This post, Baguettes-to-go, by Nicole-Anne Boyer is a quick, light mudge about fast food and the cultural price paid for convenience but it also makes casual reference to an earlier post, Getting Into The Dirt, at her personal blog Fuzzy Signals.

Flipping through the Financial Times this weekend, I found a little article most people would just scan over: "Threat to fertile soil blamed on farming practices" by Clive Cookson (Feb 14/04.) As the article leads off, " the loss of good quality soil because of poor agricultural practices is a serious problem around the world but it receives little attention compared with other big environmental threats..." I knew this distressing situation already, but what caught my trolling eye was something else: the fact that the brilliant evolutionary anthropologist, Jared Diamond , the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, was ringing the alarm bells and even making this his next topic of study. As he observes, "the over- exploitation of fertile soil had destroyed many civilizations through history, from those of the original Fertile Crescent in the Middle East to the Mayans of pre-Columbian Mexico and Guatemala."

The facts about declining soil productivity are not pretty. The amount of arable cropland worldwide has declined by 20 percent per head of population over the past decade. This is an exponentially deteriorating situation because it takes (we think) hundreds to thousands of years create just inches of healthy topsoil. I say "we think" because the science of soil is actually quite hard; we still don't fully understand soil in its full complexity – how it transforms itself from detritus and decay into something fertile and fecund. Agriculture, and in particular, industrial agriculture is largely to blame. Poverty and social instability is the other big factor, but these two drivers are not entirely unconnected. For now, let's just focus on agriculture, the timeless variety; that great social invention that pulled us out of hunter-and-gather mode into creating civilizations.

The first thing to note is that "agriculture does not improve soils," says Professor Chesworth of the University of Guelph in Canada. He continues: "For more than 10,000 years we have conducted a long agricultural experiment with the biosphere by using modified annual grasses to mine the soil for plant nutrients. Like all mining operations, this one will eventually fail unless we can find a way of conserving the fertility of soil that does not depend on the diminishing natural resources that we currently use for that purpose."

It's emotionally hard for us to link something as "motherhood" as agriculture with something as rapacious and extractive as mining, but this is essentially what we have been doing for millennia. Mostly, this has been a good thing: we've improved the human condition immeasurably by harnessing and controlling agriculture. The trick, if history is our guide, is to do so by balancing the needs of the earth with the needs of its people. The civilizations that didn't do this paid the ultimate price: decline and demise.

Agriculture is a problem though not as much as noted above when well managed. For example, soil depth can increase at the rate of an inch per decade in well managed grazing systems. There's a reason that general farms growing various crops as well as keeping livestock were once the standard - they restored damage done by tillage and cropping. This has profound implications for the scale, structure and methods of agricultural enterprises and reveals a basic weakness in industrial agriculture based on large scale cropping.

The food and agriculture business is many different businesses and industries, everything from bioscience to fast food. It's hard to get your head around this vast market, which meets the most fundamental human demand of all: keeping our bodies nourished, healthy and productive. We have companies like Monsanto and Cargill selling seeds and other inputs needed to grow things. There are also large manufacturers and producers like Proctor & Gamble and Unilever, and then people in the distribution channels, retailers like Wall-mart, Tesco and Carrefour. The food business must include restaurants and take-out chains, especially large fast food behemoths like MacDonald's and KFC, which influence strongly the nature of production and supply. (Check out Fast Food Nation for a glimpse of this.) Then there are the thousands of middlemen and billions of smaller players – including the actual farmers and growers – but the market control and power is really with the larger corporations. Like big sumo wrestlers sitting on top of an anthill, they remain aware of the buzzing of activity underneath them, but they remain relatively unperturbed by what goes on. (Except when one of the fat men decides to sue an ant for patent infringement.)

