By Jerold Hubbard
Grassroots farmer and activist
Our present system of food production is killing us. Life is full of beauty and irregularities. The drive for 100% efficiency in farming will always kill the complex organisms and ecosystems involved.
Why? Because we live in, or are suspended in a complex “dancing landscape.†This means that the womb or environment from which life is produced is constantly changing in unpredictable ways. Therefore, adaptability must never be sacrificed, yet this is precisely what happens when 100% efficiency is strived for!
The drive for perfection via 100% efficiency drives out diversity, and allows no room for differences to exist. Therefore, when the unpredicted, unexpected happens, there is no room for natural survivability via the ability to adapt to a changing landscape.
Complex, not Complicated
Complex is not the same as complicated. The difference is adaptability. Complicated systems have a top down, military-like central command creative center. A watch is a perfect example of something that is complicated. It is a machine with diverse, interconnected, interdependent parts, which are constructed in a complicated manner, but it is not complex. Why? Because it is not adaptable. If one part out of the hundreds, which act to make it work or function breaks, the whole watch becomes worthless. It does not have the ability to adapt. This is the failing of our current agricultural system, which uses complicated systems, each with one purpose, one goal, and one limited solution.
Nature gives us an example of complex systems. Our body’s immune system is one that evolves from the ground up, by the continual interacting, networking, and feedback looping of all the parts in harmony with the landscape in which it was born. It is not the product of a man made, central, top down, created system like the watch. It is extremely adaptable because it evolves through the interacting of diverse parts.
On the Road to Extinction
Our current agricultural system is not adaptable because it attempts to replace nature’s complex systems with complicated man made systems with one thing in mind – only one solution to all problems – a powerful force intended to align all parties with a central, narrow minded, non-inclusive, created purpose and will. It cannot survive because it is not able to adapt to the ever-changing landscape that we live in.
It’s true that most of us would prefer not to think too much about where our food comes from or what it’s doing to the planet — after all, as Chipotle’s Ells points out, eating is not exactly a “heady intellectual event.” But if there’s one difference between industrial agriculture and the emerging alternative, it’s that very thing: consciousness.
Niman takes care with each of his cattle, just as an organic farmer takes care of his produce and smart shoppers take care with what they put in their shopping cart and on the family dinner table. The industrial food system fills us up but leaves us empty — it’s based on selective forgetting. But what we eat — how it’s raised and how it gets to us — has consequences that can’t be ignored any longer. (Bryan Walsh)
Agriculture as we know it is becoming extinct. It is broken, and cannot be fixed with the current complicated system. The old ways must be discarded and nature’s complex system of life instituted in its place. We either learn to live with nature, or destroy it at our peril.
Jerold Hubbard
Tags: adaptability, agriculture, ecosystem, environment, farming, food, life