The Root of All Evil May be Found in the Roots

The Root of All Evil May be found in the Roots.

In chapter 6 Davis describes all of the negative (and only negative) consequences of industrialized agriculture which range from all war to the Oklahoma City bombing. They also give some pretty startling stats about the productivity of small farms vs. industrial farms which are pretty hard to believe, 200-1000% more productive? Yeah okay. I’m going to break down each claim and see how well it stands up to some scrutiny.          TO GOOGLE! AWAY!

 Militarized Entities (sooooo....everyone?)

Let’s start with the idea that militarized entities are more concerned with the political sovereignty of land rather than the care of land. No dip Sherlock. Of course the military is more concerned with the control of land rather than the care of it. That’s the military’s job just like the care of land is the farmer’s job. This is a nonpoint, it neither helps nor harms their argument and is technically true. Sure you can say that “militarized entities” refers to nations and not the military but the same can be said about that as well. The whole point of governments and militaries is to protect the land so it can be cared for. Small farming communities could not defend themselves against invasions or large armies so we form governments to create large armies to protect us. That’s their job, just like it’s the farmer’s job to care for that protected land. Otherwise anyone who could get a group of 1000 people would be able to take your land away from you. Thus making it impossible for a self-contained community like Shipshewana to exist in the first place.

 War...What is it Good for?

Keeping with the military theme we move on to the next assertion they make, that all war could be avoided if everyone were agrarian. How to even begin? Wars are fought for many reasons and not solely for the control of land. They are fought for religious reasons, economic reasons (like access to the sea) and even for ideological reason (unification of all Germanic speaking people). How can the agrarian system prevent war? Well the quote from the chapter states that it would present less cause for war, more nations would be self-sufficient causing less fighting over resources. This implies that EVERY war EVER fought was fought SOLELY for resources. Yes resources are almost always involved (oil in the Middle East) but often this is not the sole reason. We go to war because other nations ask for help, because we are attacked, and because a certain dictator is violating international human rights laws and the UN asks (forces) us to. Even if we consider resources the root of every war ever fought agrarian ideals don’t account for it. Most recent wars were not fought over farmland when they were fought purely for resources. They were fought over oil fields, mines, refineries, and ports. This was the motivation for Iraq to invade Kuwait and was the reason 34 nations needed to protect it. We needed oil and our source was being threatened. If we, as the author states, become more independent internationally we wouldn’t have taken action. Kuwait would be a part of Iraq and many nations who do not have a lot of oil within their borders would essentially be controlled by Iraq. We can’t just ignore the rest of the world because we can supply all of our own needs, we have more oil, more fertile land, and more natural gas than most of the world, because many places in the world simply cannot. We in America have the luxury of living in a nation that covers more than 3.8 million square miles and has every biome on Earth, from jungles to tundra to plains to deserts. We have unequalled access to a unmatched variety of resources within our borders. Sometimes we tend to forget that the rest of the world is not like this and must look outside of themselves for these resources, sometimes to us. We cannot simply say “every nation should become more self-efficient” and expect all international conflict to disappear. It won’t. This issue is so much bigger than any agricultural system.

 Math is Complicated...

Let’s move on to some of the more dubious, c’mon 1000%?, stats given by the author. I did a google search for “small farms more productive” and every source on the front page was an agrarian website. Now this in of itself doesn’t mean that this stat is wrong but it is telling that the authors seem to constantly reference themselves. I repeated the search on Google Scholar and got much the same result with titles like “the Journal of Organic Farming” etc. However I came across another article titled Mis-specification in Farm Productivity Analysis that contends that the idea that small farms are more productive than large ones is because the researchers fail to control for farmland quality. It shows that the productivity difference shrinks, and in some cases disappears, when the quality of farmland is controlled for (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2663254?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents). Since I don’t own the book (and since it’s, somewhat ironically, 30-40$ on Amazon I won’t any time soon) I cannot check out the referenced used in the actual chapter. I point this out to show that this productivity is not the consensus of every researcher and it may be a misrepresentation of statistics. 1000% more anything is difficult to believe and deserves scrutiny.

 Divide and Conquer...or Not.

After this the author goes on to discuss the idea that large farms don’t take care of their land. …Okay? So large farms don’t want to mitigate their impact on the land so they can continue to farm and profit? They seem to blame the farmer’s themselves, seem to not sure if they actually are, and not the sheer size of their farms. I would like to know how, exactly, dividing farmland into many smaller farms without eliminating acres of farmland would eliminate the environmental impact. Eliminating the use of synthetic chemical herbicides, pesticides, GMOs, and fertilizers would go towards that goal but that isn’t necessarily an agrarian ideal. Many industrial farms are moving towards this system now that technology is being developed to let them do this (this is purely an observation of most of the farmers around my area when discussing new farming techniques). One of the largest environmental impacts of large scale farming is the harm to the water table. Dividing a large industrial farm into many smaller farms ran by small families isn’t going to remove that harm. It may seem to, because each farmer will be responsible for less harm. Let’s look at it another way, if every person contributes 1000 lbs of carbon dioxide daily from driving a car because they each own a single car and that’s how much a single car contributes daily. Now let’s say we give ten people that car and each drives it the same amount and that car still produces the same amount of carbon dioxide. Now each person contributes 100lbs a day instead of 1000. It seems like we are reducing our impact on the earth but really we aren’t. The same applies to dividing up farmland, it will still draw the same amount of water from the water table because the amount of farmland was not reduced.

 Let's Wrap it up Shall We?

This chapter isn’t outright wrong in what they say, the reduction on international dependence on large farms may actually reduce the amount of war, and perhaps smaller farms would pollute less. They simply take it too far, you cannot claim that there would be no more war or that pollution would be greatly reduced if everyone was agrarian because that grossly oversimplifies the issue. Chapter 6 overextends itself into realms that are not necessarily greatly affected by farming ideologies. One could claim that agrarian thought extends far beyond simple farming, and it does, but I would counter that extrapolating it to international relations, war, and beyond is not valid. The agrarian ideology stresses smaller, interdependent communities rather than a national and international scale, keeping the wealth in the small farming communities rather than sending it out into the world. Many agrarians would contend that large, industrial farms put too much wealth in the hands of too few. However these farms provide the raw materials required to fuel our other industries, cotton for clothes, milk for ice cream, and many others. These industries then make it possible for artisans, politicians, teacher, scientists, and philosophers to exist in the large numbers they do today. Our universities would be microscopic compared to what we have today, most people would have no more than an 8^th grade education. Industrial farming has led to many problems and negative consequences, which are being worked on, but it has also led to many positives and have enriched our lives tremendously at the same time. It seems to me that we, in this class and society at large, focus too much on the negatives and ignore the positives. Either that or we focus only on the positives (Fair Oaks) and ignore the negatives completely. Most of the time this leads us to take a stance on one side or the other and hinders meaningful discussion on this issue. The answer isn’t dividing up all farmland and doing away with industrial farming and it’s not putting control of farming into the hands of only a few people. It’s somewhere in the middle. 

It takes one of these to solve problems.