The food and agriculture business is thus often big business, with increasing scale and scope all the time. There are reasons for why the industries evolved this way. A crude summary might go like this: commodity businesses favor scale and scope (in some cases vertical and horizontal integration business models), and globalization intensified this need through greater competition thus driving further consolidation. The fact that agriculture is increasingly high tech is another barrier keeping smaller players out of the game. New agribusiness and food technologies require serious R&D and consumer understanding, which is expensive. This is driven in part by consumer pull and producer push. It's easier to make money if margins are higher, which is easier to do if there is a constant churn of new products. This requires constant innovation. And consumers seem to like this variety. Food is also being produced farther and farther from its source of consumption, so much research and technology goes into extending their shelf life for transportation and handling, especially perishable ones. Even in protectionist France, the poster child for local production, most of the fruit and vegetables come from lower cost centers in North Africa (Morocco and Tunisia), Brazil, Chile, Vietnam, Ghana, Turkey, and so on. I know this because by French law, all groceries have to have their point of origin noted in the signage – very useful information for consumers like me.

Food and fiber has become big business at every level - suppliers, growers, packers, transportation and retailing - but this didn't happen because of market pressures. It happened as a consequence of governments that became big industrial systems. The policies and practices of already industrialized governance actively sought to create industrial food systems both to reflect their own socio-political views and to fight wars. It began in earnest during WWI to feed and clothe the millions of men in arms - who would otherwise have been home working the fields - and accelerated from that point as governments were seduced by ideas of scientific management, collectivization, mass production and the brave new world of heavy metal industry. WWII continued and accelerated the transition.

With these systems well developed in Europe and the Americas for the war effort it is little wonder that they continued for the rest of the century and spread to other parts of the world. It is little wonder that of the myriad technologies that became available in those years the ones that became dominant were the ones suited to that system. The subsidies, protections and infrastructure developed initially to feed a war-ravaged Europe while the workers were away fighting had to be large scale and automated to replace lost labor. When the soldiers came home from war they were no longer needed in the fields so they went to work in factories producing consumer goods. The war period totally redesigned the agricultural system, especially in the US. An agrarian nation of yeoman farmers who prized liberty and independence was changed into something reminiscent of the European colonial plantation era.

But, they got steady paychecks, automobiles and televisions so there were compensations for the loss of independence. They became workers rather than independent businessmen but had less stress. Besides, after going away to war they had lost their appetite for rural living. As the popular song said: "How do you keep them down on the farm/ After they've seen Paris"

This isn't just a correction of flawed scholarship, neeping about history. Before you can intervene in a system you have to understand how it works and how it evolved. The agricultural system is a reflection of the techno-social system of governance. The reflection is a bit distorted and dimmed by history and circumstances rather than a clear image, but the one causes the other. For example; Europe was where the war was being fought so its industrialization took a different path than in the US which was the breadbasket that fed the troops and the people during and after the war. This happened twice. The US experienced acceleration for each war while Europe experienced setback. Looking at their agricultural systems through this clarifying lens reveals the genesis of many of their differences.

The pastoral image and myth of the family farmer is also being replaced with a much more industrialized one. Farming is now highly mechanized and high tech. Modern farmers need to be just as familiar with computer modeling software as they do with operating trackers. While small family-run farms still exist, they are fast becoming an endangered species, especially in places like America, where just 2% of the population is involved in food production. Drive across the US and one can see these "mega-farms" stretching across entire states. Brazil has a similar trend with these massive soybean farms (soy bean is the #1 feed stock for poultry and pigs; it also competes with other seeds to make cooking oil), which span enormous distances. To survey land, small aircraft are now the tools of choice for the modern farmer. I recently read they are even using GPS-enabled micro-weather prediction systems to fine tune decisions on harvesting and planting.

Technology isn't the problem, socio-political structure is the problem, primarily the regulatory system. For example, when the European CAP rewarded high production to increase earnings from exported food and fiber even the smallest of family farms abandoned their sustainable agronomic systems to increase production. Multiple use farms gave way to specialization, human labor was replaced by machines, fertilizer and cultivars that could best utilize them increased in use. As the old farmer says, "you get what you manage for". Now that the CAP has been partially reformed and is planned to be further reformed in future to emphasize land management rather than production we can expect to see a slow change that might recapture some of the lost techniques.

