Agriculture: The faults in the conventional system.

Normal agribusiness provision of food is one of the most faulty systems in consumer-capitalist society.  Consider the following comparisons with home gardening, local co-ops and small farm local food production.

· Agribusiness involves huge quantities of energy use; in machinery, fertilisers, transport, warehouses, packaging, “marketing”, pesticides, bureaucracies, dealing with wastes. Much food is transported half way around the world, (…to where local fruit trees are being pulled out.)  Energy goes into supermarket floodlighting and refrigeration.

· Agribusiness creates vast waste, which cannot be recycled (the feedlots are a long way from the fields, the consumers are on another continent) and thus needs to be dealt with via energy-intensive systems, and damages ecosystems.

· Artificial fertilisers are applied, damaging soils and ecosystems; acidification and nitrogen flows are major global problems, and soil carbon levels are depleted by ploughing.  Nutrients are not returned to the soils; agriculture is thus “soil mining.”

· There is large scale abuse of animals, e.g., in battery egg production, intensive pig raising.

· Many chemical additives are needed, e.g., to keep disease levels down in crammed battery hen sheds and piggeries, to preserve foods for long shelf life, to colour and augment taste.

· Profit is maximised by growing only the few highest yield varieties, resulting in the massive loss of plant biodiversity.

· Nutritional quality and taste are of no concern to agribusiness.  Values that maximise profit include appearance, toughness to survive long transportation and packaging, and absence of blemishes (meaning specked fruit can’t be marketed.) The result is dramatic reduction in quality, evident in tasteless supermarket fruit, especially tomatoes.

· Conventional food supply involves huge numbers of expensive people in suits with degrees, sitting at computer screens, with expertise in finance, personal relations, logistics, engineering, bio-chemistry, insurance, law …  Home gardening and small local farming avoids just about all of that, and enables ordinary people to be excellent food producers.

· Agribusiness involves borrowed capital and thus interest payments at all levels. Costs at one level include interest payments at the previous level, leading to perhaps 40% of the price paid by consumers.

· Agribusiness destroys rural life.  Big corporations undercut local costs and farmers and rural decay, especially in the Third World.

The alternative?

Almost all of our food should be produced in small local farms and gardens close to where we live. This eliminates the above problems while eliminating the need for sewers and fertiliser production, because nutrients are recycled to nearby compost heaps and methane digesters.

Our settlements should be “edible landscapes”, full of home gardens, commons containing community gardens, orchards, herb patches, fish and duck ponds, and forest gardens. Your neighbourhood could have a fishing industry, based on highly productive small tanks in backyards. Within and close to the settlement there should be small farms, enabling food scraps to be returned to their soils.

These alterations to our presently boring dormitory suburbs would make them far more interesting and generate community and solidarity. We should have agriculture committees (and many others) educating, experimenting with new varieties and advising.

Many small processing “industries” could be throughout our towns and neighbourhoods, fermenting, preserving, making jams and chutneys etc. This would also eliminate much packaging and advertising. Small family-run shops would replace air-conditioned and floodlit supermarkets.

There could be many animals within the neighbourhood, especially poultry but also sheep, rabbits, pigs, and more on the nearby farms. Horses could do much of the work carting and ploughing, and provide leisure resources. Because food would be coming fresh from the gardens we would need far less refrigeration, canning and preserving. We might need only a few neighbourhood freezers.

These principles apply to other than food items. In stable Simpler Way settlements there would be little construction, of simple structures (no toll roads, big bridges, warehouses), therefore local quarries (especially for clay), forests and plantations could supply most building materials.  And some clothing needs could be met by leather, plants such as flax and wool from the sheep. Rushes and reeds can be made into baskets, hats and seating. Plantations of fast growing wattles could fuel potteries, including making roof tiles, drainage pipes and fired bricks.

Such a landscape also constitutes a rich leisure resource. Instead of travelling to resource-intensive leisure and holiday sources, there would be many things to visit, observe, be involved in, especially little farms, potteries and saw mills.