Appreciating Natural Gifts

Agriculture

Appreciating Agriculture

Food

Appreciating Food

Appreciating Energy

Appreciating Time

Government

Appreciating Government

Education

Appreciating Education

Religion

Appreciating Religion

Business

Appreciating Business

Michael Specter, “The Extremist,” The New Yorker, April 14, 2003.  Pages 63-4

There aren’t many places today where cows roam free and chickens lay eggs on a haystack.  Less than two per cent of the American population is involved in producing food.  American agricultural technology has managed to transform farms into factories, and animals are, as Wayne Pacelle, a senior vice-president of the Humane society of the United States, put it in an op-ed piece that appeared recently in the Los Angeles Times, really nothing more than incredibly efficient “meat-, milk- and egg-producing machines.”  The only encounters many of us have with animals are when they appear on our plate.  Most of these animals never see a day of natural light or spend even an hour free with other members of their species.  Chickens live in a constant state of dismal twilight; the darkness makes them logy and encourages them to eat more and move less, both of which help them to grow more rapidly.  “That’s what the companies call feed conversion,” Marshall told me.  “It’s the amount of feed you need for the weight gain you want.  Obviously, you look to use as little food as you can.  That’s why you don’t want them moving around.  It just wastes a bunch of calories.”

Marshall took me to a nearby plot of land where he maintains more chicken sheds; they were occupied.  He pointed out the computer system that regulates the levels of heat, oxygen, and the nutrients in the food.  “We have to pay for it, and it’s a major expense,” he told me.  “But the companies push you to do it—because it’s better for them, more efficient, and it really turns raising these chickens into an assembly-line process.  We can program it for everything.”

Thin metal pipes that look like sprinkler valves run the length of each chicken shed.  When the chickens are thirsty, they can drink from these “water nipples.”  It’s a revolutionary thing,” Marshall said.  “You used to have to use a trough, and every other day you were in there for hours cleaning them.  They would get stopped up, and you would have to fix them or the chickens would die of thirst.” We went into one of the sheds—again, the smell was overpowering—and he explained that when the time comes to send the chickens to the factory, crews consisting of eight men show up with big trucks and tons of cages.  They drive the trucks right into the shed and put the cages on a forklift.  The they begin to herd, collect, and throw the chickens into the cages.  “They can get to throwing those birds around a bit,” Marshall said.  “It’s a tough job.”  I asked him if he misses the old days on chicken farms.  “Personally, of course I do.  It was nicer.  But as a business it’s hard to argue.  Factories are what work best in this country.  It’s sad that you can’t see chickens running around in the yard laying eggs.  We could raise them free range, but the mortality would be higher, and if you have more than two per cent mortality you lose money.  and nobody wants that.”

American meat produces have become remarkably specialized and economically adept.  Since the animals are seen as widgets, their welfare has never been much of a priority.  The guidance imperative is efficiency and economy, and of course you can raise many more chickens, pigs, and cows if you cram them into an aluminum shed or a crate rather than let them wander around the farm.  A pig living in a concrete crate that is two feet wide can’t move, and that’s the point.  In 1994, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, seventy-three per cent of the pigs raised in America were on small farms and twenty-seven per cent were on large industrial farms; by 2001, those figures had been reversed.

Litters are bigger and more frequent now, so industrial farms have to pack the animals in as tightly as possible.  Pigs have a four-month gestation period.  Before giving birth, the sows are moved from the gestation crates to farrowing crates, which have just enough extra room for the piglets to emerge.  When they are taken from the mothers— after three weeks—the sows are immediately impregnated again (through artificial insemination) and returned to their gestation crates.  On factory farms, any sow that isn’t pregnant or lactating isn’t doing her job.

Calves are usually taken from their mothers the day they are born.  The females are raised to replace dairy cows, and the males, since they can never produce milk, are raised for meat.  Most are killed for beef, but about a million are used for veal in the United States every year.  (The veal industry was created solely to take advantage of the large supply of unwanted male calves.)  Farmers pack them into crates so small that sometimes they can neither lie down nor turn around.  The calves are fed a milk substitute that is deficient in iron and fibre and is designed to make them anemic.  It is the anemia that produces the light-colored flesh for which veal is so highly prized.

Raising meat in America has become such an exact science that, through genetic selection and better knowledge of nutrition, researchers have been able to alter the physical composition of most of the animals we eat.  Poultry companies, for example, have reduced the time it takes a chicken to reach its final four-to-five-pound weight from seventeen weeks, in the nineteen-fifties, to six weeks today.

Bodley John. H.  Anthropology And Contemporary Human Problems.  California: 1983.  ISBN 0874846714, Page 49

Ecosystems modified by industrial civilization become much simpler, less efficient, and more unstable than those affected by tribal cultures.  Such differences sometimes result directly from contrasting subsistence systems.  For example, the ecological advantages of traditional, root crop shifting cultivation over intensive monocrop systems in tropical areas have frequently been noted (Geertz 1963; Rappaport 1971).  In their crop diversity and organization, swidden plots structurally resemble the rain forest ecosystem, and thereby utilize solar energy with great efficiency and minimize the hazards of pests and disease.

Page 55

Tribal systems have been described as if they were barely able to meet subsistence needs, and it has been assumed that tribal peoples faced a daily threat of starvation that forced them to devote virtually all their waking moments to the food quest.  This traditional view remained almost unchallenged until careful studies of productivity and time-energy expenditure in tribal societies revealed that even the most technologically simple peoples were able to satisfy all their subsistence requirements with relatively little effort.  It has been shown, in fact, that many of these societies could have produced far more food if they had been so inclined; instead, they preferred to spend their time at other activities, such as socializing and leisure.

Page 115

Paradoxically, Bangladesh is potentially a very rich agricultural land with excellent climate, abundant water, and fine alluvial soils.  Before the British arrived in 1757, the region (then called Bengal) supported a prosperous local cotton industry.  The peasantry was well able to feed itself because land was not privately owned and was not part of the market economy.  The British forcibly introduced cash cropping for export, first of indigo, and then of jute, and they made land a commodity to be individually owned.  Through a variety of legal and extralegal means, the peasantry was steadily deprived of the land.

Page 124

A factory farm is actually an extremely costly, sloppy, and inefficient attempt to replace nature with a very simplified, artificially maintained and subsidized machine.  Chemical fertilizers manufactured and transported with fossil fuels replace the tightly calibrated nutrient cycles of the natural ecosystem.  More chemicals and machinery control the weeds that in a swidden system are merely part of the restart mechanism and are shaded out as the successional pattern they initiate proceeds.  Plant geneticists working in laboratories replace the natural process of biological evolution based on natural selection and species diversity.  The delicate natural balances that prevent consumer species from overgrazing are eliminated by heavy application of chemical poisons.  Pollution and environmental deterioration are unintended direct by-products of industrial farming, because the exotic nutrients and insecticides do not fit into natural ecosystem cycles but instead merely pile up in unexpected places to block these cycles.  The massive use of chemical pesticides also has serious direct implications for public health, and has stirred widespread public concern and controversy on many occasions. Much of the energy and workforce needed to support an industrial food system is disguised by statistics that focus on farm labor and yields per acre....

