Modern & Indigenous Agricultural Systems by David Sopkin

I started this blog by listing the pros and cons for modern and indigenous agricultural systems, and was fairly surprised at what I came up with. The indigenous people were practicing sustainable farming; they just didn’t call it that because it was their way of life, their tradition. Practices such as polyculturing, and growing for sustenance, resiliency and quality, they had a more ecological way of growing food. On the other side, they had no real, integrated food buffer, in case of a drought, flood, or other natural event that would wipe out their food supply. They only needed to plan for the cyclical winter seasons.

Modern agriculture is hard to generalize because of its complexity. When we think of modern agriculture we usually think of Monsanto, DDT, and Round-Up all having their hands in the production of high fructose corn syrup. This is more or less true; modern agriculture has focused its attention on quantity in products, and corporations that sustain the industry but not the farmers, growing the food and tending to the soil. Quantity-based innovation can leave things like polyculture, quality, agroecology, and others behind. We are no longer growing for sustenance but rather for quantity. Add corporate monopolies on seed and you have effectively locked America’s farmers into a downward, death spiral, where they cannot and will not make enough money back on their crop to make another one next year.[1]^{, [2]}

So what happened? Did the scientists start innovating faster than the average farmer could keep up with? Did they innovate to the behest of an agricultural giant? Did the shift of science from ‘applied’ to ‘transitive’ science reprioritize scientific projects, and subsequently shift whom they’re designed to benefit? If I were a modern day farmer I would be pretty ticked off at my inability to a) poly crop, and b) make a profit off of my crop. Yet farmers are pretty much locked down upon in this country for some reason or another, for reasons I will probably never figure out.

Nevertheless, I am not so skeptical about our agricultural future. Despite a system so ingrained and entrench ed in deceit, corruption and bribery, we have entrusted more people (corporations, my friend) to provide us with food, yet we’ve pretty much left out the most important piece in the puzzle: the farmers. Yes, indigenous practices had their heyday and their inefficiencies, but that’s because they didn’t have to produce more than the amount of people they were feeding. In one word, modern agriculture has been more about quantity, than quality. However, we are so far advanced  in our food production systems and rely on it for so many things, that it would be almost an abomination to go back to the way things were, just because we would lose all of that capacity. However, is it worth to go back to more quality food? I say yes.