Quotes & Sayings About Industrial Agriculture

It is now 14 years since I first suggested that organic farming might have some benefits and ought to be taken seriously. I shall never forget the vehemence of the reaction.. much of it coming from the sort of people who regard agriculture as an industrial process, with production as the sole yardstick of success. — Prince Charles

Industrial agriculture now accounts for over half of America's water pollution. Two years ago, Pfiesteria outbreaks connected with wastes from industrial chicken factories forced the closure of two major tributaries of the Chesapeake and threatened Maryland's vital shellfish industry. Tyson Foods has polluted half of all streams in northwestern Arkansas with so much fecal bacteria that swimming is prohibited. Drugs and hormones needed to keep confined animals alive and growing are mainly excreted with the wastes and saturate local waterways. — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When — Yuval Noah Harari

Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest. — Wendell Berry

To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals - obviously because of the importance of these things to the household. And there have been times, one of which is now, when some people have tried to practice a proper human husbandry of the nondomestic creatures in recognition of the dependence of our households and domestic life upon the wild world. Husbandry is the name of all practices that sustain life by connecting us conservingly to our places and our world; it is the art of keeping tied all the strands in the living network that sustains us.
And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry. — Wendell Berry

We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish. — Ken Robinson

The second reason for the failure of industrial agriculture is its wastefulness. In natural or biological systems, waste does not occur. And it is easy to produce examples of nonindustrial human cultures in which waste was or is virtually unknown. All that is sloughed off in the living arc of a natural cycle remains within the cycle; it becomes fertility, the power of life to continue. In nature death and decay are as necessary - are, one may almost say, as lively - as life; and so nothing is wasted. There is really no such thing, then, as natural production; in nature, there is only reproduction. But — Wendell Berry

The whole problem of industrial agriculture is putting all of your eggs in one basket. We need to diversify our food chains as well as our fields so that when some of them fail, we can still eat. — Michael Pollan

Humanity has experienced many revolutionary changes over the course of history: revolutions in agriculture, in science, industrial production, as well as numerous political revolutions. But these have all been limited to the external aspects of our individual and collective lives. — Daisaku Ikeda

Traditional histories of technology do not pay much attention to food. They tend to focus on hefty industrial and military developments: wheels and ships, gunpowder and telegraphs, airships and radio. When food is mentioned, it is usually in the context of agriculture - systems of tillage and irrigation - rather than the domestic work of the kitchen. But there is just as much invention in a nutcracker as in a bullet. — Bee Wilson

In our day, there are stresses and fractures of the human-animal bond, and some forces at work would sever it once and for all. They pull us in the wrong direction and away from the decent and honorable code that makes us care for creatures who are entirely at our mercy. Especially within the last two hundred years, we've come to apply an industrial mind-set to the use of animals, too often viewing them as if they were nothing but articles of commerce and the raw material of science, agriculture, and wildlife management. Here, as in other pursuits, human ingenuity has a way of outrunning human conscience, and some things we do only because we can
forgetting to ask whether we should. — Wayne Pacelle

The reductionist measure of yield is to agriculture systems, what GDP is to economic systems. It is time to move from measuring yield of commodities, to health and well-being of ecosystems and communities. Industrial agriculture has its roots in war. Ecological agriculture allows us to make peace with the earth, soil and the society. — Vandana Shiva

To visit a modern Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) is to enter a world that for all its technological sophistication is still designed on seventeenth-century Cartesian principles: Animals are treated as machines - "production units" - incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this anymore, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert one's eyes on the part of everyone else. — Michael Pollan

Chemical products are used in virtually every branch of industry and agriculture and come to the consumer in almost every product he consumes; yet, because they are primarily industrial raw materials which have lost their identity, the average consumer is unaware of them. To him even their names are meaningless. — George W. Stocking

Because industrial cycles are never complete - because there is no return - there are two characteristic results of industrial enterprise: exhaustion and contamination. The energy industry, for instance, is not a cycle, but only a short arc between an empty hole and poisoned air. And farming, which is inherently cyclic, capable of regenerating and reproducing itself indefinitely, becomes similarly destructive and self-exhausting when transformed into an industry. Agricultural pollution is a serious and growing problem. And industrial agriculture is forced by its very character to treat the soil itself as a "raw material," which it proceeds to "use up." It has been estimated, for instance, that at the present rate of cropland erosion Iowa's soil will be exhausted by the year 2050. I have seen no attempt to calculate the human cost of such farming - by attrition, displacement, social disruption, etc. - I assume because it is incalculable. This — Wendell Berry