Page 126

On a factory farm in the United States, potatoes can be grown as a successful monocrop only with the help of vast energy inputs to maintain correct soil conditions, moisture, and nutrients, and to control weeds, epidemic diseases, and insect infestations.  On the swidden sweet potato farm, all of these functions are carried out by the natural ecosystem, and by the diversity of the garden plantings, which imitates that natural system.  No irrigation or fertilizer is required on swidden plots, but factory potato farmers must apply chemical fertilizer constantly and in many areas must irrigate to maintain their high yields.

Andrew Kimbrell, Fatal Harvest.  California: Foundation for Deep Ecology, 2002. ISBN 1559639415, Page 2

It is generally agreed that an efficient farming system would be immensely beneficial for society and our environment.  It would use the fewest resources for the maximum sustainable food productivity.  Heavily influenced by the “bigger is better” myth, we have converted to industrial agriculture in the hopes of creating a more efficient system.  We have allowed transnational corporations to run a food system that eliminates livelihoods, destroys communities, poisons the earth, undermines biodiversity, and doesn’t even feed the people. 

All in the name of efficiency.  It is indisputable that this highly touted modern system of food production is actually less efficient, less productive than small-scale alternative farming.  It is time to reembrace the virtues of small farming, with its intimate knowledge of how to breed for local soils and climates;; its use of generations of knowledge and techniques like intercropping, cover cropping, and seasonal rotations; its saving of seeds to preserve genetic diversity; and its better integration of farms with forest, woody shrubs, and wild plant and animal species.

Andrew Kimbrell, Cold Evil. E.F. Schumacher Society lecture. Great Barrington,  MA 2002. 

Page 24 

Pig number 6707 was meant to be “super”—super fastgrowing, super big, super meat quality.  He was supposed to be a technological breakthrough in animal husbandry.  Researcher Dr. Vern Pursel and his colleagues at the U.S.  Department of Agriculture had used our taxpayer money to design this pig to be like no other, and to a certain extent they succeeded.  No 6707 was unique, both in his general physiology and in the very core of each and every cell.  For this pig was born with a human growth gene engineered into his permanent genetic makeup, one of hundreds of thousands of animals that have now been genetically engineered with foreign genetic material.  I met the pig and his creator over a decade ago while doing research for my book The Human Body Shop.  Pursel’s idea was to engineer human growth genes into livestock in order to create animals many times larger than those currently being bred.

Pursel’s pig did not turn into a super pig.  The human genetic material injected into the animal at the early embryo stage had altered its metabolism in unpredictable and horrifying ways.  By analogy, imagine injecting elephant growth genes into an early human embryo and the physiological changes that would accrue.  The human growth genes caused huge muscle mass in the pig, which made it crippled and bow-legged and riddled with arthritis.  The genes also made it impotent and nearly blind.  This deformed pig could not stand up and could be photographed in a standing position only with the support of a plywood board.  When I asked Pursel about his purpose in creating this pathetic creature, he responded that he was attempting to make livestock more efficient and more profitable.  As for his failure, he said that “even the Wright brothers did not succeed at first.”  My attempts to point out the difference between the pig and a machine (i.e., airplane) were met with an uncomprehending shrug.

Page 26

Pursel was motivated to genetically engineer no. 6707 by his belief in objective science, efficiency, profit and a mechanistic view of life.  These ideologies have also become the central dogmas underlying the technosphere.  They are modern credos born centuries ago of the minds of some of the enlightenment’s great thinkers.  I am not suggesting that animals researchers or other purveyors of cold evil have read up on their Descartes, Bacon, or Adam Smith.  Quite the contrary:  I believe that certain basic tenets of these philosophers have trickled down from the scientific and academic elite to become habits of thinking and perception for the general public.  These ideologies now go virtually unexamined, yet they provide the basic rationale for much cold evil.

Page 32

Perhaps the greatest impact of Cartesian mechanism is its creation of the cult of efficiency.  Efficiency—maximum output with minimum input in minimum time  -- is an appropriate goal for the productivity of machines.  Under the sway of mechanism, however, efficiency has metastasized over the past century into the principle virtue, not just for machines but for all life forms as well.  We have undergone a kind of mechano-morphism, turning all life into machines and then judging and changing life utilizing the mechanistic value of efficiency.  The effort to make humans more efficient began in earnest over a century ago when the eugenics movement became accepted public policy in the United states and led to the sterilization of thousands of the “unfit.”  The cult of efficiency was further forced on humans in the years prior to World War I by the pioneering work of U.S. mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, who began a managerial revolution to make workers more efficient in the newly developed assembly-line method of production.

Over the generations the tickle-down effects of the cult of efficiency have turned into a veritable flood.  Efficiency has become our number one unquestioned virtue.  A large part of our public and personal lives is constructed around this cult.  As a society we repeatedly urge efficient government, an efficient and productive work force, efficient use of natural resources, and efficient use of human resource (that’s us!).  Everyone is trying to become more efficient.  We have all become “multi-taskers,” using the best-selling minute-manager manuals for reference (surely The Nanosecond Manager will be a bestseller of the future).

Page 33

As demonstrated by the creation of pig no. 6707 the cult of efficiency is leading to enormous potential crimes against life.  The great philosopher Owen Barfield in his seminal work Saving the Appearances warned that “those who mistake efficiency for meaning inevitably end by loving compulsion.” Now the genetic engineers such as Pursel are literally remaking the genetic code of the world’s life forms in order to make them more efficient.  Humans are not to be spared, as indicated by a recent report with recommendations by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the National Science Foundation: altering the permanent genetic make-up of humanity to increase the “efficiency of performance” is now a top scientific priority.  Even as the doctrine of efficiency is becoming the dictate for biotechnology, nanotechnologists tell us that they will soon be rebuilding all matter, molecule by molecule, to make it more efficient.

As with the cult of objectivity, if the efficiency principle is applied to private life, it quickly turns into the ludicrous.  This should not surprise us, for efficiency is a machine value, not a life value.  Is a father to treat his children efficiently, giving them minimum food, affection, and “quality” time for maximum good behavior or academic performance?  Are we to treat our friends according to an efficiency calculation?  Do we treat our beloved pets on an efficiency basis?  Most pets produce nothing at all (my dogs specialize in spoiled rugs and chewed baseball gloves), but we lavish on the, our love and affection.  In fact, all these relationships are based not on efficiency but on empathy and love.  Yet the cult of efficiency has robbed much of our public life of the language of empathy.  Thus, the cold-evil cruelties of the workplace, slaughterhouse, and research laboratory overwhelm the values that could reform and heal them.

