They're right - But for all the wrong reasons and with the exact opposite of solutions.
Big Ag is a pox. Corporate farming is a destruction. Monocultural farming (and ranching) is horrible to the land - Evidenced anywhere you'd care to look in the south and midwest. Topsoil is way less than half of what it used to be. And water use a waste.
But the answers are in restorative farming and small farming. What BUILDS soil is cows. Way more than whatever else. Mob grazing. Multicultural pastures and farms. Farms have to rotate into ranching and add big animals back into their mix. Farms need to rotate crops and find companion crops.
The answers are there. And they point directly opposite from both sides.
No argument, here. Old school ways were often best. All this talk of sustainability would shut down farming operations (often in the same family for hundreds of years) "for the planet"--but you don't farm the same land successfully for centuries without being a good steward of the land. Large scale farming of cereal grains and oilseeds (Sunflower, safflower canola, soy) is huge, often measured in sections (square miles), not simply acres, but the farms attacked most profoundly will not be the large operations so much as the small farmer who has the produce stand on the roadside, sells a few head of livestock a year, whose kids do a 4-H critter for the County Fair, and whose wife may well have a stash of 'egg money'.
Crop rotation, cover crops, grazing, planned 'fallow periods' to let the land rest, and returning unused parts of the plants to the soil (via a critter's alimentary canal, or direct application of composted materials) all tend to maintain better soil, and long term productivity.
But, as ever, the whole debate starts with a premise, a given axiom that forms the fundament upon which the rest of the debate is constructed: That somehow, after billions of years of the Earth maintaining a temperature range suitable for life (at least somewhere, somehow), the Earth
needs humans to "save" it..
Oh, please. C'mon, man!
The planet will keep going unless we manage to fragment it like the one that was between Jupiter and Mars. We're pretty good at breaking things, but that is a league or two above us.