Sometimes the large scale organic farmer looks like someone trying to practice industrial agriculture with one hand tied behind his back. — Michael Pollan

Regular crises perpetuate the past by reinvigorating cycles which started long ago. In contrast, (capital-C) Crises are the past's death knell. They function like laboratories in which the future is incubated. They have given us agriculture and the industrial revolution, technology and the labour contract, killer germs and antibiotics. Once they strike, the past ceases to be a reliable predictor of the future and a brave new world is born. — Yanis Varoufakis

If we took 75% of the world's trashed rangeland, we could restore it from agriculture back to functioning prairies - with their animal cohorts - in under fifteen years. We could further sequester all of the carbon that has been released since the beginning of the industrial age. So I find that a hopeful thing because, frankly, we just have to get out of the way. Nature will do the work for us. This planet wants to be grassland and forest. It does not want to be an agricultural mono-crop. — Lierre Keith

Globalization, which attempts to amalgamate every local, regional, and national economy into a single world system, requires homogenizing locally adapted forms of agriculture, replacing them with an industrial system-centrally managed, pesticide-intensive, one-crop production for export-designed to deliver a narrow range of transportable foods to the world market. — Helena Norberg-Hodge

Industrial agriculture, because it depends on standardization, has bombarded us with the message that all pork is pork, all chicken is chicken, eggs eggs, even though we all know that can't really be true. — Joel Salatin

Much of the vaunted material wealth that shields us from disease and famine was accumulated at the expense of laboratory monkeys, dairy cows and conveyor-belt chickens. Over the last two centuries tens of billions of them have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth. If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When evaluating global happiness, it is wrong to count the happiness only of the upper classes, of Europeans or of men. Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans. — Yuval Noah Harari

Analog components don't 'scale' as well as digital components, but integrating them into relatively mature 28 nm platforms will accelerate the connection of everything from watches, personal healthcare, and home appliances to automotive, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, and industrial controls. — Henry Samueli

The modern chicken is both a technological triumph and a poster child for all that is sad and nightmarish about our industrial agriculture. The most engineered creature in history is also the world's most commonly mistreated animal. — Andrew Lawler

I wish for recycling to become a major industrial agriculture. — Tishuan Scott

I don't believe vegans (or vegetarians) who still get their (packaged, preservative/chemical-ridden) food from industrial food systems have any righteous ground to stand on, nor do I think a deep look at the sentient life of plants or the true environmental impact of agriculture permits them any comfortable distance from cruelty. Everything in this world eats something else to survive, and that something else, whether running on blood or chlorophyll, would always rather continue to live rather than become sustenance for another. No animal wants to be penned up and milked, or caged and harvested, and you've never seen plants growing in regimented lines of their own accord. — Brian Awehali

Ebenezer Howard's vision of the Garden City would seem almost feudal to us. He seems to have thought that members of the industrial working classes would stay neatly in their class, and even at the same job within their class; that agricultural workers would stay in agriculture; that businessmen (the enemy) would hardly exist as a significant force in his Utopia; and that planners could go about their good and lofty work, unhampered by rude nay-saying from the untrained. It was the very fluidity of the new nineteenth-century industrial and metropolitan society, with its profound shiftings of power, people and money, that agitated Howard so deeply — Jane Jacobs

Etatism by no means aims at the formal transformation of all ownership of the means of production into State ownership by a complete overthrow of the established legal system. Only the biggest industrial, mining, and transport enterprises are to be nationalized; in agriculture, and in medium- and small-scale industry, private property is nominally to continue. Nevertheless, all enterprises are to become State undertakings in fact. Owners are to be left the title and dignity of ownership, it is true, and to be given a right to the receipt of a 'reasonable' income, 'in accordance with their position'; but, in fact, every business is to be changed into a government office and every livelihood into an official profession. — Ludwig Von Mises

