Toward New Models for the Scale and Practice of Agriculture, No. 4
Our first, second, and third posts in this series are, respectively, here , here , and here . �Agribusiness lab breeds its few poultry lineages at the level of grandparent stock before shipping out the product to clientele around the world. The practice in effect removes natural selection as a self-correcting (and free) ecological service. Any culling upon an outbreak or by farmers in reaction to an outbreak has no bearing on the development of immune resistance to the pathogens identified, as these birds, broilers and layers alike, are unable to evolve in response. In other words, the failure to accumulate natural resistance to circulating pathogens is built into the industrial model before a single outbreak occurs. There exists no room for real-time, ecologically responsive, and self-organized immune resistance. From a world away, human breeders and vaccines must somehow track microscopic molecular trajectories across dynamic mixes of myriad local pathogen variants, a Sisyphean task.