Dump Industrial Agriculture

A Change We Can Believe In - Dumping Industrial Agriculture

World food supplies have kept pace with population growth. There is enough food to adequately feed everyone. Clearly, root causes of the food crisis lie in politics, problems with food distribution, poverty and a failure of the industrial food system to deliver its promises.

This will be hard for most peple to understand: industrial agriculture is *causing* the current food crisis. How? By selling its output to the highest bidder and today that is biofuels.

America's food system has never been set up to feed people, it's always been to sold to corporations to decide what to do with it. Each person owes it to themselves to have the freshest food possible, but what we're left with is highly processed "food" that has been robbed of its nutrients in favor of marketing. And if you live in say, Mexico, your food was sold to a biofuels company so they could burn it.

Here's more:

Study after study indicates small scale, integrated organic/low input sustainable production can produce more food, of higher nutritional value locally, where it is needed.

Small scale means just that: small. Small enough that one person can do the job because the next attribute is "integrated organic/low input" which means no pesticides, no chemical fertilizer.

Small is the new big. Actually, it's been big for a really long time it's just that via the Farm Bill that is passed every year the government has driven small farmers out of business.

Anyways, one of the chief reasons I'm changing my career from web development to growing food is because while I'm here, I want nutritious food so I can enjoy a healthy life.

I've shopped both organic veggies at the local grocery, and the farmers market veggies. The farmers market veggies are better by far because they came from nearby and in most cases were picked that morning. They haven't lost their nutrients in transit. Those nutrients mean a lote more than you realize because I'm not talking calories, I'm talking nutrients.

Nutrients are everything. You can eat organic all day long, every day of the year, but if it's more than a few days old it doesn't tase as well. Taste is one of the chief indicators of nutrient value.

Back to small:

As for the US, we need sensible food policy; less grain for animals, more home and community gardens, farmer owned grain reserves, energy policy that does not use food for fuel and an end to food price speculation. That is a "Change we can believe in".