'Cost-saver' in industrial livestock agriculture may usually be taken to mean 'moral shortcut.' — Matthew Scully

It is only two hundred years ago that we had the invention of industrial agriculture. What did that revolution do to us? It brought us power. And freedom from a life spent kneeling in sodden rice paddies or struggling fourteen hours a day to collect cotton bolls or snap peas. Freedom, in short, from an existence governed by agony, injury, and pain - one that most farmers, and most humans, have always had to endure. — Michael Specter

Industrial medicine is as little interested in ecological health as is industrial agriculture. (Health Is Membership, pg. 98) — Wendell Berry

Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks' hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running. — Toni Morrison

Traditional agriculture was labour intensive, industrial agriculture is energy intensive, and permaculture-designed systems are information and design intensive. — David Holmgren

Industrial agriculture freed many people to pursue lives their parents and grandparents could never have. It made America modern. — Michael Specter

If manufacturers are so sure there is nothing wrong with genetically modified foods, pesticides and cloned meats, they should have no problems labeling them as such. After all, cancer will kill one in every two men and one in every three women now alive, reports Samuel Epstein, chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition. Like our ancestors, we act in ways that will bemuse future societies. The military-industrial complex lubricates the mass-agriculture system with fossil fuels. Tons of heavy metals and other hazardous, even radioactive, waste is sprayed on American agricultural soil. — Adam Gollner

An organic farmer is the best peacemaker today, because there is more violence, more death, more destruction, more wars, through a violent industrial agricultural system. And to shift away from that into an agriculture of peace is what organic farming is doing. — Vandana Shiva

I've been thinking about that question about what city people can do. The main thing is to realize that country people can't invent a better agriculture by ourselves. Industrial agriculture wasn't invented by us, and we can't uninvent it. We'll need some help with that. — Wendell Berry

What is most troubling, and sad, about industrial eating is how thoroughly it obscures all these relationships and connections. To go from the chicken (Gallus gallus) to the Chicken McNugget is to leave this world in a journey of forgetting that could hardly be more costly, not only in terms of the animal's pain but in our pleasure, too. But forgetting, or not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat. — Michael Pollan

bananaland, where the jungle had been leveled and replaced by endless acres of banana trees, each displaying bunches of bananas enclosed in bright blue plastic bags. The bags would be filled with insecticide and chemicals deemed essential to marketing bananas where winter was cold and people liked their fruit in uniform: industrial agriculture gone tropical. Later, after the harvest, many of the bags ended up in the Caribbean, where they would be mistaken for jellyfish and eaten by turtles that would then choke to death. Unlike the complex ecosystems of the rainforest and jungle, mono-crop plantings like bananas couldn't hold the ground; when the hard rains fell - it — J.J. Henderson

This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting - to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture. — Michael Pollan

Socialist revolution aims at liberating the productive forces. The changeover from individual to socialist, collective ownership in agriculture and handicrafts and from capitalist to socialist ownership in private industry and commerce is bound to bring about a tremendous liberation of the productive forces. Thus, the social conditions are being created for a tremendous expansion of industrial and agricultural production. — Mao Zedong

Globalized industrialized food is not cheap: it is too costly for the Earth, for the farmers, for our health. The Earth can no longer carry the burden of groundwater mining, pesticide pollution, disappearance of species and destabilization of the climate. Farmers can no longer carry the burden of debt, which is inevitable in industrial farming with its high costs of production. It is incapable of producing safe, culturally appropriate, tasty, quality food. And it is incapable of producing enough food for all because it is wasteful of land, water and energy. Industrial agriculture uses ten times more energy than it produces. It is thus ten times less efficient. — Vandana Shiva

Industrial agriculture, built according to the single standard of productivity, has dealt with nature, including human nature, in the manner of a monologist or an orator. It has not asked for anything, or waited to hear any response. It has told nature what it wanted, and in various clever ways has taken what it wanted. And since it proposed no limit on its wants, exhaustion has been its inevitable and foreseeable result. This, clearly, is a dictatorial or totalitarian form of behavior, and it is as totalitarian in its use of people as it is in its use of nature. Its connections to the world and to humans and the other creatures become more and more abstract, as its economy, its authority, and its power become more and more centralized. — Wendell Berry