Name 12th Grade Reading Comprehension
very heart of agriculture, has the capacity to
Is Big Agriculture Progress?
American agriculture has become increasingly
dominated by large companies like Archer-Daniels
Midland (ADM), Cargill, and Monsanto, and the
number of people working in agriculture has been
cut in half since 1946, as agriculture becomes
increasingly mechanized. Modern American
agriculture is said to be increasingly productive,
having increased about 5 percent every year since
1990. It is said that on an average, every individual
working in agriculture today produces enough food
to feed nearly 100 people. But if everything is going
so well, then why have the past decades seen such
a rise in agriculture activists decrying the small family
farm and advocating for locally produced foods?
In his essay “Six Agricultural Fallacies,” written in
1985 and published in a collection of essays entitled
Home Economics, Berry disagrees with the idea that
agriculture “may be understood and dealt with as
an industry.” He cites multiple reasons. He says that
agriculture deals with living, biological systems; while
the small farmer is a nurturer and is therefore
concerned with the quality of the lives that he
affects, big agriculture, on the other hand, focuses
only on quantitative things like productivity,
efficiency, and profitability. He adds that soil, the
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regenerate, and thus “live” on indefinitely, while
industry is comprised of tools and technologies that
invariably wear out and need to be replaced. In his
opinion, the family farm is superior because it is not
just a farm; it is a family’s home, and they are
therefore completely invested not just in its
profitability, but in its health and longevity. Finally, he
reminds us that while agriculture is an investment in
the land, industry characteristically extracts —
taking, and taking, and taking from a resource until
it is not just unhealthy, it is exhausted.
Twenty years after Berry was taking exception to
the trends in modern agriculture, they have not
improved, and a new generation is speaking out
against many aspects of our current food system.
One spearhead of this movement is Michael Pollan,
author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism
at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
Pollan’s writings touch upon the problems with
modern agriculture, but they do so from more
personal and cultural points of view. In his book The
Omnivore’s Dilemma, he shines a light on the
distance that most of us now have from the sources
of our food by exploring the four ways that human
societies have historically obtained food, starting
with our current industrial agricultural system,