Industrial Agriculture: Food Revolution or Farmland Welfare

Industrial Agriculture: Food Revolution or Farmland Welfare

Delton Quarles

DeVry University

Industrial Agriculture: Food Revolution or Farmland Welfare

Modern grocery shopping has become a pick and prod, mix and match free for all. Americans constantly find themselves attempting to diversify their palates, always looking for new foods or recipes to try, but where does all this food come from? In the documentary King Corn, former U.S. Agricultural Secretary Earl Butz states that the average American family only spends about 15% of their annual income on food (2007). Mr. Butz calls this low expenditure on food one of America’s best kept secrets, but what is the real cost of this inexpensive food? Agricultural industrialization threatens the health of Americans by valuing quantity over quality, through the unsanitary raising of slaughter animals, and with the genetic engineering of crops; the health of Americans would be better served if the government stopped subsidizing the surplus of #2 industrial corn and re-evaluated the country’s livestock production standards.

The industrial revolution for agriculture started to take hold of the American market in the 1940s; at this point in time most farms had replaced the traditional work animals found on farms with machines and chemical fertilizers (Windham, 2007). Up until this point the only farming that existed was totally solar powered. This natural way of farming required farmers to rotate their crops to ensure the health and productivity of the soil from one year to the next. Industrial agriculture practices circumvent this natural process through the use of nitrogen enriched chemical fertilizers; this technique allows great yields of the same crop to be planted year after year on the same plot of land (Pollan, 2006). After World War II America was undergoing what was then called a green revolution, which was described as the use of pesticides and new hybrids of crops brought on by technological advancements...