Technological advance is among the most promising trends. As everything becomes smaller, more flexible, smarter and better connected the trend to heavy metal industrialization diminishes. Human labor will not return to the fields but we may see human equivalent machines of a size and flexibility that allow the same sorts of agronomic methods or even better. Already there are small self propelled and self guided bots with limited flexibility that can do some cultivation chores. Progress is accelerating.

This won't be more difficult for small farmers, it will be easier. Just as more power allowed better interfaces and so brought the benefits of computers to the dullest among us, newer agricultural machines will be "plug and play". Even illiterate developing world farmers will be able to use them, and they will be cheaper to own and operate than the current generation of heavy metal ag equipment. The era of the steam engine, mass production, large machines with severely restricted capabilities, and the techno-cultural systems that accompanied them, was just a phase and is passing. The developing world will leapfrog from low tech to advanced tech without having to experience the heavy tech phases that so altered western society and degraded environments.

The dominant corporations also have long established global brands, and these tend to win out over smaller local ones. These global brands have a lot of power, leverage, and investment behind them, which is just a fact of competitive life. That is, assuming it's a fair playing field in the marketplace, which it is not. The insidious part is that many of these large corporations have won this competitive advantage through creating rules that favor them; namely, they are very good at protecting their position through lobbying efforts that result in government subsidies and tax incentives. Possibly the most depressing example of maladaptive public policy in the world is farming policies in America. These are policies that were supposedly in place to protect the small farmer whereas in reality they have only increased farm consolidation, not to mention punish poorer producers in places like West Africa, where it makes infinitely more sense to grow things like cotton.

So to make money and survive in this business requires size – or so the logic goes. Economies of scale is needed for all kinds of things, but the most important (say the agriculture economists) is to achieve higher levels of efficiency. By higher levels, I mean every micron of efficiency has to be squeezed out of the system and optimized to make it work. Every bit counts. I read an amazing observation recently: if every food producer in the US were to suddenly work for free, consumers would only pay 10 cents more for every dollar spent on food. Not much more to squeeze out of that system!

Global brands come and go with increasing rapidity. The faster technology changes the faster they evolve. It is only when taking a static view that ignores both history and current trends that one can make a case against brands, which are, after all, merely reputations. Big players didn't create rules that favored them, they adapted themselves to rule making regimes primarily determined by socio-political philosophy.

The failure of scholarship noted above about the evolution of the American agricultural system - blaming markets rather than governments and wars - is repeated here with a little gratuitous America bashing. Agricultural policy in America has not been about protecting small farmers, it has been about increasing production while decreasing labor and stabilizing prices at a low level to provide cheap food and fiber for urban workers. It is a common and obvious policy for a developing country. It was also the explicit policy of the government for decades to move people off the land and into the factories and offices to improve their lives and strengthen the economy. It all worked. Food and fiber are so cheap that they account for very little of the retail cost to consumers who mostly work in manufacturing and services rather than agriculture.

...we may need to turn our thinking about efficiency on its head. For instance, nature is not driven by efficiencies per se, but by the logic of abundance. In Cradle-to-Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (2002) by McDonough and Braungart, illustrate this most powerfully when they describe the role and function of a cherry tree. Yes, a cherry tree. To paraphrase them, every year, thousands of blossoms are created and used as fruit for humans, birds and plants in order that one pit makes it to the ground, and becomes rooted and grows and survives. The cherry tree achieves this feat without depleting the environment; in fact, the nutrients it gives freely leaves its surrounding environment much better off for its existence. Seen from a human frame of reference, many of these blossoms are "wasted" but we don't step back and say "how inefficient." The tree contributes more than it needs for its own short-term success because this logic of abundance is a winning formula that co-evolved over many millions of years.