Page 47

If you think that there’s no difference between a river an a Buick—that they’re both just systems and the only questions is which is the more efficient one - then the only comfort you have is that things are as good as humans can make them.  If you believe in a given good, on the other hand, there is truly comfort, for there is a Creator who is inherent in the given good, in which we can participate and which is within us.

Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies. New York:  Cambridge University Press, 1988.  ISBN 052138673

Page 25

Fred Bateman (1969) has investigated changes in labor efficiency in the American dairy industry between 1850 and 1910.  There was no major technological breakthrough in this interval, but other changes took place.  One major shift was the widespread extension of dairying into the winter months.  Another was improvements in feeding.  Still a third was the addition of stricter sanitation requirements.  All of these added to the labor requirements of dairying, although yields did not increase proportionately.  The figures in Table 1 show that between 1850 and 1910 dairy output per unit of labor declined by 17.5 percent.

Page 98

Table 1.  American dairy labor efficiency, 1850-1910

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1 After Bateman (1969: 222).

Page 99

Gregory Johnson (1982) has shown graphically that as the size of a social group increases, the communication load increases even faster.  Information processing increases in response until capacity is reached.  After this point, information processing performance deteriorates, so that greater costs are allocated to processing that is less efficient and reliable.  At this point information processing hierarchies may be expected to develop (Johnson 1982:  394-5).

Page 107

Parkinson (1957) indicated bureaucratic self-serving to account for declining marginal returns on investment in hierarchical specialists.  However comforting to some, this is far too simplistic an explanation.  Bendix (1956) has compiled for private industry, in several nations, data similar to those Parkinson has uncovered in government.  He was able to show that a pattern of increasing hierarchical specialization characterizes the private sector as strongly as Parkinson has demonstrated for the public (Fig. 15).  Clearly in the private sector, where economic success depends on efficiency, this pattern cannot be attributed to self-serving inefficiency.  The reason why complex organizations must allocate ever larger portions of their personnel and other resources to administration is because (as discussed in Chapter 2) increased complexity requires greater quantities of information processing and greater integration of disparate parts.

Page 108

Although some authors (e.g. Schmookler 1962) believe that technical innovation responds to economic productivity, there are also data suggesting that technical innovation often occurs along a curve of declining marginal productivity.  Fig. 17 shows reductions in fuel consumption of steam engines resulting from increases in thermal efficiency, from the early eighteenth to the middle twentieth centuries.  In such a field, technical innovation slows down as returns for improvement diminish.  For the steam engine, the remaining possibilities of fuel-saving were reduced as thermal efficiency was increased.  A doubling of efficiency in this century would save much less fuel, per engine, than would a 10 percent increase in the eighteenth century, and the saving would be much harder to achieve (Wilkinson 1973:  144-5).

Zolotas has argued that the productivity of industrialism for producing social welfare is declining.  In partial support of this assertion he points out that while U. S. per capita product increased 75 percent from 1950 to 1977, weekly work hours declined by only 9.5 percent (Zolotas 1981:  92-3).

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Why does information processing often show a declining marginal return?  Why do investment in education, and in research and development, result in decreasing productivity?  The answers in both spheres are similar.

The case of education was touched on earlier.  Reiterating in brief:  general education, which occurs in the earliest years of life, is of the most lasting, widespread value.  It is also attained at the lowest comparative cost.  Later, more specialized training is considerably costlier.  Its benefits may apply only to narrow segments of the society, while its costs are spread throughout the system.  It may institutionalize rigidity where flexibility is called for.  What is more, the benefits of specialized training are at least partly attributable to the generalized education will obtain greater marginal returns on its investment than a society dependent on specialized training.

Page 112

The situation in research and development is similar.  As with education, specialized scientific knowledge depends upon prior, general principles.  Within a scientific field, early work develops the general parameters of the discipline, the nature of the subject matter, the scope of inquiry, broad research questions, and like scholars (Kuhn 1962, nevertheless there is also substantial derivation from it (Schwartz 1971:  43).  Thus, the product of early, generalized work in a scientific field includes all knowledge derived from later, specialized research, and so -- again axiomatically—specialized work can never yield the benefits achieved by earlier, generalized research.  It is no coincidence that the most famous practitioners historically in each field tend to be persons who were instrumental in developing the field, and in establishing its basic outline.  No Einsteinian physicist, no Darwinian biologist, and no Marxist social scientist will ever achieve the fame and influence of these masters who revolutionized their fields.

January 5, 2004 EDITORIAL OBSERVER – New York Times

Holstein Dairy Cows and the Inefficient Efficiencies of Modern Farming   By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Sixteen years ago, I met a Holstein cow named Juniper-Mist Bell Paula.  She lived in splendid solitude in a stone-walled paddock on a venerable Massachusetts farm. Bell Paula was, in fact, more chicken than cow. Her job was to produce eggs, not milk. Several times a year, she was given hormones that caused her to super-ovulate — to release many eggs instead of one. These were flushed from her, fertilized and implanted in receptor cows as near as the next stone paddock or as far away as China and Japan. The reason was Bell Paula’s milking record. At the time, an average Holstein in America — the ubiquitous black-and-white dairy cow —gave some 16,000 pounds of milk a year. Bell Paula could give 31,000 pounds a year when she was still being milked.

If Bell Paula represents one end of the Holstein spectrum — the long-lived queen of the hive, so to speak — the Holstein in Washington State that was found last month to be infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, represents something much closer to the middle. She was unusual only in the disease she carried. When it became clear that she was unhealthy, she was slaughtered. And, under a testing regime that was changed only last week, her carcass, once tested, was presumed to be safe and fed into the system, instead of being held until the test results were in.

There was nothing anomalous in that Holstein’s slaughter. Beef cattle and dairy cattle represent two different types of animal, but their fates are identical. What most Americans do not realize is that nearly every dairy cow eventually becomes either hamburger or the cheaper variety of steak when her profitability drops. Holsteins are frequently culled for slaughter when they are between 5 and 6 years old. When you figure that a Holstein first gives milk when about 2 years old, that means a productive life on the dairy farm of about three years. In that brief life span, everything is done to maximize yield, including the regular use of antibiotics and the feeding of high-protein concentrates of the kind that used to contain meat and blood meal from other Holsteins, a practice that has since been banned.

After poultry and pigs, the dairy industry has become one of the most concentrated forms of agriculture in America. The old mental picture of a herd of Holsteins standing hock-deep in pasture bears no relation to the way milk is produced in much of America. Some herds, especially in the West and Southwest, number in the thousands, which means the animals spend their lives in barns on cement where they are milked automatically, in some cases on huge rotating platforms that look like something out of science fiction.

