Farmageddon

Commercial Farms

Nature produces food: Animals graze or forage, mostly eating foods that humans don’t consume. Animals convert food into waste products that fertilize the fields, forests and oceans. Humans butcher the animals for meat, and the cycle continues. Commercial farms, on the other hand, crowd animals into small spaces, pump them full of antibiotics, and feed them grains and other food that could otherwise sustain billions of people. In return, consumers get unhealthy cheap protein produced by methods that degrade the environment.

In 1958, China’s Chairman Mao tried to boost farm output by organizing a billion people to eliminate sparrows in one day of killing. After the sparrows died, the insects they would have eaten decimated the crops Mao sought to save from birds, resulting in widespread famine. Developing and developed countries repeat Mao’s type of folly by assuming they can improve on a balanced, natural system. Today, intensive industrialized farming poisons the Earth, the oceans, the atmosphere and living things – all for no gain.

When Britain passed the Agricultural Act in 1947 – “heralding government funding and encouragement for the new ...