Quotes from the book I just read.

Published Tuesday, September 18, 2007 by Dan Gainsford | E-mail this post

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Looking back forty years or so to the beginnings of our current agricultural excesses, knowing what we know now about the earth, it would be easy to condemn people for having made a lot of wrong choices. But condemning our grandparents is too glib, and pointless besides; our grandchildren will no doubt condemn us for our short-sighted stupidity. Since our grandparents had no spaceship vision of Gaia to contemplate in their moral debates, and we do, our sins shall be deemed the greater. The fact is that, wishful thinking aside, people are short-sighted by nature, and the most we can expect from ourselves is to make the best decisions we can based on current knowledge – knowing that our knowledge is always incomplete and that it is a sign of wisdom and strength to be able to change you mind when faced with new evidence or arguments.

I believe there was a time – and I don’t think I’m romanticizing this – when we as society had a coherent view of livestock rearing. Animals had their place in agri-culture, the culture of farming. If we no longer have such a coherent view, I think it is largely because of two things. In the first place, animal agriculture itself has become fractured into two basic camps, the centralized, urban consumer and money-driven agribusiness, with it’s related chemical industries, and the decentralized, increasingly marginalized, rural , farmer-driven agriculture. A recent issue of the magazine The Ram’s Horn: A Monthly Newsletter of Food Systems Analysis, has a front page headline: “If you ask, who speaks for agriculture” You also have to ask, what “agriculture” do they speak for?”

In the second place, we as a culture have displaced millions of people from the countryside, where they were either on the farm or close to the farm, into cities, where a whole generation is now growing up with no sense of the reality of livestock agriculture. Modern urban consumers – and that, after all, is most of us – have only images selected in the service of competing ideologies to go on. And, as with the three blind men and the elephant, we have different groups in society with opposing views of animal agriculture in the environment, each of them claiming to have the right and while image.

Political and economic leaders have taken great pride in saying that some 3% of our population can now feed the other 97%, with enough surplus left over to service the national debt. The implication is that there have been too many farmers. This quite frankly, is stupid. I don’t think it’s a good thing that only 3% of our people are working the land. I think it’s a tragedy. I think we’d be much better off all around if that number were 30%.


I think people… should consider more carefully how to help farmers to farm better, more in keeping with the essential life cycles of the planet. I think this will lead us away from the “bigger is better” philosophy that we’ve had foisted on us in the last few decades. From the point of view of disease control and animal health, from the point of view of the quality of both individual and community rural life, from the point of view of caring for the earth, all the evidence I’ve seen seems to say that smaller, complex systems are usually better than bigger, simpler ones. We’ve gone the way of the Holsteins and Leghorns not because, ultimately, it’s better for agriculture, or animal life, or for the humans that care for them, but because it’s the easiest, slickest road to short-term profits. And intensive monoculture has been profitable because we’ve structured our economy in such a way that the major real costs of intensive animal production – waste disposal, dislocation of human populations, environmental degradation, urban sprawl, Third World dependency, etc. – are externalized and paid for by society at large, a kind of “hidden tax” on other people, including our own children.


Unless urban dwellers have a direct stake in agriculture, unless they know in a real physical sense where food comes from and how it ties us to the rest of life on this planet and to the environment, why our rural spaces are important, the farming community will find itself increasingly forced into enslavement to urban-based agrifood business.


A few common-sense aphorisms are as good criteria as any to guide our quest. If you do no good, at least do no harm. In a polluted world, there is no safe place. Be vigilant. Moderation in all things. Often the best treatment for a sick animal is loving personal care and attention. Everyone’s truth is a partial truth. Leave well enough alone.
- One Animal Among Many: Gaia, Goats and Garlic
By David Walter-Toews, DVM

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