For all their adaptability, even Holsteins can put up with only a certain amount of this. By the time they mature, at around 5 years old, many begin to break down from leg and foot problems. Dairy organizations distribute locomotion charts to help workers assess lameness, which can lead to reproductive failures — another reason for culling animals. Other cows begin to fail from the stress of carrying an udder that can weigh as much as a full-grown man. To prepare them for slaughter, the cows must be given time to get any residue — the word means traces of drugs — out of their systems.

As always, the goals of industrial agriculture create a perverse logic.  Instead of adapting the agricultural system to suit the animal, we try to adapt the animal to suit the system in order to eke out every last efficiency. We may take it for granted that dairy cows will eventually be slaughtered. But strange as it sounds, it makes greater financial, ethical and social sense if we subscribe to the cows’ notions of efficiency, which do not include living on concrete or eating anything but grass and grain, rather than to ours. The animals would be healthier, their milk would be better, and we would not have to worry quite so much about what was in our food.

At some point Americans will begin to judge agriculture not by its intentions but by its unintended consequences. The intention in the dairy industry has always been to streamline, modernize, automate, all in the interest of greater profits. But the consequence has been to concentrate power and money in the hands of a few, to drive down prices and to create a national surplus of milk that forces small dairy producers out of business. That, in turn, frees former dairy land for development, for suburban sprawl. The consequence has also been to breed an animal that can barely sustain the way she is forced to live.

The river of milk in America brings with it a river of ground beef made from dairy cows, a river that is almost impossible to inspect adequately in a deregulated industry. The problem isn’t just a concentration of meat.  It’s a concentration of political power that hamstrings any calls for closer inspection. The industry has been quick to point out that far more people die from salmonella and E. coli than from mad cow disease. That’s not exactly a reason to stand up and cheer.

It’s possible that the Washington State Holstein may have had the only case of mad cow disease we come across. But if so, it will have been luck rather than good planning. According to the philosophers at Cow-Calf Weekly, an online journal for the beef industry, “Perception is reality.” That’s the sort of thing one says when the reality is too unbearable to look at.

McKnight, John L.  “John Deere and the Bereavement Counselor” Page 169-70

The story begins as European pioneers crossed the Alleghenies and started to settle the Midwest.  The land they found was covered with forests.  With incredible effort they felled the trees, pulled the stumps, and planted their crops in the rich, loamy soil.

When they reached the western edge of the  place we now call Indiana, the forests stopped; ahead lay a thousand miles of the great grass prairie.  The Europeans were puzzled by this new environment.  Some even call it “the Great Desert.”  It seemed untillable.  The earth was often very wet, and it was covered with centuries of tangled and matted grasses.

With their cast iron plows, the settlers found that the prairie sod could not be cut and the wet earth stuck to their plowshares.  Even a team of the best oxen bogged down after a few yards of tugging.  The iron plow was a useless tool to farm the prairie soil.  The pioneers were stymied for nearly two decades.  Their western march was halted and they filled in the eastern regions of the Midwest.

In 1837 a blacksmith in the town of Grand Detour, Illinois, invented a new tool.  His name was John Deere, and the tool was a plow made of steel.  It was sharp enough to cut through matted grasses and smooth enough to cast off the mud.  It was a simple tool, the “sodbuster,” which opened the great prairies to agricultural development.

Sauk County, Wisconsin, is the part of that prairie where I have a home.  It is named after the Sauk Indians.  In 1673 Father Marquette became the first European to lay eyes upon their land.  He found a village laid out in regular patterns on a plain beside the Wisconsin River.  He called the place Prairie du Sac.  The village was surrounded by fields that had provided maize, beans, and squash for the Sauk people for generations reaching back into unrecorded time.

When the European settlers arrived at the Sauk prairie in 1837, the government forced the native Sauk people west of the Mississippi River.  The settlers came with John Deere’s new invention and used the tool to open the area to a new kind of agriculture.  They ignored the traditional ways of the Sauk Indians and used their sodbusting tool for planting wheat.

Initially the soil was generous and the farmers thrived.  Each year, however, the soil lost more of its nurturing power.  Within thirty years after the Europeans arrived with their new technology, the land was depleted.  Wheat

farming became uneconomic, and tens of thousands of farmers left Wisconsin seeking new land with sod to bust.

It took the Europeans and their new technology just one generation to make their homeland into a desert.  The Sauk Indians, who knew how to sustain themselves on the Sauk prairieland, were banished to another kind of desert called a reservation.  And even they forgot about the techniques and tools that had sustained them on the prairie for generations unrecorded.

And that is how it was that three deserts were created—Wisconsin, the reservation, and the memories of the people.

Bodley, John H.  Victims of Progress.  Mountain View: 1990.  ISBN 0874849454 Page 7

The most powerful cultures have always assumed a natural right to exploit the world’s resources wherever they find them, regardless of the prior claims of indigenous populations.  Arguing for efficiency and survival of the fittest, early colonialists elevated this “right” to the level of an ethical and legal principle that could be invoked to justify the elimination of nay cultures that were not making “effective” use of their resources.

Page 8

Members of the expanding culture rationalized as “natural” evolutionary processes that eliminated groups considered to be either culturally or racially inferior.  They thought this “selection” process was so natural and “inevitable” that nothing could prevent it....

Page 13

Development writers with tractors and chemicals to sell have expressed more ethnocentrism in their treatment of traditional economic systems than for any other aspect of tribal culture.  These writers automatically assume that tribal economies must be unproductive and technologically inadequate and therefore consistently disregard the abundant evidence to the contrary.  It has long been fashionable to attack the supposed inefficiency of shifting cultivation and pastoral nomadism and the precariousness of subsistence economies in general. 

But it could be argued that it is industrial subsistence techniques that are inefficient and precarious.  Mono-crop agriculture, with its hybrid grains and dependence on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and costly machinery, is extremely expensive in terms of energy demands and is highly unstable because of its susceptibility to disease, insects, and the depletion of critical minerals and fuels.  The complexity of the food distribution system in industrial society also makes it vulnerable to collapse because of the breakdowns in the long chain from producer to consumer.  In contrast, tribal systems are highly productive in terms of energy flow and are ecologically much stabler, while they enjoy efficient and reliable food distribution systems....

Page 16

Peoples who have already chosen their major cultural patterns and who have spent generations tailoring them to local conditions are probably not even concerned that another culture might be superior to theirs.  Indeed it can perhaps be assumed that people in any autonomous, self-reliant culture would prefer to be left alone.  Left to their own devices, tribal peoples are unlikely to volunteer for civilization or acculturation.

