The Importance of Sustainable Farming
By Jennifer Flaten, for Revive Your Life
Photo by JamSki
While loading your shopping cart with a package of meat or bag of produce during your regular grocery store visits, do you consider where these items come from? If you don’t, maybe you should. There was a point in time when everything consumers purchased was fresh from the local farm. Farmers brought fresh fruits, vegetables, and eggs to market. The neighborhood butchers would work with local farmers to provide the best cuts of meat for the community. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case.
The local family farm, once the backbone of our food supply, is no longer the place where the majority of our food is cultivated. Instead, most of our food makes the long journey across the country, or, sometimes even around the world. In order for fruits and vegetables, for example, to survive this long journey, produce must be picked before ripened and sprayed with chemicals for the sake of preservation. Then, usually at a great expense to the consumer, the items are trucked or flown into our local stores. Understandably, there are many people who see our ability to have fresh strawberries, in Michigan, in December as progress - but at what cost to the environment, not to mention our health?
Statistics show that local family farms are on the decline. This is because large farming organizations, also known as factory farms, are slowly buying up the small family farms and combining them all into one giant farming monopoly. Sustainability issues arise from the fact that factory farms have one goal - to make money. These organizations have no ties to the land and view it as simply a means to an end. The more animals or crops that can be raised in a small space, the larger the resulting profit.
Conversely, a family farm is invested in the land itself. Many of these farms have been in families for years, the land handed down from generation to generation. If the families failed to nurture the land, it would not only result in no food to sell, but also no food for themselves.
The Impact of Large-Scale Factory Farming
Since factory farms do not have this sense of history or reverence for the land, they care less about whether their practices may be detrimental to the earth. It is no surprise that these types of farms do a large amount of damage to the environment, along with that, they often compromise the overall safety of our food supply. According to many reports, large-scale farming is responsible for topsoil erosion, depletion of water reserves, and pesticide contamination. In addition, the unsanitary practices at factory farm slaughterhouses can result in food-borne illnesses.
One prime example of the negative impact a factory farm has on the environment is the way in which animal manure is handled. On a smaller farm, the manure could be reclaimed as fertilizer for the crops, but factory farm manure output can be so enormous that there is no way to reuse it. A large scale farming operation with 5,000 hogs can generate as much solid waste as a city with a population of 20,000. Obviously, the hog waste is not run through a sewage treatment plant, but is instead often stored in manure lagoons or giant holding tanks. These tanks often leak causing groundwater contamination or allowing hazardous gases to escape into the air.
With over 70% of all pollution found in the U.S. rivers and streams resulting from the agricultural practices of large-scale farming operations, it is becoming increasingly imperative that we find alternatives to factory farming. This pollution, which is in the form of pesticides, fertilizers, and hormone and antibiotic residue, can run off or leach into the water supply. Currently, the EPA estimates that over 1 billion tons of pesticides are used in the U.S every year. A vast majority of this amount comes from factory farms.
Sustainable Farming - Hope for the Future
All hope is not lost as there is a small but growing movement in the farming industry known as sustainable farming. What sets sustainable farming apart is how it is invested in preserving the environment. In addition to protecting the land, sustainable farmers believe in treating both animals and farm workers humanely. They do all of this while providing the farmer with a fair wage and supporting and enhancing the local community.
Sustainable farming strives to keep contaminants from entering our water supply by employing strategies that use less chemicals and fertilizers, along with methods to prevent run-off and soil contamination. Sustainable farming works to keep our water supply safe.
Of course, sustainable farmers are not only concerned about the water supply, but the soil itself. Healthy soil is the key to sustainable farming and research shows that healthy soil makes for healthy food. Sustainable farmers work hard to use cover crops and wind breaks to prevent soil erosion. Using a mixture of crop rotation, adding organic matter, and no- or low-tillage techniques, the soil remains healthy by, as they say, putting back what is taken out.
The environment is not the only benefactor as a result sustainable farming. Those who consume the foods produced under these farming methods also see the benefits as it has been shown that many of the sustainable farm products are healthier than those produced on factory farms. Organic produce that has been raised in healthy soil has been found to contain a significantly larger amount of vitamins and minerals such as iron and magnesium.
A final benefit of sustainable farming is that the produce is most often sold locally. Money spent to purchase meats, dairy, and produce from sustainable farms finds its way back into the local economy. With the items no longer being trucked across the country, a significant decrease in the amount of harmful emissions is realized.
So what can you do to help? Support sustainable farming efforts by buying locally-grown produce and meats from farms that use sustainable farming practices (not all small, local farms do). Even better, save the environment and save money by planting a garden of your own. Who wouldn’t love fresh, organically-grown produce right in their own backyard?
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[...] or conservationists, we can learn green living lessons from their lifestyle. My grandparent’s farm sustained them in most every way. The animals provided meat, milk and lard (ugh!). The produce was home grown and canned to [...]