Sanet Post, Woody Woodraska, November 17, 1996

To the List:

All of the discussion on Roundup-ready crops, Biotechnology, Genetic engineering, BST, linear vs. holistic thinking in agriculture...all this discussion in the past few days leads me to quit lurking and make the following contribution from another viewpoint.

High, off-farm inputs in agriculture--first chemical fertilizers, then fossil fuels, then hybrid seed, then pesticides, then hormone implants and hormone-laced feed, then the mad notion to turn herbivores into carnivores with animal byproducts in feed, then gene splicing ... all the rest--are aberrations of the last 100 years or so, most in the past couple of decades. These practices are a temporary zit on the face of the 12,000+ year history of agriculture. Temporary because they are manifestly unsustainable.

Like the doctor who offers yet another medication to counteract the side effects of the first prescription, agricultural scientists cheerfully offer solutions for problems they themselves created in the first place--solutions that must be purchased.

It is prevarication of the most baldfaced sort to claim that these practices will feed the hungry people of the world. American agricultural science already has one failed green revolution to its credit; here is another in the making.

On the positive side: there is already in place a model for feeding people through a holistic, local, human-scale, ecologically sound, economically viable system--Community Supported Agriculture. I'll happily explain, if someone asks, how and why there are more than 500 of these farms thriving now in the U.S., up from one or two 10 years ago.

Woody Wodraska
woodyw@juno.com
"There is no scarcity abiding in Nature.
Any scarcity we see is our own doing."