Patrick's Bio Blog: February 2011

Sustainable Agriculture is what most people would call a natural and original way of doing things. Where farmers are actually doing the farming manually, and cows are seen in a lush, green, pasture. As much as we thought that they are still the majority of today’s farms, it’s not true. On the contrary, they are pretty obsolete.

Beautiful, isn't it?

These days, most of the agricultural process has been mostly taken over by Industrial Agriculture, which focuses on mass production, to feed all of the humans of the world. Industrial Agriculture is much faster, efficient, and probably more economic friendly than the old fashioned method.

Some differences between Industrial and Sustainable methods:

Pesticides are used in industrial agriculture to maximize outputs, whereas sustainable agriculture produces organic products.
Livestock are more prone to diseases due to many animals being cooped up into a small space in industrial agriculture. This fact is supported by the recent outbreak of diseases (H1N1, H5N1, etc.)
Biodiversity is encouraged with sustainable agriculture, but it is not encouraged with industrial agriculture, as a mass production method usually requires the same crop or livestock to be grown every year.
The farmland doesn’t get a chance to restore itself to its original richness due to mass production.

As one can clearly see, sustainable agriculture is obviously much better for our environment than industrial agriculture, but the problem doesn’t lie in the benefits of sustainability, but what it lacks compared the industrial method.

The popular saying, “Money makes the world go round,” can be easily incorporated into the reason why we, as people, rather disturb nature for our food. It is simply more efficient to mass produce products, rather than get small amounts of multiple crops, and it costs less as well. Ever since industrial agriculture was introduced, the job opportunities for farmers have been steadily dropping, as their experience is not needed anymore, because they are replaced with high-tech machinery. Also, what is the point of making so much food, if most of the world’s population are suffering from starvation?

Industrial Agriculture is already chosen over nature and human needs, let alone biodiversity. “Who needs animals when we have money?” is what I feel the people who run this industry thinks. They may make some publicity stunt to make them seem environment-friendly, but honestly, do they really care? They should. After all, animals, like us, just want to survive.

I think that the true evil behind this deviated method of agriculture originates from money. Everything in this world is all about money now. Why is industrial agriculture preferred over sustainable agriculture? It’s because it provides a higher income. Why do people support industrial agriculture rather than sustainable agriculture? That’s because the organic products are more expensive compared to the inorganic. People need to put aside money for once, and think about the bigger picture. Don’t take nature for granted, especially because it is so fragile.