A Regenerative Food System is Both a Means and an End

By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth

Continued intensification of the food system will lead to increased pressure on nature as well as the continued erosion of food culture.

Locals Unite to Stop Hog Farms From Polluting Their Community

By Wyatt Massey, YES! magazine

So Sue George organized her neighbors and created a legal document to protect her farm, and town, from the large-scale hog operations she said are destroying a way of life and polluting the environment.

‘Monster’ Turns Our Farmers into Serfs and Sharecroppers

By Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative

Industrialized agriculture prioritizes efficiency and quantity over human and ecological flourishing: it pushes farmers to plant more commodities over greater swaths of land,

To Beef, or Not to Beef, That is the Question (Act 1)

By Paul Alward, Resilience.org

In the recent debate about beef and it’s impact on the environment there are two views. There are those who view cattle as greenhouse-gas belching planet destroyers, while others depict them as benevolent carbon sequestration machines.

Catastrophe, Technology, Limits, and Localism

By Russell Arben Fox, In media res

Charles C. Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet, published earlier this year, is a fabulous book. Not a perfect book; sometimes, in order to bulk up this two-pronged thesis, he will throw in supplementary material that threatens to bog down his central investigation. But that investigation comes through loud and clear all the same, and it is one worth looking at closely.

How the Cult of the Colossal Imperils American Agriculture

By Gracy Olmstead, American Conservative

The ethos we’ve built around farming in the United States is broken. Rather than encouraging farmers to eliminate risk by diversifying their crops, pursuing sustainability, and embracing a proper scale, we’ve propped up a truly unsustainable style of production with subsidies and insurance programs.

Inefficient Productivity or Productive Inefficiency?

By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth

New research demonstrates – again – how deceptive the concepts of productivity and efficiency are in agriculture. Huge increases in labor productivity and modest increases in land productivity are gained by a massive increase of use of external resources, while natural capital is depleted. Is that efficient?

It’s Not the Grapes

By Brian Miller, South Roane Agrarian

The Cornish-Rock cross is an ideal partner for the vertical factory model — a model in which bird, agribusinessman, and illegal immigrant plant worker are tightly bound in the same machine that spits out soylent green parts for consumption by the masses. The model that provides cheap protein, provides cheap veggies, provides cheap clothing, provides a cheapened life….

Chemical Industrial Agriculture is Unsustainable. Here’s why

By Alice Friedemann, energyskeptic.com

Even without pesticides, industrial agriculture is doomed to fail from extremely high rates of soil erosion and soil compaction at rates that far exceed losses in the past, since soil couldn’t wash or blow away as easily on small farms that grew many crops.

‘Pesticide Powerhouses’ and the Future of Farming

By Eva Perroni, Sustainable Food Trust

Should they be approved, just three companies will control 65% of the world’s pesticide sales and 61% of the world’s commercial seed sales – the biggest agribusiness oligopoly in history.