Organic and sustainable...

There's an old racist joke; "What do you call ten black guys sitting in a field?"  "Abandoned farm equipment."

I was watching "Cadillac Records" last night and it had a couple of scenes showing how Muddy Waters was discovered and that showed how sharecropping was done in 1941.  Lots of people with hand tools in the fields doing what a tractor and some chemicals does today.

Slavery was GREEN!

So was the Peasant/Serf deal.

Bear in mind that this is the logical conclusion of "organic" agriculture.  To get everyone back in the fields labor has to be cheap enough that prices of the crops are not affected.  Think about how little our farm equipment must be paid.  It rapidly gets to the point where just feeding them is all a land-owner can afford.

Even without slavery or feudalism, manual farming is a low profit venture.  The romanticized family farm for centuries was mostly a sustenance level business with very little going to sale.  Access to market was a large part of it.  Why grow more than you can eat if what you have to sell is going to rot before you can get it to the buyer?  This is also why grain is so much more common a crop than, say tomatoes.  Grain is a lot easier to render to a form that can be stored until, at least, next season.  This means a wagon of it will last until it can be horse drawn to the market for sale.

Do some reading about the medieval diet.  Cereals and legumes dominate.  Then some fruits and root vegetables and finally a wee bit of meat.  Things that were not cereal tended to be grown at home in a garden.

When was the last time you were confronted with a organically sustainable cattle drive?

Where did all this rustic, sustainable, Gaia friendly agriculture go?

It was mechanized.

Even back during the Civil War slavery was doomed.  A cotton gin was simply cheaper than keeping slaves from a purely economic perspective.  The moral argument falls pretty squarely on the gin's side too.

Then there are trains.  Trains allowed the crops to be delivered to distant locations before they could spoil.  They allowed animals to be carried to the slaughterhouse in much healthier condition, giving the rancher more profits.

Then there are plows, discs, planters, combines, pickers, seeders, sprayers...  All manner of handy machines developed to make farming faster and less labor intensive.  Those increased yields means more food, more food means less famine.

Then we have chemicals.  Fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.  More food survives to be harvested, more money for the farmer, more food-less famine.  These chemicals are what makes our current methods of farming sustainable.  They replenish the chemicals in the soils and just the chemicals that were depleted without dropping a large percentage of material that's hazardous to life while growing and clings to the crop all the way to market.  Look up why pottage had to be boiled for three hours to be safe to eat some time; it has nothing to do with flavor or texture preferences.

Then there are genetically altered crops.  Which is something I always giggle about.  Our distant ancestors have been genetically altering our (their) food since before we stopped hunter-gathering.  Just ten thousand years ago, that boutique toy chihuahua's ancestor was a wolf.  Mr yip dog is the product of genetic alteration via selective breeding.

Wheat was, centuries ago, just a kind of wild grass.  The same sort of husbandry was used to create better yielding crops.

Modern gene altering really just eliminates some random chance and speeds up the process.  The output is not really any different, in fact that's a goal.  To make the plant more resistant to hazard X without lowering yields or changing quality.  Quality means things like flavor and safety.

So just remember, when some environmentalist starts talking about "sustainable" agriculture, it's talking about slavery and famine.