Page 147

After the initial depopulation suffered by most tribal peoples during their engulfment by frontiers of national expansion, most tribal populations began to experience rapid growth.  Authorities generally attribute this growth to the introduction of modern medicine and new health measures and the termination of intertribal warfare, which lowered mortality rates, as well as to new technology, which increased food production.  Certainly all of these factors played a part, but merely lowering mortality rates would not have produced the rapid population growth that most tribal areas have experienced if traditional birth-spacing mechanisms had not been eliminated at the same time.  Regardless of which factors were most important, it is clear that all of the natural and cultural checks on population growth have suddenly been pushed aside by culture change, while tribal lands have been steadily reduced and consumption levels have risen.  In many tribal areas, environmental deterioration due to overuse of resources has set in, and in other areas such deterioration is imminent as resources continue to dwindle relative to the expanding population and increased use.  Of course, population and increased use.  Of course, population expansion by tribal peoples may have positive political consequences, because where tribals can retain or regain their status as local majorities they may being a more favorable position to defend their resources against intruders.

Winner, Langdon.  The Whale and the Reactor Reactor : A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology .  University of Chicago Press: 1988.   ISBN 0226902110.  Page 26

The mechanical tomato harvester, a remarkable device perfected by researchers at the University of California from the late 1940s to the present offers an illustrative tale.  The machine is able to harvest tomatoes in a single pass through a row, cutting the plants from the ground, shaking the fruit loose, and (in the newest models) sorting the tomatoes electronically into large plastic gondolas that hold up to twenty-five tons of produce headed for canning factories.  To accommodate the rough motion of these harvesters in the field, agricultural researchers have bred new varieties of tomatoes that are hardier, sturdier, and less tasty than those previously grown.  The harvesters replace the system of handpicking in which crews of farm workers would pass through the fields three or four times, putting ripe tomatoes in lug boxes and saving immature fruit for later harvest.  Studies in California indicate that the use of the machine reduces costs by approximately five to seven dollars per ton as compared to hand harvesting.  But the benefits are by no means equally divided in the agricultural economy.  In fact, the machine in the garden has in this instance been the occasion for a thorough reshaping of social relationships involved in tomato production in rural California.

By virtue of their very size and cost of more than $50,000 each, the machines are compatible only with a highly concentrated form of tomato growing.  With the introduction of this new method of harvesting, the number of tomato growers declined from approximately 4,000 in the early 1960s to about 600 in 1973, and yet there was a substantial increase in tons of tomatoes produced.  By the late 1970s and estimated 32,000 jobs in the tomato industry had been eliminated as a direct consequence of mechanization.  Thus, a jump in productivity to the benefit of very large growers has occurred at the sacrifice of other rural agricultural communities.

Hightower, Jim.  Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times.  Cambridge, MA: Schenkman 1978. ISBN 0846705168 Page 2

The basis of land grant teaching, research, and extension work has been that “efficiency” is the greatest need in agriculture.  Consequently, this agricultural complex has devoted the overwhelming share of its resources to mechanize all aspects of agricultural production and make it a capital-intensive industry; to increase crop yield per acre through genetic manipulation and chemical application; and to encourage “economies of scale” and vertical integration of the food process.  It generally has aimed at transforming agriculture form a way of life generally has aimed at transforming agriculture from a way of lie to a business and a science, transferring effective control from the farmer to the business executive and the systems analyst.

On the one hand, this focus on scientific and business efficiency has led to production (and over-production) of a bounty of food and fiber products, and, not incidentally, it certainly has contributed to the enrichment of an agribusiness few.

On the other hand, there have been far-reaching side effects of the land grant college’s preoccupation with the “green revolution.”  As statistics indicate, and as visits to the countryside make clear, rural America is crumbling.  Not just the family farm, but every aspect of rural America is crumbling— schools, communities, churches, businesses and way of life.

Nye, David E. Consuming Power.  United States:  1998, ISBN 0262140632, Pages 120 and 191

Efficient harvesting, better food preservation, and more efficient marketing did not improve farmers’ incomes, however.  The last 20 years of the nineteenth century was a period of agricultural depression.  Commodity prices fell as a result of overproduction.  Many farmers were unable to meet mortgage payments and had to leave the land or become renters.  Farmers blamed railroads, middlemen, banks, and Wall Street for their plight, and through political organizations (notably the Populist Party) they called for nationalization of railroads, lower freight rates, better terms for their loans, funding for irrigation research, and more democratic control over corporations.  But the underlying problem of the 1890s was the success of farm production coupled with the development of the food-preservation industry....

Efficiency did not make farmers rich.  Despite dramatic increases in productivity, commodity prices, already low in the 1920s, fell even more during the Depression.  If one takes 1920 as a baseline, there was a decline in total farm inventory of 10 percent by 1940, despite investments in tractors, automobiles, and other energy-intensive technologies.  Even this grim statistic hides the desperate situation of many midwestern farmers in the Depression, who organized to defy foreclosures, dumped milk and other commodities in an attempt to force up prices, lobbied for government cost-of-production price guarantees, and got mortgage moratorium laws passed in some state legislatures.  The high productivity of mechanized agriculture was at the root of the problem.  Not only did yields per acre increase, but continual improvements in food processing eliminated waste, while the advent of tractors released one-quarter of the nation’s farmland that had been used to feed horses.

Paepkem Owen C.  The Evolution of Progress.  New York: 1993.  ISBN 0679415823 Page xviii

With the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, material progress quickly began to make up for lost time.  It has virtually defined the era.  Nations wax and wane; creeds and philosophies gain and lose favor; political and social structures evolve; but progress itself continues.  Despite the wars, natural disasters, political detours, economic dislocations, and other temporary setbacks that dominate the history texts, every generation has surpassed its predecessor, even in nations in relative decline.  Famine, never more than two bad harvests away before the nineteenth century, has been buried by mountains of surplus food in every advanced economy, with even India occasionally exporting grain.  The typical supermarket daily offers a wider selection than people of just a few generations past ate in a lifetime.  Houses with running water, refrigerators, more bedrooms than people, and other commonplace miracles have replaced dirt-floored hovels shared by three or more generations.  Improved health care has stretched life expectancies from less than fifty years in 1900 to more than seventy today.  Before railroads, people rarely left their home counties.  Many thousands now cross continents and oceans each day.  In 1900, not one student in ten earned a high school diploma, the presumptive minimum for entry into the workplace since World War II.  Telecommunication makes knowledge of events, still the dearest of commodities through the early nineteenth century, available worldwide, instantly, at little or no cost. Progress has been the only true status quo of the modern era.

This progress has transformed daily life not once, but repeatedly.  The much-pitied industrial worker of late Victorian England had already progressed far beyond the nobleman of the preceding century in many of the material aspects of life.  The nineteenth-century in many of the material aspects of life.  The nineteenth-century robber baron could only envy the diet, mobility, medical care, and general comforts and amenities available to the average American worker of the 1950s.  The present middle-class American, so often portrayed as a victim of the 1980s, lives better than even the wealthiest plutocrat of the 1920s.  these long-term improvements owe little to the clamor for reform and everything to the expanded output that progress has routinely delivered.  The productivity and technology of the nineteenth century deliver only nineteenth-century squalor, whenever and wherever they occur and however humanely their output is divided.

