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Tue Jan 12, 2010 at 12:53:45 PM PST
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| Here's an op-ed from a South Dakota farmer I caught while on vacation. http://www.argusleader.com/art...
Here's my rebuttal. http://www.argusleader.com/art...
Note that I'm criticized for being anti farmer in my defense of "farming" against "producing," but that I reply by defending farmers.
In part I show agreement with the original: family farmers were greener than GMO. |
| Brad Wilson :: Industrial vs Sustainable, op-ed vs letter |
| The "utopia" argument has been used for decades against family farmers and organic farmers (as have the other arguments and claims about industrial farming as green). The claim is that hard nosed and scientific farmers see things correctly while soft, touchy feely farmers who emotionally value their way of life naturally miss the facts. (Does that sound like Mars vs Venus?)
There too, I argue that industrial ag is really the utopian (ie. emotional) system, albeit a dark utopia. Wendell Berry (chapter five of The Unsettling of America) critiques a February 2002 National Geographic article, "The Revolution in American Agriculture (with artist's rendering of the glass domed future farm, pp. 184-185 [similarly featured in a circa 60s Yearbook of Ag]). Paradigm shift at NG?
Under the artist's dome we see cows grazing on green floors upstairs in a high rise. On pp. 174-5 we see a photo of a giant Colorado Feedlot. Then in May 2002 National Geographic features "Food How Safe? How Altered? with almost the same photo of a Colorado feedlot pp. 18-19. |
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