Commodification and the Destruction of Efficacy
On the one hand American agriculture can be seen as a huge success: the number of Americans required to till our fields has dropped from more than 60% to less than 2%, and only six percent of the farmers produce 56% of the crops; corn yields increased 333% over sixty years, to a point where agricultural products make up 10% of all exports. Whole industries have arisen to supply materiel to the farmer: in 1992 for example, 1.1 billion pounds of pesticidal chemicals (worth a solid eight billion dollars to GNP) and over four billion pounds of fertilizer (and this is only the active ingredient weights).1 Industrial agriculture views the farm as a factory with 'inputs' (such as pesticides, feed, fertilizer and fuel) and 'outputs' (corn, chickens and so forth). The goal is to increase yield (such as bushels per acre) and decrease costs of production, usually by exploiting economies of scale.2
But there have been costs, too: falling water tables on a continental scale; chemical contamination of drinking water; eutrophication of lakes and streams; damaging outflows of both topsoil and nutrients into coastal estuaries. And these are just the environmental costs; there are social and economic costs as well, related to the eventual cleanup of pollution, the high energy input of modern, conventional agriculture, and the urban and suburbanization that result from the migration of farm populations into other employment sectors. All this has been created by viewing agriculture strictly through an economic lens, though it is essentially a natural process. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists,
This view of agriculture as a system of inputs and outputs has led, according to critics like Richard Lewontin of Harvard, to a situation where farmers are receiving a steadily declining portion of the 18% of the United States economy that flows from their farms and fields.3 Other factors are mechanization and the resultant plant and animal monocultures. Monoculture, at its current level, means growing literally thousands of contiguous acres of the same plant, which is an incredible biological incentive to the explosion of pest and disease populations. Both of these incentivize an increase in farm size, and a decrease in the number of crop varieties grown within the monoculture itself.4
