Industrial agriculture, with its reliance on synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation, has come at a cost to the environment and local communities. And its promise to "feed the world" has largely failed.
Published: 10/08/18, Last updated: 2/08/21
The US has long embraced industrialized farming methods, but agricultural industrialization as we know it today began in earnest after World War II. Its hallmarks are mechanization and reliance on inputs like nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides and intensive irrigation. The global move towards this model of farming has not led to the promised results of “feeding the world,” but has come with many human, environmental and societal costs.
While we may think of industrial agriculture as a relatively new phenomenon, our country was built on ever-expanding farming methods. From Southern cotton plantations made possible by the labor of enslaved people to intensive Great Plains grain production, which led to the 1930s Dust Bowl, to water engineering projects that turned the California desert into one of the world’s most productive regions, large-scale agriculture (often for international export markets) is at the very heart of American history.
The scale on which agricultural projects take place has ballooned since the 1950s. Today, the hallmarks of industrial crop production are the widespread use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation and machinery; huge fields that are anywhere from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of acres in size; a distinct lack of crop diversity or crop rotation; a heavy reliance on fossil fuels.
Industrial crops are not just vast acres of corn and soybeans in the Midwest, grown for animal feed, ethanol and processed food. In truth, most crops in the US, from apples to zucchini, are grown with industrialized practices, treated more as outdoor factories than as part of an ecosystem. The industrialization of agriculture artificially separates two aspects of a naturally closed-loop and renewable cycle: nature’s reciprocal and balanced system in which crops feed animals and animal wastes fertilize crops. What we have instead are depleted soils on one hand and toxically excessive animal wastes on the other – both problems generated by commercial agriculture.
The major problem with industrialized farming is that it is unsustainable: it relies heavily on finite resources, including fossil fuels and rapidly-depleting water tables, and it negatively impacts the environment, which affects everything everywhere with real costs at all levels.
Nitrogen is a key building block of life and a critical nutrient for plants and animals. Although nitrogen is abundant in the atmosphere as an inert gas, it must be “fixed” into a reactive form to be used by plant cells. Bacteria on the roots of legumes like peas and beans naturally fix atmospheric nitrogen into nutrients that can be taken up by other plants. Until 1913, cultivating legumes, spreading manure and crop residues, as well as mining deposits of bird droppings were the primary ways to access nitrogen for farming. 5 Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer and waste from confined animal operations containing nitrogen is applied imprecisely to farm fields, often in excess of what the plants need or what the soil can absorb. The excess fertilizer leeches into surface and groundwater. In Iowa and across the Midwest, swimming and other recreational activities are no longer allowed in many lakes and rivers. Too much nitrogen in a body of water can lead to an overgrowth of algae; when the algae die and decompose, they draw oxygen from the water, creating a “dead zone,” where no other plant or animal life can survive. Dead zones have become common in water bodies across the US. In 2015, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico – created by runoff from manure and other agricultural fertilizer in the Mississippi floodplain – was more than 5,000 square miles: this is the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. 7
Phosphorous, another key element in fertilizer, can also cause problems like the bloom of toxic algae in Lake Erie, which forced Toledo, Ohio, to shut down its municipal water system in 2014, requiring its 400,000 residents to drink bottled water for three days. Algae blooms have gotten larger in Lake Erie and other water bodies in recent years, primarily due to phosphorus in fertilizer on farm fields upstream. 8 Nitrogen and phosphorus algae blooms are expected to increase with the warmer temperatures and bigger storms of a changing climate. 27
Previous page photo by fotokostic/Getty Images.
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