Patient natural history observation gives us a different view. The cherry tree is a consumer of nutrients, the tip of an ecological system that is largely below ground and largely microbial. It is that system rather than the tree that is resilient, that creates fertility. The various members of the ecosystem are adapted to one another in ways that when viewed individually can be seen as competitive - each using the other for its own private needs - but when viewed as a system appears cooperative as the outputs of one are the inputs to another in a circular fashion. Disrupt the system - for example by cultivating the ground around the tree which disrupts the network of VAM hyphae - and the tree becomes phosphorous starved.

The system as a whole is efficient and when properly understood each part of the system is as well since its functions are far more complex than producing a single item valued by humans. The useful lesson of the cherry tree is that it is cheaper to produce large quantities of blossoms, and large numbers of cherries, though most will never result in a new tree than it is to create one super-duty seed at great expense that has a high probability of success. Understanding this is useful, a task facing scholars today attempting to move past cybernetics to complex adaptive systems thinking. In Timothy Burke's words:

We will have to unlearn assumptions about scarcity. At the scale of living things, making more copies of living things may be thermodynamically incredibly cheap. At the scale of post-Fordist mass production, making more material wealth may be much cheaper than we tend to assume. We will have to root out our presumptions about efficiency and optimality and recognize that many real-world systems whose results we depend upon, from the immune system to the brain to capitalist economics, depend upon inefficient effectiveness (productive non-optimality, wasteful utility).

The cherry tree isn't a good citizen, graciously cooperating with the ecosystem, it just worked out the best way to launch its genome into the future with no thought for the system as a whole. Most trees do the same but not all. Some do create very few, very robust seeds. Some don't rely on seed alone but propagate themselves with rhizomes. In most environments cheap seed is a successful strategy and the descendants of trees that went this route have come to dominate the earth as a consequence.

Industrial agriculture doesn't work this way, quite the opposite. The use of monocultures, for instance, is a prime example. Monoculture farming is the practice of the planting of just one variety of "super-crop". This is usually a seed varietal or hybrid that has been genetically enhanced in some way, i.e. to generate a high yield, protecting against pests, be drought resistant or handle colder warmer. In addition to being more lucrative from a yield point of view, farming just one crop is also more efficient. So monocropping is very efficient and pays dividends accordingly.

Monoculture and monocropping have little to do with the cultivars used, they are the result of changes in methods of sowing, cultivating and harvesting crops with machinery. Purely mechanical machines can't pick and choose which plant to harvest, they just clear cut the sward. Such harvesting methods changed the field of adaptation, favoring cultivars that achieved a uniform height at a uniform date. Those that were the wrong height or maturity weren't used for the next year's seed. They fell to the ground, were consumed by livestock or otherwise evaded the seed sack. All crops have been genetically enhanced. Domesticated food crops have wild cousins but were long ago selected and bred for desirable characteristics. Those that did not thrive in the prevalent agronomic circumstances no longer exist. They are all super-crops, but some are more super than others.

All of this seems great. And it is great in the short term... Until diseases hit and soil productivity decreases rapidly. Until farmers find out that the hybrid seeds require three times more water and other inputs. That the ancillary services (and patent restrictions) tied to the monocrop make the farmer totally dependent on the supplier. The world got a glimpse of the downsides of this "green revolution" early on when a rice blight hit Southeast Asia in the late 1970s. In the past, rice blights didn't make international headline news, but that year it did.

Potato famine. There's nothing new about plague.

Hybrid seeds don't require more water or nutrients, in fact due to hybrid vigor they are more productive with less inputs than their parents. However, a hybrid cultivar specifically created for an agronomic system with abundant water and nutrients will do poorly in another system. One must choose the right seed, hybrid or not, for the expected agronomic conditions. In most of the developing world, such as Southeast Asia, little effort had been spent to breed productive hybrids in previous decades. That is a shortcoming that is now being corrected to the very great benefit of even the smallest of traditional farmers.

