permaculture

[Victor Guest <vic@daena.eepo.com.au>]

Date: Mon, 02 Nov 1998 13:15:16
From: hawiaa@access.digex.net
Subject: Wallace Institute's report on ag industrialization

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This is interesting in light of our concepts of permaculture. HM is what
the resolution of conflict( and animal impact) is all about. 
The role of industrialisation in the destruction of Agriculture, is a 
question reflected in Agricultural Statistics.

Vic
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"Agricultural Industrialization in the American Countryside"
A New Report from the Wallace Institute


The spread of large confined-animal facilities is dividing many rural
communities. These industrial farms share the countryside with an
increasingly diverse set of neighbors--including other farmers, nonfarm
residents and businesses, and recreationists--those diverse interests have
spawned conflict. Accounts from Oklahoma, North Carolina, Iowa, and other
states tell how divisive issues, such as managing air and water pollution,
have pitted farmer against farmer, rural neighbor against farmer, rural
townspeople against immigrant farm laborers, environmental advocates
against agri-business, and local versus state governments.

With such contentious problems confounding the search for constructive
solutions, the Wallace Institute commissioned Professor Emery Castle of
Oregon State University to analyze the problems and suggest a constructive
approach for reducing conflict. Professor Castle's new report, Agricultural
Industrialization in the American Countryside, offers an approach that all
rural communities can use to assess and shape the process of agricultural
industrialization for the greatest benefit to their communities. Those
participants often are urged by special interests to take an extreme
position--either to accept industrial agriculture without modification for
fear of losing economic benefits, or to ban all forms of industrial
farming. Professor Castle rejects both of these alternatives as unwise or
unrealistic.

        Instead, he urges communities to adopt a "monitor, manage, and modify
where necessary" approach to ensure that new agricultural enterprises
support the full complement of rural community objectives. He explains the
concept of "rural capital stock," comprised of manmade, natural, human, and
social capital elements, for use in measuring and evaluating the effects of
industrialized farms. If rural communities conserve their total rural
capital, they have the best chance to achieve economic, environmental, and
social vibrancy well into the future.

        Copies of the Wallace Institute's new report are available for $10.00
each, or may be viewed or printed from the Institute's Web site
(http://www.hawiaa.org) after November 6, 1998.

Henry A Wallace Institute for Alternative Agriculture
9200 Edmonston Rd Ste 117
Greenbelt  MD  20770-1551

Phone: 301-441-8777
Fax:   301-220-0164
Web site: www.hawiaa.org

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------------------------------

*************************************

Nancy Grudens-Schuck, Ph.D.

Department of Education
422 Kennedy Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853

PHONE office: 607 255-2508
FAX: 607 255-7905
E-Mail: ng13@cornell.edu
http://www.cals.cornell.edu/dept/education/faculty/grudens/