
because urbanites don't understand the need for the growth
and decay of slimy things to sustain life. Good farmers
are not just people who dig in the dirt. They are the
stewards of healthy soil, many of them unrecognized or
even dismissed by those who can't comprehend why anyone
would want to do such hard work so far away from a Starbucks.
Because it takes fewer
people to beat the earth into
submission than it does to lovingly care for it, fewer
farmers are producing more food, and fewer rural communities
survive to support and be supported by those farmers.
But it cannot last.
And the final effects will be felt far
from the fields, in the deepest urban canyons.
Many city dwellers
seem to think we would be doing
farmers a favor--and ourselves no harm--by turning
them into computer pieceworkers. But the fact is that
fewer people on farms is both cause and symptom of
degraded land, land that is rapidly losing its ability
to produce healthy food, now and into the future.
George B. Pyle is a
director of the Prairie Writers
Circle, a project of the Land Institute, a research
organization in Salina, Kan.
Copyright 2002 Los
Angeles Times
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