Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

tion of heavy machinery and agrochemicals. Adopting twentieth-century
agricultural methods greatly accelerated soil erosion.
One of the most persistent agricultural myths is that larger mechanized
farms are more efficient and profitable than smaller traditional farms. But
larger farms spend more per unit of production because they buy expensive
equipment, fertilizer, and pesticides. Unlike industrial enterprises in
which economies of scale characterize manufacturing, smaller farms can be
more efficient—even before accounting for health, environmental, and
social costs. A 1989 National Research Council study flatly contradicted
the bigger is more efficient myth of American agriculture. “Well-managed
alternative farming systems nearly always use less synthetic chemical pesticides,
fertilizers, and antibiotics per unit of production than conventional
farms. Reduced use of these inputs lowers production costs and lessens
agriculture’s potential for adverse environmental and health effects without
decreasing—and in some cases increasing—per acre crop yields.” 12
Small farms also can produce more food from the same amount of land.
A 1992 U.S. agricultural census report found that small farms grow two to
ten times as much per acre as do large farms. When compared to farms
greater than six thousand acres in size, farms smaller than twenty-seven
acres were more than ten times as productive; some tiny farms—less than
four acres—were more than a hundred times as productive. The World
Bank now encourages small farms to increase agricultural productivity in
developing nations, where most landholders own less than ten acres.
A key difference between small farms and large industrial farming operations
is that large farms typically practice monoculture, even though they
may grow different crops in different fields. Single-crop fields are ideal for
heavy machinery and intensive chemical use. Although monocultures generally
produce the greatest yields per acre for a single crop, diversified polycultures
produce more food per acre based on the total output from several
crops.
Despite the overall efficiency of small farms, the trend is toward larger,
more industrialized farms. In the 1930s seven million Americans farmed.
Today fewer than two million farmers remain on their land. As recently as
the early 1990s, the United States had lost more than twenty-five thousand
family farms a year. On average, more than two hundred American farms
have gone under every day for the past fifty years. In the second half of the
twentieth century, the average farm size more than doubled, from under
one hundred to almost two hundred hectares. Less than 20 percent of U.S.
farms now produce almost 90 percent of the food grown in America.
dust blow 159