by Carol Smock

Created on: August 05, 2010   Last Updated: August 06, 2010

Simply put, our food supply system is not sustainable. Professor David Pimentel of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University said in an October 1999 speech that American agriculture “may look successful, but it can’t last. Not economically, not environmentally. That has not changed significantly.

The federal government has found it necessary to subsidize large farms. This system takes more resources and produces more environmental damage than the earth can tolerate long-term. The reasons for this are many.

Americans consume a lot of red meat. This is not healthful, and not efficient. American agriculture has changed from many small, independent farms to fewer large corporate farms. Livestock is raised in feed lots, knee deep in mud and manure, and fed grains instead of their natural diet of grass. It is estimated that 9-16 pounds of grain are required under this system to produce 1 pound of beef.

Ruminant animals (cattle, sheep, goats, buffalo and camels) produce methane as part of their natural digestive process. The number of livestock animals has exploded from 8 billion in 1965 to 20 billion in 2010. In the United States, many of these animals are kept in CAFO’s, large feed lots. The manure they produce is dumped into “lagoons” to be broken down by anaerobic bacteria, thus releasing more methane. Livestock production contributes almost half of the increase in greenhouse gases we have seen in the last 100 years.

Over 100 million acres of American cropland erode each year.  Our soil is disappearing at 16 times the rate of natural soil replenishment. Iowa has lost over half its agricultural soil to erosion. In this country, over 100 million acres of once prime farm land have become so depleted that they are now abandoned. To make up for the poor quality of soil, farmers use chemical fertilizers to make crops grow and pesticides to protect them.

Preventable soil erosion costs the United States $44 billion per year in eroded soil that piles up behind dams, silting of canals, polluting of water, fertilizer carried off from fields, and lower crop yields. As the soil is depleted, farmers use increasing amounts of fertilizer for decreasing crop yields.

Plant pests such as insects, weeds and disease are attracted to large areas of a single crop. To protect the plants, farmers spray a billion pounds of poison on their land each year at a cost of $4.1 billion. Still, they lose 37% of crops to pest infestation. The rate of loss

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