Present industrial farming practices are more like mining than agriculture. Exploitative farming methods remove the live giving properties from the soils. The response is to inject the soil with chemicals to revitalize the soil. These nutrients rapidly ooze out of corporate mega-farms, becoming pollutants in the surrounding ecosystems. What is left is severely degraded soil (it can hardly be called an ecosystem), which does not produce food of high nutritional content and is of limited quality in terms of taste as well.

While many farms are now growing organic food and much of this is finding its way into mainstream store shelves, the reality of a sustainable farm is another story entirely. Many health food stores like Whole Foods market gourmet products that are highly processed and packaged from places distant from where they are sold and consumed. The positive ecological attributes of organic farming are reduced when it is shipped from afar. The one to two weeks it takes to get to stores, causes it to lose freshness and flavor (Jennifer Wolcott “Straight to the Source” The Christian Science Monitor 5/14/ 03). Food is now shipped an average of 1,500 to 2,500 miles. This is 25 percent farther than in 1980 (Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture). The Leopold Center says growing and transporting just 10 percent more food within Iowa alone would lead to an annual savings of 294,000 to 348,000 gallons of gasoline and 7 million to 7.9 million pounds of emissions.

Rising Awareness of the Benefits of Organic Foods

As people have become aware of these issues and the unsustainable way our conventional agricultural systems function, they have increasingly sought to get more of their food locally at farmers markets, through community supported agriculture (CSAs) and health food stores. There are now 3,137 farmers markets today up from 1,755 in 1994 (U.S. Department of Agriculture). This rising socially conscious consumer activism has enabled innovative farmers to experiment with new and more environmentally sustainable methods of food production, developing successful business models based on the cultivation of organically grown crops. Humanity has been using many of these techniques for thousands of years. However, the decision was made to discard them in the mad dash towards the industrialization of agricultural systems and resulting increase of agricultural production. Now even the institutions behind this push to modernize agriculture are rethinking many of the assumptions of the agricultural revolution.

Sustainable Agriculture
The agribusiness model can be faulted in many respects. However, the idealization or denigration of the small town country-bumpkin or peasant farmer is a thing of the past in both here and in the developing world. This is not to deny the inherent wisdom in many indigenous rural societies but land use and effective resource management are increasingly complex issues. Farming will be increasingly be integrated with many considerations such as the ecological and social impacts of food production. Sustainable farming requires an interdisciplinary approach that broken down into four main groupings:
Types of inputs used in growing food such as pesticides and fertilizers
Energy inputs
Production of Crops
Transporting supplies for growing
Processing
Transport of crops to market
Transport for workers
Construction of the infrastructure—embodied energy
Types of crops being grown

While all organic farms must conform to the first criteria, few commercially viable organic farms presently qualify in all four categories.