I believe modern conventional agriculture, like many other modern industries, is pointed in a highly unsustainable direction. Socially, the “get big, or get out” mentality that has driven agriculture for the past 75 years is depopulating our rural communities, and requiring ever increasing capital investments that make entering agriculture risky and difficult. From an energy perspective, we are at the end of cheap fossil fuels that has driven almost every aspect of modern agriculture – replacing manpower and horsepower with machines, replacing biological controls with fossil fuel-derived chemicals, and replacing natural fertility (crop rotation, legumes, and animal manure) with fossil fuel-derived fertilizer. And, finally, modern agriculture has become one of the most environmentally destructive industries polluting our air and water, destroying the health of our soil, eroding our top soil, and producing large quantities of nutritionally void food. The rise in grain production has particularly revolutionized livestock agriculture, leading to many unintended consequences.
New technologies, subsidies, and cheap fossil fuels have helped fuel a huge increase in the production of a few grain commodities. Bomb-making military research during WWI and WWII developed ammonium sulfate and ammonium phosphate out of natural gas. After the wars, the industry found these fossil fuel-derived chemicals were also excellent inorganic fertilizers. The adoption of inorganic fertilizers and subsequent development of highly responsive crops to increased nitrogen fertilizer led to the “Green Revolution.” During this period, huge strides were made in increased crop production with the aid of fossil fuels for fertilizer and labor.
To find markets for these commodities, international trade practices known as “dumping” flooded developing countries with cheap commodities, destroying the development of local sustainable farming in many countries. Cheap by-products like high-fructose corn syrup have come to dominate ingredients in our supermarkets leading directly to a national and international pandemic of obesity. The biofuel industry was developed as a “green” fuel (unfortunately, it takes about the same amount of fossil fuels to produce a similar amount of ethanol). And, livestock have been rounded up off the land and concentrated in confinement operations to make space for more grain production and be fed well over 50% of the cheap grain produced in the U.S.
Ruminants such as cattle and sheep have uniquely co-evolved with grasslands, and each needs the other for a healthy ecosystem. Cattle have highly evolved 4-compartment guts with a host of microbes to efficiently utilize grass and fiber as their primary source of nutrition. Cattle can thrive on a 100% grass diet, especially when grass is managed for high energy and crude protein. Grassland ecosystems also appear to thrive when properly grazed. This means being regularly rested to simulate natural migrating herbivores.
The ruminant gut is also incredibly flexible and the microbe community can be altered to digest a starch-based diet. Modern agriculture, with its glut of cheap grain, realized that consistently higher animal production can be achieved by switching cattle to a starch (grain)-based diet, thus effectively ending the millennia of co-evolution between grasslands and ruminants. With our subsidized cheap grain, the U.S. is the only country in the world to adopt such widespread grain-feeding to cattle. Most every other country in the world and throughout human history has determined it to be more economical to allow the animal to harvest her own food through grazing. Even in the U.S., only during the “finishing” faze for beef and for higher income potential industries like dairy has it been considered economically advantageous to feed grain. Even still, during cycles of higher grain and fuel prices, there is renewed interest in removing grain from cattle’s diet.
This move of industrial agriculture to intense grain production and confinement animal operations has had a host of unintended environmental consequences. This system has removed grasslands and grazing from the landscape and has replaced the landscape with monocultures fertilized, planted, sprayed, harvested, and feed with fossil fuels and lots of human labor. It’s amazing that this system is deemed more efficient with all these steps than the cow putting her face to the ground and harvesting her own meal! Farming has since become one of the biggest contributors to green house gas (GHG) emissions and contributors to global climate change. Monocultures of crops have destroyed the health of the soil, where billions of microbes need complex ecosystems in the soil to stay healthy. Chemical fertilizers of the macro nutrient (N,P,K) have increased yields that mine the soil of the hundreds of micro nutrients which are not replaced, making crops far less nutritious. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides have also destroyed the health of the soil and water. Fields that have very little crop rotation and even fewer perennial crops in the rotation, with very few grass buffers are losing top soil through erosion, destroying the long term health of the land and rivers. Animals concentrated on small areas lead to ground water contamination and runoff polluting our ground and surface water with unsafe levels of bacteria and nutrients.
The “Green Revolution” was not intended to have such negative consequences. But, unfortunately, whenever humans throughout history have attempted to live outside the rules of nature, humans usually end up at the losing end of the equation. Depending on the use of a finite amount of stored energy below the ground (fossil fuels) is shortsighted and increasingly proving to have many unintentional consequences. Farming must become increasingly efficient and productive using only current energy and working within the rules of nature. Modern conventional agriculture is moving in an opposite direction, conquering and manipulating nature through biotechnology, extensive precision agriculture technology, and ever higher inputs of non-renewable energy. Conventional farmers are also losing intellectual autonomy and becoming increasingly squeezed as the agri-business industry is requiring an ever increasing share in the farmer’s profits (higher seed costs, more expensive technology and equipment, crop insurance, chemical costs, “expert” advice, etc.). This conventional model is moving in the opposite direction of long-term sustainability in spite of the occasional adoption of environmentally helpful management practices such as no-till agriculture (that has now been co-opted by the chemical companies as a means to promote increased pesticide use). Thus, the alternative agriculture movement must create a parallel trajectory for the future of agriculture that looks quite opposite from conventional agriculture, burrows heavily on agriculture knowledge prior to the “Green Revolution”, but also adopts new scientific methods of increased production and profit while farming with nature.
