Small farms
Sustainable farming
Small farms fit
References
http://journeytoforever.org/farm.html
Small family farms are the
backbone of a community, a nation, and of society as a
whole. A landscape of family farms is settled, balanced
and stable, and generally sustainable. It's the natural
shape of society on the land. Such communities aggregate
into strong and secure nations.
But it's difficult to find a government that thinks that
way, now or ever: the history of small farms presents a
fantastic picture of neglect and abuse. Maybe the family
farming landscape just doesn't offer enough opportunity
for the rich and powerful, and the greedy.
Compare Rome before the Punic Wars, built on a bedrock
of independent yeoman farmers, with Rome after the wars,
the small farms swallowed by big estates owned by nobles
and worked by slaves, a mighty empire with cancer at its
heart, inevitably to fall.
"The original strength of Rome, like that of China, was
that of a superior family-agriculture." -- "Restoration
of the Peasantries" by G.T. Wrench, Chapter 4 -- The
Second Agricultural Path
"If, by some magic, we could transport ourselves back to
the days of the early Latin farmers, we should see a
picture of a well-populated countryside with the land
divided up into a number of small farms, often not
exceeding five acres in extent." -- "Reconstruction by
Way of the Soil" by G.T. Wrench, Chapter 2 -- Rome
Now it's industrialization that collapses rural
economies, driving the farmers into factories and city
slums, fodder for economic growth and a "development"
that turns a country from food self-sufficiency to a
producer of commodities with massive food import bills,
an economic success story that can be wrecked by a run
on the foreign exchange market.
The cancer at the heart of today's mighty industrial
empire is the ruin that this woefully unbalanced
landscape is wreaking upon both the natural and the
social environment. It's not sustainable, by any
measure, as everybody knows.
"Global Agricultural Survey Shows Nearly Half of Farm
Soil 'Seriously Degraded'" -- Associated Press, May 22,
2000. Detailed satellite photos of the Earth's land mass
and other data are helping scientists at the
UN-affiliated International Food Policy Research
Institute determine the state of global agriculture.
Their conclusion: nearly 40% of farmland is seriously
degraded. Soil erosion, loss of organic matter,
hardening of soil, chemical penetration, nutrient
depletion, excess salinity and other damage have left
much of the world's potential and previous agricultural
land unusable. The research covers only human-induced
degradation. See Land Degradation In The Developing
World: Issues and Policy Options for 2020:
http://www.ifpri.org/2020/briefs/number44.htm
The 1999 report on the University of Wisconsin-Madison's
ongoing 37-year project monitoring the effects of
nitrogen fertilisers in the US concluded that
agriculture's continuing overapplication of nitrogen
fertilizers is causing irreparable damage to the soil.
It said US farms have "a 50% applied nitrogen efficiency
rate" -- only half the nitrogen applied to the soil is
actually used by the crop. The other half becomes
harmful nitric acid. They said three decades of such
overuse of nitrogen has destroyed much of the soil's
fertility, causing it to age the equivalent of 5,000
years. -- "Acidification From Fertilizer Use Linked To
Soil Aging":
http://www.cals.wisc.edu/media/news/03_99/acid_soil.html
"Crops without profit", New Scientist, 18 December 1999
-- Low-cost food, the great achievement of postwar
high-input intensive farming, may be an illusion. The
most detailed study yet of the industry's wider balance
sheet has found the costs of cleaning up pollution,
repairing habitats and coping with sickness caused by
farming almost equals the industry's income. The true
cost of £208 per hectare is double the amount suggested
by previous, less detailed, studies of the costs in
Germany and the US. But the survey's chief author, Jules
Pretty of the Centre for Environment and Society at the
University of Essex, describes this figure as "very
conservative". Environmental economists say the findings
suggest the need for a radical rethink of Europe's
farming policy.
http://www.biotech-info.net/crops_without_profit.html
An assessment of the total external costs of UK
agriculture, J.N. Pretty, C. Brett, D. Gee, R.E. Hine,
C.F. Mason, J.I.L. Morison, H. Raven, M.D. Rayment, G.
van der Bijl, Agricultural Systems 65 (2) (2000) pp.
113-136 -- this paper was this peer-reviewed journal's
second-most-popular download of the year. The report:
http://www2.essex.ac.uk/ces/ResearchProgrammes/
Externalities/AgSystTotalExtCostsUKagri.htm
"European Union Goes Organic to Tackle BSE Scare",
February 13, 2001 (ENS) -- Organic farming is at the
heart of a seven-point plan announced by the European
Commission to tackle the continent's BSE (mad cow
disease) crisis. The Commission called for a move away
from industrial farming and increased support for
extensive, organic agriculture. "The BSE crisis
demonstrates the need for a return to farming methods
that are more in tune with the environment," EU Farm
Commissioner Franz Fischler's proposal said. The UK's
Soil Association estimates that demand in the UK for
organic food is growing by more than 40% a year and much
of Europe is following the same trend.
and much, much more
...........
http://journeytoforever.org/farm.html
The English Peasant and Agricultural Labourer
German Colonies: The Mandates
Russia, South Africa, Australia
Farming in the United States of America
The Small Farm
