After the green revolution in the 60’s, big agribusiness companies figured out ways to vastly increase crop yields and quality by using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Another technique that proliferated during that era was mono-cropping, the practice of planting vast fields with only a single crop. Herds of livestock were crammed together in unhealthy and incredibly polluting conditions. The focus turned away from the quality and connection we have to our food and towards producing massive quantities. Farmers could transport water to dry areas and use it for irrigation, allowing us to grow large amounts of crops that weren’t native to the area. These techniques had one goal: Increase yearly yields. Not customer satisfaction, environmental sustainability, nutrition of the food, or even setting up the fields to produce more in the future! All that mattered during the population boom in the 60’s was how to produce more food per square foot of land. Agricultural subsidies made it easier to rely on store-bought synthetic fertilizer and purchasing huge machines for harvesting mono-cropped fields. Advances in genetics led to the creation of pesticide resistant plants, so farmers could spray more poison on our food(tasty, right?). Lax regulations on agriculture has allowed mergers of the largest agriculture companies, increasing the scale, environmental consequences and amount of livestock manure produced by factory farms.

These same lax agricultural regulations also enable companies to not really care where their manure goes, poisoning entire ecosystems and causing dead zones with tons of runoff.

So you see, this confused and unfortunate conflation of factors has led to the current industrial agriculture paradigm in the U.S..

Why, you might ask, is this industrial agriculture such a terrible thing? Isn’t it providing more food at a cheaper price?

Sure, the price of food is cheaper when you buy it at the store because of these agricultural techniques. But I argue that while food is cheaper on the surface, the hidden environmental, taxpayer, and health costs that lurk deeper will in time completely override the off-the-shelf price.

To summarize, the unsustainable and rapid scaling techniques of industrial agriculture caused three main issues:

Physical and emotional disconnection from our food(we don’t know or care how/where it’s made)

The synthetic fertilizers and singular harvesting periods from the monocropped fields lead to rapid soil degradation, decreasing nutrient richness/crop return overtime and increasing needs for more fertilizer.

The overuse of pesticides that leads to adaptation of insects, requiring a rapid increase in pesticide use. Pesticides are toxic to humans as well as insects, so this leads to food becoming tainted.

Now that we all have a good idea of why the current system won’t work, lets look at ways to fix it. Thank for your patience in reading through my rant against industrial agriculture, I know that much negativity is hard to handle. On to the solutions!