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  • From: Harvey Ussery <harvey@themodernhomestead.us>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Big Ag's Big Lie About Organic Food
  • Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:53:30 -0400

Two things occurred to me reading this post:

My impression is that the Obama administration is indeed opening up to new possibilities for how we do agriculture, and I welcome that. But what nobody at the official levels--from the President to the key Ag members in Congress to USDA and certainly Big Ag--is even thinking about is the possibility of more human-powered (and animal-powered) agriculture. They all assume that "efficiency" means one farmer in a giant tractor, doing the work of a hundred (people, horses, oxen). At the same time the President moans about the need to create six million jobs. Duh.

And secondly, I think the assumption is well-nigh universal--far's I can tell, on Jill Richardson's part as well--that in a more sane agriculture, we'll still be growing the same mix of crops to feed our population, we'll just grow them more sustainably/organically. Few are thinking about a truly radical alternative: Quit plowing. Stop making row crops the foundation of the national diet. Keep most of our agricultural lands clothed with grass, and emphasize more the foods that ruminants can produce on that grass. Better for the life/fertility in the soil, more carbon sequestration, less pollution--anybody listening?

Again: "How we eat determines, to a significant extent, how the world is used." And we're fixated on the notion that the most efficient way to feed lots and lots of people is by growing lots and lots of grains and legumes. It's a recipe for soil destruction and other disasters. It's also a recipe for the sorry state of the nation's health, some of which ills have been with us since the Agricultural Revolution, some of which have emerged since we accelerated the hyper-processing of our food and our reliance on a narrow base of plant ingredients (corn, soy), in lieu of the animal proteins and fats that were the foundation of traditional diets.

If you haven't read Lierre Keith's THE VEGETARIAN MYTH, please do so. It's not the same tired old debate about whether eating meat or eating grains/legumes is more moral. It makes an excellent case about the devastation caused by our massive reliance on row crops to feed ourselves. Nothing especially moral about that, to my mind.

~Harvey

http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.dailykos.com//140847/
Big Ag's Big Lie About Organic Food
By Jill Richardson, Daily Kos
Posted on June 23, 2009, Printed on June 29, 2009

You've been told a lot of lies, but right now I'm going to focus on just one.

You've actually been told a lot of lies, but right now I'm going to focus on just one. It comes in many different forms:

--
Harvey in northern Virginia
www.themodernhomestead.us





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