There is a problem with hybrids but it isn't excessive input requirements. They don't breed true so seed has to be bought new each year from seed farmers that painstakingly cross the original parent varieties each year. They have to grow pure stands of both parents, and save the seed, as well as grow a stand of hybrids to sell to other farmers. It's a more complicated system that requires a community able to specialize and cooperate for the benefit of all.

Why did this happen? In the past, blights were relatively contained because many different rice varietals were being grown, often varying from village to village. Co-evolving with each local microclimate, they also acted like natural breaks when diseases hit. This protection, however, vanished when in the mid 1960s the miracle "golden rice", a hybrid seed called IR-80, was introduced on a mass scale. It was to be the savior, the solution to feeding the hungry peoples of the world. And it did do much good, producing incredible results and yields. Even so, there was some resistance. In fact, in some places, it was legislated into effect; local farmers were forbidden to plant the old local varieties using the old "primitive" techniques. Ten years later, the disadvantages of monocropping became apparent with this dramatic blight. But even with this shock, and many shocks since, it's been hard to ween folks off of this technique just because it's so lucrative in the short term. Yet the critique is clear to an outside observer. As McDonough and Braungart's concisely put it: "the cultivation of one species drastically reduces the rich network of 'services' and side effects to which the entire ecosystem is engaged." In fact, studies from agriculture experts have since shown that while the economic payout usually rises in the short term, the overall quality of every aspect of the system is in decline. Conventional agriculture is often "a simplifier of ecosystems, replacing relative complex natural biological communities with relatively simple man made ones" write the Cradle-to-Cradle authors.

This isn't a monoculture or hybrid issue. Monoculture is an agronomic system suitable to automation. There's no advantage to planting every field to the same cultivar and so inviting the spread of insects or disease. It's even counterproductive to do so since fields vary and do best with different cultivars. It is also an advantage to have early and late varieties, that are planted and harvested at different times and/or have different maturation time needs since both planting and harvest dates can be staggered to make better use of available labor and equipment.

The system failed catastrophically because it was a command and control society where some priggish martinet could forbid farmers to plant as they know best. The problem was socio-political rather than agronomic. Every element of the system could have been done well - use the right hybrids, vary them as deemed useful - and collapse would not have occurred.

Culture and agriculture are intimately related as well, something the Anglo-American mindset overlooks.

What bigotry, especially given this statement from the worldchanging post:

As much as it gets ridiculed, places like France have some deep wisdom we should surface, understand, and preserve: they know about the advantages of local production – the deep connections between local food, the land and communities – through thousands of years of culture.

Such ignorance of the sheer size and diversity of Anglo-American culture is, well, very French. Perhaps humorously, it is also ignorant of French history and those, such as the Huguenots, who left France to live among Anglo-Americans. Anglo-American culture incorporates the cultural traditions of all of Europe as well as many other nations. To enumerate the diverse agricultural influences would be exhausting since they include every continent. Such small mindedness is perhaps to be expected since it comes from people who see their small world, and its comparative poverty of diversity, with exaggerated significance and the standard for all. They simply can't conceive of such diversity and so assume that others are like them. Their outlook is provincial.

Culture and traditions often co-evolve with nature in such a way that it disguises deep intelligence and wisdom, especially to the eye of the modern expert.

Modern experts are fully aware of the issues having had decades of practice honing their professional skills. However, every expert has a domain. Moving beyond their area of competence defeats their expertise. It has always been so. When European farmers came to the Americas few of them made effective use of the new environment. Their methods were inappropriate, especially in the midwestern states. They weren't less intelligent or less wise, they were strangers in a strange land.

An archetypal story of this is in Good News for a Change: Hope for our Troubled Planet by David Suzuki and Holly Dressel (2002). It's about how modern experts in the late 1960s and 1970s almost destroyed the Balinese water temple cult, which managed the complex social and biochemical balance needed to sustain the rice terrace system on Bali, something that had been functioning well for thousands of years.

