Problems with the Agricultural Industry of Today

The food chain is a little bit out of whack these days, notably with fruits and vegetables. Ideally, crops would be grown, harvest and then shared or sold and eaten. It starts at the farm, and gets to your dinner table in maybe two steps. However, that is hardly the case these days with the way the agricultural industry is run in the Western world.

The sad truth of the matter is that the cozy little image of a small family running a small farm is quickly becoming an antiquated concept. Every day there are fewer and fewer farms run by actual people and more and more run by enormous companies. Where people can give their product a human touch and pride themselves in their work, mega corporations are normally more concerned with volume of produce and making money.

One of the main problems with this line of thinking is that once corporations begin buying up farms and land, they eventually gain control of massive holdings that are well beyond their reasonable scope of being able to manage and overview every holding effectively.

It has taken a recent massive outbreak of E-Coli in Europe for officials to admit that the way the agricultural industry is set up doesn't work. Because such a massive volume of food is produced by only two or three corporations, they are having a hard time tracking the source of the outbreak because there is simply too much going on.

The food could come from dozens of farms in an area, which all grow the same crop and ship it to the same distributor, who then mingles it will all the other food and sends it out to various locations, and then to grocery stores and markets and so forth. Because of this, tracking the origins of an outbreak is a nightmare, become too much food comes into contact with it and ends up in too many areas.

If farms were more localized, an outbreak of E-Coli wouldn't spread across the continent, and would be easy to contain because the crop could be identified immediately.

One of the reasons small local and organic farms are so important is that they are actually accountable for the crops they produce. Unlike in the system of corporations where farms just produce and send the crops away and out of their hands, smaller farms tend to take pride in their work and remain local and visible. As well, there is much smaller chance that dangerous food bacteria will emerge and spread from these locations.

It also helps that organic farms do not use pesticides and other toxic chemicals to protect their crops from insects, considering that there are plenty of natural and safe to humans ways of fighting off insects and other ills from their crops.