Are We Eating Our Way Into A Crisis?
Did you know: the average American consumes 400 gallons of oil just to feed himself or herself each year?
Today’s industrialized agricultural system is taking a large toll on the environment. From the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, to the genetic engineering of seeds, to the way food is transported, our agricultural system is using vast amounts of fuel, depleting our soil, and damaging our waterways. As our food system has become more industrialized, it has increasingly come under attack from critics, who believe the current system is unsustainable.
Vast Amounts of Fuel Used in Every Stage of Food Production
Currently about 20 percent of the fossil fuels used in the United States goes toward food production, according to the non-profit Food & Water Watch. Vast amounts of oil and gas are used as raw materials in the manufacture of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
In addition, fuel plays a huge role in every stage of food production, from planting to irrigating to harvesting. Interestingly, the biggest percentage of fuel – about four-fifths – is used for transporting, packaging and storing food after it is produced.
As our food system has become more industrialized, it has increasingly come under attack from critics, who believe the current system is unsustainable.
Centralization Means More Miles to Travel
Over the last seven decades, the amount of fuel required to produce the food we eat has skyrocketed. In 1940, our farming system produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used (NY Times, Oct. 2008). Today, it takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food.
Mega Farm
s Increase Dependence on Oil
So why has our agricultural system become so fuel dependent? As farms become increasingly consolidated, small farmers are being put out of business. Armed with government subsidies in the billions of dollars, mega farms are growing mono-crops such as corn, soy, wheat and rice on ever larger tracts of land.
This industrialized approach to agriculture requires great amounts of pesticides and fertilizer. It has also created a more centralized food production system, forcing food products to be transported over great distances before reaching the supermarket.
Today, the average food item in the U.S. travels 1,500 miles from the farm to our plate.
Small Farms are Squeezed Out
The most recent $307 billion farm bill did little to change the status quo. It extended subsidies to large agribusinesses that rely on pesticides and feedlots, while allocating only a small percentage of funds toward local and organic food initiatives. Time Magazine called the legislation “a welfare program for the mega farms that use the most fuel, water, and pesticides; emit the most greenhouse gases; grow the most fattening crops; hire the most illegals and depopulate rural America.”
Chemical Fertilizers and Pesticides Make Their Way Into Our food and Water Supply
While synthetic fertilizers have been used since the 1920s, their use began to boom shortly after World War II, when the U.S. found itself with a surplus of ammonium nitrate, the main ingredient used to make explosives. The government asked munitions plants to begin manufacturing chemical fertilizers and pesticides from its bomb materials, giving birth to our industrialized farming system, where farmers were able to grow vast amounts of a single crop on the same tracts of land year in and year out. Pesticide use has increased 50-fold since 1950, with 2.5 million tons of industrial pesticides now being used each year.
What’s Leaching it’s Way Into The Water You Drink?
While this new form of agriculture has dramatically increased crop yields, it has also had a devastating effect on the amount of pollution in our water systems. As the use of pesticides has grown, our hydrologic systems have become increasingly contaminated.
With half the population getting its drinking water from ground water, pesticide contamination of our ground water has become an issue of national importance. Likewise, synthetic fertilizers leach into the water, pollute our lakes and rivers, and endanger fish and aquatic systems.
Chemical pesticides and fertilizers have been linked to a variety of negative effects on our health, from headaches to neurological disorders and cancer.
Soil Damage
Chemical pesticides and fertilizers also contaminate the soil. They can kill the micro-organisms essential to healthy soil, and strip the soil of the minerals and trace elements found in healthy crops. The corporate farming practice of planting vast amounts of the same crops such as corn, soy, rice or wheat year after year also depletes the mineral content in soil, while increasing farmers’ dependence on fertilizers. By contrast, rotating crops improves soil structure and fertility, while reducing the need for pesticides and fertilizers.
