녹색혁명과 공업형 농업의 성장

So one thing that many people may not be aware of is when this whole “industrial farming” thing really took hold here in the US (and across the world). The answer is that industrial farming became what it is today mostly between the 1940s and late 1970s, during what’s called the “Green Revolution.”

The Green Revolution gave rise to many of the modern farming practices that we now associate with industrial agriculture*, including:

• Large Scale – many hundreds or thousands of acres
• Monocropping (or Monoculture) – growing a single crop year after year
• Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) – genetically engineered seeds that produce higher yields than traditional seeds (in the presence of agrichemicals and irrigation)
• Agrichemicals – synthetic fertilizers and pesticides
• Large Scale Irrigation – heavy water use and growing crops in otherwise unsuitable regions
• High Mechanization – replacing people with huge machines

That’s not to say that all of these things originated during this time period (synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, for instance, were first produced in the early 1900s), but they really came into their own and became more or less the standard way of doing things. The result was that a large number of small, independent farms were replaced by a much smaller number of huge, industrial ones. From 1945 to 1975, the number of farms in the US dropped from approximately 6 million to about 2.5 million. And the number of people working on farms went from 20 million in 1950 to just half that in 1970.**

At the time, this seemed like a tremendous boon for the US and mankind in general. It allowed us to produce a lot more food much more cheaply, which allowed us to feed a lot more people. And this no doubt was a huge benefit of the Green Revolution, especially in developing countries like India that were on the brink of famine when industrial farming was introduced.

But what wasn’t fully appreciated at the time was all the damage this new way of farming would do to both the environment and our health. We’re just now starting to feel the negative environmental effects of many years of industrial farming in the form of heavily depleted water reserves, reduced biodiversity and degraded soil qualities (due to monocropping), the accumulation of toxic pesticides in ground and surface waters, and the runoff of synthetic fertilizers into rivers and ultimately estuaries (which, in the case of Midwestern farms feeding into the Mississippi, has resulted in a large “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico where aquatic life cannot survive).

The negative impact on our health comes from a number of factors, including:

• Industrial produce and processed foods (which are the end result of many industrial crops such as corn and soy) often come with fewer micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, etc.) and less nutritional balance (too many simple carbs in the form of sugar, for instance).
• Having a surplus of cheap, often very processed food has led to the obesity epidemic, which is resulting in increased levels of Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, metabolic syndrome, and other diseases.
• High levels of pesticides found in some industrial crops may be increasing the likelihood of cancer, although more research needs to be done to prove a definitive link.

Over the last couple of decades, growing awareness of these “hidden costs” of industrial farming has given rise to the organic movement, sustainable farming, and the local food movement, all of which we’ll be discussing in more detail soon. These are positive developments, and we’re doing our best to support them here at Dig Inn.

This is not to say that we view industrial farming as an evil thing in and of itself, and we do not believe that the founding fathers of the Green Revolution were ill-intentioned. Rather, we view industrial farming as just one step in the evolution of our food system (albeit a step that we seem to be stuck on for a bit too long). As we become further aware that industrial agriculture comes with certain costs and is ultimately not sustainable for the planet or mankind, it is our responsibility to make adjustments and further evolve our way of doing things, which many organic, sustainable, and more responsible conventional farmers are doing these days.

However, we can’t say that we’re big fans of the large companies who own industrial farms and continue to practice techniques that they know are bad for the environment and our health. And this is why we do our best to find and support smaller, local farms who are doing more things the right way and are committed to further evolving their farming practices as new, more sustainable methods become practical and economical.

* Please note that for the purpose of this post, I’m going to focus on industrial crop farming and ignore industrial livestock raising (what we like to refer to as “factory farming”), which we’ll discuss later in a separate post.

** Source: US Dept. of Commerce & USDA via Living History Farm.