by Matthew Tyler Funk

Created on: August 11, 2010

Agriculture is one of the biggest contributors to environmental changes in our global and local communities, and with almost 7 billion people on the planet and rising fast, something needs to be done to change the way we feed ourselves.

Agriculture is about growing plants, and to a lesser extent, animals. Since it's pretty difficult to raise animals in the absence of plants, both activities should be an atmospheric carbon sink. Instead fossil fuels are burned to create the fertilizer. The animals are concentrated in such close quarters in the absences of carbon sequestering plants that the meat industry has come to be widely recognized as a significant contributor to global warming.

Animals could be raised in much more natural and sustainable ways. While we may not all agree on what IS natural, I think we can all agree that it is not natural for animals to live in cages inside of mass-production factories, or standing knee-deep in their own manure in what are known as CAFO's; Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. Not only are these unnatural industrialized food production processes horrible for the animals, they are equally horrible for the environment.

The problem isn't only with meat, it's with vegetables too. A parcel of land must be cleared of whatever was there before; usually wild prairie or forest, before it can be used to grow a monocrop field. This kills native plants and destroys habitat for native animals; killing virtually all of them too. 90% of soybeans are genetically modified to resist a certain herbicide which kills all "competing" plants in the area where the soybeans are planted. The problem really, is that species diversity brings strength to a food production plot, but most modern farmers consider species diversity competition.

Modern monocultural farmers like to refer to themselves as "traditional" farmers, but actually polyculture is much older and much more common than monoculture. Generally, monoculture is a lot more work and before the age of fossil fuels, has historically only been attempted when there were great multitudes of slaves available who could be forced to do the majority of the work. Those who had to do the work of planting and harvesting themselves almost always have had polycultural food plantings. Modern monoculture is only possible because of a hugely disproportionate input of fossil fuels, in which ten calories of fossil fuel energy are put into growing one calorie of food energy. Modern agriculture is unsustainable, and a change in how people feed themselves will come whether we implement one proactively or not.

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