Page xix

Two centuries of material progress in many nations with sharply differing governments and cultures through countless economic cycles have etched an improving standard of living in the public’s mind as one of the few eternal verities.  Rising incomes, larger houses, and more and better things, all obtained with less effort, are the normal state of affairs, the baseline against which an economy’s actual performance is judged.  That complacency is unwarranted.  The current era of progress is over.  It will not return.

Page xxv

The growth of the 1980s, welcome as it was, did not mark a sustainable return to progress.  Productivity in the United States had been virtually unchanged since 1973.  Output has increased not because of improved efficiency of labor or capital, but because of increased amounts of capital and, particularly, labor.  This contributes little to the standard of living.  Indeed, average weekly earnings in constant dollars have actually fallen slightly since 1973.  These trends are utterly without precedent since these statistics have been compiled.  Not even the Depression produced such a prolonged loss of economic momentum.

Page 54

Real progress, on the other hand, stretches the boundaries of productive capacity.  The factors that govern such progress have little in common with those that govern economic cycles; indeed, the rate of progress may suffer from policies that produce short-term prosperity and vice versa.  A progress platform could promise years of sacrifice for important interests groups, with the uncertain benefits spread among the public at large over a span of decades. 

Few candidates seem eager to stake out that territory.  Most economists follow the politicians in neglecting the long term, in part because the forces of progress are alien to the standard economic models and cannot be manipulated with economists’ familiar tools.  Keynesian demand management, supply-side tax cuts, easy monetary policy, public works projects, and the like may stimulate output under the right circumstances, but the sustained rise in productive capacity over the last 250 years owes nothing to them.  Despite the attention lavished on such short-term policies, their role in deciding an economy’s output of goods and services pales in comparison to that of long-term progress: a jet airplane does not need full throttle to outdistance a Conestoga.

Material progress is, in any event, passing from the realm of politics into that of history.  Three forces—innovation, market expansion, and capital accumulation—produced and sustained it, and they are spent.  Any effort to understand the long-term trends must begin with an analysis of these forces and the limitations they are confronting.

Consider the beleaguered owner of a widget factory. The price his widgets fetch in the marketplace barely covers his labor, raw material, and capital costs.  Other widget makers, who incur about the same costs and whose widgets are comparable, undercut him when he tries to change more.  The need to end this “cutthroat” price competition has been floated more than once, but the effort falls apart almost before it starts, and he rightly suspects that the Justice Department would have taken a dim view if such an attempt had ever succeeded. 

He strives to eliminate waste and raise quality, but so do his competitors, with about equal success.  All too rarely, demand creeps ahead of supply, buyers cannot squeeze him so hard, and he is able to pad his margins.  Such respites are always brief.  Some competitor, either foreign or domestic, adds capacity, and margins fall again.  The profit on the books at the end of the year is little more than the owner could earn by selling the factory and investing the proceeds in securities.  It seems a poor regard for all the effort, risk, and sacrifice.

Page 55

His research and development department delivers one of two solutions:

(1)                 It has discovered an improved widget-making process that increases production using the same amounts of labor and material.  No one else has caught on yet, so the market price stays the same.  By barely shaving his price, the owner can sell the entire increased output.  The cost reduction is pure profit.

(2)                 It has enhanced the widget with a new feature that adds nothing to the cost of manufacture.  A patent blocks competitors from copying the feature immediately.  The customers complain and chafe, but most ultimately agree to pay more to obtain the added feature.  The higher price drops straight to the bottom line.

(3)                 For once, the owner has some breathing space. It will not last.  His profit arises from the loss of equilibrium in the market.  He sells more units, his competitors less.  His higher profitability allows him to expand capacity, win the close bids, or extend his distribution to build market share.  To survive, his competitors must respond in kind.  This creates a Wonderland existence, with every firm innovating as fast as it can just to maintain its place.  When enough competitors match the original innovation, equilibrium is restored.  Either (1) the price falls to the new lower cost of production, or (2) the new feature becomes standard on widgets selling at the old price.  In either case, profits return to their unsatisfactory pre-innovation levels, and the cycle starts anew.

The following table indicates the impact of such advances on farming efficiency.

4.1 U.S. FARM LABOR PRODUCTIVITY, 1925-86

In each instance, labor productivity has risen more than tenfold.  This rise had steadily reduced prices.  A bushel of wheat averaged $1.05 during the 1870s.  An equivalent price in the 1980s would have been about $12 per bushel, about three times the actual price. Enchantment of crops will continue.  Genetic engineering offers many of the same opportunities as cross-fertilization and cross-breeding, but with much greater speed and flexibility.

Page 92

Food production, once the dominant activity of society, has been permanently relegated to the margin.  The trends that produced this transformation are readily identified.  One was mechanization.  The subsistence farmer scratched the earth with a few hand tools and, if he was comparatively prosperous, an ox-drawn plow.  Contrast modern agribusiness.  A grain combine harvests more than one hundred acres of grain in a day, compared to about one acre for a man with a scythe.  Such combines, rare as recently as 1920, numbered more than a million in the United States by 1960.  Tractors represented nearly as great an improvement over horses for plowing.  Milking machines reduced the required labor per dairy cow fourfold.  Mechanization brought similar gains across a broad range of farming, ranching, and fishing activities.

Meanwhile, improvements on nature sharply increased output.  Chemical fertilizers are higher in plant nutrients and cheaper to apply than manure and other organic fertilizers.  Worldwide usage now exceeds 100 billion pound annually (about twenty pounds for each person on the planet), not only raising yields, but also reducing the need for crop rotation in advanced economies.  This allowed increased scale and specialization, but at the cost of providing a banquet for insects.  DDT and other organic insecticides greatly alleviated this problem after World War II.  But the largest improvements were in the crops themselves, as America began and then exported the “Green Revolution.” Semidwarf hybrid wheats, with thick, short stalks to support heavier heads of grain, replaced marquis wheat, itself a hardy Canadian hybrid, beginning in the 1960s.  Corn hybrids, almost unknown in 1930, were nearly universal by 1980. 

Fast-maturing, disease-and insect-resistant semidwarf rice hybrids followed in the 1960s.  Together, these advances have raised yields from threefold to tenfold over nineteenth-century levels.  Selective breeding has similarly doubled average milk production per dairy cow since the 1930s and halved the amount of grain consumed by chickens per pound of meat produced since the 1940s. Another doubling of agricultural productivity would now free only about 1 percent of the work force, producing a comparable gain in overall productivity. 

