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FAR ING?
Mass-production farming
once
promised hope
for the world's hungry. Toda
y
mass problems
threaten agriculture. Here
are
the ominous facts
and what they portend.
by
Dennis Neill
Y
ou
PROBABLY
don't live on a
farn1. Yet you
are
no less
dependent on farm produc–
tion to put food on your table than
is the farmer. Did you ever wonder
how
your
food is produced?
An Enemy Strikes
Farmíng was once man's most
unpredictable occupation. A bewil–
dering array of catastrophes could
strike- either singly or all at once.
Within the past thirty years, how–
ever, it has begun to look as though
modero agricultura! techniques are
finally eliminating the threats of in–
sect infestations, diseases, adverse
weather conditions and related nat–
ural disasters. Large farms have be–
come as routinized and mechanized
as manufacturing plants. These
large commercial operations are
known as "factory farms."
If you ever visit a factory farm,
you
will
see an entirely different
concept of farming. Traditional
methods are passé. Factory farms
ASSEMBLY UNE
egg production. Row
upon row of living machines produce
most of the eggs used in the Western
world today. This ranch in Cucamonga,
California, houses 50,000 chickens.
Don lorlon -
Ploin Trvlh Pholo
concentrate on producing one or
two products. Their intent is to pro–
duce as large a quantity of saleable
foodstuffs at as low a cost as pos–
sible. This concept has given rise to
10,000-acre (4,000 hectare) grain
farms, feedlots with thousands of
cattle, pigs or sheep confined to
pens, and egg- or meat-producing
chicken ranches that may house mil–
lions of birds in wire cages.
Farms of this sort supply 75 per–
cent of the foods sold in the United
States. Continental Europe has not
yet reached that point, but Euro–
pean agricultura! planners are pull–
ing out all stops in an attempt to
reach a similar position. The British
lsles have already reached and ex–
ceeded it
in
at least one aspect: 87
percent of all English Iaying hens
a re found on giant commercial
ranches.
Turning farms into factories has
vastly increased food production. It
has also created the potential for
unexpected disastrous breakdowns
in food production. The United Na–
tion's Food and Agriculture Organi–
zation (FAO) gave one exarnple of a
critica! situat ion which developed
recently when a chicken sickness
(Text continued on page 22)
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