Corporate farming practices also contribute to soil erosion, which poses a huge problem because it can quickly turn fertile soil into barren land that’s unusable for agriculture. Although soil erosion occurs naturally as the result of wind and rain, industrial farming practices have dramatically increased the speed at which agricultural soils have eroded. Poor land management, overgrazing, chemical agriculture, mono-cropping, and deforestation have caused soil erosion and desertification on an unprecedented scale. The Food and Agriculture Organization, a branch of the United Nations, estimates that the global loss of land through erosion is 5 million to 7 million hectares per year.
And What Would You Like Served With That High Carbon Diet?
Antibiotic Use and the Inhuman Treatment of Animals
As farmers convert more land to commodity crops such as corn and soy, pasture-raised cattle have increasingly been taken off the land and confined in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), fed corn instead of grass, and pumped full of antibiotics to help them digest this food foreign to their systems.
Pigs and chickens, too, are warehoused together in CAFOs without room to move, pumped full of antibiotics to prevent disease, and given growth hormones to promote faster growth.
Today, 2 percent of livestock farms raise 40 percent of all animals in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Industrial farms often rely upon man-made lagoons containing gallons of animal waste, which leaches into the groundwater and contaminates waterways.
Genetically Engineered Crops
Another threat to our agriculture system is genetically modified food made from crops that have been given specific traits through genetic engineering.
First introduced into the market in the early 1990s, about 200 million acres of farmland worldwide are now used to grow genetically engineered crops such as cotton, corn, soybeans and rice, according to the non-profit group Sustainable Table. Genetically engineered ingredients have now found their way into 70 percent of processed foods in American supermarkets.
Proponents of genetically engineered foods say GE crops use fewer pesticides than non-GE crops. But opponents argue that GE plants require even more chemicals because weeds grow resistant to pesticides, leading farmers to spray even more pesticides on their crops. This causes environmental pollution, exposes food to higher levels of toxins, and changes the nutritious content of foods.
Another problem with genetically engineered crops is that it limits the crop diversity that’s critical to the continuing development of varieties resistant to new pests, diseases, and changing environmental conditions. Many major crop epidemics in human history have been attributed to a lack of genetic diversity.
In addition, windblown pollen from GE crops spread through nature and interbreed with natural organisms, contaminating non-GE environments in ways that can’t be controlled. These concerns have led consumers in some parts of the world to call for mandatory labeling laws of GE foods or even outright bans.
Foreign Producers Mean Less Oversight
Concerned about the health and environmental effects of industrialized food, more and more people have turned to crops grown organically without chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Consumer demand for organic agricultural products has increased steadily in the U.S., rising 20 percent or more annually throughout the 1990s, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Yet as organic foods have risen in popularity, they’ve increasingly become dominated by industrialized agriculture, which has centralized their production, diluted organic labeling standards, and relied on large amounts of fuel to transport organic food over long distances. About 40 percent of organic food is now produced in foreign countries, where there is often less oversight of organic food products and where food must travel thousands of miles to get to kitchen tables in the U.S.
Consumers are Looking for a Return to Basics
As large agribusiness operations create organic brands, some farmers and consumers have put an emphasis on eating food that is produced locally rather than eating certified organic food that is produced in a monoculture environment, and consumes vast amounts of fuel as it is shipped thousands of miles.
Through the use of farming techniques such as crop rotation, conservation tillage, raising animals on pasture, and natural fertilization, “sustainable farming” strives to produce food without harming the environment.
Sustainable farming is typically the domain of family farmers who conserve fuel consumption through environmentally-friendly farming techniques and by selling their crops locally to nearby grocery stores, restaurants and farmer’s markets. Nationwide, the number of farmer’s markets has more than doubled from 1,755 in 1994 to 4,685 in 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Some farms have also developed direct relationships with the food-buying public by forming Community Supported Agriculture groups or CSAs. CSA farmers sell subscriptions directly to buyers who pay a set fee each season in exchange for a weekly or monthly basket of produce, flowers, fruits, eggs, milk, meats, or other combinations of farm products. The number of CSAs in the U.S. has grown from just 50 in 1990 to more than 2,200 today, according to the non-profit web site Local Harvest.
Now is the Time to Act
The way we eat can have a great impact on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, creating a better place for generations to come, while improving our own health. Please explore the other parts of this site to learn more about how you can get involved.