The same limitation increasingly applies to manufacturing:  improved productivity saves too little labor to provide much boost to the economy as a whole.  Thus, “brilliant productivity performers may actually be condemned by their ... achievements to “burn themselves out.’”  Through this process, stagnant sectors assume an enlarged role simply by remaining in stasis; hence the increasing relative importance of retail trade and of services generally in the United States and other advanced economies.  This shift dilutes the effect of any continuing advances in the most progressive sectors.

Page 183

Progress is not produced by and can scarcely be affected by economic policy.   In the past, innovation, market expansion, and capital accumulation could be relied upon to reduce the labor and other inputs needed to produce a given output.  Those forces are large spent, and the progress they generated has limited the scope available for further productivity gains.

Agriculture is the paradigm.  The rising productivity of American farmers provided the labor needed for manufacturing and other expanding sectors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  But ever-increasing efficiency has since reduced the economic role of farming to virtual insignificance.  Another doubling of agricultural productivity would now free only about 1 percent of the work force, producing a comparable gain in overall productivity.  The same limitation increasingly applies to manufacturing:  improved productivity saves too little labor to provide much boost to the economy as a whole.  Thus, “brilliant productivity performers may actually be condemned by their ...  achievements to ‘burn themselves out.’” Through this process, stagnant sectors assume an enlarged role simply by remaining in stasis; hence the increasing relative importance of retail trade and of services generally in the United States and other advanced economies.  This shift dilutes the effect of any continuing advances in the most progressive sectors.

Page 184

An era’s living symbols of wealth speak volumes about its defining values and dynamics.  Stanford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford, for all their flaws, built fortunes out of railroads, oil, steel, and factories, the vehicles of  progress for their age.  consider some of the comparable symbols of the 1980s:

Michael Milken, Henry Kravis, Donald Trump, Joseph Flom, Joe Jamail, and even Michael Jackson.  Their fortunes arise not from building or making, but from manipulating.  Carl Icahn was no expert in railcar leasing, textiles, or airlines, as events quickly proved.  But he had few peers in redirecting existing wealth and income from others to himself and those aligned with him.

This is “the ‘rent-seeking’ society, in which the tax lawyer and the political lobbyist have replaced the inventor and the engineer and the entrepreneur’s main instruments toward higher profits.  Agriculture, manufacturing, and construction have occupied steadily smaller portions of the civilian work force since 1970.  Meanwhile, the number of new law-school graduates in the United States roughly doubled during the 1980s.  Accountants, investment  advisers, stockbrokers, and real estate agents have also multiplied.  These are typically people of considerable energy and intellect, “diverted from productive contribution in pursuit of their share of the available pool of rent.  The damage they do while rent seeking, although considerable, is less troubling than the loss of their talents from the tasks of production and progress.

Rodes, Barbara K., and Rice Odell.  A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations. New York:  1992. ISBN 0801857384, Page 41, Quote 13.

We used to be hunter-gatherers, now we’re shopper borrowers.

                -- Robbin Williams  -- Earth Day Special, ABC-TV, 4/22/90

Bodley John. H.  Anthropology And Contemporary Human Problems.  California:1983.  ISBN 0874846714, Page 118

The food systems of industrial nations represent an enormous advance in the evolutionary progress and a proportionate loss in long-run adaptive success.  The primary distinguishing feature of these systems is their fossil fuel energy subsidy, which permits very high crop yields for very low inputs of human energy.  Other critical aspects are the extreme complexity of the production-consumption chain, and the tendency to increase the per capita energy and resource cost of food consumption through expanded dependence on synthetic and highly processed foods and inefficiently produced animal protein. 

These systems are not only far more costly in terms of per capita demands for energy and resources, but they are unquestionably more frail than tribal systems, they demand much more intensive ecosystem management, and they have greater potential for environmental deterioration.  Perhaps, most critically, they can clearly not be sustained at present rates of increase or even at present levels unless they are radically restructured.  It is also very doubtful that, if such systems diffuse, they could be supported at all on a global basis, given present population levels.  These are critical issues because the present strategy for solving the world food crisis not only ignores the fact that many of the problems are inherent features of state-level cultures based on intensive food production systems, but also makes the dangerous assumption that industrial food systems will feed the world if only they can be established everywhere.

Worster, Donald. Human Ecology. The Wealth of Nature.  New York:  Oxford University Press, Inc., 1993.  ISBN 0195076249, Page 89

In an earlier America of extensive rural poverty and poor living conditions more could be said for the vigorous pursuit of wealth in the marketplace, just as more may be said for it today in Bangladesh or Haiti.  But when that pursuit persists beyond the point of material sufficiency, when it becomes a dream of unlimited economic gain, troubles follow.  That is what has happened to American farmers and indeed to this country in general.  Farmers must run their machines nonstop to keep up with the self-aggrandizing industrialist.  The faster farmers go, the more crops they harvest, the more secure their position in the marketplace may be, the more they can buy—so they hope.  But what they win in that way lasts only for a brief while.  A continual uncertainty is their fate in this society.

The average farmer is not altogether responsible for this predicament.  He did not set up the race, and he is not leading in it but is somewhere back in the pack, straining to catch up with corporate presidents, athletes, lawyers, movie stars, and engineers.  The modern farmer lives in an intensely high-pressure world of many wealth maximizers.  In the milieu, growing food becomes his only defense, his sole means of competing for social position.  Unfortunately for him, food has been a comparatively poor basis for income growth, for it quickly saturates its market: humans can eat only so much lettuce or beef.  Unlike others in the race, the farmer must always confront the biological limits of the consumer.  He cannot make more money without finding more mouths and bellies to feed.  Agriculture, by its very nature, is a productive activity that deals primarily with real human needs, not the contrived wants around which the game of maximization revolves.  That difference must inescapably put the farmer at a disadvantage.

Sikorski, Wade.  Modernity and Technology: Harnessing the Earth to the Slavery of Man, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993, Page 67

Both the farmer and the consumer are revealed as the Reserved by the food industry—the consumer because her consumption is a thing to be manipulated and controlled by advertising technology, the farmer because her craft is measured by its usefulness to the food industry.  “Inefficient” farmers go broke and become surplus farmers.  The ugly truth of the farmer as Reserved by the food industry is best revealed by President Reagan’s joke that we should keep the wheat and export the farmers.

Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics Illinois, 1972:  ISBN 0202010988, Page 21

The Bushman figures imply that one man’s labor in hunting and gathering will support four or five people.  Taken at face value, Bushman food collecting is more efficient than French farming in the period up to World War II, when more than 20 percent of the population were engaged in feeding the rest. 

Confessedly, the comparison is misleading, but not as misleading as it is astonishing.  In the total population of free-ranging Bushmen contacted by Lee, 61.3 percent (152 of 248) were effective food producers; the remainder were too young or too old to contribute importantly.  In the particular camp under scrutiny, 65 percent were “effectives.” Thus the ratio of food producers to the general population is actually 3:5 or 2:3.  But, these 65 percent of the people “worked 36 percent of the time, and 35 percent of the people did not work at all”!  (Lee, 1969, p.  67).

