agriculture definition

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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....

Our first and second posts in this series are, respectively, here and here . �The logistics of a just, equitable, and healthy agricultural landscape here in the United States would remain a problem if Michael Pollan himself, Wendell Berry , or better yet Fred Magdoff were appointed Secretary of Agriculture. Decades-long efforts pealing back agribusiness both as paradigm and infrastructure, however successful, would require a parallel program. With what would we replace the present landscape? As a black hole about its horizon, a poverty in imagination orbits the question stateside. The vacuum is most recently felt in the developing animus between public health officials and artisan cheesemakers. What Europe has long streamlined into amicable regulation, the United States has lurched into clumsy opposition: cheese wheels are increasingly treated as suitcase bombs filled with Listeria . After [more than] sixty years of industrial production Americans have quite forgotten the logistics o...

Our first post, with an introduction to this series, is here . �Dumping grain on another country is a classic maneuver in economic warfare. When a country�s borders are opened by force or by choice, by structural adjustment or by neoliberal trade agreement, when tariffs and other forms of protectionism are finally scotched, heavily subsidized multinational agribusinesses can flood the new market with commodities at prices less than their production costs. That is, these companies are happy to sell their foodstuffs abroad at a loss. That doesn�t make sense, you say. Aren�t these guys in business for profit? They are indeed. The deficits are in actuality a cold-blooded calculation. The objective is to drive previously domestic sectors unable to compete with that kind of pricing, out of business. Once the mom-and-pop competition is rubbed out, Walmart-style, the multinationals, their competition cleared off the field, can impose what prices they please across a market they now dominate. [...

Over the course of a month or two (perhaps longer), I�m going to occasionally post snippets from a handful of Rob Wallace�s rhetorically pungent, intellectually incisive, and politically powerful collection of essays in his book Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatchers on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science (Monthly Review Press, 2016). Early last year I posted notice of an article in New Left Review , 102 (Nov/Dec 2016): � Ebola�s Ecologies: Agro-Economics and Epidemiology in West Africa ,� co-authored by Rob Wallace and Rodrick Wallace, appending a list of suggested reading that included Big Farms . I will post bits and pieces from the book sans the notes and with slight editing (e.g., in the interest of length, I�ve left out some of the many examples that illuminate the arguments), although I may provide some embedded links (some of which may be in the book�s notes). As this work�with notes�is well over 400 pages, the material I�m sharing is best viewed as provid...

Some readers�as viewers!�may be interested (assuming you�ve yet to see it) in the recent documentary on the remarkable and inspiring life of Dolores Huerta on PBS (Independent Lens): �Dolores.� And should you have missed its earlier posting, here is my bibliography for �C�sar Ch�vez & the United Farm Workers � and the Struggle of Farm Workers in the U.S.� Image: �Yreina D.Cerv�ntez� 1989 mural La Ofrenda , painted under a bridge in downtown Los Angeles.... In it, Cerv�ntez�an artist and Chicana activist�pays homage to Dolores Huerta, co-founder with C�sar Ch�vez of the United Farm Workers of America.�

My latest bibliography, on the history, causes, and consequences of famine, is here . Compilations with significant family resemblance: Beyond Inequality: Toward the Globalization of Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness: Toward Agroecology & Food Justice Ecological & Environmental Politics, Philosophies, and Worldviews Global Distributive Justice Health: Law, Ethics & Social Justice Marxism

� Agriculture Wars � By Nick Murray (March 12, 2018), for Viewpoint Magazine   �The town of Maricopa may be surrounded by Arizona desert, but a small plot of land near its northern border may qualify as the most closely studied piece of farmland our planet has ever produced. Here stands the LemnaTec Scanalyzer. Weighing some 50,000 pounds, the device sits on a steel gantry that moves back and forth along tracks that line the field. It monitors the growth of every plant below it, and by the end of the day it generates five to eight terabytes of data. What it records could help scientists develop the next generation of genetically modified seeds. The University of Arizona, the company LemnaTec and the U.S. Government, which funded the project through the Department of Energy, all agree: this could be the future of agriculture. �Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process,� Raymond Williams says in Keywords . It described �the tending of something, basically crops or animals...

New article of interest: Mathilde Cohen, � Animal Colonialism: The Case of Milk ,� American Journal of International Law Unbound (September 2017) Volume 111: 267-271. [Being a vegan, and with a significant portion of my worldview best described as Marxist,* I�m predisposed to find the argument in this very short article congenial. No doubt others will view it differently.] The first two paragraphs: �Greta Gaard writes that � [t]he pervasive availability of cows � milk today � from grocery stores to gas stations � is a historically unprecedented product of industrialization, urbanization, culture, and economics. � To these factors, I would add colonialism and international law; the latter understood broadly to include the rules considered binding between states and nations, transnational law, legal transplants, international food aid, and international trade law. Until the end of the Nineteenth Century, the majority of the world population neither raised animals for their milk nor...

�Cipriano Ricardo Flores Mag�n (known as Ricardo Flores Mag�n; September 16, 1874 � November 21, 1922) was a noted Mexican anarchist and social reform activist. His brothers Enrique and Jes�s were also active in politics. Followers of the Mag�n brothers were known as Magonistas . He has been considered an important participant in the social movement that sparked the Mexican Revolution.� �Periodically throughout their history, California farmworkers have fought vigorously, sometimes in small, local battles unknown to anyone but the immediate participants, and at other times in large campaigns�directed by radical or even openly revolutionary leaders�that have lasted for several seasons. The nature of these fights is rooted in the special character of agricultural production and in the real opportunities that farmworkers have encountered in the fields for nearly a hundred years.� Frank Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage : Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (Verso,...