[PEN-L:28578] RE: Re: industrialized farming

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:28565] Re: industrialized farming

me:>>Here in California, we have industrialized farming, with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, etc., but it's hard to describe it as involving monoculture.<<

LP:> Really? I was under the impression that lettuce farms grew only lettuce, hile tomato farms grew only tomato, etc.<

This is a miscommunication due to differences in the meaning of words. I was using the term in the way that I'm most familiar with, as with a country that over-specializes in bananas. In any event, there are a lot of commercial farms that produce more than one product (e.g., corn and soybeans, at one farm I visited in Illinois). Perhaps they should be called "conglomerate farms." There may be commercial farms which grow two crops in one field. Their philosophy is "whatever is profitable, goes." (They even recycle, using the hog-poop as fertilizer, etc.)

I should mention that even Gallo Wineries (hiss!) avoids pesticides. If I understand correctly (and Michael Perelman, who works at an ag-school will correct me if I'm wrong), Gallo's main winery lives us to the California legal standards of "organic farming." They don't advertise this fact because they get lots of grapes from non-organic vineyards. (The California standards aren't very high, I understand, but they're better than nothing.)

>>BTW, I think that "commercial" or "commercialized" farming is a better term, referring to the profit-seeking motive. "Industrialized" focuses on the technique, which glosses over the commercial causes of use of destructive "industrial" techniques.<<

> No, I am actually referring to industrial in the sense of the factory system. In factories, we welcome new technologies that can improve productivity. But you cannot simply replicate this in the countryside because it introduces new contradictions. The "Green Revolution", which has been ballyhooed as farming based on the industrial model, has produced all of the ill effects that Marx was addressing in v. 3 of Capital.<

I was simply disagreeing with Marx's terminology, preferring "commercial" over "industrial" for clarity's sake.

BTW, it's not factories or machine _per se_ that represented the shame of the 19th century "industrial model," but how they were used, who made the decisions, and the motivations of these people (aggressive profit-seeking). Similarly, I don't think that pesticides and chemical fertilizers _per se_ are the problem. The "Green Revolution" technologies would have worked out better if social relations in the countryside had been different.

JD