There's a pattern here. Examples from 40-50 years ago are used repeatedly as criticisms of current practices. This isn't all innocent error since the individuals could not possibly be unaware of the changes that have occurred in the intervening decades. They are packaging their ideas for a particular audience that will not buy more up to date and honest accounts since they aren't tragic and can't be used to bash Americans. This is an example of pollution introduced to the ideosphere by popularizers trying to make a buck and advance a socio-political agenda.

There is an instructive story that could be told about the Balinese water temple cult but it would involve identifying the common patterns in many agro-economic systems to inform a student about the utility of becoming native to a place rather than attempting to manage them by remote control from centralized bureaucracies. There's no particular technology that is inherently problematical but it must be used appropriately under the control of locals able to make timely decisions. Intelligence and power must be independent and distributed.

To speak abstractly for a minute, when you start decoupling local networks (in this case local production and consumer demand) from global and centralized systems (in this case large agribusiness and food companies), you have a recipe for trouble – a more volatile situation where the resilience of the system becomes hard to sustain. Vulnerabilities to disruption increase exponentially. While this may work for silicon chip manufacturing, this may be harder to sustain when it comes to our food system.

As the authors of Panarchy put it, "when the scales of human affairs become decoupled from those of nature, signals of change are eliminated and the learning that such signals can generate begins to wither." This is clearly happening in the case of our industrial agricultural system, and this a much more generic problem embedded in our own technological paradigm. Indeed, the reason why we are constantly surprised by "unintended consequences" of new technologies is a function of an impoverished design methodology and mental map. Our technological designers have tended to build things around a linear logic (cradle-to-grave) as opposed to cycles, which is what nature does. Moreover, technological solutions solve problems at one scale only, without paying attention to other layers and paces of change. It turns out that resilient systems have a careful division of labor between faster moving layers (e.g. stock markets, business metrics like quarterly reporting, product cycles, technological development, political mandates, fashion) and slow moving layers (e.g. infrastructure, education, culture, laws and social values, and of course natural systems.) As the Resilience Network scientists put it, technological solutions "represent a single variable intervention in a complex and imbricate systems" and "therefore create new problems at different time scales."

The decoupling of local control is unrelated to industrial agriculture, particular technologies or the scale of the food system. It isn't our technological paradigm that is a problem, it is our socio-political paradigm that is at fault, the lingering poison of command and control policies that so damaged so much of the world in past decades. Technological solutions solve problems. Like any tool they can be used clumsily. Selecting the wrong tool or simply using it poorly isn't the fault of the tool, it is the fault of the user. The failure to grasp this simple truth that every craftsman and every farmer knows well is perhaps the biggest problem in pop punditry.

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The post also contains an excerpt from The Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand that has some glaring errors.

Industrial agriculture is full of these examples, these new problems. Let's look at the mass application of fertilizer (which uses nitrogen-fixation) over the last few decades. Fertilizer, while lacking the sizzle of computers, is probably one of the most important inventions of the 20th century because of what it did to increase food supply. But this wonderful contribution to the human condition is looking less wonderful every day. The adverse consequences of industrialized fertilizer include many things that its original designers and promoters didn't think about, including:

• Increased toxic levels of nitrates in ground water,
• Acidification (or declining biodiversity) of ecosystems,
• Increased greenhouse gases,
• Eutrophication (e.g. the increase of algal blooms in coastal oceans)
• Not to mention reinforcing a population because more available food means more people.

None of these problems are caused by fertilizer, they are caused by misuse of fertilizer. There are no adverse effects for ecosystems when the proper amount of fertilizer is used at the proper time. Quite the opposite, ecosystems are greatly improved as they become more inherently fertile with more organic matter. This takes skill since fields vary over space and time and application rates must be varied appropriately. This takes either a wise and industrious farmer who knows his land like his lover's body or some very good sensor networks to guide the clumsier types. Yes, good farmers exist and use these technologies skillfully.

