Differing Visions of Agriculture: Industrial‐Chemical vs. Small Farm and Urban Organic Production

Seed diversity and soil preservation are the foundations of healthy agriculture. Over many generations, farmers have developed varieties of wheat, rice, corn, and other crops that are adapted to local growing conditions. Industrial‐chemical agriculture has abandoned that local knowledge, replacing seed diversity with genetically uniform crops that require large doses of fertilizers and chemical poisons to survive. One way the United States exerted control over Iraq, starting in 2003, was to enable agribusiness to disrupt thousands of years of tradition by imposing industrial methods on the country where evidence of the earliest mass production of food was discovered. Thus, it seems that conquest of people goes hand in hand with conquest of soil. There is resistance to agribusiness around the world. In the United States, small farms and urban agriculture are not only providing healthy food but also reconnecting people who grow up in cities with the life of the soil.