For each adult worker, this comes to about two and one-half days labor per week.  (“In other words, each productive individual supported herself or himself and dependents and still had 3-1/2 to 5-1/2 days available for other activities.”)  A “day’s work” was about six hours; hence the Dobe work week is approximately 15 hours, or an average of 2 hours 9 minutes per day. Even lower than the Arnhem Land norms, this figure however excludes cooking and the preparation of implements.  All things considered, Bushmen subsistence labors are probably very close to those of native Australians.

Martinez Alier, Juan., and Klaus Schlupmann.  Environmental Policy. Massachusetts:  1987. ISBN 0631171460, Page 3

The productivity of agriculture has not increased, but decreased, from the point of view of energy analysis.  This does not mean that a new criterion of economic efficiency, such as energy return to energy input, should be introduced, which would be substituted for the usual criterion of economic efficiency.  It is a fact, for instance, that different agricultural products have use values which are not always related to their energy content, and even less to their energy cost, but rather to their protein or vitamin content, or simply to the pleasure to be gained by eating or drinking them.  Nevertheless, such studies of the flow of energy in agriculture show that it is not appropriate to analyse economic growth in terms of an increased productivity of agriculture (said to be based upon technical progress or upon the development of productive forces) which, because of the relatively low income-elasticity of demand for agricultural produce, frees labour to other sectors of the economy.

Lehman, Hugh.  Rationality and Ethics in Agriculture. Idaho:  1995.  ISBN 0893011797, Page 150

Definition 2 also stipulates that a sustainable production system must be efficient.  Efficiency is a matter of degree.  A system can be more or less efficient.  Further, to speak of efficiency is virtually meaningless unless we are told the respects in which the system should be efficient.  Should the system be efficient in the use of land or other natural resources?  Should the system be efficient in the use of human labor?  Should the system be efficient in the use of energy? Perhaps, the stipulation that the production system be efficient reflects the assumption that resources essential for production are in limited supply.  Eventually they will be used up, and at that point in time production would have to be discontinued.  Given this assumption, we can agree that a production system would be sustainable for the longest possible time if it were efficient in its use of essential resources.  For this reason, we would agree that a sustainable production system would be efficient in this respect.

However, in contexts of discussions of modern agriculture, the term “efficiency’ normally has other connotations.  In my discussions with agricultural scientists who use this term, I get the impression that they regard one system as more efficient than another if the former system yields relatively more income for every unit of costs.  In other words, the term “efficiency” when used in discussions of agricultural matters, normally connotes economic efficiency.  Further, the time frame over which the system is economically efficient is usually not specified. Now, as he has often been pointed out, a production system can be economically efficient for a period of time while it is rapidly consuming or dissipating resources which are essential for long-term functioning of the system.  Thus, an agricultural production system can be both economically efficient and relatively non-sustainable.  If the term “efficiency” is understood to mean economic efficiency then, I do not agree that efficiency is essential to sustainability.  A sustainable production system could operate in ways that are not economically efficient given

prevailing economic circumstances.

Busch, Lawrence.  Science, Agriculture, and the Politics of Research. Colorado: 1983.  ISBN 0865312257, Pages 229 and 246

The agricultural sciences developed as part of the expansion of colonial empires and the shift from subsistence to capitalist farming.  This origin had the effect of institutionalizing the goal of increased productivity as a central theme in agricultural research.  Over the years, increased productivity came to be seen as an end, rather than as a means.  Even today, productivity often remains an unchallenged and paramount goal for agricultural research....

Some years ago a noted agricultural scientist wrote: “In our investigations we still stress too much the goal of increased productivity as our great task.  We still have too much faith in knowledge of the physical and biological facts and principles as all sufficing.  There should be searchings of heart as to our policies and programs.  Are they adequate to the needs of the new epoch?”  We believe that this question, raised by Kenyon Butterfield in 1917, (1918:54) is still valid today.

Beresford, Tristram.  Limits of Efficiency.  1974, Page 6

The current idea of agricultural efficiency, which is fashionable today that is to say makes the headlines, hits the viewing peaks, sells the gadgetry, and commands popular respect, -- appears to me to rest on three propositions:   one, that farming is not a primary industry, but a disguised secondary one, concerned with objects, things, artifacts, and therefore just another industrial process; two, that since properties of these objects are ascertainable by analysis, we can practise agriculture as if it were a scientific discipline; three, that because one and two are self-evident truths, there is no room in the farming of tomorrow for anyone who thinks differently.

Lovins, Amory B., L. Hunter Lovins, and Marty Bender. “Energy and Agriculture”. Pages 68, 69, 73 and 80

If we look at just the agricultural production consumed within the United States, slightly more than three calories of energy are invested per calorie of food obtained.  When the energy costs for processing, distribution, and preparation are added onto the three calories, the total energy cost is about 9.89 calories of energy per calorie of food consumed in the United States ....

In contrast, the food systems of the rural populations of developing nations use an estimated 16.4 quads annually to feed about two billion people with a diet ranging from 1,800 to 2,400 calories per person daily (such diets contain much less meat than ours).  This 16.4 quads is less than one-tenth of what the same number of people would consume were they utilizing the food system of the United States ....

About forty million tons of fertilizer are applied to America’s fields each year—approximately 330 pounds for each person in the country ....

At present, much of American farming and forestry is little more than a mining operation.  A massive biomass fuels program that simply serves to put greater pressure on overstressed land would not only risk crushing a budding energy program but could also pull down much of American agriculture.  Renewable must mean sustainable in the very long run.  No biomass program can long endure unless it is based on the preservation and enhancement of soil fertility, water quality, and the biotic community on which agriculture depends.

Mason, Jim.  An Unnatural Order.  New York:  1993.  ISBN 0671769235, Page 271

When we look at the imbalance of power and wealth in the world, we see clearly that the most dominionistic societies have the lion’s share of both.  This, of course, leaves less for the countries whom they exploit, so we have a burgeoning world underclass.  Our notion of “modern progress” is either cruel or moronic when our “development” has created more people poor and hungry today than ever before in history.  If this sounds like a sweeping statement, just think for a minute:  This earth didn’t even have a billion people until the early 1800s.  Even then, not a fifth were poor and hungry because people in those days still had access to land and the means to produce their own food.  Go back further—before agriculture, which is though to have fed more people. 

Tribal forager peoples did not suffer massive famines and chronic starvation.  They may have had a bad season and lost some weight, but they did not go hungry year in and year out.  We know this from archaeological evidence, from bones, teeth, and other remains, which reveal no signs of the malnutrition and wasting diseases we see today in the children of the poorest countries in Africa, India, and Asia.  We know this, too, bec