More food means less people not more. Fertility rates drop as material well being improves. However, more food usually comes with better sanitation and medication so deaths decrease. It takes a while for the demographic bubble to work its way through a population when such changes are sudden due to external intervention.

Industrial agriculture is clearly dominated by the faster pace of big business. This has caused much under-investment in the lower moving layers, especially the ecological infrastructure it depends upon – and most evidently in our soils, the most important "layer" of all. It's no coincidence that another word for soil is "earth". When there is disconnect between these different paces of change, the lower layers start to make noises. They go into "revolt" mode, and start churning out small and large signals that a rebalancing is needed. Revolutions from the bottom up occur. I believe declining soil productivity is just one signal of this. BSE and SARS are other signs. Both of these diseases were really a product of the industrial agriculture system: BSE because of the unnatural use of animal protein to feed (which fattens the cows) and the centralization of slaughtering; SARS because of the density of chicken and pig farming using questionable standards so close to large urban centers.

Big business is irrelevant. The problem is that all of the costs of agriculture have not been accounted for, they were externalities not explicitly valued. This is changing just as we are changing in the way we value clean water and air as we grow more wealthy. BSE and SARS are not signs, they are not novel. New disease have always evolved, and always will do so. TSEs are an old, old companion of humans that take many forms and are spread in many ways. SARS is the new flu, and a new version arrives every year. There are reasons to improve our agricultural system, but scare stories that fail to inform don't help, they just diminish the credibility of scientists, pundits and governments.

Is there some good news? I think we are starting to see more thinkers and agriculture practitioners think beyond the current model to a "post industrial" approach. This approach is both trying to recover older wisdom from traditional cultures and trying to mimic the sophistication of natural systems. We're using technology, of course, to do this. A few pioneering agricultural economists are showing that the most productive form of agriculture is actually polyculture, which thrives in both traditional cultures and nature.

Yes and no. Polyculture is more productive, makes better use of biotope space, and has network effects that amplify those benefits, but there are no useful ways to sow and harvest them yet so the benefit is theoretical. This isn't new news. Farmers know this stuff forward and backwards but they have to get a crop in using available tools and techniques.

The rest of the Brand excerpt continues in the same vein; half truths and platitudes about things well understood by practitioners and only controversial for politicized camp followers. This is the true problem. So long as socio-political interference in agro-economic systems persists farmers will do what they must to survive. They will farm the regulatory and political system rather than the land because they, like their crops and livestock, are not stupid. They are the ones who survived all of the previous system shocks coming from central command. The stupid farmers went to the city long ago. They are now the bureaucrats regulating the good farmers.

In both the Boyer and the Brand writing there is a common confusion, an attempt to confirm existing biases rather than insightfully analyze systems. It's hard for them since the command systems they favor have failed universally and the remaining vestiges of such systems are under continual pressure to reform. Their response is to revert to pre-modern systems and technologies for comfort. This can't work except for boutique applications so their prescriptions and futures scenarios are merely quaint.

Even when faced with sophisticated analyses such as those of Holling in Panarchy they evade the obvious implications that it is attempts to control systems that have failed and that control and prediction are not desirable or possible. The thing that pre-modern systems have that is of value for present day and future systems is independence and diversity determined by local circumstances and individual skill. It doesn't matter what technology is used so long as the structure of independence is maintained so that the individuals on site choose a kit of technologies appropriate to their objectives. Though some will choose poorly the scale of each failure is limited, what Holling calls "safe-fail". The mean of all of the individual choices made by diverse, independent operators is superior to any grand plan.

» Agro-Political Foo from Crumb Trail
There's a long ag rant at M&M dealing with world techno-social systems, the girl, the gold watch and everything. Before you can intervene in a system you have to understand how it works and how it evolved. The agricultural system is a reflection of th......[read more]
Tracked: August 3, 2004 08:27 AM