by Angie Mohr

Created on: May 01, 2008   Last Updated: May 07, 2008

The face of agriculture has changed immensely in the past fifty years. What was once an activity carried out by local family farmers has morphed into an industrial megalith. Today, your cellophaned 4-pack of tomatoes is more likely to come from a thousand miles away rather than the next county line. Non-renewable petroleum consumption in agriculture has skyrocketed. Oil is gulped by both the mechanized harvesters and meat processing facilities and the trucks and airplanes that haul "fresh" produce around the country. Sustainable farming practices like crop rotation and polyculture have all but disappeared in the quest for getting more food out of every acre. Pesticide and herbicide use has jumped dramatically as companies like Monsanto develop new hybrid seed resistant to toxic chemical application. Seed growers are patenting new hybrids and prosecuting farmers for saving seed from year to year, a time-honored farming tradition. We have gained productivity from most of these changes but it is what we have lost that should concern us all.

What we've lost is the connection to the food we eat. Beef comes shrink-wrapped from a grocery store, not a cow. We no longer eat by the seasons: peas in the spring, tomatoes and peppers in the summer, squash and potatoes in the fall and winter, all of it picked fresh off the vine and usually from our own back yard. We can get a tomato shipped to us from Ecuador in February or peaches in December from Mexico. A new danger lurks in our cornfields: the move towards growing crops for fuel and not bellies. The effects of this food crop reduction are being felt around the world.

We all lose in many respects because of these changes. According to the U.S. Census of Agriculture, the 6.8 million farms in the United States in 1935 dwindled to 2.1 million by 2002. Families that have farmed for generations have had to give up the family farm and get other jobs because they can't compete with the large industrialized agricultural operations. As the number of farms decreases and the average farm size increases, we also lose the diversity of our crops; a real danger to the future security of our food supply. The creation of bio-fuels, almost exclusively grown from corn in the United States, was touted as being the answer to our dependence on foreign oil. We have since discovered that it takes more than a unit of fossil fuel to create a unit of corn-based bio-fuel so the net gain is zero or less. Yet we plow more and more fields under to grow more corn for our gas tanks.

There are signs that the pendulum is beginning to swing in the opposite direction. Consumers are becoming more aware of the real economic costs of the food they eat. A new term has entered our lexicon: locavore- someone who eats only what is produced locally. And the organic movement has allowed some family farmers to chisel out a niche on smaller tracts of land. These are small steps in the right direction but it will take an agricultural revolution to bring us all back to the land.

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