Conventional Agriculture, Industrial Farming, Monocultures, The Way We Should Farm?
Recently in Advisory we’ve been studying about agriculture. At first, I thought the movie Fresh was going to be about the freshness of food and where they came from. When I finally saw the movie Fresh, I started to think about the food I ate everyday, where it came from and how it was processed. I know that many people don’t really care or pay attention to where their food came from, but they should think about that. They should also think about the damage of conventional agriculture and industrial agriculture. After doing this study, I think that most foods should be natural and unprocessed instead of doing anything to get the most abundance of food. It is much healthier than most foods we get at the supermarket. Foods should also be natural because the way that the monoculture factory farms farm is detrimental to the animals, plants, and the environment.
One thing that I know for sure about agriculture is that factory farms produce unnatural foods and the animal and plants are not healthy in those farms. Now I studied my share of agriculture and I believe that monoculture farms will disrupt nature by harming the environment. Animals and plants grown naturally would save the environment because of how they are grown. Animals would be being fed what they eat naturally and put into their natural environment rather than eating feed with antibiotics and being put in factory farms. Plants would not be sprayed with pesticides. Personally, it’s funny to me how people don’t notice where their food came from and factory farms are continuing what they are doing when its causing so much pollution and suing so much energy.
I did some research on agriculture. I came across some annotations about the movie: Fresh. This movie provided a lot of information and opinions on agriculture and farming. Some people felt that monoculture, conventional, and industrial farming were very dangerous to the animals, crops, and the environment. “It’s all about maximum short run production efficiency. Like a factory process. When you find something that works well then we continue to use it because it works so well. Then we say we begin ti apply the same kind of paradigm, the paradigm of industrialization: specialization; standardization; economies of scale. We begin to apply it to everything. And it doesn’t work on everything. ” This statement didn’t surprise me as much because I have seen a lot of this in current society. However, It did make me feel a bit angered because no force is large enough yet so most conventional farming, industrial farming, etc. would be a minority of how this country would farm.
In another source that I looked at, “Fresh” there was this one statement that made me nod my head in agreement with Joel Salatin. It was: “If your committed to healing the land, then you do something different. If you look at nature as the template, and look at the pattern and say: how can we most closely approximate this? Let’s treat the herbivore like the herbivore first and then other things will fall into place.” This is so true because if you disturb the natural and rural world, you would disrupt their natural process which would ultimately lead to the destruction of the animals and the environment. Industrialization of farming would change nature and would genetically alter it to the industry’s liking.
All of this makes me think that technology can change the world in a worse way rather than progressing. Everything is being genetically altered and the environment is being damaged. The food made from the farms are losing their nutrition and is more unhealthy. The rivers and land are being polluted and so much energy is used for the monoculture farms. No one knows what change and damage could be done if this continues.
