What farming looks like today

 

Family Farm:

a means of organizing agricultural, forestry, fisheries, pastoral and aquaculture production which is managed and operated by a family and predominantly reliant on family labour, both women's and men's.

 

Industrial Agriculture:

This is the dominant form of agriculture in our world today. While it is portrayed as a wholesome, family style farm, the majority of our food is grown in the style of industrial agriculture. "Industrial agriculture... intensifies inputs to maximize outputs. These inputs include fossil fuels and large amounts of energy, biocides, fertilizer, higher volumes of  water, and farming machinery are all tools used for one goal: to maximize yield of large single variety crops at one time"(Jacques & Jacques, 2012, p.2973)

 

Unlike the traditional family farms, that working with nature and the animals, "industrial agriculture is agriculture that changes plants to fit machines [24]. Harvesters, must be able to economically harvest a large amount of one kind of crop " (Jacques & Jacques, 2012, p.2973)

 

Monocropping:

Because of the set up of industrial agriculture, farms are adopting the technique of monocropping. This is the "agricultural practice of growing a single crop year after year on the same land, in the absence of rotation through other crops or growing multiple crops on the same land"(Wikipedia, 2015)

"[M]onocropping has been implicated in declines in crop yield and loss of nutrients from the soil"(Sustainable Table, http://www.sustainabletable.org/804/industrial-crop-production)

 

Terminator Seeds or Variety-GURT seeds:

"Some GE seeds are engineered so that plants cannot reproduce their seeds. In many parts of the world, saving seeds from season to season is the only way farmers are able to survive and continue growing food. However, with G[enetically] E[ngineered] technology, seeds can be sterile (infertile), forcing farmers to rely on seed companies for their livelihood" Sustainable Table, http://www.sustainabletable.org/264/genetic-engineering)

 

Industrial Farms or Factory Farms

"a modern type of agriculture which 1 ) requires high inputs of money, fertilizers, and eliminates jobs and 2 ) for animal production, is characterized by a dense population of animals raised on limited land and requiring large amounts of food, water and medical inputs.  F" (Sustainable Tablehttp://www.sustainabletable.org/859/industrial-livestock-production)

• Animal Feeding Operations (AFO) are “agricultural operations where animals are kept and raised in seriously confined situations” and they “congregate animals, feed, manure, dead animals, and production operations on a small land area.” (Sustainable Table http://www.sustainabletable.org/859/industrial-livestock-production)

• Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO  G) which is defined according to the number of animals in an operation.

• A large CAFO includes 1000 cattle (other than dairy, which is 700), 2500 hogs over 55 pounds, or 125,000 chickens" (Sustainable Table http://www.sustainabletable.org/859/industrial-livestock-production)